Ex Libris C. K. OGDEN STRATHMORE OR WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND a lifi* Somnnce. BY "OUIDA," AUTHOR OP "HMJ> IN BONDAGE; OR, ORANVILLE DK vioinu* Thr are depths in Man that go the lengths of lowest Hell, aa there ara height! that reach highest Heaven ; for are not both Heaven and Hell made oat of him, lade by him, everlasting Miracle and Mystery that he is f CARLYLE. Oblivion cannot be lured. SIR THOMAS Baow.XK'a "Urn Burial," Good and evil we know, in the field of this world, grow np together almost insepa- rably ; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil thut thoso confused seeds which were imposed upon Psyche aa an incessant abor to cull out and sort asunder wore not more intermixed. MILTON. LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL, 193, PICCADILLY. 1870. STRATHMORE, CHAPTER I. STRATH MORE OF WHITE LADIES. WtirTE LADIES meant neither snow-drops, by their pretty old English name, ghosts in white cere-clothes, nor belles in \vhit< tarlatan. It was only an old densely-wooded estate down in one of those counties that give Creswick his cool c-oequered shade and wild forest streams, and lend Birket Poster his shallow sunny brooks and picturesque roadsides? but which, I am told of superior taste, are terribly iu&ipid and miserably tame, with many other epithets I do not care to repeat, having a lingering weak- ness myselr ibr the old bridle-paths with the boughs meet- ing above brad, the hawthorn hedges powdered with their snowy blossom, and the rich meadow lands with their tall grasses, and clover, and cowslips, where cattle stand up to their hocks in fresh wild thyme, and shadows lengthen slowlv and hjily through long summer days, w^ White Ladies was an ancient and stately abbey, the last relic of lands once wide and numerous as Warwick's < re he fell at Gladsmoor Heath; a single possession- though that lordly enough where it had once been but one among a crowded beadroll of estates that had stretched over counties before they were parcelled out and divided, some amongst the hungry courtiers who fattened upon abbey lands ; 'some among the Hanoverian rabble, who eicrambled for the goodly spoils of loyal gentlemen ; some, later on, among the vampires of Israel, who, like their forefather and iirst usurer, Jacob, know well how to treat with the famished, and sell us our mess of pottage at no smaller price than our birthright. In the days of Monkery (7) 1C77C92 8 STRATIIMORE; OR, and of Holy Church, White Ladies had been a great Dominican monastery, rich in its wealth and famous in its sanctity; and though since those days the great Gothic pile bad been blasted with petronels, burned with flame, and riddled with the bullets of the Ironsides, when the western sun slanted in flecks of gold through the boughs of the wych-elms and fell on the panes of the blazoned windows, or the moonlight streaming across the sward, gleamed through the pointed arches and aisles and down the ivy-covered cloisters, the abbey had still a stately and solemn beauty, given to it in ancient days by the cunning hand of master masons, in the days when men built for art and not for greed, and lavished love in lieu of lusting gold, when they worked for a long lifetime to leave some imperishable record of their toil, grandly heed- less how their names might perish and be forgot. It stood down in deep secluded valleys on the borders of Wales, shut in by dense forest lands that covered hill and dale for miles about it, and sheltered in their recesses the dun deer in their coverts and the grey herons by their pools ; a silent, solitary, royal place, where the axe never sounded among the centenarian trees, and the sylvan glory was never touched by the Vandal of time and the Goth of steam that are swiftly sapping what Tudor icono- clasts spared, and destroying what Puritan petards left free. Through the dark elm-boughs that swayed against the marvellous carvings with which Norman builders had enriched the abbey; through the tangled ivy that hid where Cromwell's breach had blasted, and where Henry's troops had sacked ; through the deep heraldic blazonries upon the panes, where the arms of the Strathmores with their fierce motto, " Slay, and spare not!" were stained ; the summer sun shone into one of the chambers at White Ladies. In olden days, and turn-by-turn as time went on and fortunes changed, the chamber had been the audience-place of the Lord Abbot, where he had received high nobles who sought the sanctuary because the price of blood was on their heads, or thriftless kings of Planta- genet who came to pray the aid of Mother Church for largesse to their troops ere they set sail for Palestine. It had been the bower-room of a captive queen, where Mary had sat over her tapestry thinking of the days so long WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 9 gone by, when on her soft childish brow, fair witL cho beauty of Stuart and Guise, the astrologer had seen the taint of foreshadowed woe and the presage of death under the soft golden curls. It had been the favorite haunt of Court beauties where they had read the last paper of Spec, and pondered over new pulvillios, and rejoiced that the peace had been made at Utrecht, to bring them the French mode and Paris chocolate, and thought in their secretly-disaffected hearts of the rising that was fomenting among the gallant gentlemen of the North, and of the cypher letter lying under the lace in their bosoms from one brave to rashness, and thrice well-beloved because in danger for the Cause, who was travelling secretly and swiftly to St. Germain. Now the Plantagenets had died out, root and branch, and the tapestry woven by Mary was faded and moth-eaten, and the Court beauties were laid in the chapel vault, and oriel-chamber was scented with Manillas, Burgendies, and liqueurs, while three or four men sat at breakfast with a group of retrievers on the hearth. The sun falling through the casements, shone on the brass andirons, the oak carvings, the purple silk of the hangings on the walls, and on the game and fruits, the steaming coffee and the golden Rhenish, that were crowded in profusion on the table, at which the host and the guests of White Ladies lounged, smoking and looking over the contents of the letter-bag, peeling an apricot, or cutting into a haunch a la Marinade, silent, lazy, and inert, for there was nothing to tempt them out but the rabbits, and the morning was warm and the shaded room pleasant. At the head of his table the host sat in the deep shadow, where the light of the outer day did not reach, but left the dark purple hangings of the wall with the dead gold of their embroideries in gloom behind him, at the back of his fautcuil. He was a man then of nine-and-twenty or thirty, but looked something older than he was; he was tall and slightly made, and wore a black velvet morn- ing-coat. His face was singularly striking and impressive, more by expression than by feature it was such a counte- nance as you see in old Italian portraits, and in some Vandykes, bearing in them power strangely blended with passion, and repose with recklessness ; his hair, moustache, and beard were of a dark chestnut hue ; his mouth was 10 STRATHMORE; OR, very beautifully formed, with the smile generous, but rare ; the eyebrows" were dark, straight, and finely pencilled; the eyes prey. And it was in those, as they lightened to steel-like brilliance, or darkened black as night with instantaneous and pitiless anger, that an acute physiogno- mist would have inferred danger and evil to himself and to others, that would arise from a spring as yet, perhaps, unknown and concealed ; and that an artist study- ing his face, in which his art would have found no flaw, would have said that this man would be relentless, and might have predicted of him, as the Southern sculptor prophesied of Charles Stuart, "Something evil will befall him. He carries misfortune on his face." He lay back in his chair, turning over his letters, look- ing idly one by one at them, not opening some, and not reading wholly through any; many of them had feminine superscriptions, and scarlet or azure chiffres at the seal, as delicately scented as though they had been brought by some Court page, rather than by the rough route of the mail- bag. They afforded him a certain amusement that sum- mer's morning, and Strathmore of White Ladies this man with the eyes of a Catiline, and the face of a Strafford had no care greater on his mind for either the present or the future just then than that his keepers had told him the broods were very scanty, and the young birds had died off shockingly in the early parts of the spring; that he was summoned to go on a diplomatic mission to Bulgaria to confer with a crabbed Prince Michel, before he cared to leave England ; and that one of his fair cor- respondents, Nina Montolieu, a Free Companion, whose motto blazoned on her pretty fluttering pennon, was a very rapacious "tout prendre!" might be a little more troublesome and exigeante than was agreeable, and give him a taste of the tenacious griffes now that he had tired of playing with the pattes de velours. He had nothing graver or darker to trouble him, as he leant, back in his fauteuil in the shadow whore the sunlight did not come, glancing out now and then to the masses of forest, and the grey cloisters, ivy-hung and crumbling to ruins, that were given to view through the opened casement of tht arched windows of his chamber. His face was the face of a State-conspirator of Velasquez, of a doomed Noble WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. H of Vandyke ; but his life was the easy, nonchalant, un- troubled, unchequered life of an English gentleman of our days ; and his thoughts were the thoughts that are natural to, and that run in couple with, such a life. "Born to calamity" would have been as little applicable to Strath- more as it seemed to Charles of England, when he and Yilliers looked into the long eyes of the Spanish donnas and drank to the loveliness of Henriette de Bourbon. But in those joyous, brilliant days of Madrid and Paris, the shadow of the future had not fallen across the threshold of Whitehall neither as yet had it fallen here across the threshold of White Ladies. He looked up and turned a little in his chair as the door opened, and the smile that was the more brilliant and attractive because extremely rare, lighted his face. " You .incorrigible fellow ! the coffee is cold, and the claret is corked, and the omelettes are overdone, but it's no more than you deserve. Won't you ever be punctual ? We were going down to Hurst Warren at nine, and it's now eleven. You arc the most idle dog, Erroll, under heaven !" "You were only clown yourself six minutes and a half ago (I asked Craven), so don't you talk, my good fellow. You have been reading the first volume of the 'Amours d'une Femme,' and sending the rabbits to the deuce ; and I've been reading the second, and consigning them to the devil, so nous sommes quittes. A summer morning's made for a French novel in bed, with the window open and the birds singing outside ; pastorals and pruriencies go uncommonly nicely together, rather like lemons and rum, you know. Contrasts are always chic!" With which enunciation of doctrine the new comer sat down, rolled his chair up to the table, and began an inspection of some lobster cutlets a ia Marechale, taking a cup of creamy chocolate from the servant behind him, while Strathmore looked at him with a smile still on his lips, and a cordial look in his eyes, as if the mere sound of the other's voice were pleasant to him. The belated guest was a man of his own age, or some few years older; in frame and sinew he was superb ; in style he was rather like a dashing Free Lance, a gallant debonnair captain of Bouibon's Reiters, with his magnificent muscle and reck- IS STRATHMORE; OR, .PSS brilliance, though he was as gentle as a woman and as lazy as a Circassian girl. He called himself the harid sornest man in the Service, and had the palm given him undisputingly; for the frank, clear, azure eyes that grew so soft in love, so trustful in friendship, the long fair hair sweeping off a forehead white as the most delicate blonde's, the handsome features with their sunny candour and their gay sensuous smile, made his face almost as attractive to men as to women. As for the latter, indeed, they strewed his path with the conqueror's myrtle-leaves. His loves were as innumerable as the stars, and by no means so eternal ; and if now and then the beau sexe had the best of the warfare, it was only because they are never com- passionate to those who surrender to them at once, and whom they can bind and lead captive at their will, which the least experienced could do at one stroke with Bertie Erroll, as he freely and lamentingly confessed. The Beau Sabreur (as he had been nicknamed, a la Murat, from his cornethood, partly from some back-handed strokes of his in Caffreland, partly from the personal beauty which he inherited from a race whose beauty was all their patri- mony), terrific, as his science could tell when he put the gloves on, and daring, as the chronicles of the Cape- decreed him to be in the saddle and the skirmish, was soft as silk in the hands of a beauty, and impressionable and plastic as wax when fairy fingers were at work. He had never in his life resisted a women, and avowed himself utterly unable to do so. Have you ever known the muscle that brought Laomedon to grief of any avail against the Lydian Queen? " Letters ! Why will they write them ?" he said, as he glanced at the small heap of feminine correspondence piled beside his plate. "It's such a pity! it only makes us feel bearish, bored, and miserably ungrateful ; wastes an hour to get through them religiously, or hangs a millstone of unperformed duty and unexpiated debt about our necks for the livelong day, till post-time comes round again and makes bad worse !" " Why will they write them ?" echoed Strathmore, giving a contemptuous push of his elbow to Nina Montolieu's envelope, a souvenir of the past season, with which he could very well have dispensed. " Our Brinvilliers poisor WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. i3 as with patchouli paper, and stab us with a crowqull. One might like to ' die of a rose in aromatic pain,' but I would rather not die of a billet of three-scented sheets crossed ! Correspondence is cruel with women. If you don't answer them, you feel sinful and discourteous ; if you do answer them, you only supply them with ammunition to fire on to you afresh with fifty more rounds of grape and canister. They love to spend their whole mornings skimming over a thousand lines, and winding up with ' Toujours a toi !' They love to write honey to you with one pen, and gall about you with another ; they love to address their dearest friends on a rose-tinted sheet, and blot it to damn them on a cream-colored one. Writing is women's metier ; but it is deucedly hard that they will inflict the results upon us !" " It's an odd psychological fact that women will write on for twelve months unanswered, as religiously as they wipe their pens, omit their dates, and believe in the acceleration of postal speed, by an ' immediate' on the envelope," put in Phil Danvers from the bottom of the table, helping himself to some Strasbourg pate. " Some of them write delightfully, though Tricksey Bellevoix does. Her notes are the most delicious olla podrida of news, mots, historiettes, and little tit-bits of confidence imaginable ; she always telis you, too, mischievous things of the people you don't like, instead of scandalizing people you do, after the ordinary fashion. Her letters are not bad fun at all when you're smoking, and want something to look at for ten minutes." " I'll tell her how you rate them ! She's going to Charlemont next week. See if you get any more letters, Phil !" cried Erroll. " My dear fellow, if we turned king's evidence on one another, I don't think we should get any more feminine favors at all 1" laughed Strathmore. " Very few of them would relish the chit-chat about them if they'd correct reports from the club windows and short-hand notes from the smoking-rooms. Would you be let in again to the riolct boudoir in Bruton-strcet if Lady Fitz knew you'd told me last night that she had the very devil's own temper ? and would Con be called ' ami choisi de non cceur/ if Madame la Baronne knew that when he gets her 2 14 STRATIIMORE ; OR, notes hft says, ' Deuce take the woman ! how she bothers.' audibly in 'White's? Try that grilse, Langton it was in the river yesterday." " And is prime. It would have been worth Georgie's trolling." " Georgie lost all her rings last week in the Dee five thousand pounds' worth in diamonds and sapphires served her perfectly right ! What business has she with March browns and dun governors ?" said the host of White Ladies, drawing a plate of peaches to him. " I cannot conceive what women are about when they take up that line of thing. How can they imagine an ill-done replica of ourselves can attract us ? A fast woman is an anomaly, and all anomalies are jarring and bizarre. To kiss lips that smell of smoke to hear one's belle amie welcome one with ' All serene !' to see her ' bugle eye-ball and her cheek of cream' only sparkle and flush for a tan gallop and a Rawcliffe yearling to have her boudoir as horsy as the Corner, and her walk a cross between a swing and a strut ! Pah ! give me women as soft, and as delicate, and as velvet as my peaches P "Peaches?" put in Erroll. "Ominous simile! Your soft women have an uncommonly hard stone at their core, and a kernel that's poison under the velvet skin, mon cher Cis!" "Soit! I only brush the bloom, and taste the sweet- ness!" yawned Strathmore. "A wise man never lingers long enough over the same to have time to come to the core. With peaches and women, it's only the side next the sun tint's tempting; if you find acid in either, leave them for the downy blush of another ! How poetic we grow! Is it the Rhenish? That rich, old, amber, mellow wine always has a flavor of Hoffmann's fancies and Joan Paul's verso about it; it smells of the Rheingau ! I don't wonder Schiller took his inspirations from it. I say. Erroll, I heard from Rokeby this morning. He doesn't say a word about the Sartory betting, nor yet of the While Duchess scandal. He is only full of two things: La Pucelle's chances of the Prix de Rastatt at Baden, and of this beauty lie's raving of, something superb, according to him, a Creole, I think he says Lady Vavasour ! Really one's bored to death with ccstacics about that woman ! WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HANI). 15 Have you heard the name ? / have lots of times, but I've always missed her." "Vavasour? Vavasour? The deuce, I have rather!" said Erroll, thrown into a beatific vision by the mere name of the lady under discussion, stroking his soft, silky mou- stache, w r hile he stirred some more cream into his chocolate. " Who is she?" asked Langton, who was only just back from a ten years' campaign in Scinde, curling a loose leaf round his Manilla. " More than I can tell you, tres-cher. I believe it's more than anybody knows. She sprang into society like Aphrodite from the sea-foam. One may as well be grace- ful in metaphor, eh ? You mean a Creole, Strathmore, who made a tremendous row at St. Petersburg came nobody knew precisely whence hadn't been seen till she appeared as Lady Yavasour and Yaux tooling a six-in-hand pony- trap, with pages of honor in lapis-lazuli liveries, that created a furore in Longchamps, and made the Pre Ca- talan crowded to get a glimpse of her. Ever since then all Europe's been at her feet !" " That's the woman !" broke in Danvers. " Oh, she's divine, they say ! Everybody goes mad after her, and can't help himself! Scrope Waverley raved of her; he saw her at Biarritz, and swears she's quite matchless. She's the most capricious coquette, too, that ever broke hearts with a fan-handle !" "Hearts! Faugh!" sneered Strathmore; and, when he sneered, his face was very cold a coldness strangely at variance with the swift, dark passions that slumbered in his eyes. " My good fellow, don't give us a rechauffe of Scrope Waverley's sentimental nonsense de grace f The man must be weaker than the fan-handle if he be ruled by it." Erroll lifted his eyebrows, and sighed : "May be! But the little ivory sticks play the deuce with us when they're well managed." "Speak for yourself! Don't make your confessions in the plural, that their be'tise may sound general, pray !" "Oh, you you're a confounded cold fellow! Wear chained armour, wrap yourself in asbestos, and all that tort of thing ; 'lava kisses' wouldn't melt you, and Helen wouldn't move you unless you chose!" 1ft STRATIIMORE; OR, Strathmore laughed a litt.c as he brushed a gnat off t>.e velvet sleeve of his coat : " Why should they ? It is only fools who go in fetters. I can not comprehend that madno?s about a woman to lie at her feet and come at her call, and take her caresses one minute and neglect her the next, as if you were her spaniel, with nothing better to do than to live in her bondage ! It is miserably contemptible ! What is weak- ness if that isn't one, eh ?" Erroll flung the envelope with the scarlet chiffre, lying on the table within reach of his hand, at his host and friend, as proof and reproof of the nullity of his doctrines. " Most noble lord ! you have the cheek to talk coldly and disdainfully like that, while you know you are in the griffes of the Montolieu, and Heaven knows how many others besides !" Strathmore laughed as the envelope fluttered down on the ground, falling short of him where he lay back in his fuuteuil : " Becasse ! that is a very different affair. Nina is a dashing little lawless lady, and knows how to pillage with both hands ; one must pay if one dallies with the Free Companions. You don't suppose she ever held me in her bondage, or flattered herself she did for an hour, do you ? No one was ever in love with that sort of women after twenty; one makes love to them, en parenthese as it were, of course, but that's quite another thing. It is how you lose your hearts, how you hang on a smile, how you let yourselves be marked and hit and brought down like the silliest noddy-bird that ever sat to be shot at, how you go mad after one woman, and that one woman with, nine times out of ten, nothing worth worshipping about her it is that which I can't understand." " Tant mieux pour vous !" said Erroll, softly, and with a profound sigh of envy. " Go about with your noli me tangcre shield, and be piously thankful you've got it then. Only the ' haughty in their strength,' et caetera, you know what's the rest of the scriptural warning ? unbelievers do come to grief sometimes for their hardened heterodoxy! This superb Vavasour I want dreadfully to see her They say she is the best thing we have had for a long time, since the Duchessc d'lvore was in her first prime " WROUGHT BY IIS OWN HAND. 17 " She must be the same I heard so much about in Paris last winter ; she was passing the season in Rome, so I missed her. She has the most wayward caprices, they cay, of any living woman," said Danvers, turning over the leaves of the morning papers ; " but the caprices d'une belle femme are always bewitching and always permissi- ble. A great beauty has no sins ; she may do what she likes, and we forgive her, even with the leopard-claws in our skin. The pretty panther! it looks so handsome and so soft; its very crimes are only mischief." , " You haven't been in Scinde, Phil," said Langton, with the grim smile of a vieux sabreur who hears those who have never suffered jest at scars ; while their host, rather tired of this breakfast-chat about women, turned to his unopened correspondence, till his guests, having thrown their letters away, to be answered at any distant and haz- ardous future, having yawned over the papers, casually remarking that that poor devil Allington's divorce case was put off till next session, or that there was an awful row in South Mexico, rose by general consent, and began to think of the rabbits. White Ladies was one of the pleasantest places to visit at in England. A long beadroll might have been cited of houses that eclipsed it in every point but the abbey had a charm, as it had a beauty, of its own ; and those who went thither once always gave the preference to a second invitation there, over those to other places. In the deep recesses of its vast forest-lands there were droves of deer that gave more royals in one day's sport than were ever found south of the Cheviots. In the dark pools, some of them well-nigh inaccessible, where they lay between gorze-covered hills or down in wooded valleys, the wild fowl flocked by legions. The river, that ran in and out, of which you just caught glimpses from the west windows, dashing between the bows in the distance, was famed for its salmon, and had in olden days given char and trout to the tables of the monastery, whose celebrity had reached to royal Windsor and princely Sheen, and made the Tudors covetous for the land and water that yielded such good fare. Sport was to be had in perfection among the braky a gold-fringed portiere, as the culverin above the gateway had been removed for the soft, silken folds of a flag. Lions long kept in a tame life lose their desert instinct and their thiret for blood ; so the Strathmores in long centuries of WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 19 court life might have outworn and lost what had been evil and dangerous in them in the days of Plantagenet, of Lancaster, and of York. Or, if the nature were not dead, but only sleeping, there was nothing to arouse it; life went smoothly and well with Strathmore ; he had birth, fortune, talents of a high order ; he was courted by women, partly because he was very cold to them, chiefly, doubt- less, because he was son of the Marquis of Castlemere arid master of White Ladies. In a diplomatic career he had a wide field for the ambitions that attracted him the am- bition not of place, wealth, or title, but of Power, the deep, subtle state power that had in all ages fascinated the Strathmores, and been wielded by them successfully and skilfully. Life lay clear, brilliant, unruffled behind him and before him ; singularly generous, caring little for money or for luxury, he was cordially liked by men, though there were some, of course, who as cordially hated him ; and if there ran in his blood the old spirit of the Strathmores that had in ancient days begotten their fierce motto, " Slay, and spare not;" that had often worked their own doom and been their own scourge ; that gleamed from their eyes in the old portraits by Antonio More, and Jameson, and Vandyke, hanging in the vaulted picture-gallery at the Abbey, and that made those who looked on them under- stand how those courtly, elegant, suave gentlemen had been swift to steel, and pitiless in pursuit, and imperious in ire if this spirit still ran in his blood, it was dormant, and had never been wakened to its strength. Opportunity is the forcing-house that gives birth to all things ; without it, seeds will never ripen into fruit ; with it, much that might otherwise have died out inocuous expands to bane- ful force. Man works half his own doom, and circumstance works the other half. Yet, because \ve have not been tempted, we therefore believe we can stand ; because we have not yet been brought nigh the furnace, we therefore hold ourselves to be fire-proof! Mes freres, the best of us are fools, I fear! The steel is not proven till it has passed through the flames. Sooner or later though they may lie to it long, half a lifetime, perhaps I believe that men and women are all true to their physiognomies ; that they prove, sooner or later, that the index Nature has writ (though writ in crab- 20 STRATHMORE; OR, bed, uncertain characters that few can read altogether aright) upon their features is not a wrong or a false one. Men lie, but Nature does not. They dissemble, but she speaks out. They conceal, but she tells the truth. What is carved on the features, will develop, some time or other, in the nature. When Bernini made the prophecy that fore- told ill for the heir of England, could any prediction seem more absurd ? Yet Charles Stuart wrought his own fate, and the fruit of the past, whose seed had been sown by his own hands, was bitter between his teeth when the foretold calamity fell, black and ghastly, betwixt the Peo- ple and the Throne. Stratbmore's life, cold, clear, cloud- less as the air of a glittering, still winter's noon, was utterly at variance with his physiognomy the physiognomy that had the eyes of a Catiline and the face of a Strafford ! Yet, as time went on, and he passed of his own will into a path into which a man stronger in one sense, and weaker in another, would have never entered, the spirit that was latent in him awoke, and wrought his own fate and wove his own scourge more darkly, and more erringly, because more consciously and more resolutely, than Charles Stuart, making him eat of the fruit of his own sowing to the full as bitterly as he of England, who might never have bowed his head to the axe that chill January morning, when a king fell, amidst the silence of an assembled multitude, if the first obstinate error that had seemed sweet to him had been put aside, and the first wilful turn out of the right path been avoided: the turn so slight! that lead on to the headsman and the scaffold ! CHAPTER II. UNDER THE SHADOW OF THE ELMS. THE rabbits were tame in comparison with the drives f jc which the forests of White Ladies were famed, and with the bouquets of pheasants that the battues afforded later on in the year; but still they woro better than WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 21 nothing, and were peppered faute de mieux that day, though the chief thing done by the whole quartette was to lie under the trees and drink the iced champagne-cup and Badminton, brought there, with a cold luncheon, oil an Exmoor pony by the under-keepers about two o'clock ; which was, however, as pleasant occupation for idleness on a sultry summer's day as anything that could be sug- gested, while the smoke of the Manillas curled up through the leafy roofing above head, and the dogs lay about on the moss-covered turf with their tongues out, hot, tired, and excited, and the mavises and blackbirds sang in the boughs. " Where the deuce is the Sabreur ?" said Phil Danvers, when the rabbits had been slain by the score, and the chimes of the Abbey, ringing seven o'clock with the slow, musical chant of the "Adeste Fideles," came over the woods, and warned them that the dressing-bell must be going, and that it was time to think about dinner. " By George I I don't know," said Strathmore, raising himself from the lichens and ferns on which he lay, and standing up, with a little yawn, to stretch himself. " I haven't seen him for the last hour. Didn't he say some- thing about the Euston Coppice ? I dare say he is gone there after the rabbits ; we must have missed him some- where." " It's deucedly easy to lose oneself ia these woods of yours, Strathmore," said Langton, striking a fresh fusee. " The timber's so tremendously thick, and there are no paths to speak of; you never Lave the wood cut down, do you ? " " Cut down ! Certainly not I My good fellow, do you think the woods of White Ladies go for building purposes ? The Strathmores would rise out of their graves! I won- der Bertie is gone off like that. Pritchard, have you seen Colonel Erroll ? " I see the Colonel a going toward the coppice, my lord, about an hour ago, when we was beating of the Near Acre a going down that ere path, my lord," responded Pritchard, the under-keeper. " Queer fellow !" said Strathmore, as he gave his gun to one of the boys, and lighted a weed. " What did he go off for, I wonder ? He must have missed us, somehow * J 22 STRATIIMORE; OR, " Perhaps he's taken a wrong cut, and will wander miserably till the soup's cold and the fish overdone," suggested Danvers. " Lady Millicent is coming to-night, ain't she, with the Harewood people ? He'll hang him- self if he isn't in in time to take her in to dinner; he swears by her just now, you know. The Sabreur's eter- nally in love ! Who isn't, though ? " " 7'm not," said Strathmore, with perfect veracity. It was somewhat his pride that he had never lost his head for any woman in his life. " Because you're panoplied with protocols, and sworn to the State ! You're a cursed cold fellow, Cis always were ! " interrupted Danvers, with a mixture of impa- tience and envy. " The Sabreur has lost himself, I bet you ; it is easy enough in these woods. I was benighted once, don't you remember? the undergrowth is so con- foundedly thick, and it's as wild here as in Brittany. If be miss Lady Millicent, he'll hang himself, to a certainty I We must ask her for one of her rose-tendre ribbons to make the suicide effective 1 " " I'll go round by the coppice home, and look for him," said Strathmore, putting his cigar in his mouth. " There are two hours before the people come; it's only now striking seven. I shall be back in plenty of time, and it's a splendid evening. Au revoir! you and Phil want longer for your toilettes than I do, because you'll dress for the Harewood women ! " It was a splendid evening clear, sultry, with an amber light falling through the aisles of the trees, and long sha- dows deepening across the sward, while the wild fowl went to roost beside the pools, and the herons dipped their beaks into the dark cool waters that lay deep an still, with broad-leaved lilies and tangled river-plants floating languidly on their surface. Strathmore left Dan- vers and Langton to take the shorter cut through the gardens that led direct to the side-door of the bachelor's wing, and strolled himself along through the Hurst Wood, by the lodger devour known as Euston Coppice, a wild, solitary, intricate bit of the park, that had, as Danvers said, more of the luxuriant forest-growth of parts of Lower Brittany than of the tamer, more cultivated look of Eng- lish woodlands. Some vulcanic convulsion long ages ago WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 23 bad rent and split the earth in this part into as fantastic and uneven a surface as the Black Rocks of Derbyshire, the gaps so filled up by furze, and hazel, and yellow heath, and the rugged sides so covered with mosses, violet-roots, and hyacinths, that the right track might very easily be lost if you were not acquainted with every nook, and corner, and forest-path, as Strathmore had been from his childhood. He walked onward, looking about him; for he thought it possible that Erroll might have missed the right path, and that he might fall in with him as he passed round through the Euston Coppice homewards. Bertie Erroll was the solitary person whom Strathmore could ever have been said to have loved. His attachment was very difficult to rouse ; he cared for very few people, and, in the world, everybody, especially pretty and romantic women, called him without any heart, perhaps without any feeling. It was true that he had never lost his head after any women ; he had had an intrigue with this one, a liaison with that, but loved them he had not; his indiffer- ence was no affectation, and his vaunted panoply no pre- tence ; the Strathmores bad always better liked State plot and subtle power than the women whose odorous tresses had swept over their Milan corslets, and whose golden heads had been pillowed on their breasts. To Bertie Er- roll, Strathmore bore, however, a much deeper attachment than women had ever won from him the attachment of a nature that gives both love and friendship very rarely ; but, when it gives, either gives instantly, blindly, and trustingly ; the nature that had always been characteristic of the " swift, silent Strathmores," as the alliteration of cradle chronicles and provincial legends nicknamed the race that had reigned at White Ladies since Hastings. The friendship between them was the friendship closer than brotherhood of dead Greece and old Judea the bright truthfulness, the soft laziness, the candor, the dash, the nerve, the hundred attractive, attachable qualities of Er- roll's character, endeared him to Strathmore by that strange force of contrast that has so odd a spell sometimes in friendship as in love ; and the bond between them was as close and firmly riven as a clasp of steel. They never spoke of their friendship hardly ; it was not the way of either of them ; it is only your loving women who lavish 24 STRATHMORE; OR, eternal vows, and press soft kisses on each other's cheeks, and swear they cannot live apart over their pre-prandial cup of Souchong, to slander each other suavely behind their fans an hour afterwards, and sigh away their bosom- darling's honor with a whisper! They rarely spoke of it; but they had a friendship for one another passing the love of women, and they relied on it as men rely on their own honor, as silently and as secretly. Once, when they were together in Scinde, having both gone thitl eron a hunting trip to the big-game districts for a change one autumn, to bring home tiger-skins and dry pig-sticking, a tigress sprang out on them as they strolled alone through the jungle sprang out to alight, with grip and fang, upon Strathmore, who neither heard nor saw her, as it chanced. But before she could be upon her victim, Erroll threw himself before him, and catching the beast by her throat as she rose in the air to her leap, held her off at arm's length, and fell with her, holding her down by main force, while she tore and gored him in the struggle a struggle that lasted till Strathmore had time to reload his gun, and send a ball through her brain ; a long time, let me tell you, though but a few short seconds in actual duration, to hold down and to wrestle in the grip of a tigress of Scinde. " 5Tou would have done the same for me, my dear old fel- low," said Erroll, quietly and lazily, as his eyes closed and he fainted away from the loss of blood. And that was all he would ever vouchsafe to say or hear said about the matter. He had risked his life to save Strathmore's ; he knew Strathmore would have acted precisely the same for him. It was a type of the quality and of the character of their friendship. The evening shadows were slanting across the sward, while the squirrels ran from branch to branch, and the chestnuts lying on the moss turned to gold in the western sun, as Strathmore walked along through the Hurst Wood with a couple of beagles following in his track. See Er- roll he did not, and he wondered where the deuce he had gone ; if he bad been absolutely after the rabbits he would have taken some of the men or the dogs, at the least, with him ; and it was odd he had chosen that night in especial to be belated, as among the people coming to dine at White Ladies in an hour's time was Lady Millicent Clio- WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 25 ton, a beautiful blonde, tantalizing, imperious, and bewitch- ing to the highest degree, whom Enroll had watched for at Flirtation Corner, left the coulisses for at the opera, bought guinea cups of Souchong for at bazaars, and dedi- cated himself to generally, throughout the past season, lie walked onwards, flushing the pheasants with his step, and startling the grey herons as he passed the pools, till they rose at the bark of the dogs, and sailed majestically away in the sunny silent air. At last, as he went along the confines of the deer-park, towards the entrance of a long elm-walk, half lane, half avenue, that led round to- wards the Abbey, a spaniel bustled out of the brushwood near and leaped upon him ; it was one of his own dogs, a water-spaniel that Erroll had whistled to him, and brought with them that morning. "Hallo, Marquis ! where is he, old fellow?" said Strath more, as he stooped and patted the dog. Marquis understood the question, shook his long ears that were dripping with water from his chase of a wild duck, looked vivaciously intelligent and specially important, and ran onwards, turning back now and then to see that he was followed. No detective from Scotland- yard could have better done his duty. As Strathmore looked to watch where the dog ran, he saw standing in the deep shadow flung by the trees, across the walk, lean- ing over a gate against which his gun was resting, and talking to a woman, Bertie Erroll in quest of other game than the rabbits. He was at some distance from Strath- more, almost at the other end of the avenue ; across which broad lines of yellow light fell through the trunks of the trees from the sunset, where the elm-boughs meeting above head, thick with luxuriant leaf, threw chequered shadows on the turf below. He was leaning down over the stile which led into a bridle-path that wound up to the church a mile or so beyond, and was talking earnestly to his com- panion, who stood on the other side, and who, even at that distance, made a charming picture, much such a one as Aline, when Boufflers toyed with her at the woodland brook' under the forest of Lorraine, with the butterflies fluttering above her head, and the wild flowers hanging in her childish hands. She stood on the lower step of the stile, so that as she reached upwards one of her arms was wound about his neck ; her face, soft, youthful, and fair, 3 26 STRATHMORE; OR, was lifted to his own, as his hand lingered on her brow, pushing back from it the shining waves of hair, while she nestled closely to him as a bird to the one Avho caresses it, us a spaniel to the master it follows. It was a scene to be interpreted at a glance, that golden sunset hour under the shadow of the elms and in those hours who remem- bers that the sun will set, leaving the dank dews of night to brood where its beams have fallen ; that the foliage above us will drop off sere and withered like the "dark brown years" of Ossian, into which we must enter and dwell ; that in the grasses the asp is curling, that in the west the clouds are brooding ? None remember, mes amis ! neither did those who lingered then beneath the elms before the sun went down. "!ZV?a/'s his game ! By George ! I thought it was odd if the rabbits alone made him too late for dinner! I wonder how many he has shot in the coppice. Poor Lady Millicent! she would die of mortification and pique," thought Strathmore, as he looked up the elm-walk at its crossed light and shade, with a smile in which there was a dash of contempt. He had been loved by women who might well have claimed to haunt his memory ; proud, peerless beauties, who might well have looked to rouse the swift imperious passion which, when they loved that unloving race ! the love of the Strathmores had ever been ; but he had cared for none of them, and this wasting of hours, this ceaseless adoration of women, this worship- ping of a mistress's eyebrow, was incomprehensible and somewhat contemptible in his sight. He never was so near losing patience with Erroll as when he came en evidence with the perpetual gallantries, the never-ending, ever-chang- ing grandes passions, as easily lit as cigars md as quickly thrown aside, that were the characteristic of the Sabrrur, and his best-beloved pursuit. Strathmore M-oulil as soon have understood consuming his time in constantly blow- ing soap-bubbles, like Hawthorne's hero of the Seven Gables! and he looked now with a certain disdainful amusement at them where they stood, while Err^U stooped down so that his moustaches almost brushed tW. woman's brow, and she leaned forward so that her head, uncovered to the sun that played upon the auburn ripples oi >er hair, rested against his arm. Then, unseen himself, ho turned, WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 27 and making the spaniel quiet with a sign, crossed the avenue, and went along beside the sunken fence of ihp deer-park by another route homeward, so thai he snould neither spy upon nor interrupt them. Such game was Erroll's especial sport, if he fouud it ou the lands of White Ladies he was fully welcome to the preserves undisputed. Strath more did not envy him either the small amusement of slaying, or the inevitable trouble of the game when slain. A quarter of an hour later on, as he crossed the lawns that lay in front of the Abbey, while the chimes of the bells were ringing the curfew with low mellow chants and carillons, he heard a step behind him, and as he turned faced Erroll, who came along smoking, with Marquis at his heels, and blandly unconscious that he had been seen In his tete-a-tete undei the elms. " Had good sport in the coppice, mon cher ? What did you mean by giving us the slip like this ?" said Strath- inore, as he swung round and waited for him. " Pretty good ; rabbits were rather shy," answered Erroll, with the Manilla between his lips, and the most tranquil air of innocence that the human countenance ever wore. "But la belle wasn't! Tant mieux! you seemed very good friends; is she an old acquaintance or a new? Is the game in the bag or only marked; hit or only just flushed ? I expect the whole story in the smoking-room to-night !" A certain dash of annoyance and discomfiture went over Erroll's face for the moment, but he laughed as he broke the ash off his cigar against the grey stone of the cloisters under which they were passing ; " Hang you ! where did you see me ?" " Where you were very plainly to be seen ! If you make open-air rendezvous, tres cher, you must be prepared for spectators. Who is she? If the game's been found on my lands, I think it is fair I should have an account of it. Is she an old love or a new ?" "Not new," laughed the Sabreur, pulling his velve* Glengarry over his forehead, to keep the sunset glare out of his eyes "Not new ! I thought you gave no more thought to old loves than to old gloves the gloss off both, both go 28 STRATHMORE; OR, to the dovil ' 1 suppose you found hor up last autumn, when you were down here in my place. I was in the East, so 1 am not responsible for what- happened. You might have told me, my dear fellow ; I shouldn't have rivalled you ; pretty paysannes never had any attraction forme; I like the tourneure of the world, not the odor of the dairy. Give me grace and wit, not rosy checks and fingers fresh from the churn and the hencoop; the perfume of frangipane, not of the farm-yard. Petrarch might adore a miller's wife ce n'est pas selon moi and I think the flour must have made Laura's chiome d'oro look dusty: I never took a mistress from my tenantry ! Who is she Erroll?" Erroll took the Manilla out of his mouth, sent a puff from it into the air, and turned to Strathmore with his gay, insouciant laugh, clear as a bell and sweet as a girl's, that had so much youth in it : " I'll tell you some other time. Old story, you know, nothing new in it. We're all fools about women, and she's sweetly pretty, poor little thing! beats any of those we shall have to-night hollow, Lady Millicent and all of 'em !" Strathmore raised his eyebrows and stroked his mou- staches : "An old love ! and you're as enthusiastic as that ? What must you have been in the beginning! Thank Heaven I was not here. Poor Lady Millicent! sal volatile by the gallon would never restore her if she knew a young pro- vincial, smelling of the hayfield, with a set of cherry ribbons for a Sunday, and a week-day aroma of the cow- shed (if not the pigsty), was said by the difficile Sabreur to beat her hollow! and she a Court beauty and a Lady in Waiting ! So much for taste !" "Pigsty? Cowshed? You didn't see her just now, Cecil; you couldn't!" broke in the Sabreur, disgusted. "I saw a woman, my dear Erroll, c'etait assez ; she was your property, and I noticed no more." "For God's sake don't suppose me such a Goth that I should fall in love with a dairymaid, Strath !" said Erroll, plaintively. " She's nothing of that port nothing, 1 give you my honor ! Let me clear my character, pray. Should I love a 'Phillis in a hazel-bower?' 1 hate cobwebs, de\v, and earwigs ; and I can't bear a coarse color for a woman J WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 1 2^ I say, Strathmore, don't let out anything about it, though, will you ? Don't tell the other fellows ; there's no object, and they'd only " "Chaff you? Exactly!" "No ! I don't care a straw for chaff," said Erroll, medi- tatively, with his Manilla in his mouth, drawing his Glen- garry over his eyes. " It's only boys who mind chaff, we don't. But they might get hunting her out, you see would, I dare say, 1 should in their place and I don't want that. I wish to keep the thing quiet. I have managed to do it hitherto; and she would cut up as rough at insult as Lady Millicent herself; you understand?" " Not very clearly; but it doesn't matter; one doesn't look for perspicuity in love intrigues nor for reason." " Hang you! you know what I mean," murmured the Sabreur, lazily. " You mean, you don't want me to tell of your tete-a-tete, and set the men on to badger you about it when the women are gone? Very well ! I'm silent as the dead!" laughed Strathmore. "What a wicked dog you are, Bertie, on my word, though. Country air ought to purify your morals ; one naturally sins in cities, but " "Inevitably sins in villages! Just so, one's nothing else to do ! In town one sins from sociability ; in the country, from solitariness a safe indication that the soft sins are the natural concomitants of one's existence every- where, and shouldn't be resisted!" said the Sabreur, with a yawn. "Admirable theory! developed in practice, too, by its preacher, which can't be said of all precepts! Arcadia and the Rue Breda have-more in common than one gene- rally fancied then ; but I shouldn't have thought you'd have taken to provincial amourettes, Sabreur! However, failing hot-house fruits, I suppose you take a turn at black- berries. What an odd state of existence it must be, not to be able to live twenty-four hours without finding some woman's eyes to look into!'' "Very natural, 1 think! when women's eyes are the pleasantest mirrors there are, and framed on purpose for us. You were never in love in your life, Strath." " I was never the fool of a woman, if you mean that." " You've brought over a pnina Jonua, because, in a cold 3* 30 STHATIIMORE; OR, sort of way, you thought hor a handsome Roman," went on the Sabrear, disdaining the interruption "or you've taken up the Montolicu. because she made a dead-set at you and because one has a Montolieu as naturally as one has a cigar-case or a pair of slippers or you've made love to some grande dame because it answered a political purpose, and advanced a finesse to be in her boudoir when everybody else was shut out of it; but as for love you know nothing about it! " Strathmore laughed : " I know as much as any wise man knows. I know just as much as flavors life any more disturbs it. I like a woman for her beauty, but I should be particularly sorry to sup in raptures off a single smile, to tie my hands with a golden hair, and to go mad after the shape of an ankle, as you do with a dozen divinities in as many months. A week or two ago you were wild about the Clinton, who t'.s- worth looking at, I grant you, and now, I dare say, you've lost your head just as completely for little Phillis yonder, with her hands in the butter ! My clear Bertie, it's positively inexplicable to me ; I can fancy your kissing the lips, if they're pretty ones, of all those goddesses, but I can't possibly understand your caring about the goddesses themselves ! " "Hold your tongue! and, for Heaven's sake, don't suppose I'm in love with a human churn ! Hands in the butter; what an idea! " murmured the Sabreur, disgusted. "Well ! it must be a- cabbage-rose this time, conserva- tory ones don't grow about the home farms. Or if it isn't " Strathmore stopped, struck with a sudden thought, and swung round, as they walked under the cloisters, his face as he turned to Enroll softening with that rare smile which took from it all that was cold, dark, and dangerous in its physiognomy, and gave it a generous and almost tender warmth a warmth that as yet no woman had had the magic to waken there. He laid his hand on Erroll's shoulder with the old familiar gesture of their Eton days, MS they came out of the aisles of the cloisters on to the lawn that stretched smooth and sunny before an antique grey terrace, with broad flights of steps In.ig with ivy, looking down on to thick avenues and long glades of WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 31 trees, like the terrace at Haddon, where Dorothy Vernon fled in the summer moonlight to the love of John Manners. " Erroll, I say, it is no entanglement, no annoyance, is it, this affair of yours ? " Erroll threw his cigar away, shook his head, and laughed : "Not in the least; except that my conscience smites me a little for it sometimes. That's all ! " Strathmore's hand rested still on his shoulder, lying there in the safe, cordial grasp of a friendship warm as the friendship of David for Jonathan: "Conscience! How exceptional you are ! The word's out of all modern dictionaries, and rococo from use. But what I meant was, if you had any difficulty of any kind if you need to shake yourself free from any embarrass- ments you would keep to your promise and let me serve you in all ways. Remember, old fellow, you gave me your word." He meant that Erroll would let" him assist him more substantially than by advice. The Sabrcur was a cadet d'un cadet, a man about town, with little more to float him than a good name and a fashionable reputation, lucky Baden " coups " and dashcd-off magazine articles ; his debts were heavy sometimes, his embarrassments not a few, though on his gay, sunny nature they never weighed long ; he was, very literally, a " beggared gentleman," though his beggary was as joyous and insouciant a Bohe- mianism as might be ; and well off himself, Strathmore, who was generous to an extreme, and ascetically indifferent to riches, as I've said, had always pressed him, and some- times, though generally with the utmost difficulty, com- pelled him to accept his aid without bond or payment. His hand lay on Erroll's shoulder where they stood at the foot of the terrace steps, and the light from the west fell full upon his face as Strathmore looked at him it was so frank, so glad, with a smile as bright as a girl's upon it, that many years afterwards Strathmore saw it in memory fresh as though beheld but yesterday. " Dear old fellow ! 1 know you would ! If I needed, I would ask you as freely as though you were my brother ;" and Erroll's voice was rich and full as he spoke, like the voioo of a woman when she speaks of or to that which sne loves : then he laughed, and curled a loose leaf round 32 , STRATIIMORE; OR, his Manilla. "But there's no need here; 7'm not the sufferer. They are not panther griffes, like your Mon- tolieu's or La Julia's, confound her! /play the tiger part if there be one in the duo. I say, Strathmore, what a confounded bore your going off to Servia Bosnia, Bul- garia, where is it? Won't Prince Michel wait?" " Prince Michel would willingly wait till doomsday rather than see me, but England won't. It is a bore ; I didn't want to leave till over the 1st; however, diplomatic oblige! and there'll be a good deal of finesse wanted. It is an errand quite to my taste." " Perhaps you'll see this adorable Vavasour and Taux beauty on the Continent. Do try ! " "And report her to you, as game worth your coming over to mark or not, as the case may be ? Your paysanne won't hold her ground long against the Peeress, if she's only a tithe of what Rokeby says. I will make note for you accurately if I see" her ; and I may come back through Paris in the spring. The deuce ! it's getting very late. Those people will all be here before we are dressed for dinner," said Strathniore, as he crossed the terrace, entered the house, and went up to his dressing-room that was over the billiard-room, and looked out across the pleasaunce and the deer-park that lay beyond. Lady Millicent came, haughty, lovely, and bewitching, with the Harewood people and several others, to dinner that night at White Ladies, in the great dining-hall that had been the refectory of the old Dominicans. Whore travel-worn pilgrims and serge-clothed palmers, footsore and bronzed by Eastern suns, had sat and supped, telling of miracles of Loretto or persecutions from the Moslem to the listening brethren ; pretty women with diamonds glancing in their hair, and smiles brightening in their languid, lustrous eyes, sat at the table, covered with gold plate and Bohemian glass and delicate Sevres, with rich fruits and brilliant exotics, and Parian figures holding up baskets odorous with summer blossom, while the wines sparkled pink and golden in their carafes, and flushed to warm, ruby tints in the silver claret-jugs. Where the white rcbcs of the Dominicans had swept, the perfumed laces and silks of their trailing dresses as noiselessly moved ; where the Latin chant of the Salataris Hostia WROUGHT BY HIS OWN RANB. 33 had risen and swelled, the low laugh of their musical voices echoed ; where the incense had floated in purple clouds, the bouquet of Burgundies and the perfume of Millefleurs scented the air; where the silent monks had sat and broken black bread in the monarchical gloom of their woodland Abbey, Lady Millicent and her sisters flirted and smiled, and blushed the bloom off a hothouse grape, and trifled with the wing of an ortolan, while the light flashed azure-bright in their sapphires, and the opals gleamed in their bosom. Le Roi est mort. Vive le Roi! So To-day succeeds to Yesterday, and the dead are sup- planted and the past is forgot ! Where the viaticum last night was administered to the dying, the laugh of the living echoes gaily this morning, and in its turn the laugh will die off the air, and the chant of the tomb will come round again. Such is life and such is death, and the twc are ever fused together and twisted in one inseparable cord, the white line running with the black, side by side, crossed and recrossed, following each other as the night the day ! " You incorrigible fellow, what would your wood-nymph have said to you, if she'd seen you making such desperate love to Lady Millicent to-night ? " said Strathmore, as he and Erroll passed down the corridor to the smoking-room, as the last roll of the carriages echoed down the avenue. " The devil !" laughed Erroll. " If they had a lorgnon long enough to let them see any of us when we're away from them, the tamest Griseldis would have little to say to us when we went back to her! Those poor women! they're shockingly cheated." " They have their revenge, mon cher. If we're their first instructors in mischief, they take to the lesson very kindly, and improve on it fast enough ! " laughed Strath- more. " If M. son Mari deceive Lucretia, Lucretia soon turns the tables, and dupes her lord. They are quits with us, and don't wan't any pity. I wish your luckless wood-nymph had seen you go on with the Clinton to- night! I am curious really to know how you get up the steam fresh every time ; now with a duchess, and now with a dairy-maid, now with a blonde, and now with a brune 1 " "Afin de varier les couleurs I " 34 BTB \TIIMOKK; OK, quoted RiToll, appropriately, wrapping about him his seed- pearl broidered and sable-lined dressing-gown, dainty and lOTely enough for Lady Millieent's wear. I'aramba !" broke in Strathmore. " I have a good mini! to punish your inconstancy by betraying your incognita. Such a monoply of the wild game and tin- tanu- birds at once isn't fair. I'll tell Danvers the whereabouts of your preserves." \ '. No! Don't! there's a pood fellow," interrupted Krroll, quickly. "You see it would only bother one anil " Stratlnnore laughed as be opened the door of the sinok- inir-rooin, and a flood of warm lii^lit streamed out from within : " \\"e don't like poaching in neglected ]ireserves even ! I understand, my dear tVllow. \\\\* your bis; triune ami your small, make love to your Court belle and your country jrirl both at once, and just as you like! / won't set the beaters after either. Have 1 not said I'll be silent as death? Kntre/.! Bah! there is Phil smoking those wivtehed musk-scented cigarettes ajrain; they are only lit for Lady Georjrie or Eulalie Pnpellori. What taste, when th^re are my llavanuas and cheroots 1" CHAPTER III. .THE VIGIL OF ST. JOHN. It was the vigil of St. John in Pratrue. The stars were coining out one by one in the clear violet skies, that were still yellow in the west with the beams of the setting sun; and the dews of the evening were moist upon the thick foliage of the Loren/.ibenre and the vineyards of Anh'igen, encircling the city with their fresh green /.one. The lights already lit upon the bridges were mirrored in the waters of the Moldau, or the Veltava, as it is called by its softer Czeschen name, that ran like a broad smooth silver band beneath their arches; and the glare from the wenf-ern s WROUGHT BY IIIS OWN HAND. 35 fell on the gilt crosses of the Tcyn church, making ihem blaze and sparkle with fairy brilliance, while the mosque- like spires of a thousand towers stood out clear and deli- cate as fairy handiwork in the warm golden haze, as the measured chant of litanies, sung by gathered multitudes, rose and fell with slow sonorous rhythm on the hnsh of the coming night. For many nights and days before, the hum of collecting people and the weary tramp of tired feet had been heard throughout the city, as pilgrims and dev- ntres of every stock and province had flocked far and near, from wild Silesian forests, from remote Bavarian mountains, from Saxon hamlets buried in their pine woods, and charcoal- burners' chalets in Moldavian wilds, and Czeschen home- steads nestled in their cherry orchards, to the great Festi- val of Holy Johannes of Nepomiik, at whose most sainted martyrdom, as Legend and Church record, five" stars arose and glittered in the waters where the Saint sank, a thou- sand years ago, and gleamed in golden radiance, heaven- sent witnesses to innocence. At the Cathedral and in the Platz, before the stars and statue on the bridge, and around the bronze ring in St. Wenzel's Chapel, at every smaller shrine and lesser altar throughout the city, the dense crowd of pilgrims knelt, all their heads bowed down in prayer, as the numberless ears of wheat in a corn-field bend with one accord before the sweep of a summer breeze. There is something oddly touching, pathetic, majestic, almost sa- cred in the sight of a surging sea of human life. What is it that is grand and impressive in a dense silent crowd collected together, no matter whether that crowd be a mass of troops in the Champ de Mars, the gathering of the people upon Epsom Downs, or a countless assem- bling of peasants in Prague on a Holy day ? What is it ? Taken individually, the units of each are unimpressive, grotesque, common-place; a French guide, an English touter, a Sclavonian glass engraver, have no sublimity about them taken singly, but in their aggregate there is that same strange, nameless, mournful solemnity, which brought hot, unbidden tears to the eyes of the man who, while the Magi offered libations to the manes of the Ho- meric heroes, sat on the white throne at Abydos, looking down on the crowded Hellespont, and the countless thou- sands that were gathered by the shores of Scamander, 36 STRATHMORE; OR, beneath the shadow of Mount Ida, while the sunlight glittered on the golden pomegranates of the Immortal Guard, and the gorgeous robes of the Thracians fluttered in the winds. Perhaps, with him, we vaguely, unwit- tingly, involuntarily campassionate these vast multitudes, of which in a century there will not be one who has not been gathered to his tomb, and the depth of the sadness lends a sanctity to these crowds, whose goal is the grave, which the chill and shallow philosophies of an Artabanus cannot whisper away; for we too are wending thither in their company; we too must turn our steps from golden Abydos, and \ay us down to die at Salamis ! It was the Vigil of St. John. Pyramids of gas-jets flared up to the calm violet skies, the Five Stars com- memorative of the Saint of Nepomiik glittered on the para- pet in the profound silence of the evening air ; there was no sound but the swelling melodious cadence of the Latin litanies, chanted by a million voices in solemn and regular rhythm, filling the night with music, full, rich, mournful as the glorious harmonies that peal from cathedral choirs at a midnight mass ; and an Englishman strolling through the city on foot (for no carriages are permitted in the Platz and Bridge at the Yigil and Festival of St. John), looked down on the kneeling multitudes with a smile on his lips, a smile that had perhaps a little of the sadness of the Persian as he gazed down on the ^Egean, and more of natural disdain for these superstitions before him, that were but type of the bigotries of a wider world, where difference from him is your neighbor's measure of your dif- ference from Deity, and where we are bidden to accept our creed, as in the time of the Molinistes they were bid- den to accept the Pouvoir Prochain, by no better rule than that "il faut prononcer le mot des levres de puer d'etre heretique de noni." As he strolled down Wenzel's Platz, in the centre of which sprang a tree of gas, with a myriad burning lumin- ous leaves, that threw their glare on the kneeling devotees, packed as closely as sheep in their pens, as they bowed in adoration before the holy shrines and chanted the litanies of St. John ; a carriage that had come into the square against all rule for the best reason, that the horses had broken away, frightened at th<3 music, the WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 37 lights, the crowds, and had taken their own way thither, beyond their driver's power to pull them in dashed down the Platz at a headlong gallop. The crowd of pilgrims were too densely packed to have power to move to save themselves by separation or by flight; they fell pele-mele one on another, the stronger crushing the weaker, according to custom in every conflict, calling on Jesus and the Mother of God and Holy Johannes to preserve them from their fate, shrieking, praying, sobbing, swearing; while the horses, maddened by the tumult and the gas glare, tore across the square, dragging their carriage after them like a wicker toy. Nothing less than a heavenly interposition, miraculously great as the Five Stars of Holy Johannes, could save the people in their path from death and destruction ; the carriage rocked and swayed, its occupant clasping her hands and crying piteously for help; the horses dashed through the kneeling multitude, knock- ing down aged men and sobbing children and shrieking women in their headlong course ; the oaths and prayers and screams rose loud and shrill, half drowned in the rich sonorous chant of the litanies from priests and pilgrims beyond, that swelled out uninterrupted from every lighted shrine and blazing altar. Death was imminent for many death in the hour of prayer, death on the eve of glad festivity; the horses, snorting, plunging, flinging the white foam from their nostrils, trampled out a merciless path through the close- packed crowd, and trod down beneath their hoofs what they could not scatter from their road. The blaze of gas, the loud swell of the chants, the glitter of the altar lights, the wild tumult and uproar about them, terrified and mad- dened them. Death was in their van and in their wake for all the multitude kneeling there in prayer; but as they neared the spot where the Englishman was, who had not moved a yard, but calmly awaited their approach, ho stood firmly planted, as though made of granite, in their path, and catching them, with a sudden spring, by their ribbons close to the curb, checked them in full flight with a force that sent them back upon their haunches. It needed what he had, an iron strength and perfect coolness ; even with these to aid him it was a dangerous risk to run, Ccr if they shook themselves free, the infuriated beasts 4 SS STRATIIMORE; OR, \vouid trample him to death. They reared and plunged wildly, flinging the foam, tinged with blood, over their chests and flanks, and into his eyes, till it blinded him with the spray ; they lifted him three times up off the ground by his wrists with a jerk sufficient to wrench his arms out of their sockets, with a strain enough to make every fibre and muscle break and snap. Still he held on ; they had met their master, and had to give in at last; they were powerless to shake off his grip ; and, tired out at last with the contest, they stood quiet, panting, trem- bling, passive, fairly broken in, their heads drooping, their limbs quivering, blood where the curbs had sawn their mouths, mixed with the snowy foam that covered them from their loins to their pasterns. He let go his hold ; his face was very pale, and perfectly calm, as though he had lounged out of a ball-room ; but his eyes glittered and gleamed dark with a swift, dangerous passion a passion that was evil. lie stretched his hand up, without speak- ing, to the coachman for his whip ; the man stooped down and gave it to him, and, clearing the crowd wide with a sign, he lashed the horses pitilessly, fiercely lashed them till the poor brutes, spiritless, powerless, and trembling, stood shaking like culprits before their judge. That mer- ciless punishing done, his passion had spent itself; the horses were broken down to the quietness of lambs, and might have been guided by a young child ; and, letting go his hold on them again, he approached the carriage window, and lifted his hat as carelessly and indifferently as though he were bowing to some acquaintance in the Ride or the Pre Catalan. " Madame, you must be very much terrified, but I trust you have not been hurt?" he said, in German, to the single occupant of the carriage, who, leaning out. eagerly, and with grateful empressement, stretched to him two delicate, ungloved, jewelled hands. " Monsieur ! Mon Dieu ! how brave you have been ! You have saved my life and at the risk of your own! What can I say to you ? How can I thank you ?" As the glare from the gas-pyramid near and the lights burning on the shrine fell upon her face, he saw that it was one of rare and exceeding loveliness, and smiled WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HA.VP. 39 slightly as her warm white hands touched his own, thai were aching; and throbbing with pain: "Madame, I am thanked already par un regard de vousJ Is there any way in which I can have the honor to assist you ?" Before she could reply, the carriage moved. The driver, a rough, ill-mannered Czec, who wasted no words and no time, started off his trembling horses afresh ; he was im- patient to be out of the crowd, that, recovering from their terror, were swearing bitterly at him in a hundred guttural dialects, and screaming vociferous, indignant wrath ; and he was afraid, moreover, of the arrival and the fury of police officials. Without awaiting orders, he started them off back again through the square, and the carriage rolled away down the Platz, bearing its occupant out of sight; a broidered handkerchief she bad dropped, as her hand met her deliverer's, was the only relic left of her, where it lay on the stones at his feet. The pilgrims, closing over the vacant spot as the vehicle rolled away, crowded round the Englishman, who, by his nerve and muscle, had saved two-thirds of them from imminent death, with impetuous, demonstrative, enthusiastic gratitude, the vivacious Scla- vonians calling on the Mother of God and Holy Johannes to bless and reward him, showering down on him a thou- sand valedictions in harsh Saxon and vehement Czeschen; the women holding up their children to look at him, and remember his face, and pray for him for ever; the terrified peasants kissing his clothes in frantic adoration, canoniz- ing him then and there, and calling down upon his head the blessing of the whole heavenly roll of saints and angels' guardian; while through the multitude ran a breathless whisper, that their deliverer was none other than St. John of Nepomtik himself, descended on earth in human form to save and champion his faithful people, keeping watch and prayer at his Vigil in Prague ! To be canonized was very far from his taste, and the vehement gratitude lavished upon him was an infinite bore. The vociferous worship of the crowds could very well have been dispensed with, and, signing them off to leave him a clear path, he pushed them away, and break- ing free from their eager clamor with some difficulty, he walked down the Platz, striking a fusee and lighting a 40 STRATIIMORE; OR, oigar as ne went an act that slightly disturbed the pil- grims who had canonized him, and shook their faith as to his saintship: Holy Johannes would never have smoked! As he moved from the spot, he saw the handkerchief lying at his feet, and stooped and raised it; it was of gossamer texture, bordered with delicate lace; it was perfumed with bois-de-sandale, and in the corner, broidered with fantastic device, was a coronet and an interlaced chiffre, whose initials were too intricately interwoven for him to be at the pains to decipher them. It was a woman's pretty toy ; some men would have kept it en souvenir of this Vigil of St. John when a face so marvellously lovely had beamed upon them; he was not one of those; it was not his way. For a moment he took it up to thrust it in the breast of his waistcoat, more without thought than from any motive in the action ; but as he did so he was passing a pretty Bohemian glass-engraver, whose bright black eyes sparkled with eager longing as her pretty brunette's face looked out from her yellow hood, and she saw the dainty, scented handkerchief in his hand. He threw it to her, dropping the little gossamer toy, with its broidered coronet, into her bosom. " It will please you better than me, little beauty," he said, carelessly, as he went on through the thickly packed crowd, and not taking in return the caress she would willingly have allowed ; as the pilgrims returned to their prayers, closing over the vacant spot, and the chanted orisons, broken off for a while, rose again in slow- measured harmonies, the litanies ringing out into the silent air, the lights burning on the blazing altars, and the dense crowds bowing down before the shrines throughout the city, while the golden cross of the Teyn Church glittered in the light of the stars, and the hushed skies brooded in the twilight of the coming night over the towers and the palaces, the river and the vineyards, the lighted altars, and the frowning fortresses of antique and historic I'rague. WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 4] CHAPTER IV. A TITIAN PICTURE SEEN BY SUNSET-LIGHT. " MOUTON qni ive, are you thinking of Prague and of me, mon ami ? " A cumbersome Czeschen boat was dropping down the Moklau, its sails idly flapping in the sultry June night, in which not a breath of wind was stirring, while the mournful music of some of the national lays broke on the air from a little band of musicians playing in the aft of the vessel, wild, sweet, and harmonious, as though they were the melodies of legendary Rubeziihl and his Spirit Band. The boat was chiefly filled with peasantry going by water to a fair at Auzig, and bright-eyed glass- engravers, with yellow or scarlet kerchiefs on their black- haired heads, were laughing merrily with each other, and casting mischievous glances at the sailors as they passed them. It was such a summer night as you may see any year in Bohemia; the lazy, silent hour when the hot, toilsome, blazing day is sinking into the warm, still, tranquil night; when the peasantry leave their field-work, chanting fragments of the Nieb-^lungenlied or some other Sclavonic song; when the engravers put aside their little graving-wheels, and lean out for a breath of air from their single window under the eaves; when the cattle wind homeward down the hill-side paths, and in the doorways of the Gasthof, under the cherry-trees, the gossipers drink their good-night draughts of Lager and Bayerisches. The orchards white with blossom, bowered gaily-painted home- steads ; the dark red roofs peeped out of chalets half hidden under hollyhocks ; the poppy grounds glowed scarlet, catching the last gleam of the setting sun; and over the rye-fields a low western breeze was blowing from the fir-covered hills as the vessel floated down the stream, passing green wooded creeks, and pine woods growing between the clefts of riven rocks, and golden glimpses of huzy distance from the banks through which the JVIoldau H'ound its way. 4* 12 STRATflMORE ; OR, <( Mouton qui rove, arc you thinking of Prague and of me, mon ami ?" The voice was low, and sweet, and rich that most excellent thing in woman ; and the speaker was worthy the voice, where she sat leaning amongst a pile of shawls and cushions with which her servant had covered the rough bench of the boat, as an Odalisque might have leaned amongst the couches of the Oda, with as much p]astern grace and as much Eastern languor. A blonde aux yeux noirs, her eyes were long and dark and lustrous, with a dangerous droop of their thick curling lashes, but her skin was dazzlingly fair, Avith a delicate rose tendre bloom in her cheeks ; the hair was not golden, nor auburn, nor blonde cendre\ but what I have only seen once in my life, the "yellow hair" of the poets, of Edith the Swan- necked, and of Laura of Avignon ; the lips were beautiful a trifle too full, and too sensual feminine detractors would have objected, but Beranger would have sung of them : pour ma Ikvre qui les presse, C'est un defaut bien attrayant ! and it was a mouth that surely smiled destruction ! It was a face, brilliant, tender, marvellously lovely like a face of Titian or of Greuze, as she leant there among her cushions, with a black veil over her hair, thrown tin-re with the grace of a Spanish mantilla ; and her white hands lying on the rough wooden edge of the vessel, with their rings gleaming in the sunset glare. Her e} r es were dwell- ing on the face of a man who leant over the boat-side within a few yards of her, and who was looking down into the water, a cigar in his mouth, and his profile turned towaids her; dwelling with curiosity, admiration, satis- faction. A woman appreciated better than a man the peculiar and varied meanings of that physiognomy ; women will not often see widely, but they always see' microscopically; they cannot analyze, but they have invaluable, rapid intuition. "It is a face of Vandyke! so much repose, with so much passion. I like it. It tolls a story, but a story whose leaves are uncut," she thought to herself, as she leaned forwards, touched his arm with a branch of cherry- WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 43 blossoms she held, and challenged him with her Kughing words, "Mouton qui reve ! " He turned; he had not seen her there before, though both had been on board some hours; and as the light blow of the cherry-blossoms struck his arm, scattering their snowy petals, and her low, soft laugh fell on his ear, he recognized the face that he had seen a few days before in the gas glare of the Vigil of St. John, whose broidered handkerchief he had dropped into the bosom of a Bohemian peasant girl, instead of treasuring it en souvenir of one so fair. Such a woman would have won courteous welcome and recog- nition from a Stagyrite or a nonogenarian ; and he took the hand she extended 4o him, soft, warm, and small, with sapphires and pearls gleaming on its ungloved fingers, lifting his hat to her with answering words of gratified acknowledgments. He had not been thinking of her, but Diogenes himself would not have had discourtesy enough to have told her so; and of a summer's evening, dropping down a river in a si -w, tedious passage, such a rencontre to while away the time could not choose but be acceptable to any man. "Ah, monsieur!" she said, softly, as. he drew near to her, " how brave you were that night. To dare to stop those houses in full flight! it was marvellous! it was heroic ! Vou saved my life ; how can I ever thank you well enough ? ever show you half my gratitude '<"' " Hush, madame, I entreat you !" he said, with a smile, that was rather the calm conventional smile of courtesy than the warmer one she was used to see lighten at her glance. " You have thanked me abundantly ; if you do more, you will make me ashamed of having served you so little. Few men would not envy me so rich a recompense as lies in having won the smallest title to your gratitude !'' La blonde aux yeux noirs looked up at him searchingly through her silky lashes, and laughed a pretty, mocking, airy laugh : " Graceful words! but are they meant?" " Ah, madame 1" be answered, laughing, as he seated himself beside the fair stranger, into whose path accident had thrown him so agreeably. " Perhaps that is a ques- 'ion that it is always wisest never to ask concerning any words at all !" STRATEMORE ; OR. "What an odd man!" thought the lovely Odalisque of the Moldau, letting her eyes rest on the countenance that had for her, as it had for most women, a peculiar fascina- tion, while she laughed again : " Very true ! Some women will tell you, monsieur, they do not like compliments never believe them ; it is only that the raiKins sont verts. I like flattery. I live on it as children live on bonbons ; if it be not sincere, it is nothing to me, the blame lies on the bad taste of the flatterers. I must have my dragees, and, as long as they are sweet, what matter whether they are real sugar or only French chalk ?" "All offered to you must be genuine you need have no fear!" he answered her and he meant it. As he looked down on the dazzling incognita, whose insouciant freedom had yet all the grace and charm taught by the breeding of Courts and beaux mondes, though critical and very difficult to please, he confessed to himself that he had never seen anything more lovely out of the pastelles of La Tour, or the dreams of Titian, than this young and brilliant creature, found thus strangely out of place, and alone, in a Bohemian boat that was carrying a load of peasant passengers to Auzig Fair! Who could she be? a lady of rank, laisscz faire and untrammelled, amusing herself with the romnnccs and caprices of a momentary incognita; a Princess of the Tuileries, or of the Quartier Breda ; a Serene Plighness of some Sesquipedalinn-Strclitz, sans state and sans suite ; or a Comtesse sans Chateaux (save en Espagne), with a face and a grace more fatal to her prey than her vin mosseux and her skilful ecarte ? As yet it was impossible to tell, and with a lovely woman so ungracious an inter- rogation can never be put as the insolent question, " Who are you ?" She looked up and met his eyes bent on her, as the light of the sun setting behind the pine woods lit up her face and form, as she leaned among her cushions, into Reuben-like richness, with a bright touch of Fra Angelo and Carlo Dolce softness about the tableau. " How strangely we meet, monsieur, on this clumsy little Czeschen boat ! I came by water because the night was so warm ; and you came for the same reason ? Ah ! C'est le desiin, monsieur! We were fated to meet again/' WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 45 "If fate will always serve me as kindly I will become a predestinarian to-morrow, and go in leading-strings with blind contentment!" God help us ! how rashly we say things in this world. Long years afterwards we remember those idle, careless, unmeant words gaily uttered, and they come back to us like the distant mocking laughs of devils! devils who tempted us, and now riot in their work. " C'est le destin /" she said, smiling, her fair face, with its luminous eyes, looking the lovelier for that beaming coquettish smile, half languid, half moqueur : "But, monsieur, you have been my deliverer, may I not ask to know, who is it I have to thank for so daring a rescue as I owed to you in Prague ?" "Assuredly. My name is Strathmore Cecil Strath- more." " Strathmore !" she repeated, musingly : " It is a very pretty name, and a good one. Then you are English, monsieur? And if so, you are thinking, of course, what a strange incorrect whim of mine it is for me to be travel- ling alone with only my maid in a little Czeschen boat ill the evening ? You English are so raides, so prudish !" Strathmore laughed, as he wound the shawls about her that had dropped aside : " The English are (though I am neither of the two, believe me), but they generally verify Swift's aphorism, that 'a nice man is a man of nasty ideas;' the chill icing is only to conceal dirty water, and they freeze to hide what lies below 1 But may not I claim similar confidence, and entreat to know by name one for whom no name is needed, it is true, to make one remember her?" She laughed, and shook her head in a denial so charm- ing that it was worth fifty assents : "No, I am travelling incognita. I cannot reveal that secret. I like Romance and Caprice, monsieur, they are feminine privileges, and following them I have found far more amusement than if I had gone in one beaten track between two blank walls of Custom and Prudence. It may have made me enemies ; but, bah ! who goes through life without them ?" "None! and never those who awaken envy. Dulness and mediocrity may live unmolested and unattacked, but 46 STRATHMORE; OR, people never tire of finding spots on a sun whose brilliance blinds them." "Never!" she answered, with a naive and amusing personal appropriation of his words. " If I had been born plain like some poor women, I should not have had so many siffleurs ; but then, on the other hand, my claque would not have been so loud or so strong; and the cheers always drown the hisses." " You have had siffleurs ? They must have bandaged their eyes, then, before taking so ungracious a role ! Surely societj 7 hissed them for such atrocity?" said Strath- more, noticing the dazzling fairness of her skin and the exquisite contour of her form, and thinking to himself: " The deuce ! she makes me talk as absurd nonsense as the Sabreur!" " Of course it did, but siffleurs hiss on through all opposition, you know, monsieur " " Because it pays them ! " " No doubt. But, what do a few hisses matter, more or less, as long as one enjoys one's-self in one's youth one's delicious, irrecoverable youth? I suppose if I live long enough my hair will be white and my skin yellow, but I do not spoil my present by looking into the future. If it must come, let it take care of itself. It may never come why mourn about it ? Those people are becasses who work, and toil, and wear away all their beaux jours, and live hardly and joylessly only to hoard money to buy tisane, and nurses, and crutches, when all the zest of existence is gone from them, and given to a new gene- ration that has pushed them out of their places ? Doesn't Balzac say, that. whether one sweeps the streets with a broom or the Tuileries with a velvet robe, it comes to much the same thing when one is old ; the salt is equally out of the soup whether it is eaten in a Maison Dieu or in a ducal chateau ! " "Almost thou persuadest me to be an Epicurean!" smiled Strathmore, as he thought to himself, " who the deuce can she be?" and gnzcd down into her soft, laugh' ing, lustrous eyes, languid yet coquettish, like the eyes of the women of Seville: "But 7 do not hold with v<>u there, ma belle inconnue ; to me it seems that with years alone can be gained what is worth gaining power. The WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 41 butterfly pleasure of youth can very well be spared for the ambitions that can only be reaped with maturity. A man has only become of real value, and able to grasp real sway, when he is near his grave." "Ah, for your sex that is all very well, your youth lasts to your tomb, but with us nous autres femmes ! with our beauty flies our sceptre. How can we reign after youth, without youth ? You will not care for a mistress who is wrinkled ! " cried the belle blonde, im- patiently, the impatience of a lovely coquette incensed to be contradicted : " So you think power the only thing worth having? Then you do not care for love, monsieur, I presume ?" " Well! I must confess, not much." It was rank heresy in the presence of so fair a priestess of the soft religion, it was a fatal challenge to the one who heard it, though Strathmore spoke the cold, careless, simple truth, and did not heed whether he offended or piqued a chance acquaintance of the hour by it. "And yet that man will love, fiercely, imperiously, bitterly, one day ! " thought the Neriad of the Moldau, who, a stranger to him, as he to her, read his character by a woman of the world's clairvoyante perception, as he failed to read hers by a man of the world's trained pene- tration. " For shame ! " she said, aloud, striking him a fragrant blow with her sprigs of cherry-blossom. " If you are heretical enough to feel so, mon ami, you should not be uuchivalric enough to say so ! Your bay-wreaths will be very barren and withered if you don't weave some roses with them. Cffisar knew that. So you admire age because it will give you power; and I loathe it because it will rob me of beauty comme c'est different ! I wonder how we shall both meet it! But, bah! why talk of these things ? The wind will be chilly, and the green leaves brown, and the ground frost-bound in six months' time ; but the butterflies playing there above our heads are too wise to spoil the sunshine by remembering the snow? They are Epicureans; let us be so tool" To such a doctrine, expounded by such lips, it was impossible to dissent. The sunset faded, the purple mists stole on down the slopes of the hills, the west wind rose, Bringing a rich odor from the pine forests ; the Bohemian 48 8TRATHMORE; OR, musicians, for a few coins, song airs sweet enough to have been played by the legendary music-demons of a land where Mozart rules ; the boat dropped slowly down the stream in the evening twilight, and Strathmore leant over the vessel's side, talking on to his chance acquaint- ance, and looking down on to the exquisite Titian-like picture that she made, reclining on her pile of cushions, with the black mantilla of lace thrown over her yellow hair, and her dark, lustrous eyes gleaming softly and dreamily in the light of the summer stars. He was singularly critical of the beauty of women, and coldly careless of their wiles and charms; yet even he felt a vague dreamy pleasure in floating down the river in the sultry moonlit night thus, with the echo of this sweet silvery ^oice in his car, and a face on which he looked in the gloaming, soft as the music that lingered on the silent air. I don't think he would altogether have found the voyage weari- some though it had lasted till the dawn; but pardieu, mes freres 1 one never drops long down any river, real or allegorical, with a smooth current and Arcadian land- scapes, under the shade of pleasant woodlands, beneath which we would willingly linger till sunrise, but that we are safe to be soon startled by the rough grate of the keel on the sand, that breaks the spell pour toujours! It was so now; the boat ground in a shallow bit of the water where red sunken rocks made the navigation troublesome for a vessel so cumbersome and boatmen so clumsy as were those who now steered it down the Moldau's course. No harm was done that could be of serious account, but the boat was stuck hopelessly fast between the rocks, and could not proceed to Auzig that night, at all events; while its passengers had no choice but to remain where they were till the sunrise, or to disembark at a landing-place which was luckily easily to be reached by a plank between the vessel and the shore, where, buried in the favorite cherry-orchards of Bohemia, with a gaudy sign swinging under its dark red roof, half hidden in a profusion of giant hollyhocks, with linden trees in full flower before the door, and the pine-covered hills stretching behind it, stood a little river-side Gasthof. La blonde aux yt'u.r iioirx, into whose society and in whose protection he was thus in a manner forced, laughed brightly, and made light of the WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 49 contretemps when Strathmore explained it to her. " We must wait here ? tant mieux ! I like the smallest soupqon of an adventure. I will dine under those limes. I suppose they can find something to give us ; but I must go on to-night if there be a vehicle procurable," she said, gaily and good humoredly enough, without any feminine repining or pitie* db soi meme, as she gave him her hand to be assisted acioss the plank. Perhaps she was not altogether sorry to be aole to retain as a detenu an English aristocrat, with a face like the Vandyke pictures ; who was coldly indifferent tw the soft creeds of which she was a head- priestess, ami was a renegade and disbeliever in their faith. " Destiny throws us together, monsieur! We must be good frienas. Dieu le veut ! " she laughed, as Strath- more lifted her from the plank on to the landing-place, while the white soft hands lay in his, and the delicate fragrance of tbe perfumed hair floated across him, as the lace of her mantilla brushed his shoulder. "I am the debtor of destiny, then!" he whispered, in answer, noting as she stood by him in the starlight the sweet grace and luxurious outline of her perfect form, that even the dark drapery of her travelling-dress, wrapped about in long voluminous folds, could not avail to hide. Mes freres ! it is well for us that we are no seers 1 Were we cursed with prevision, could we know how, when the idle trifle of the present hour shall have been forged into a link of the past, it will stretch out and bind captive the whole future in its bonds, we should be paralyzed, hopeless, powerless, old ere ever we were young! It is well for us that we are no seers. Were we cursed with second sight we should see the white shroud breast-high about the living man, the phosphor-light of death gleaming on the youthful, radiant face, the feathery seed, lightly sown, bearing in it the germ of the upas-tree, the idle careless word gaily uttered, carrying in its womb the future bane of a lifetime ; we should sec these things till we sickened, and reeled, and grew blind with pain before the ghastly face of the Future, as men in ancient days before the loathsome visage of the Medusa! 6C BTRATHMORE; OR, CHAPTER 1Y. THE BONNE- AD VENTURE TOLD UNDER THE LINDENS. CONTRETEMPS generally have some saving crumbs of consolation for those who laugh at fate, and look good- humoredly for them ; life's only evil to him who wears it awkwardly, and philosophic resignation works as many miracles as Harlequin ; grumble, and you go to the dogs in a wretched style; make mots on your own misery, and you've no idea how pleasant a trajet even drifting " to the bad" may become. So when the Czeschen boat grated on the laud and stuck there, coming to grief generally and hopelessly, fortune was so propitiated by the radiant smile with which its own scurvy trick was received by the loveliest of all the balked travellers, that what would, under any other circumstances, have been the most pro- voking bore, became a little episode, picturesque and ro- mantic, and took a coleur de rose at once under the resist- less magic of her sunny smile. It was a beautiful night, starry, still, and sultry ; the riverside inn stood like a pic- ture of Ostade, hidden in its blossomed limes ; the pine- woods stretched above and around, with the ruddy gleam of gypsy fires flashing between the boughs; and with such a companion as hazard bad given him, Stratlnnore could hardly complain of the accident, though he was a man who found the gleam of women's eyes in a cabinet particu- lier of a cafe, or a cabinet de toilette of a palace, far better than in all the uncomfortably-romantic situations in the world, and held that a little gallantry was infinitely more agreeable and rational in a rose-tendrc-hung chamber than & la belle etoile in a damp midnight under the finest violet skies that ever enraptured a poet. The little hostelry was already full of travellers. Some English en route to the waters of the Sprudel, some Mo- ravians and Bohemians on their way to or from Bucharest or Auzig; and the arrivals from the boat filled it to over- flowing, for its accommodation was scant, and its attrac tions solely confined to its gaily-painted and blossom WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 51 buried exterior. There was but one common sitting- room, but one common supper-table, and the guests, whether graffins or glass-engravers, were treated without distinction ; a Bohemian Gasthof is about the only place upon earth where you see the doctrine of equality in ab- solute and positive practice. The Selavonians, accustomed to it, took it unmurmuringly ; the English tourists grum- bled unceasingly; preserved (the ladies in especial") a dead silence to companions for whose respectability they had no voucher; scorned the sausage, the baked pie, the cucumber-soup, and the rest of the national menu, and solaced themselves with gloomy consumption of hard biscuits from their travelling-bags ; while without, under the lindens, on the sward before the door, Strath more's Albanian servant making a raid upon the Gasthof larder with the celerity of long continental experience, spread on a little table the best fried trout, Toplitz and other fare that the inn afforded for the refreshment of the fair tra- veller with the Titian face, who, refusing to enter the hostelry, sat on a bench under the limes, leaning against the rough bark as gracefully as amongst velvet cushions, looking upward at Strathmore with her soft Orientalesque eyes, while the leaves and flowers of the boughs swayed against her yellow hair. She gave a Tokay flavor to the Lager, a Yatel delicacy to the trout, a strange but charm- ing spice of petits souper to this primitive supper under the limes; an unsuitable but delicious aroma of Paris to the solitary river-side hostelry in Bohemian pine- woods. " Who the deuce could she be ?" he wondered in vain ; for on that head, under the most adroit cross-questioning, she never betrayed herself. She talked gaily, lightly, charmingly, with some little wit, and a little goes a long way when uttered by such lips. With something, too, of soft graceful romance, probably natural to her, perhaps only learned second-hand from Raphael, and Indiana, and Les Nuits d'Octobre ; and Strathmore, though the light gallantries of a Lauzun had little charm for him, and the only passion that could ever have stirred him from his coldness would have been the deep, voluptuous delight, fierce and keen as pain, that swayed Catiline and Cimon. could not refuse his admiration of a picture so perfect as she sat in the light of the midsummer stars, leaning her 52 STRATHMORE; OR, head ,/n ner small jewelled hand, the lime-boughs drooping abovt, ner, and the dark, dimly-lit room within forming a ilembvnatesque back-ground, while the river below broke* against tne rocks, and the heavy odor of the lindens and pines filied the air. "How cold he looks, this handsome Strathmore, does he dare to defy me ?'' she thought, as she glanced upwards at him where he leaned against the trunk of the linden \vhen the supper was finished, and while she herself still lin- gered under the limes as the stars grew larger and clearer in the .May sfcies, and the purple haze of night deepened over the hills. He was the only man who had not bowed down at her iwt at her first smile, and his calm courtesies piqued her. "Do you like music, monsieur?" she asked him, with that suddenness which had in it nothing abrupt, but was rather the suddenness of a fawn's or an antelope's swift graces. Then, without awaiting a reply, without apology or prelude, inspired by that caprice which rules all women more or less, and ruled this one at every moment and in every mood, she began to sing one of the sweet, gay, familiar Canzone of Figaro, with a voice at which the nightingales in the linden-leaves might have broken their little throats in envying despair. Then, without pause, she passed on to the sublime harmonies of the Stabat- Mater now wailing like the sigh of a vesper hymn from convent walls at even-song, now bursting into passionate prayer like the swell of a Te Deum from cathedral altar. She sang on without effort, without pause, blending the most incongruous harmonies into one strange, bizarre, weird-like yet entrancing whole, changing the Preghiero from Masaniello for one of Verdi's gayest arias, mingling Kiiken's Slumber Song with some reckless Venetian bar- carolle, breaking off the solemn cadence of the Pro Pec- catis with some mischievous chansonette out of the Quar- tier Latin, and welding the loftiest melodies of Handel's Israel with the laughing refrain of Louis Abadie's ballads. Out on the still night air rose the matchless music of voice, rich, clear, thrilling, a very intoxication of sound ; min- gling with the ebb and flow of the waters, the tremulous sigh of the leaves, and the rival song of the birds in xhe boughs. Those sitting within in the darkened chamber WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 53 - : itened spell-bound ; the peasantry, laughing and hat- ling under the low roof of the hostelry, hushed their g ssip in enchanted awe ; the boatmen in the vessel moon i in the shadow below looked up and left off their toil; -tnd, as suddenly as it had rung out on the summer air, tho exquisite melody ceased, and died away like the notia of a bell off the silence of the night. She looked up at Strathmore, the starlight shining in the dreamy, sm'nng depths of her eyes, and saw that he listened eag./ly, breathlessly, wonderingly, subdued and intoxicated c/en despite himself by the marvellous magic, the delicious intricacies, the luxurious richness of this voluptuous charm of song, with a spell which, the moment it ceased, was broken. " You like music ?" she asked him, softly ; " ah, yes } I see it in your face. You Englishmen, if you be as cold as they call you, have very eloquent eyes sometimes. Are you not thinking what an odd caprice it is for me to sing to you a stranger at ten o'clock at night, under lime-trees ? r ' "Indeed, no; I am far too grateful for the caprice. Pasta herself never equalled your voice ; it is exqu.site, marvellous !" She laughed softly. "Do you think so? And yet, I imagine, you art very difficult to please ? When I sing some of those aii., the luflamrnatus or the Agnus De'i, they make me think of the old days in my convent at V alladarra ; how I us ed to beat my wings and hate my cage, and long to escape over the purple mountains. Why is it, I wonder, that a gloomy past often looks brighter than a brilliant present ? what is there in the charm of Distance to give such a golden chiaro'scuro ?" " V alladarra ? Are you a Spaniard, madame ?" he asked her, catching at any clue that might enlignten him as to the whence and the whither of the bewitching creature. " A Spaniard ? What makes you think so ?" " Because it is usuved forth ; an irrepressible coldness, like that which comes irom the touch of a corpse, passed over him where he stood. And the incognita clung closer to him, her white hand closing on his arm, and her laugh- ing lips turning pale : " Mon Dieu ! quelle sort affreuse. Renvoyez-la I Elle me fait peur." Strathmore laughed, the impression of the ominous prophecy passing off as soon as it was made ; and he threw another gold dollar to the Zingara : " My handsome Arab ! you might have been more cour- teous, certainly. If you wish your predictions to be popu- lar, you must make them a little more lively. Be off with you ! Go and frighten the peasants yonder!" " Redempta can say only that which she sees," mur- mured the Gitdna, sadly and proudly, as she stooped for the gold where it shone on the turf, and turned slowly away, till her form was lost in the dense gloom cast by the shadow in the woods. " Quelle sort affreuse !" said his companion again, not able so quickly to shake off the vague terror with which the sing-song, chanting recitative of the Zingara had haunted her. "She has terrified you?" laughed Strathmore. "I am sorry for that, madame ; you shouldn't have tempted prophecy in my behalf. All seers from the political world to the gipsy camp must make their predictions ominous, or they would carry no weight; and evil is so generally predominant in this life, that to croak is pretty sure to be on the right side." " Ah, mon Dieu ! do not jest !" cried the belle inconnue, veith a little shiver of pretty terror: " It is no laughing matter, such a horrible future." WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 59 " But it is a laughing matter, such a horrible bonne aveuture," said Strathmore, smiling, and thinking how lovely she looked as she shivered with pretty, pretended fear, and clasped her hands, on which he noticed a mass of brilliant rings that might have belonged to an empress's toilette boxes, but which didn't tell him much, since paste is very glittering, and defies detection by moonlight. " She deals in the Terrible prophets always do, or what sway would they have over their dupes ? You should have let her told yours, madam e ; she w r ould have given something better to the lines in so beautiful a hand ?" "Ah, bah!" cried the incognita, shaking off her super- stition with a sweet silvery laugh : " I know my future ! I shall triumph by my beauty till that goes, and then I shall triumph by my intellect, which won't go. I shall tread my way on roses, and rule as Yenus Yictrix till grey hairs come and I have to take to enamelling; and then I shall change my sceptre, and begin e"carte, embro- glie, prudence, and politics. But I don't count on the change ; I am not like you, and do not court Age " " Because you are not like me, and need not wait for Age to bring you Power; your power lies in a glance of the eyes and in all the purpureal light of youth 1" laughed Strathmore : "I fancy our ambition centres alike in ruling men, but with a difference I" " You are very secure in your future, despite all the Gitana's foretelling?" she asked him, with a curious glance, half-malicious, half-interested. " Yery ! We can make of our future what we like. Life is clay, to be moulded just at our will ; it is a fool, or an unskilful workman, indeed, who lets it fall of itself into a shape he does not like, or lets it break in his hands." " But one flaw may crack the whole !" said the belle inconnue, as Strathmore's valet drew near them to an- nounce the immediate departure of a clumsy vehicle, the only one the Gasthof could furnish, that had been engaged before their arrival by English travellers, and in which, at ^er urgent instance, Strathmore had taken the sole remain- ing places for herself and her maid: " Are they starting? I am ready ! My lord, I owe you more gratitude still ; how deeply I grow in your debt ! But I forgot ; if I take these two places, you must remain under that miserable 60 STRATIIMORE; OR, little red roof till to-morrow. I ought not to have douo it, mais je suis ego'iste moi!" " No matter! I am most happy to relinquish anything in your service," said Strathmore, as he took the hand held out to him within his own. He did not care about women, but this one was specially lovely and specially captivating, and thrown as she was on his courtesy, he could not refuse it to her: " I shall sleep under the pines ; it will not be the first time I have camped out, but, I con- fess, I was tempted to make you a detenue, madame, per- force to-night by bidding Diaz let the car go without you. Give me some praise for my self-abnegation !" His voice was very melodious, and had a softness when he was quite guiltless of intending it, while his features, with their cold, proud Velasquez type, on which the pas- sions that had never been roused still threw their shadow, had always a fascination for women, who, by the instinct of contradiction ever dominant in their sex, always seek to chain a man from whose hands their fetters slip. Her bright, soft, dazzling eyes looked up to his almost tenderly in the light of the midsummer stars : " I will thank you when we meet again !" " When! But what gage do you give me that we may ever do so ? You refuse me any name, any address, any single clue ; you oblige me to part from you in ignorance even of " " Who I am ! The first question you Englishmen ask before you give your hand in friendship, or speak to your neighbor at a table d'hote," interrupted the bright capri- cieuse, with a low, ringing laugh: "No! J will not give you even a clue. It will be a Chinese puzzle for your ingenuity. When we meet (and we shall ; we are both in the world ; we are cards of the same pack, and shall some time or other be shuffled together), I will thank you for all your courtesy and chivalry, and pay my debt comme vous voudrez! Till then, you must submit to mystery. I may be a prima donna, a dame d'industrie, a princess incognita, a dangerous Greek you may thinlc me whatever you like. You will remember me better if you are left in perplexity; your sex always covet the unat- tainable, and there is a golden charm in mystery that shall veil me till we meet !" WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 61 "But what a cruel caprice! \vhat an indefinite pro- bation !" " Do you good, mon ami ! Perhaps you have never had to wait before; I fancy so! There! they are waiting, and we must part, monsieur. Adieu and au revoir!'' Tantalizing, obstinate, capricious, wilful, wayward, but bewitching ; all the more bewitching for that very quin- tette of faults she let her hand linger in his where they stood in the shadow, with the moon shining on her up- raised face, and the lime-blossoms swaying against her liair, delicately scented as the fragrance of their flowers, as he stooped towards her in farewell : a soft, subtle, amber-scented perfume, such as the tresses of Lesbia might have borne as she came from her odorous bath, or wound the roses amongst them at the banquet a perfume that, as he caught it, had something of the same soft intoxication as her voice had carried with it in her song. Another moment, and the hand that had lain in his, soft and warm as a bird, had unloosened its clasp, and the clumsy, covered cart of the Gasthof, laden with its passen- gers, had rolled slowly from the door beneath the roofing of the lime-boughs, la blonde aux yeux noirs leaning out from its heavy tarpaulin, and looking at him with a gay farewell smile leaving according to her vow, with the golden veil of mystery flung over her lovely, dazzling face, soft with Eastern languor, and bright with the brilliance of youth, that disappeai'ed from his sight as the car, creak- ing slowly over the moss, was lost in the shadows of the pine-woods as it turned a bend in the hills, and left him behind alone. " Who the deuce can she be ? Something very out of the common, talking to one at first sight about love, and singing to the nightingales, au clair de la lune ! I never saw a lovelier creature in my life, nor a more nonchalante one ; and yet she isn't exactly Quartier Breda style ; she has more the look of a Court than a casino. Who the deuce can she be?" wondered Strathmore, as he threw himself down on the moss under the limes, smoking and throwing stones idly into the river-that flowed below. He knew most Courts and most cities; he lived chiefly abroad, and thought he knew every beauty in monde or demi- monde, sovereigns of the left hand as of the right. The 6 62 STRATHMORE; OR, numberless anomalies in this dazzling inconnue piqued his curiosity the first of her sex who had ever so fer excited him. Strathmore thought romance simply insanity, and had lived at too thorough a pace to care to twist a chance into an adventure, and make poetic material out of a rencontre with a stranger, as other men might have done. But he thought of her, and of little save her, when he lay smoking, while the river broke against its over- hanging banks, and the heavy odors of the pines rolled down from the hills above. And as he mused over the bright, capricious mystery that had come and gone sud- denly as a swallow comes and goes through the air, and listened to the distant chimes of churches and monasteries tolling out the short summer hours as the night wore away to the villages sleeping below, he only thought once, as he caught the gleam of the camp-fires flashing fitfully in the darkness from the gloom of the pine-woods, with the dark lurid glare of a Rembrandt scene, while their flames leapt up through the fan-like boughs of the firs, of the destiny the Zingara girl had foretold him ; and then be smiled as he remembered the prophecy the Gitana had made. CHAPTER Y. THE WHITE DOMINO POWDERED WITH GOLDEN BEEb. " NOT seen La Yavasour! mon cher you have yet to live !" yawned Arthus de Bellus, Yicomte and Chambellan du Roi, wiping his long perfumed moustaches as he rose from a baccara table, and drank down some iced Cbam- bertin from a buffet near at hand. Cards and Napoleons lay on the table in confusion in Strathmore's room at Meurice's; four or five men had been dining with him, and had been playing baccarat for the last hour or two, as more piquant than the olives and more tasteful than the Burgundies they had trifled with and left. It was about twelve months since his run down the Moldau ; affairs threatening to the peace of Western WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 63 Europe had Vept him much longer than he had imagined, and this was the first night of his arrival in Paris, free fo* a little time after his negotiations with Prince Michel, though he meant to leave again for Baden as soon as the races were run at Chantilly, where his own chestnut, Marechale, stood a good second for the French Derby. "Yet to live!" he said, lying back in his arm-chair and curling a leaf round his cigarette : " My life don't hang in women's eyes, thank Heaven! I can exist very com- fortably without seeing your divine Vavasour for the next twenty years, if that's all, and by that time I suspect nobody will care much about seeing her ; your superb Helen will be like most other Helens of a certain age then ; decolletee to a disadvantage, ruddled with rouge, jealous of her daughters, and fat (or scraggy), a faire fremir J" " Blasphemer, hold your tongue !" cried Bellus. " What a future for La Vavasour! She would poison herself with a bonbon, or die of a bouquet of heliotrope, before she'd exist for such a degradation !" " Tres cher, she may be a spoiled beauty, but she can't change the laws of nature. Briedenbach and Bulli haven't the Beuvage de Ninon in their treasury, and to be steeled against and disenchanted with the loveliest mistress, one has only to remember what she will be!" "Or to see what she is, sometimes, even will do," laughed the Viconte : "En grande tenue, what lovely figures they have ! but the embonpoint is dreadfully fic- titious with certain divinities we know !" " And so is the bloom ! However, so that they look well that's all they think about, since it's what they're bought upon in Belgravia as in la Boheme. Lady Ida and the Vespasie alike keep themselves under a glass case to their buyers until the money's down !" laughed Strathmore. " 1 always make up my mind, though, to enamel, &c. ; I should die of a mistress who was bete, and their wit's rarely worth much till they've come to their first touch of rouge." " The Lady Yavasour is alone an exception; her bloom is her own as yet; but her mots are perfection. You must see her, Strathmore; she'll make you recant that heterodoxy." f>4 STRATIIMORE; OR, " I don't the least think she will," said Strath more, giving a spin to one of the gold pieces : " My dear Arthus, I have seen so many of those divine beauties, those dames du monde, those Helens a la mode. I admire them ; they are delightfully bred, they have charming minauderies, they are perfectly gantees, coiffees, tirees, d, quatre epingles ; they are charming to talk to in their own boudoirs, where the light is half veiled, and your eyes the same ; they are admirable when you want a little love d, discretion, with Cupid delicately scented with bouquet, and with pleasant platonics as elastic as india-rubber. I admire them ; but I have seen so many ; there can be nothing so very new in the salons ! Your exquisite Marchioness may be the best of the kind, but then one knows the kind so well ! Who was she, by-tbe-by?" "Well! nobody knows exactly,'' said Lyster Gage, of the British Legation, reluctant to admit such a flaw in this idol as that she had not a pedigree to flutter in the face of the world, blazoned with bezants of gold, and rich in heraldic quarterings : " When she appeared at St. Petersburg, you know she was already Marchioness of Vavasour; it was said that the Marquis had married her in the Mauritius when she was fifteen those Creoles are women so early. I never heard anything more definite, but his sixteen quarterings are quite wide enough to cover any deficiencies, and her divine beauty did the rest ; she became the fashion at once, and she has reigned the queen of pleasures, caprices, and the salons ever since, here. Her circle is as exclusive as the Princesse de Lurine's ; it is only plain women who dare to hint her as ' adventuress.' " "Adventuress! adventurer! That is the name the world gives any man or woman who dares to be clever, brilliant, or successful out of the old routine! The world must have its revenge! Society falls down before the Juggernaut of a Triumph, but, en revanche, it always throws stones behind it. I detest Creoles those black- browed, lazy, inert women, who have fattened on sugar- canes, and learned to scold slaves instead of to spell 1 1 shall not admdre your matchless Peeress." 'Peste!" said the Chambellan du Roi, settling the diamond stud in his wristband: "If you don't, you'll oe WROUGHT BV HIS OWN HAND. Oi the first man in Europe who's braved her. The utmost any of them can do is only to let their eyes be dazzled, and not lose their heads. As Tilly said of Gustavus, ' c'est un joueur centre qui de rien perdre est de beau- coup gagner.' It is lucky Lord Tavasour is no Georges Dandin!" " Bah ! So he gave her his rank, and gets rewarded with dishonor ! It's always the way ! That's the common coin in which wives pay their gratitude," laughed Strath- more, with a dash of disgust. "Dishonor? Fie, fie, Strathmore !" cried the Earl of Lechmere, a good-natured fellow, in the Coldstreams: " Nobody uses those coarse, ugly dictionary words now- a-days, except when one wants to get up a duel. Vavasour's a wise man, and doesn't ask the character of his lovely wife's caprices and coquetries. They sign a mutual Iloving Commission, and don't trouble each other to know where the cruise extends. Besides, madame'a amities may be only friendship ; some say so, and swear she's so heartless, thwt her pretty, dainty brodequins dance fire-proof over red-hot ploughshares that would sear ten- derer feet to the bone." " I don't believe in miracles, thank you !" said Chateau- Renard, of the Guides : " She must get scorched en pas- sant, at any rate. How metaphorical you are, tres cher, and your metaphor's remarkably inappropriate ; plough- shares are for martyrs, and madame will never be a martyr, however many martyrs she may make. You'll see her to-night, Strathmore, I expect, but if she don't unmask " " The sun will stay behind a cloud. Yery well ! I shall endure it. I never exist on that sort of rays at any time. I don't feel the slightest interest in your Creole coquette, Bellus. I'm getting tired of Mondes one con- founds so easily with Demi-Monde, and Aristocrates that are so near allied to Anonyma. I should rather have liked those old times when 'noble women were chaste,' and dishonor got a taste of cold steel. Now, your hus- band is as obliging as Galba to Mecamas! The lady goes to Baden ' till the gossip's blown over,' and her lord is discreetly silent, and doesn't trouble himself to notice what goes on before his eyes. Unless, indeed, he thinks 6 66 STHATIIMORE, OR, be can turn the scratch on his scutcheon to pecuniary account, and make out of the crim. con. a neat little sum to stop the hole in his exchequer, or cover his Goodwood debts ; tlien he becomes as anxious as his counsel to prove his own dishonor, and take the co-respondent's money with a chuckling compassion for the poor devil that's bought the damaged article and doesn't know very well what to do with it ! That's the style in England, and these Vavasours are 'of us.'" " Que le diable ie prenne, Strathmore!" cried Bellus : " Don't be so bitter ! What would you have the husband do ? If he's a gentleman, he keeps quiet, and you English are never quiet, unless it's 'made worth your while.' ybw're much more fit for the Middle Ages than you are for the present day." " I think I am. Things were called by their right names then ; men sharpened their steel, and struck a straight, swift blow ; now they sharpen their pen, and wound in the back, sheltered under a shield of anonymity. Then they had ' honor,' and held it at the sword's point ; now they've ' mock morality,' have lawyers to defend it (which is something like giving an artificial lily to a sweep to keep un soiled), and trade in their shame, and ask for 'costs' for every stain, from a blackened eye to a blasted name! Caramba! this claret is corked !" "Uncommonly inconvenient times; your favorite ones, though, tres cher," said Lechmere, taking some marons glacees : " One would be in perpetual hot water. Fancy an inch of cold steel waiting for us at the bottom of every escalier derobe, and an iron gauntlet dashed on our lips every time we laughed away a lady's reputation ! Where febould we all be? It would be horribly troublesome." " No doubt 1 We're much wiser now. We chat amicably in the clubs with the husband after leaving madame's dressing-room. I don't dispute our expediency ; it's a quality in the highest cultivation in the age ; even Aspasia, while she laughs over her own demi vertu in the evening, takes the Communion like a devotee in the morning, to wash away her sins in Sacramental Tent. Apropos of Aspasia, Vernon-Caderousse is fettered hand and foot by Viola Ve ; she boasts that she will ruin a Peer of France everj trimesire. Take care of yourself, Bellus !" WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 67 " Yes, for she'll keep her boast, the little demou !" laughed the Yicomte : " She might begin with a more profitable speculation than the ' Duca scnza Diuati,' as La Manilla calls him; Caderousse is all but 'gone.' I wish he would smash quite ; I should bid for that Petitot snuff- box of his, the Ariadne a Naxos." " So much for friendship ! Take a pinch out of my snuff-box to-day, and bid for it to-morrow; sup with me on Monday, and speculate on my sales on Tuesday ! I think you'll have your wish, Arthus. Ye would ruin a niillion- naire, and Avill make very short work of Caderousse. She should net Tchemeidoff; Russians are the best prey; the Rosieres revel in their roubles, and the lords of the serfs are the slaves of the serail," said Strathmore, as his guests rose to leave and dress for a bal masque in the Faubourg St. Germain, at the Duchesse de Luilhier's, an inaugura- trix of a thousand modes that passed the time for her own thorough-bred set, and served for talk for half Paris. "What are you all going for? It's so early yet only eleven. Baccara is better than a ball, though it is one of Marie de Luilhier's ; those things all bore one so after one's first season." "Horridly!" yawned Lechmere: "but one's on the treadmill, and one must tramp along with it, that's the worst." " Stay and play, Lechmere," said Strathmore. " You're all going, I do believe, for the sake of this Vavasour. For shame, Bellus ; et tu Brute ! I did think better of you, on my life. I never dreamt that sort of thing survived in anybody after twenty." " You haven't seen her," said the Yicomte, pettishly. "Bah ! she does what she likes with one." " A very self-evident fact, tres cher ! If you like to be slaves of a domineering, lazy Creole, be it ; I don't under- stand your taste, that's all ; but then I suppose I'm ex- ceptional altogether; I don't like olives, and I don't care about women." "Quite right," swore the Earl, under his moustaches: "both of 'em make you buy the nice rose flavor with too salt a bitterness." " I don't know anything about the bitterness, thank God ; I nevei travelled to that stage, laughed Strathmore : 68 STRATIIMOIIE; OR, "but olives tempt one to drink, and women tempt one to weakness, and when either the love or the brandy's taken too strong, we lose our heads and tell our secrets ; and, on the whole, I think two bottles less detrimental than one woman ! Wine steals our wits, but Dalilah does worse ; because she's a tongue to ask questions.'' " Devil take your philosophy." " Bien oblige. I don't wish any devil to take it, male or female, Belphegor or Melusine. 'My mind to me a kingdom is.' I should be specially sorry for any raids to be made on it." "I bet you fifty to one, Strath, you adore la Vavasour when you see her." "I? This Vavasour tyrant. I bet you a thousand to one I don't even admire her.'' "In Naps? done! It's a heavy bet, mon ami," said Chateau-Renard, entering the wager in a little dainty jewelled book, a gift of S. A. R., the volage, and tant soit peu indiscrette Princesse de Lurine. "And a very safe one for me," said Strathmore, with a slight yawn : " If you don't make your wagers more dis- creetly, Armand, it's not much to be wondered at that you come to grief at Sartory and Chantilly as you do. Au revoir, if you will go. We meet again at Philippi, I suppose, in an hour?" " I promised the Sabreur to give him correct notes of the Vavasour. I must notice her if she comes here to- night,'' thought Strathmore, as he lay back in a dormeuse before the fire, when he was left alone, finishing his cigarette, while the firelight danced on the marble bronze and ormolu of the mantelpiece, and the gas shone on the gold lying on the table, and on the wines that stood in a dozen decanters on the console: "1 can picture her per- fectly a tawney, large, black-browed, voluptuous woman, silent, sensual, handsome, heavy, with a brow of Egypt, a Juno figure, and a West Indian languor. She takes because of her luxurious outline and her Creole indolence, and because she's a new style, and has done two clever Strokes of diplomacy, by persuading an English Peer to marry her, and a thorough-bred set to make her Queen of the Ton. She must have been very adroit these silent, Btiil-life women often cover matchless finesse ; nobody WROVQHT BY HIS OWN HAND 69 Buspects them of the manufacture till the wtb is woven. What could the Marquis be about? However, he was three parts a fool, they used to say, I think, and women make idiots of wiser men, if once they're allowed to have their own way. I dare say his yacht anchored off Mar- tinique, and one day, when he was very hot and very lan- guid, intensely bored, and had drunk a good deal of brandy, this woman had him alone in a verandah, where she lay fanning herself amidst a pile of flowers, with the air scented with pastclles, and everything planned to take him in a moment of weakness, and looked so handsome that she did what she liked with him, and made him say what he couldn't unsay. So much is done in that sort of way ; there would be no marriages at all if men kept their heads cool always, but they're taken at a disadvantage, just after dinner, when they're lazy, and would consent to anything; or after the champagne at supper, when they talk nonsense they'd never have committed them- selves to at noon; or in the whirl of a waltz, when the turns of the dance turn their heads! If we were always what we are between breakfast and luncheon, we should never do any betises at all. We're cold after our matutinal mocha, but we're easily fooled after our dinner coffee. What we defy in the morning light, we yield to in the moonlight. Women know that; this Lady Yavasour, I dare say, lured her lord into his declaration when the stars were shining on the mango-groves and on the green sea-vines, or perhaps, more likely, she was a noucelle riche, and brought him money. Men barter their good blood now-a-days; soiling the scutcheon don't matter if they gild over the dirt ; we don't sell our souls to the Devil in this age, we're too Christian, we sell them to the Dollar !" With which satirical reflection on his times, and his order drifting through his mind, Strathmore's thoughts floated onward to a piece of statecraft then numbered among the delicate diplomacies and intricate embroglie of Europe, whose moves absorbed him as the finesses of a problem absorb a skilful chess-player, and from thence stretched onwards to h's future, in which he lived like a!) men of dominant ambition far more than he lived in his present It was a future, brilliant, secure, brightening in 70 STRATHMORE; OR, its lustre, and strengthening in its power, with each suc- cessive year ; a future which was not to him as to most wrapped in a chiaro'scuro, with but points of luminance gleaming through the mist, but in whose cold glimmering light be seemed to see clear and distinct, as we see each object of the far-off landscape stand out in the air of a winter's noon, every thread that he should gather up, every distant point to which he should pass onward ; a future singular and characteristic, in which state-power was the single ambition marked out, from which the love of women was banished, in which pleasure and wealth were as little regarded as in Lacedasmon, in which age would be courted not dreaded, since with it alone would come added dominion over the minds of men, and in which, as it stretched out before him, failure and altera- tion were alike impossible. What, if he lived, could destroy a future that would be solely dependent on, solely ruled by, himself? By his own hand alone would his future be fashioned ; would he hew out any shape save the idol that pleased him ? When we hold the chisel ourselves, are we not secure to have no error in the work ? Is it likely that our hand will slip, that the marble we select will be dark-veined, and brittle, and impure, that the blows of the mallet will shiver our handiwork, and that when we plan a Milo god of strength we shall but mould and sculpture out a Laocoon of torture ? Scarcely; and Strathmore held the chisel, and, certain of his own skill, was as sure of what he should make of life as Ben- venuto, when he bade the molten metal pour into the shape that he, master-craftsman, had fashioned, and give to the sight of the world the Winged Perseus. But Strathmore did not remember what Cellini did that one flaw might mar the whole ! The rooms were filled when he ascended the staircase and entered the first of that suite of superb salons where Madame de Luilhiers gathered about her her own par- ticular and exclusive set, and reigned supreme. Her ball was a replica of a bal de Vopera, with a dash of the brilliance of the Regency, a time the Duchess loved to resuscitate; scandal, indeed, said that she loved it so well that she enacted the role of the Marquise de Parabero with a descendant of Monseigneur d'Orleans ; but, taic< 6 WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 71 nous, scandal is ever indiscreet, and never true, we know, save here and there, when it hits the defenceless, or besmears the fallen, or so delicately stabs our bosom friend that we haven't heart to forswear it ! The low hum of many voices, that sound which, subdued and harmless as the musical hum of gnats, yet buzzes away the peace of entire lives, and murmurs death-blows to a myriad of reputations, filled the rooms as he moved slowly through the throng of glittering dominoes, broidered with gold or studded with jewels, while brilliant eyes smiled recognition on him through their masks, and witty badinage was whispered to him by fair incognito. " Deucedly like life, mon cher eh ? People take advan- tage of disguise to slander at their ease, and under a mask the dastard grows daring, and whispers a scandal, or what's as bad a truth ! Very like life ! Under the domino how suavely they stab their foes, and unrecognized in the vicinity of his dear friends, how secure a man is to over- hear them damning his name!" laughed Strathmore to Chateau-Renard as he passed him in the vestibule, and went on to chat with the Comtesse de Chantal, a bewitch- ing little brune, who had confided to him the color of her adorable rose domino, and would quickly have been recognized without any other guide than her bright marmozet eyes. " The domino gives one the privilege of laissez-faire and laissez-parler ; it would be very pleasant if the world were one long bal masque," said Madame la Comtesse, letting the eyes in question rest on him with coquettish brilliance, for Strathmore was much courted by the sex be contemned. " Madame ! I think it is one. Who is there in it without a disguise?" he answered her, laughing, as they moved on to the ball-room through the crowd of titled maskers, while the music echoed from the distance, and the lights gleamed on the gorgeous dresses of those bidden to the Duchesse's fete a ia Regence. " Who, indeed ! Not even Lord Cecil Strathmore, since he disdains women, yet he flirts with one 1 " murmured a whisper at his side. "Mais qui nous parlait alors, Cecil ?" said the Comtesse, slightly disgusted with the style of the attack. 72 STRATIIMORE; OR, "Some one of your Court jealous of my distinction, rnadame," laughed Strathmore, as he thought to himself, " I would swear the voice was a woman's," and turned to see who had recognized him with his mask on. Among the crowd of dominoes near, the one closest to him was white, powdered with golden bees. "Fi done! c'elait line femme; a man would have attacked me, not you," said Madame de Chantal, giving him a blow of her fan, a little jealous of the domino that Strathmore's eyes were tracking ; more jealous still, when dexterously disentangling himself from her, he left her with Bcllus, and followed the white domino in its swift passage through the crowd, that would have been a crush in any other salons than those of the Hotel Luilhiers: followed on an impulse vague and irresistible, as he had never before followed the voice of a woman. With what- ever swiftness and dexterity he traced her, she perpetually eluded him ; though she never turned her head, he would have sworn she knew he was pursuing her (women, like flies, know all that goes on behind them), and she seemed to take a perverse delight in winding in and out inter- minable mazes, and in letting him approach her only to escape him ; the white folds of the domino, with its glittering golden bees flutterkig in the light, ever within tantalizing reach, and ever at provoking distance. At last, when he was tired of the chase, and on the point of giving it up, her own passage was obstructed ; he pushed hastily forward and overtook her in the Pavilion do Flore, a winter garden, where Marie do Luilhiers had the tropics reproduced under glass in all their Oriental heat and Oriental fragrance, and in which the maskers were moving, amidst the broad leaves and glowing creepers of the East, while the falling waters of innumerable fountains cooled the air, and subdued lights gleamed through the dark tropical foliage, like fire-flics in a palm grove. "If I disdain all women, I have followed one. Belle dame, whoever you be, I may trust your reproof to me shows some sign of interest in him you condemned," whispered Strathmore in her ear. Though she had penetrated his disguise, he could not penetrate hers; shrouded in her domino she defied detection, and by her voice he could not recognize her in the least WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 73 He only saw, as she turned her head, that her eyes laughed, shining brightly as stars, and that the lovely mouth below her mask had the bloom of youth on its lips, like the soft bloom on an untouched peach. " Not at all 1 You are far too presumptuous, and if you disdain all women, you cannot care what one of them thinks of you. You have only pursued me because I eluded you; we beat you best, ' en fuyant comme les Scythes.' 1 Montaigne is perfectly right." Her voice had a sound in it familiar to him, but not familiar -enough to be recognizable in her disguise. She baffled all detection, provocative as were the luminous eyes shining on him through her mask, and the laughing lips, like two roses d'amour, which were all that the envious masquerade gave to view. " I have pursued you to learn who honors me by for- bidding me to flirt. Presumption or not, belle inconnue, I shall construe its interdict, as it flatters me most. You recognized me even in domino ; there must be some elective affinity between us ! " " None whatever. I knew you by your eyes, Lord Cecil. What does your legend say ? 'Swift, silent, Strathmore's eyes Are fathomless and darkly wise; No wife nor leman sees them smile, Save at bright steel and statecraft wile; And when they lighten, foes are ware, The shrive is short, the shroud is there!'" The words startled him, spoken by the lips of the fair mask in the gay salons of the Hotel Luilhier; they were the burden of a rhyming chronicle, old as Piers the Plow- man a wild, dark legend, still among the cradle songs of his country and the chronicles of his own household. It was strange to hear here, in Paris, in the gay revelry of the fete a la Regence, words which he thought had never travelled beyond the woods of White Ladies, which he had never remembered since the days of his boyhood I Who could she be who knew him so well? " Belle amie," he said, bending his head to her as they passed under the fragrant aisles of the winter garden, 'you flatter me more and more! I must, at least, have 7 T4 STRATHMOUE; OR, some interest for you, since you know by heart my family legends and the look of my eyes ! We cannot possibly be strangers " " Perhaps we are enemies !" interrupted the mask, the sapphires gleaming here and there on her domino, flashing their azure beams in the light : " The instinct of enmity is quicker than that of friendship or of love, you know, all the world through. How did you bend Prince Michel to your will a few months ago ? by playing on the subtlest and surest of human passions revenge I" " The deuce ! is she a witch or a clairvoyante !" thought Strathmore, fairly astounded. The policy he had pursued had been closely kept, if ever the tactics of diplomacy had been so. Who had betrayed them to this Domino Blanc ? Who was this Domino Blanc that she knew them ? The only woman who could have penetrated their intricacies was that modern De Longueville, the Princesse de Lurine ; but the princess was a brune, an olive-cheeked daughter of Sardinia, and the delicate chin of the mask, which (save the rose lips) was all he could see of his clairvoyante un- known, was white as the skin of the fairest blonde. " Did you think your state secrets were unknown, Lord Cecil ?" she whispered rapidly, her bright eyes dancing with malicious amusement : " Bah ! even a swift, silent Strathmore cannot defy a woman, you see. If we are not good for very much in this world, we are good for med- dling and for espionage. We are the best detectives in the world, only we can't hold our tongues we can't keep the secrets when we have learned them. We are so proud of our stolen. nuts that we crack them en pleinjour, in- stead of keeping them to enjoy in the darkness of night, as you wise men do I" " Caramba, madame !" laughed Strathmore, looking down into her glittering eyes : " I think it is a popular error that your sex cannot keep a secret ; you guard your own most admirably for a lifetime, if you deem it politic ; it is only the secrets of others that you betray !" He had no under-meaning, no hidden innuendo in the satire on her sex, but, for an instant, the bright eyes of the White Domino were clouded and angrily troubled. Perhaps he had struck without knowing it, on some jarring chord ; perhaps she was startled for the moment lest she WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 75 should have encountered clairvoyance, en revanche. Then she laughed, a gay, fantastic chime of mellow laughter " Those who are wise trust us ; those who are unwise pique us by drawn veils and forbidden fruits. A woman is never so exasperated as when she is refused of course it spurs her to her mettle, and into what is bolted and barred from her she will enter by a chink, coiite que coute. Seal a letter, and we look into it by a corner; shut a door, and we pass through it by the keyhole ; tell us a thing is poison, and we taste it, as if it were elixir. No book is so eagerly read as one you forbid us ; no secret is so quickly found out as one you taboo to us. If you do not wish me to learn all about the Voltura embroglio, you will tell me, with a good grace, what private instructions D'Arrelio received from Turin ; you were with him this morning!" She whispered it very softly, where they stood beside one of the fountains, falling with measured murmur into its marble basin, and casting its silvery spray high up amongst the scarlet blossoms and the luxuriant foliage of the Eastern creepers. The Voltura embroglio! that intri- cate knot of Anglo-Franco-Italian intrigue, whose slightest threads had never been dropped rave in the privacy of the most secret bureaux ! Who the deuce could she be, and how could she come by that? Wi 4 ch, clairvoyante, polit- ical intrigante, whatever she migbt be, he would have defied her to have probed that mo* secret of diplomatic secresies, and to know of a visit paid t cried the Domino Blanc, inter- rupting him misvrhi3vously : "I may be wrinkled, hag- gard, and enamelled, for anything you can tell ; I may be a Ninon of seventy, a I)u Deffand coquetting in my eightieth year, a female Miraheau pitted with small-pox and yellow with dyspepsia. Unmasked, I should have lost the charm that only goes with the Unseen. Thank you ! I am too wise to part with it !" " I am anything but rash, and you are anything but wise," persisted Strathmore : " One guesses the perfec- tion of the statue by the little that is unveiled ; the beauty of the volume by the grace of the vignette that peeps through the uncut leaves ! Enamel, madame, could no more have given the bloom to your lips than their bloom to those blossoms, and those eyes would not be so danger- ously eloquent unless they were washed with the morning dew of their dawn !" "Charming compliments!" laughed the mask, striking him on the arm with the jewelled sticks of her fan : " But you only flatter my beauty to have your curiosity gratified. It is not to see my face, Lord Cecil, but to find out who whispers to you of your tete-a-tete with Arrelio that you would like my mask off. M. mon diplomat, I take your flattery at its .worth !" "Then you do injustice to yourself and to me," whis- pered Strathmore, urgently, tantalized and provoked to the last degree by a woman who knew so much of himself and would let him know nothing of her: "Your hand alone is insignia and type of what the tout ensemble would be were it on'iy unmasked. Those Titania-like fingers must have face and form to match with them. Do you not think your mask is as cruel as the closest veil of the Odalisque, since, like that, it only shows us enough to make us wistfully dream of all we are denied ?" " Gracefully turned 1 were it only sincere !" answered the White Domino, her low, musical, mocking laugh echo- WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 77 ing softly where they stood by the fountain, where the light of the lamps was shaded by the fantastic ferns and fan-like leaves of the profuse Oriental foliage that drooped around. "But with Lord Cecil Strathmore it is only flattery, adroit and* diplomatic, to find out who has the clue to his secret interview with Arrelio! Neither the mask nor the veil are cruelties to you; you care nothing for what they shroud ; and as for dreaming of what is denied to you, you would disdain so poetical a weakness, unless the denial involved a state secret ; then, indeed, it might haunt your sleep a little ! Listen, Lord Cecil 1 I know your diplomacies, see if I know you personally: You are ambitious, but with a singular and lofty ambition, in which wealth has no share. You disdain gold as the dieu du roture, and seek power alone. You are cold, and proud of your coldness, as of the polish of steel that has never been dimmed. You prize friendship, but disdain love as the plaything of fools and the dalliance of dotards. You look on life as the clay, and on men as the plaster through whom you, master-craftsman, will fashion the shape that pleases you without a flaw, ductile and plastic f ,o every turn of your hand. You love finesse, sway, dominance; you are independent of sympathy ; you are perfectly and presumptuously self-reliant ; you have the profound subtle intellect of the old Italian statesmen ; perhaps you have their swift, dark, relentless passion, too; but, if so, it slumbers as yet, as it slumbered with them till it was time to strike. You are like the Strathmores cf White Ladies, line by line, feature for feature, and with their physiognomy inherit their character. Now, am I clairvoyante or not ? Tell me !" She spoke in a low, sweet whisper, bending towards him with her luminous eyes shining on him through her mask, while the sapphires flashed their azure rays in the light, and the mystical, monotonous music of the fountain murmured on and on, and the scarlet flowers of the East- ern creepers swung against the glittering, snowy folds of her domino. With something of the strange, startled wonder with which Surrey saw his love shadowed out on the Mirour of Gramarye, Strathmore heard his character drawn in the unerring words of the mysterious mask. A moment before he would have sworn that no living crea- T8 STRATIIMORE ; OR, ture, save, perhaps, Bertie Erroll, could have known him so well ; and the portraiture, exact to the life in every line, startled him as we may have been startled coming suddenly upon an unseen mirror that gives us b&ck our own reflection in every trait and in a strong; light. He stretched out his hand to her, his grasp involuntarily closing on the folds of the domino. " Clairvoyante or not, you are an enchantress ! and I must know who has studied me so miraculously before we part. Unmask, ma belle. I cannot let you go unknown. I will not!" She laughed the laugh sweet as music, that had some- thing menacing and mocking in its soft, subdued carillon. " But you must, by the rules of all masquerades. I am like Eros, I must be adored unseen ; bring light to unveil me, and I shall take wing! Will you lament as sincerely as Psyche? Adieu!" With a swift, sudden movement, ere he could detain her, the white folds slid from his hand, and she had flut- tered away, as though she literally took wing like the Eros she spoke of, floating off under the tropical foliage like some rich-plumaged bird, the gold-flowered domino brush- ing through the dark glossy leaves as she passed. As swiftly Strathmore pursued ; but before it was possible to overtake her, a group of dominoes had surrounded her, and on the arm of one of them she had passed so rapidly out of the Pavilion de Flore, that ere he could follow she was lost in the throng. Who could she be ? Who could know him so well while she was unknown to him ? Her air, her voice, her eyes, were half familiar while yet strange, and the mask might have effectually disguised his best-known friend. Yet, as he recalled those who alone could have spoken thus to him, he rejected them all ; this mysterious clairvovante could be none of them. The lost White Domino piqued him. Soft voices challenged him with witty mots, fair maskers kept him talking to them that light, brilliant badin- age that women live on, as humming-birds on farina, and bees upon honey; eyes dazzling as hers wooed him ten- derly through their masks; but Strathmore was haunted by one woman, to the exclusion of all the rest ; he sought Ler unceasingly through the Luilhiers' salons, but always WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 79 in vain. The sweet, sensuous mouth, the luminous eyes, the thrilling, musical voice and laugh, that would have had magic for others, were not what piqued him; it was the strange knowledge that she had of himself, the uner- ring fidelity with which she had sketched traits in his character that he himself even had known but in indis- tinct shadow till the light of her words had streamed in upon them. Had he believed in clairvoyance, he would have sworn to it now ! He sought the White Domino persistently, ceaselessly, through the crowds that filled the rooms for the Duchesse'b fete a la Regence sought her always in vain. At last, giving up in provoked despair his bootless chase of the azure sapphires and golden bees, that only flashed on his sight in the distance to perpetu- ally elude his approach, he leant against the doorway of one of the conservatories, where a breeze reached him, cooling the air that was hot with the blaze of the myriad lights, and heavy with the odor of perfumes and flowers ; and stood there looking down the long suite of salons, glit- tering with the moving throng of dominoes, and holding his mask in his hand, so that the light fell full upon the peculiar Vandyke-like character of his head, rendered the more striking by the dark violet of his masquerade dress and the diamonds that studded it. He was provoked, impatient, interested more than ever he had been in his whole life save once and he was annoyed with himself that he had so mismanaged the affair as to let the Domino Blanc slip from his hands. He was annoyed with himself, and not less so when, as he stood there, snowy folds swept past him, the jewelled handle of a fan struck his arm, and a soft voice was in bis ear : "Reveur! you look like a portrait of the Old Masters! Are you thinking of the Voltura affair, or of me ? You will be foiled with both ; Arrelio will not sign, and I shall not unmask! Good night, Strathmore ! Perhaps, I shall haunt your sleep this morning, as I know a state secret !" The words were scarce whispered before she had passed him! Again she eluded his detention; again, swift as lightning, he pursued her, this all-mysterious and all-tanta- lizing mask ; but destiny was against him. The throng parted them, an Austrian Baroness detained him, the trail- ing folds of a rose-domino entangled him ; she was perpe- 80 STRATIIMORE; OR, tuallv at a distance as he followed her through the salons, which she was then leaving on the arm of a black domino to go to her carriage, the golden bees glittering, the snowy dress fluttering, just far enough off to be provokingly near and provokingly distant, as, detained now by this, now by that, he threaded his way through the interminable length of the salons, ante-chambers, cabinets de peinture, and reception-rooms in her wake, and passed out into the staircase at the very moment that she was descending its last step! She had a crowd about her, following her as courtiers follow their Queen, and her sapphires were gleaming and her white domino glittering as she crossed in a blaze of light the marble parquet of the magnificent hall of the Hotel Luilhiers. " A white domino, powdered with gold bees ! can you tell me whose that is, Arthus ?" asked Strathmore, eagerly, where he stretched over the balustrade as Bellus came out of the vestibule, while below, with her masked court about her, she passed on to her carriage. "A white domino with golden bees!" cried the Yi- comte : " Pardieu ! you have seen her, then ?" " Seen her! Seen whom ?" " Did she take off her mask ?" went on Bellus, not heeding the counter-question : " Did you see her face f Did you look at her well ? What do you think of her?" "Her! Whom? I ask you who the white domino is. Look quick ! you will catch her before she has passed out of the hall. Whose domino is that?" " That ? Nom de Dieu ! that is HERS ?" "Hers? Curse your pronouns! She must have a name! Whose?'' " Peste ! Lady Vavasour ! You have seen her, then, at last !" WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 31 CHAPTER YII. TWO NIGHT PICTURES BY WAXLIGHT, AND BY MOONLIGHT. MARION, LADY VAVASOUR and Yaux, sat before her dressing-room fire (which, born in the West Indies, she had lighted in summer or winter), watching the embers play, nestled in the cozy depths of her luxurious chair, with a novel open in her lap, and her long shining tresses unbound and hanging in a loose, rippled luxuriance as the hair of the Ve'nus a la Coquille. No toilette was so becoming as the azure neglige of softest Indian texture, with its profusion of gossamer lace about the arms and bosom, that she wore ; no chaussure more bewitching than the slipper, fantastically broidered with gold and pearls, into which the foot she held out to the fire to warm was slipped ; no sanctuary for that belle des belles fitter and more enticing than the dressing-room, with its rose- tendre hangings, its silver swinging lamps, its toilette- table shrouded in lace, its mirrors framed in Dresden, its jasper tazze filled with jewels, its gemmed vases full of flowers, its crystal carafes of perfumes and boquets, its thousand things of luxury and grace. Here, perhaps, Marion, Lady Vavasour, who had rarest loveliness at all hours, looked her loveliest of all; and here she sat nowj thinking, while the firelight shone on the dazzling white- ness of her skin, on the luminous depths of her eyes, on the shining unbound tresses of her hair, and on the dia- mond-studded circlet on her fair left hand that was the badge of her allegiance to one lord, and the signet of her title to reign, a Queen of Society and a Marchioness of Vavasour and Vaux. Her thoughts might well be sunny ones ; she was in the years of her youth and the height, of her beauty ; she had not a caprice she could not carry out, nor a wish she could not gratify. Her world, deli- rious with her fascination and ductile to her magic, let her place her foot on its neck and rule it as she would ; the was censed with the purple incense of worship wher 82 STRATHMORE; OR, ever she moved, and gave out life and death with her smile und her frown, with a soft whispered word, or a moue boudeuse. From a station of comparative obscurity, when her existence had threatened to pass away in insular monotony and colonial obscurity, her beauty had lifted her to a dazzling rank, and her tact had taught her to grace it, so that none could carp at, but all bowed before her; so that in a thorough-bred exclusive set she gave the law and made the fashion, and conquests unnumbered strewed her path " thick as the leaves in Yallambrosa.'' On her first appearance as Lady Yavasour and Yaux, which had been made some six years before this at St. Petersburgh, women had murmured at, and society been shy to receive, this exquisite creature, come none knew whence, born from no one knew whom, with whom the world in general conceived that my lord Marquis had made a wretched mesalliance; the Marquis being a man sans reproche as far as " blood'' went, if upon some other score he was not quite so stainless as might have been. But the world in very brief time gave way before her; with the sceptre of a matchless loveliness, and the skill of a born tactician, she cleared all obstacles, overruled all opponents, bore down all hesitations, silenced all sneers. She created a furore, she became the mode ; women might Blander her as they would, they could do nothing against her; and in brief time, from her debut of finesse, by witchery, by the double right of her own resistless fasci- nation, and the dignity of her lord's name, Marion, Marchioness of Yavasour and Yaux, was a Power in the world of fashion, and an acknowledged leader in her own spheres of ton, pleasure, and coquetry. "Woman's wit" can do anything if it be given free run and free scope, and with that indescribable yet priceless quality of her sex she was richly endowed. How richly, you will con- ceive when I say that now she had so effectually silenced and bewitched society, that in society (save here and there, where two or three very malicious grandes dames, whom she had outrivalled, were gathered together for spleen, slander, and Souchong) the question of her Origin was never now mooted. It would, indeed, have been as presumptuous to have debated such a question with her as for the Houries to have asked Aphrodite of hT birth WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 83 when the ambei -dropping golden tresses and the snowv shoulders rose up from the white sea-foam. Lady Yavtw sour was Herself, and was all-sufficient for herself. Her delicate azure veins were her sangre azul, her fair white hands were her seize quartiers, her shining tresses were her bezants d'or, and her luminous eyes her blazonry. Garter King-at-Arms himself, looking on her, would have forgotten heraldry, flung the bare, lifeless skeleton of pedigree to the winds before the living beauty, and allowed that Venus needs no Pursuivant's marshalling. She sat looking into the dressing-room fire, while the gleam of the waxlights was warm on her brow, and played in the depths of her dazzling eyes ; a pleased smile lingered about her lovely lips, and her fingers idly played with the leaves of her novel her thoughts were more amusing than its pages. She was thinking over the triumph of the past night and day; of how she had wooed from the Marquis d'Arrelio, for pure insouciant curiosity, state secrets that honor and prudence alike bade him withhold, but which he was powerless to deny before her magical witchery ; of how Constantino of Lanaris had followed her from Athens, to lay at her feet the sworn homage of a Prince, and be rewarded with a tap of a fan painted by Watteau ; of the imperial sables Duke Nicholas Tchemidoff had flung down a la Raleigh on a damp spot on the Terrace des Feuillans, where, otherwise, her dainty brodequins would have been set on some moist fallen leaves, as they had strolled there together ; of the pieces of Henri-Deux and Rose-Berri ware, dearer to him thau his life, which that king of connoisseurs, Lord Weiverden, had presented to her, sacrificing his Faience for the sake of a smile ; of the words which men had whispered to her in the perfumed demie-lumiere of her violet-hung boudoir, while her eyes laughed and lured them softly and resist- lessly to their doom ; of all the triumphs of the past twelve hours, since the doors of her hotel in the Place Vendorne had first been opened at two o!clock in the day to her crowding court, to now, when she had quitted the bal masque of her friend Louise de Luilhier, and was inhal- ing again in memory the incense on which she lived. For the belle Marquise was a finished coquette, never sated with conquest ; and it was said, in certain circles antagoti' S STRATIIMORE; OR, istic to her own, that neither her coquetries nor her con- quests were wholly harmless. But every flower, even the fairest, has its shadow beneath it as it swings in the sunlight ! " He did not remember ME ! " thought the Yenus Aphro- dite of the rose-hung dressing-room, looking with a smile into the flames of the fire, which it was her whim to have even in so warm a night as was this one: "My voice should have told him ; it is a terribly bad compliment ! However, he shall pay for it! A woman who knows her power can always tax any negligence to her as heavily as she likes. How incomprehensibly silly those women must be who become their lovers' slaves, who hang on their words and seek their tenderness, and make them- selves miserable at their infidelities. I cannot understand it; if there be a thing in the world easier to manage than another, it is a MAN! Weak, obstinate, vain, wayward, loving what they cannot get, slighting what they hold in their hand, adoring what they have only on an insecure tenure, trampling on anything that lies at their mercy, always capricious to a constant mistress and constant to a capricious men are all alike ; there is nothing easier to keep in leading-strings when once you know their foibles I Those swift, silent Strathmores, they are very cold, they say, and love very rarely; but when they love, it must be imperiously, passionately, madly, tout au rien. I should like to see him roused. Shall I rouse him ? Perhaps ! He eould not resist me if I chose to wind him round mf fingers. I should like to supplant his ambition, to break down his pride, to shatter bis coldness, to bow him dowa to what he defies. Those facile conquests are no honor, those men who sigh at the first sight of one's eyebrow, and lose their heads at the shadow of a smile ; I am tired of them sick of them! Toujours perdrix ! And the birds so easily shot ! Shall I choose ! Yes ! No man living could defy me not even Lord Cecil Strathmore ! " And as she thought this last vainglorious but fully- warranted thought, Marion, Lady Yavasour, lying back in her fauteuil, with her head resting negligently on her arm, that in its turn rested on the satin cusKj^ns, with that grace which was her peculiar charm, as the firelight shone on her loosened hair and the rose-leaf flush of her delicate WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 85 cneeKS, glanced at her own reflection in a mirror standing near, on whose surface the whole matchless tableau was reproduced with its dainty and brilliant coloring, and smiled a smile of calm security, of superb triumph. Could she not vanquish, whom and when and where she would ? That night, far across the sea, under the shadow of English woodlands that lay dark, and fresh, and still beneath the brooding summer skies, a woman stood within the shelter of a cottage-porch, looking down the forest lane that stretched into the distance, with the moonbeams falling across its moss-grown road between the boles of the trees, and the silent country lying far beyond, hushed and dim, and shrouded in a white mist. She was young, and she had the light of youth love in her eyes as she gazed wistfully into the gloom, vainly seeking to pierce through the dense foliage of the boughs and the darkness of the night, and listened, thirstily and breathlessly, for a step beloved to break the undisturbed silence. The scarlet folds of a cloak fell off her shoulders, her head was uncovered, and the moon bathed her in its radiance where she stood, the branches above her, as the wind stirred amongst them, shaking silver drops of dew from their moistened leaves on her brow and into her bosom. She loved, and listened for that which she loved ; listened patiently, yet eagerly and long, while the faint summer clouds swept over the dark azure heavens, the stars shining through their mist, and the distant chimes of a church clock from an old grey tower bosomed in the woods tolled out the quarters, one by one, as the hours of the night stole onward. Suddenly she heard that for which she longed heard ere other ears could have caught it a step falling on the moss that covered the forest road, and coming towards her; then she sprang forward in the darkness, the dew shaking from her hair, and the tears of a great gladness glancing in her eyes, as she twined her arms close about him whom she met, and clung to him as though no earthly power should sever them. "You are come at last! Ah, if you knew how bitter your absence is, if you knew how I grudge you to the rruel world that robs me so long, so often of you " 8 86 STRATIIMORE ; OR, He laughed, and looked down fondly on her while she clung to him, wreathing her arms about his neck: " Silly child ! I am not worth your worship, still less worth the consecration of your life, when I repay it so little, recompense it so ill." She laid her hand upon his lips and gazed up into his eyes, clinging but the more closely to him, and laughing and weeping in her joy: " Hush, hush ! Pay it ill ? Have I not the highest, best, most precious payment in your love ? / care for no other, you know that so well." He stroked her hair caressingly, perhaps repentantly (few men can meet the eyes of a woman who loves them purely and faithfully, after a long absence, without some pangs of conscience, without some contrast of the quality of her fidelity and their own), and kissed the lips uplifted to his own ; the love that he read in her eyes, and that trembled in her voice, saddened him, he could not have told why, even whilst he recognized it as something unpurchasable in the world he had quitted, where its strength and its fidelity would have been but words of an unknown tongue, subjects of a jeer, objects of a jest. "And you have seen none who have supplanted me since we parted ; none of whom I need have jealousy or fear?" she whispered to him, with a certain tremulous, wistful anxiety he was her all, she could not be robbed of him ! yet with a fond, sunny smile upon her face as it was raised to his in the faint sheen of the starlight, the smile of a love too deeply true, too truly trustful to har- bor a dread that were doubt, a doubt that were disloyalty to the faith it received as to the faith it gave. He looked down into her eyes, and pressed closer against his own the heart that he knew beat solely, purely, wholly for himself. " My precious one ! you need be jealous of no living thing with me. None have twined themselves about my heart, none have rooted themselves into my life as you have done. Have no dread! No rival shall ever supplant you, I swear before God!" He spoke the oath in all sincerity, in all faith, in all fervor, speaking it as many men have BO spoken before bim. not dreaming what the day will bring forth, uot WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. Si knowing hew fate will make them unwitting perjurers, unconscious renegades to the bond of their word, as they are lured onwards, and driven downwards, almost one would say blameless, in the hands of chance. And the woman that nestled in his arms and gazed up into his eyes sighed a low, long, tremulous sigh of too great gladness. He was her world ; she knew of and needed no other 1 Then he loosed her from his close embrace, and still looking down into the eyes that uttered a love which the women in the world he lived in neither knew nor guessed, and to which he came back as from the atmosphere of gas- lit salons one comes into the clear soft air of the dawn ; he led her under the drooping branches of the trees that hung stirless and dew-laden in the warm air, into the house hidden in the profuse and tangled foliage. Their steps ceased to fall on the moss, their shadows to slant across the star-lit path, their whispered words to stir the silence; the woodland country lay beyond calm and still in the shade of the night, the fleecy clouds drifted slowly now and then across the bright radiance of the moon, the winds moved gently amongst the leaves ; in the lattice casements shrouded in the trees the lights died out, and the church chimes struck faintly in the distance their hours one by one. On the hushed earth three angels brooded Night and Sleep, and Peace. CHAPTER VII. THE KISMET TJIAT WAS WRITTEN ON A MILLEFLEUR8- SCENTED NOTE. " Meurice's, Paris. " MY DEAR ERROLL, To keep faith with you, I must tell you that I have seen Lady Vavasour I Rather, to f peak more properly, have heard her, for she was masked, nnd I saw nothing except, what I freely confess to be, as lovely a mouth and chin as the devil ever gave his special aides-de-camp, the daughters of Eve, for a weapon of 88 STRATHMORE; OR, slaughter and a tool of perdition. I met her at Madame de Luilhier's bal masque, and she has her full share of Eve's curiosity ; for though, to my certain knowledge, I have never seen her before, nor she me, she informed me of everything about myself, and a little more besides! She repeated one of the old White Ladies chronicles where the deuce could she get hold of it ? and was up to some diplomatic tricks, whose juggling we all thought had been done strictly in petto. I suppose the Nazarenes, who lie in the laps of the titled Dalilah, let her coax their secrets out of them. The ass that Samson in all ages ought to smite is Himself! You will think her divine, I dare say; fascinating I can very well believe that she is, by the wiles she tried upon me to-night; and she's gifted with the sex's true genius for tantalizing. I like nothing I have heard of her; and I should say it is particularly lucky the Marquis is of elastic conjugal principles ! I never re- member seeing him, do you ? I don't envy him his wife, though I admit she is half a sorceress, and has a very pretty mouth ; but it is a mouth that would whisper too many infidelities to please me, were I he! What the deuce are you doing with yourself? Carlton tells me you said ' you were going out of town c'efait tout.' Out of town in June ! You surely are not turning pastoral, and getting entile, of provinciality ? The Beau Sabreur a Strephon ! What a vision ! I dare say a woman's at the bottom of it ; but Aspasia was always your game, not Phillis, except, indeed, with that mysterious White Ladies inamorata, whom you wouldn't be chaffed about. But it can't be she, because that love's twelve months old now to my knowledge, and must have been rococo long ago. I will pique Lady Millicent till she badgers you out of your secret. Good-night, old fellow! I shall be heartily glad to see you again. When will it be ? Can't you run over nere ? I expect I shall get the French Derby, though Lawton's confounded love of a close finish lost me the English one. The betting's quite steady here on Mare- chale, always five to one. I shall start him for the St. Leger, and send him over to Maldon to train through August and September. Nesselrode's a good second. They don't offer freely at all on Tambor, and I half thinfc he'll be scratched. The Abbey's at your service, of course, as it altvays is, to fill as you like for the Fiist. You will WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 89 oblige me very much by keeping the old place open, and knocking over the birds, whether I come or not. " Yours as ever, " CECIL STRATHMORE." Strathmore, having written those last words as the morning sun streamed in through the persiennes of his bedchamber, addressed his letter to Major Erroll, 19A, Albermarle-street, London (where that debt-laden Sabreur had a suite of rooms, dainty and luxurious enough to domicile Lady Millicent), and lying back in his chair, put his Manilla between his lips, stirred the chocolate Diaz had placed at his elbow, and sat thinking, while the smooth Albanian moved noiselessly about, laying out the clothes that might be needed through the day, polishing an eye- glass, rubbing up a diamond, refilling a bouquet-bottle, or performing some other office of valetdom. Carelessly and cavalierly as he had dismissed the domino blanc in the letter he had just been writing, the tantalizing mystery of the night before was not so easily to be dismissed from his memory. Lady Vavasour I For once Strathmore's keen penetration and diplomatist acumen were baffled and at fault ; he could fathom neither the means nor the mo- tive of the dazzling Peeress's interest in, and attack upon him. How could a woman, whom he had perpetually missed, and never met during the five years that she had sparkled through society, know him, as he would have taken his oath his oldest friend could not do, and photo- graph his character with a realistic accuracy that he himself, limning it from analysis, could barely have attained ? The belle Marquise lying back in her fauteuil, gazing dreamily and nonchalantly at herself in the mirror, with her shining hair falling over her arm, and a smile of superb consciousness on her rich curling lips, might have exercised a mesmeric power of will the night before, so persistantly had she haunted him from the time that he saw the last flutter of the snowy folds of her domino. Is there any electro-biology so potent as beauty ? A vague prejudice had associated Lady Vavasour in his eyes with a danger- ous and disagreeable aroma; he had mistrusted, without knowing her, this woman who fooled fools at her will: 8* 9) STRATIIMORE ; OR, she bad been a mesalliance, and he abhorred mesalliances; she was a Creole, and he detested Creoles ; she was a coquette, and he was always impatient of coquettes. If Strathmore had ever wasted his hours in imagining an ideal mistress (which he most assuredly never did), his ideal would have, probably, clothed itself in some form, pure, stainless, lofty, of a soilless honor, and a grave and glorious grace, such as Hypatia, when the sunlight of Hellas fell on her white Ionic robes, and her proud eyes glanced over the assembled multitudes. This malicious mask, this tantalizing clairvoyante, was certainly of an order its direct antipodes ! But despite all that, perhaps because of it, Lady Vavasour, seen yet unseen, unknown yet knowing so much, haunted him, piqued him, usurped his thoughts ; and when a woman does that, what use is it for any man to send her to the deuce, to consign her to the devil ? Heaven knows, not one whit ! Anathema Maranatha only incenses the sorceress, and the more she is exorcised the more she persists. To dismiss her troublesome memory, he took up one out of a pile of letters Diaz had placed on a salver beside him. It was a delicate cream-colored Millefleurs-scented billet, fragrant with the odour of the boudoir, breathing of a buhl writing-case, and a gemmed penholder, and white jeweled fingers ; it was only a note of invitation, pressingly worded, and signed Blanche de Ruelle-Cour- ances, asking him to join the party gathered at her chateau of Vernon9eaux, now that Paris was -growing empty and detestable, and the country and the vine-shadows a la mode. The Comtesse de Ruelle was a charming leader of his own set, English by birth and tint, Parisienne by marriage and habit; there was no more agreeable place in Europe to visit at than Vernon9eaux, and she always had about her as amusing and as chic a circle as the fashion of the two nations afforded. He read the note ; not inclined to accept the invitation, but intending to go across the Kohl, in common with most other European dips and decores, to the pet Bad of ministers and martin- gales, congresses and coups de bonhe.ur, Chevaliers of the order of honor and Chevaliers of the order of industry, ki_g-like Greeks and Greek-like kings. His weighing of the merits of Baden v. Verno^eaux, and fifty other places WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 91 open to him, was interrupted by Diaz approaching hio. from the ante-room : " M. le Comte cle Valdor demande si milord est visible f Strathmore looked up, setting down his chocolate: "To him oh yes! Show M. le Comte up here, if he have no objection." The Albanian withdrew (Diaz was soft, sleek, noiseless as a panther, and obeyed implicitly four inestimable qualities in a valet, a wife, or a spy!), and, in a few minutes, ushered Valdor in ; a very young man, not more than four or five-and-twenty, slight, graceful, animated, delicately made, the beau-ideal, as he was the decendant, of those who turned back their scented ruffles, and shook the powder from their perfumed locks, as they went out with a mot on their lips to the fatal charette while the tocsin sounded. " Valdor, tres cher, forgive my receiving you en neglige," laughed Strathmore. " We don't stand on ceremony with one another. I'm later than usual, and you are earlier. It isn't twelve, is it?" Valdor looked at his little jewelled watch, the size of a fifty-centieme, and answered a trifle & turf, et a travers as he sank into a dormeuse, and played with Galignani. "If you come out at noon like this, Valdor, you'll soon lose your reputation ; you'll tan your skin, disenchant your lady worshippers, and sink among the ordinary herd, who are deep in business before we've had our coffee, and trade in their coupons before we've thought of our valets," laughed Strathmore, noticing his unusual absence of man- ner, for Valdor was generally the most insouciant of blondins, and boasted that he never reflected but on two subjects the fit of his gloves, and the temperature of his eau-de-Cologne bath. Valdor laughed too, and stroked his moustaches with a hand as small and delicate as that which the White Domino could boast: " It is horribly early ; friends are great bores in the morning ; nobody's mot's good till the luncheon wine has washed it; indeed, I don't think a decent thing's ever said before dinner. I'm sure Horace himself was prosy before he had sat down to the ccena; wit must have starved of famine on a date! I ewe you fifty excuses, 92 STRATHMORE; OR, Stratnmore, for intruding so soon, but I wanted to see you alone." "I'm most happy to see yon, my dear fellow. If you are g>ing to be unassuming, it's the prerogative of friend- ship to prose, as of marriage to bore one you know ; every virtuous thing is dull ; a preacher and a prig from time immemorial!" said Str&thmore, feuilletonnant the dainty paper of the Millefleurs-scented note : " What's the matter, Yaldor anything? Are you running yourself for Viola Ve, like Caderousse ? Has Nesselrode gone lame ? Has some brave du roture been copying your liveries, or has some ugly Serene Princess fallen in love with you, and left you vacillating between the horrors and the honors of the liaison ? What is it, eh ?" " Only this once for all, I'm ashamed to say I must keep in your debt a little longer " " That all !" cried Strathmore, stopping him before he could finish the sentence : " My dear fellow ! never trouble your head about such a trifle; I had forgotten it, I assure you ; oblige me by doing the same." Valdor shook his head, the color in his face deepening, as he tossed the Galignani with the nervous gesture of a man embarrassed and mortified : "I can't forget so easily ; I would not if I could. You are too generous, Strathmore; you lend to men who have nothing. I never dreamt I should be unable to pay you ; I made sure that by this time but Lascases refuses to renew mv bill ; I cannot get money anywhere just yet, and " Strathmore stopped him with a gesture, and stretched out his hand ; he liked young Valdor, and his own wealth, as I have said, he held in superb disdain, save in so far as it conduced to Power. He gave freely and royally ; evil there might be in his nature, but not a touch of meanness ; at that time he would have succored his darkest foe from his purse; the virtues, as the errors of this man, were all naturally in extreme ; petty things were not alone beneath him, but impossible to him. " You would get into Lascases's debt to get out of mine ? For shame ! Trust your friend rather than that beggarly Jew, surely ! You will repay it when you can, that I am certain of; meantime, give me your honor you will ne\ ct WROUGHT BY IIIS OWN HAND. 93 renew the subject unless I do. It was a trifling affair, and you were most welcome to it !" As he spoke the generous smile which gave much of sweetness to his face, came on it, softening what was dark relaxing what was cold ; and Valdor, as his band closed on Strathmore's, saw all that was best, all that was most attractive, in a nature that was an enigma in much even to itself. He spoke a few hurried words of thanks ; he, a bel esprit of the salons and the circles, was now at a loss for speech now that \\vfelt; and Strathmore stopped him once more. " Xot a syllable more about it ! If ever the time come that I have to ask you to do anything, I know you will do it for me c'est assez. Are you going to Vernon9eaux this year, Valdor?'' He spoke carelessly, laughingly, to cover whatever em- barrassment the other might feel in accepting his gener- osity ; he little foresaw what the service would be that he would call on his debtor to render him. " You are ? Well ! there isn't a more charming chate- laine than Blanche anywhere. She invites me, but I fchall go to Baden after the race-week," went on Strath- more, brushing a fly off the rose Cashmere sleeve of his dressing-gown : " I shall meet Arrelio there, and you get a man's meaning out of him in chit-chat as you never do in a conference. If congresses were held en petit comite, with a supper worthy Careme, they might come to some- thing, instead of ending, as they always do now, in cob- webs and in moonshine. Why do the English always get cheated and fooled in a European congress, I wonder? Not because they can't lie, it is the national metier. Be- cause they lie too much and too barefacedly, I think; and no gobemouche is ever tricked into even suspecting there of the truth ! A wise man never lies ; I don't mean because he's moral, but because he's judicious : ' On peu: etre plus fin qu'un autre, mais pas plus fin que tous lee autres.' Somebody always finds out a falsehood, and, once found out, your credit's gone ! 1 say, Valdor, dc you know my compatriote, Lady Vavasour?" "Lady Vavasour? Bon Disu ! I think I do! What a cold-blooded question to ask anybody in that indifferent way ! Who doesn't know her rather ?" 94 STRATHMORE; OR, " 7 don't. What sort of woman is she ?" " Peste, ir.on cher, you ask a folio. I couldn't tell you. She is divine !" "Divine? Well! 'a woman is a dish for the gods if the devil dress her not,' Shakspeare says ; but I think the devil generally has the dressing, and serves up sauce with it so very piquante that it's all but poison ; it's a dish like mushrooms, dainty but dangerous ; with the beau sexe as with the fungi, it's fifty to ten one lights on a false one, and pays penalty for one's appetite ! Is she a malicious woman, your divinity?" "Malicious? No! Malice is for passees women, pinched, sallow, and hungrily jealous ; for dowagers who nod their wigs over whist and their neighbor's character; for vielles filles who vacillate between sacraments and scandals! Malice is a vinegar thing that belongs to a 'certain age!' it has nothing to do with her. She's a little tantalizing, if you like " " Distinction without a difference ! I thought she was ! And a coquette ?" " To the last extent !" Strathmore laughed: " To the last! I dare say ! when women once pass the boundary line they generally clear the ramparts. I sup- pose the Marquis gives the latitude he takes just, at any rate. We're not often so on those points ; we take an ell, but we don't give an inch. That's the beauty of vesting our honor in our wives; it's so much easier to forbid and dragonize another than ourselves! What a droll thing by the way, it is, that an Englishwoman piques herseh. on being THOUGHT faithful to her husband, and a French- woman on being thought unfaithful; their theory's differ- ent, but their practice comes to much the same thing !" " They're like schismatics in the Churches, they split in semblance and on a straw's point, but, sous les cartes, agree to persecute and agree to dupe ! As for Lord Vavasour, he's a detestable gourmand, invents sauces, bores you horribly, and has but one virtue a great con- jugal one ! he never interferes with his wife ! He's a serai-sovereign with a lot of parasites, a mauvais sujet with a ton de garnison, and just brains enough to be vicious without enough to be entertaining." WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 95 " A very general case, my dear fellow ! Vice is very common, and wit is very scarce ; fifty men make mischief to one that makes mots. We can fill our cells with con- victs, but not our clubs with caseurs. I wonder govern- ment don't tax good talk ; it's quite a luxury, and they might add de luxe, since so many go without it all their lives, in blessed ignorance of even what it is! Where does your belle Marquise go this year? I suppose you know all her movements? She must be leaving now." " Peste ! don't you know ? I thought you were asked to Vernonceaux ? " " Well, if I be, what has that " " To do with it ? She is going there, too. She leaves Paris to-day." "There f The word had a clash of eagerness in it, different to the uninterested, careless tone with which Strathmore had asked all his other questions. "Yes, She and Madame de Ruelle are sworn allies; they are constantly together. Go there and you'll see her. Do, Strathmore ; parole d'honneur she is worth the trouble. She is exquisite, and for you, you icicle, she can't be dangerous." " Dangerous !" said Strathmore, with his most contemp- tuous sneer: "Thank God, no woman was ever yet dangerous to me ; a man must be a fool indeed, who is snared by the ready-made wiles of a coquette." "Antony was no fool." " No, but he was a madman, and that comes to the same thing ; besides, Antony must have had very extra- ordinary tastes altogether, to be in love with a woman forty years old, and as brown as a berry." " Yes," said Valdor, pathetically, " I do wish, for his credit, Cleopatra bad been half her years, and a shade or two fairer. Acti'um would have been very poetic then.'' " Poetic ? Pitiable, if you like, as it is now. I say, Valdor to go to a better theme those steel-greys of Lee Vivian's went for nothing at the sale yesterday; they were splendid animals, and the pigeon-blue Arab mare was knocked down for five thousand francs 1 The wines will be worth bidding for, too ; he had some of the best comet-hock in Paris. Poor fellow ! one drinks his winea ct his table one month, and discusses them in a catalogue 96 STRATIIMORE ; OR, the next. Ars longa, vita brevis ! one's connoisseurship survives one's friendship; Orestes must die, and lolaus must dine ! Damon must go to the dogs, a,nd Pythias must season his dishes! Because our brother's in the Cemetery, that's no reason why we should neglect our Cayenne ! '' With which remark upon friendship, which was with him as much serious as satirical (since Strathmore was an egotist by principle and profession, habit and nature, and had never had any death touch him as he had never had any life wound round him), he began to discuss the news of the day with his guest, and it was not till Valdor had left that he took up the letter from Yernon9eaux again, and drew a sheet of paper to him to answer it now by an acceptance ! In the little Milleflenrs-scented billet lay, unknown to its writer as to him, the turning-point of his life ! God help us ! what avail are experience, prescience, prudence, wisdom, in this world, when at every chance step the sil- liest trifle, the most common-place meeting, an invitation to dinner, a turn-down the wrong street, the dropping of a glove, the delay of a train, the introduction to an unno- ticed stranger, will fling down every precaution, and build a fate for us of which we never dream ? Of what avail for us to erect our sand-castle when every chance blast of air may blow it into nothing, and drift another into form that we have no power to move ? Life hinges upon hazard, and at every turn wisdom is mocked by it, and energy swept aside by it, as the battled dykes are worn away, and the granite walls beaten down by the fickle ocean waves, which, never 'two hours together alike, never two instants without restless motion, are yet as changeless as they are capricious, as omnipotent as they are fickle, as cruel as they are countless! Men and mariners may build their bulwarks, but hazard and the sea will overthrow and wear away both alike at their will their wild and unreined will, which no foresight can foresee, no strength can bridle. Was it not the mere choice between the saddle and the barouche that day when Ferdinand d'Orleans flung down on second thoughts his riding-whip upon the console at the Tuileries, and ordered his carriage instead of his horee, that cost himself his life, his son a throne, the Bourbon WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 97 blood their royalty, and France for long years her pro- gress and her peace? Had he taken up the whip instead of laying it aside, he might be living to-day with the sceptre in his hand, and the Bee, crushed beneath his foot, pow- erless to sting to the core of the Lily ! Of all strange things in human life, there is none stranger than the dominance of Chance. CHAPTER Till. THE WARNING OF THE SCARLET CAMELLIAS. WHERE the grey pointed towers of the Chateau of Vernon^eaux rose above the woods among the vine- shadows of Lorraine, the air seemed still perfumed with the amber, still echoing with the madrigals of Gentil-Ber- nard, still rustling with the sweep of robes a la Pompadour, still filled with the mots of abbes galants, and the laughter of pretty pagans of a century ago. For Vernou9eaux was near to Lune"ville the Luneville of Stanislas, of Voltaire, of la belle Boufflers, the replica of Versailles, the plea- sant exile of forbidden wit, the Luneville of a myriad memories! Vernon9eaux stood as secluded in its forests as the oastle of the Sleeping Beauty so tranquil and so shaded, that the gay sinners of Luneville might have been chained there in enchanted slumber, like the Moorish Court under the marble pavements of the Alhambra; but if, without, there was a sylvan solitude, broken but by the song of the vintagers or the creak of the oxen-drawn wagon ; within, when the Comtesse de Ruelle went there for the summer months with' a choice selection from her ultra-exclusive Paris set, there were as much luxury, wit, and refined revelry as ever the Marquis de Boufflers, a hundred years before, had presided over at the little palace of Luneville. No sound broke the silence, save the ring of his horse's feet, as Strathmorc drove the mail-phaeton that had been sent to meet him through the park to Vernon9eaux, on bis way to the visit for which he had abandoned Baden. 9 9S STRATIIMORE; OR, There was not a thing in sight save the rich country beyond and the dense forest-growth about him, until, as a break in the wood brought into view the grey facade of the building, a riding party rode into the court-yard by opposite gates to those by which he would enter, looking like some court cavalcade of Watteau, some hunting group of Wouverman's and breaking suddenly in with life, and coloring, and motion on the solitude of the landscape, aa they were thrown out in strong relief against the ivy-hung walls of the chateau. " I'm in time for dinner," he thought, noticing how well one of the women rode who was teasing her horse with sharp strokes of her whip, and making him rear and swerve, before she sprang from the saddle : the distance was too far for him to make out who she \vas, and, as he dropped his eye-glass, he wished for a lorgnon. The saddle-horses were being led off by their grooms, and the first dressing-bell had just rung, when he drove into the court-yard. At the moment of his arrival all the world was dressing, and Strathmore, as he went straight to his room, passing along the Gall6rie des Dames, con- secrated from time immemorial to the repose of the beau sexe, heard a handsome brune coming out of one of the dressing-rooms say to another lady's-maid, apparently her sub-lieutenant in office, " Ya vite chercher les camellias roses, dans les serres chaudes. Madam desire des fleurs naturelles, c'est sa u'him comme disent les Anglais. Ah ma foi ! qu'elle a des caprices, Miladi Vavasour ! " This name was the first that he heard at Vernonyeaux. As he heard it, Strathmore, the last man in the world who was ever -troubled by regrets or haunted by fore- bodings, who ever descended to "the weakness of vacillation, or paid himself so ill a compliment as to imagine any step he took, however great, however trivial, could by any possibility be unwisely taken, wished for the moment, on an impulse he could not have explained, that he had gone to Baden instead, and left the Mask unmasked, the White Domino unknown. It was the first time a woman had ever influenced him, and he resented the influence. Hig prejudice against Lady Vavasour came back in full force as he heai'd her maid order the fresh scarlet camellias. The flowers were harmless, surely, and yet (perhaps it was association with La Dame aux Camellias!') with WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 99 them she reassumed a dangerous aspect, as of a sorceress unscrupulous in her spells, a coquette merciless in her wiles, a woman who lived upon vanity and adored but herself, a creature like the Japan lilac, lovely to look on, but to those who lingered near, who touched or who played with her, certain destruction ! By what force of argument he could not have told trifles play the deuce with us, oddly sometimes, but by some irrepressible instinct, all his old dislike and mistrust of Lady Vava- sour came back with that innocent and luckless hothouse order! "Who are here, Diaz do you know?" he asked the Albanian, as he dressed after his bath and a cup of coffee. The inimitable modus operandi of that priceless person had mastered the whole visiting-list of Yernon9eaux, though he had had, on the whole, but about three minutes to himself for the process. "Marquis and Marchioness of Vavasour, please your lordship," began Diaz. "A stupid pigeon and a clever snarer ! " thought Strath- more, as he held out his wrist to have his sleeve-links fastened. "Lady George Dash wood and her sister " "Pretty precisians, naughty as Messalina, who go to church, like Marguerite, to meditate on Faust ! " reflected Strath more. "My Lord Viscount Blocquehedd and M. de Croquis." "One a fool, who writes slangy, burlesqued travels, that sell because hundreds in coronetted carriages drive up to his publisher's doors to get a copy in public and enjoy a laugh in private ; and the other, a magnificent fellow, who'd have been fit company for Scipio at Linter- num, but who can't send a sheet of copy to press without a 'caution' and a chance of Cayenne," thought Strath- more, perfuming his beard. " Lady Fitzeden, my lord," pursued Diaz. " Who gives ball-vouchers for other people's ' unimpeach- ability.' but couldn't on oath give one for her owul" reflected his master " Monsignore Villaflor and M. 1'Abbe de Verdreuil." "A brace of priests, who have intrigues and absolution? in their hands, make penitents and shrive them, hide the 100 STRATHMORE; OR, rou& under the rochet, and Cupid in tbe confessional. I know the race," thought Strathmore. "M. le Vicomte de Clermont, Lord Arthur Legard, Colonel Dormer, and M. de la Rennecourt," pursued Diaz, in profound ignorance of his master's mental com- mentary. "Very good fellows all of them ; dress better than they talk, shoot with truer aim than they think, bore one rather at everything but billiards, and bestow more on their hair than on the brains underneath it, comme il faut but common-place," said ritrathmore to himself, with the con- tempt of a clever man for men who are only educated, of an ambitious man for men who are only a la mode, of a man who out makes society his stepping-stone for men who never see or soar beyond it. "Madame de Saint-Claire, H. S. H. Ilelene of Mechlin, and Lord aiid Lady Beaudesert, are here too, my lord," added the Albanian, closing the list. " I think that is all all I have heard of at present, at least." "A bas-bleu as mathematical and material as Madame du Chatelet, a babyish blonde with a mushroom royalty and a nursery lisp ; a dashing brunette who smokes cigar- ettes and has led the Pytchley. Well, there will be change, at any rate. Blanche hasn't sorted her guests as she sorts her embroidery silks, in shades that suit ; how- ever, good contrasts are effective sometimes. There's nobody I don't know, except the priests and the Vava- sours. That's a bore ; new acquaintances are much pleas- anter than familiar ones; the varnish is fresh, and the gilding is bright, and the polish is smooth, and you only just touch the surface with friends an hour old. Nothing wears so badly, and stands the microscope so ill, as Humanity. I suppose because we are all sham to one another, and les hommes sa haisent natureUement ; so the electro comes off, and the hatred come out, when we've been some time together," thought Strathmore, as he left his room to go to the drawing-rooms. No one was yet down when he was ushered into the salons, and he threw himself down on a dormeuse with his back to a window opening on the terrace, playing idly with the snowy curls of a little lion-dog, who, recognizing him, leapt on his knee, shaking its silver bells in a joyous welcome. Strath- WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 101 more did not care about animals in truth, I don't think he cared much about anything except himself! Not that he was an egotist in any petty sense of the word : he wonld have shrouded no man's light, profited at no man's cost, taken no man's right, but he was self-sustained and self-absorbed ; keen personal ambitions were dominant in him, pure personal interests alone occupied him, and the instincts and weaknesses kindlier if you like, but more general and less viril of most men had no part in him. He was kind to a dog, for instance, because it was helpless, and he would have disdained to be otherwise; but to care for a dog's fidelity, to regret a dog's death as be had known Erroll do, were utterly incomprehensible to him. lie sat there some few moments listlessly twisting the ear of the Maltese, while the clock on the console near gently ticked away the time, and pointed to a quarter to nine ; he did not hear a step approach towards the back of his chair from the terrace behind, he did not turn and see a' figure that stood just within the window betwixt him and the faint evening light. " Bon jour, Lord Cecil ! Are you meditating on the Gitana prophecy, or on the Domino Blanc which? Or is the Voltura affair absorbing you, pray, to the utter exclusion of both ?" That light, mechanic voice that had mocked him from the mask struck on his ear like the gay, sudden chime of some silvery bell, and, for once in his life, Strathmore started ! As he rose and swung round, the night under the Czeschen limes came buck swiftly and vividly to his memory ; bow had that voice failed to recall it before ? With the scarlet coronal of flowers on her lovely amber hair, and the light of a sunny laughter beaming in her eyes ; framed between the gossamer lace and broidered azure silk of the curtain draperies ; a form bright and bril- liant and richly colored as any picture of Watteau's, thrown ouf against the purple haze of the air, and the dark shadows of evening that were veiling the; landscape beyond ; there stood the blonde aux yeux noirs of the Vigil of St. John, the White Domino of the fete a la llegence Marion Marchioness of Vavasour ! Strangely r-DOugh, he had never even by a random thought con- 9* 102 STUATHMORE; OR, tiected tlie two as one. Involuntarily, unwittingly, he stood a moment dazzled and surprised, looking at the deli- cate and glittering picture that was before him, painted in all its dainty coloring on the sombre canvas of the night; and she laughed softly to herself for one brief instant she had startled him from his self-possession. She guessed rightly, that no woman before her had ever boasted so much. Then Strathmore bent to her with the soft and stately courtesy for which his race of steel had ever been famed the velvet glove that they habitually wore over their gauntlets of mail : " I merit a worse fate than the Gitana predicted me, for my blindness in not recognizing the veiled picture by its eyes, in not knowing that no two voices could have a music so rare ! May I ask to be forgiven, though I can never forgive myself?" She smiled as she gave him her hand: "You may. You rendered me too daring and too gener- ous a service, Lord Cecil for me not to forgive you weightier offences than that. I am your debtor for a heavy debt the debt of my life saved ! Believe me, I am very grateful." The words were few and simple; a young girl out of her convent could not have spoken more earnestly and touchingly than the woman of the world ; where more florid, profuse, eloquently-studied words would have been set aside by him as the conventional utterances of neces- sity, these charmed and won him, these rang on his ear with the accent of truth. " To secure so Thigh a price as your gratitude most men would have perilled much more than I did," he answered her : " But I had not then the incentive that would tempt the world to any madness at Lady Vavasour's bidding. I had not seen what I rescued, I did not know whom I served." She looked up at him from under her black silken lashes as she sank into the chair he wheeled to her, and smiled: "You compliment charmingly, Lord Cecil (you remem- ber, I suppose, that I said I liked bonbons), but then, how much is true? You are a diplomatist: It is jour habit tc WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND 103 speak suavely and mean nothing, it is the specialite that will get you the Garter and give you an Earldom." " Lady Vavasour by everything I have heard of her can surely never mistrust her own power to convert the must sceptical, and do with all men what she w r ould ?" Her attitude, as she sank down into the chair, had all the soft Odalisque-like grace with which he had first seen her lying amongst her cushions on the bench of the Bohe- mian boat ; and he confessed to himself that this match- less and dazzling beauty, at once poetic and voluptuous, at onc gifted with the loveliness of the cerail, and the tour- nurc- of the salons, might well play with men, and make theii madness at its will. "Ah!" she laughed her airy, silvery laugh! "but I do not profess to deal with people who desire age and despise love ; they are not in my experience, or my cate- gory. 1 shall be a long while before I credit any compli- ment from you, mon ami. Did I not show you how well I knew your character at the bal masque ? Was it not sketched, now, as accurately as any one of La Bruyere's?" " It was, though it was not drawn altogether en beau. It was so accurate fhat it flattered me even by its unflat- tering points, since it showed that I must have been a subject of interest and of study to my unerring clair- voyante." A momentary blush tinged her cheek, making her love- liness lovelier, and not escaping Strathmore, though he knew how grandes dames can blush, as they can weep at their will when they need it to embellish their beauty, too well to be much honored by it. She looked at him with the same glance that had flashed through her mask. " Not at all ! You are much too vain ! I only wanted to puzzle you. If my shafts hit home, it was chance, not effort. Hearsay and penetration made my clairvoyance, as they make all. You were no stranger to me by name. I had heard plenty of you from others ; though we had never happened to meet till that night in Bohemia. Come 1 tell me the truth. Do you not think it a terrible escapade to have travelled alone, at night, in that inconsequent manner, with only my maid ?" " J think it a ' caprice d'une belle dame,' which became her far better than the common-place and the conventional, 104 STRATIIMORE ; OR, which have nothing in common with her," smiled Strath- more. And for once he paid a compliment that was sincerely meant! "But why did you so cruelly refuse me your name, and condemn me to pursue ' un ombre, un reve, un rien,' in seeking to see again the phantom which had flashed on me, when, had I but known whom I sought, all Europe would have guided me to its idol ?" " Very gracefully asked, indeed !" said Lady Vavasour, with a sign of her fan, made eloquent in her hand, as in the hand of a Gaditana of Cadiz : " But, first of all, you never pursued the phantom at all, mon ami. You don't do those things ! I wasn't a state secret, and I didn't carry despatches: sequitur, you were courteous to me while we were together because you were well bred, and I was a woman ; but you never thought twice about me after we parted, except just that night, when I left you behind to smoke and sleep under the pines, when, perhaps, you said to yourself: 'Blonde with dark eyes unusual! Travelling alone, too very odd !' and then dismissed me to think of Prince Michel ! Secondly, I refused you my name, because it was my whim to travel incognita ; and down the river I dispensed with even* my courier. I am as capricious as the winds, you know, and, like the winds, never change my caprices for any one's will I" Before he could answer her the door of the salon was thrown open, and several people entered his hostess among others, with that courtly, velvet-shod churchman, Monsignore Villaflor. Strathmore had to rise, and his place was taken by the priest, who was a courtier, a con- noisseur, and a coureur des ruelles. The rooms filled ; dinner was announced and served as the little chimes of the clock rang nine, and to Strathmore's lot fell Lady George Dashwood, whose soft platitudes had never seemed more wearisome to him than to-night, when they dis- coursed of chamber-music, old china, Maltese dogs, new fashions, Elzevir editions, and altar-screens, in the same unvarying and perfectly-bred monotone, which had much the same effect as if a humble-bee had been perpetually humming in the flowers of the epergne before him. At some distance from him too great for any conversation with her sat Lady Vavasour; and, while keeping up hia recitative with Lady George, Strathmore could not choose WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 105 but look at her, could not choose but think of her this woman who had been first so strangely thrown in his way, against whom he still felt an unconquerably stubborn prejudice, yet who exercised over him, when he was with her, a necromancy of air, of glance, of tone, that surprised him, incensed him, and yet beguiled him. Had he fore- seen his future, he would have flung aside every thought of this bright, brilliant beauty, as he had flung aside her broidered handkerchief into the bosom of the Czeschen peasant girl in Prague ; but, could we foresee one step before another, would the lives of any one of us be blasted, blundered, full of bitterness, and of evil as they are? Is not the misery of every life due to the band that is bound fast on our eyes, which the wisest can do little to lift, which makes us feel our way blindly, uncertainly, erringly, stumbling at every step ; which is never lifted, save when our faces are turned backwards, and we are bidden to look behind us at the land that we have quitted, which is sown thick with graves ; and at the gates that are closed upon us, on which is written " Too Late ?" Amidst the hum of conversation, the bouquet of the wines, the fragrance of the exotics, the numberless mur- murs of " Sauterne, monsieur?" "Chateau Yquem ? " Supreme de Yolaille ?" " Macedoine d'Abricots ?" " Beignets d'Annanas ?" Strathmore throughout dinner let his thoughts be usurped by the dazzling face, with its amber hair drawn slightly back from the delicate temples, in masses and ripples of yellow gold, which was but tantalizingly visible to him through the clusters of gor- geous flowers, and behind the form of an alabaster Ariadne that intervened between her and himself. Is there any separation more exasperating than the length of a dinner- table ? I don't believe the Hellespont was half so pro- voking! Leander could cross that if Hero didn't mind receiving him au naturelle : but what man, pray, can move from his place at a dinner-party ? He must say with Claude Frollo, "Anakthe /" submit, and sit where he's put! Strathmore found the dinner an interminable bore, and felt his prejudice giving way; his judgment in no way t-'werved from his settled conviction that Lady Vavasour v as vain, spoiled, dangerous, and a consummate coquette, 106 STHATIIMORE; OR, bent upon conquest, and not over-careful of her character a glance told him that; but the rich, glad, luxuriant music that he had heard from her lips under the lindens by the river-side, now s\veet as a bird's carol, now sad as a tniserere, seemed to ring in his ear again, and he caught himself thinking a poetic scntimentalism worthy of the Sabreur that she must have some of that music in her soul! Against the White Domino, the malicious Mask, he would have been prepared and steeled ; the bright Odalisque of the Moldau, the songstress of the Spring night, took him unawares, and disarmed him. As the women rose at length and swept out of the great banqueting-hall, where Guises had feasted Yalois, she had to pass his chair, the lace of her dress brushing his shoulder, the subtle fragrance of her hair wafted to him like the odor of some hothouse flower ; as she did so, a bracelet of cameo dropped from her arm (really dropped, she was too highly finished a coquette to need any such vulgar and commonplace ruses), and as Strathmore bent for it and fastened it again on her arm, he noticed how snow-white and polished the skin was, like the skin of the unguent-loving and delicate Greeks, and confessed to him- self that the smile on those sweet, laughing lips was the loveliest a woman ever had at command. " Merci ! We leave you, d, V Anglais, to olives and repose, politics and cigarettes, solitude and slander. How you will pick our beauty to pieces and legislate for the nations 1 Adieu !" she v/hispered, as she passed onward. " By George ! they did not overrate her, and that fool is her husband! Faugh! it is Caliban wedded to Miranda!" thought Strathmore, as he poured some Johannisberg into his glass, looking across at the Marquis of Vavasour. The epithet and the comparison were both somewhat overstrained, it must be admitted; but there are very few men, I think, who, admiring a beautiful woman, are not disposed to think her lord and master a contemptible fellow, and feel very much towards him as you may have felt on a still grey day in September, lounging along by the sunken fence of some splendid pre- serves of which you have not the entree, looking at the cover and hearing the whirr of the birds toward? tho owner, whoever he be, for whom the game's set apart. WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 10T And when M. le Mari is a muff, or the owner no shot, your sense of injury is very naturally redoubled in both cases, and your animus increased. Envy is a quick match, easily lighted, and needs no spirit added to the wick to make it strike fire and flare into flame. The Marquis was not a Caliban, and not a fool, though Strathmore, from the eminence of an acute, subtle, and brilliant intellect, chose to call him so. He was a short, plain, grey-haired little man, with small dark eyes, that leered and twinkled viciously; a very sensual mouth, a good deal of wickedness in the upper part of his face, and a good deal of weakness in the lower ; a man specially to enjoy taking the world in neatly and slyly, yet a man not difficult to govern by any one who knew his weak points. He had not very many brains, and those he had had been spent chiefly in the study of Brillat-Savarin, and the eluci- dation in theory of new plats and sauces. He had taken no share whatever in public life, had lived chiefly abroad, was principally noted for his dinners, was considered rather an insignificant person by those who stripped him of his strawberry-leaves ; but being a very great Personage to the world in general, had the kow-tow performed to him to any amount, threw his ermine over his emptiness, covered all cancans with his coronet, and hushed all whispers with his wealth. He was the Marquis of Vava- sour had livings for which the ecclesiastical saints scrambled and truckled, granting him easy absolution for such superior advowsons, and presenting him with a brevet to heaven, as only a decent return for his rich presentations ; he had a considerable amount of family patronage, the eighth cardinal virtue, for which a man will get loved more than for all the other seven put to- gether; he had a title of the highest rank and longest date; therefore, though chiefly remarkable for gourmandize and a certain monkeyish malice, this inert, obstinate, sly, and rather demoralized gourmet gave the law, had the pas, and was held in high honor and distinction by all, save, indeed, by Strathmore, who thought again, as he looked at his lordship : " Faugh ! it is Caliban wedded to Miranda 1'' It was the first time that Strathmore had ever thought a woman thrown away upon a man in marriage ordinarily hi? opinion was precisely the reverse ! But the Marquia JOS STRATIIMORE ; OR, was a provocative owner of anything half so lovely aa Marion, Lady Vavasour, though it must be confessed he was an easy one ; the liberty he took he gave, he never crossed her caprices, and there were invariably between them that polite bon accord, that cool don't-carish, very- happy-to-see-you never-interfere-with-you sort of friendship which is the popular hue of "marriage in high life," and is decidedly the best and least troublesome it can wear. If you have to look long on one color, let it be a well- wearing, never-dazzling nuance; if you have to run in leash, don't pull at the collar, it won't keep your companion from going her pace, and will only gall your own throat for nothing. That discreet, tranquil "friendship" of the Vavasours is an admirable thing; it's like a well-bred monotone, or a well-bred man that smooths overall things and never makes a row. Galba, who shuts his eyes and shakes hands with Maecenas, is the wise fellow. Mene- laus, who raves, can't rouse his friends in our day; he'll only get a sneei'ing chuckle from them all, from Nestor in at Boodle's, to Amphimachus in at Pratt's, run the risk of a Times leader, which is our modern substitute for the pillory, and in lieu of Troy will only obtain a " Decree Nisi, with costs!" CHAPTER IX. . LA BELLE V. LA BELLE. WHEN they entered the drawing-room, half an hour after, the first thing that met Strathmore's eyes was the woman who, more or less, had haunted his memory and excited his curiosity since the May night under the lindens, in the solitudes of Bohemia. Lady Vavasour was lying back in a dormeuse, glancing through George Sand's last novel ; the full light from a chandelier above fell upon her, making the snowy camei dazzling, and the scarlet flowers glow ; she looked like some rare and exquisite Sevres figure as she sat there, with her cheek resting on her hand, and the lashes drooped over her eyes, the form perfect as a WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 109 statuette jf Coysvox, the coloring rich and delicate as an enamel of Fragonard. And yet those cursed camellias! Was it the strange grouping of those scarlet flowers circling the dead gold of her hair that gave to her some- thing startling with all her seductiveness, bizarre with all her beauty, dangerous with all her delicacy; something that made him involuntarily think of Lucrezia Borgia, Catherina Medici, Clytcmnestra, Fredegonde, Olympia Mancini, Gunilda, in a pelc-mele chaos of every divine demoniac, every fatal fascinatress that the world had seen since the world began ; something which struck him with nothing less than aversion for the first moment that the glowing. coronal on the amber hair met his eyes again; but which then forced him against himself into a dizzy, blind, breathless, admiration, such as no woman had ever wrung from him. " That ever such beauty as this should belong to a creature good for nothing but to criticize sauces, smell the bouquets of wines, and gluttonize over green fat!" thought Strathmore, who held all gourmands in contemptuous dis- dain, and this one especial gourmand in particular, as he drew near her, and sank down in a low chair by her couch, regardless that Lady George looked chagrined, and that Lady Beaudesert had signalled him with her fan. The bright beauties of his set rather resented his sudden and immediate desertion to another standard. "Lady Vavasour, may I not trust to hear to-night the voice whose music drove the nightingales to despair under the limes ?" said Strathmore, as he sank into a low chair beside her, to the chagrin of Monsignore Yillaflor and a host of baser rivals. She glanced at him under her silky lashes, and that under-glance was the most dangerous in the world : " No ! I sing to nightingales, but not to order, like a prima donna. The birds can appreciate me, the bores can't !" and her ladyship included, in a disdainful sign of her fan, the men whom Strathmore in his pride had classified as " qommeil faut, but common-place" a classi- fication, by-the-by, which would fit, I fear, most of the members of " good society." " But you sang to ME. and you will sing to me again ! " said Strathmore. with the calm, appropriative, Brummek 10 110 STRATIIMORE: OR, lian hGnchalance of tone that women always like. Women iove an autocratic ruler; even your imperious coquettes, believe me, feel the charm, though they won't, I dare say, often own to it ! " Do not be so sure of that ! I am not Malibran, whom you can hear any night for five guineas, and I did not sing to you under the limes; you are infinitely too vain! I sang pour m'amuser, and to scandalize those English women who grumbled at the cucumber-soup, and thought me 'evidently not a proper person!' The English are born travellers. I wonder why they think it necessary to make one of the specialties du voyage a compound of ice and acid for every stranger they meet ?" " Because suspicion and reserve are to us what their shells are to cocoanuts ; they make a little kernel look big, and if there's emptiness inside, conceal it," laughed Strath- more : " But you arc very cruel to charge me with vanity. If I be vain, have I not food for it in knowing that I am such a subject of interest to one whose tap from her fan is one of the cordons d'lwnneur of Europe, that she honored me with studying my character, learning my preferences, and even making researches among my family legends ? Lady Vavasour must not send me to Coventry when I remember the Domino Blanc ! " Her eyes laughed with malicious amusement: " The Domino Blanc seems to have made a great im- pression on you, Lord Cecil ! but only because she knew of the Yoltura affair, and you are curious to know how she knew it. No woman ever makes you vain. What you are vain of are things like your conduct of the Murat entanglement, when your chief's d, propos brain-attack so obligingly left you alone to steer through the troubled waters. Now, confess me the truth, were you not glad when Lord Ternpletown had congestion just at that juncture ?" " I believe I was ! If a military man's friend dies who had the step above him, his first thought is ' Promotion ! deucedly lucky for me!' His next, 'Poor fellow! what a pity ! ' always comes two seconds after. I understand Voltaire. If your companion's existence at table makes you have a dish dressed as you don't like it, you are naturally relieved if an apoplectic fit empties his cLair, WROUGHT BY HIS OWN IIANO. Ill tnd sets you free to say, 'Poin de sauce blanche." All men are egotists ; they only persuade themselves they are not selfish by swearing so so often, that at last they believe what they say. No motive under the sun will stand the microscope ; human nature, like a faded beauty, must only have a demi-lumiere ; draw the blinds up, and the blotches come out, the wrinkles show, and the paint peels off. The beauty scolds the servants men hiss the satirists who dare to let in daylight!" She listened, and laughed her low, silver laugh. This was not the conversation with which her courtiers usually entertained her, but, if only as a novelty, she rather liked it : " Quite true ! It is only here and there a beauty like myself, who can brave the noontide, and a man who, like yourself, can stand the satire who dare to admit it as true. / don't want rouge yet, and you don't want ruses yet; but I dare say we shall both come to them, and then we shan't like the blinds up better than any one else." "Lady Vavasour needing rouge! it is an impossible stretch of imagination. One cannot realize the doom of mortality thoroughly enough to picture that cheek of child- like bloom ever condescending to the aid of the dressing- box!" smiled Strathmore, his eyes dwelling on the bloom in question, that was softly faint, yet warmly bright, as the flush on a sea-shell. "But a diplomatist needing ruses is not so difficult! You must condescend to the blanc de perle of the bureau White Lies or you will forsake your metier, or your metier you. If I can defy enamel, you won't be able to defy expediency, mon ami!" Strathmore laughed: " Enamelling is as much in favor in the cabinets as in the cabinets de toilettes, I admit, and is very useful in both. Nations suffer for the cost in the one, and husbands for the cost in the other 1 But, for myself, I don't think I shall ever use the blanc de perle you predict. I am of Talleyrand's way of thinking, that the able man disdains so clumsy a tool as falsehood. It is the weafion of the hungler, not of the master. Take refuge in falsehood, and you have dealt a trump into your enemy's hand that he can play against you whenever he likes. The most adroit Hi STRATH MORE; OR,. falsehood is but thin ice that may break any day. The true art is to know how to hold truth, and how to with- hold it ; but never to deal with anything else." "Then you can never humor men, and never flatter them ! How can power be obtained without?" " By using them and ruling them. Men are the wise man's tools, to be commanded, not his mutinous crew, to be bribed and pampered ! " She looked at him as he spoke, and saw on his face the look of pitiless power, of imperious passion, of merciless will, that the Gitana had seen as she studied it under the Bohemian stars that all saw who looked at the portraits of the Norman Strathmores, when the western sun shone on them through the stained windows at White Ladies and, while she was fascinated by it, thought to herself ho\u she would soften it, subdue it, break it down beneath her hands, chain it there beneath her feet. Women delight to ponder how "the dove will peck the estridge ; " and the keener and fiercer the hawk which is their quarry, the more they glory in blinding him with the dazzle of their silvery wings, and in disabling him with the music of their soft wood-notes! Shakspeare knew that women justified his metaphor, though falconer's lore might not ! " You are very secure of your future," she laughed, while the brilliant light above her head shone down on the waves of her amber hair, and the scarlet coronal that wound round them, in so startling and strong a contrast of color a contrast that no beauty less perfect, less delicate, less exquisitely tinted, could ever have borne : " Doesn't the Bohemian's prophecy make you tremble ? How horrible it was ! " Strath more laughed too, looking into the lustrous eyes flashing on him sweetly and softly as an Oriental's: " Yes ! she gave me plenty of melodrame for my money, but I don't see very well how it can come to pass. I'm not a hero of romance, with a mysterious parentage or a hidden murder; I shan't make a double marriage, discover a family secret, or take anybody's life in hot or cold blood ! All my actions are patent to the world ; I fear I shall never do anything to merit Redempta's. romantic pre- diction! But that reminds me, when YOU talk^ to me WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 113 that night, you talked only in French, Lady Vavasour, I thought you were a Parisienne?" " Of course you did. I would not give you a clue even to my country." "Which was very cruel, madame ! But, though you pave me no clue, you gave me a promise, and I must claim its ftilfllment." "/ gave you one ? Indeed ! I have forgotten it, then. A year ago is an eternity to be called on to remember. Don't you like those Maltese dogs? I think they arc such pretty snowy things." " But / remember it," said Strathmore (indisposed to turn the conversation from himself to the lion-pups), with a smile that piqued his companion because she could not translate it : " It was, that when we met again you would thank me for my chivalry, as you honored me by terming it, and would pay your debt comme je voudrais! I am tempted to be an inexorable creditor!" The lovely mouth made a moue boudeuse, but she gave him the look that she had given him under the lime in Bohemia soft with all its coquetry, tender with all its dazzling brilliance. " I dare say 1 Well ! what would content you ?" she laughed, softly stirring her fan, while its motion floated the subtle fragrance of her hair to him when he leant to- wards her. It was a dangerous question for such lips to put to any man ! He could scarce have but one answer rise to his tongue within sight and touch of that tempting loveliness an answer that could not be uttered in the salons of Yernonceaux, to the wife of a Peer, to Marion, Lady Yavasour! Strathmore bent down towards her till his voice could reach her ear alone, his eyes darkening with that swift, instantaneous light which showed to any woman that the passion he disdained did but sleep, and might yet wake, like " giants refreshed from their slumber." " Some day, perhaps, I may dare to tell you not here, not yet!" Tne words escaped him before he knew it. As the per- fume of her hair reached him, as he met the glance of her eyes, as he looked on her delicate dazzling face where the light from the chandelier shone upon it, this woman's 10* 114 STRATIIMORE; OR, beauty captivated him against his will, and made the jlood course quicker through his veins, as though he had drunk in the rich bouquet and the subtle strength of some rare rub} T wine, warm from the purple clusters of the South. Tne faint rose-blush, that was the most dangerous of all Lady Vavasour's charms, since it was the one which flattered most, and most surely counterfeited nature, came on her cheek, and her eyes met his with a languid sweet- ness. It was the first whisper of the syren's sea-song, that was to lead by music unto wreck and death ; it was the first beckoning of the white arms of Circe, that were to wreathe, and twine, and cling, till they should draw down their prey beneath the salt waves flowing over the fathomless abyss whence there is no return. Then with one of her rapid, coquettish mutations, one of those tantalizing boutades that were her most cruel and certain witcheries, she signed him away with a blow from her fan, and laughed lightly: " Lord Cecil, I have talked to you alone for full ten minutes. I never give any one a longer monopoly. Sur- render your place to Monsignore Villaflor, and let the world in to our conversation." Strathmore leant back, and nestled himself more closely in among his cushions with calm nonchalance: "Pardon, madame ! Monsignore can seat himself, and a signal of your pretty toy will summon the world without my moving. I am very comfortable just now!" She glanced at him with a sparkle of malicious amuse- ment: " You are piqued, mon ami, already /" she thought, with gratified triumph, as she arched her delicate eyebrows with provoking indifference, and signed Villaflor towards her. Dormer, Legard, and Rennecourt gathered about her dormeuse the instant the signal permitted them ; and for any evidence she gave of remembering his presence, or even his existence, Strathmore might have utterly faded from her memory as she dispensed the mischeivous mots, the moqueur smile, the silent, dangerous glances that were the war-weapons of the arch-coquette whom Lord Vava- sour had taken to himself. She knew that no possible mode of action could have better impressed her on Strathmore's thoughts, the WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 115 Annoyance it awoke in him with himself, retained her in his mind ; the momentary tenderness that had gleamed in her eyes, succeeded by the tantalizing indifference of her dismissal ; he knew them well enough, they were the tactics of a coquette, and he hated coquettes, " women who live on the censing of fools, and spend their time in fool- ing wise men ;" he thought contemptuously, while without moving so as to give up his place to Villaflor, or any one else, he began to play ecarte with the Yicomte de Clermont, at a table that stood at his elbow. Strathmore was specially fond of that little witching French game ; he was one of the best players in Europe ; be liked its tranquil, subtle finesses that were to be enjoyed without stirring from his dormeuse ; he liked its keen excitement bought for a few Naps a side, and he was tenacious of his reputation in it. Clermont was almost the only member of the Paris Jockey Club who claimed to equal him, and their ecarte was always a sharp contest of skill. Another time he would have gone farther out of the reach of the babble of conver- sation round Lady Vavasour's sofa; now, Strathmore did not choose to let her think she could be any disturbing element at all. It was a dangerous neighborhood for ecarte, or any game that hung on skill, thought, and finesse, where every word of the silvery mocking voice was to be heard, where every echo of the airy laughter rang on his ear, where the fluttering motion of the fan, the gleam of her amber tresses, the glitter of the cameo on an arm as white, as they, caught his eye every moment. But Strath- more invariably risked danger in little things as in great; he never avoided it, he always disdainfully and self-reliantly lingered in it; it was his strength or his weakness which- ever you like. He played eight games as scientifically as though he had been in a card-room, with not another face to distract him from that of the king's be marked ; and Lady Vava- sour, glancing at him, began to doubt her own power. Strathmore leant back, his eyes fixed on the cards he held, his interest centred in the game he played, and she might have been fifty leagues away for any sign she could dis- cover tnat she disturoed him ; the Voltura affair she might endure as a rival, states and princes were involved in that, but to be rivalled by ecarte, by painted pieces of pasteboard 116 STRATIIMORE; OR, and a few Naps a side ! never! She felt her character at stake her vanity was. (There are plenty of people in this world, my good sirs, besides coquettes, who take the one thing for the other, and when they cry out their repu- tation's attacked, are in truth only snarling from their wounded conceit !) The eight games had been evenly won and lost, they were four all, and they began la belle ; the Strath mores of White Ladies had never born patiently to lose in anything, they were a race that dearly loved dominance, and took it coiite que coute like imperious, unyielding Normans as they were ; he did not choose that Clermont should beat him ; this evening, in especial, defeat would have annoyed him unspeakably. The luck of the cards had always been with the Vi- comte, but Strathmore's play had more than balanced that; it was evident to all those who gathered near the e"carte table that the game was in his hands. His hostess from a distance watched him over the top of her fan, while dis- coursing of turquoise celadon with II.S.II. of Mechlin ; her name had some years before been entangled with his own in that gossip which is rife in those hot-beds of scandal, club-rooms and salons ; the gossip had long given place to newer slander, yet the woman of the world could not wholly lose the tenderness that still clung about her heart for one who she knew had never loved her could not wholly keep down a sigh that rose to the lips, against which the gold-powdered down of her fan was pressed.* The Marquis, lying half asleep, pondering on a new flavor for a salmi of woodcocks that he should have tried by his chef the first day of the season, looked through his shut lids at him with snarling envy. The Marquis always thought "plus beau que moi c'est un tort quil me fait!'' and the Catiline- like physique of Strathmore being specially his own anti- podes, specially attracted his attention. " That man's like a Velasquez picture, but he'll do something bad some day," muttered Lord Tava^our, comforting himself with the de- trimental rider with which we always qualify an admira- tion extorted from our envy. Most people in the room watched him as la belle began, catching the contagion of a skilfully contested game, and the excitement of a chance so evenly poised that a single card would turn the scale. Strathmore himself was entirely absorbed in it, entirely WROrQHT BY HIS OWN HAND. Ill intent on it, keenly, eagerly, resolutely bent on winning. He would have lost fifty times the amount staked on it rather than have lost that game at ^cartel He played in- different cards with such superb skill, such matchless finesse, that la belle was all but won, when, from where she sat near on her dormeuse, Lady Yavasour leant to- wards him to look over his hand to watch his triumph, the fragrance of her hair crossing him like the perfume of some exotic, her lovely lips, whose charm even he had admitted, so near his own that their breath fanned his cheek. He looked up and met her eyes ; the dazzling beauty of this woman ran through his veins like subtle fire, and threw him off his guard, as though the air had been suddenly filled with the dreamy intoxicating odor of narcotic fumes, that bewilder the reason and charm while they weaken the senses. He played inadvertently the wrong card. The false step was not to be retrieved (what false step is ?); it gave the game into Clermont's hands, and for the fir-ot time for years Strathmore lost at ecarte. For the instant, trifle though it was, he hated the woman who had unnerved him and fooled him, as passion- ately, as bitterly, as though the wrong card had been some stain on his honour, the lost game some indelible shame on his name ! The bad play he had been betrayed into incensed him enough, but that she should have had this power over him incensed him far more. " I compliment you on your skill, Clermont. You played admirably. You have beaten me! They won't believe it at the Jockey Club!" he said, laughing, as he leant back again among his cushions. His annoyance only showed itself in his eyes, that darkened with the swift anger of his pitiless race, though the rest of his face never changed. "When I came to look on at your victory, it was very uncomplimentary to entertain me with a defeat. I thought you were the best ecart6 player in Europe," said Lady Yavasour, maliciously, with a slight shrug of her snowy shoulders, and as much tranquil unconcern as though she were innocent and ignorant of having done all the mischief. " Lady Yavasour, from Paradise downwards feminine interference was never productive but of a losing game 118 STRATH MORE; OR, for man!" said Strathmore, in the tranquil trainante tones in which he always spoke his rudest things. She laughed softly; it amused her; he had lost his game and she had Avon hers: "L'une belle te perdait I'autre, tri-is cher," said Renne- court to Strathmore, as they went to the smoking-room that night, when the women had deserted the drawing- rooms and gone to their chambers and their novels and their charming negligees in the Galerie des Dames. Strathmore suppressed an impatient oath to himself; the libel, like most libels, was unpalatable because it was true. He hated the woman whose mere touch had so fooled him, and whose sway and whose spells, as he had seen her that night, he had been forced to confess the wildest rumors had not overdrawn. But for all that, though, he owed her his defeat at ecarte', and loathed her sudden and subtle power over him ; as he lay on tjie couch of the smoking-room that night, while Baden favour- ites, new caprices of reigning lionnes, the hushed-up affair of the marked cards at Flora Dohla's, in which well-known names were involved, the dernier debauche of a Russian Prince, who was startling even Paris, were chatted over with the freedom that's only attained when the papooshes are on and the ladies are off, and is enjoyed like the ease of the dressing-gown after the restraint of the grande tenue; I think Strathmore felt a keener detestation still for his lordship of Vavasour and Yaux as he glanced at the Marquis (who, wrapped in his luxurious Cashmere robes, looked something like an over-fed monkey, grizzled with age and pampered with eating, as his eyes leered and twinkled at a grivois tale), and thought as he glanced, " Faugh ! that Caliban to ! " It was an envy and an impatience that many before him had smarted under, looking at her lord and master, so made and termed by marital right, and thinking of Marion, Lady Vavasour. WROUGHT BT HIS OWN HAND. 119 I CHAPTER X. THE DAUGHTER OF EVE IN THE GARDEN (IF ROSES. STRATHMORE very rarely got up early ; usually he had his chocolate brought to him, glanced through new novels, read his letters, had his first cigar before he rose, and then lounged down among the latest to breakfast. He was accustomed to say, that your best causeur is dull over his coffee; with his cutlets, a man thinks of consols and coupons, and with anchovy only finds relish for tele- grams; in the oil of his sardines his satire is swamped, and as he breaks his plover's eggs he's only good for reading and speaking political platitudes ; his head's ad- mirably clear, but his wit isn't ripe. Therefore Strath- more's rule always was : " Do your own business before noon; but don't be bored by your friends till after. In the morning we're all cautious, not convivial: so breakfast and write to your lawyer in solitude ; congregate at lun- cheon, and take croustades and conversation together!" It was a very good rule, I think letters written in the morning never compromise you ; mots made in the morn- ing never amuse you and it was one he seldom broke. But the morning after his arrival at Yernon9eaux, when Diaz entered his chamber to draw up the persiennes and fill his bath, the breeze as it blew in from the windows, which had been partially left open through the hot night, came so pleasantly laden with the fragrance of the rose- gardens, the pine-woods, and the vine-covered hills, that it seemed for once more tempting than his yellow-papered roman and his chocolat a la Vanille, which had both a strong flavor of Paris ; a flavor than which ordinarily on ne pent mieux ; but Paris, like partridges, may want change sometimes, and pall as what doesn't, from women to wine ? under the ruinous test of "Toujours!" For inco Strathmore felt tempted to get up early ; and he rose, dressed, and sauntered out by an escalier that led, with- out passing through any part of the building, from his wing of the chateau down into the gardens below. 120 STRATIIMORE: on. " A device of some dainty cMtelaine, some dame des beaux cousins, for her lover to pass* up to her chamber without waking the seneschal, or risking his limbs by climbing," thought Strathmore, as he stood on the grey stone steps looking over at the gardens that lay before him : " Well ! we have escahers derobes still ! License may have gone out of the language, but it hasn't gone out of the manners; we've learnt to be hypocrites, but we haven't altered our tastes. To advance in Civilization is after all only to perfect Cant. The nude figure remains the same delight to the precisian as the profligate ; but he drapes her discreetly in public, while he gloats over her un draped in petto. Men don't change their natures, only their faces !'' With which, Strathmore sauntered down the steps, and took any way that hazard led .him, which was through the bronze trellis-work gates that opened into his hostess's rose-gardens, mazes of blossom, where the birds sang under the roses, and the air was full of the rich fragrance of clusters of crimson bloom, as he strolled slowly along, profaning these sacred precincts, that were as voues aux dames as the gardens of Odalisques, with the scent and the smoke of his Manilla. There is something in the freshness, the stillness, the sunny calm of early morning, that has its charm, even when we are least inclined to give way to these things, and most inclined to sneer at them. Strathmore essentially a man " of the world, worldly " who lived in Courts, clubs, and salons, who had never got up and come on deck to see the sun rise any day that his yacht was at anchor in the Bosphorus; whose manual was Rochefoucauld, and breviary Bruyerc ; whose life had been spent in an atmosphere scented with perfumes and pastilles, where daylight was never needed and never re- membered, and a purer air would have lacked in excite- ment; even Strathmore, though nature was not much more to him than to Talleyrand or Grammont, felt the freshness, the tranquillity, the peaccfulness of the hour. It was perfectly still and solitary round him, there was not a, sound but of the wood-pigeons cooing from afar off, and the wind gently stealing through the fragrant aisles of the rose arcades, while the sun fell on the eastern side of the silent chateau, and on the terrace, with its grey balustrade WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 121 covered by gorgeous creepers, that looked like the back- ground of some Louis Quinze picture. He knew no one would have risen except the household at that early hour, and as he walked on, just under the terrace, that was at some considerable elevation above him, a voice startled him as it fell on the air : "Since when have you become pastoral? I should not have fancied you had had sylvan tastes, mon ami!" She stood immediately above him, leaning over the stone balustrade; behind her was the ivy-hung fa9ade of the chateau, with its peaked tourelles and its long range of Gothic windows; beneath her sloped the ivy wall of the terrace, covered with the broad leaves of creepers and the profuse blossoms of the twining roses: the whole scene was like a landscape of Greuze or Lancret, and she who completed it added to its coloring of the Beau Siecle where she leaned on the parapet, looking down with a smile on lips that rivalled the half-opened roses. As he glanced upward, her loveliness swept over him like the intoxication of some dreamy perfume, now in the cooler judgment of morning, as at midnight, a few hours before, when the light of the chandeliers glanced on the scarlet camellias. Away from her he could criticize, condemn, displace, defy her ; in her presence, with her eyes smiling down into his, with her voice vibrating on the air, he might resent, but he could not resist her. She enthralled him by the senses, so subtly, so seductively, that she drew him within the charmed circle of her power, even while he hated her for her dominance over him. " Sylvan tastes or not, would not any one, from an idler to an anchorite, be irresistibly drawn where the early morning proffers such a reward to all those who rise early ?" said Strathmore, as he ascended the terrace steps to her side. He had not seen her, until her greeting made him look upwards. But what man can tell the precise truth to a beautiful woman ? She smiled as she gave him her hand, white, small, soft, with the jewels of an Empress upon it ; a hand to close gently but surely on the life of a man, and make it its own ; a hand to be raved of by poets, and hold sages in thraldom ; to he modelled by sculptors, and coveted by courtiers. 11 123 STRATHMORE; OR, "Last night you were quoting from Genesis to show the mischief done by a woman ! How can you be so in- consistent as to seek one in Eve's special province of mis- chief a garden ? A diplomatist tasting the dew of the dawn, and sunning himself among roses ! you are an anomaly, mon ami. Is it your lost ecartd which has dwelt on your mind, that you are wandering at such an unearthly hour ?" "It is more likely to be remembrance of the one who lost me the ecarte ! said Strathmore, bending towards her. His voice had an unusual softness, his eyes darkened and dwelt on her, fascinated by the voluptuous charm of her beauty, and the confession broke from him unawares. She arched her delicate eyebrows, and looked at him with mischievous amusement, where she leaned against the rose-wreathed parapet : " Of M. de Clermont ! You must be very deep in his debt for him to haunt you ! or perhaps you were medita- ting some sure, silent revenge on him? that would be more a la Strathmore !" " I thank you for the hint and the reminder, belle amie ; I will revenge myself for the game that I lost on the tactician who threw me off my guard! But the revenge, like the payment I spoke of last night, must wait; it would be too great rashness to risk taking either as yet He spoke softly, and with meaning ; her power was winding itself about him, his senses were yielding them- selves to the languid charm, the subtle spell of her beauty; Strathmore, who denied that any woman could be dan- gerous to him,' might have known, then, how dangerous one might be ! She blushed, slightly, softly, and played with one of the rings of her left hand the diamond- studded circlet that was the badge of her marriage was it by hazard, or as a warning? Be it which it might, it served to recall to him that the woman he looked on was Marion, Lady Vavasour, the arch-coquette of Europe. "I was unaware your tastes were a la Phyllis, Lady Yavasour," he went on, with the smile, slight, cold, half a sneer, which piqued her more than anything, since it perplexed her as to its meaning, and only gave her a vague idea that her game was foreseen, and defied : " What charjn can the early morning have for you ? Your WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 123 preferences, surely, are no more sylvan than mine, and there is nothing to be captivated but the bees and the birds! I have read in some old Trouvere song of a breu- vage for perpetual youth and beauty, to be gathered from the first dew of roses can that be your mission ? If so, we must pity, as under de L'Enclos, generations unborn, who will suffer like us 1" " Don't use the first person! you never suffer," she answered him, toying with the hanging sprays of the roses : " The charm that guided me was what rules me always the caprice of the hour: I admit no other law! In Paris one never thinks the day is aired till two; but in the country c'est toute autre chose I heard the birds singing, the scent of the roses came through my windows,.. and Ah, Lord Cecil, though we live in the world till we forget it, there are things better than pleasure, there is an air purer than the air of the salons ! I am young, I am flattered, I reign, I love my sovereignty who does not, that has a sceptre to grasp? and still, sometimes I wish that I were a peasant-child, playing with the brown chestnuts under the trees, and catching the butterflies in the sunshine !" I have said that she had now and then a tendresse, a mournfulness, real or assumed ; and at such moments, while the lids drooped softly over the black gazelle eyes, and a shadow of sadness stole the brilliance from her face, she was yet more resistless than in her most dazzling coquetry. Even Strathmore felt its charm, though, now with the gesture that had recalled to him her title and her ownership, he had steeled himself afresh against her. "Indeed!" he answered her, with the smile she mis- trusted : " The world would scarcely credit you, Lady Vavasour; to play with men's lives must be more amus- ing than with fallen chestnuts, and to catch Princes and Peers in your net must be more exciting than the child's yellow butterflies! Who shall hope to be content if the envied of all wishes to alter her lot 1" "Ah ! mor. ami, those who envy us do not always know us. Among all rose-leaves there is one crumpled !" Her voice was saddened, the lustre of her eyes grew languid a,nd softened, and her fingers unconsciously played with the diamond wedding-ring uoon her finger, as it sparkled 124 STRATIIMORE; OR, among the roses. Again the action spoke more eloquently than words. Besides her fascination, she tried now a charm more dangerous for him she claimed his pity! " Look!" she went on as she took one of the flowers, and opened its fresh crimson leaves. " Look ! as the rose swings in the sunlight, how lovely it is the Queen of flowers ! And yet, at its core lies a canker !" " Is it so with our queen of flowers ?" He asked it involuntarily, bending lower towards her, till he saw the faint sigh with which her bosom heaved, under the gossamer lace that shrowded it, " Hush !" she said softly, with a light blow of the rose spray on his arm: "You must not ask. I wear the badge of servitude and silence!" And silence fell between them ; such silence as fell between Launcelot and Guinevere, when the first subtle poison ran through the veins of the man whom Arthur loved. With a light laugh the silence was broken, as she flung the gathered spray off on the sunny air, and let her white hands wander afresh among the twining blossoms : " I like roses, don't you ? They are the flowers of poetry. I don't wonder Cleopatra had her couch of them, and the Epicureans loved them showered down as they sat at banquet, and strewn upon the floors ankle-deep ! They are the flowers of silence, of revel, of love ; the flowers of the Greek poets and the Provence Trouveres ; of the cbaplets of Catullus and the lays of Chastelar. Roses are for all time while they bloom afresh with every summer, how can tlte earth fail to guard its eternal youth ?" While she spoke, she drew out one of the roses from the rest, crimson, and fresh, and fragrant, with the dew glittering still in its odorous core ; and broke it off with its unopened buds and dark shining leaves. "Is it not worthy Cleopatra?" she laughed, holding it up in the light before her eyes and his his that followed her as she fastened the rose in her bosom with negligent grace, where it nestled half hidden, half seen, lying againsi the white skin that the tracery of the lace covered without wholly concealing, and contrasting its snowy beauty with its deep crimson petals. " Come! we have been talking WROUGHT BY IIIS OWN HAND. 125 mournfully, and I meant to teach you epicureanism you who trample aside the roses of life, and covet only the withered yellow laurels of Age and Power. Adieu! I must leave you to finish your solitary promenades; I am going in to my chocolate!" His eyes dwelt on her, on the rose, where it lay half hidden on her heart, on the hair lit to gold by the sun- shine, on the antelope eyes that glanced at him through their black lashes, on the exquisite and voluptuous grace of her form. Though it had fastened fetters on him which had made him this woman's slave for life, he could not have resisted his impulse to follow her then ; she fasci- nated him by the senses, and it was a fascination to which he chose to yield. What evil could lie in it for him ? He was strong in his own strength, secure in his own coldness ; he believed he could handle fire without feeling its flame ; he believed he could let the whirlwind sweep over him, without being stirred by its breath ; he believed he could meet the sirocco, and neither be blinded, nor staggered, nor scorched by it. Actually he would have called the man a lunatic who did these things : meta- phorically, and quite as dangerously, he did them all. A scornful self-confidence made at once the grandeur and the weakness of Strathmore's nature. As Lady Vavasour turned from the parapet and swept over the gray pavement of the rose-terrace to re-enter the chateau, the snowy folds of her dress gathering up the fallen crimson leaves, and her head slightly turned over her shoulder in adieu to him; he followed her, bending to her with a few low words : " Who would not learn epicureanism or any other creed from such a teacher ? You have given that senseless rose so fair a lodging; do not banish me utterly! I am going to my chocolate, too ; must I take it in solitude ? For the remembrance of our tete-a-tete meal under the limes, let us breakfast tete-a-tete this morning !'' The daughter of Eve had tempted him in the garden of roses, and while yet he might have turned away, he choso to follow and to linger with his temptress. 11 l26 STRATHMORE; OR, CHAPTER XI. IN ROYAL BROCELIANDE. IN the breakfast-room every dejeuner delicacy was wait- ing, ready for such of the English guests at Vernon9eaux as it might please to come down stairs early. None had so pleased that morning save themselves, and this break- fast was tete-a-tete. He was alone with her, and in that solitude she ceased to be Lady Yavnsour, whom he pre- judged and mistrusted ; she was the songstress, the in- cognita, the witching waif and stray of the Bohemian lindens. Almost too dazzling at night, with its exquisite tint, and its singular contrast of eyes and of hair, her love- liness losing none of its brilliance, gained much in softness with the morning light. Moreover, you saw then how real was this youth, how wholly from nature this marvellous coloring; for, stream down on her as the sun would, its strongest rays could never show a flaw or a blemish. Used to the women of Courts, no woman would have had charm for Strathmore who had not had wit on her lips and a finished grace in her coquetries, and that namelcs air which the world alone gives ; the fairest bourgeoise beauty he would have passed unnoticed, and rustic loveliness was no loveliness in his sight. Condemned to love, he would have made his condition like Louis Quatorze, " qu'on m?aime mais avec de V esprit!" Therefore, Marion Tava- sour had her subtlest charm for him, in that exquisite grace which empresses had envied her; in that sparkling play which, if it were not wit, sufficed for it from such lips ; in that very worldliness which might have chilled as heart- lessness, men less petri with the world themselves than Strathmore was. What had struck him the night before as startling anu bizarre, what even in his momentary breathless admiration of her had repelled him, and made him think of Clytemnestra and La Borgia, had gone perhaps, with the scarlet camellias ! She was dressed simply, in snowy gossamer folds of muslin, with floating azure ribbons here and there, and the richness of her ye)' WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 127 low hair, gathered back in its natural waves and ripples, looked but one soft mass of dead gold now it was unmixed with any color. There was nothing to mar the spells of her beauty, and those spells she wove to her uttermost witchery as she sat daintily brushing the bloom off a grape, or toying with her strawberries, adding the cream to her chocolate, or touching the tiny wing of some deli- cate bird. With all her caprices, her coquetries, her rapid wayward mutations, she was ever essentially femi- nine ; too skilful not to know that the surest charm which a woman wields over men is the charm of difference the charm of sex ; and that half this charm is flown when Christina of Sweden wears her Hessians and cracks her whip ; when her imitators of to-day, chatter slang with weeds in their mouths, and swing through the stable- yards, talking in loud rauque voices, of dogs with a " good strain !" They were full an hour alone, and in that hour she led him far on a dangerous road; none the less dangerous because he knew her tactics and deemed himself secure to defy them. She was a coquette, therefore he was armed against her; she was a woman of the world, therefore he could trifle with her with impunity ; she was Lady Vava- sour, therefore he knew the worth of every smile, the value of every glance, which were but golden hooks flung out by skill to catch and fasten the unwary : so Strath- more reasoned he who was a man of the world, and would lose his head for no woman! and in his security lay his risk. For he felt that she had already a certain power over him the power for which he hated her when he threw down his losing cards at ecarte the power with which her beauty had swept over him as he had come suddenly upon her in the sunlight of the rose-garden; but to have feared it would have been to confess that he might yield to it, and Strathmore held that he could evoke a storm and then arrest it with " Thus far shalt thou go and no farther;" he held that he could let poison flow into his veins and then eject it with " I do not choose to receive thee !" The disdainful strength of the Strathmores had ever, I say, been their weakness ; and the ruin that had come to them had ever b^en wrought by their own hand : 123 STRATIIMORE; OR, the graven steel of their unyielding race ever the reed that bent beneath them. The tete-a-tete breakfast was as seductive as any meal ever has been since she of the Golden Shuttle entertained the wanderer at Ogygia. Through the shaded windows me rose-scented air stole fragrantly in, while stray rays of sunlight streamed upon the amber grapes touched by her delicate fingers, and on the crimson rose lying hid in its snowy nest. Her moods were as variable as summer clouds, and her mood that morning was soft, subdued, gentle with all its gaiety, triste with all its coquettishness, and I am not sure it was not the most bewitching of all. "What is your White Ladies like they say it is such a superb old place ?" she said, when her mischievous witticisms ceased, as though tired with their own play and sparkle: "Charlie St. Albans who told me your family legend, by the way, one day at Biarritz raves about its beauty. It was an abbey, wasn't it ?" "An old Dominican monastery yes. It has a beauty of its own, the beauty of that past when men sought rest as we now seek reputation, and found in solitude what we find in strife. May I not hope you will some day honor it with a visit, Lady Vavasour, and judge of it yourself?" he answered her, stroking her greyhound ; his prejudice against her was quickly fading since he invited her to White Ladies the daughter of Eve to the ancien Monastery ! She smiled the dazzling smile that had intoxicated wise men to worse than the madness of the opium-eater. " Perhaps. Some day some day. Ah, what may we all do ' some day !' You and I may be foes & outrance some day who knows ?" " Foes ? Nay, surely not. Did you not tell me 1 destiny threw us together, that we must be friends ?' Dieu le veut /" "Dieu veut ce que femme vent, inon ami!" said the belle Marquise, arching her eyebrows : " You know that j and on a man who disdains the love of all my sex I am not at all inclined to waste my own friendship I" " Why ? You had better rather cure me of my heresy in both. W T hat teacher could convert me to her soft do* WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 129 trines with such success ? what rebuke could be at once more merciful and more convincing to me?" A. tristesse almost tenderness shaded the dark gazelle eyes for a moment as they met his, and she was silent. Lady Vavasour knew the charm of silence when the eyes may be trusted to speak. A moment after she laughed coquettishly : " Merciful ? Perhaps not, monsieur, if I did take your conversion in hand." " True. Perhaps the denial of your friendship is more merciful than its donation would be. Nevertheless, at all risks, I will seek it." " You love risks ?" she said, looking at him with a dash of tantalizing malice. Strathmore laughed slightly a laugh that sounded to her like contempt of her power: " Well, I confess I do not fear many." " Nor did Ragnar Ladbrog, mon ami, the northern Scalds tell us ; sheathed in his armor of ice, what could attack him? How scathless he went for so long! And yet he came at last to his Hella, and he languished to death in the cave of the serpents. Take warning!" Strathmore smiled : " I am not quite so Quixotic as the Bersaker, and before I handle serpents 1 take out their stings ! Grasped rightly, no serpent can bite. But surely, belle amie, you do not pay yourself so ill a compliment as to compare the gift of your friendship with the fang of an asp ? Though perhaps you are right it may be as dangerous !" " But a danger you smile at! Well, take it if you will. Shall we be friends, then, Lord Cecil ?" Her eyes were resistless in their witching softness, and a certain tremulous smile that seemed half born of a sigh was on her lip, as she held out in pla3 T fulness, yet in earnest, her white jewelled hand, as she leant slightly towards him What man could have rejected the hand or the friendship? Strathmore bent forward and accepted both : as he took the warm fingers within his own and met the glance that dwelt on him as they sat there alone in the shaded light, his pulse quickened, and his own eyes gleamed with some- thing of the swift, dark brilliance that she had sworn to lighten there the dawn of the passion she had vowed to awaken in the nature that, by character imperious and 130 STRATIIMORE; OR, unyielding, deemed itself by a fatal error to be also cold and calm. He released her hand suddenly, and threw himself back in his chair; the doors opened, and with Beaudesert and Clermont, there entered Lord Yavasour and Yaux. " Bon jour, messieurs," said the Marchioness, including her lord in her negligent, graceful salutation: " I suppose you have all been wasting the hours over cheroots and novelettes that I have been giving to the roses. Ah, if you were all to see the sun rise once in a day, what a deal of good it would do you ! I will have a Trianon, and then perhaps you will learn to be pastoral. M. de Cler- mont, will you milk the cow like the Comte d'Artois ? Yavasour, did I ever tell you that it was to Lord Cecil Strathmore I owed my escape that dreadful night at Prague ? No ? 1 ought to have done ; then you have never thanked him ?" Her husband, thus apostrophized, turned to Strathmore, and addressed his thanks to him, complimenting him with as gracious a courtesy as that pampered, gouty gourmet, whose general manner was guilty of Yaldor's impeach- ment, a "ton de garnison," could assume for any mortal. "Singularly striking looking man quite Yandyke!" thought the Marquis, while he uttered his gratitude for his wife's rescue ; " but I am sure he will do something bad some day come to a violent death, perhaps. That physique very much so!" Which possibly was a com- placent source of gratification to his lordship, as he had just come in on a tete-a-tete. Strathmore received his thanks with that cold negligence which had the effect of making him cordially disliked out of his own immediate set, and lay back in his chair, play- ing with the greyhound, and joining now and then in the conversation. He knew that this woman's beauty stole on him despite himself; when her magic was off him he hated her for the food that she had made him give her vanity ; but a seductive sensuousness allured him in her g'orious loveliness, which, though he rated it lightly, should have made him place distance betwixt him and its subtle temptation betwixt him and the wife of Lord Vavasour. A weak man might have done this, and been strong; Strathmore, a strong man, stayed, conteniptuoufi WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HANI). 131 and defiant of the weakness. A man less cool, less keen, less nonchalant of all danger, might have taken warning; he saw no danger possible in it. One careless, over-con- fident turn of the hand may mar the whole of the statue which the sculptor deems plastic as clay to his will, obe- dient to every stroke of his chisel ! The statue that Strath- more at once moulded and marred was his Life: the statue which we all, as we sketch it, endow with the strength of the Milo, the glory of the Belvedere, the winged bril- liance of the Perseus ! which ever lies at its best ; when the chisel has dropped from our hands, as they grow power- less and paralyzed with death ; like the mutilated Torso, a fragment unfinished and broken, food for the ants and worms, buried in sands that will quickly suck it down from sight or memory, with but touches of glory and of value left here and there, only faintly serving to show what might have been, had we had time, had we had wisdom ! " Well, wasn't I right; isn't she divine, eh ?" said Valdor to him that day, as they were playing billiards. " She who ? My dear fellow, there are half a dozen divinities here who wear the cestus of Venus, or claim it at the least ! Be a little more definite !" " The deuce ! Who should I mean ? Nobody can hold a candle to her. Vavasour's in luck to have a wife that everybody envies him." " Dubious luck !" said Strathmore, sticking his penknife through his cabana: "A wife of the first water, like a diamond of the first water, is rather a perilous possession. It's apt to be disputed by too many owners! You can't ever be sure the wards haven't been picked and the casket been rifled!" " Exactly," said Legard : " Marriage is a disagreeable legal necessity for men with titles and entails, and the best color for a wife's a discreet plainness ! No Bramah can protect you so effectually as an ugly physique ; besides, I shouldn't think it's bad for yourself upon principle ; if Lucretia's unlovely you must relish Lais and her graces all the more. One never enjo} r s a good omelette at Vefour's so much as after an ill-done one in the Grisons." "There's something in that," said Valdor, reflectively: w But then twelve hours with an ugly woman would kill one ! Why are any of them ugly, 1 wonder? They were 132 STRATHMORE; OR, created on purpose for us. What's the good of giving us five out of six, as we don't like them? If they were all such as the Vavasour, now " and Valdor paused, in mute contemplation of the delicious universal seraglio that might then be commanded. " The Vavasour's something that comes once in a cen- tury. The deuce ! how that woman does flirt !" interrupted Dormer, in the tone, half disgusted half admiring, with which a man might say of some magnificent drunkard, like Piron, " How that fellow does drink !" Strathmore sent his ball to make a ricochet with a cer- tain impetus, as if the conversation annoyed him, and did not join in it. "If fifty naughty stories ain't rife about her before next season, I'll bet you a thousand to one," went on Dormer, offering his wager generally, but nobody, it seemed, having sufficient confidence in her ladyship to be chivalrous enough to take it up ! " They do say it's only flirtation as yet; and I believe she's as heartless as icj; but she does horrible mischief, if she's never absolutely ' compro- mised,' and I think that's open to doubt! At Biarritz, last year she played the very deuce with Marc Lennartson ; you remember him don't you, Strathmore Austrian Cuirassiers, you know ? She drew him on and on, made him follow her about like her greyhound, fooled him before everybody, and then turned him off coolly for the Prince de Vorhn, and laughed at him with a blow of her fan. Lennartson had lost his head about her, and he shot him- self through the brain! I knew that for a fact; nothing but that woman at the bottom of it ; and the very night she heard of his death she went to a fancy ball, fluttering about in her diamonds. By Jove ! it was too bad, wasn't it ?" Strathmore made a haphazard carom, with his coldest sneer upon his face; the story angered him: " My dear Dormer! if a man's such a fool as to ' follow a woman about like a lapdog,' whether he goes out of the world or stays in it, doesn't matter very much, I think. Yours is a romantic story ; it would charm the women, but, pour mot ! I must fancy there were some heavy debts hanging over Lennartson's head, or some more rational reason for your sentimental finale. I don't credit those things quite so easily " WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 133 "It was true, whether you like to believe it or not." Strathmore lifted his eyebrows and dropped the subject; he would have said it did not interest him ! "What a voice of lamentation there was in Ilamah when Yavasour married her," said Beaudesert, who was betting on the game : " The women had made such hard running on him all over Europe; when the regular troops had always missed fire, it was a horrid blow to have an outside skirmisher knock him over ! " " Of course ! Virtuous women love to take in hand the conversion of a sinner when the penitent can give them a coronet; they are very happy to be taken, like soda-water after a debauch, if the debauchee excuses his past orgies with a page in Burke. There wasn't a precieuse in England that wouldn't have sold her pure soul to the devil and the Marquis for his settlements. The morals of monde and demi-monde don't differ very much, after all ; only the inferior goods are content with Rue de la Paix jewellery, and Lady Vavasour et C' e don't let them- selves go under anything less than the family diamonds!" said Strathmore, with his coldest sneer. It gratified him to fling the sarcasm at that marriage of convenience, where Helen of the antelope eyes had bartered herself for the gold and the titles of gourmand Menelaus ; perhaps the flash and sparkle of the diamond circlet he had seen among the roses, added, by its memory, point to his irony. " Quite right ! " laughed Beaudesert. "And when we have to pay a so much heavier price to monde, and get so much better amused by demi-monde, how the deuce can they wonder we prefer ease to imprisonment, and laissez- faire to il faut faire ?" " Perhaps they don't wonder, my good fellow, and in that lies the essence of their pique and the root of their philippics. If the debatable land's so agreeable, they know very well the time may come when the legitimate king- doms will be left altogether," laughed Strathmore, as he went back to his game, and, Lady Vavasour not being there to spoil it, won it, as he piqued himself on winning r:ost things that he tried for in life, from billiards upwards. As he finished it, a servant entered to tell him that the horses were coming round ; he had promised to make one J34 STRATIIMORE; OR, of a riding party at four o'clock, and left the billiard-room will) Dormer to obey the summons. " The pretty panther, how handsome she looks ! She has merciless griffes, though, and her graceful play's death to those who play with her," said Dormer, under his moustaches, memories of Biarritz rising savagely within him as they passed out of the long gallery leading from the billiard-room into the great hall. The "pretty panther," as he called her, was just at that moment standing on the grand staircase with some men about her, holding her jewelled whip in one hand, and the viole folds of her habit in the other, the light from the long range of stained windows falling on her, and on the tapestried arras, the damascened armor, and the dark oak carvings of the wall behind her. Strathmore glanced at her, and gave Dormer his coldest laugh : " Fearfully poetic you are to-day, Will ! Have you been scratched yourself?" " No ; but you're about to be." "7? You don't know me much, my good fellow." " But I know r HER, and I bet you five to one that she is trying to play the deuce with you. Strathmore." " Let her try ! I have "one bet pending already on that event, but I'm quite willing to take yours too." " Glad to hear it ; but forewarned's forearmed, you know." " Thank you," said Strathmore, with that negligent cold- ness which was as chilly as ice : " but when I need counsel I ask for it, my dear Dormer. It is a dish I am not very fond of having offered me." His eyes had lightened to the swift, dark anger of his race; and Dormer, a good-natured, easy, indolent fellow, accustomed to be put down by him, and to be silenced by his sneer, held his peace with an obedience, the relic of their old Eton days ; while Strathmore joined the group on the staircase, and, by a nonchalant finesse, displaced the others, who had a prior claim as before him in the field, and leading her out into the court, assisted Lady Yavasour to mount the spirited Spanish mare that he had admired as it had reared with her, when he had seen the riding party from the distance the previous day. Assist- ance, indeed, she needed little; an inimitable rider, she WROUGHT BY IITS OWN EAND. 135 sprang, lightly as a bird to a bough, to her saddle 'mt to have the foot, beautiful as Pompadour's, placed on hia hand, the light weight leant upon him for an instant, the perfumed hair brush near him, the hand touch his as he put the reins within it, the lips softly thank him these made a service bitterly envied to Strathmore. As she dashed out of the great gates of the court, the mare rear- ing and plunging with the fire of its Spanish blood, Lady Vavasour had never looked, perhaps, lovelier, with her delicate cheeks flushed from the exertion of her strength, her light, defiant laugh ringing out, her eyes flashing with impatient will. Yet for one moment as he saw her teeth clench tightly, her eyes gather a sinister light, her whip cut the mare with sharp, stinging strokes, it crossed Strath- niore's mind that the real instinct, the true pleasure of this soft, da/zling woman might be, after all, Cruelty the cruelty of the young cat that loves to see the wounded bird flutter and shriek and struggle for its liberty, with the blood dabbling the broken wing, and to let it go for one fleet, mocking moment, and then to seize on it afresh, till the death-cry rings sharp and clear upon the air, and its own white teeth tear asunder the quivering flesh. The fancy crossed him, and the aversion, amounting to almost the strength of hatred, which, mingled with the fascination that Marion Vavasour had for him, flamed up in all its bitterness. " She danced in her diamonds the night that poor devil shot himself!" he thought; "I dare say. What fools men are to let a woman play with them." But twenty minutes after, Lady Vavasour turned her head towards him with her brightest smile : " Lord Cecil, you are our cicerone ; which way leads to the Breche du Gaston ?" And as he spurred his horse to overtake her, and cantered on by her side, the wiser thought was forgot, the danger that was in this woman served but to give piquance to her beauty, as the thorns of the rose which pique those who delight to gather it ; and as though she had divined the verdict that his reason was giving against her, she chained him to her side during the ride, and had iill that softness of manner which, when she chose to assume it, would have made the testimony of men and angels weigh nothing against Marion, Lady Vavasour 1 " So if I come to England this 3'ear, as Ladv P.eau- !36 STIIATIIMORE; OR, desert tries to persuade me, you will be prepared to do me the honors of White Ladies ?" she said, laughing, to him an hour afterwards, as, having outstripped the rest of the party, they rode through a wagon-way that ran under the shelter of the hills, with the wild vine cluster- ing in rich luxuriance from bough to bough, and the glow- ing light slanting in, to turn the moss into gold, and burnish the ripening grapes into bloom. " But too gladly ! Since the Reine Blanche was received there the Abbey will never have sheltered so fair a guest. But Mary Stuart came to us as a captive ; you will come as a captor omnipotent ! Your sceptre rests on a sway that men cannot break, and your kingdom lies in a power more potent than mailed might " "Ah !" she said, softly and mournfully, "but don't you know the Reine Blanche had my sceptre and my kingdom too, and yet her hair whitened and her head was bent to the block! She was a captive at White Ladies? and I dare say my lord of Strath more was a courtly but a pitiless gaoler, had many a courtier-phrase upon his tongue, but never relented to mercy ! What a triste souvenir! I shall be afraid to come there; perhaps you will imprison me !" Strathmore bent down in his saddle and looked into her eyes, while his own grew dark and brilliant, and the cold- ness of his face softened. Was it the warmth flung on it from above by the amber sunlight that was streaming through the vine-leaves and the purpling grapes ? "That I .shall be tempted, I would not denyl Who could, who spoke truth ?'' The reins drooped on their horses' necks, they paced slowly over the yielding mosses, their speed slackening, their voices softening, under the leafy boughs and the tangled tendrils of the drooping vines ; the warm sun fell between the stems of the trees, the leaves were stirless in the sultry air, the birds sang with subdued music in the woodland shadow and they rode onwards, as in the days of the past Launcelot and Guinevere rode through the silent aisles and forest shades of Royal Broceliande. WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 137 CHAPTER XII. THE WEAVING OF THE GOLDEN SHUTTLE. BERTIE ERROLL sat at the head of the dinner-table at White Ladies with other spirits like himself, keeping the house open, as he had been bidden to do by his absent host in the first week of September. Dinner was just over, and the Sabreur lay back in his chair, lazily peeling a nectarine, recommending the Marcobrun to Langley t/f the Twelfth, vowing it was deucedly warm, and lamenting pathetically that Strathmore would prefer the click of the roulette-ball to the glories of the open, the pleasures of Pair et passe to those of the stubble, and forsake White Ladies thus perpetually for the Continent. Some half-dozen men were down with him for the shooting; Strathmore had always bade him look on White Ladies as though it were his own home, to open to whom he would ; and they were' chatting over their grapes, peaches, and comet wines this warm, mellow September evening, while the last rays of the setting sun fell across Erroll's fair frank face as they slanted through the painted windows of the diuing-hall, where the scutcheon of the Strathmores was blazoned, with their merciless motto, " Slay ! and spare not !" radiant in gold and gules. " We don't want women in September," Rockingham of the Guards was observing, with more truth, perhaps, than politeness: " They're delightful in their season, but when we're shooting we're better without 'em ! Paullet took Valerie Brown and that lot down to Market Har- borough last season, and we were positively ruined by 'em ! Champagne suppers at two in the morning, and all the rest of it, put us shockingly out of condition ; we were hardly in at a death, any one of us, all thanks to those confounded women " "Phyrne v. the Pytchley! St. John's Wood morals spoiling Northamptonshire runs ! You should write a 'Tract for the Times' on it; a 'Warning to the Pink not to trifle with the Rouge.' r laughed the Sabreur, pouring 12* 13S STRATHMORE; OR, himself out some Rhenish : "Well, thank God, I'd suffer deterioration any day from that quarter. A bright-eyed brune is better than a brush any day, and two good things can't spoil one another. I say, Phil, did you see in the papers that Jack Temple's run away with Ferrars's wife ?" " Never read the papers, my good fellow," said Danvers : " Froth in the leaders, gall in the debates, acid in the on dits, and flummery in the Court news, make an oUapodrida that don't suit my digestion. Poor Jack! what could he be thinking of? She weighs nine stone, and is shockingly sallow in the daylight " Danvers stopped, the dogs gave tongue, the man hnnd- ing the coffee round paused in his duty, Waverley looked up from his olives, Rockingham dropped half a dozen almond soufflees on to a terrier's nose, Erroll sprang from his chair: "My dear fellow! By Jove! how glorious!" And, as the groom of the chambers flung the door wide open, Strathmore entered his own dining-hall, unannounced and unexpected. " Keep your seat, old fellow ! You or I, what does it matter which?" he laughed, as he shook the Sabreur's hand, and forced him back into the chair at the head of the table, looking on his old Eton chum with a warmer glance than women had ever won from him, as the other men gathered round to greet him: "How are you all? Who's shockingly sallow by the daylight, Phil ? Nobody you've brought down here, I hope, is it ? Sit where you are, Bertie. I'm your guest to-night, s r il vous plait!" With which Strathmore, refusing to take the head of his table, and looking with eyes of love upon Erroll, sank into an empty chair, told the servants to bring him some soup, and sat down at White Ladies as though he had never left it. He had arrived only some half-hour before, but had gone straight up to his own room, forbidding the groom of the chambers to disturb the dinner-party by announcing his arrival. " My dear old fellow, this is prime ! How are you, Cis ?" said Erroll, lying back to look at Strathmore with an un- utterable satisfaction, fully content to give up his pro tempore ownership of White Ladies to see his friend bact again. WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 139 "All right, old boy. You're astonished to see me to- night, Bertie?" "By Jove I am ! I thought you were at Baden?" "I was at Baden. I only left on Tuesday, and shouldn't have left then but I had asked some people here, and given them carte blanche to fix their own time, and they fixed it at such a short notice, that I had only just days enough to come over to receive them. It wasn't worth while to write, as I should have come with the mail-bag." "Are there any women coming?" asked Buckingham, with prophetic pitie de soi-meme. "Some. Why?" "Nothing, only I hate the sex in September," muttered the unlucky victim to Valerie Brown and " that lot " in the shires : " So your Jack of Trumps colt didn't win the Prix du Foret Noir?" " No ; only came a good third. I rode Starlight myself for the Rastatt; we did the distance very nicely." " By Jove you did, and gave Ninette a dress of your colors, I saw in the Post. How's the pretty bouquetiere T' " Handsome as ever. She asked for you, Erroll; I don't think there's one of the Jockey Club who cuts you out with her. She looked very charming in the scarlet and white. A poor devil of an Englishman shot himself on Monday night, after losing his last Nap, but all Baden was too occupied with Princcsse Marie Yolgarouski's desperate engouement of a young Tuscan composer to pay much at- tention. It's quite Pauline Bonaparte and Blangini over again. She's a striking looking woman, but I don't care for those Petersburgh beauties,they're too olive." "Ah, by George, Strath ! you put me in mind," inter- rupted Erroll, with all the eagerness of a retriever scenting a wild duck: "you said vou saw Lady Vavasour in Paris?" "So I did." " Well ! What's she like ? Have you seen her again?" " Oh yes. She's been staying at Vernon9eaux." " The deuce she has ! and you never said so ? What do yon think of her how do you like her what style- ?" * My dear fellow, don't ask me to describe a woman!" interrupted Strathmore, indifferently: " They are like kaleidoscopes, and have a thousand phases, all pretty for HO STRATHMORE; OR, the time, but never to be caught, and always changed when a new eye's on them." " Hang you!" swore Erroll: "You wrote just enough to intriguer one about her, and now shove one off with an epigram ! Come, is she the atrocious coquette they all say?" "All women are coquettes, except plain ones, who make a virtue of a renunciation that's de rigueur, and hate their virtue (like most other people) while they brag of it!" " Confound you ! I don't ask about all women, only *about one. You set out with a dreadful prejudice against her; you'd seen her at one masked ball, and wrote me word on the strength of it that you thought it particularly lucky that the Marquis was of clastic principles, and that you didn't envy him his Avife, because her mouth, though perfection, would whisper too many infidelities to please you !" A dark shadow of impatient, intolerant annoyance passed over Strathmore's face, and glanced into his eyes for an instant as the sun fell on it, slanting through the "Slay! and spare not!" of the motto blazoned on the painted panes ; but there was no trace left of anger as he looked up and laughed slightly: " I dare say it is particularly lucky the Marquis has elastic conjugal principles; it's lucky for any husband that has a handsome wife, and yet likes to live in peace with his brethren. Lady Vavasour is a very exquisite beauty, there's no disputing that ; 7/ow'll rave of her, Bertie ; at the same time, I never heard beauty reckoned as the best guarantee for marital fidelity !" " The devil not exactly !" said Scrope "Waverley. "The Tavasour's the most abominable coquette shocking, on my honour, isn't she, Strathmore? Be warm as the tropics on you one minute, and cold as the poles the next." Strathmore looked at him with his chilliest contempt: " Perhaps you have suffered ! Acrimony generally be- speaks adversity. Not having been the subject of her ladyship's caprices, I cannot compare notes with you, Scrope, nor yet back your experience, though in your case I don't doubt any part of them, except that } r ou ever basked much in the tropics !" Waverley looked sulky as he picked over his olives, not quite certain how to take the shot that had told in a very WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 141 eore spot ; while Erroll, ever good natured, and who could no more take pleasure in making a man smart than a dog wince, turned the subject, and postponing his own curi- osity, asked Strathmore who the people were that were coming? "Who? Oh, some of the Yernon9eaux set," answered Strathmore, taking a Manilla out of the little silver wagon: " The De Ruelles, the Beaudeserts, Madame de Cevillae, your old friend Lady Camelot, and Lady Vavasour." He paused a moment before he added her name, but then spoke it indifferently enough. "The Vavasour!" echoed Erroll and all the other men with him: "By Jove! Strath, you don't mean it!" " Why should I not mean it ?" " The Vavasour ? By Heaven !" ejaculated the Sabreur, stroking his moustache in beatified astonishment: "I thought you didn't like her, Cis ?" " I don't think I ever said so ? De plus, she invited herself, and reigning beauties are like reigning fashions one must obey them." " Does the Marquis come too ?" " God forbid ! At least, he comes for a day or two, but only en route to the Sprudel to cure his dispepsia. Like the Roman, he goes to a bath that he may come back for a banquet." " And leaves his wife a droit de chasse in his absence ?" laughed Erroll. " But the idea of keeping that to yourself all this time, letting us talk of her and never telling us ! What an odd fellow you are ! You called her a sorceress, and said she tried her wiles on you at the Luilhiers's ball. Has she bewitched even you, old fellow ?" " Not exactly !" said Strathmore his tone was more contemptuously cold than he had ever used to Erroll " but I like beauty as I like a good Titian, a good claret, a good opera, a good racer. Who doesn't ? To hear you, Bertie, one would certainly think no woman had ever been entertained at White Ladies since Mary Stuart ! If Lady Vavasour wished to come here with Beatrix Beaudesert, could I say I wouldn't have her? Besides, I had no wish to say so; she is very charming. By-the-by, Phil, who was that you were talking about when I came in, who'a 142 STRATIIMORE ; uR, tsallow in the daylight most blondes are that, though, after twenty ?" He spoke so carelessly, as he lay back in his chair, that not a man present, guessed that the name of Marion Vava- sour was anything more to him than the names of fifty fair women, who had been, season after season, recipients of the stately hospitalities of White Ladies : except, indeed, Erroll, who looked at him with a puzzled look clouding his clear azure eyes, and drank his coffee in silence. lie, the sworn Squire of Dames, who worshipped everything feminine that crossed his path, felt a vague dislike rise up in him against this witching beauty, whom Strathmore denied had had charm for him, and yet who was bidden beneath the roof of White Ladies. That night, when they had left the smoking-room, Strathmore, sitting alone in his own room, thoughtful yet listless, with a restless indifference which had grown on him of late, and which he had vainly doctored with very heavy betting at Baden, and dangerous coups de hasard at roulette, threw open his despatch-box and took out a little note a note which was not very many lines, which placed his title before his name, and which was chiefly gay, mischievous badinage and pretty command, with but here and there touches of something deeper, and these only deepened to friendship. Yet this letter had sufficed to bring him from Baden at its bidding; it had been looked at many times, where no other note addressed to him had ever served for any other purpose than to light his cigar, and it had a fascination for him which no words written by a woman's hand had ever claimed, for it was signed " Marion Vavasour and Vaux." Letters have a strange glamour! with this, the sweet mocking voice echoed in his ear, the smile of the dark antelope eyes laughed into his, the fragrance of the amber hair floated past him, and he flung the note back into its resting-plaee with a fiercf oath he hated the senseless paper! For he hated the hot, insidious passion that was creeping into his blood, and that, in night and solitude, wreathed round him as the serpent folds round the Laocoon, sapping his strength, and only twisting closer and closer with each effort to thrust it aside ; the passion that would make him the slave of a woman, the vassal of a smile, the bond-servant of a kiss! WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 143 In the simplest trifles Strathmore was remarkable for ..n unswerving tenacity to truth, too proud a man not to hold his word his bond even in ordinary colloquial inter- course ; yet that night, when denying to Erroll that she had any sway over him, he had for the oniy time in his life lied. It was the first trivial unnoticed step of the downward course that he was even now commencing, as the first unperceivcd loosening of the snow is the signal for the downward sweep of the avalanche. Marion Vavasour had a power over him such as no woman had ever gained before her ; the strange force, with which absolute hatred mingled with the charm her beauty had over his senses, served only to heighten and give it a sting which excited and enthralled a man, whom a tamer or wiser love would nover have governed. Strath- more had stayed on at Vernon9eaux, voluntarily remaining in the danger, which a weaker man would, or might at least, have fled from while there was yet time ; finding in this new beguilement, this woman's intoxicating loveliness, a spell, subtle and resistless, the same dazzling, sensuous delight as lies in a soft Bacchante of Coustou's golden chisel, or a voluptuous reveuse warm with the rich varied colors of the canvas of Greuze. Constantly in her society, meeting her alone in the freshness of the early morning, strolling with her at evening under the trellised roofing of the vines, bowing to the sway of her coquetries in the salon where she held her gay omnipotent reign, Strath- more did not dispute the " destiny " which she had said had decreed them to be friends. For him, too, she had her most certain and most dangerous charm : capricious, mutable, scattering her coquetries d pleines mains, as the Hours of Corregio scatter their roses ; she had a softness, a sadness, a tenderness, / call it she termed it a " friend- ship". for and with Strathmore which seemed to bespeak that something warmer than vanity, something deeper than mere pride of conquest, might be awakening in her. Amidst the largesse of adoration that she levied from all who came within sight of her brilliant banner, which flut- tered with its audacious motto, "Je regne partout," from north to south, from east to west; she made a distinction towards the man who had saved her life at the Vigil of St. John, which gave good ground for attributing a prefer- 144 STRATHMORE ; OR, ence that every man, from Monsignore Yillaflor down- wards, bitterly envied him as they began to yield place to him as of necessity, and to couple his name with hers in the card-room or smoking-room, when neither he nor the Marquis was present. The latter was the only one at Yernon9eaux who never troubled his head which way his Marchioness's caprices might be turning; it was a matter of profound indifference to him, and he dozed, and read French novels, and played e'carte, and discussed Vart de gout, and let his wife go on her own ways, like a gentle- man of breeding who did as he would be done by. Half hating her, half beguiled by her, one hour accredit- ing to her all the velvet treachery, the wanton cruelty of the panther; the next, subdued by that sensuous charm which he had little wish and less will to resist; one instant, bitterly contemptuous on the witchery that made his pulse beat quicker at the mere fragrance of a woman's hair; another seeking with all the skill the world had taught him, to make the softened glance of her eyes deepen into tenderness so the golden shuttle of a woman's power had woven its woof and wound its web round Strathrnore, and so he had courted, even while he rebelled from, its enchanted toils. And just at the very moment when the surest meshes of its twisted threads were entangling round him, when he was first beginning to feel it a necessity to be in her presence just then, Lady Vavasour left Yernon- eaux. Without announcement, without preparation, she went; carefully avoiding any tetc-d-tete farewell, bidding him " au revoir " with laughing negligence in a crowded salon, with an indifference which Strathmore was not slow to simulate in imitation. Yet that adieu, by its very avoidance of him, by its very abandonment of that tendresse which she used as her habitual weapon of war, told him, by his experience of women, might equally mean one of two things: that she felt nothing, or felt too much! Which? The question was left open, and pursued him ceaselessly; nothing in his life had ever haunted him so persistently as that single doubt. I believe that weeks, months spent in her presence, would not have rooted her in his memory so firmly as that well-timed absence, that insoluble uncertainty. Away from her, it was in vain that he contemned, as he did with bitter irony, with piti- WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 145 less rancour, her coquetries and her caprices ; or merci- lessly dissected her faults, her foibles, and her fascinations her power had begun 1 Insecurity is to passion as the wind to the flame without the cold breeze wafted to it, the embers would have faded fast, and never flared up into life; with the rush of the cooler air the fire leaps into flame, and its lust is not sated till it has destroyed all before it. The Strathmores of White Ladies had never loved the women who had slept innocently on their hearts, and laid their pure lives within their keeping; the only passion that had ever roused them had been some fierce forbidden desire, and the guilty leaven of the dead race was alive in the man who bore their name and their features. From Vernon9eaux Strathmore went to Baden, and if any feeling was strong in him towards the woman whose beauty, when the scarlet flowers bound her amber hair, had made him think of Fredt'gonde, of Sifrid, of Lucrezia, of every living Circe who had drawn men downward by the witch- ing gleam of her white arms till they lost all likeness of themselves, and sank into an abyss whence they could never more rise again into the pure light left for ever at her bidding ; he would have said, and perhaps said rightly, that it was hatred. If pity be akin to love, believe me passion is as often allied to hate ! It would slay what it vainly covets; if it cannot kiss the lips it woos, it would blur them out of all beauty by a blow ; what it seeks so fiercely, it loathes for the pain of its own unslaked desire ; and what it is forbidden to enjoy, it would thrust away out of its own, and other eyes, into the darkness of an absolute, or of a living death ; with the hatred of Amnon, to the tomb of Heloise ! Such was the passion now wakening in Stratbmore ; which, whilst it made him hate the woman who fascinated and blinded him, because he knew that the softness of such hours as that upon the rose-terrace was but a more fatal phase of her brilliant and studied coquetries, were but the shadows which, with a cunning art she threw in, to heighten a dazzling picture, had still made him leavo Baden the instant that the note he now flung aside had reached him the note which accepted his invitation afresh, 13 146 STRATHMORE; OR, and selected White Ladies from amidst a hundred jther places that were open to the honor of her ladyship's bright and sovereign presence. In his own room that night he read over the delicate, fragrant letter that had made him leave Baden (and would have made him leave Paradise !), and with an oath threw it away from him, as though it were tainted with poison. He hated the mad fool's delight that lay in it for him because her hand had touched it, yet he longed with ungovernable desire to feel that hand lie once more within his own ; and Strathmore, who held that he could mould his life like plastic clay into any shape that pleased him, did not seek to inquire whether the clay would break or harden in the fire which was beginning to seethe and coil around it ! As he flung the letter away and rose, he pulled back the curtains of the window nearest him, and threw one of its casements open. He felt impatient for the air, impatient with himself, intolerant with all the world ! The night was very hot, and he stood looking out for awhile into the moonlight. The scene was lovely enough, and the old monastic lands, as far as he could see, were his own ; but Strathmore, absorbed in his own thoughts, looked little at the landscape ; it was a mere hazard that the figure of a man crossing the turf caught his eye. "A poacher as near the house as that? impossible! That Knightswood gang are the very deuce for audacity, but even they'd never " he thought, as he leaned out to get a good look at the intruder ; in the clear white light the form, though distant, was distinct enough, and the red end of a cigar, as it moved through the gloom, sparkled like a glow-worm. Strathmore looked hard at the mysterious shadow till it had gone out of the moonlight into the deep shade of a cluster of elms. " By Jove ! Erroll, as I live I Another "of my tenant's daughters come to grief, I suppose 1 What a fellow he is ; if he's away from Phya of the Bijou Villa, he takes up with Phyllis of the Home-farm ! I wonder how cider tastes, faulting champagne? rather flat and terribly homely, I should fancy; better than nothing, though, J WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 147 for the Sabreur. Well, it's a very nice night for an erotic adventure. Byron's quite right 'The devil's in the moon for mischief; there is not a day, The longest, not the twenty-first of June, Sees half the business in a wicked way On which three single hours of moonshine smile And then she looks so modest all the while !' He might have said, too, that in that respect the women who make the mischief are like the moon that looks on it! Chaste Diana of the skies, or of the sex, only veils that she may lend herself to something naughty!" With which reflection Strathinore shut the window down and rang for his Albanian, giving no more thought to Erroll's moonlight errand. Long afterwards, when it formed a link in that chain which his own passions forged about his life, the remembrance of this September night came back to him. CHAPTER XIII. FEATHERY SEEDS THAT WERE FREIGHTED WITH FRUIT OF THE FUTURE. " IT was fine moonlight, last night, my dear fellow, and Hampshire 'moonrakers' do go fishing after contraband goods, au clair de la lune, but I didn't know you belonged to the fraternity, Bertie," said Strathmore, the next evening, as they walked home brushing through the ferns, after a good day out in the open. Erroll turned with a certain dismay ; the Sabreur, though in the teeth of a convicted wickedness he would stroke his moustache with the blandest plait-ill look of innocence, n/as thrown a little off his guard, and confidence was such a Habit with him with Strathmore, that it was difficult to get out of it. '' The duuce, Strath, you're as bad as a detective !" he murmured, plaintively : " Where did you see me ?" 148 STRATIIMORE ; OR, " Where yon were very easily to be seen, my dear fellow, as I told you once before. If you walk about in the open air as large as life, with a cigar in your mouth, I can't understand how you can very judiciously expect to go unseen, myself! What have you got about you, Erroll, to confer invisibility ? You seem to expect it as your prerogative !" " Bosh "! interrupted Bertie, striking a fusee. " But, by the way, my dear Cis, how came you to be looking at the moonlight last night? That isn't your line at all." "Thank God, no! Who will may have the moon rays for me: we can spend the night much more pleasantly than by looking at it! Who is she, mon chcr? Such nocturnal depredations are poaching on my manor-rights; however, I don't grudge them to you. Katie or Jeanneton may make a very pretty picture with a broken pitcher or a gleaner's bundle for Mulready or Meissonnier, but in real life no, thank you! No Psyche can lie on a hard pallet under a thatched roof. Bah ! I thought better of you, Sabreur !" En-oil laughed and didn't defend himself, but he looked a trifle thoughtful and worried for so insignificant an affair as a provincial amourette, which to that universal conqueror was usually something what knocking over a swallow with a stone might be to a splendid shot after the best bouquets of prhne battues. " Don't say anything about it, there's a good old fellow !" he said, carelessly, after a moment's pause a pause appa- rently of some hesitation and indecision on the subject on which he seemed tempted to speak fully. " Did I say anything about the other, last summer? Tf I were a man now who liked cabbage-roses, I should take my droits de seigneur, and turn you out from your mo- nopoly. But on my life, Bertie, I don't understand your village liaisons," went on Strathmore, thinking no more about the matter than that the Sabreur's equal worship of Eros, whether the little god of mischief lived under a lean- to roof or a ceiling painted after Fragonard, was not his own line of action, and seemed an unintelligible elasticity of taste: '"A Gardener's Daughter' and 'Jacqueline la Boquetiere' look very well in poetry and painting; so do rags and tatters ; but, in real life, I c.in no more fancy WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 14& making love to them, than taking to a beggar's clothes by choice. Love's born of the senses ; then why the deuce take Love where half his senses must be shocked ?" "Uamour est niveleur /" laughed Erroll, a little more absent still than usual: "He's the only real republican, the only sincere socialist going, my dear Cis ; he won't complain where you take him so long as he has a soft nest in a white breast, and can talk in his own tongue ! What do you know about him ? You only ' make love' languidly to some grande dame, who blinds him with sandal-wood and stifles him in lace ; or some Champs Elysees Aspasia, who drenches his wings with vin mosseux, smothers him n cac/iemires, kills him with mots, and sells him for rou- leaux ! Your god isn't the god !" "My dear fellow, will you tell me in what religion my god is ever the god according to my neighbor's orthodoxy?" said Strathmore. " I say, Bertie, didn't you lose a good deal at the Spring Meetings ? I told you that miserable bay was worth nothing." Erroll laughed gaily: " I did drop a good deal, but I cleared a few hundreds after at Goodwood, that put things a little square. Things always right themselves: worry's like a woman, who, if she sees she's no effect, leaves off plaguing you. Bills, like tears, are rained down on you if they disturb you an inch, but, if you're immovable to both, you see no more of either !" " Comfortable creed ! I never knew, though, that the unpaid and the unloved were quite so soon daunted ! But, Bertie, you promised me that that if " " My dear old fellow, I know I did !" broke in the Sabreur: " If I were in any mess for money, I would tell you frankly, and take from you as cheerfully as you'd lend " "Parole d'honneur?" " Parole d'honneur ! Won't that satisfy you?" "No! I want to free you from those beggarly Jews. You might let me have my own whim here. Name any Interest to me you like a hundred per cent., if that will please you but only " " Sign a bond that you'd tear in two and scatter to the winds, or thrust in the fire as soon as it was written 1 You served me that trick once," muttered Erroll ; but his 13* 150 STRATHMORE; OR, eye grew soft with a grateful and cordial light as he looked at Strathmore : Old fellow, you know how I thank you ; but I can't let you have your whim here, though you're as true as steel, Strath, God bless you ! I say, what does Paris think of Graziella ? She's not worth half they rave of her in the Guards' Box, and her ankles are so atrociously thick I" "The deuce they are! She owes everything to her face ; her pas de seul would never be borne in public, only she's so extremely handsome for a pas de deux in private ! Carlotta has ten times more grace; but Carlotta got a claque against her from the first ; she began by being virtuous, and though she's seen the error of her ways, the imprudence will never be forgiven her. Virtue is as detri- mental in the Coulisses as Honesty on 'Change ! The professors of either soon get hissed down for such an eccentric innovation, and tire of its losing game before the sibilation !" With which truism upon Life and Virtue, Strathmore walked on through the ferns, talking with Erroll of the topics of the hour, from the carte of the coming policies of Europe, to the best site for a new tan-gallop. That even- ing, as they strolled homewards in the mellow sunset, smoking and chatting, while Our Lady's bells chimed slowly and softly over woodland and cornland, over river and valley, in the Curfew chant, was the last hour in which they enjoyed, untainted, the free, frank, bon coma- rade communion of a friendship that was closer than brotherhood an.d stronger than the tie of blood. It was the last before a woman laid the axe to its root. And even now their conversation lagged, and their voices dropped to silence, as the thoughts of both were occupied by her whom neither named Erroll musing with an impatient curiosity, a prophetic prescience of distrust, on this sorceress-beauty which men attributed to the Marchioness of Vavasour and Vaux, yet which his friend averred had assailed him no more than the lifeless per- fection of some Titian chef-d'oeuvre ; and Strathmore think- ing of the hour, now near, when her hand should touch his, when the light of her eyes should glance on him again, when his own roof should shelter the loveliness which was fast shattering to the dust the proud panoply of his WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 151 chill philosophies, and whose seductive sweetness had stolen into his life unperceived, from the first night that he had looked by the light of the spring stars on the blonde aux yeux noirs in Bohemia. That evening Lady Vavasour drove through Paris ; she had been staying with the Court at Compiegne, and was here but for a day or two in her favorite residence, which was peerless among cities as herself amidst womanhood. She and Paris both brilliant, sparkling, proud, without rival in their path, with their days one brilliant fete de triompke, and their sovereign sceptre, wreathed with flowers, suited and resembled each other the Queen of Cities and the Queen of Fashion ! And if in the Past and Future of the woman, as in the Past and Future of the city, there were cruelties which teemed with the ferocity of the tigress, lustful vanities which rioted with the license of a Messalina, dark hours in which the Dis- crowned tasted of the bitterness of death ; with both the past was shrouded and the future veiled. Paris, fair and stately, lay glittering in the sunset, with its myriad of lights a-lit, its song, its revels, its music ; and Marion, Marchioness of Yavasour and Yaux, drove through the streets, her moqueur smile upon her lips, her silken lashes lazily drooped as she mused over a thousand victorious memories, her delicate form wrapped in costliest silks and laces, the very crowds doing homage to her as she passed through them, and they turned into the streets to glance after the loveliest woman of her day. The carriage with its fretting roans, its mazarine-blue liveries, its outriders a la Heine for she passed through Paris with well nigh as much pomp and circumstance as Montespan or Marie Antoinette halted before the doors of her hotel, and the people, thronging on their way to the Boulevards and the Cafes chantants, turned to gaze at the superb equipage, and more at the loveliness which lay back upon its cushions, negligently indifferent to their gaze. Among the crowd was a woman, a gipsy, at whom a Quartier Latin student, who lived on a pipe and three litre a day, and dreamt of high art when he was not drunk with absinthe, looked, thinking ruefully what a model she would have made had he had a sou to give her ; for as the double lijjht of the sunset and the reverberes fell on 152 STRATIIMORE; OR, oer, ncr vagrant dress was Rembrantcsque, and her olive features had the dark, still, melancholy beauty of an Arab's that mournful and immutable calm which Greek sculptors gave to the face of Destiny and of the god Demetcr, and which on the living countenance ever bespeaks repressed but concentred passions. And this woman, mingling among the passengers that thronged the trottoir, drew nearer and nearer the carriage as it stopped before the Hotel Yavasour. The horses pawed the ground impatiently, the outriders pulled theirs up with noise and fracas, the Chasseur lowered the steps, and Lady Yavasour descended from her carriage, sweeping onwards with her royal, negligent grace, the subtle perfume of her dress wafted out upon the evening air. The Bohemian had dra\vn near; so near, that as she stretched forward this vagrant obstructed the path of the English peeress, and her heavy, Aveather- stained cloak, covered with the dust of the streets, all but touched the scented, gossamer laces and trailing train of the Leader of Fashion 1 " Chassez-la ! " said Marion Yavasour to her Chasseur, as she slightly drew back she for whom sovereigns laid down their state, and before whose word bowed princes of the blood, to have her passage blocked by a beggar woman! The Chasseur, obedient, struck the gipsy a sharp blow with his long white wand, and ordered her out of the way. She fell out of the path, and Lady Yavasour went onward up the steps of her hotel, and passed at once to her own rooms to make, still more elaborately than usual, her dinner toilette; S. A. R. le Prince d'Etoile and his Eminence the Cardinal Miraflora dined with her that night, and ere bringing down royal stags, she loved to know that all her weapons were primed and burnished. As she sank into her couch, and resigned herself into the hands of her maids, she tossed carelessly over the hundred notes that had collected in her absence, and were heaped together on a Louis-Quinze salver, chased by Reveil ; she glanced at this, threw that carelessly aside, till she had dismissed dozens, scarce reading a line ; at last over one she paused, with an amused triumph glancing away the languor from her eyes, and a smile playing on her lips & emile of success ; while as she looked up from the letter WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 153 to the face reflected in the mirror before her, the thought that floated through her mind was a fatal truth : " My cold, proud Strathmore, who dared to disdain the power of woman ! you own it now, then, at last ! " And underneath the windows of her stately hotel the Bohemian still lingered, as though loth to leave the place, while the crowds brushed past her, and the carriage and the outriders swept away. When the blow of the Chas- seur had struck her, and he had ordered her out of his path like a cur, the fixed, immutable melancholy of her face had not changed ; she had spoken no word, made no sign, only her teeth had set tightly, and the light as of a flame had leaped for one moment into her eyes; this had been all. She lingered some moments longer, while the rush of the throngs jostled and moved her unnoticed; then she passed slowly away, walking wearily and pain- fully, with her head bowed, as the daylight faded and the gas in the lamps glared brighter; while, amidst the gay babble and the busy noise of Paris, her lips muttered to herself in the mellow Czeschen patois of her people : " My beloved ! my beloved ! lledempta has not forgot thee ; lledempta will yet avenge thee ! Her hireling struck me, at her bidding, like a dog that was not needed too. Patience 1 the lowliest stone may serve to bring to earth the loftiest bird that soars 1 " CHAPTER XIV. ROSE LEAVES WHICH BORE A POI.w*i CHARM. " SHE is divine but she will play the veff devil with him!" They were uncomplimentary words, and very harsh ones, for that devout adorer of the beau sexe; but as Erroll stood leaning against the doorway of the portrait- gallery at White Ladies, and looking down it to its farthest end, where Lady Vavasour was seated, while Strathmore bent towards her, on the morning after her arrival, a jeal- 154 STRATIIMORE; OR, onsy towards this woman stirred in a heart which never harbored any acrid thought, or unjust envy to any living tLing. Is a man ever leniently disposed towards the woman whom his friend loves? Very rarely. She is his rival, and in lists, moreover, in which he can oppose nothing to her power. She supplants him, she invades his supremacy, fifty to one she is the cause of dispute be- tween them ; and he will see no good in this soft-skinned intruder, this dangerous Nazarene, unless he does what is worse fall in love with her too ! And Erroll twisted his moustaches, and muttered to himself the first unflattering and mistrustful words that he had ever uttered of a lovely woman ; Bertie being gene- rally given to deny at all odds that the Ceinture could ever strangle, or the "Drink to me with thine eyes!" ever be an invitation to a cup of poisoned wine. Yet what he looked at was matchless, .and dazzled his eyes even while he swore against it ! " Hate her 1" the germ of hatred might lie in it, but all of impatience and aversion that had crossed and checked the witchery she had for Strathmore were swept away the moment that he touched her hand and received her be- neath his own roof. She came the beauty of Paris, the Queen of Fashion where before her Mary Stuart had languished a captive, and in ages yet farther the ascetic Dominicans had dwelt, thrusting away from them with the throes of an unnatural struggle the mere thought, the mere memory of her sex. She came to White Ladies with the rest of a gay, dashing, fashionable party from his favorite Paris set ; and the advent of royalty could not have been received there with more splendor than was the Sovereign of the Salons. The State-chambers were given to her, where the White Queen and the Winter Queen had closed their soft Stuart eyes in slumber before her, and where none save Crowned-heads till now had been laid. The witchery of this woman was on him, and to lend eclat and honor to her I believe Strathmore would have dissolved peails in his wines, or scattered diamonds ci pleines mains. He did not realize it; told it, he would not perhaps have believed it even yet; but the web woven Vy the goMen shuttle was drawing its charmed toils tighter and tighter about him, and he was fast becoming the slave of Marion WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. .56 Vavasour: doubt had but bound him closer, absenre had but riveted her chains; and Lady Vavasour laughed softly to herself when on the night of her arrival she drew her hands through her amber tresses, as she leant her head on her arm and looked at her face in the mirror, thinking, "My cold-Strathmore, you are my captive now!" Was it love that she felt for him which set her heart so strongly on this triumph ? It is as easy to follow the way- ward flight of a bird on the wing, or an April wind's wanton vagaries as it blows over field and flower, as to fiift the reasons of a woman's will of a coquette's caprices 1 "That is your best friend, Major Erroll, isn't it?" she asked Strathmore, when they stood together in the deep embrasured window of the picture-gallery, her eyes glancing at the Sabreur where he leaned against the door- way. " My best indeed ! You have been introduced to him ?" " Oh yes, you introduced me last night. I was anxious to see the only person in the whole world to whom you are not indifferent! What charm has he about him ?" "What charm ? dear old fellow ! None, save the gentlest nature and truest honor that I ever found in any man. He has the strength of a lion and the sweetness of a woman ; he is game to the backbone and frank as a boy I" She raised her eyebrows. She was a little impatient of the warmth of his tone and the sincerity of his praise ; a tyrannous, victorious woman is jealous of all influence not her own ; and perhaps she foresaw here a power that might be opposed to hers. Lady Vavasour, with a woman's swift, unerring instinct, guessed that Erroll would be against her, in exact proportion to the sway she exercised over his friend. "You admiring warmth of heart and the candor of boy- hood, Strathmore," she said, maliciously enough : " Why don't you cultivate them, mon ami, if you think them so admirable ?" At her tone, all the strange, sudden hatred of her, which now and then flashed so ominously across the passion that was growing on him for this woman, stirred into life afresh for a moment: he smiled slightly, the smile which made his face sneeringly cold and gave his eyes the look that in a dog or a horse we call dangerous. 156 STRATIIMORE ; OR, " 1 am an Athenian, Lady Yavasour. I may admire what, I fail to practise. Life makes us all egotists and dis- semblers ; but we may honor the nature which is such true steel that it resists and escapes the corroding. Erroll's is the only one I know which has done so." Her impatience at Erroll increased. With the quick wit of her sex she saw at once that Erroll would undermine her power if she did not undermine his, and she changed her tactics accordingly. She looked at the Sabreur, letting her lashes droop over her eyes, and lend them that glance of softened interest which was the most delicate flattery such eyes could bestow : " I can believe it, his face tells one so. How singularly beautiful a face it is too ; a woman might envy him his golden hair and his azure eyes!" And for the first time in his life, as he stood beside her not for the praise of his personal attractions, such petty vanity and envy Strathmore was far above but for the softness of her eyes as they dwelt on him, the softness Avhich with imperious jealousy he loathed to see wake 'for any save himself; and an ill-feeling stirred in him towards the man whom he loved, closer than a brother. And Lady Vavasour glanced at him, and smiled, amused and content: she had sown the larva? of the canker-worm that would eat away friendship. It is a work at which the hands of women ever well love to be busy. She had done enough to please her, and with one of her graceful, antelope-like movements, she turned and looked upward at the portrait above her : "Ah ! a Vandyke and a Strathmore. Really you are wonderfully like one of those old pictures animated into life, Lord Cecil ! My lord is quite right ; he says you are a walking Velasquez. There are the eyes, ' fathomless and darkly-wise ' of the legend ; you have them and the por- trait has them ; and in both they never soften, even to a woman !" As she spoke, her own glanced at him with their most enchanting mischief, and Strathmore, subdued to the charm of her will, bent towards her: " Looking down on you, the very portraits of the dead might soften their glance. How then, shall any living raan have power to resist? Have you not heard that tho WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 15'f Strathmorcs of White Ladies have often disdained all, only as their doom, to madly and vainly covet oneP It was as he whispered those words that Erroll, not catching even the sound of his voice, but seeing the meaning warmth upon his face, the gaze which Strathmore fastened on her, muttered, sotto voce, " She is divine ; but she will play the very devil with him!" Into him, too, entered with a nature as different to Strathmore's as the summer to the winter, as the sunny unruffled lake to the deep and silent sea the subtle poison of Marion Vavasour's beauty, mingled with a warning and prophetic hatred of her power. There was a large party gathered by this time at the Abbey, and the hospi- talities she had recently quitted of a Bourbon at Neuilly had scarcely been more brilliant than those which wel- comed her at White Ladies. There was Blanche de Ruelle, that haughty dark-eyed beauty, who, amidst all the homage she received, treasured bitterly and wearily the memory of the love once whispered by a man whom no love had touched who was now her friend and her host. There w r as Beatrix Beaudesert, that dashing brunette who led the first flight in a twenty minutes' burst-up wind, and never funked at any bullfinch or double that yawned in good Northamptonshire ; but could have cleared Brixworth Brook and won the Grand Military were the sex allowed to enter either for the Steeplechase or the Service. There was the Comtesse de Chantal, who wove half the intrigues of the Tuileries, while statesmen and diplomatists wound her floss silks, and who brewed em- broglie for the Western Powers in her dainty Sevres coffee-cup. There was pretty Lady Alaric, who was so very religious, and went on her knees before her missal- like prayer-book before she floated down to breakfast to commence the flirtations, which always pulled up just short of a court and a co-respondent; of an error and an esclandre. There was Lady Clarence Camelot, leader of rhe most exclusive of the thoroughbred sets, who was cold and still as a rock-crystal, and proud as any angel that over fell by that queenly sin ; but whose nature was sweet as the sun of Sorrento, and whose heart was as mellow as a Catherine pear, for the few who had the fortunate sesame to either. There were these and others at White Ladies, 14 1M STRATHMORE; OR, but L*dy Vavasour outshone them all: she was the Heine Regnante, and she used her sceptre omnipotently, and far eclipsed those whom most women found it a hard matter even to equal. The Marquis, who came thither, en route to Spa, for a few days, chiefly because the venison and the char out of the White Ladies woods and waters had had such a celebrity for centuries that he was curious to test their reputed superiority, was blessed with the most gentlemanlike indifference to his lovely wife's vagaries. He knew she was always flirting with somebody who, it didn't matter much ; perhaps when he did think about it, his chief feeling was a certain malicious pleasure in seeing so many of bis fellow-creatures chained, and worried, and fooled, by the seductive tormentress whom he had let loose on the world with her droit de conquele legitimatized by his coronet. The Marquis was a philosopher, and the very husband for his wife: their marital relations were admirably ordered for the preservation of peace and friendship ; they saw little or nothing of one another (the secret recipe for conjugal unity), and, by mutual consent, never interfered, he with her caprices cle cceur, nor she with his " separate establishments." When he had first married, people had said his lordship was madly entete with his bride ; but that inconvenient folly had departed with a few months' wear: and now he was proud of her loveliness, but wisely and placably negligent on whom that loveliness might shine ; a wisdom and placability never more needed, perhaps, than now at White Ladies. "Lookest thou at the stars ? If I were Heaven, with all the eyes of Heaven Would I look down on thee !" The words were very softly whispered as Strathmore stood that evening on the terrace. It was late, the stars were shining, and the murmur of the waters flowing ontt'ard under the elm-woods was heard plaintively and monotonously sweet, as Marion Vavasour, whose whim was every hour changing, and who laughed at all feeling one hour only to assume it most beguilingly the next, left the drawing-rooms, where she reigned supreme and strolled out for a brief while in the summer night, followed by her host. The white light of the stars fell about her, WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 159 glancing on the sapphires and diamonds that glittered in her hair, or sparkled in her bosom, and shone in the depths of her eyes, as she raised them, and looked upwards at the skies above, where, here and there, some cloud of trans- parent mist trailed across the brilliance of the moon, or veiled the swift course of a falling star. She laughed, toying with the closed autumn roses that twined round the balustrade : "Strathmore! you would do no such thing! If you had the eyes of Heaven, they would all be bent on watch- ing conferences you cannot join, and in reading despatches you cannot see ! There are three things no woman rivals with a man who loves any one of the triad ; they are a Horse, a State-secret, and a Cigar. We may eclipso all three, perhaps, for a little while, but, in the long run, any one of the triad outrivals us." He bent lower towards her, with a soft whisper: " Do not slander my sex, and belie the power of your own. Have there not been women for whom men have thought the world itself well lost ?" ' There have been fools, mon ami ; and that is how you would phrase it if you were out of my presence and in the smoking-room, and anybody advanced the proposition!" she laughed, with that moqueur incredulity with which at Vernon9eaux she had so constantly tantalized and pro- voked him. " Fools ? It would be rash to call them so. Manuel was no fool, yet he found his Isles of Delight sweeter than the din and clash of triumph, and the fall of conquered citadels. Alcibiades was no fool, yet he found to look into the eyes of Aspasia better than the sceptre of the Alcmoe- onidae and the wisdom of the Schools !" Three months ago Strathmore would have sworn never to utter such words save in derision : but now, as he stooped towards her in the sultry stillness of the night, it was not either in jest or flattery, that he spoke them ; the roses had the perfume for him with which they had wooed Manuel in the Isles of Delight ; the eyes had the power io which the soft Greek had bowed and sunk. For with every year the roses bloom, and with every age men love ! Her" sweet mocking laugh rang in the air the laugh 160 STRATHMORE; OR, which had enthralled him under the lindens of Bohemia, and from behind the mask of the White Domino. "What! you who acknowledge but one love Power, and covet but one boon Age ; confess so much as that ! You must be very suddenly changed since three months ago; your eyes, a Strathmore's fathomless eyes, actually soften at the mere memory of Aspasia !" Her eyes laughed up into his, her hand touched his own where it wandered among the roses ; the sultry air of the night swept round them, only stirred by the dreamy splash of fountains, and the rise and fall of her low breathings. He had no strength against her in such a moment, nor did he seek, or sti'ive, or wish to have. "Changed? If I be so, the sorcery lies at your door. It is not the memory of Aspasia which evokes the confes- sion ; the daughter of Hellas has bequeathed her glamour to one who uses it to the full as fatally and as surely !" A smile trembled on her lovely lips which became half a sigh, while her hand absently toyed with the sapphire cross that glittered just below her throat. "Ah-bah !" she said, with a laugh, whose gay mockery had in it for the first time a timbre of constraint, as of lightness assumed but uufelt : " I do not believe in such sudden converts ; I do not receive them into my creed ! Strathmore, am I, who read you so well while you were yet unknown, likely to believe in your suave words HO quickly? Remember! I am clairvoyante. I know the sincerity of every one Avho approaches me, and I know the worth of your words, my diplomatist! I shall be a very long time before I accord to you the honor of any belief in them." " If you be clairvoyante, you will no longer disbelieve ; you will see without woi-ds what your sorcery works. You must know your own power too well to doubt it !" Know her own power? in every iota! and she knew it now ; knew that this man, who was steeled in his own strength, and held himself far above the soft foolery of passion, was fast bending to her will, fast drinking in the draught which she tendered to his lips, fast succumbing to her feet, to lie there, bound, and powerless to free him- self from bondage; letting his life drift on as she should choose to guide it; losing all, forsaking all, risking ali. 4 STHATIIMORE; OR, which she had vowed to arouse in the man who held him- self sheathed in an armor of proof; his words, losing the softness of suave compliment, were hoarse with a deeper meaning, and as he followed her he thrust the rose into his breast the delicate leaves that had gained value in his sight, because her lips had touched them ! That night he drank deep of the delirious draught of a woman's witchery; that night, as he paid his gold to the Marquis, at ecarte, he loathed the man who had bought her beauty with his title, and claimed her by right of ownership, as he claimed his racing stud, his chef de cuisine, his comet wines! he loathed himself for having him at his table and beneath his roof; for chatting the idle nothings of familiar intercourse with him, and bidding O O the friendly good-night of host to guest, *ne man whom he hated with the dark hatred of the Strathmore blood, which was ever stronger than their wisdom, and deeper than their love, and closer than their honor. True ! We seat our foes at our board, and welcome what we hate to our hospitality, and eat salt with those who betray us and those whom we betray ; wroi?p;^d Octavia smiles as she receives Cleopatra into her bo-'j^e, and Launcelot shakes hands in good-fellowship with Arthur the day after he has writ the stain on his friend's kiVMly shield! It is done every day, and he was accustomed to such convenience and such condonation ; but Stratbmo**, when once roused, was a man of darker, swifter, deeper passions than the passions of our day, and the leaven of his race was work- ing in him, beneath the cold and egotist io surface of habit and of breeding. As stillness fell that ?iight upon his household, and sleep ca*ne with the hush -o^the advancing hours, and he stood in the silence of h ; s own chamber, hating the husband, coveting the wife, knowing that both were now beneath his roof; he thought ot Kr, like the Lady Christabel, Her lovely limbs she did undresa, And lay down in her loveliness; till, with an oath he pressed the broken rose-lcpv^i to his lips with a fierce kiss where her own had rested or* them. and hurled them out away into the darkness of the uigJs. Already did he love this woman ? WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 165 CHAPTER XV. "AT HER FEET HE BOWED AND FELL." " I CONGRATULATE you on your fresh honors, old fellow. Bomont writes word the ministers have selected you for the Confidential mission to . Ticklish business, and a very high compliment," said Camelot, one morning at breakfast, when Lord Vavasour had left for Spa, and his wife had been some weeks the reigning Queen at the Abbey. Strathmore went on stirring his chocolate : " Bomont has no earthly business to tittle-tattle Foreign- office secrets ; however, since he's let it out, I may confess to it." " You accept, of course ? You must leave at once eh ?" " The affair's been on the tapis some time. I always knew I should be selected to succeed Caradoc. Try that potted char, Lady Beatrix," answered Strathmore, avoid- ing direct answer to either of Camelot's inquiries, while among his letters lay one which selected him in a juncture of critical difficulty to occupy a post which older diploma- tists bitterly envied him, and which gratified his ambition and signalized his abilities to the fullest. Questions and congratulations flooded in on him from the people about his breakfast-table, among whom Lady Vavasour was not ; she usually had her chocolate in her own chamber. " You will draw us into a war, I dare say, Strathmore," laughed Beatrix Beaudesert: "You dips love an em- broglio, as dearly as journalists love a ' crisis ;' and your race are born statesmen. Your berceaunettes must have been trimmed with Red Tape; and you must have learnt your alphabet out of Michiavelli's Maxims ! You're not like Hamlet ; you specially enjoy the times being ' out of joint,' that you may show your surgical skill in setting them right." " Of course," laughed Strathmore: "If half a million slaughtered gets a General the Garter, what does he care who rots, so long as he rises ? Man's the only animal that preys upon his species, and for his superiority calls 16C STEATUMORE; OR, himself head of all creation. The brutes only fly at their foes; we turn on our friends if we get anything by it!" " Fi done!" cried Madame de Ruelle: "You have just received the Bath, and are appointed to a post which all the diplomatic world will envy you. You ought not to be in a cynical mood, Strathmore ! It is those with whom life goes badly who write satires and turn epigrams ; a successful man always approves the world, because the world has approved him !'' " True, madame ; but at the same time there may be a drop of amari aliquid under his tongue, because the world has approved other people too !'' " Dear old fellow, how glad I am !" said Erroll, meeting him in the doorway a quarter of an hour afterwards : " My K.C.B. ! a discerning nation does for once put the right man in the right place. On my word, Strath, I am proud of you!" "Thank you!" The two monosyllables were odiously cold after the cordial warmth of the other's words, and Strathmore crossed the hall without adding others. He was con- scious that he could fling away power, place, fame, honor, if one woman's voice would murmur, " Relinquish them for me!" And the consciousness made him bitter to all the world, even to the man who was closer than a brother. "The deuce!" How changed he is! It is all that woman's doings, with her angel's face and her devil's mischief; her gazelle's eyes and her Messalina's soul!" muttered Erroll. " Vous avez Vair tant soit peu contrarii', monsieur!" said a voice behind him, half-amused, half-contemptuous, as Lady Vavasour, having just descended the stain ase, swept past him, radiant in the morning sunlight ; her silk folds trailing on the inlaid floor, and the fragrance of her hair scenting the air. Perhaps she had heard his words? Lady Vavasour, however, could very admirably defy him and his enmity, and anybody or everybody else. She played utterly unscrupulously, but equally matchlessly, with Strathmore; now avoiding him, till she made his cheek grow white and his eyes dark as night with anger; now listening with a feigned rebuke, which made it but WKOUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 167 the sweeter, to the whispers of a love, that while she chid, she knew how to madden with the mere sweep of her dress across him. She was a coquette and a voluptuary.- She loved, I believe, with the shallow, tenacious, fleeting love, such as Parabere and Pompadour knew, while romance still mingled with license, as their best points rt la sauce. Strathmore's nature was new to her. To first rouse, and then play with it, was delightful to this beautiful panther ; and she did both, till a very insa,nity was awakened in him. Love is by a hundred times too tame and mean- ingless a word, for what had now broken up from his cold- ness as volcanic flames break up from ice. It was a pas- sion born entirely from the senses, if you will, without any nobler element, any better spring; but for that very reason it was headlong as flame, and no more to be arrested than the lightning that seethes through men's veins, and scorches all before it. She heard of his appointment to conduct the missioa to as though he were her brother, in whose career she was fraternally interested, and nothing more ; and spoke of his coming departure to Northern Europe as if it were a question of going into the next county for a steeple- chase or a coursing meeting ! "Ah! you are going to ?" she said, tranquilly, when she met hirn in the library, trifling with a new French novellete : " It will be very cold ! Give my com- pliments to M. le Prince de Vorn ; he is a great friend of mine, though he is a political foe of yours. His wit is charming 1" Strathmore, standing near her, felt his face pale with passion to the very lips as she spoke. She had wooed, while she repressed ; she had tempted, while she forbade his love, as a woman only does who knows that she has conquered where conquest is dear to her; and now, she heard of his departure for a lengthened and indefinite term as carelessly as though he told her he was going to visit his stables or his kennels ! He tried vainly that day to meet her alone ; she avoided or evaded him from luncheon to dinner with tantalizing dexterity. Letters to write, a game of billiards, chit-chat in the drawing-rooms one thing or another occupied her BC ingeniously that not even for a single second did she 168 STRATIIMORE; OR, give him the chance of a tete-d-tete. She knew he sought one, and pleasured herself by baffling and denying him, while her insouciant indifference tortured him to fury. Ambition had been the god, power the lust, which alone had possessed him ; with both within his grasp he would now have thrown both from him as idly as a child casts pebbles into the sea, only to feel the lips of Marion Vava- sour close upon his own ! That night there was a ball given at White Ladies, one among the many entertainments which had marked her visit; it was to be, according to her command, a bal cos- tume, and as Strath more went to dress, he caught sight of the azure gleam of her silken skirt sweeping along the corrider to the State-chambers. He crossed the passage that divided them, and in an instant was at her side ; she started slightly, and glanced up at him : "Ah ! Lord Cecil, you try one's nerves ! really, you are so like those Vandykes in the gallery, that one may very pardonably take you for a ghost!" Strathmore laid his hand on her arm to detain her, look- ing down into her eyes by the light from above : " I have sought a word alone with you all the day through, and sought it vainly ; will you grant it me now ?" " Now ? Impossible ! I am going to dress. The toilette is to us what ambition is to you, the first, and last, and only love a ruling passion, strong in death ! A statesman dying, asks, ' Is the treaty signed ?' a woman dying, asks, 'Am I bien coiffee V " Laughing, she moved onward to leave him, but Strath- more moved too, keeping his hold on her hand: " Hear me you must ! I told you 'once that I did not dare to whisper the sole guerdon that would content me as the reward you offered ; now I dare, because, spoken or unspoken, you must know that the world holds but one thought, one memory, one idol for me ; you must know that I love you!" The words were uttered, which, old as the hills eternal, have been on every human lip, and cursed more lives than thcv have ever blessed. And Marion Vavasour listened, as the light gleamed upon the lovely youth which lit her face, and .her eyes met his with the glance that women only give when they love: WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 169 " Hush ! you foi'get," she murmured (and chiding from those lips was sweet as the soft wrath of the south wind!) "/must not hear you." But the eyes forgave him, while the voice rebuked; and Strath more's love, loosed from all bondage, poured itself out in words of eager, honeyed eloquence, with every richest oratory, with every ardent subtlety, that art could teach and passion frame. To win this woman he would have perilled, had he owned them, twenty lives and twenty souls, and thought the prize well bought! She listened still, her hand resigned to his, a warm flush on her cheeks, and her heart beating quicker in its gossamer nest, of priceless lace, stirred with triumph, per- haps stirred with love. Then she drew from him with a sudden movement, and laughed in his face with radiant, malicious laughter: "Ah ! my lord, you have learned, then, how dangerous it was to boast to a woman that you had but one idol Ambition ; that you desired Age, and despised Love ! The temptation to punish you was irresistible ; you have learned an altered creed now!" The silvery laughter mocking him rang lightly out upon the silence, and, ere he could arrest her, she had entered her chamber, and the door had closed. He stood alone iu the empty corridor stunned ; and a fierce oath broke from his throat. Had this woman fooled him? The echo of her words, the ringing of her laughter, stung him to mad- ness ; the taunt, the mirth, the jest flung at him in the moment when he had laid bare his weakness, and could have taken his oath that he was loved, was like seething oil flung upon flame. He swore that night to wrench confession from her of her love, or or He grew dizzy with the phantoms of his own thoughts. But one resolve was fixed in him ; to win the woman, or to work on her the worst revenge that a foiled passion and a fooled love ever wrought. As he passed out of the state corridor and turned towards bis own chamber, he came unhappily upon Erroll. " Is it you, Strath ?" said the Sabreur : " I want a word with you; may I come in for ten minutes?" "Evtrez." Strathmore's voice sounded strange in his own ears; he 15 170 STRATHMORE; OR, would have given away a year of his life to have been left alone at that moment. Erroll followed him into his chamber, however; noticing nothing unusual ; for Strathmore, with Italian passion, had more than English self-control ; and Bertie, who had had bad intelligence of a weedy-looking bay on whom he had risked a good deal for the approaching Cesarewitch, came as usual to detail his fears and doubts, and speculate on the most judicious hedging with Strathmore. With a mad love running riot in him, and a fierce resolve seething up into settled shape, Strathmore had to sit and listen to Xew- market troubles, and balance the pros and cons of Turf questions as leisurely and as interestedly as of old ! Ap- parently, he was calm enough ; actually, every five minutes of restraint lashed his pent-up passion into fury. The Newmarket business done with, Erroll still lingered ; he had something else to say, and scarcely knew how to phrase it. " Will all these people stay much longer, Strath ?" he began ; "they've been here a long time." " I don't tell my guests to go away," said Strathmore, with a smile : " Besides, the pheasants just now are at their prime." " The pheasants ! Oh yes, I was thinking of the women. To be sure though you must leave yourself, in a few days; I forgot! When must you start for ?" " It is uncertain." The subject annoyed him, and he answered shortly. Erroll was silent a moment ; then he looked up, his eyes shining with their frank and kindly light : " Strath, you wouldn't take wrongly anything I said, would you ?" " My dear Erroll ! what an odd question. I believe I am not usually tenacious ?" "Of course not; still I fancy you'd let me say to you, what you mightn't stand from another man ; I hope so at least, old fellow ! We have never been on ceremony with one another yet ; and I want to ask you, Cis, if you know how your's and Lady Vavasour's names are coupled together ?" He could not have chosen a more fatal hour for his question 1 WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND 171 " Who couples them ?" The words were brief and quietly enough said, but Strathmore's hand clenched where it lay on the table, and an evil light gleamed in his eyes. " Oh, nobody in especial, "but more or less everybody/' answered Erroll, carelessly, whom the gesture did not put on his guard : " Your attention to her, you know, must be noticed ; impossible to help it ! Naturally the men joke about it when you're out of hearing, fellows always will." " What do they say ?" The words were quiet still, but Strathmore's teeth were set like a mastiff's. " You can guess well enough ; you know how we always laugh over that sort of thing. Look here, Strathmore !" and Erroll, breaking out of the lazy softness of his usual tone, leant forward eagerly and earnestly : " I know you'll take my words as they're meant; and if you wouldn't, it would be a wretched friendship that shirked the truth when its telling were needed. If you called me out for it to-inorrow I would let you know what everybody is say- ing that you are infatuated with a woman who is only playing with you 1" Strathmore leaned back in his chair, fastening his wrist- band stud, with a cold sneer on his face ; it cost him much to repress the passion that would have betrayed him : " The world is very good to trouble itself about me ; if you will name the particular members of it who do the gossiping, I will thank them in a different fashion." " The better way would be to give them no grounds for it !" " Grounds? I don't apprehend you." " You do, and you must !" broke in Erroll, impatiently ; this smooth, icy coating did not impose on him : " Whether your heart be in the matter or not, you act as though it were. You are becoming the very slave of that arch coquette, who never loved anything in her life save her own beauty; you, who ridiculed everything like woman- worship, are positively infatuated with Marion Vavasour! Stop! hear me out! I have no business with what you do; true enough! I am breaking into a subject no man has any right to touch on to another I know that I But I 172 STRATIIMORE; OR, like you well enough to risk your worst anger ; nnd I speak plainly because you and I have no need to weigh our words to each other. Good God ! you must have too much pride, Strathmore, to be fooled for the vanity of a woman !" He stopped in his impetuous flood of words, and looked at his listener, who had heard him tranquilly a dangerous tranquillity, thin ice over lara-flames ! Strathmore only kept reins on the storm because it rose to his lips to betray him. " Pardon me, Erroll," he said, slowly and pointedly, " I will not take your words as they might naturally be taken, since you claim the privilege of ' old friendship ;' but I must remind you that friendship may be both officious and impertinent. The office of amoral censor sits on you very ill ; attention to a married woman is not so extraordinarily uncommon in our set that it need alarm your virtue "Virtue be hanged!" broke in Erroll, impetuously : "Bosh! You don't understand, or you won't understand, me. All I say is, that hundreds of fellows will tell you that Marion Vavasour is the most consummate coquette going; and that as soon as she has drawn a man on into losing his head for her, she turns round and laughs him to scorn. What do you suppose Scrope Waverley and all that lot will say? Only that you have been first trapped and then tricked, as they were !" "Thank you, I have no fear! Lady Vavasour makes you singularly bitter?" " Perhaps she does ; because I see her work. Near that woman you are no more what you were than " Really I must beg you to excuse my hearing a homily upon myself!" interrupted Strathmore, as he rose, speak- ing coldly, intolerantly, and haughtily : " As regards Lady Vavasour, she is my guest, and as such I do not hear her spoken of in this manner. As regards the gossip you are pleased to retail, people may chatter as they like; if they chatter in my hearing I can resent it, without having my path pointed out to me ; and for the future I will trouble you to remember that even the privileges of friend- ship may be stretched too far if you overtax them." As he spoke he rang the bell for Diaz, and as the Albanian entered the chamber from the bath-roon) E-rrull WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 1/3 turned and went out without more words. lie was angered that his remonstrance had had no more avail; he was hurt that his interference had been so ill received, and his motive so little comprehended. Like most coun- sellors, he felt that what he* had done had been ill-advised and ill-timed: while Strathmore, indifferent to how he might have wounded a friendship which he had often sworn worth all the love of women, was stung to madness by the words with which Erroll had unwittingly heaped fuel on to flame. Men saw his passion for Marion Vava- sour! He swore that they should hopelessly and long- ingly envy its success. The fancy ball at White Ladies was as brilliant as it could be made ; the great circle at the Duke of Trt-mayne's, the people staying at Lady Millicent Clinton's, and at other houses of note in the county, afforded guests at oncq, numerous and exclusive, and the Royal women who had been visitors at White Ladies had never been better enter- tained than was Marion Yavasour. As he received his guests in the great reception-room known as the King's Hall, that night, women of the world, not easily impres- sible, glancing at him, were arrested by they knew not what, and remembered long afterwards how he had looked that evening. He wore the dress of the Knights Tem- plars, the white mantle flung over a suit of black Milan armor worked with gold, and the costume suited him singularly ; while it seemed to bring out yet more strongly still the resemblance in him to all that was dark and dangerous in the Strathmore portraits. His face was slightly flushed, like a man after a carouse ; his wit was courtly and light, but very bitter; his attentions to the women were far more impressive than his ever had been he might have been in love with all in his rooms! but his eyes, dark with suppressed eagerness and wkh a heavy shade beneath them, glanced impatiently over the crowd. Every one had arrived, but she had not yet descended ; his salons were filled, but to him they were empty ! This was no light, languid love, seeking a liaison as a mere pastime, which had entered into Strathmore for another man's wife; it was the delirium, the frenzy, the blindness in which the world holds but one woman ! At last, with her glittering hair given to the winds, a 15* if 4 STRATHMORE; OR, diadem of diamonds crowning her brow, snow-white clouds of drapery floating around her, light as morning mist, and her beautiful foot bare, only shod with golden sandals, she came, when all the rooms were full, living impersonation of the Summer-Noon she represented. A crowd of costumes followed her steps, and murmurs of irrepressible admiration accompanied her wherever she moved; there were many beautiful women there that night at White Ladies, but none that equalled, none that touched her. The golden apple was cast without a dissent into the white bosom of Marion Vavasour; and at sight of her his reason reeled and fell, and his madness mastered him as it subdued him of Broceliande before the witching eyes and under the wreathing arms of Vivien, "While the forest echoed 'Fool!'" tlis face wore the reckless resolve which was amongst the dark traits of the Strathmores when their ruthless will had fixed a goal, and underneath their calm and courtly seeming, the fierce spirit was a flame which made them pitiless as death in all pursuit. His eyes followed the gleaming trail of her streaming hair, the flash of her dia^ mond diadem, with a look which she caught, and fanned to fire with one dreamy glance of languor, one touch of her floating drapery. And yet, even while the passion devoured him, he hated her for its pain hated her because she was another's and not his! Do you know nothing of this because it has not touched you? tut! the forms of human love are as varied and as controlless as the forma of human life ; and 3 r ou have learned but little of the world, and the men that make it, if you have not learned that love, often and again, treads and trenches close on hate. It was as though she set her will to make her beauty more than mortal, and goad him on till he was as utterly her bond-slave as the Viking whom, as the Norse legend tells, twenty strong men could not capture, yet who lay helpless and bound as in gyves of iron by one frail, single thread of a woman's golden hair ! That night his passion mastered him, and all that was most dangerous, in a nature where fire slept under ice, woke into life, and set into one imperious resolve. It was some hours after midnight, when he passed with WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND 116 her into a cabinet de peinture. The wax-radiance streamed upon her where she stood like some dazzling thing of light, some dream of the Greek poets, some sorceress of the East, while the diamonds crowned her brow, and the gold sandals crossed her snowy feet. In the stillness of the night they were alone, and her eyes met his with a glance which wooed him on to his sweet temptation. Ambition seemed idle as the winds; fame he was ready to cast aside like dross; at the most brilliant point in his career, he was Avilling to throw away all the past, and cut away all the future, so that her voice but whispered him " Stay !" His honor to the man who had been a guest beneath his roof, the bond which bound him to hold sacred the woman whom his house harbored, were forgotten and left far behind him, drowned in his delirium as men's wisdom is drowned in wine. He saw, remembered, heeded nothing on earth or in heaven save her. And she knew the meaning of his silence as he stood beside her. " So you will leave England very soon, Strathmore ?" The words were light and ordinary : but her words are but a tithe of a woman's language ; and it was her eyes which spoke, which challenged him to summon strength to leave her ; which dared him to rank ambition before her, and claimed and usurped the dominion which power alone had filled! It was the eyes he answered, only see- ing in the midnight glare the fairness of her face. " Bid me stay for you ; and I resign the mission to- morrow!'' " What ! desert your career, abandon your ambition, give up vour powei', and at a woman's word, too ! Fie, fie, Lord'Cccil !" The sweet laughter echoed in his ear, and her face had all its witching mockery as she turned it to him in the light. " Hush! My God! you know my madness; you shall play with it no longer. Bid me stay, and I give up every- thing for you ! But you must love me as I love ; you must choose to-night for yourself and me. If you are fooling me, beware ; it will be at a heavy price. Love me! and I throw away for you honor, fame, life what you will !" The words were spoken in her ear ; fierce with the passion 176 STRATIIMORE; OR. which was reckless of all cost ; broken with the love which vvas only conscious of itself and of the beauty that it craved. His face was white as death ; his eyes gazed into hers, hot, dark, lurid as the eyes of a tiger. This mad idolatry, this imperious strength, made a love new to her, dear to her as its costliest toy to a child ; a richer gage of her power, a stronger proof of her dominion. A blush warm and lovely, if it were but a lie, wavered in her face ; her eyes answered his with dreamy languor; the diamonds in her breast trembled with the heavings of her heart, and even while she hushed him and turned from him, her hand lingered within his. He knew that he was loved ! and his whole life would have been staked on that mad hour. His arms closed round her in an embrace she could not break from ; he wound his hands in the shining shower of her amber hair; he crushed this soft and dazzling thing, which mocked and maddened him, against the chill steel of his armor as though to slay her. Burning words broke from him, delirious, imperious, half-menace, half-idolatry, born of the strong passion, and the sensuous softness, of which his love at once was made : " I sacrifice what you choose, for you ; or I hate you more bitterly than man ever hated ! Friendship between us / My God ! it must be one of two things deadliest hate, or sweetest love !" He paused abruptly, crushing her with fierce uncon- scious strength against his breast, gazing down into the face so fatally fair. Her eyes looked into his with all their eloquence of loveliness ; her amber hair floated, soft and silken, across his breast, and his lips met hers in kisses that only died to be renewed again, each longer, sweeter, more lingering than the last. And that night at the tempting of a woman he bowed and fell. WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 1U CHAPTER XVI. THE AXE LAID TO THE ROOT. " Tu Vas ecrite ?" she said, softly, looking up into bis eyes. The whisper was brief, but as subtle and full of power as any words that ever murmured from Cleopatra's lips, wooing him of Rome to leave his shield for foes to mock at, and his sword to rust and his honor to drift away, a jeered and worthless thing, while he lay lapped in a woman's love, with no heaven save in a woman's eyes. It was some hours past noon on the morrow of the bal costume; she had not yet left her dressing-room in the State-chambers. Her hair was unbound, folds of azure, and lace of gossamer texture, enveloped her ; and she lay back on her couch, resting her cheek on her white, bare arm, and letting her eyes dwell upon his. "Tu Vas ecrileV 1 she murmured, softly, her hand lying in his, her lips brushing his brow. For all answer he put into her hand a letter he had just then penned a letter to decline the appointment offered to him ; to refuse the most brilliant distinction that could have fallen to him; in a word, to resign the ambitions his life had been centred in, to destroy the career and the goal of his present and his future ! Her head rested against his breast while she read it, her eyes glancing over the few brief lines which gave up all power and honor, the world and the world's ambitions, and flung away life's best prizes at her bidding, as though they were empty shells or withered leaves. And a smile, proud and glad, came upon her lips. Even she had scarcely counted on binding him thus far to her feet on chaining him thus utterly her slave. She read it, then she lifted her eyes, now sweet \vith the languor of love, while sho lay in his arms, her warm breath fanning his cheek. " You will not regret it, Cecil? Are you sure?" "Regret! My Heaven! what room have I to dream US STRATIIMORE; on, even of regret now ? My whole future would be a willing price paid down for one hour of my joy !" The last words were spoken in a madman's heedless, headlong love ! He stooped over her, spending breathless kisses on her lips, and passing his hands through the golden, scented hair which floated on her shoulders. Every single, shining thread might have been a sorcery-twisted withe that bound him powerless, so utterly he bowed before her power, so utterly he was blinded to all that lay beyond the delicious languor and the sensuous joys which steeped his present in their rich delight! An hour afterwards, Strathmore descended from the state-chambers by a secret staircase which wound down- ward to the library. He listened ; the room was silent ; he looked through the aperture left in the carvings, by those subtle builders of the olden days, for such reconnois- sance by those who needed secresy; it was empty, and, pressing the panal back, he entered. As it chanced, how- ever, in the deep embrasure of a Avindow, hidden by the heavy curtains, Erroll sat reading the papers ; and, as he looked up, he saw Strathmore, before the panel had wholly closed on its invisible hinges, that were screened in a mass of carving. Erroll knew Avhence that concealed passage led. " Why was she not dead in all her demon's beauty before ever she came here?" he muttered to himself; for Erroll had grown jealous of Marion Vavasour; and had, more- over, strange, stray notions of honor, here and there, better fitting the days of Galahad than our own. "You here, Bertie !" said Strathmore carelessly, very admirably concealing the annoyance he felt, as Erroll looked up from his retreat. " What's the news ?" "Nothing!" yawned the Sabreur, stretching him the Times: "They notice your appointment for ; very approvingly, too, for the Thunderer. When do you go, old fellow ? " I do not go at all," Strathmore answered briefly. He was aware it must be known sooner or later, and. in the reckless rapture of his present, ridicule, remark, or censure, were alike disregarded. Erroll looked quickly up at him : "Not go ?" WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. '79 " No- 1 have requested permission to decline the ap- pointment." There was a dead pause of unbroken silence ; then, with a sudden impetuous movement, Erroll rose, pushing back his chair, and flinging his fair hair out of his eyes with a gesture of impatient anger : " Good God 1 Strathmore, have you sneered at every love all your life through, only to become a woman's slave at last !" The swift dark wrath of his race glanced into Strath- more's eyes. At all times he brooked comment or inter- ference ill ; now he knew himself the* slave of a woman, and while in the sweet insanity of successful love his serfdom was delicious, and its bondage dearer than any liberty that had ever been his boast, the words were still bitter to him. To any but the Sabreur they would have been as bitterly resented. " That cursed coquette !" muttered Erroll between his teeth, as he paced impatiently up and down : " What ! she enslaves you, till you wreck your whole future at her word, let all the world see you in your madness, and forget your honor, even under your own roof!" The words broke out almost unconciously ! he was rife with hatred for the woman who had robbed him of his friend, and grown more power- ful with Strathmore than honor, or ambition ; than the present, or the future ; than the ridicule of the world, or the ambition of his career. Evil passions passed over his listener's face flaming into life all the more darkly because the accusation bore with it the sting of Nathan's unto David the sting of truth : " By Heaven ! no man on the face of the earth, save you, should dare say that to me, and live !" Erroll looked up, stopped, and halted'before him, his sunny, blue eyes growing cordial and earnest as a woman's : " Dear old fellow, forgive me ! I had no right, perhaps, to use the words I did, but we have never stopped to pick our speech for one another. No ! hear me, Strathmore. By Heaven ! you shall ! Your honor is dearer to me than it ever will be to any one, and I only ask you now to pause, and think how you will endure for the world to know that you are so utterly a coquette's bond-slave, that you lie at her beck and call, and give up all your best 18C STHATIIMORE; OR, ambitions at her bidding. I am sinner enough myself God knows, and have plenty to answer for ; but no passion should have so blinded me to honor, let her have tempted as she would, that the wife of an absent guest should have ceased to become sacred to me, while trusted to my pro- tection, and under my own roof!". He stopped : and a dead silence fell again between them. They were fea^ess and chivalrous words, built on the code of Galahai and Arthur, and the spirit of the dead Knights and of a bygone age broke up iYom the soft indolence and easy epicureanism of the man, and found its way to just and dauntless speech, but speech that on the ear which heard it was* useless as a trumpet-blast in the ear of a dead man, as little heeded and as powerless to rouse ! The sting which lay in the Prophet's charge to him of Israel lay here ; but here it touched to the quick of no remorse, it only heated the furnace afresh, as a blast of wind blows the fires to a white heat. For one instant, while Erroll's glance met his, Strathmore made a forward gesture, like that of a panther about to spring ; then with all that was coldest, most bitter, most evil in him awake, he leaned back in his chair, with a sneer and a smile on his lips: "An excellent homily ! Perhaps, like many other preach- ers, you are envious of what you so venomously upbraid!" Over Erroll's face a flush of pain passed, as over a woman's at a brutal and unmerited word. "For shame! for shame!" he said, hotly: "You know better than to believe your own words, Strathmore! I do not stand such vile inuendoes from you !" Strathmore raised his eyebrows, his chill and contemp- tuous sneer still upon his lips ; his anger was very bitter at all times wh'en the velvet glove was stripped off, and the iron hand disclosed, which was a feature of his race. "Sort! it is very immaterial to me! Pray put an end to these heroic speeches. I have no taste for scenes, and from any other man I should call an account for them under a harsher name." "Call for what account you will ! But does our friend- ship go for so little that it is to be swept away in a second for a word about a woman who is as worthless, if you saw her in her true light, as any - ?" WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 181 " Silence !" said Strathmorc, passionately : " I bear no interference with myself, and no traducement of her. End the subject once and for all, or " " Or you will break with a friendship of twenty years for a love that will not last twenty weeks!" broke in Erroll. bitterly. It cut him to the quick to be cast off thus for the mere sake of a capricious coquette ; from their earliest Eton days they had no words between them till now that this woman brought them in her train: " It is the love which appears to excite your acrimony!" laughed Strathmore, with his chilliest sneer ; that swift, keen jealousy stirring in him which is ever the character- istic of such passion as his, even in its earliest hours of acknowledgment and 'return, and which permits no man even to look wistfully after its idol unchastised. As sharply as if a shot had struck him, Erroll swung round, righteous indignation flushing his face, and his azure eyes flashing fire : " For God's sake, Strathmore, has your mad passion so warped your nature that you can set down such vile mo- tives, in cold blood, to my share? I have no other feeling than hatred for the woman who befools you. That I will grant you is strong enough, for / see her as she is !" " Most wise seer and admirable preacher ! Since when have you turned sermonizer instead of sinner ?" sneered Strathmore, coldly, the dark wrath of his race gleaming ia his eyes : " It sits on you very ill !" " Sermonizer I am not, nor have I title to be!" broke in Erroll, his gentle temper goaded fairly into anger: "but still in your place of host I might have paused before I violated the common laws of hospitality and honor to the wife of an absent man, let her have been my temptress as she would!" In another instant w r ords would have been uttered which would have cut down, and cast away, the friendship of a lifetime; but the door of the drawing-room opened : " Are you tired of waiting, Major Erroll ? Never mind ! Patience is a virtue, if, like most other virtues, she be a little dull sometimes!" said Lady Beaudesert, as she floated in a picture for Landseer with a brace of handsome spaniels treading on the trailing folds of her violet habit. Her presence arrested, perforce, the words that were 16 182 STRATIIMORE; OR, rising hot and bitter to the lips of both. But when the axe is laid at the root, what matter if its work be delayed a few hours, a few days, a few months ? The tree which would have stood through storms is doomed by it, and will fall at the last ! The words Erroll had spoken that day had been just and true ones : but, like most words of truth in this world, they had been trash, and idle as the winds to carry one whit of warning, to stay for one hour's thought the headlong sweep of a great passion. Now that she had, like himself, forgotten every bond of honor, and cast aside every memory save the indulgence of a forbidden love, the semi-hatred which had so strangely mingled with Strathmore's fatal intoxication had gone, and with it the last frail cord which held him back from falling utterly beneath the sway of her power. If in the bitterness of an unwelcome love he had been her slave, in the delirium of a permitted one, he was more hopelessly so still. Erroll's charge of having violated the laws of hospitality stung him for one instant to the quick ; but the next it was forgotten, as her smile lighted upon him, and her silvery laugh rang on his ear! He weighed nothing in the scale against her ; he cast away all to stay in the light of the eyes where his heaven hung ; he remembered nothing but the exultant joy which lay in those brief, yet all-eloquent words : " he loved, and was loved !" She held him in her fatal web, as Guenevere held her Lover, when the breath of her lips sullied the shield that no foe had ever tarnished, and her false love coiled with subtle serpent-folds round Launcelot till he fell. But in Marion Vavasour would never arise what pardoned and purified the soul of the daughter of Leodegrauucc those waters of bitterness which yet are holy Remorse and Shame. WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HANI>. 153 CHAPTER XVII. GUENEVEBE AND ELAINE. THAT night, when the men had left the smoking-room, nnd all was still, Bertie Erroll left the Abbey by one of those secret entrances which had been known to him as to Strathmore from their childish da} r s, and took his way across the park, treading the thick golden leaves under foot. A bitterness and a depression were on him, very new to him, since he usually shook off all care as he shook the ash off his cigar. After such words as had passed between them he would not have stayed an hour under any other man's roof; but he loved Strathmore wejl enough not to resent it thus, though the breach in their friendship cut him more hardly than the sneers which had been cast at himself; as he paced on through the beech woods, that were damp and chill in the silent night, with white mists rising up from the waters in thin wreaths of vapor. At some distance, just without the boundaries of White Ladies, a light glimmered through the autumn network of brown boughs, and crimson leaves, from the casement of a cottage which stood so shut in by wood from the lonely road near, that it might as easily have been overlooked by any passer-by as a yellow-hammer's nest on the high- way. Its solitary little beam shone bright and star-like through the damp fogs of the chilly midnight, like the light which burns before some Virgin shrine, and greets us as we travel, wayworn and travel-stained and foot- weary, down the rocky'windings of some hill-side abroad. The simile crossed Erroll 's mind, and perhaps smote some- thing on his heart; ii was the light of a holy shrine to him, but one from which his steps too often turned, and one which now reproached him. He passed under the drooping heavy boughs, and over tne fallen leaves, across the garden of the little cottage, drew a latch-key from his pocket, opened the door, and entered. A light was left burning for him in the tiny cottage entrance, which was still as death ; he took the 184 STRATIIMOKE ; OR, lamp in his hand, mounted the staircase noiselessly, ami turned into the bed-chamber upon his left. It was small, and simply arranged, but about it, here and there, were articles of refined luxury ; and half kneeling beside the bed, as she had lately knelt in prayer, half resting against it, in the slumber which had conquered the watchful wakeful- ness of love, was a young girl, delicate and fair as any of the white lilies that had bloomed one brief hour, to perish the next, on the lake-like waters of White Ladies. Her head rested on her arm, her lips were slightly parted, and murmuring fondly his own name, while ' her face so fair, Stirred with her dream as rose-leaves with the air." His step was noiseless to awake her, and he stood still gazing on her in that slumber in which Life, becoming at once ethereal and powerless, escaping from earth, yet lying at man's mercy, so strangely and so touchingly counter- feits Death. And while he looked, thoughts arose filling him with vague reproach, thoughts at which the women he had just left, the women who knew him in intrigue, and in pleasure, and in idle flirtations, would have bitterly marvelled, and as bitterly sneered. The world in which we live knows nothing of us in our best hours, as it knows nothing of us in our worst ! They were in strange contrast! the dazzling beauty of Marion Vavasour, on which he had looked a few hours before, with a sorceress-lustre glancing from her eyes, and rare Byzantine jewels flashing on her breast; with this fair and mournful loveliness, which was before him now, hushed to rest in the holiness of sleep, with a smile like a child's upon the tender lips, and with a shadow from the lamp above falling upon a brow so pure that it might have been shadowed by an angel's wings. They were in strange contrast! and he stood beside his Wife, as Launcelot stood and gazed upon Elaine, while the pure breath of a stainless love was still upon his soul, and Avhile the subtle power of Guenevere only stole upon him in the fevered, vague phantasma of a fleeting dream, unknown and unad- mitted even there. He stooped over her, and his lips broke the spell of her sleep with a caress. She awoke with a low, glad cry, aud WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. sprang up (o nestle in his breast, to twine hei arms abou; him, to murmur her welcome in sweet, joyous words. " Ah, my better angel," he whispered, fondly yet bitterly, as he rested against his the cheek which still blushed at his kiss, speaking rather to his own thoughts than to her, " why are men so doomed by their own madness, that they sicken and weary of a pure and sacred love like yours, on which Heaven itself might smile, and forsake it for a few short hours of some guilty passion that is as senseless as the drunkard's delirium !" And she believed he only spoke but of the sweetness of their own love, pitying those who had never known such, and smiled up into his eyes ! CHAPTER XYIII. THE SILVER SHIELD AND THE CHARMED LANCE. " Is be to monopolize her for ever? He's kept the field a cursed long time," said a Secretary of Legation, dropping his lorgnon one night at the Opera in Paris. " The deuce he has," said his Grace of Lindenmere : " La belle is marvellously faithful ; and they say he's as mad after her now as when he first " "Taisez rows/ A scandal six months' old is worse than dining off a rechauffe," broke in the Yicomte de Bele- spriet: "A naughty story is like a pretty mistress; charm- ing at the onset, but a great bore when it's lost its novelty. All Paris chattered itself hoarse over their liaison last December; what we want to know now is when will it come to an end?" " I dare say you do," chuckled the old Earl of Beaume : " But the succession there will be as dangerous as to the Polish Viceroyalty ; a smile from her would cost a shot from him." "Ah ! sort of man to do that style of thing," yawned the Duke : " Don't understand it myself, never should. But he's positively her slave actually." 16* 180 STRATHMORE; OR, "Plenty of you envy him his slavery; white arms arc pleasant handcuffs," laughed Lord Beaume: "But that woman's ruined him. and what's worse, his career. He crave up the special mission to , because it must have taken him where her ladyship could not go! A man's never great in public life till he's ceased to care for women ! " " Which is possibly the cause, sir, why the country, looking to you for great things, has always looked in vain?" said LiFvdenmere. The Earl laughed, taking out his tabatiere ; he was good nature itself, and his Grace was a privileged wit, c'est d dire, one of that class who have made rudeness "the thing," and supply the esprit they lack by the impudence they have ! The fashion has its conveniences ; it is difficult to be brilliant, but it is so easy to be brusque ! Those whom they discussed were Lady Vavasour and Strathmore. Their liaison had been the theme of many buzzing scandals the autumn before, when on leaving White Ladies she had returned to Paris, accompanied by him ; but the buzz had soon exhausted itself, and their connection had become a fact generally understood and but very little dis- guised. His place and right had been long unchallenged, however bitterly envied ; and whatever rumor had said of her capricious inconstancy, as yet she had showed no disloyalty to her lover, whatever she showed to her lord. Either she really loved at last, or her entire dominion over the man who had scoffed at the sway of women satiated her delight in' power, for no coquetries ever roused the jealousy, fierce as an Eastern's, which accompanied his passion, or flattered the hopes of those who sought to supplant him. If any magician had had the power t\velve months before to show him himself as he had now become, Strathmore would have recognized the revelation as little as we in youth should recognize our own features could we see them marked with the corruption they will wear in death. Men who have been long invulnerable to passion ever become its abject bond-slaves when they at length bend to it. Ambition was lulled to forgetfulness in the sweet languor of his love; had he been offered the kingship of the earth, he would have renounced it, if to WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 187 assume its empire he must have left her side ! This man, who had long believed that he could rule his will. and WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 907 to revive the petits soupers that came in with the Regency and went out with the Revolution. These suppers were a peculiar charm of the Bosquet cle Diane, and to-night one of the most brilliant of them followed on '* Hernani," at which the sparkle of the wit might fairly have vied with the mots of Claudine de Tencin, Piron, or Rivarol ; at which the Due de Vosges, regarding his hostess, began to ponder that the advice of Arthus de Bellus might after all be the best, and that it would be well to shoot a lover whom there seemed no chance of supplanting ; and at which Erroll's mots were so sparkling and his spirits so high, that some of the men there wondered to themselves if he were bent on eclipsing Strathmore. The supper lasted long, every one loth to leave a table at which he was so well amused, and with the introduction of those perfumed cigarettes which Lady Vavasour per- mitted to be smoked in her presence, and which scented the air with a delicate Oriental odor, fresh jeux de mots seemed introduced, and it was very late when the Bourbon Prince took his departure. Son Altesse Royal was always cordially gracious and en bon camerade with Strathmore, whom he detained now at the door of his carriage, saying some last words relative to the Sartory Stakes, for which their horses were respectively entered ; and when he rolled away, Strathmore stood outside the house a few moments, while Lord Yavasour left the entrance-hall after accom- panying the Due to his carriage. The air was pleasant, for the night was very sultry and oppressive, as with the near approach of a tempest ; it reminded him of the one, now near twelve months past, when the first words of love had passed his lips to Marion Vavasour, and he had thrust into his breast the crimson leaves that had been pressed against her lips ; it was she only of whom he thought now as he paced up and down, while the dawn broke above the woods to the east. His passion had this characteristic of a worthier love that its success had not weakened, but tenfold strengthened it, and her memory alone filled his thoughts now in the hot, hushed stillness. She was h ; s ! and he would have driven out of his path the boldest that had dared to seek her love, he would have revenged with death the fairest rivalry that had dared to usurp his place ! 208 STRATHMORE; OR, Some twenty minutes might have gone by when, as he turned to re-enter the maisonette by one of the French windows which stood open to the piaz/a, the figure of a man came between him and the moonlight, he did not see whether from the villa or the grounds, though a moment after he recognized Erroll. They met as the one left, and the other turned to enter, the house, met for the first time alone since the day at White Ladies, when words about a woman, rash on the one side, bitter on the other, imd laid the axe at the root of their friendship. In a clearer light, or when his own thoughts had been less pre- occupied, Strathmore must have noticed the change that had come over Erroll in the short half hour that had gone by from the time of the Due's departure, when he had been laughing and talking at the supper table with all his usual gaiety, and even more than his usual wit. Then, his mots had sparkled through the conversation, dropped out in his soft, lazy voice, and his laugh had rung as often and as clearly as a young girl's now, his face was hag- gard and lined, and as he pulled the Glengarry over his eyes his hand shook slightly, like the hand of a man who has been drinking deeply, which was scarcely the case with him, since he had never left the society of titled women. Strathmore, however, did not observe this ; it was very dark just then, as the clouds swept over the moon, and the lights from Lady Vavasour's villa, which were stream- ing full in his own eyes, dazzled them, while Erroll stood with his back to their blaze. " I thought you had left us, Bertie. Have a cigar ?" he began, holding out his own case: " What a hot night, isn't it ? There's a storm brewing. WP shall have it down in half an hour." " It looks dark," said Erroll, briefly, as ho struck a fusee. " Mild word! How sweet those limes smell, rather op- pressive, though. I will walk across the grounds with you to Sir Arthur's ; how is he to-day ?" " Not much better." " AVell, really that tyrannous old gentleman has lived quite long enough," laughed Strathmore, as he moved down the terrace steps: " I want you to have that Hurst- wood property, the timber is magnificent. vVi*. was near at hand I WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 215 CHAPTER XXL THE ASHES IN THE LAMP. THERE was no moment when Lady Yavasour was so resistless as en negligee in her own dressing-room. With half the pearls and diamonds of her regalia glittering on her in the presence-chamber of St. James's or the Tuileries, though perhaps more dazzling, she was less dangerous than reclining among her cushions like the Odalisque of a harem, with the light softly shaded and the air scented with attar of roses, with her shower of hair unloosed, and the folds of some texture, white as snow or delicate in coloring as the blush on the opal, half enshrouding, half uoveiling her, as the sea-foam the goddess. She was so lovely, then, at midnight or morning ! and it was a privacy wherein so few saw her, while of even those few each believed himself the only one ! Strathmore looked at her where she lay, with her feet softly sheathed in pearl-broidered slippers, and a slight smile of amused reverie just parting her lips. He adored her beauty now as madly as at first, and his eyes dwelt on it unsated, indeed, with a fiercer and fonder delight, because it had been long his own. It was the morning after Hernani, and he thought of the hint that had been thrown out to him the night before, with disdainful ridicule and bitter scorn of the man who had employed such methods to implant the lie he had not even dared repeat. Long ago at White Ladies he had suspected where the root of Erroll's bitterness upon her lay ; in the last few weeks at Auteuil his suspicion had strengthened into certainty, and this morning, as he felt her hand wander over his brow when he lay at her feet, he repented thai he had allowed the memory of any friendship to stay him, and that he had not washed out with fitter punishment the coward envy that had sought to revenge itself on him by the suggestion of a hideous suspicion. Truly all better thiuprs are swept away betwixt men, when once the face of a woman has come between them ! 215 STRATHMORE; OR, " What are you thinking of, caro ?" she asked him, softly touching his hair. In her husband's house they were as secure from intrusion as though they had been alone in Naxos or Cyprus. Celeste was always without en sentinelle on such occasions, and even that precaution was needless. "I was thinking how many would make you faithless to me if they could." " What a wide field for speculation there are hundreds ! Well, if they succeeded, I should not expect you to com- plain." " Hush ! Do not jest about that." " Why not ?" she laughed : " Love wisely taken is a jest, you know. You would have no right to complain, Cecil. One may be queen of all the world, but not sove- reign of oneself; and our hearts are like Ben Jonson's ' blow-balls,' now here, now there, wherever the winds of chance and caprice like to float, them. Indeed, I should expect you to take your conge with the most tranquil grace. Come ! what would you do if I said I loved you no longer ?" The question was asked with that mocking malice which was part and parcel of her nature; this delicate, youthful creature loved to torture ! His passionate eyes looked up into hers with the jealous love of Othello : " Do ! God knows ! Take your life or my own or both 1" The answer was not wholly a jest, too deep a meaning lay in the look he fastened on her and the unconscious vibration of his voice ; and, for once, she felt a vague terror at the force of the love she had delighted to excite and feed, till it lost all reason in its madness ; for once she felt that she had roused what she could not so easily allay, and that the weakness she triumphed and tyrannized over, was a strength which might one day menace her, when no words of hers would be able to soothe it away. For the moment she feared the work of her own will, the next she gloried in her power, and laughed, her white lingers caressingly wandering among the dark chestnut waves of his hair. " What a horrible answer, Cecil ! One would think we were in the Cinque Cento! You swift, silent Strath- WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 21 T mores have much more of the Italian in you than of the English nature. You ought to be a Colonna or a Mala- testa, with the steel in your sleeve, and the poison in your ring. What! has one love become so necessary to you, that life would be unbearable without it? Oh, Lucifer, Son of Morning, how art thou fallen !" " But my fall has opened heaven to me, not exiled me from it," smiled Strathmore, as he lay at her feet: " Why do you wonder at my answer ? Love has turned to crime in its agony more than once since the world began." " Perhaps but not in our world " Where passion enters all worlds have the same law! You have made me learn the same madness as an Israelite learnt from Mariamne a thousand years ago, as twice a thousand a Spartan learnt from Cleonice." "Who both taught it to be slain by it! What an ominous souvenir! You would not slay me, Cecil?" And the loosened tresses swept against his brow, and her eyes looked laughingly yet lovingly into his. "Almost I could, rather than other eyes should feast on you. Ah, Marion ! when men love as I love, they loathe the very daylight to look on what they idolize." "Tu esfoue," she interrupted him, but the words were spoken so softly that they were themselves a caress : " It is a madness, Cecil ! But why, I wonder, are men who love us as you do, imperiously, avariciously, jealously, and would hate us as pitilessly, always most dear to women ? Why ? It is very bete. " " Why ? Because you know no love, worth the name, ever yet bore the shadow of a share in what it loved; because you delight to feel yourselves the mistresses of a man's life, and taste your power to give him misery or rapture, to yield him a god's delight, or cast him out to worse torture than the cursed ! To learn how men can love, women must be loved as I love you." "Ah, my cold, proud Strathmore, what lava flames lay beneath the ice !" she murmured, while the smile still hovered on her lips : " You did not know your own nature till I loved you !" As she stooped towards him, her caress lingering on hia brow, the forward movement dislodged a note which lay among the laces, silks, and Eastern stuffs piled on her 19 218 STRATHMORE; OR, luxurious couch, so that it fell, with its superscription upward, upon Strathmore's arm. He took it up to throw it towards a table which stood near, attaching no import to it, but Lady Yavasour with a quick movement inter- posed her hand, and as he gave it to her he caught sight of the handwriting. Coupled with the memories of the night that was just passed, it struck on Strath more with a keener suspicion. " You correspond with Erroll ?" he said, quickly, keep- ing the note in his hand. " I invite him to dinner, and he answers me," she said, carelessly, with a little half-suppressed yawn : " and I do it pretty often since he is so adored a friend of yours." " Is this a dinner acceptation ?" " No, a refusal, I fancy ; Milly Mostyn said something about his going back to England." She had moved her hand again as if to receive the note, but had checked herself, and lay with her head resting on her arm, with negligent grace, and her lashes drooping languidly. Nothing could be more easily indifferent than her manner, but as his eyes fastened on her, a faint color deepened the sea-shell bloom on her cheeks, and Strath- more noted it with the swift Moor-like jealousy that always run in leash with such a love as his. On his im- pulse he would have wrenched the envelope open ; honor and courtesy compelled him to restrain himself, but he did not give up the note. " Will you permit me to read this ? I have my rea- sons," he asked her. He believed she might resent, but could not refuse him. "No!" The single prohibition was uttered with disdainful non- chalance and haughty sovereignty; the superb and grace- ful indignation of a proud woman subjected to a doubt that is insult. "No? Why not? You claim your right to my confi- dence, I claim my title to yours." She raised herself upon her arm from her cushions, with questioning wonder in her eyes, and a smile of scorn upon her lips she, Marion Yavasour, to be arraigned in judg- ment by a lover who was as wax in her hands, and wlom WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 219 she could have bent to any sin, or any folly, at her word! She to be doubted, questioned, opposed! " Confidence !" she re-echoed, with a scornful curl on her lovely lips, and an angry light in her eyes, very new to them, for Marion Yavasour was by nature of a sunny, insouciant temper, rarely troubled by irritation or bitter- ness : " What confidence can be needed in such a trifle ? You have lost your senses, Cecil, I think. Certainly, since you presume to disbelieve my word, I shall not allow you to insult me by verifying it." " It is not I who have lost my senses, but you your memory, Marion," said Strathmore, the black jealousy in him leaping into sudden life : " Discourteous or not, I must doubt either your word or your recollection. This is a strangely lengthy 'dinner refusal.'" The letter which had fallen from its envelope, was of four pages closely covered with many lines. For an instant her color deepened and then died out, leaving her cheek pale, her eyes sank beneath his, and her fluent tongue was silent. Strathmore rose to his feet, grasping the letter in his hand, a hideous suspicion coiling round him, and the jealous love in him working up in silence : " Since you must be in error as regards its meaning, Lady Vavasour, do you now permit me to read this mere ' dinner refusal ?' " " No !" " And as the single word was launched from her lips in haughty denial, with the swift movement peculiar to her, she raised herself from her pile of cushions, caught the note in her hand, twisting it by a rapid action from his hold, and held it to a spirit-lamp that was burning liquid perfume on the table which stood with her coffee at her elbow. The flame caught, it flared alight, and shrivelling in a second, the note fell, a harmless heap of light-grey ashes, into the jasper saucer of the lamp, its words destroyed, its secret safe. Then she laughed softly and amusedly at her own success her mood, changing like a child's. "Amigo mio," she said, gaily, " never oppose a woman she will always outwit you ! While you have but one mode of Menace, we have a thousand resources of Finesse !" Lady Yavasour was laughing, tranquil, at her ease again, 220 STRATIIMORE; OR, now that the note was floating among the liquid perfume in ashes which could tell no tales. Done in one moment, ere he could arrest her hand or avert the flame, the action literally for that moment confounded Strathmore, and struck him dumb ; the next, the abhorred suspicion seemed written in letters of flame before his eyes. His love, though an utter slavery in its bondage, was imperious in its dark and bitter jealousy ; the blood rushed over his forehead, and his teeth clenched hard, as he saw the ashes fall into the essence, and heard her low, soft laugh of triumph : " That letter holds a secret so dear that you destroy it! So be it, then ! I will wrench it out of the man who shares it !" He moved to leave her presence, but, before he could escape her, she raised herself from her couch, and laid her hand on his arm the hand that could hold him closely as a chain of iron: " Cecil, you must be mad ! Wait and listen to me !" Every word of her voice he was used to obey as though he had no law save her will; but the very weakness of the love she had triumphed over, made its ferocity when crossed with the looming shadow of the slightest rivalry; now be threw her hand off him : "Listen! you have palmed one falsehood off on me already, why wait for another? Your own secrets you must keep as you will, but the man who shares them shall answer to me " "You are mad, Cecil!" cried Marion Yavasour again, her eyes lighting with pretty, contemptuous anger, as of a spoiled beauty crossed in her will, while the slender hand closed still on his arm with a movement that, slight as it was, might betray anxiety : " I forbid you to do any such thing! My name disputed over, as over some dancers, or rosiere's! I forbid it I will not have it!" "Let me go !" said Strathmore, so rife with passion that he scarce knew or heeded what he said: "Let me go! You have lied to me, and I will know what made the need of a lie. You burnt the letter, lest I should even see one word ; I have a right to know what those words were which must have been faithlessness +o me ; I cannot grind it from you by force I will seek it where I can, and. by God! if " WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 221 The words broke asunder unnttered ; he could not put into plain speech the hideous thought which he would have disbelieved, in the teeth of all evidence on earth or heaven, save her own witness against herself. His strength went down under the torture of the mere doubt that she could be faithless to him, and the oath died away on his lips, which were blanched as death ; his love swept aside all beyond itself; to Tier he had no pride, and he threw himself beside her, twining in his hands her loosened hair, and scorching her broAV with his breath. " I am mad, if you will ! My God ! have pity on me. I never stooped to any living thing I stoop to you ! Give a thought to another you shall not you cannot! For the love of Heaven, tell me what it is you hide ?" "No!" And she thought with all a woman's glad idolatry of power how utterly this man loved her ! " Do not trifle with me," muttered Strathmore, incohe- rently twisting round his hands, in his delirious suffering, the golden meshes of her hair, as though with that frail bond to knit her to him through life and death : " Tell me the truth the truth ! or I will wrench it from the coward who has robbed me. No man should thieve even a glance of yours, and live " The words were muttered in his throat, fierce in their menace, yet imploring in their pain ; his very life more than his life ! hung on this woman's love. She saw he was no longer to be played with; she saw that every syllable he said would be wrought out ; she saw that here with his jealous passion loosed he was no more her slave, but had become her master, and Marion Vavasour shrank from his grasp and from his gaze ; she feared the strength of what she had invoked. But she was a woman who knew well how to deal with the men she ruled. Her hand gently touched his brow, and she stooped towards him with a pitying, tender smile : "Ah, Cecil! can you not trust me even in so little? Sceptic ! you are unjust and cruel ; I but burnt that letter to spare you po>~ '" " To spare me pain ! Quick ! tell me all all !" " No," she whispered, bending till her wooing lips kissed 222 STRATIIMORE ; OR, his brow: "let it pass. You know I love you love but you ! Let it pass, my dearest !" "Never! Tell me at once or I seek him this moment !" She stooped lower still, while her fragrant breath was warm on his cheek, and her whisper stole on his ear : " Then then (let it stir no words between you, Cecil, for my sake !) but your friend was very treacherous to you, and that letter spoke a love which was as hateful to me as it was craven to you. That is all the truth ! Forgiv-e me its concealment; I would so gladly have saved you its pain !" CHAPTER XXII. THE SWOOP OF THE VULTURE. AN hour afterwards, Strathmore quitted the Bosquet de Diane, and took his way across the grounds. He walked at his usual leisurely pace, he had a cigar in his mouth, and his manner was tranquil as usual ; but a dog glancing at him would have shrunk whining and frightened away, and a stranger meeting him and looking at the deadly glitter in his eyes under their drooped lids, would have thought, "that man is bound on a merciless errand." The hour was just mid-day, the birds had ceased from song, the scythe lay among the unshaven grass, the vintagers afar off had left their work, the very leaves hung stiriess. All nature was calm and at rest all, save the same pas- sions which have drenched the laughing earth in blood, and mocked the sweet, hushed stillness of the summer skies, and made the fair day hideous with their riot, since the suns of Asia shone on the white, upturned face of the First Dead, and the curse was branded on the brow of Cain. Strathmore crossed the gardens without haste in his steps, his hand closing on a little cane ; the blood of his race ran unchanged in his veins, dark with that ruthless WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 223 wrath which had never yielded to the memory of mercy, the pravers of pity, or the rights of justice, and which had scathed all out of its path, as the scythe sweeps the seeding-grass. To the woman he had quitted he had said but little ; but he left her to revenge the coward who had robbed him, by such chastisement as men do not speak of to women. Less fully told than hinted at, less gathered by deliberate evidence than grasped in all its broad, accursed meaning, the treachery stood out black and bare before him. In his revenge he would have spared no living thing that could have risen up betwixt him and it; had he known of any darker, fuller, fouler, which his birth and breeding could have permitted, or the age and the world allowed, he would have made the man he hated drain it to the last drop. He had left her, soothing her fears, promising her no violence left her, with the passions in his blood, that in darker ages far back, had trodden out human life pitilessly and reck- lessly, as so much waste water spilt, and had scored down with unrelenting bitterness the ruthless motto of a ruthless race, " Slay ! and spare not !" He walked across the grounds alone once he glanced up. The radiant day seemed hot with flame, and the cloudless heavens looked brazen in the light. But he went onward, still calmly, leisurely as before, but with the bloodhound's thirst growing stronger and stronger within him, and set but on one goal. What are our passions, once let loose, but sleuthhounds freed from leash, which run down all before them, and hunt on even to the death ? A breadth of sward alone separated the maisonette of Lady Vavasour from the villa beyond. He opened the gates and passed on, leaving the paradise of roses behind him. Through the glades of trees, the terrace which ran before the villa was visible, and a group of men were standing there. Three of them were strangers to him, the fourth was Erroll, who was standing with a brace of set- ters at his feet, behind him the open window of the dark oak library he had just quitted, before him all the light of the summer noontide. Strathmore saw him and his hand clenched down on the cane he held, that dainty jewelled switch, fragile and t-osiiy enough for a lady's riding-whip. As the sun flick- 224 STRATTIMORE ; OR, ered through the branches on to his face it was calm and impassive, but there was a cruel smile about his mouth, and his grey eyes were black and lustrous, with a fierce, eager light. The setters as he approached gave tongue, and Erroll turned. He was talking with them of Court beauties, of Blois races, of the barcarat at Lilli Dorah's, of all the trifles and the chit-chat of an ordinary Paris day ; for we smoke and gossip and laugh and dine while our lives are making shipwreck, and all we value is drifting away to the greedy, tideless sea of a fathomless past, that will never give back its dead. As he looked up his face brightened he thought Strathmore had come for a tacit reconciliation. Enough had been said twelve hours before to have steeled him to any such feeling ; but his nature was not capable of harboring revenge ; he forgave freely as he would have forgiven now, even such epithets as men never pardon, for the sake of all those thousand memories of childhood and manhood, that were still warm about his heart, not even to be washed out, and trampled from remembrance, by the tide of a jealous love, or by the sting of a bitter feud. He looked up, a smile of pleasure lighting his eyes, which had been heavy and worn before ; and Strathmore saw him as he came up the slope terrace the man who had once flung himself in his defence into the near grip of death, who had been with him in shifting scenes of danger, pleas- ure, revel, or privation, and who had trusted him and shared his trust, as though the same mother had borne them, since they had been children together playing with fallen chestnuts, or wading in the shallow estuaries under the woods of White Ladies, far away in England. Strathmore saw him, and looked at him with a relentless smile about his lips, and his hand closed tighter on the switch, with which he moved out of his path the curling tendrils of the clematis. The revenge of men of his blood had always been swift and silent, but they had always tasted it, slowly yet thirstily, drop by drop, with the fierce delight of the vulture, as it sweeps and circles above its prey, before it swoops down to wrench and tear. He went up the terrace-slope leisurely and lifted hia hat with suave courtesy, the soft ceremony in which men WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 225 of his blood had ever clothed their deadliest approach, the silky velvet glove which they had ever drawn over the merciless iron hand whose grip was death. Erroll stood leaning against the side of the window; he could not make the first movement towards a tacit recon- ciliation, but he was ready to meet, to more than meet one. He only needed Strathmore's hand stretched out to him. in silence, to give his own, and mutely forgive the worst words which had been uttered twelve hours before. " Pardon, messieurs ! said Strathmore, quietly passing the other men, while they parted to let him approach ; as the sun fell on it, his face wore a strange look, out of keep- ing with the easy sauvity of his manner. He moved on to the library window, where Erroll stood, with the sun- light full upon his face. Calmly, as though he tendered them a cigar, Strathmore glanced round him at the three other men, with a bitter evil sneer about his lips : " Mes- sieurs ! is there any answer save one customary to a lie ?" -The men young fellows surprised and embarrassed, hesitated; Erroll looked up, the angry blood rushing hotly to his face ; but he stretched out his hand with an involun- tary gesture. " Strathmore ! you are in gross error ! Come within here a moment; I must have one more word with you." "Words are not my answer!" And as the syllables left his lips, hurled out in blind and deadly fury, he lifted his right arm, the jewelled handle of the cane flashed in the sunlight, the switch whirled through the air like a flail, with a shrill sound, and in the swiftness of a second had struck a broad, livid mark across Erroll's brow, brutal as a death-stroke, in- effaceable as shame. " That for your treachery to me. I will have your life for your love for her!" The words were hissed in Erroll's ear as the blow fell, low but distinct as the hiss of a snake, chill as steel, re- lentless as death. As he reeled back, for the moment rtaggered and blinded, Strathmore's eyes fastened on the swollen crimson bar, where the switch had cut its mark, with the steady, pitiless greed for revenge that, ted to the full, yet clamored still for more. In the blazing glare of the hot noon the vile, ineffaceable insult seemed stamped 226 STRATIIMORE; OR, on the living flesh in letters of flame, which nothing in past, or present, or future, could ever cover or wash out, for which blood alone could ever atone . . . And Strath- more laughed low to himself a chill and mocking laugh. Breaking the switch in two, he threw the fragments down at the feet of the man he had struck, his eyes glit- tering exultant, the veins in his face black and swollen in the fury of his wrath, a sneering smile set about his lips, as he turned to the others with a slight bow of careless courtesy : "Messieurs! you are my witnesses " But Erroll's hand struck his lips to silence with a force that would have sent a weaklier man hurled backward to the earth: "By God! you must answer this." The oath rattled in his throat, his face was white, save where the red cut stood out across his brow ; his voice was hoarse and his breath stifled as the words gasped out; the suddenness of the foul indignity seemed to have para- lyzed in him all save the sheer instinct of its revenge, and to have numbed and stricken even that. "With pleasure!" said Strathmore, while he drew on his right-hand glove, slowly and gently. "Where?" The single word came from Erroll's throat hoarse and stifled with passion. ' In the Deer-park of the Bois, by the pond, if it suit you." 'Your hour?" 'At sunset to-night? I am engaged until then." 'I shall await you " 'Soil!" With these few rapid words all was said ; all had been done and spoken in less than sixty seconds, swift as thought and breathless as passion, staggering and bewil- dering those who looked on like the sudden flash of light- ning in their eyes. Then he turned, bowed low to those standing by, passed along the terrace, and took his way across the lawn back to the Bosquet de Diane. He was well content. Half his vengeance was wrought, the r the rest of the dwelling. The woman preceded him, herself strangely silent and subdued, and drawing aside the muslin curtains of abed which stood, in foreign mode, in an alcove, motioned him thither, without a word, to her side. At the. gesture he paused involuntarily. "Good God! is she ill?" The servant looked at him surprised and her voice sank to a whisper : 256 STRATHMORE ; OR, "111? I thought your lordship knew she died at dawn to-day 9 " -Dead!" The word rattled in his throat, he staggered back against the wall, and leaned there, his face covered, his breath thick and labored ; another life lay heavy on his soul! "A few weeks ago, my lord," went on the woman, while her voice faltered and grew thick with tears, " a letter came from Paris leastways, it was that post-mark with a strange writing on the envelope, and inside of it another letter from Major Erroll. Mademoiselle Lucille read the note from my master first, and as she read her face grew scared and awful, with a piteous look in her eyes, like a lamb's they're leading to slaughter. She seized the letter it had come in, and her eyes had scarce fell on it before she gave a cry like a death-cry, my lord, and sunk down, all cold and senseless and crouched together." The woman's voice stopped with a low gasping sob: " We did all we could, my lord indeed we did ; but the minute the doctor see her, he said as there was no hope ; that a sudden shock had shattered her brain, and that the cruellest thing to wish for her was life. Oh, my lord ! and so young as she was ! She never knew any one of us again, not even the child, but lay there, weeks through, with no sense or sight in her beautiful eyes. She sank slowly of sheer exhaustion, fading off like a (lower. And, at length, at sunrise this morning she died. I suppose your lordship will know what has chanced to my master? His letter that she held clenched in her hand, the doctor took and locked up with other papers, but that in the strange handwriting was left, and I made bold to read it. It came from a gentleman, w r ho wrote that Major Erroll had been shot in some duel at Paris, and had bade him as wrote it to enclose that letter to Mademoiselle de Vocqsal if he fell. I know nothing else, my lord ; I only know that the news killed my mistress." She ceased; and each of her homely words struck like steel to the heart of her hearer, staining his soul with the guilt of two lives blotted out by his hand from the living. DEAD! Had he known her and loved her well, the word could scarce have echoed more hideously in his ears than now, when it met him on the threshold mocking the atone- WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND 257 mcnt that he came to offer, and striking paralyzed and powerless the soul which in its presumption had thought to strike the balance with its sin, and cover crimj by cost- less expiation. DEAD ! He leaned against the wall, with his head bowed in silence ; the direst agony that racks men in their hours of bereavement was mercy to this man's remorse. Then he raised his head slowly and moved towards the couch, whilst the woman turned away so that she did not look upon his face; she, who had only heard of his close friendship with the dead man, thought he was moved by grief at his friend's loss, and his rank made his sorrow sacred and unapproachable in her eyes. He drew near the bed, impelled by some resistless impulse to look on the work he had wrought, urged by that strange self-chastise- ment which forces us to drink to the uttermost dregs irom the cup of letribution. The pale lamp-light fell on the white and delicate couch, fit bier and pall for the k,arly youth thus early smitten to the tomb, and on the bed she lay dead in the opening summer of her life dead like a lily rudely broken in its bloom. The love faithful in life was faithful unto death ; she had gone to rejoin her husoand. The lifeless form lay there in its ethereal and solemn love- liness, her hands tightly folded on her breast, her eyes closed as though in slumber, bearing no sign of the De- stroyer's hand, save in the hue that blanched the lips, on which, even now, a sigh seemed set, a voiceless prayer suspended. And in strange contrast with her mother's mournful and motionless repose, her head pillowed on the heart that had no throb for her, her brow resting on the arm that gave her no embrace, her breath leaving its fresh warmth on the lips that answered her by no caress, lay a young child sleeping. Life in its earliest bud, side-by-side with Life stricken in its fullest bloom ! the light golden locks commingling with the dark unbound waves of her mother's hair, the flushed cheek, with its rose-leaf hue, lying against ihe one now colorless and cold, the soft and dreamless sleep of childhood beside the chill and hopeless slumber of the tomb. " The child would not leave her, my lord," whispered the woman: "She sobbed herself to sleep there trying to waken her mother, and I had not the heart to stir her. 22* 05S STRATIIMORE; OR, Poor orphan! she is but an infant; only two years old, and a lov-child ! What will become of her?" " Her future shall be my care." His voice sounded dull and hoarse in his own ear as he answered the brief words ; standing there, the hideous mockery of the atonement he had come to offer seemed to arise and jibe and gibber in his face before the holy hush of death, and the hand of God seemed stretched to sever him from those whom he had slain, and bid him stand aloof, alone on earth, with no companion'save his crime. He was too late ! Too LATE ! The words seemed wailing through the air the eternal requiem of every sin ; and as he stood there, with his head bowed in the faint lamp-light of the chamber of death, the young child, waking from her sleep stirred as from some joyous dream, and pushed her fair hair from her eyes, and laughed up in innocence and gladness in his face. With an involuntary gesture he spurned her from him as though pome accursed thing had crossed his vision her lips wore her father's smile. Stricken by that look as by the sword of an avenging angel, he turned and went out into the silent night ; and in his ear the ceaseless moaning of the distant seas and the weary cry of the winds, wandering and without rest, followed in his path with one eternal wail "Too late! too late !" CHAPTER XXYIII. "GOOD AND EVIL AS TWO TWINS CLEAVING TOGETHER." " Yor drink the bitterness of Remorse ? Taste the sweetness of Revenge." These words stole softly to his ear in the stillness as he paced down the ruined cloisters of the Abbey, brooking in on the far-off lulling of the seas and the hoot of the night-birds near. They pierced so strangely to the secret of his thoughts, broke in so suddenly on the solitude, in which no living thing was near him, that he started and WROUGHT EY HIS OWN HAND. 259 looked up with, for one instant, what in a weake* man 'night have been akin to superstition. The fitful moonlight, slanting grayly in through the low pointed arches, fell across the figure of a woman leaning against the moss- grown pillar of the cloister side; and in the dress, worn something as Arabs wear their garments, with the vivid colors which marked her tribe, and in the profound melan- choly of the Sclavonian features, he recognized the Bohe- mian, Redempta, who thus crossed his path for the third time like some fixed recurrent fate. His steps were involuntarily arrested, and he paused, looking at her in the moonlight, whilst her gaze steadily met his, without boldness yet without fear, with something compassionate in its mournful fixity; and as she moved forward, where a brighter streak of the moon's rays fell, he saw that the olive bronze of her cheek had paled, and that her deep-set eyes were alit with a luminous gleam : " Well ! " she said, slowly, " does the kiss burn like poison no\v? Was sin born of the love, and a crime of the sin, and a bitter curse of the crime ? Were the words of lledempta right?" He flung her out of his path with unconscious violence ; the passions that were at work within him made this mocking travesty of them seem scarce so much insult as jibe: "Out of my way, woman devil whichever you are ! " " More devil than woman, for, like you, I hate ! " The answer came slowly and bitterly from her lips with menacing meaning ; the ferocity of his grasp and his words seemed to have swept unnoticed over her, and to have stirred her no more than the sweep of the forest wind past her cheek. Her intonation caught his ear, and he turned and looked more closely at her features, on which were written the dark passions of the Sclavonic character, masked by that melancholy composure natural to the Eastern blood which mingled in her veins. He saw that this woman's words were not the offspring of charlatanry, if they might be those of a maniac's wanderings, and he paused, in- stinctively drawn by the fate which seemed to have inter- woven her knowledge and her actions with his own. Of that moment's pause she seized advantage, and leaned 2CO STRATIIMORE ; OR. towards him, changing her slow and imperfect English for her own swift, mellow Czeschcn " Listen ! You are an English noble, rich and full of power I a wandering Czec, whom your laws call a tramp and your scorn calls a vagrant, and yet yet listen ! I, the daughter of Phara, the gipsy, can give you what your wealth cannot buy nor your power command. I can give you your vengeance ! " By the faint yellow light she saw in his eyes rise the steej-like glitter of his dangerous wrath as he thrust her back : " You are mad, or an impostor ! Let me pass, woman ! I am in no mood for fooling ! " A smile bitter as his own crossed her face, and she did not move from his path : "Am I? Look in my face and see! Listen first, my lord, ere you judge ! If the words of Redempta were error that she spoke to you long ago in Bohemia, then say she speaks falsely now ; if you did not find, as she foretold to you a brief while since in France, that your love, changed to hatred, will know no rest for its throes till it is slaked in revenge, then believe that she lies to you now. But if you found these things true, then judge her by them; as true is her hatred for her whom you hate, as sure is her power to point you your vengeance. Say ! were they truth or error? Say ! " She waited for his answer, and he was silent, where she stood fronting him in the dim moonlight of the ruined cloister; a bitter wrath was in his eyes, a haughty menace on his lips, but the melodious appealing voice of the Bohemian carried its own conviction, and in a measure disarmed his anger; her words struck too closely home to the curse he bore within him to be heard idly or with scorn, and the soul of this man, in whom much that \va.s great commingled with dark and evil crimes, was too in- stinctively true to itself and to others to sully itself by a lie even to a beggar. She saw the advantage gained, and pursued it, her voice growing swifter, and sunk to a whisper, whilst the untutored poetry of her natural speech lent dignity, almost solemnity, to the Bohemian tongue m which she spoke : " They were truth ! and you have known ine^r bitterness WROtGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 261 Listen, then ! I have followed you here to your own country to be heard, for what you vainly seek I can point out, what I vainly crave you can work. Listen! The worm burrows where the tiger cannot reach ; the tiger tears and rends to death where the worm would be trampled and crushed underfoot; let them both work together! Will you bold your revenge in your own grasp, to let its blow fall, slowly, surely, sharply, at what hour you will 1 Will you shatter the jewels from her breast, the smile from her lips, the laughter from her eyes, the world from her feet? Will you hold her fate in your grip, meting it out at your will, crushing all that wanton loveliness which has betrayed you, as you might crush this velvet-painted moth in your hand ? If you will, then, my lord, listen to the words of Redempta, who, though anhungered and athirst, a wanderer on the earth, without home or people, poor, and stricken, and desolate, will ask no reward of you save one one! to see her suffer!" Her voice sank lower and lower, stealing out in the hushed night with a terrible and ghastly meaning; her hand clenched unconsciously upon his arm, her eyes gleamed with a lurid, thirsty light, and the immutable and melancholy calm that veiled her features, as it veils the faces of the Easterns beneath the throes of strong emotion, only lent but a more deadly strength to the last words than the wildest curse of passion could have carried with them.- To doubt her was no longer possible ; and he answered her nothing where they stood in the sickly autumn moonlight, the air around them filled with the faint and mournful soughing of the sea, and the lull of the winds among the cloisters of the dead Dominicans. " To see her suffer!" It was the lust of his own soul this merciless and brutal longing to draw within his grasp the vile and lovely thing who had been his madness and his curse, and watch his vengeance work, and fester, and eat its way into her very soul, whilst he stood calmly by, as men in ancient days stood to watch the lovely limbs of women stretched and broken on the rack. For Strathmore, who had been born pitiless, had now become cruel. The Bohemian was silent also; she seemed to have lost all memory of his presence or her errand; and when she 2^2 STRATIIMORE; OR, leaned against the broken archway, her eyes were vaguely looking onward into the darkening night, and as her hands moved unconsciously over her chain of Egyptian berries, her lips muttered still : " Thou knowest how I have toiled to keep my oath. Grant me but this but this! To see her suffer ere I die suffer as she made thee. Yengeance is righteous!" A smile more evil than the worst curse that ever lodged on human lips, came upon Strathmore's face where the watery light of the moon fell on it. Having tasted guilt, he had ceased to abhor guilt; racked by remorse, he was still athirst for added crime, and the fires that seethed his soul neither chastened nor purged, but only burned what was iron into steel. "Righteous?" he said, with a sneer, while his voice was labored with the passions roused by this woman's tempting, but suppressed by her presence : No! it is hellish. But what matter? it is sweet. Answer me, impostor or devil, whichever you be why do you hate?" A weary smile, haggard as grief, crossed her lips for one moment, and a strange softness trembled over her face. " Why, why !" she cried. And the melancholy Czeschen words rose plaintively upon the silence : "Why do women ever hate, sorrow, travail, rejoice, lament? Because they love! I loved, I, the vagrant, the gipsy, the fortune- teller, whom delicate women shrink from as from pollution, loved, what she, the aristocrat, the courted darling, the beauty of courts, robbed from me. I loved oh God! it is not of the past. I love still ! my beloved, my beloved !" Her head drooped upon her breast with a low, gasping sob, and her form trembled as though she shivered at the wind ; then she threw back her head and stood erect with her stag-like gesture, the light glittering flame-like in her eyes, the dark blood burning flame-like on her brow. "We met in Galicia. He was an Austrian soldier, a noble like yourself, and he found beauty in me, and I loved him as the chill, pampered, luxurious women of his world never love. I was his toy, but he he was my god! What others called my shame, was my glory ; what others held my sin, was my crown; and I said in my soul, 'f have lived enough, since I have lived to be thus dear to him.' I quitted my "ribe to become his mistress; and WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 263 when Lannarston left the province, and went to Vienna, 1 followed him and he loved me still, though where he once gave me days, he gave me hours. And when he went to Southern France, I forgot my people and my country, and followed him still thither and still he loved me, though where he once gave me hours, he gave me moments. It is ever so with men's love ! And there he saw HER. By night, as I crouched under the myrtle shrubs of her villa, to see his shadow, where it fell, I saw him in her gardens ; by day, hidden under the pines, watching for his horse's gallop, I saw them riding together. She beguiled him even as she beguiled you ; he loved her, and he was lost to me forever ! For a while, I know scarcely how long, time was a blank to me. I remember nothing; people who tended me said afterwards that I went mad it may have been so. The first thing I re- member is, when I crawled out and found my way to his house, there was a crowd about the crowd whispering and awe-stricken ; and when I pushed my way through them, I saw him " A shiver ran through her frame, and her voice dropped; she waited one instant, then summoned back the proud and mournful calmness with which she spoke : "I saw him, dead, shot by his own hand, and those about him were saying how she had laughed and taunted him the night before, and how, maddened by her, he had left her presence and ended the life that she had made worthless. She had slain him ! and when they told her she felt no remorse for her work, but went to a ball in her diamonds and her loveliness with a laugh on her lips. And by his corpse, when it lay there, wet, pale, its beauty shattered, and its glory stricken, I took my oath to God and him to know no rest until I had revenged him!" She paused again ; and in the silence between them thene sounded the melancholy lulling of the ocean like the endless ebb and flow of human passions, ever renewing, never at rest. Then her chaunting and melodious tones took up their burden once more : "And I have kept my vow. I joined my own people again ; but, unseen, undreamt of by her, I have followed in her track, groping in the dark for some dropped clue, souic broken thread, to guide me to the redemption of my 264 STRATIIMORE : OR, oath. She never saw me save once, when she bade her hireling strike me out of her path like a dog; yet I never let her escape me, but followed ever in her shadow, as her doom should follow a murderess. Oftentimes my errand seemed hopeless, and I said in my heart, ' Fool ! can the field-lark cope with the falcon ? can the emmet destroy the gazelle? how then canst thou reach her?' Yet ever again I took patience and courage, since ever in my ear his voice seemed crying ' Revenge! revenge!' and when my soul fainted because of the weariness of its travail, I thought of him as I had beheld him, driven to his death by her, with his beautiful face shattered and ghastly, and bathed in its blood! Then I gathered my strength afresh, and afresh pursued her, blindly, but yet in security, for I believed that the hour would come when the God of "Ven- geance at length would deliver her into my hand. And lo ! the hour at last is here. Yet, now that I have the knowledge, my power is too weak to turn it against her. I, poor and lowly, and whose voice would never be heard, cannot use what I have found. But you, English lord, can do with it what you will. I, the Vagrant, and you, the Noble, both hate ; let the great take the key to his ven- geance from the obscure. The worm has burrowed, let the tiger rend!" Her voice ceased, and there was silence again between them, whilst the winds swept with hollow echo through the arched cloisters where they stood, these strange com- panions thus strangely drawn together, with the great chasm of social difference yawning between them, only bridged by the community of hatred, which, like the com- muuity of love, binds together those who are farthest asunder. He had heard her throughout without interrup- tion, and as the moonlight fell about him she saw the varied passions that swept across his face, and the tiger glare darkening his eyes. As dried wood ready for the burning leaps up to the touch of flame, so the lust of revenge which was within him leapt up to the woman's words, "To see lier suffer !" He, too, was athirst for it. All that was evil and merciless latent in his nature and there was very much had fastened on one desire ; to Avreak the fullness of some hideous revenge where he had blindly doted. And he stood now silent, while many WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 265 thoughts coursed through his brain, larvae of evil which the hotbed of remorse was swiftly nourishing to deeds. A profound and rapid reader of human character and motive, this woman's soul was bare before him as a book, and in it be read truth. Her history brought back to him that which had once been told him at Yernoi^eaux of .Marc Lennartson's death and of its cause, and he saw that the heart of the Bohemian, untamed and untutored, knowing no god but its love, and no heaven but its hate, would make no erring flight to the quarry of its vengeance. He saw that this woman held, or believed she held, the key to the redemption of her oath ; and he saw that, weak with her sex's tenderness, yet thereby strong as her sex ever is, ignorant, malleable as wax in his guidance, yet with the tenacity of an Indian in tracking the trail she followed, she would be his tool to work as he would. For one moment he paused ; the pride of rank and of habitual reserve, rather, perchance, than any nobler prin- ciple, shrinking from association with the Gitana, rejecting the employment of one thus far beneath him, loathing his instrument because he must make it even with himself if he once stooped to use it. That moment passed ; then he motioned her toward him : " I will hear you ; follow me." And she followed him in silence clown the cloister as he went onwards to the entrance of the Abbey which stood out, a grey, sombre, stately pile, in the moonlight that was shining white upon it's delicate fretwork and its pointed windows, and leaving deep in shadow its masses of Nor- man stone and battled wall, shrouded in their vast elm- forests. An hour afterwards the dark figure of the Bohemian moved swiftly and silently across the park of White Ladies, taking the road which led out to the little hamlet beyond the gates, and at the window of the library where his audience had been given to this strange, unfitting guest, Strathmore stood leaning out to catch the coolness of the autumn-night fire seemed on his brain, fire in his blood, for the hatred of men of his race had ever out- weighed and outstripped the sweetness and madness of their love: and as a sleuthhound scents the trail of what he would hunt downward to its death, so he now saw 28 266 STRATHMORE; OR, shadowed out before him the sure track of a deadly vengeance. Here, beneath the roof of the Dominican Abbey, which once had sheltered both, both seemed beside him the woman who had betrayed him, the man whom he had slain. The sweat of a great horror gathered thick upon his brow, flee where he would these must ever pursue him, wander where he would, forever on his lips must burn the delicious lie of her guilty kiss forever in his path must rise the spectre of that death-agony which he had gazed on with a smile. For Conscience is God! and hide us where we will, it tracks us out, and we must look whither it bids, we must listen to that which it utters, we must behold that which it brings, in the reeling revel as in the silent dawn, in the dull stupor of sleep as in the riotous din of orgies from its pursuit there is no escape, from its tribunal there is no appeal. And where he stood, while through the silence there seemed to echo the mocking music of Marion Vavasour's sweet, accursed laugh, and down the hush of night there seemed to tremble the dying sigh of him whom he had murdered at her bidding ; good and evil strove together in his soul ; the remorse that should have purified like fire, and the hatred which, like fire, would destroy. Atonement! his soul hungered for it. It had been shattered from his hand to-night; yet, later on, it might be wrested back. If he gathered, by his will and by his wealth, about the young child whom he had orphaned, all that earth can know of gladness, shelter, riches, tender- ness ; if, for her father's sake and in her father's trust, ho made her future cloudless as the life of the flower which but opens to the light to rejoice through the sunny length of a fair summer day, and made her lips only speak his name in gratitude and blessing, the sin might be atoned? He had loved the man whom he had brutally slain : through the young life given by the dead, should exoia- tion to the dead be wrought. Expiation to the dead ; but to the living Vengeance The lust for it was in his blood as strong as at that hour when his hand had been upon her throat, her life within his grasp and the power of vengeance lay now within bis grip. " To see her suffer" suffer, and plead fov mercy, WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 267 and be denied, even as she had denied it, and find he- loveliness of no avail to shield her from the doom of an unerring and pitiless fate ! For this his soul was at hirst ; to its purpose his life was set; he saw it looming; through the darkness of the future ; the pursuit in which his speed would never slacken, in the success of which his will would never relent. In this hour, when he stood alone in the autumn night, with no companion save the distant lulling of the weary seas ; of his remorse was begotten his atonement, of his hatred his revenge. Twin-born, must not one strangle the other in the birth ? Or, twin-nurtured unto strength and life, could both pros- per side by side ? CHAPTER XXIX. THE FRAIL ARGOSY WHICH WAS FREIGHTED WITH ATONEMENT. FOR a year Strathmore was not seen in Europe. Humor, which must ever lie rather than keep silence, babbled now and again remembrance of him ; he had been seen in Luxor ; he had been met on the Amazon, or the Ganges; he had been heard of as dwelling at Damascus, and studying the buried learning of the East ; he bad been slain in a midnight fray with dragomans close by the Gates of the Kings of Egypt these were among the things that rumor babbled of him, and that rumor lied, for none were true. Those who knew him best deemed that he shunned the world, and had sought solitude ; and these also erred : for Strathmore was of a nature which masked anguish with an iron strength and an impassive calm, and to which the artificial atmosphere, the feverish crowds, the profound ambitions of the great world, were the necessities of existence ; of the air of the mountain and the valley he !.i ;ul ever wearied; his breath was the breath of cities. Whatever of returning peace the eternal calm of mountains aud the freshness of trackless forests may lend to the man 268 STRATIIMORE; OR, whom the world has wronpred, they have none for the man Pelf-doomed by a self-chosen guilt. And now solitude was abhorrent to him to be alone with Nature, man must he at peace with himself. Solitude! while over the still, starlit, pathless ocean, in the hush of night, there seemed to steal the quiver of that dying sigh! Solitude! while the crimson glare of the desert sunlight streaming from the brazen skies seemed reddened with the blood that he had shed ! Solitude ! while in the fairest fall of the tropic night there seemed to look into his those dying eyes, with their look of blind, beseeching pain! His solitude was hell! Yet for a year he was absent from Europe, and though many babbled of him none truly saw him, or knew whither he had gone. He was absent for a year. For he held, what had been ever the creed of those of his blood, that vengeance accomplished, is crime acquitted, and remorse dulled. And patiently and ruthlessly as the sleuthhound follows in the trail of its prey, he followed the track of his revenge. For his own agony had not taught him mercy, and in pur- suit he was pitiless. In the betrayal of his love he had suffered enough to have chastened his sin to its full due, the most rigid moral- ist might have compassionated this man beneath the tor- tures of his guilt-stained passion. It had not been love with Strathmore, it had been worship blind, and insen- sate, if you will, but one in which his whole being had been absorbed, which had cast down unheeding every sacrifice at her feet, which would have died for her, content if his last breath had been spent upon her lips, and which had laid waste his life as no merely sensual passion could have ever done, when he had learned that his love had betrayed him, her fealty forsaken him, that her kiss, her sigh, her smile, her loveliness were divine lies as free to all the world as to himself! Therefore was the bate wherewith he bated her great as the love wherewith he had loved her. Born with that certain taint of cruelty which belongs often to a character in which love of power is dominant, and which an imperious, negligent egotism renders indifferent to all not touching on itself, the latent trait, hitherto negative or dormant, rose under the pres- WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 26 i) sure of a maddened passion and remorse into an accursed thirst for retaliation. Ere this he would not have inflicted pain save when compelled to deal it to clear his path or tc advance an aim ; now, the germ, grown into a tree, the seed sprung to a disease, the passive quality that had lain in his nature, grew active, coldness ripened into cruelty, and he set himself with pitiless purpose to work such ruin as he should watch and taste and prolong to slow pro- tracted pain, and deal out as though his hand and his will had but to wield the iron flail of destiny. Blindly as Othello had he worshipped what he loved ; ruthlessly as Othello he was now athirst to crush her out with his own hand where none could gaze on the loveli- ness which had betrayed him. For there is no cruelty with which passion has not been allied; there is no ven- geance so remorseless as that which has its birth in love that has turned to hate. And although his soul had been bowed and bent under the weight of its agony, as steel in the hand and the flame of the smithy, it had but grown like the steel in the ordeal, the keener to strike, the surer to slay. Because a ceaseless remorse ate like fire into his soul, he clung but the closer to his vengeance; because an anguish of regret smote his strength till it sickened and reeled, in the torture of his lonely hours he reared his strength but the more, to gather afresh the reins of fate into his grasp, and build up with his own hand the struc- tures of expiation and of chastisement. Strathmore, great in much, and guilty in far more, was very human ; for human nature, with many touches of deity in it, has yet far more of devil, and is a tree of which ma/ be written, " Sed quantum vertice ad auras, /Etnerias tautum radice in Tartara tendit." And of the few boughs which stretch to heaven how many fibres strike to helll Where the Atlantic waves wash on the western shore, and the headlands are clad with ivy and trailing honey- suckle ; where the white surf foams up on the ribbed, pearly fcands, and in the shadows of the hollowed rocks, there ever sounds from dawn to sunset the delicate music of 23* 270 STRATHMORE; OR, birds' voices mingling with the murmur of the seas--wag sheltered the young life which Strathmore's crime had orphiinrd in its opening. It was a fitting place wherein for childhood to grow up, free as the winds which swept over the ocean, joyous as the white-winged sea-birds which cleft their path through the sunlight this place on the western sea-board, with the melody of its waves sounding through the day and night, with its warm breezes blowing over golden gorse and purple heather, with its snowy breakers dashing on the rocks, and with its broad blue waters tossing seaweed in the light of a summer's noon. Here, where the boughs of her trees drooped almost to the edge of the sheltered sunny bay in St. George's Chan- nel, and through her opened windows on a summer-dawn, came the voices of the fishermen, and the sound of the sea, and the piping of the waking birds, dreamily mingled in one pleasant music, lived the one, who filled her dead parent's place to Erroll's young child Strathmore's mother, Lady Castlemere. Although he had given to her but negligent regard, a cold ceremonial of attachment, his mother had loved him (not in his childhood or his youth, for she had then been a political leader absorbed in her great party, and had yielded to none, that tenderness which, had he known it, might, perchance, have done much to abate the evil of his character), but proudly and warmly now that she followed his brilliant career from her solitude by the western shores, whither she had gone when age and delicacy of health had made the great world distaste- ful, and had softened that haughty chillness which came with her Norman blood. A stately and noble woman still, with that which had been unyielding in her nature rendered touchingly gentle under the hand of Time, which mellows whilst it destroys, she left the proud station of Marchioness of Castlemere to her elder son's wife, and merged her own ambitions into those of Strathmore, whom she saw seldom, but of whom the world told her much. She had bitterly mourned when she heard of the slavery into which a woman's beauty had fettered him, and had shuddered aghast at that deadly tragedy the crime of Cain which the world passed over with a light forgiving name. But in his guilt she loved him more truly, per WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 271 chance, than she had ever done ; and in his guilt his thoughts turned to her. It was his mother to whom he had delegated, and who had accepted, that trust which the death of the wife had rendered it alone possible to fulfil to the child ; and in pro- portion to the remorse which gnawed to his heart's core with every remembrance of the man whom he had mur- dered, was his almost morbid craving to fulfil to its utter- most breadth and depth that which he looked on as a request to be obeyed sacredly and unceasingly, as the sole atonement that lay in his power to render to the dead. If you have once known what it is to recall, in a too-late repentance, cruel words spoken, harsh thoughts uttered, to one whom you loved well and who has gone from you forever beyond hearing of your prayer, and to lavish your care on horse, or dog, or flower that he or she had trea- sured, in your poor, miserable, futile longing for some atonement, or cleaving to some relic of the dead, then you know in some faint shadow of its bitterness that which he now felt that on which he now acted. The heart of his mother yearned to him in his crime and his remorse. For his sake, and at his wish, she accepted the guardianship of Erroll's young child ; he coupled it with the condition first, that the child as she grew up should be taught to look upon him as her friend and guardian, and, again, that she should never be told her father's name. So, alone, could none unfold to her the history of her father's death ; so, alone, could she grow up ignorant that the hand which fostered and sheltered her was stained with her father's blood. It was easy to accomplish this. Erroll's marriage had been known to none ; the clergyman of the obscure village where the ceremony had been accomplished, was dead ; his wife had still borne her maiden name ; the servants, the doctor, and the vicar at White Ladies had looked on the offspring of their union as a "love-child," and there were no others who ever knew of her birth. Accordingly, when the young Lucille was secretly removed and placed with Lady Castlemere, under her mother's Hungarian name as an orphan whom she had adopted, and to whom her son had been appointed guardian, into a matter of so little moment none inquired, and his mother's protection of her 272 STRATIIMORE; OR, excluded any coarser supposition as to Strathmore's rela- tionship to her, which, under other circumstances, might perchance have been mooted, to her disadvantage in later years. On her he settled, independently of himself, a considerable sum, more than sufficient for all needs of her nurture and education, and, in case of his death, provided that she should inherit largely of his wealth. He willed that if she grew to womanhood she should hold his name in love and gratitude, ignorant of the heritage of wrong she owed to him ; he willed that there should be one innocent life on earth unaware of the guilt which lay upon his soul. And here, too, the will of the dead strengthened and sanctioned his own ; Erroll had written: "Never let her know that it was by your hand I fell." A wish of his was now more sacred to the one who had slain him, than all the laws of God and Man which he had broken ! The arrangements with his mother had been made before he quitted England, and the child had been two years in the dower-house of Silver-rest, happy as a joyous childhood ever is from the sunrise of its careless, cloudless days to the sunset of its peaceful, dreamless nights ; happy with the sea-weeds for her treasures, and the yellow gorse for her wealth, and the hushing of the seas for her slumber- song, yet it might have been whimsically fancied with the regret of her mother's loss vaguely told in the wistful gaze of her fair eyes, and the shadow of her father's dark and early doom left in the touching and unconscious sadness which stole like a fate over her young face in sleep or in repose. She had been there two years when, in the late summer, Strathmore's yacht "Sea Foam," bringing him, as most believed, from the trackless forests and buried cities of Mexico, came to anchor in the little western bay, after her long run across the Atlantic, before she went down Channel. He landed, and went on alone to Silver-rest in the morning- light. Far as the eye could reach stretched the deep, still waters of the bay ; the white sails of his yacht and of the few fishing skiffs in the offing stood out distinct and glancing in the sun ; over the bluffs and in all the clefts of rock the growing grass blew and flickered in the breeze ; and as he crossed the sands the air was fragrant with the scent of wild flowers that grew down to the water's edge. But to WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 275 note the-e tilings a man must be in unison with the world ; to love them he must be in unison with himself. Strathmore scarce saw them as he went onward ; all that he beheld was the Future and the Past, the vengeance which should stand in the stead to him of all that he had forfeited, and the crime which gnawed unceasingly at his soul, as the vulture at the living entrails of the doomed. Outwardly Strathmore was unchanged; the cold, urbane manner, the chill, keen brilliance natural to him were unaltered; he was a courtier and a man of the world ; for twenty years to come he would not change perceptibly ; but in character he had altered much ; or rather to speak more truly his nature had leapt up from its repose like a lion from its sleep. An agony of repentance had shaken his soul to the dust, rousing it forever from the calm egotism in which he had bade it lie ; a guilty passion had swept over his life like a whirlwind, smiting from his hands forever the curb with which he had boasted, god-like, to rein his passions at his will. The temple which he had built unto himself had been riven to the ground by the thunderbolts of the storm ; a holier from its ruins might yet have arisen, but that with his own hands he chose to fashion the twin structures of Retribution and Expiation. Briefly, Strath- more had grown at once less cold and more pitiless. Aye ! and though the whole creed of his pride had been scattered like leaves before the wind before the test of a great temptation, though the soul which had haughtily held all human error aloof and in disdain, had succumbed to the first attack of passion, and had wrought a foul crime as calmly as a righteous act, Strathmore altered not in this; Ijfe was still to be moulded by his will, and by his decree he held still that he should rule fate even as Deity. He went this morning whither, in his yearning love for the man whose blood was on his hands, he had centred his sole chance and choice of expiation on the frail life of a young child. As he walked onward over the wet, smooth sand, he came into a sheltered semicircle in the rocks, part of the grounds of Silver-rest, where the trailing plants were thick and odorous, forming a hanging screen of flowers, through which the sun-rays played upon the pools, and on the boulders that glowed deep red where the. water had splashed them wet ; and here he stopped, for lying on ohe 274 STRATHMORE; OR, wild ivy full length, with two setters beside him, he saw a boj of some ten years old, Lionel Caryll, the son of one of his sisters by an ill-fated mesalliance, who, early left an orphan, had always been brought up by Lady Castlemere. The boy started, rose, and stood shyly silent ; he had seen but little of Strathmore, and of that little he was afraid. He was a handsome child of the true English type, with a fair, tanned skin, and a mane of fair, tangled hair. Strathmore put out his hand carelessly to him, he disliked and never noticed children. " How are you, Nello ?" The boy, shy still, did not answer, and Strathmore passed onward, putting aside a quantity of creepers which, hanging from the shelf of rock above, obstructed his progress. But the boy sprang forward with an eager gesture: " Stop ! please pray ! you will wake her!" "Wake what?" ' : Wake her! and she was so tired." Strathmore instinctively looked down, deeming that the buy's care referred to some pet setter or retriever. Amongst the long grass under the ledge of rock, with the sun-light streaming fitfully through the leaves upon her, with her arms above her head, and her limbs lying in the pliant, unconscious grace of childhood and of, sleep, there at his feet lay the child he had last seen at the death-bed of her mother. Her clasped hands held a long trail of ivy, her fair hair was wreathed in with a childish crown of wood- violets, and her face was turned towards him, with the dark lashes resting on its warm, flushed cheeks ; and in it's loveliness, still almost that of infancy, the shadow of her father's fate, a presage or a heritage of woe. Strathmore paused, and a shudder ran through his frame ; again this young child, in her innocent sleep, seemed to him as his worst accuser, seemed to him at once her father's phantom and avenger ; and again this time, as she slept,' the smile that smote him to the soul parted her lips and passed over her face, the smile that he had seen so often on the lips of the Dead. Lionel Caryll looked at him, awed and terrified, he scarce knew why : "Are you ill ?" the boy asked, timidly Strathmore signed him away : WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 275 " Yes no. Run on and tell mv mother I am here, Nello I will follow." The boy hesitated, and looked at the sleeping child who had been his companion in play: " Will you take care of Lucille ?" Accustomed to deference and intolerant of opposition, Sirathmore signed him away : "Go, and do as I bade you." The -boy wavered, looking wistfully at his companion and doubtfully at Strathmore ; then, instinctively compelled to obedience, he went like a greyhound over the sands, followed by his setters. Strathmore was. left alone with the remorse which an infant's smile had sufficed to waken into all its ghastly anguish ; such is the coward doom of Crime. He stood in the profound solitude, with the sound of the seas about him, and at his feet the sleeping child, with the violets tangled in her fair, floating hair; and as he looked on her young loveliness, which, so different yet so similar, bore so strange a likeness of the Dead in every lineament, memories thronged upon him, starting from the haze of long-forgotten years, and gathering around him, even as the pursuant Shapes gathered about Orestes, till the air, which was clear to the sinless, grew to the accursed dark- ened and ci'owded with their thronging, shadowy forms. He saw him, a young child, even as this, with the same fair, trailing hair and the same smile like sunshine on his lips ; he heard his fresh, glad laugh ring on the summer air; he heard his childish voice echo upon his ear; he felt the touch of his young hand ; he lived again in those years that had long drifted by, forgotten in the whirl of years more evil, when in his own soul there was no sin, when the man whom he had murdered played beside him in the sunlight, when his life was guiltless as that on which he now looked, where it lay sleeping at his feet! And a bitter cry broke from him where he stood on the solitary shore : " My brother ! My brother ! " Back upon his ear the echo of the rocks around wailed in return his own yearning, futile anguish, like a prayer fruitless and rejected of Heaven. In the sunny stillness of the noon Strathmore bowed 27(> STRATIIMORE ; OR, down his head upon his hands, and his frame shook with deep and tearless sobs; the throes of the remorse which could not force back the sealed portals of the grave, which could not call to earth the existence one fleeting instant had been sufficient to destroy. He could not have told how long he sat there in the solitude, where every stirring pulse of life, from the noiseless rush of the sea-bird's wings to the faint shouts of the fishermen across the bay, seemed like the voice of God calling upon him to answer for the life he had hurled into the grave ; moments might have passed, or hours, when he was roused by the silken touch of hair against, his hand, and a voice which whispered sof^.y in his ear : " You are not happy ! tell Lucille ! " He startH and looked up ; then he saw that the young child, awakened from her sleep, had come to him, and vaguely grieving for the grief she could not comprehend, as spaniels do at sight of human pain, was blindly striving, as a spaniel might, to comfort him. For, losing fear of a stranger in her child's compassion, she had drawn close to him, so that her bright hair swept over her hands, and in her large, soft eyes stood tears half of terror, half of pity, for the suffering which she saw and vaguely felt, with answering pain, as the spaniel the sorrow of which he nothing knows. And her young voice, tremulous but tenderly caressing, murmured in his ear: " Lucille is sorry for you do tell Lucille ! " With a gesture as though a serpent had stung him, Strath- more started, flung her off, and quivered like a man \vho has been struck a death-blow : "Child, child! hate me, curse me, reproach me, but oh God! do not pity me! Keep off! my hands are red with his blood, your's must not touch them ! " The wild words died inarticulate in his throat, and his teeth clenched as the anguish she had strung to torture rent and tore his frame the worst chastisement from the hands of man would have been mercy to the reproach of those innocent words which pitied him; to the uncon- scious accusation of those uplifted eyes, gazing with a child's tender yet wondering compassion on the face of her father's murderer ! She stood apart, awed and silent, the tears standing in her eyes, that were at all times wistful with a haunting, WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 271 beseeching sadness; the fierce gesture which had flung her off she understood, the words she did not; they were unintelligible indeed, unheard but she waited, pale to her lips and trembling like a voting fawn after a cruel blow, yet drawn by a strange instinct of compassion to- wards this agony which she seemed to know was brutal, not to her, but from its own blind pain. She waited, then grown more daring, and taught by those who-instilled into her an infinite love for all who suffered, she drew near him again nearer and nearer, till her hair swept once more on his hand, and a pathetic entreaty trembled in her voice: "Speak to me do speak to me! Lucille meant no harm." Again at her touch and her voice he shrank and shud- dered as under physical torture ; this child came with caressing gentleness and plaintive pity to the one whose guilt had orphaned her, and to whose hands she owed the deepest wrong that life can owe to life ! Then he lifted his head and looked at her; when his will was set his strength was iron to bridle himself or to coerce others, and it was his will that she should grow up holding him in love and gratitude, and ignorant ever of the crime which otherwise must stretch a hideous and impassable gulf between her and the assassin of her father. He passed his hand lightly over her fair silken hair, and answered gently : "Lucille is very kind. I thank her. Tell me, you who are so pitiful to pain, are you happy ?" "Always." Her eyes looked their mute surprise that any could ask her such a question, and a smile played about her lips as she drew a long glad breath, recalling her own exhaustless treasury of joy the joys born of sea, and bird, and flower, of a crown of forest violets, and a chase of summer butter- flies ! The joys which are pure, and cost no pang of shame, no purchase-gold of guilt, in their glad reaping ! Strathmore found in the simple answer the first seed of iiis atonement ; it was much to him to learn from the child's fresh, truthful lips that she was "happy" happy by his means, and in his fulfilment of the trust bequeathed him by the dead. His hand rested on her hair and his eyes upon her face as she leaned against him caressingly and 24 STRATH MORE; OR, without fear, as though he was known and dear to her, rather than, as he was, a stranger. Skilled in reading human features, he read the nature easily which was dawning here, the susceptibility to joy and pain suggested by the lips with their mournful lines in repose, and their sunny, laughing smile which sparkled and then died ; the too early depth and poetry of thought which were written on the low, broad brow ; the latent tenderness which lay in the sadness of the upward look, and in the liquid, melan- choly depths of the eyes, soft and dreamy as the night; these might have told him that to secure happiness to the Childhood was easy, with its fleeting pleasures centred in a bird's carol, in a dog's love ; but to secure it to the Womanhood was a more perilous venture, which might chance on shipwreck. At that moment a little toy-spaniel that was with him caught her eyes, and with a child's swift change of thought she uttered a laugh of delight, and threw herself upon the sands beside it, kissing its long ears, and bathing it fondly in her bright long hair. With a stifled cry Strathmore seized the animal from her arms ; the dog was the one which had nestled in Erroll's breast, and refused to leave the side of the dead man ; he could not see the child in her unconsciousness caress the brute whose fidelity had outlived his own, whose watch had been kept over her father's coi*pse ! She looked up at him, deeming that she had committed some great fault in touching a stranger's dog without his leave ; and with caressing grace and penitence she leaned against him, lifting her dark, beseeching eyes: " Lucille is sorry Lucille was wrong ! But he is so pretty, and he would love me all things do!" Callous to much, merciless to more, Strathmore, who had deemed that nothing in life could ever wound or move him, felt the burning tears gather in his eyes at the simple words and action of this child, so unconscious of his own deep guilt and of her own great wrong ! His voice shook as be stooped to her: " The dog is yours none have so great a right ! Lucille, if all things love you, will you give some love to me ?" She looked surprised yet wistful, and her eyes dwelt on him earnestly. WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 279 " Yes, Lucille will love you. But not for the clog Tell me your name that I may say it in my prayers?" For many moments he made her no answer; and in the silence his loud labored breathings hoarsely rose and fell. Then his hand passed slowly and gently over her hair, and his voice shook still: "Ay, in your prayers! God knows I need them from all things innocent! Remember me and love me I was your father's friend !" The last words were hoarse as with a great agony, and seemed to rend and stifle him in their utterance. His hand lingered for a moment in farewell upon her hair; then he turned and left her, bidding the spaniel, which clung to and fawned upon the child, stay with her. Young Caryll was coming swift as the winds towards them. Strathmore passed him without word or sign and went onward, leaving behind him, standing together on the sunny, silvery sands the boy Nello and the young child Lucille, between them the little dog which had crouched in its love upon the dead man's breast, when human friend- ship had betrayed, and human watchers had forsaken him. CHAPTER XXX. THE WHISPER IN THE TUILER1ES. MARION LADY VAVASOUR stood in her dressing-chamber, before her Dresden-framed mirror, ready for a fete of one of the leaders of that brilliant set of which she was still the Fashion, the Cynosure, and the Queen. The lustrous light in those superb eyes was not dimmed; the mocking smile on those lovely lips laughed triumph that was unshadowed; the fair brow and the delicate bloom wore the brightness of their youth unmarred. For the world was as ever at her feet, and remorse had no part and no share with her; it could not whisper in her golden dreams, nor dog the royal negligent step with which she swept through life.. Remorse! She knew it rrt>t ! How could 280 STRATIIMORE; on. its ghastly cry be heard above the ceaseless chant of hom- age about her path ? how could its dread terrors force their way into the proud and dazzling presence to which kings bent and princes knelt ? She knew revenge, she knew cruelty, so do the velvet panther and the painted snake ; but she knew not remorse, neither do they. And that dark tragedy of which she had been the cause touched her no more than these are touched by the death they deal save that she knew, rvhen the world babbled of it, it babbled of her power ; save that she loved to learn how deeply a woman's smile may strike, how widely a woman's loveliness may blast ! True ! till she had wearied of the fidelity even of a guilty passion, all that she had vowed to Strathmore had, perchance, not been a lie ; true! there had come hours when she had thought that had they met earlier, met when their love might have been pure, and the breath of the world had not sullied their hearts, she might have given him such constancy as poets fable and she mocked : the fleetest rivers have their deeper waters, the most heartless amidst us have their better hours ! But her lust was Tyranny, her glory Power, and the evil which she worked smote not upon her for her, as for Greek Helen, brethren warred with brethren, and men cast their lives into the slaughter! And this triumph was her crown. She stood now before her mirror, and let her gaze dwell proudly on the peerless form whose divine grace no living woman rivalled; then she swept onward to her carriage to go to that world which was her court. She was the most beautiful woman of her time!. Who shall give me title so omnipotent, sceptre so mighty ? Whither she went was to the Tuileries. Here the Eng- lish Peeress, the beauty of Paris, the leader of Fashion, had ever found her proudest triumphs ; here to-night, as countless nights before, Princes coveted her smiles, Queens were out-dazzled by her, and Sovereignties paled beside the sway of the woman whose beauty owned no rival ; here, Marion, Lady Vavasour, was in the height of her brilliance, and her fame! And here and thus she was watched by the man whom her love had made a slave, whom her lie had made a murderer. She glittered through the titled crowds that were gathered in the palace of the WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 283 Bourbons, with the sapphires glancing amidst ner amber hair, and her smile of superb triumph upon her lovely lips, her choice and delicate wit falling like a shower of silver, her resistless coquetries charming to blindness all drawn within her circle in the salons of a King. And he watched her this divine loveliness that had betrayed him with a kiss; this soft and dazzling thing that had forsaken him with the vileness of the wanton ; those angel lips with their child-like bloom, which had whispered and wooed him to the bottomless hell of crime ! So much the more madly worshipped once -ay, still! so much the more mercilessly was she now doomed, so much the more deep- ly damned ! The palace was thronged that night. The ball was on the occasion of a royal marriage, and all that was greatest in Europe was assembled at the Tuileries; but as her sap- phires outshone all the jewels of royal peeresses and im- perial orders, so she outshone all the loveliness gathered there, while she floated through its courtly crowds, now listening to the flatteries of Princes of the Blood, now to the murmur of velvet-lipped Cardinals, now bending to her feet austcrest Statesmen, now seeing bowed before her some proud crowned head. And Memory was far away from her in her superb omnipotence, her cloudless present far as was Remorse! She passed down the ball-room on the arm of the Due cl'Etoile, her perfumed lace floating about her, the sapphires starlike above her brow, the light falling on her dazzling face ; and every glance involuntarily turned on her and on her Royal lover, for such he had notably become. But as she went, unrivalled in her omnipotence, unequalled in her beauty, sweeping through the courtly crowds with wit on her lips and conquest in her glance, the eye of D'Etoile, resting on her, saw her face grow pale and a strange tremor seize her. AVhat was it? Was there poison in that perfumed air miasma in those royal salons plague-taint, or subtle death- odor, burning from the lights which gleamed above upon her loveliness, or exhaling from the jewels which glistened in her bosom ? Nay, none of these ; we are not in the days of Medici and Sforza, and (grown virtuous from dread of science and of law) we do not slay the body, we only 282 STRATIIMORE; OR, slay by slow and sure degrees the soul, the honor, or the peace of what we hate, because this is a homicide absolved of men. AVhat was it, then, that, suddenly as she swept through the presence-chamber of the Tuileries, made her lips grow white, her eyes gleam for one fleeting moment with the Terror of a hunted antelope, her hand tremble on her Royal lover's arm ? It was this only the whisper of two words, which seemed to float to her from a distance, yet which reached no ears save hers : " Marion St. Maur." She glanced on all immediately about her courtiers, ministers, ambassadors, princesses, peeresses, maids of honor but she saw that as none of these had heard, so none of these had spoken that whisper of her maiden name. But as she lifted her eyes, they fell upon the face of the man she had forsaken and betrayed ; the man who, in the last hour she had beheld him, had hurled her from him because death was too swift and merciful a vengeance. Strathmore stood at some slight distance, leaning against a console where the light fell full upon his face, which wore its look of cold and pitiless calm; and his eyes were upon her, watching her with a steel-like glitter, a dark tiger- passion, insatiate and without mercy, that the drooped lids did not veil. And she who in her light insouciance, her omnipotence of beauty, feared Heaven and its wrath as little as the most daring blasphemers, the most stoic of philosophers, turned pale even to her laughing lips, and felt the air turn sickly faint, the. lights whirl round her, the crowd grow dizzily indistinct, and saw nothing but that gaze, with its mute and merciless menace, suddenly met there as a ghost arisen from the tomb, silently quoting to her the Past, si- lently threatening the Future. The weakness endured but an instant, too swift for even the Prince, on whose arm she hung, to note it, and she passed on passed him. He did not move; he gave her no sign of recognition ; but his eyes rested on her, and he smiled. She knew the deadly meaning of that faint, chill smile ; she had seen it on his lips before he went from her to meet the man whom he had doomed, and she shuddered and grew sick and cold, and shivered with WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 283 vague and intangible terror, as at the chastisement of their mutual sin. In that single moment, which for the first time smote on her soft and brilliant life with a ghastly and nameless fear, his vengeance had begun. The flatteries had lost their honey, the homage had lost its glory, the charm of the world wa,s marred, the power of her sway was broken that night to Marion Vavasour ; and while she reigned in all her radiance in a King's Palace the hand of a nameless terror lay heavy upon her, and she saw, ever pursuing her with its iron calm, that ruthless and unspoken menace. Henceforth there would be poison in her wine, a canker in her rose, a ghost beside her couch, an asp within her bosom. His vengeance had beg-un. CHAPTER XXXI. THE DAGGER SUSPENDED BY A SINGLE HAIR. The Paris Season had commenced, inaugurated by the marriage-ball at the Tuileries, commenced something earlier than usual, and Marion, Lady Vavasour, sat in her loge at the Opera, moving her fan with all a Spaniard's grace, lazily listening to Mario and Malibran, or to the whispered worship of her cohue of courtiers, while the delicate sandal-wood perfume floated from her rich lace, and some of the brilliant deep-hued tropic flowers of the East lay crown-like upon her lustrous hair. In the light, in the warmth, w.ith a Prince's homage murmured in her ear, with diamonds of untold price glistening in her bosom, with a proud title her own, in the w ight of a proud Order, surely she, if any, was secured from the evil stroke of bitter fortune ; looking on her, it seemed that even Death itself must pass by this beautiful, pampered, imperious thing, as too fair to smite, too full of sovereignty to slay ! Yet where she sat, with the sweet- ness of music lulling her ear, and the gaze of lovers' eyes worshipping her beauty and entreating for its smile, lapped 284 STRATIIMORE ; OR, in her own dazzling, voluptuous, victorious Present, like the epicurean she was, the same fear which had suddenly smitten her in the presence-chamber of the Tuileries smote her suddenly here, the same chill ran through her, the same emotion for one brief instant blanched her lips, gave terror to her eyes, made the wit falter on her tongue for sho heard the same whispered words spoken on the air close by her : "Marion St. Maur!" Yet they r were but the words of the name she had borne before marriage. " Qu'avez vous, madame ? Yous trouvez 1'air du loge tant soit peu etouffant?" D'Etoile asked with tender solicitude. " C'est 1'odeur, des fleurs quo'on a mises a mon bouquet, prenez-le !" said Lady Yavasour, holding to him the jew- elled bouquetiere, which Etoile took with such a subtle, graceful flattery in his thanks as only a Parisian can turn ; but it fell for once dull and lost on the ear to which it was murmured, as Marion Yavasour pressed her fan against the lips on which she knew their bloom had paled, and thought in her soul : " Who can know it here? Not he surely not he!" For the terror on the life of this courted and sovereign beauty who had been used to coquette at her will with Destiny, and rule Fate by a sign of her fan, a moue of her lip, was her dread of the man whose love she had fed to madness and goaded to crime, and who had spared her from death only that he might see her live to suffer. As her eyes wandered, half unconsciously, half restlessly, over the house, in the full glare of the light on the opposite side, she saw him again, saw him as in the Tuileries, with his eyes fixed upon her under their drooped lids, and upon his face that slight, chill, merciless smile which struck like the cold touch of steel. A few moments previous he had been in the loge which adjoined hers ; now he stood front- ing her, looking on her as he had trained himself to look, tranquilly, passionlessly, but pitilessly, as in the Question Chambers of the Inquisition, the Dominican, with gentle voice and soul of steel, looked on the tortured whom ho doomed, and bade the rack be turned. Marion Yavasour could have called out in her dread, WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 28J and risen and left the opera-house, as though to flee from some haunting spectre ; for she knew then that it had beei Strathmore's voice which had whispered her maiden name But she was too skilled an actress thus to betray herself, though of much cowardice with much cruelty (for her nature was one essentially feminine), she had ever at command finest finesse and calmest self-control ; like many of her sex, pusillanimous to the core, she was an actress to the life. She sat there, now that his gaze was on her, with the bloom on her cheek, the smile on her lips, the lustrous languor on her eyes, while her royal lover leaned to her with suavest homage, and the wit, the scandal, the persiflage circled around her. She listened, she laughed, she moved her fan with softest coquetry ; she reigned with all her negligence, her brilliance, her grace, her imperious charm. But in the rich harmonies of the music, the courtly flatteries of murmured words, the jeux d'esprit, the wooing homage which filled for her the hours of the Prophete, she only heard the single whisper of that name which bad told her that the secret of her early life was in the hands of Strathmore. In the glare of light she only saw the face of the man she had betrayed, watching her with that merciless menace of the veiled eyes which quoted to her the unburied Past, which foretold to her the shrouded Future. Hear what she would that name sung forever in her ear ; look where she would that glance forever followed and met hers ; there in the glare of the Opera-house, with the light falling on the pale bronze of his face and the dark gleam of his passionless eyes, he stood before her he whose love had been insanity, whose religion would be revenge. And when after those brief hours, which had been to her one long-protracted torture torture which was endured with a smile on the lips, lustre in the eyes, sovereignty seemingly shadowless as of yore ; Marion Vavasour, alone in her carriage, sank back, trembling, quivering, unnerved, dreading evil with the shrinking terror of a delicate woman, shuddering from the fury of the storm whose whirlwind she, the sorceress, had raised from the passions of the man she bad tempted and betrayed. It was thus he ordained that she should suffer first, even as tbe Dominican, with astute calculation, commanded that 2^6 STRATIIMORE; OR, the torture should be administered gently and by slow degrees, so that each succeeding pang was tasted to the full. To wrench the limbs from out their sockets at once were too much mercy. Was it no torture to himself to go into her presence as into the presence of strangers ; to look with unmoved calm upon her face ; to hear echo on the air the silvery music of her voice ; to stand by and watch the gaze of those who had succeeded him fasten on her loveli- ness and her eyes look up to theirs ? Truly it was such that when it had been endured, and he was alone in the solitude of midnight or of dawn, when the strain was released, and the unnatural calm broken down, the suffer- ing of this man was, as his love had been, a madness. In the great agony of that lost, fooled, cheated, guilt-steeped passion, which even in the riot of its hate begrudged the breath which whispered to another, and envied the dog that nestled in her bosom, his misery was fearful in its strength, fearful in its despair, for he loved while he loathed her still. But Strathmore's will was iron to endure; what he appointed to himself that he would have wrought out though his own life had been the penalty at the close. His lust of vengeance was brutal, but none the less was it immutable as death, unswerving as destiny. lie had the fierce passions of an Eastern, and the profound dis- simulation of an Eastern ; therefore he trained himself to meet her thus, and she alone read the menace written in the veiled depths of his eyes. (The world deemed that the liaison of a year before had been dropped by him among the things of the past; and the world deemed also that considering the tragic story which had been inter- woven with its rupture, he was somewhat callous to have forgot so soon ; but then, the world remarked, he was a cold and heartless man, and for the issue of a duel he of course could not reproach himself. Poor world ! great spy though it be, how surely, how universally it is chicaned.) Strathmore remained in Paris through the whole of that winter; and through that season, rarely and slightly at the first, more often and more markedly towards the spring, it was remarked, chiefly by women, that Lady Vavasour was losing the brilliance of her beauty, and was looking pale, almost worn. It was the first time that such WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 287 a rumor had ever been whispered against her dazzling loveliness, since the clay now eight years passed, when she had first appeared as the Marchioness of Vavasour and Yaux. That which wrought it, was that which has power to shatter the strongest nerve, to break the boldest spirit, to undermine the most careless insouciance it was a hidden fear, the asp among her couch of scented roses, the dagger suspended above her head by one frail thread of hair, which the world could not behold, but which never quitted her. He had shown her that he knew her secret, and he let that knowledge the more bitter because indefinite slowly and surely eat its poisoned way. They knew each other's hearts, they whom sin had united and sin had severed; and as she read his doom so he read her suffering, without speech, without disguise. That single name breathed in her ear told her that she Avas in his power; that single glance from his eyes told her with what mercy that power would be used ; though when, or how, or where the blow would fall, she knew no more than we know when the stroke of death will descend upon us. And it was this endless uncertainty, this un- ceasing apprehension which wore and tortured her till her careless, epicurean creeds were rent by it like filmy gauze, and the woman who had become so used to sovereignty that she had learned to believe she could command every hazard of life at her pleasure, grew the perpetual prey of a ceaseless fear and a momentary anxiety, which gnawed at her heart the more cruelly because concealed from all. Whithersoever she went, thither Strathmore followed her, till his presence grew as fearful to her as the spectres which follow the distempered mind in delirium tremens. In the salons of the Tuileries, in the reception-rooms of ambassadors, in the entertainments of princes and nobles, at the Opera, on the Boulevards, in the clear noonday as *;he drove through the streets, in the midnight glare of light at some patrician bal masque, she saw him; always before her, in the distance and as a stranger whose glance swept over her unmoved, but with the meaning on his face under the cold and courtly calm which she had seen there when he went out to deal death to the man he loved, and with the menace in his fathomless eyes, which spoko to none but her. He was ever before her like some pitiless 288 STRATHMORE; OR, fate from which to escape was hopeless, and which tran- quilly and immovably awaited a chosen hour to strike. He was ever before her, with that unspoken doom in his glance, and that unknown power silently told in the slight, calm, cruel smile which she knew so well. And the feat Avhich had possessed her of him, from the hour when her slave had risen to crush his tyrant, and the passion she had loved to excite to delirium had turned upon her in its madness, grew gradually under this ceaseless watch into a terror unbearable. It made her nerves unstrung, her manner uncertain, her glance like that of the hunted ante- lope when it listens for the eager step which gains nearer und nearer through the awful hush of the night in the jungles. They noted that her bloom paled, that her dazzling insouciance was capricious and depressed, and they noted rightly; the beautiful hue upon her cheek, which so long had distanced art, now needed, for the first time, to be re- placed by art. To regain that repose which had deserted her she had refuge in narcotics, which, however subtle, left their depression on the morrow; and to cover that depression had recourse to stimulants which, however skilfully prepared, left their mark on one, the happy and childlike sunniness of whose nature had been the chief spring of her ceaseless fascination. The hidden canker in the rose ate at its core, and dimmed its bloom. Marion Vavasour ere this had been a perfect actress, and had never known one pang of pain; but that was when the peace and lives of others hung in the balance. Now it was her own that were in jeopardy ; and so strong upon a mind naturally impressionable grew her dread of the vague doom which threatened her, and of the cold, pitiless face which, go whither she would, seemed forever to pursue her, that she could have shrieked aloud and shrunk away when, day after day, night after night, she met the gaze of Strathmore, and could have fled out from his presence trembling, as those who flee from the ghastly phantom of their own imaginings. That she never thus betrayed herself, was due f o her proud and haughty spirit; where dissimulation alone might perchance have broken down, this enabled her to meet and brave unflinchingly what, became an hourly torture, so that WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 289 the world should never have title to whisper that Marion Vavasour was agitated by the presence of the lover whom she had deserted. To this, also, it was due that she never permitted her dread of Strathmore's power to drive her from the circles where she reigned. Once she felt tempted to flee from him to Nice, Florence, Pau, the Nile, any- where where her caprice or her physicians might furnish an excuse ; but she disdained and repelled the temptation ; she felt that, go where she might, there would his ven- geance pursue her; she refused to give to it its first triumph by surrender. Besides, she knew not what he knew; and Marion Vavasour was in her own epicurean fashion a fatalist. The blow did not fall yet, the blow might never fall ; circumstances might arrest it, death itself might close his lips with her secret still unuttered. So she reasoned, so she reigned throughout the Paris winter. But in her soul she never lost the sickening sense of that dagger which hung vibrating above her head to descend at any instant; in her white bosom, unseen by the world, the asp coiled ever under the freshness of the flowers, under the brilliance of the diamonds, and ate and ate with its poisoned fangs. He saw how she suffered this woman to whom her sovereignty was her secret, to whom her pride was so dear; he saw, and drove the iron farther down into her heart by every glance with which his eyes met hers, and made her, while the eyes of the world were on her, compelling her to smile, to coquette, to scatter her golden wit and her lustrous glances unmoved and undimmed, grow faint and heart-sick with the terror of that power, vague yet wide and sure as destiny, in which he held her. Thus he tortured her till the dread of meeting his gaze grew with her into a morbid agony ; thus he tortured her until, imperious beauty and accom- plished actress though she was, her cheek paled, her eyes grew anxious, her health became uncertain ; thus he tor- tured her, for he willed that she should taste the fell bit- terness of vengeance by being forced to watch its slow approach, as the prisoner chained to the stake was con- demned to watch the gradual onward creeping of the pitiless flame. 25 290 STRATIIMORE; OR, And he waited, for the blow of his revenge to fall in the sight of all assembled Paris, upon the same day in the spring-tide as that on which, three years before, they had met at sunset on the Bohemian waters. CHAPTER XXXII. THE POISONED WOUNDS FROM THE SILVERED STEEL. EARLY in Spring the carriage with the coronet of Vava- sour and Yaux upon its panels, its chasseurs, its lackeys, its postillions, its outriders, left the court-yard of her hotel to drive amidst all the other 61ite of the equipages of Paris, through the Barriere de 1'Etoile, and round the Bois, and past the site of the ancient ruins of the Abbaye de Long- champs, whose religious rite has passed into a ceremonial of fashion. The day was softly bright, the city was in its spring- tide gaiety, the dense crowds wei'e sweeping down to- wards the barrieres of the west, Paris was en fete ; and Lady Vavasour's cortege, dashing through the streets with its accustomed royal fracas, bore onwards to join the great stream of carriages which brought the sovereigns of the Faubourg St. Germain and the Breda Quartier, the Royal Highnesses and the Empresses Anonyme, alike to the throng of Longchamps and the inauguration of La^ Mode this sunlight day upon the Boulevards. And she* leaned back upon her cushions in her languid loveliness,} with the imperial ermine, a Czar's gift, which formed her^ carriage-rug; leaned back, for the hour was warm, and her- priceless perfumed point d'Angouleme gathered about her', with that carelessness which was her own inimitable grace. ' The carriage joined the row, eight broad, on the Place de la Bastille, and closed in with it; all eyes turned on her, for she gave the law of the year and kd-the fashion, and men surrounded her as her Guards surround a Queen, Princes and Ministers spurring their horses to opproacb WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 291 her, and stooping from their saddles to seek a word as eagerly as the} 7 would have sought a Crown. She. swept along the Boulevards and down the drives of the Bois, where the man whom her lie had murdered had been slain when the sun had set ; and the Past was not remembered or repented, for Remorse had no share in her shadowless life ; Remorse had no place in her world. She was alone in her carriage; none were permitted that day to share that throne (of which her barouche-step was the haul pas} of the Sovereign of Fashion ; her little lion-dog alone occupied the cushions beside her, with his jewelled collar on his snowy fleece, and in the double line of horsemen, on either side the throng of carriages, on every lip there was but one theme the beauty of the English Marchioness who gave the mode to Paris. Lady Vavasour drove onward past the site of the old Abbaye, whilst Etoile leant from his saddle, breathing a Prince's flatteries in her ear, until she reached the full stream of equipages, where the occupant of almost every carriage (that was patrician, not lorette) was numbered on her visiting-list ; and each one of those delicate aristo- crates was either her friend for boudoir confidences, or her acquaintance for State dinners. And now in the rich morning sunlight, as she encountered their equipages and received their salutations, she saw that which sent an ice- chill through the warm current of her glad life. What was it, slight, nameless, intangible yet to be felt, that she read in the glance of one or two of the highest women of the French and English aristocracies? Imper- ceptible to another, she caught it for Marion Vavasour had a secret to guard, and whoso owns a secret ever sus- pects that the world has unearthed it. That which she read, or fancied, in their look was not censure, not inquiry, not insolence, not wonder; it was more vague than any of these, yet to her it spoke them all. She caught it once, twice, thrice on different faces, and her delicate bloom paled ; it was that chillness which is marked and felt ratner by that which it suggests than by what it does, slight, but intentional as it was unrniala-kable. Etoile looked surprise"; but he was too true a gentleman to affect to perceive what in real truth bewildered him. For one 292 STRATHMORE; OR, brief second her soft antelope eyes lightened with ill-sup- pressed anxiety and with unrepressed anger; since there is no glass which reflects so delicately, yet so bittenly and so surely, every shade of disdain as the faces of trained women of the world ! The steel with which their scorn thrusts is silvered, but the wound it deals is barbed, and deep, and poisoned ! Lady Vavasour caught that look, and knew or guessed its meaning, and her cheek paled under the sea-shell bloom of her delicate rouge ; the thrust of the silvered steel struck to her soul, for she knew that it struck to the core of her secret ! The carriages rolled onward, and yet the coldness lay but in look, the blow was dealt but from manner, her bows were returned as of yore, though with a certain distance, a marked dullness ; and Etoile found no constraint in her wit, no light the less in her luminous eyes, she seemed to note nothing of the look which spoke so much ! But the asp in her bosom had fangs not one whit the less bitter because the smile did not leave her lips, or the nonchalant grace of her attitude change: women cover their wounds, but under the veil they throb they throb! The carriages rolled on, and her postilions threading their way through the throng passed the stately equipage of her chosen and intimate friend Lady Clarence Camelot that cold, proud beauty in whose veins ran the " blue blood" of Norman monarchs, and whose social creeds were lofty if stringent. But yesternight they had sat at the Opera together, rival rulers yet close allies; but yesternight, so complete had been their sisterhood, that they were ever in private to each other " Marion," and "Ida." Now, the azure eyes of the descendant of Plantagenet looked with calm, cold regard at her, as though regarding a stranger, and, recog- nizing her presence no more than she would have recog- nized that of a beggar, the Lady Clarence Camelot passed on round Longchamps. On Marion Vavasour's lips, which blanched to white- ness, the smile was arrested as on the lips of those sud- denly smitten with death ; and while the smile rested there, into her eyes came a wild, haunting anxiety as they glanced over the crowd to see whether in the crowd this had escaped all others. And as they glanced they saw cold, pitiless, with the brutal menace in the eyes and the slight WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 293 smile about the mouth, unmoved as though cast in bronze the face of Strathmore. He was watching the progress of his work watching, how slowly and surely, drop-by-drop, his poison fell. The throng bore his horse backward ; her carriage rolled onward with the glittering mass making the tour of the Bois de Boulogne ; and once, twice, thrice, again and again, the Queen of Fashion was made to eat of the ashes of the deadly humiliation ; and the silvered steel thrust its barbed point farther and farther down into her soul, probing deep to the core of her secret. She passed the Countess of Belmaine; she passed the Duchesse de Lurine; she passed the Marchioness of Boville; she passed the Vicomtesse de Ruelle ; she passed her oldest friend, Lady Beatrix Beaudesert. And all these dealt her the same blow, one-by-one, with the same chill, delicate, unerring weapon ; all these gave her no recognition even of her presence. The procession of Longchamps, which had ever been one long, triumphal passage for the proud and dazzling English leader, was one long pilgrimage of shame, even such, as in the centuries gone by, the barefoot penitents had made by that same route, when the blind, the sick, and the lame had thronged to the Abbaye altars, to the grave of Isabelle Capet. On many tongues in that dense throng, among such as could observe it, was but one theme the insults of her Order to the Marchioness of Vavasour and Vaux. But she leaned back, not letting the smile even grow constrained on her lip, not allowing even a glance of anxiety in her eyes, a flash of anger on her cheek; but negligent, graceful, tranquil as of old, not seeming even to have noticed the thrusts which pierced her to the soul. At last, as her carriage was turned back to Paris, it passed side-by-side with the equipage of the most notorious adventuress of the demi-monde, Viola Ve, celebrated for ruining a peer of France every trimestre, and whose ex- travagances startled even " equivocal society ; " and as her barouche wheel locked slightly in that of Lady Vava- sour, the Lorette smiled and bowed, and said a few care- less words to the English Peeress, as though they were of the same world and the same order! And laughed, as 25* 204 STRATIIMORE; OR, her carriage rolled on, as one who gives an insult sfco knows cannot be resented. The open outrage and insolence were translatable to every looker-on in that dense crowd ; the key to it was a mystery which convulsed Longchamps with bewildered amazement, and convulsed Paris similarly in a few hours after. And at this coarse indignity Marion Vavasour turned white to the very lips, and trembled exceedinglv ; for she was proud, very proud ! and she had had her foot on the neck of this haughty and patrician world so long, so long ! It was bitter to have the diadem torn from her brow, the sceptre shattered from her hand! Once again, as rallying her courage, she glanced around in defiance of the insults, again she saw in the yellow sun- light the cold and pitiless face of Strathmore, watching her with the smile on his lips and the menace in his eyes, as the serpent watches the bird which cannot escape from its fangs. And Marion Vavasour knew that it was he who had her secret, and was on her track ; his hand which, by the silvered steel of these women's indignities, dealt her this poisoned and mortal wound. With all nonchalance, all hauteur, all easy grace, un- changed, but with her lips blanched and drawn over her pearly teeth, the most beautiful woman of her time returned with that slow and glittering procession from Longchamps to Paris, veiling the quivering nerves and the throbbing pride with calm courage, with admirable artifice for she vvas a more perfect actress than any the stage has seen. Yet she ran the gauntlet of a deadly trial ! for in those hours which that long pageant occupied, in the dense throngs which fashion gathered, all the eyes of Paris Proper were on her, and the crowd was divided but into two classes, those who passed the outrage on her and those who witnessed it! As at last she swept up the steps of her own hotel, she did not observe a vagrant woman loitering hard by on the pavement ; but the Bohemian had watched there through livelong hours, watched to see her face as she returned from Longchamps, and a smile came on Redempta's lips as her vigil was repaid, and she muttered in Czeschen : " IT is begun. I have not lived in vain, beloved ! She Buffers ! she suffers ! " WROUGHT BY IIIS OWN HAND. 295 It was true she suffered ! Marion Vavasour had laughed her sweet, soft laugh at the mortal agony she dealt to others, but in her own bitterness she, the discrowned, who had known no pain and no remorse, suffered suffered even as Marie Antoinette when the crown was wrenched from her golden head, and the Dethroned was led out for the gibes of the people. There was some confusion and agitation in her household as she crossed the great parquet of the hall, but not noting it she swept onward up the staircase, turning to the groom of the chambers : " Where is my lord?" The man hesitated slightly, and looked grave ; she re- repeated her question imperiously: " Where is his lordship ? Answer me ! " " Pardon me, my lady, but during your ladyship's absence his lordship was attacked with a slight indisposition." An intense alarm and anxiety came into her face strange visitants there, for the world had never known that she had loved her lord! "Indisposition of what kind?" " Something I believe of a syncope, my lady." He was too polite and too elegant a philomath to use so brief a term as " fit," but her fears grasped his meaning, and she bade him send the physicians to her in her boudoir. They came, honeyed and deferential, and from much cream and verbiage the simple truth gradually oozed that, in plain terms, the Marquis of Yavasour had been struck by apoplexy after a pate of nightingales, followed by too many bouchees and rosolios, at his luncheon, and now lay, sensible indeed, but in a state most precarious, of which the issue was doubtful. Then she dismissed them with a queenly bow of her graceful head, and signified an imperative necessity that she should see her lord alone on family matters of the highest moment. The physicians, curious, like all of their trade, vainly strove to represent that their presence was indispensable for every second ; all Europe bowed to her will, and she permitted none to gainsay it ; it was obeyed now. His score of attendants retired from his chamber, and her husband was alone when she entered it. With her rich and graceful beauty she came and stood 296 STRATIIMORE ; OR, by the bedside of the sick man, on whose face death had written its mark out plainly ; and, for he was quite conscious and had every sense left him, he opened his eyes and looked at her curiously, for it were hard to describe the change which had come over her features, and she wore no mask with him. She leant over him as she sat beside the couch, after a few hurried words of condolence, speaking low and swiftly: "Vavasour! All Paris knows it!" Into the supine face of the old Marquis came a gleam of malicious amusement, crossed with surprise. " The deuce they do!" he said, with a labored articula- tion : " Who told 'em ?" "God knows! What matter who!" And she, whom grief in all its agony, passion in all its fury, had never moved, save to that gay, triumphant amusement with which a child crushes his costliest toy, spoke with breath- less agitation, her lips quivering, her fair hands trembling, her eyes filled with tears of bitterness ! " They know it ! Even Ida Camelot cut me dead an hour ago ; a score of them passed me as they would pass a dog ! And even that woman Ye, Caderousse's mistress, dared to insult me . ME! They know it! Nothing less could make them act so, nothing else could give her title with impunity to " The sick man chuckled low and with difficulty, as though this were the best joke which could have come to cheer him on his death-bed : " Gad ! I wish I had been there ! Deuced pity to have lost it ! Eh ! bien ma belle ! you can't complain ; you've cheated them a long time!" And where he lay back among his pillows he chuckled still, faintly, for his breath was with difficulty drawn, but with a malicious amusement that was in ghastly contrast with the marks which death had set upon his face. A passionate anger and misery gathered in her's : "And that is all the pity that you " " Pity," broke in the Marquis, with a laugh which struggled with a spasm of the breath : "Gad! the deuce ! what pity do you want ? You've had your own way, ma belle, and women love it. I was a great fool to take your terms, for they were confound(d high; however, WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 29'? I don't mind it, you've amused me. It was a drawing- room vaudeville, with the fun always kept up; but pity ' ; fore George ! women's ingratitude " And the Marquis, choked with disgust at the ill return which was given him, and with his amusement at what roused him even from all the apathy of a moribund : " But, Vavasour, now now why not now? If you would, still it might be done privately, secretly ; secresy could be bought, and the world would never know " She spoke low, tremulously, incoherently, and in strange agitation for the flattered, courted, proud, omnipotent beauty ! Her hands played nervously with the lace and silk of the counterpane, where she leant half-kneeling, against the bed ; her attitude was almost supplication, and her haughty loveliness was abased and dejected; for she had worn her diadem long and proudly, and it was bitter to the Queen of Fashion to have her sceptre wrenched and her purple torn aside for all to see the secret of the discrowned. " Why not now, Yavasour ?" she whispered eagerly, while her lips were hot and parched : " It would be so little to you ; it would spare me so much. Now now, before it is too late ! I can purchase inviolable secresy " The dying man interrupted her with his stifled, ghastly laugh rattling in his throat, while his sunk eyes leered maliciously, and his hand feebly played with the diamond circlet of her marriage-finger the badge, she had whis- pered to Strathmore on the rose-terrace of Vernon9eaux, the badge of Servitude and Silence. "I dare say! and ma belle veuve would then win, perhaps, M. D'Etoile, who knows ? As it is, she will have to be only his mistress! No! I am not in the mood 1 You think one en moribund ought to lend himself as a lay figure? Ah! there you are wrong, ma belle; you must ask the favor of some one of your old lovers, that man with the Yandyke face, who killed his friend for your beaux yeux ; or one of the new ones, perhaps, may pay the price more graciously." Again the horrid, unfitting laugh, chuckling and rattling in his throat, sounded through the stillness of the death- chamber; Lord Yavasour had eaten his last pate of oightingalcs, but he had still palate and power to enjoy 2fl8 STRATIIMORE; OR, what fie and most men with him find of still sweeter flavor the pleasure of Malice. And leaning there against the costly draperies of the bed, in her lace, her jewels, her delicate floating dress which that day had given out the fashion of the year to Paris, in her lovely womanhood, in her haughty grace, Marion/Lady Vavasour who wore no mask with him sank forwards, thinking nothing of her husband before her, but with her white hands clenched, her teeth set tight, her fair face blanched, her rich hair pushed back in its masses from her temples, eating in all their bitterness of the ashes of Humiliation, tasting in all their cruelty the death-throes of Abdication. CHAPTER XXXIII. THE ERRAND OP THE LOST. THE household was hushed, and all moved with noise- less footsteps through the wide marble staircase and the stately corridors and the brilliant-lighted chambers of the Hotel Vavasour: the presence of death was nigh, and breathed its solemnity even through the gilded halls and the pompous hirelings of that magnificent palace, where wit was usually as rife as in the salons of Rambouillet, and cost was as unheeded in luxury or dissipation as in the days of Vitellius. It was known that his lordship could not recover, and that, Vitellius-like, his goblet was reversed and his last Falernian was drunk, and the Prae- torian Guards of Pallida Mors were leading him out, stripped of his purples, and made nothing better or greater than an old, bloated, gluttonous man, to hurl him over the fathomless abyss, where none would mourn him, and down the dark, cold river whence none return. The household was still and awed through this early part of the spring night, and his wife sat in her own chamber, when her dinner had been served and dismissed, musing and alone. From custom she had dressed for the evening, as habitual, and the delicate shower of iostly lace WROtGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 299 fell about her, and the diamonds and amethysts sparkled in her hair as she sat there, her head leaning on her arm, her lips white and pressed together, her fair, proud brow knit in vain, cruel thoughts thoughts how to baffle, how to escape from the vengeance which netted her in and held her tight beneath its stifling meshes. Only five-and-twenty years had passed over her head, and she must lay down the sceptre, and put the crown from off her brows, and pass from the haut pas and the throne, to mingle with the jeered and common crowd. Already ! already ! She must leave her kingdom in her youth. She had known that sooner or later this must come, that sooner or later this shame and bitterness must fall ; but in the royalty of her omnipotence, the gladness of her power, she had forgotten her doom. She had believed that it would come, perhaps, at some far distant time, when her beauty was spent, and when in age it would matter but little ; nay, she bad at last believed that so happily had fortune favored her that her life would flow on forever in the sunlight, and that she would live and die in the honor and odor of the patrician world she ruled, her secret never guessed, and buried with her in the grave which would bear the name and titles of Marion, Marchioness of Vavasour and Yaux And now now in the brilliance of her youth, in the splendor of her triumphs, the stroke had fallen ; and she must go out, to be the jibe, the mockery, the scorn of her rivals and her foes. The dews stood on her brow, her fair hands clenched in her anguish, she shivered and started from her solitary reverie it was so horrible ! to stoop her pride into the dust; to be banned for ever from the haughty, shadowless, patrician life she loved ; to be the scorn and the derision of the women she had outshone and outrivalled, and made follow the mere fashion of her drapery, the mere mode that her changing caprice gave as law. She started and rose to her feet, and there was a piteous misery in the eyes ere this so proud, so lustrous, so full of careless laughter; she had known no mercy for others, but she knew suffering for herself. As she rose her lace caught in and overturned a gold fillagree basket filled with the notes which had come during the past twenty-four 300 STRATIIMORE; OR, hours; one rested, as the sho\ver fell, upon her dress, and mechanically she raised it and broke the envelope ; they were only a few lines in French, bearing tne date of the previous day : " MADAME: Lord Cecil Strathmore has some secret of your past, with which he intends to take his vengeance on you to-morrow, in the sight of Paris. I know no more than this, which I gathered from what I accidently and unavoidably overheard between him and Madame de Ruelle this morning. I acquaint you, that if you deem fit you may seek to avert what seems to threaten indignity, or worse, to you, and I am willing to answer to him for having done so. In this I render you good for evil, but, as you know but too well, I have loved you more faithfully than most. " Veuilles agreer Madame, Vassurance de ma considera- tion distinguee. FALCONBERG." That note she should have received the night before ! and it had lain there in the jewelled basket unnoticed, while the Queen of Fashion had gone out to meet her doom. She, sceptical of all else, believed in that hour in Destiny and Retribution ; the writer was an Austrian, a mere boy in years, whose young life the beautiful panther had torn and destroyed for a night's amusement, a coquette's triumph, at one of the gorgeous masked balls of the Viennese Court ; and while she read her lips quiv- ered and her hand shook as it clenched upon the paper. It told her no more than her fears had known before than the cold and pitiless face she had seen that day had told her without words. " Poor Falconberg, poor child !" she murmured uncon- sciously, for in triumph we cast aside human tenderness, but in despair we value it: "His mercy his! As soon seek pity from marble, warmth from ice ! As soon ask the vulture not to tear, the lion not to rend !" And she sat there with the pallor of a sickly terror blanching her lovely lips, which trembled as with cold : she knew that more hopeless than to seek mercy from the beasts of prey were it to seek compassion from the hand which her love and her lie had dyed with blood. WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 301 And yet and yet her eyes fell on her own loveliness. It had bent him as the wind the reeds; it had melted him as the flames the steel. Might its ancient power not be wholly fled ? could he who had been her abject slave gaze on it wholly unmoved ? Up from the dread of a great despair grew the sickly shadow of a vain hope, side-by- side with the mad impulse of an unconsidered resolve. She was so used to her sovereign sway, her proud omnip- otence resistance to her prayer seemed a thing impos- sible. And hastily, and on the instinct of a misery which made death from his hand look rather to be coveted than the living chastisement to which he doomed her, she arose nerved to a hopeless and desperate purpose. Late that night Marion Vavasour entered a little brougham by one of the side doors of her own residence, and was driven rapidly through the few streets which parted her from the Hotel de Londres. The carriage was hired, the driver a stranger, and she herself was enveloped in long, black, sweeping folds, which concealed her person, while a thick black veil, thrown over her head, wholly obscured her features. Etoile himself might have passed her at his elbow and never penetrated her disguise; those who would have died for one smile from her eyes would not have recognized her in that veiled and sombre form. The driver stopped at the hotel, and came to the door for his instructions. "Inquire if Lord Cecil Strathmore be visible?" The man obeyed, and ten minutes after returned. " Milord is within, madanie, but they doubt if he will be seen so late." "Very well, let me out." She descended from her carriage and entered the hotel. A few moments' conversation with one of the attendants, two louis d'or slipped into his hand, and she followed him up the staircase, along the corridors, and towards the door of one of the great suites. " Your card, madanie ?" She handed him one, on which was printed a name, but not her own, and the servant entered the apartment, leaving her without, but with the door not wholly closed, BO that where she stood she could hear his voice and thai of the one who replied to him. 26 S02 STRATHMORE; OR, "A lady entreats milord to see her for a few moments ?" "The 'Countess Lena!' I do not know the name; and what an hour! However, show her in " The man returned, threw the door wide open, ushered her ceremoniously into the salon, and retired, closing the door behind him. He presumed this veiled midnight guest, whose voice thrilled him like sweet music, came from the Bre'da Quartier, and envied the Englishman who received her. The door closed, and Marion Vavasour was alone with Strathmore. He rose as she entered, standing under the full light of the chandelier immediately above his head. "Madame, puis je demander a quoi je doi cet honneur?" As the calm, chill, courtly tones, addressing her as a stranger, fell on her ear, she shivered could that suave, cold, immutable voice ever soften to pardon, to mercy? She was silent, pausing in the centre of the chamber, and he moved a fauteuil towards her. "Asseyez vous, madame. Je suis a vos ordres." She did not take the chair; she did not answer; and Strathmore, marvelling if his veiled visitant were dumb, awaited her pleasure leaning his arm on the mantelpiece while the light was shed on the peculiar Vandyke type of his features, with the dark gleam of his fathomless eyes under their drooped lids, and the cold, straight line of the calm brows. She looked at him and shuddered, for stue knew the chill brutality which lay beneath his high-bred and courtly suavity ; she knew the steel gauntlet which was covered with that delicate, velvet, broidered glove of a courtier's manner. And the courage which had brought her hither on a mad impulse failed; the last time that she had been within his reach his band had been upon her throat seeking her life! She sickened and shuddered with the memory of that ghastly hour, that awful torture, when death had been so nigh! and noting how she trembled, this stranger, this veiled woman, Strathmore approached her gently: " Ne vous inquitez pas, madame. Si je puis vous assiter, commandez-moi ?" "Strathmore, you can spare me!" The words rang out almost with a shriek; and, as the voice smote on his ear, he staggered back, and a spasm WROUGHT VY HIS OWN HAND. 303 passed over his face as at some wound suddenly dealt by a keen knife. His passion was not dead because it had changed to hate; nay, hate rioted in him because, though love abhorred her, love still craved her. For this woman had been to him God, conscience, world, heaven, all that life can hold, all that eternity can offer! Then, he conquered himself; he held in an iron rein every emotion which could betray him ; his face grew chill and passionless, as though it were cast in bronze; he looked on her, as he had looked in the Tuileries as he had looked in the sunlight of the past day and was silent. He had trained himself to see her thus without a sign, that he might watch her suffer; and she might sooner have wrung tears from a cast of bronze, a moan from a statue of marble, than mercy or weakness from him. " You can spare me, Strathmore!" The words rang out hoarse in their bitter supplication ; coldly and tranquilly he answered her : "I can." "And you will you will?" For all reply he smiled ; and that slight, chill smile, as it passed over his face where the gaslight fell white upon it, was more pitiless than any speech which could have condemned her. A faint cry broke from her lips as she saw it ; she cast from her the trammels of her heavy, sweeping cloak, and flung back the black lace which shrouded her like a Spanish mantilla. Her loveliness was once more before him, unveiled, in all its brilliance, the the light streaming down upon her face with its glittering hair and its lovely youth, the sapphires flashing in her snowy bosom, the perfumed lace, half falling off, half trailing round, the divine grace of her voluptuous form. And she stood silent, her head drooped, her eyes soft with lustrous tears, her bosom heaving with its voiceless sobs, the light falling full upon her. This had been omnipotent to tempt him, once, to cast aside all laws of God and Man this might tempt him yet again. This had stricken his strength till it was a reed within her hands this again might give her back her power. And she stood there, while her eyes looked up to his, and her heart heaved where the jewels gleamed ; and the lace sank farther 304 STRATIIMOllE ; OR, down down from off her beautiful form, with the dia- monds glittering in her breast. But his will was iron ; his veins were ice for her; and his eyes did not change, his smile did not alter, as his words fell cold and clear on the silence: " It is too late for that /" A burning flush crimsoned her face, and she shrank under the blow. She was a woman, and one who glossed her amours with delicate refinement, and one who was used to rule omnipotent, and yield with a sovereign's grace not to sue and be repulsed. Tears, genuine and bitter, started to her eyes, and her voice thrilled with pas- sionate emotion : " Strathmore ! Strathmore ! I am in your power, spare me ! I am a woman, be pitiful to me ! You loved me so well once have some pardon for me now !" He did not change his attitude; he leaned there against the mantelpiece, with his eyes, under their drooped lids, fixed on her ; and his words answered her, falling low and chill on the silence, like the dropping of ice-water: " I marvel that you dare say that to me ! Go ! you were always a matchless actress; it is a pity to waste your time, 3~our tempting, and your loveliness !" She shivered as she heard him ; from fiery passion, from brutal menace, from bitter reproaches, she would have hoped to win, to touch, to tempt, to torture him into some mercy. With those cold, measured, inflexible tones, all hope died out. She felt as those who, gliding down into a bottomless abyss upon the Alps, feel the ice-wall they strive to grasp, slide, smooth, and frozen, and shelving, from their touch, as they sink downwards to darkness and to death. With a low cry, she threw herself at his feet in all her soft abandonment of supplication ; her proud head humbled to the dust before him ; her white hands wrung and clenched; her loveliness thrown there before him like a criminal's who kneels before her judge. And he looked down on her unmoved, save that his vengeance was dear to him, and sweet ; she suffered at last! " Strathmore ! Oh, God ! see, I kneel to you ; 7, who never bend to any mortal thing! I may merit this from WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 305 you ; I do not dare to deny it. You may have much to avenge on me much ! though I loved you ; aye, I loved you as I have loved no other ! Women crave conquest, power, cruelty ; but we love, despite that love, though we love ourselves first! If I sinned to you, I sinned fot you !" " True ! It is the trade of the courtesan I" Where she lay at his feet, prostrate in her loveliness and her abasement, she shuddered under the calm, chill, brutal sneer she ! the woman who had ruled over princes, and to whom kings had knelt! Yet she would not renounce all hope, she would not give way from all effort: she lifted her head so that the white light fell on her lus- trous hair, and shone in her lovely eyes with their appeal- ing prayer ; and that face, in its blanched pain, its prostrate beauty, its stricken pride, was more resistless than in its most radiant hour of witching sovereignty : " Shame me ! humble me ! strike me as you will ! I wronged you, and I am in your power, and a woman and defenceless ! Yet hear me : be great enough to forego vengeance be noble enough to heap coals of fire on my head by Pardon ! If I erred, were you sinless ? If I were guilty, were you stainless from crime? See! you have made me drink of the bitterness of humiliation to the dregs? Cannot that content you ? Spare me, more for the love of God ! Hear me, Strathmore, and have mercy ! To-day you have let the world whisper it, but to-morrow's whisper may soon efface to-day's. Lord Vavasour is dying, dying fast ; let me bear his name in peace ? If you do not reveal the truth to his heirs, none will dare attack, and sift, and search none will raise the question. I may live in peace ; live without shame and sneer and j&e from the women I have rivalled, from the society I have ruled ! Only spare me this this ! Do not hunt me down to poverty and degradation, do not expose me to the world !" She stopped, and a bitter sob choked her voice, for here, if acting still, the actress felt her part and pleaded her prayer in all its acrid bitterness, its keen, imploring pain, for she felt and pleaded for herself. She suffered ! she suffered ! and the burning tears gathered and fell, and under its cUlicate shroud of lace her form shivered with the physical cold of a great dread, of a convulsive suspense. 2(3* J6 STRATHMORE ; OR, She pleaded as the Condemned plead for life. Her future lay in this man's keeping and he had spared her from death only to bid her live " to suffer." She had made him in God's sight and in his own a mur- derer. Could she hope for mercy from him ? Could she strike vengeance from his hand ? A death-like stillness reigned between them as her voice ceased, and she lay there at his feet in her abject supplica- tion, her abased loveliness, her stricken pride. He stood changeless, motionless, his face unaltered in its chill tran- quillity, his eyes unfaltering in their relentless gaze : " If you were drowning before my eyes, and my hand stretched out could save you you should perish in its need ! If you were bound to the stake, and one word of mine could save you I would not speak it! If you were dying of hunger and thirst, and a cup of cold water from my pity could save you I would refuse it in your death hour! I have answered. Such mercy as you gave, I give to you no other." As his words fell slowly out upon the silence, chill, tranquil, pitiless, and inexorable as Fate, a shudder ran through her frame, and a cry broke from her lips, wild and piteous, like that of a woman who receives her death- warrant, She trembled, shivered, shrank before the iron pitiless- ness, the icy hate, of this man's nature, on which her own might fling, and wear, and spend itself forever, yet make no more impress than the fretting waves which break upon a granite sea-wall, and leave no sign of all their feverish travail. And she lay crouched at his feet in all her fallen loveliness, stricken and paralyzed as by a cruel, mortal blow. His eyes dwelt on her long and meaningly, while not a muscle of his face changed from its rigid calm, its bittei exultation ; he watched her shudder, and writhe, and crouch there at his feet with a faint smile playing on his lips as be would have watched her strained on the rack or bound to her funeral pyre ; and his voice hissed slowly through his teeth as he stooped and whispered in her ear ; "Listen! I have what you can never rob me of I have my VENGEANCE ! You have lived to suffer! And WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 307 you will fall lower and lower into sin and infamy, and misery aud want; fall as those fall who trade in beauty, and die as they die when beauty leaves them die in the streets die craving a crust! Go! your fate waits for you !" The brutal doom hissed in her ear, maddened her as a shot panther, till all its desert nature wakes to life under its pain. She started, and uprose and stood before him, her face blanched to the lips, her eyes alight with a tigress- glare, fearful in her loveliness, ghastly in her brilliance, dangerous in her weakness and her despair. "Abase me, expose me, destroy me, work your worst ; I plead no more ! But, by the God whom we have both outraged, the hour shall come when the mercy you mete out to me I will mete back to you, when you shall seek in vain of earth or heaven, Strathmore, for the pity you now deny !" She stood before him in all her beauty, while the light streamed down upon her, her face turned towards him with the glittering hair thrown back, her lustrous eyes dilated, her form instinct with despairing passion, her voice rising and quivering in the air till it rang with a menace of the future, with evil, dark and merciless as hJs own ; she stood there, terrible as Ate, prophetic as Cas- sandra in her despair. And thus they looked on one another, this man and woman, so lately bound in the close ties of passionate love and mutual sin, now sundered farther than they betwixt whom oceans roll. Thus they looked on one another, and in her e} r es was the lurid gleam of a vengeance which soon or late would pioneer its path and sate its lust ; and on his lips sat the calm, chill, brutal smile of a vengeance which would never cease from pursuing, aud never stay its hand for pity or for prayer, which held its quarry in its grip, and tasted its power slowly, drop by drop, with thirst which grew the greater with its every draught. Thus they looked on one another; there was a moment's silence again, as though she still mutely awaited whether yet he would not yield to mercy, yet abstain from ven- geance, and bid her go, loathed, abhorred, condemned, but spared. There was a moment's silence, in which the very air seemed pleading for her pardon, and suppli SOS STRATHMORE ; OR, eating for the Godlike vengeance of foi s;ivencss. Then she cast one look upon his face : it was white, calm, chill, inflexible as the marble features of the dead, and pitiless as they to prayer, or woe, or menace; and without word or sign she turned and left his presence. They had parted. CHAPTER XXXIV. THE GERM OF THE SECRET. AT twelve that night, while Lord Vavasour lay dying, and Paris danced and supped, and gamed and laughed, and whirled through the merry hours, a party of some dozen or so were gathered after the opera for a petit souper in the salons of Madame de la Ferriole, the wife of one of those princes whom the Bourse makes in a day. The hotel was superb; the ameublement would have been deemed marveltous in a palace ; figuratively, for its cost, the supper could boast of liquid gold for its wines, and melted gold for its dishes ; and the Sevres on which it was served was rimmed with pink pearls ; still, Madame de la Ferriole (genuinely, Madame le Maire), was still on the outskirts of fashionable society, and was at this moment still passing through that transmigratory period which transfers the owners of Capital among the leaders of Ton ; and blazons the Or with the Gules. She moved high, but not with the highest, and therefore her guests around the supper-table discussed the insult of Longchamps with- out the key to it, which as yet only lay in the hands of the ultra exclusives of one certain set; and, therefore, they hailed with pleasure and empressement the late advent of the single member of that set whom they had yet secured, and who had deigned to come and sup with Madame de la Ferriole, partly because, en vraie Pari- sienne, she respected the wealth, partly because, en bel esprit, she wished to satirize the appointments of tho roturiere. That single member was Blanche de Ruelle With all the "languor of good tone/' but with all the WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 36$ curiosity of scandal-mongers, the party around the million- naire's supper-table sought the confidence of the haughty and unapproachable aristocrat, who, lying back and slowly breaking her ice, seemed disposed to talk of little but the new opera, and of that only to her own escort the Yicomte de Chanrellan. Blanche de Ruelle had been the first to whom Strsthmore had entrusted the secret of Marion Yavasour's downfall, and bidden deal the poisoned wound with the silvered steel; she had been the chief to enable him to mete out revenge and chastisement thus slowly, subtilely, witheringly. And although he in unfolding, she in receiving the story, had placed but one motive in sight and surface to wit. the proud wreath of an insulted Order, and an outraged and patrician Matronage; the chastisement had been the more willingly, the more com- pletely done because she had once loved hopelessly where the woman whose abasement she was summoned to carry out, had been madly worshipped. The same passions move the world as in older and more transparent days, they are but the more closely veiled. And now about the supper-table of La Ferriole, little save one topic was circulated, if abandoned for the mo- ment, to be resumed the next ; and the bored, languid, slander-seeking flaneurs, masculine and feminine, lounging away an hour after the opera over the priceless wines of the Princess of the Bourse, sought its explanation from the first of those who had dealt the deadly thrust that day in the green allees of the Bois. For the insult to the English Peeress was the theme of Paris ; and the high station of those who had passed it raised curiosity to frantic wonder and to breathless impatience. Blanche de Ruelle let them babble on about it in her presence, while she spoke of Auber's music with Chanrellan ; then she raised her haughty eyes in answer to the questions which turned directly towards her, playing gently with her Spanish fan : " Pardon, madame ! Lady Vavasour ? Oh, I pray you flrop that subject; society has been grossly outraged, foully insulted. Have you not heard? Indeed! Why, the marriage! was fictitious she was never his wife. The world has been deceived, and we we have received 'Jie Marquis's mistress." 310 STRATHMORE: OR. CHAPTER XXXY. THE REAPING OF THE STORM. AT twelve of the night the Marquis of Vavasour and Vaux died, and his chaplain, standing by, said unctuously over the bloated body : " Blessed are the chosen who die in the Lord;" for he whose breath had just left his body had had many and rich benefices in his hand, and " died in the Lord," according to all the clergy of the Church of England, which sees no sins in patrons. " Le Roi est mort, vive le Roi ! " said the good chaplain, having said the Last Communion over the past Marquis, went to send the first telegram to the future one. But, rapid as was his own, one had preceded it to the distant heir, who, from a nameless attache, would become a Per- sonage. Where the two passions race, Revenge will outstrip Avarice of the two, though both are hell-hounds fleet of foot. This latter message ran thus : 'From the Lord Cecil Strathmore, Hotel de Londres, Paris, to William Vere-Lucingham, Esq., British Em- bassy, Constantinople : " I hear the Marquis, your cousin, died to-night, sud- denly and intestate. See me here as soon as you arrive, or you will lose the best part of the personalty." Now, in the absence of all will of any kind, since the Marquis had ever had obstinate horror of a testament, and shunned the word of death as utterly as the Romans on their tombstones, the entail devolved on Vere-Lucingham, sole, though distant, heir presumptive, and all the rich personalty would go to his widowed Marchioness. There- fore, when this telegram came to him with his morning chocolate, acquainting him of the new fortunes which Pallida Mors, best friend of the Living, had wrought for him, the young Attache was bewildered at its latter clause ; but knowing well the character of the sender, for he had WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 311 been under him at Turin, never thought of slighting 01 neglecting the strange summons, but only felt a grateful and wondering eagerness as to its purport. At twelve of the night the Marquis of Vavasour and Yaux died of too much pate de rossignol and rosolios at luncheon not a great death, perhaps, but in the main scarce so harmful an one (to others) as Gustav Yasa's or Julius Cesar's, or divers whom we call heroes because they | erished by a weapon with which they had slain thousands ere their decease, and slew by their legacies thousands after it. To be gluttonous of nightingales is bad ; but it may be worse for the universe to be gluttonous of nations ; a gourmet only kills himself; a hero fills u larger bill of mortality. The one, however, has only the restaurants, the other the world, to chant his De Pro- fundis; and, granted, it in murder on a larger scale to kill ten thousand men to make a victory than kill ten dozen birds to make a pate ! The Marquis of Vavasour and Yaux died, and left the world a legacy of many inimitable cuisine receipts and one great wonder. His young cousin, Yere-Lucingham, succeeded to the Marquisate with all its honors, and by refusing to acknowledge her claim to one iota of the rich property which the law would have allotted to the wife of the deceased to one gem of the Vavasour jewels which had so long sparkled on her fair, proud brow, the new peer proclaimed to Europe that she whom it had so long received and honored had no right or title to its respect and homage, but had only been the dead man's mistress. And when the charge was brought, the condemned could put forward no defence, could allege no denial : there had been no marriage, and the Law is not to be seduced by a feminine sophism, dazzled by an actress, or enslaved by a woman's loveliness, but wrings out one uncourtly, bitter, brutal thing truth ! She, whom the world so long had known and worshipped as Marion, Lady Vavasour, had kept her secret well. Who says that her sex has not the power to guard a secret closely : Pshaw I they keep one for a lifetime, if their own 1 She had kept it, secure that it would never be told by her lord, and that when he died, with him would die tb sole possessor of it. And now the secret was given 5U2 STRATIIMORE ; OR, to the winds, and hurled out to the light of the day, and flung to the world where she reigned, as the deer is flung to the hounds at the curee ! For the hell-dogs of Yen- goance had been on her track, and they never lose scent of the trail. Years before, cruising among the West Indian Isles, and lying in a harbor (rarely visited) to have his yacht fresh coppered, the Marquis had seen her, lovely as the morning. Her parents, English planters, were dead, and she was fretting at, and wearied of, colonial obscurity and insular imprisonment, like a brilliant tropic bird in a cooped-up cage. She looked at her marvellous loveliness, and knew that while it could give her sway wider and mightier than the Caesars', it must bloom to its full beauty, and fade and die unseen, like the radiant blossoms of some matchless flower in the tangled forests and dense swamps of her own island. The Marquis saw her, loved her, and offered her the world. She knew, by intuition in her lovely youth, how great a price such beauty as hers should fetch, and refused to sell it for less than his coronet. He declined the payment she declined any other. A pause ensued, in which both steeled themselves from surrender, and each awaited the other's capitulation. At last the man grew impatient, the woman doubtful; he was lured by her love- liness, she was lured by the vista of emancipation and conquest which stretched out before her; they each bent to a compromise. She dispensed with the legalities of marriage, but stipulated for the semblance ; she did not require to be made his wife, but she required that the world should hold her so; he, well amused to joliment jouer sa monde; and musing that (unbound) he could end the comedy whensoever he should have fatigued of it, consented. She came to Europe with him as the Marchioness of Yavasour and Yaux ; it suited his monkeyish malice to play the trick on his order and on society, and he readily lent himself to all which might best sustain the delusion. She was received as his wife, and the rest was soon accom- plished by her own unequalled beauty and unrivalled tact. She soon ruled the fashion, and set her foot on the neck of the world. And as time went on, the old Marquis grew BO weii accustomed to her reign, and was so well amvi.'-ed WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 313 to see society fall before her and men go mad for her love- liness, that he abandoned all thought of dissolving their compact; partially, perhaps, because he did not care to tell the world himself that he had palmed off a lie upon it, partially because his own weak and supine character had fhown its facile points to her, and was ruled by her stronger will with facility, and without his being even aware of the governance. Thus what she appeared to the world, she grew absolutely to regard herself. Worshipped, courted, obeyed as the Marchioness of Vavasour and Vaux, she forgot that she had no legal claim to the title and place she filled. One or two obscure persons in that remote, un- civilized West Indian island were all who knew her secret ; how should these reach her great world, or her great world reach them ? Moreover, they were in her pay, and bribed to silence ; so it was little marvel that Marion Vavasour such I must still call her deemed her position secure and her single secret safe from revelation; little marvel that, proud, made to love power and to use it royally, haughtily fastidious as though a born patrician, with some blood of an illegitimate Stuart actually wandering -in her veins, and accustomed to the homage of exclusive circles, ?he had learned to look upon her rank as unassailable, and felt the degradation of her deadly fate bitterly, bitterly as any queen who, with her crown torn from her brows and her purples rent from about her, ever was bidden to descend from her throne and come out to the gibes and the hiss of the multitudes, where yesterday the highest sought her smile, where to-day the lowest could revile and scoff and stone ! Strathmore's vengeance would have been more merciful if he had slain her in the glare of that summer morning a moment's pain, and all had then beeu over. He had chosen a more lingering and cruel retri- bution : he had bidden her live to suffer. Her secret was known in Paris, and nothing of the bitterness of her humiliation was spared to the Discrowned. She had outshone the one sex, she had maddened the other. Who was there amidst the order she had insulted, the women she had rivalled, the men she had fooled, to break the violence of her fall, to heed how brutally the diadem might be wrenched from the fair, proud head raised in its lovely sovereignty so long above them? 27 314 STRATIIMORE; OR, Her secret was known in Paris in the circles, in the salons, in the Tuileries itself, in Galignani's, on the Boule- vards ; in all the cafes, in all the boudoirs, over fine ladies' chocolate in their bedrooms, over gourmets' five hundred francs breakfasts in the Maison Dorce, it was the theme of the hour, to the exclusion of all else; it flew across the Channel as swiftly as special correspondents' copy could reach Printinghouse-square, and filled all the journals, Anglo and Gallic, with its startling sensation-news, its incredible scandal. All Europe knew this beautiful Helen with the antelope eyes, for whom princes and chiefs had been ready to war, almost as in the old days of Hellas. All Europe was summoned as witness and auditor of her shame and her abdication. From the Palace to the Press all Europe arraigned her and for what mercy could she look in her abasement, when those who found her guilty were the nobility she had insulted, the society she had trepanned, the rivals she had humiliated, the lovers she had fooled ? These made judges more pitiless than Alva's Council of Blood ! True, for sake of her loneliness many asylums offered to her, in terms Avhich now she could not resent as insult, and of them she accepted Etoile's. But the protection of a Prince was almost as bitter to her as the obscurity of a convent she who had reigned in the palaces of Europe to be classed with Viola Ye", she who had shone amidst women of blood royal and visited at St. Cloud and at Windsor to sink amidst lionnes of the Rue Breda and Enghien toy-villas! It was a bitter change from the purples of the Patrician to the stained robes of the Hetira ! She suffered ay, she suffered cruelly, this woman who had mocked at all human grief with her silvery laugh, and dealt out anguish and death as gaily as a child deals both to the painted butterflies that he slays for his sport. She suffered bitterly; for to the proud and fluttered woman there was no chastisement so fearful as humiliation. And it was a scourge of scorpions wherewith he lashed her he whose hand, though unseen, dealt every blow under which she shrank. With the keen cunning and the patience in pursuit, of her vagrant race, the Bohemian had learned the secret of the aristocrat from a quadroon woman whom she had WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 315 found, by what chain of hazard and investigation ?ombined matters not. In her hands it was powerless for evil a gipsy could not be heard against a peeress ; but she placed it in those which her shrewd intuition knew would use it most widely, most mercilessly. When Strathmore had taken his yacht, as it was believed, to the Western world, he had gone to pursue every link of the clue given him by the Czeschen, in that remote unnoticed colony whence the first thread of his vengeance had to be found. It had needed long and patient search ; those he sought were obscure and unknown ; but he was patient in the trail as an Indian, and when his gold had bought over their silence and purchased their fidelity to the secret they had in keep- ing, his vengeance was his. He had returned to deal it his hand invisible but his will directing its every step, its every sting. With his revelation he had bought oppro- brium and chastisement for her from the highest; with his gold he bought insult and degradation for her from the lowest. As it had been his intimation which had caused the patrician women to cut her dead in the passage of Longchamps, so it had been his will which had caused the lorette to greet her familiarly in the allee of the Bois so it was his wealth which purchased every subtle indignity, every suave outrage which, by a cool word or an insolent smile from those in whom womanhood is disgraced, classed her with them, and struck deeper than a dagger's thrust into the heart which, with all its sin, with all its license, remained haughty, fastidious, refined, aristocratic to its core. A laugh, a note, a bow, the pointing of the mon- strari digito, the shame of coarse epigram, or sneering quatrain, or obscene caricature, the insult of courtesans' friendship or courtesans' invitation these were the weapons with which the unseen hand that dealt her doom, stabbed her momentarily, mercilessly, with a vengeance as subtle as it was relentless. He had bade he live to suffer ! It environed her, it pursued her, it poisoned the very air she breathed ; she grew exhausted under it, this ghastly and unending vengeance, which never slacked ils speed, which never slacked its thirst, which, in its subtlety and its power, seemed all but supernatural. My brethren, iw not men's passions ever so when they break the bonds 316 STRATHMORE; OR, of natme, and trample wide the mercy which God yields, but they deny ? He had bk'klen her live to suffer; and she did suffer, this woman whom no remorse had ever touched, no pity stirred, no tenderness stricken, but who had pride, which suffered deadly agony in its fall. There is a torture of the spirit which is more devilish and more terrible to endure than the shorter and coarser torture of the body ; and she she who had reigned so long! knew this to its uttermost. She knew it when the men-servants of a household which had used to be obedient to her slightest gesture, could revenge themselves for many an imperious word or haughty command, by the slight and the sneer which the hirelings of the fresh lord had no scruple to deter them from offering to the mistress of the dead. She knew it when the women whom she had scored from her visiting list as beneath her rank, or refused to enter on her invitation-roll as roturieres or rococo, could pay her back in whatever coin they would. She knew it when she stood alone, a queen discrowned, iu the chambers where she had so long reigned absolute with a crowding court about her, and looked down the long vista of the magnificent salons, where yesterday everv art-trifle bad been hers, every will had bent to hers, every guest, every servant, ay ! even every picture on the walls, or jewel in the tazze, or flower in the conservatories had been hers, and from whence now she passed out with less honor than the lowest hireling who moved about their chambers, with less right, or title, or share in them than the dogs which slept upon their cushions. The shame of a great sin had never smitten her ; she knew it not ; but under the shame of a great abasement she writhed, she shrank, she shuddered, as the women of old, who were given over, naked and bleeding, and hooted, to the pillory and the scourge. Is she alone ? Surely not, for with man- kind it i not the crime which is dreaded, but the scaffold.* The Due d'Etoile's carriage awaited her on that day when she passed forever from the residence and the state of the Marchionness of Vavasour and Vaux. She entered * "Le crime fait la honte et nnn pas I'lchafaud," says Corncille But the world reverses the poet's dictum;- and in the world's eyes and our own, we may sin as we please provided we avoid the scandaJ of being gibbetted for it ! WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 311 it, sweeping through the great crowd, which assembled to gaze upon her as a notoriety, with all her accustomed haughty grace, now with a shade of defiance in it, and with her teeth slightly set together, for henceforth the world and she were at issue, and would contemn and confront each other. But this was only for the world ; alone, the fallen sovereign bowed under the bitterness of her degradation, and writhed upon the wheel where she was chained for public gaze and public mockery, as the carriage rolled her onward to the Due's villa; he was not with her some Court ceremony detained him at the Tuileries, and he had written that he could not be at Auteuil " jusq'au souper," in a note, in whose rich compli- ment already she learned the difference of a Prince's wording to a Peeress of England, and to one of Viola Ve's Sisterhood. She needed the solitude; she was thankful for it. Away from the eyes of the crowd, or from the presence of her lovers, Marion Vavasour's high-strung spirit gave way, like a bow over-bent. She who had looked on all pain as her sport, as the young cat claims the agonies of the dying bird for her play, she knew it now for herself. She was alone ; on her arrival the chambers seemed stifling ; the very evidences of a prince's wealth prepared for her looked loathsome they were the insignia of her fall ! She needed to suffer in solitude once once for henceforth she would be amongst those whose wealth lies in their smiles, whose livelihood hangs on the brilliance of their beauty, and who must, ever laugh laugh and love, with the rouge on their paling cheeks, and the iron sharp in their souls! She went out into the sheen of the spring sunshine, sweeping swiftly and unheedingly through the grounds of the Due's Villa. The birds sang about her path; she scared them from her; their song was jarring mockery in her ear. A gardner's child asked her for alms; she spurned him from her with a cruel word; she had lived to envy that beggar's brat playing among the roses. A bright-winged butterfly fluttered in the grass at her feet ; she trampled it to a brutal death, for daring to be joyous there that senseless insect ! in the sunny light. She swept onward swiftly, and unheeding where she went, while in the distance across the stretch of wood, and in the sunny mists of coming evening, uprose the roofs '27* 318 STRATH MORE; OR, and spires of Paris Paris, where she had reigned idol of its Court and leader of its Xoblesse ; Paris, where she had wielded more than a Sovereign's sway; Paris, where she had sunk in all the bitterness of her fall. She swept onward, fast and blindly, through the glades and gardens, her lips white, her teeth set, her frame quivering with the shame of that day's degradation, till a branch of one of the early roses struck her across the brow, and called her to herself with its sharp, physical pain. The flowers swung in the sunlight the flowers which, with that more poetic element mingling in her nature, she had ever loved and interwoven with her beauty. Now, they recalled a thousand ghastly memories; with a rapid gesture she broke them asunder, and tore and scattered their fragrant leaves upon the earth ; she was, even as those roses, a lying loveliness with a canker at the core! And, with a passionate moan of pain, Marion Vavasour sank down upon the stone steps of the terrace to which she had uncon- sciously taken her way, and, sinking her graceful, haughty head upon her hands, gave free run in solitude to the bitterness of a fallen pride, to the misery of a world-wide degradation. Yet even this luxury of loneliness she was denied : "You suffer now!" The words, hissed in her ear in strange ill-spoken French, made her start and rise with her old, proud impe- riousness, yet with something of fear ; for the ruthless vengeance which pursued her had, now that its worst was wrought, left its terror upon her, and in her nature, as in the panther's, something of cowardice ran side-by-side with cruelty. Bending above her, over the gray, ivy-hung coping, she saw the dark figure of a vagrant woman ; it was the Bohemian, Redornpta.who had stood there watching her, with a dark, hot flush warming the pale olive of her features, and lending them new life and light a flush of thirsty joy. For to the wild, half-savage nature which had known no God but its love, no law but its instincts, revenge looked great and holy ; a just peace-offering to the beloved dead. To Marion Vavasour she was unknown her face, though twice beheld, unremembered and, in vague alarm, she glanced around, and saw that she had wandered sn WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 319 far to the outskirts of the grounds that she was only surrounded by woodland, with none within call; her hand instinctively sought for gold, and tendered it in alms to this gipsy, whose gaze filled her with a nameless terror, thus suddenly met in her hour of solitude, in her day of bitterness. A smile, mournful in its utter disdain, crossed the lips of the Bohemian, and she motioned it aside with that calm dignity with which nature had dowered her: " Should I touch your gold if I were starving! I came for a richer guerdon than all the wealth of empires I came to see you suffer !" "Suffer suffer 1" She repeated the word vaguely, mechanically ; in that moment of abandonment her nerves were unstrung, her strength beaten down, and the defiance she had assumed for the world had but left her the more exhausted and heart-sick with the faintness of despair. She could not resent the Bohemian's words, but only dimly marvelled at them. The gipsy looked at her, a smile lighting her eyes, and breaking up from the immutable melancholy of her face, while her brown hand clenched on the white, soft arm of Marion Vavasour : "Ah! I have toiled, and labored, and endured for that, only for that to see you suffer ! You were the murderess of Marc Lennartson, the slayer of what I loved. Ah ! false fornicatress, did you never hear his blood cry out for vengeance? did you think to smile and sin, and drag men down to hell with all your loveliness, and never have your crime come back to you ? You slew him and you laughed at his death! You slew him but I have avenged him ! I have been on your trail day and night, and year after year; I burrowed to your secret at last, and I gave it to Strathmore to destroy you. You suffer! your lips are white, your eyes are dim, your face is hag gard you suffer ! You have eaten of such bitterness a* you gave ; you have fallen from your proud estate ; you will die in lowest infamy ! God has given me vengeance God has given me vengeance !" The words broke swift and fierce from the Bohemian's lips, with all the ferocious passion of her savage race, her eyes glittering, her voice triumphant, her hand clenching 320 STHATIIMORE; OR, Harder on the delicate arm she bruised in her grip, as she watched the woman she had hated and pursued, shrink hack and shiver, arid turn sick under her stripes, as the scourged under those of the lash ! Then the glow faded from her dark-olive cheek, the vengeful lust and joy from her gleaming eyes ; she loosened her hold, and threw up her arms with a wild, piteous gesture to Heaven : " Oh, God ! thou givest me Vengeance, but thou canst not give me back the Dead! She suffers! she suffers! but he " The shrill, agonized cry died in a broken moan, her arms fell, her head drooped ; she stood livid, mute, motion- less as a statue. For in this lawless, vagrant woman, born of savage blood and bred by savage laws, brute instincts were outweighed by one great love ; and that love turned even the long yearned-for hour of her vengeance to dead ashes, to withered fruit for Vengeance could not give her back her dead ! Her eyes dwelt on the face of Marion Vavasour with a fixed and lifeless gaze of unutterable melancholy, of fathom- less pain, and her voice came slowly and hoarsely from ner lips : " I have smitten \ r ou, but I cannot make you render back the life that you destroyed ! I revenge, but I cannot recall ! He is dead, and my youth lies with him in the grave ; though I wring you with every torture, I cannot undo your work! Yet when you live in shame and die in infamy, you will remember the woman who loved, yet was forsaken by him, avenged him on you, who betrayed and drove him to his death 1 If you had spared him, you had been spared!" Then she turned, and moved slowly away with her head bowed, passing out of sight through the leafy aisles of the trees; and Marion Vavasour stood alone, with the chill of a great and nameless terror upon her. Her hands clenched on the stone coping as if for support, her eyes swam ; she shivered in the mellow sunlight, she recoiled under the chastisement of the great sins which had found her out, and come home to her fruit of the seed sown. She shuddered there, where she stood in the warm even- ing air, and crouched down like a thing of guilt, while tho dank dew stood on her fair, proud brow. And, as ihougii WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 321 led by the hand of an avenging angel, her eyes, dim in her bitter, throbbing misery, unconsciously followed the circling sweep of a white-winged swallow skimming the surface of the earth ; and as they pursued the bird's flight, fell on the place where it rested, a block of marble, lying amidst green luxuriance of spring-tide flowers, and the leaves of drooping trees, which bore the name of the dead below : BERTTE ERROLL, AGED 33, Murdered by the Hand of his Friend. The grounds of the villa touched the cemetery of Auteuil ; beyond, well-nigh at her feet, lay the grave of the man whom her lie had given to death, with the brief record carved there by the remorse of his assassin. And she, who believed in no God, believed at last in retri- bution, and stood there paralyzed and stricken with a deadly fear, looking down on the tomb where the swallow rested and the sunlight played ! Yet, still still, the soul of this woman knew neither remorse nor repentance, for these, if they take their spring from crime, yet are holy and purifying while they scathe. But only as the panther in its mortal pain grows fresh ahungered for the death grapple in its blind instinct of revenge, so she in hers grew athirst for added evil evil which should smite him who had been the companion in her sin, yet who had pursued her as though he were guiltless evil which should blast the life that had destroyed her own, and strike to the dust the iron will that had stricken her evil in which she should hiss back into the ear of St.ro.th- more the words with which he had doomed her: " S*< h mercy as you gave I give to you no other I" 382 STRATH MORE ; OR, CHAPTER XXXYI. REQUIESCAT IN PACE. OVER that grave the twilight shadows stole, evening daws gathered in the spring violets which clustered round the marble, the birds went to roost in the boughs which swa\'ed above, and the first faint light of the young moon fell across the letters of the inscription, carved deep into the stone as though to stand there, in their recorded crime, through all the change of season and all wear of time, eternal as the sin of which they told. She his murderess had gone some hours past; and by the grave, unconscious that she had been there before him, and there sworn a vow of vengeance ruthless as his own, stood the companion and the avenger of her guilt. Always thus in solitude and in the stillness of the night Strathmore came hither; often, very often, for his nature was too brave and too proud to spare itself one tittle of its chastisement, and the love which he had borne the man whom he had slaughtered seemed to well up in deeper tenderness as everything else in him grew harder, colder, and more merciless. A command he could not resist seemed to impel him. to come there as men go to the scene of their past crimes, and to stand beside the record of his guilt, beside the tomb where the life his hand had slain in all its glory and its youth, lay rotting to decay in the womb of the black, dank earth. There, with his head bowed on the cold marble, and his hands clenched on the wet grass that already covered the ground, he often lay through many hours of long, lonely nights ; in what remorse God alone saw. He would have poured out his own life like water, to bring back the life he had slain. He stood there now, gazing down upon the white shining stone and the dark leaves which swayed against it ; be felt as though some atonement had been wrought to Erroll by the vengeance which the day just passed had crowned. Had his arm ever paused in the blow he had struck to th WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 323 assassin of one and the betrayer of both, it would have been nerved and steeled afresh by the memory of the dead Beneath the polished ice, the courtly worldliness of Strath- more's character, lay the fierce, untamable nature of the Indian, or the untutored Southern, their passions, their love, their vengeance ; to him there was not alone revenge in that which he had wrought on the traitress who had stained his hands in blood ; there was a wild justice done, there was a duty expiated to the dead in the retribution which had pursued the murderess. As he stood there in the shadowy light, while the moon streamed upon the sepulchre lying at his feet, the solitude, which reigned unbroken about Erroll's grave, for the first time was shared, and on his ear fell the low, mellow, chant- ing voice of Redempta the gipsy: "English lord, 1 have given you your vengeance! Is it sweet in your teeth, or has it turned to ashes as you ate ?" He started as her form suddenly rose from the depths of the woodland gloom and stood before him by the grave ; but the chill smile which had so much of cruelty came on his lips as he glanced at her: " Redempta, the only thing in life whose sweetness never palls, and cannot die, is vengeance." Her deep, lustrous eyes, which were now heavy and weary, gleamed for the moment with the evil which glittered in his own, as at the touch of fresh flame dying embers leap to life : "Ay, ay, she has suffered! I have seen misery gather in her eyes and shame bowing her head to the dust, I have watched her shiver under the scorn of derisive laughter, and I have heard her moan with pain like a hopeless, fallen thing. She has suffered ! That cannot escape me! that cannot be undone! I have avenged him, and now " Her voice dropped, and she was silent, while over the lurid light of her eyes a humid softness gathered, and her lips trembled with a voiceless movement her thoughts were with the dead. For the heart of the woman was ir; pain, and sickened with the futility of a revenge which couid not yield her back what she had loved ; it knew not the exultant and pitiless lust of the man, which rioted in vengeance, and fed on its knowledge, and its memory, 824 STRATH MORE ; OR, insutinte and unpalled. For there was this wide differ- 3nce between the passions of their souls : hers sprang from love which still lived and was deathless, his from love which had become hatred, and in that hatred lost all other sense. Strathmore glanced at her in the gloaming ; he owed this woman much, since he owed her the first secret of his power over the life which he had pursued and hunted down ; and the sole price which the Bohemian had asked or taken had been that which she had first named: "to see her suffer." He stretched out his hand with some Louis d'or : " Redempta, you are ill-clad and in want; take these now, and in the future I will serve you." She signed aside the proffered gift with a proud gesture of denial, and on her face came a strange smile, derisive yet melancholy : "My lord! I told you long ago that Redempta the vagrant, took no price for that which she brought you no wage for her vengeance. Since his hand lay in mine, no man's gold has soiled it; and with the future I have no share ; my work is done. The future is for you ; it lies before you ; go whither it beckons !" As the Czeschen words were uttered in the monotonous, chanting recitative in which she spoke, to the memory of each recurred the spring night far away in Bohemia, when the ruddy gleam of the gipsy-fires had shone through the aisles of the pine-woods, and when from the slumbering passions written on the brow she had made sure prophecy of all which, when they should awaken, would scorch and devastate the life. And her hand closed on his arm in a grasp which he could not have shaken from him without violence, while her eyes dwelt on him where he stood in the gloom, and studied his face with the same fixed, dreamy gaze with which she had looked on him then ; a look which had much of compassion : "/ have no future, but one waits for you ; you must reap as you have sown ; you must gather the harvest, and eat of the fruit of your past. It is the inexorable law ! The past has been wrought by your own hand ; but the future will escape you. You will seek to build anew, and lo! tho curse of the dead sin will rest on your work, and the strut"- WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 32b ture will crumble, falling to ashes as it reaches its fa'.vesst. The sin of the guilty has been avenged, but the sin to tM innocent will never be washed away. You will be great and powerful, and success will go with you, and fame ; but the blood-stain will be on your hand forever, and when you have made atonement, behold it will die in your grasp, and through you will the guiltless be stricken !" The words in her Czeschen tongue fell slowly and melodiously in the silence in her mournful and monoto- nous recitation, while her eyes dwelt on his face with their vague, fathomless gaze. Her hand dropped from his arm and left him free : "In the future you will remember the words of Redempta. We shall meet no more farewell!" She turned from him, and, with the swift, noiseless movement peculiar to her tribe, was lost in the veiling shadows of the night. He stood motionless where she had left him, in the dull, gray light as the moon passed beh'nd the clouds of the cast. Again at her words through his veins ran a ghastly chill, as at the touch of steel in a vital wound; less from their prophecy than from their truth; the future stretched before him, darkened for all time, by the shadow of remembered guilt. His hand might pioneer his road to power, and reap him honor in the sight of men, but there forever on it must rest the stain of inno- cent blood. His life might pass onwards in the fulness of years and the ripeness of triumph, but there forever at its core must lie the curse of an inexpiable guilt. Never to lose it, ever to bear it through all the years to come, that burden of life taken, never to be restored, of sin wrought, never to be undone ! Veiled in the mist of hidden years, who knew what guiltless life that guilt might strike ? who knew what retribution might be coiled and waiting to take its vengeance for the unforgotten crime ? who knew where the after-harvest of that deadly sin might be reaped and garnered ? The future ! the future ! He had said in his soul, " vengeance to the Living, but to the Dead atonement." Standipcr there beside the grave of him whom he had slain, while the words of the prophecy echoed in his ear, thfc vision of the years to come seemed to rise and swarw 28 .r2ti STUATIIMORE; OR, about him, and rend, and tear, and shatter from his hands' the work of Expiation. That night the Seine wound slowly and darkly through the open country and under the pale, clear stars, and through the rich glades of woodland towards the city, thtYe to grow black and sullen beneath the arches of dim- lit bridges, and to wash the low walls of the dreary Mot-gue, and to see the yellow candle faintly burning abo/e the iron cradle of the Enfans Trouves, and the thousand lights gleaming bright along the palace facade of the Tuileries. And where the river was still clear, and cool, and fresh, ere it had reached the evil heat and b'rooding shadows of the civy, where green leaves still swayed into its water, and in its depths the starlight gleamed, where its darkness was stiil repose, and its silence holy, a human form hovered on its brink, bending wearily towards the tranquil gliding waters, where the water-lily floated, and the hush of night seemed /isibly to rest. It waw so cool, so seiene, so peaceful to lie there, lulled to dream/ death by the cadence of its ebb and flow, and know no more the passionate pain the breathless tumult, the vain despair, and the unending bitterness of Life was this not wisdom, oh ye who suffer? It looked so to her; for her soul was weary of its travail, and iier heart was fain to be at rest. She looked far across the dark and silent country, where no living thing stirred, and upward to the stars whose white light fell upon her Jeep and melancholy eyes ; her hands were pressed upon her bosom, and her lips moved in faint, broken words : "I have avenged thee. What have I more to do with life?" Her head drooped upon her breast and she leaned nearer and nearer towards the waters, where the quiet stars were shining, and the pale lilies slowly floating in their shroud of leaves, where were oblivion, and peace, and death ; and in the silence she listened to the tranquil murmuring of the tide. And as she thus leaned nearer and nearer yet towards that cool and restful place, in her weary eyes shone the gleam of unshed tears, and in her face a new light came as on the face of one who, having WROUGHT BY IITS OWN HAND. 327 been long prisoned in the loneliness of exile, beholds escape at last, and liberty and rest. From her parted lips a whisper stole, broken and yearn- ing, on the hush of night: " My love ! my love ! I come !" And in the silence there was the dull moan of severed waters, and the troubled lilies trembled on the river's breast then, with a sighing sound, the winds swept over them, and all was still. The waters flowed on upon their changeless course. Through the summer night the river wound its way under the radiance of the stars, and bore her with it more gently than life, more tenderly than human hands. The waters flowed on with liquid melancholy murmur, and the dead body of the Bohemian floated down the stream in its serene and solemn rest, finding repose at last after the heat and travail, the passion and the pain, of many years. To her untaught, unfettered soul, love had been God, and vengeance Duty ; and death was ransom justly won, after a mission justly wrought ; death in her wild, instinc- tive, barbaric creed was sure reunion with him for whom she had suffered and been sacrificed, and to whom her life had been unceasingly consecrated even to last, if erring in its revenge, yet heroic in its martyrdom. The waters bore her onwards slowly, as merciful hands bear the bier of the dead ; now in the cool shadow of the 1'eaves, now in the clear sheen of holy stars, while on her upturned brow and her closed eyes the moonlight shone with fair and peaceful gleam, and in her dark, floating hair the stainless lilies wound, and through the hush of night the winds gently breathed over the surface of the waters, which murmured low about her in pitying whisper: "Rest in peace, O human soul! And blame her not for sin which had its root in love, you great and countless criminals upon earth, whose lust is avarice and whose god is self." 828 STRAT HMORE ; OR, CHAPTER XXXVII. AFTER LONG YEARS. A SULTRY night brooded over London, close and stifling in the dusty, crowded streets, fair and pure above head, where the stars shone over the leaden roofs and the fretted pinnacles of the great Abbey, over the thronging carriages rolling through the midnight, and the black river, with its spectral mists rising against the sky. It was a hot, oppressive night, with heavy storm-clouds drifting darkly to the westward, and every now and then a far-off roll of thunder faintly echoing; and outside the walls of St. Stephen's men thronged, talking eagerly, and avaricious of news, and waiting to learn the fate of the existant Cabinet; for in the political horizon, as in the summer skies, a storm threatened darkly, and the kingdom had thrilled with the first ominous echoes. And they surged and swayed and filled all the crooked streets round about, and were newly fed by fresh arrivals, and talked thirstily in busy groups, some anxious-eyed and with pale, eager faces : for the Ministry was unpopular, and on the issue of the night there rested not alone the question of resig- nation, but the question of war or peace, in whose balance the God of Gold hung trembling. Within the walls the heat w r as heavier, the crowd more dense, for many peers had come down to their seats beneath the clock, and the galleries were crammed; the import of the night was widely known, and the attack upon the Ministry from the most distinguished leader of the Opposition carried with it all the aspirations of his great party, and was keenly dreaded by his adversaries then in office. For he was essentially a great Statesman. His genius was emphatically the genius of Power. In classic ages he would have been either a tyrant as Pisistratus, or an intriguer as Themistocles; a ruler as Csesar, or a conspirator as Catiline; what he grasped how lie grasped, mattered nothing to him, so that he had his hand on iron reins, so that he had his foot on bended WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 329 necks. The subtle ruses, the unscrupulous finesse, tho imperious command, tho haughty dominance of power, these were what he loved and what he wielded : for his mind was one of those which are formed to rule, and before which the mass of minds involuntarily stoop sup- pliant. In his age and in his country, his ambition was perforce chained within bounds, and he could not be that which he would have been in a nation or a century where such governance might have been grasped an irrespon- sible and despotic ruler, recognizing no limits to his sway, and reigning by the sheer strength of a will of steel, and of an intellect which would have raised his people into greatness and dominance abroad, and would have per- mitted no rebellious hint against his fiat lax. This, circum- stance and nationality forbade to him ; but the character and the genius which could have made him this, made him in the highest sense a great and successful politician. A profound master of statecraft, an astute reader of men, a skilled orator as well by the closeness of his logic as by mere rhetorical grace, comprehending to the uttermost the truth of the trite byword, ars est celare artem; never for one instant irritated into abandonment of the suave, courtly dignity which did much to fascinate men to his will, and with that proud disdain of wealth, of empty place, of childish honors, which gave to his career a lofty and unsullied renown he who in his youth had desired Age and Power, now, approaching to the one, and having attained to the other, found ambition richly ripened to fruition, and exercised over the minds of men a sway wide and acknowledged, a fascination resistless and dominant. As he rose at midnight in the hot, close stillness, all eyes turned on him, and the cheers which thundered his welcome echoed loud and long, then died away, leaving a silence in which the fall of a pin would have been heard, had one dropped from the lattice-work, behind which were seated the fairest and proudest women of the two great political parties. The dead hush reigned through the Lower Chamber, so that no syllable of the opening words should be lost, as upon the air fell the first clear, chill, melodious tones of his voice, which in invective was ever iraiiquil, in command evor calm, in denunciation ever courtly, but whose wrath scathed keen as steel, whose 28* .130 STRATIIMORK; OR, mockery pitilessly withered all it touched, and whose dreaded sneer spared neither friend nor foe. He stood in the full light, one hand in his breast, the other slightly outstretched; on his face a scornful and melancholy repose, a tranquil and haughty power; in his eyes the swift light, which swept the House like an eagle's glance ; on his lips the slight smile that his opponents dreaded, while the lucid, classic, resistless flow of his oratory rolled on, never losing its dignity, while it rose to denunciation ; holding in passion, while it lashed with scorn ; fascinating the ear by the melodious music of voice, while it scathed with bitter and mocking irony, or soared to stately and measured rebuke. He spoke long and with a masterly eloquence ; his speech was an analysis and attack of a measure of the existing government, obnoxious at home and pregnant with offence abroad. Loud and repeated cheers thundered through the chamber as his keen logic mercilessly dis- sected the weak and wavering policies of the Ministry, and his brilliant argument cleft down their barriers of defence, and rent asunder their sophistries of rhetoric, as the sword of Saladin cut its way alike through iron casque and veil of gauze. When he resumed his seat the victory of his party was virtually won, and one of the most marked triumphs which had attended a continuous successful career had been achieved; a tottering government, already jeopardized by its own imprudence, and unpopular with press and people, had been shaken by an attack to which it could oppose but feeble reply and futile defence, and it was widely whispered that the Ministry must resign on the morrow. Since the great speeches of Sheridan and Canning, few had created so keen an excitement, few weighed so markedly the balance of parties, few thrilled the House so profoundly with the breathlessness of a gladiatorial con- test, the heat of a close struggle, the grandeur of a great conquest. As he left the Lobby afterwards his name was on every tongue, and' while the proud tranqnility of his features and of his manners was unruffled, and he passed from the scene of a supreme conflict with the icy negli- gence of his habitual air, unmoved to excitement or to exultation, in his eyes gleamed a haughty, imperious, WROUGHT BY HIS OWN IIAN'D. 331 rejoicing light under their drooping lids, and they glittered dark with a grand triumph ; for this man's god was Power the essence of his life, the goal of his ambition, the idoi of hi* creed. As he passed out from the Commons to his night brougham, the multitudes gathered outside (amongst whom had been spread swiftly as wild-fire the news that the Ministry had been defeated on their unpopular measure, and the country been saved from the' risk of a needless war by the issue of that great Field-night) recognized in the gaslights the grace of carriage and the haughty features of the well-known Statesman, and pressing forwards by one impulse to view him more closely, broke by one im- pulse also into a long, loud shout of salutation, which rang through the sultry air of the late night, quelling in its own thunder the distant roll of the rising storm. It was Titan homage, rendered with the spontaneity of academic ap- plause, and the hoarse roar with which the masses hurl out their gratitude and welcome, grim, wild, half-barbaric, yet grand in its deafening echo and intoxicating in its enthusiasm, like every proclamation of the people, which in the Leader of the hour recognizes the virtual Sovereign of the land. He whom they thus saluted passed through them, bow- ing slightly on either side in acknowledgment, with haughty courtesy ; he held the imperious patrician code of his Norman race, and the plaudits of the people were almost as indifferent to him, almost as disdained by him as their censure; he had much of the despot, he had nothing of the demagogue. But in those cheers echoed the homage which multitudes yield to a single dominant intellect; in that welcome rang the acclamations which greet and confirm command; in that human thunder, which out-pealed the thunder of the skies, his sway was ratified by the nation ; and as his glance swept over the masses, and he passed down the narrow path, left him, lined by eager crowds, Strathmores's pulse quickened and beat higher, and the lustre of his eyes gleamed dark with their scornful triumph ; he tasted to its full sweetness of the one lust of his soul I'OWER. O strange unequal portiouer, called Life ! unjust are its awards and inscrutable its decrees. The murdered man, 332 STRATHMORE ; OR, who when the summer sun had suuk to rest, had been hurled into his grave, guiltless of all crime save of a too /oyal friendship, lay rotting in a foreign land, forgotten from the day when the seal had been set on his sepulchre, by a world which has no time to count its lost. And his assassin lived, high in honor amidst men. CHAPTER XXXVIII. THE PILGRIMAGE OP EXPIATION. A SOFT, serene, richly-tinted picture, fairer than a thought of Lancret's, more golden tranquil than a dream of Claud's ; for one hour of earth's sunlight on one stretch of moss, one fruit-laSen bough, one changeful brook, out- shines and baffles the best that we, vain painters of nature, can ever catch of her glorious liveliness on canvas or pa- lette. Who knows this better than the Masters of the Art ? The setting sun shone on the oriel casements of an antique, ivy-covered P^lizabethan mansion, and streaming through the unclosed door of an old stone wall, ripened to gold the fruit of an orchard, whose branches nodded through the opening. Far away to the west, wide, calm, limitless, stretched the great ocean, the gleam of the light falling on the white sail of some fisher boat in the offing. Beyond the tangled leaves of trees, shone the glisten of wet sand and red boulders of the rocks. In the silence there was no sound but of the birds' last nest-songs, and of the murmuring seas ; and under the shelter of dense boughs, shutting out the sun, was a shadowy solitude, where nothing came save the fragrance of countless flowers, and nothing was seen save the silent sunlit bay, when the arching branches parted to show the sheen of sand and sea. It was a home fit for Undine, here in the shadow of the leaves, the earth covered with the delicate bells of heath, the foliage filled with the soft movement and music of young birds, the blue waters gleaming through the spaces of the boughs, the silence but the more serene for WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 333 the lulling cadence of the seas; and she to whom it was consecrated might well have been deemed to be Undine, where she sat, with her head slightly drooped and her lips slightly parted. For she was in the earliest years of opening youth, and a loveliness ethereal, poetic, such ag Dante may have prefigured amidst the angel shadows of Paradise, Guido Reni have beheld flit through the heaven of his visionary thoughts, too pure, too fair, for the artist to transfer to grosser coloring. Both poet and painter would have loved that face, but neither could have made it imperishable on written vellum or on tinted canvas ; it could no more have been imprisoned to such transcript than the blush on the heath-bells, than the smile on the seas, than the fugitive play of the sun- light. It had a beauty beyond words, beyond Art. The brow was low and broad, the skin delicate as a white rose-leaf, with the faint flush on the cheeks beauti- fully fitful; the eyes large, dark, shadowed by their lashes till their violet depths looked black. But what lay beyond poet to phrase, or artist to produce, was not these, but was the spirituality of the whole face vaguely suggestive of too early death, strangely above all grosser passion, all meaner thought of earth ; and the touching and name- less contrast of the sunny joyous smile upon the lips with the fathomless sadness of the eyes, of the grace and radiance of childhood with the ethereal melancholy of the features in repose. It was a loveliness like that of the delicate tropic flower which blooms but to perish in all its early beauty ; too fragile for the storms and darkness of night, too soilless to wither on earth. She sat there, with the shadow of the thick leaves above her, and around her the melody of the ocean, the music of the birds, and the dreamy hum of bees deep down in the chalice of flowers. And one unseen, as he stood and watched her, was never weary of gazing on that delicate picture, though it had been familiar to him from his childhood. He was a boy of two-and-twenty, tall, lithe, of a thorough Saxon beauty, with his bright fearless face, his bold blue eyes, his tawny Lair he w r as a handsome fellow, with the sun shining full upon him, yet he did not suit that scene, he was out of harmony with it, and he broke its spell, even as he broke 334 STRATHMORE; OR, that of her thoughts, as he put aside the boughs and bent towards her very gently : " Lucille ! where are your dreams?" She started a little, and looked up at him with a glad smile : " Nello ! I banished you ; is this the way you obey ? Look ! how you frighten the birds and trample the heath." Lionel Caryll looked sad and repentant as the singers flew from him with a rapid whir of their wings, and he glanced down at the trodden bells: " Oh, Lucille, I am sorry ! But surely you love me somewhat better than you do those birds, and those flow- ers ? They feel no pain !" "I think they do," she said, musingly: "Look how birds' eyes grow wild and piteous when you go near their nests, and how they droop and pine if they lose the one they love ; and look how the flowers fade when they are taken from the sun, and wither slowly when' they are torn away to die under the pressure of your hand. Ah ! I can- not bear to see a flower crushed or broken, Nello. We cannot tell what it may suffer." Her eyes grew humid and earnest in their dark depths, for the ruling power of the nature, as its fatal after-bane, was a deep and infinite tenderness, a too keen and too early susceptibility. Young Caryll did not understand her, he did not even follow the thread of her thoughts; in the long years they had spent together, the poetic and pro- found mind of the child had always been above and be- yond the boy's comprehension ; they were so now, but now, as then, he felt for all she did and said a tender and reverent love, as for something at once too holy and too fragile for his rougher hands. "Who could hurt what you plead for, Lucille ?" he said fondly: "But if you give so much compassion to your flowers and birds, give a little to me." She laughed joyously : " Pity you, Nello ! What pity do you want ? You are as happy as I am ! Why, Nello, you are sunshine itself!'' The young man's bright face laughed sunnily in answer : it was the truth, his nature and his life were both shadow- less: " Yes, but pity me for seeing that the song-birds and iL*? WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 335 ncaths arc both dearer to you than I ! True they suit you better, Lucille ; they are poetic and delicate, and I am neither ; but they cannot love you so well !" In the half-laughing words, in the half-boyish appeal, there was, almost unknown to himself, an inflection of jealous pain, of touching humility, which struck on his listener's ear with some vague sense that she unwittingly had wounded him, though how she knew not. With ca- ressing grace she stooped towards him, where he lay at her feet, and pushed back the tangled hair from his fore- head : "My own dear Nello, I know that! Could you think I rank those things before you? For shame! I thought you knew better how I loved you!" For the playmate and companion of her childhood was very dear to her, and it was an impulse with her to soothe all pain, from the flutter of a frightened bird to the sorrow of a human heart ; and Lionell Caryll gazed upward with an eager pleasure in his eyes, while his lips were mute ; it was the reverent and breathless gaze of the young devotee at the beauty of a Madonna or a Yivia Perpetua, the beauty which is too sacred in his sight to waken passion, or be profaned by aught save a holy worship. He rose with a smothered sigh, as he recollected the object of his errand, for he would gladly have stayed here till the moon rose, with the murmur of the sea in his ear, and the hand of Lucille softly playing with his hair in the familiar affection which from her infancy she had shown to, and received from, one whom she called her brother. " Lucille, Lord Cecil is here. I came to tell vou." "Here!" " Yes, he has come down for part of the Easter reces: only a day or two, for he is going to Osborne. He bade me fetch you to him." Ere the words were spoken she had sprung to her feet, dropping the Vita Nuova she was reading, and the feathery seaweeds which had lain on her lap, to the ground, and had left him, lightly and swiftly as the flight of a wild bird. And Lionel Caryll stood in the shadow of the leaves, looking after her. From his earliest years, when the young child, orphaned and desolate, and unconscious in her glad infancy of her own fate, had first come to Silver-rest, he 336 BTRATHMORE; OR, had been careful of her every step, jealous of "her every ?mile: he had followed her like a spaniel and tended her like a woman, and risked his life and limb many a time to bring her down some sea-bird's egg, some flower from tho cliffs, some treasure from the waves. And Lucille loved him very fondly, for this child's whole life and nature wore tenderness; but the boy had always felt what he felt now, thnt two stood before him in her heart the dead, whose name she cherished with a reverence which was almost a religion, and the one whom she and the world knew as her guardian. In the deep embrasure of one of the windows sat a man, with a stag-hound at his feet, and his face in shadow, as Rembrandt or Velasquez painted the faces of the states- men and conspirators who sought their canvas, to whose portraits, indeed, he bore a strange and striking rqsem- blance, for Strathmore, with the flight of years, had altered little. The darker traits were more traceable, the better less so; for in the human face, as in the picture, with time the shadows deepen and the lights grow fainter. The eyes were more pitiless, the brow more merciless, the features colder and more inscrutable still. Otherwise there was but little change save this, that whereas before, the char- acter of his face had been suggestive of evil passions, dormant and not yet called into play, it now bore the shadow of them from the past, the trace of fires which had burned to ashes, scathing as they died. Strathmore, who was God and Law unto himself, had moulded his life with an iron hand, although on that hand was the stain of .crime. Submerged for a while under the surge of passion, the ambition which had been drowned under a woman's love had returned to him ; a diplomatic career he had abandoned for public life at home, and he had reared himself from the hell of past crimes to follow one road Power. Eminence in state-craft his astute, subtle, and masterly intellect was formed to attain and wield. Under his chill and withering eloquence parties writhed ; before his subtle and scathing wit opponents cowered; beneath tho dominance of his will wavering adherents bowed ; and before the silent and profound mind of the Cabinet Minister men felt abashed, discoiufired ret governed despite themselves. WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 337 Strathmore was great in all things in bis crimes, in his strength, in his powers, in his arrogance ; and he had that silent yet astute will which bends that of all others to its bidding, and governs the minds of men by a resistless, though not seldom an evil, fascination to its sway. To trample out the memories of the past by dissipation was impossible to the man whose intellect was a master's, and who had rioted in the drunkenness of guilt; the revel of orgies was distasteful, the pursuit of licentiousness was contemptible to him. Forgetful ness he sought otherwise, under the iron tramp of mailed ambitions ; or rather, to speak more truly, forgetful ness he did not court, as weaker men would do , but as he had kept the mad love which had betrayed him before him, to be avenged brutally and ruthlessly, so he kept the crime which had stained his soul, to be atoned for as though destiny lay in his hands so he kept the blood-stain on the statue of his Life, to be wroug;h*;, out by his own hand in after work. For Strath- more, though the iron of his nature had been smitten to the dust, and though he had reeled and fallen under passion, had refused to gather warning from the Past, but held it still his to mete out Fate to himself and others, as though he were not man, but Deity. The sun-light played without, among the leaves, while the ocean broke upon the sunny sands, and Strathmore sat there in the shadow ; on his face was the look of a profound and haughty melancholy, which never wholly passed away, for the soul of this man, if merciless to others, was not less so to himself; in spirit he scourged him- self for the lives which rested on his, as pitilessly as ever Carmelite or Benedictine scourged the body for its sins, and whilst before men's sight his life was cold, unruffled, brilliant, and his " path strewn with the purples " of fame and of power, there were dark hours in his solitude, of remorse, of anguish, of unutterable horror when his great and fallen nature wrestled with itself, and struggled in its agony nearer to God's light. For repentance is a word by a thousand-fold too faint to utteV that with which Strath- more looked back upon the past looked back upou the homicide guiltier than Cain's. Suddenly, where he sat in the embrasure, a shadow fell athwart the sunshine without, and raising his eyes he saw 29 338 STRATHMORE ; OR, the young life which was freighted with his venture of atonement. She stood there in the full golden light, which fell on her fair and shining hair; on her eyes, dark as the violet skies of night, and full of their mournful earnest- ness ; on her lips, which wore the sunny and tender smile of the long-dead, radiant with welcoming joy while words were mute ; words could not have spoken half so well ! " Lucille !" He rose, and she sprang towards him, lifting her fair young face to his gaze, while he stooped and kissed her brow with his accustomed caress, which she received as a child her father's. Her hands closed on his softly and caressingly, her lips were tremulous, her eyes, loving in their earnestness, looked up to his winningly, beseechingly: "Ah! you are come at last; you have been so long away !" " ' So long !' You have watched for me, then ?" " My heart watches for you always !" He smiled ; her answer gave him pleasure. Long years before he had set his will to fasten the love and gratitude of this young life upon himself, and every assurance of them was dear to him, for they were the assurance of his fulfilment of Erroll's trust, of his atonement through the living to the dead. " And you are happy, Lucille ?" he asked her. She laughed the soft, low laugh of her still lingering childhood, in which pain had been a thing unknowu, to which sorrow had been a mystery even veiled : "You ask me that so often ! 'Happy?' All my life is happiness. I cannot even fancy grief. I try sometimes, and I cannot !" "Thank God!" The words were spoken low and heartfelt, and he shaded his eyes with his hand as he gazed down on her, while over the coldness of his face stole a warmth and a softness which never came there save when he looked on IICT. Her singular and poetical loveliness, as she stood before him in the mellow sun-ligbt, with her dark eyes uplifted in their beseeching beauty, struck on him ; he saw for the first time that she was passing out of childhood. " You are changed, Lucille," he said, as she threw hcrseif at his feet, where be sat, in that graceful and trustful WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 339 abandon which was as natural to her now as when she had first conic caressingly to his side on the sea-shore ; for this opening life had been left free, pure, untrammelled by art or bondage as any of the white-winged birds which spent their summer days above the waves. She looked up incredulous and amused: " Changed? How can I be in six months?" " Six months is six years at your age ; the passage from childhood to womanhood is very brief; crossed sometimes in a night, sometimes in an hour!" " Is it ? But I have not crossed it." " No, and I do not wish that you should." She lifted her eyes to his, full of that appealing earnest- ness which gave them so strange a sadness, so touching a beauty : " No more do I. When time rolls on the shadows deepen across the dial in the orchard and the sands of the shore ; so they say they do in life. Is is true, Lord Cecil ?" " Fatally true, my child." She shuddered slightly: " Ah ! and that is why I wish mine could rest forever where it is. I am so happy, and I dread the shadow ! In shade the flowers die, you know, killed by the darkness and thirsting for the sun ; so should I !" " Hush, hush, Lucille !" he said passionately, as he drew her towards him, where she sat at his feet. "'Dread?' ' Darkness ?' What have they to do with you ? Neither shall ever touch you. Your future is my care ; think of it as what it will be, shall be, as fair and cloudless as your cast and present. No shadow shall ever fall on you !" " Not under your shelter !" And as she spoke gratefully and caressingly, the smile was on her face which still smote him as with steel, and she bent towards him with that tender and trustful grace natural to her from her earliest infancy ; she loved the hand which fostered her the band stained with her father'? blood. The human life which the last words of the man he loved bad bequeathed to him in trust, was dear to Strath- more even as the dead had been ; and when remorse had riven m twain the granite of his nature, in the chasm left this single softness had been sown and taken root; even 340 STRATIIMORE ; OR, as on the chill and isolated mountains, ice-covered and inaccessible, deep down in some cleft and hidden rent, lives some delicate, blue alpine flower. Begotten of remorse, born of a thirst for atonement, and fostered by a passionate, almost a morbid, craving to fulfil to the uttermost Erroll's last bidding, his tenderness for Lucille had become the one holy and unselfish thing in a heart to which the gentler and purer feelings of human nature and of human ties were by nature a lie. Strathmore's haughty and sin-stained soul hung on this young and fragile life for its single chance and power of atonement. It was not she for whom he cared ; it was the dead. Had the last words of the man he had wronged and hurled from earth condemned him to endless self- chastisement or self-sacrifice, he would have obeyed them equally, nor spared himself one iota of their enjoined torture. Pitiless to others, I say he was not less pitiless to himself; his life, if stained with great crimes, was riven with a great remorse; his nature was like those lofty and darkened ones which first filled the cells of Clairvaux and the ranks of Loyola; natures passion-stained and crime- steeped, but which, even as they had spared none in their guilt, spared not themselves in their expiation. The trust bequeathed him, and bound upon him, by the weight of the two lives which his act had struck from earth, he fulfilled sacredly. His hand had orphaned her, but his hand sheltered her, and was prodigal in the wealth, and care, and luxury with which it surrounded her ; it seemed to Strathmore as though thus, and thus alone, could he atone to him who had given her life. In his mother's home she had grown from infancy to early youth, fondly nurtured anc? trained to know that it was from him as her guardian that she received all which made her young years so joyous. Those to whom her education was entrusted he forbade to use any laws with her save those of gentleness, and directed to surround her with all tenderness, to shield her from every touch of pain or harshness, and to indulge her in all things. He was scrupulously obeyed, and the result might have been to many natures dangerous; with Lucille, the inherent char- acter was too loving and too sweet to be thus harmed, to do aught but expand to all its richest luxuriance its purest WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAN'T). 34 delicacy in the constant sunlight in which it grew, though, perchance, as the hot-house flower is rendered unfit for thtt. cold winds without by the warmth which surrounds it, so might this nature be for the harsh conflicts of life. But, then, these she was never to know from those she would be sheltered, even as is the exotic through the whole of its brief and radiant life. In pursuance of Erroll's desire he trained himself to speak to this child often and calmly of her father, as of one lost and dear to him as to herself, until Lucille held, inseparably interwoven and beloved in her memory, the dead, and the living to whom the dead had bequeathed her, and who filled his place. It had been hard to say which were the dearer to her, the ideal of the dead which she cherished, or the love for Strathmore which grew with her growth. No instinct had made her shrink in infancy from the hand which was stained with her father's blood ; no prescience now warned her that he who fostered her was her father's assassin. All her joy, all her gifts, came from him ; for her his eyes were ever softened, his voice was ever gentle ; the distant visits he paid her were sealed with gold in her life, radiating every day they graced with a glory, ever missed in his absence. And thus Erroll's young child grew up in her graceful loveliness, her happy innocence, with no shadow allowed to fall on her from the dark tragedy which had orphaned her almost from her birth, but with a deep and reverent love for him, between whom and herself, had she known the ghastly truth hid from her, would have yawned a hideous and imp?ssable gulf, would have stretched a fell abyss of rriroe, which would have made her shrink from every touch o 4 bis* aand shudder from every caress of his lips. 29* 844 STUATflMORE- OR, CHAPTER XXXIX. THE CABINET MINISTER. A KNOT of lords and gentlemen, diplomatists and minis- ters, were grouped together in the ante-room at St. James's, after attending a levee the last of the season chatting while awaiting a chance of getting to their carriages through the crowd, where torn shoulder-knots, trampled epaulettes, the debris of gold lace, fragments of bullion, broken plumes, or shreds of order-ribbons, bore witness to the severity of the conflict, which is a portion of the cere- monial attendant on the Germanized Court of England. "But V. gained so much by the Schonbrun Treaty; he is far too exigeant," said the French Ambassador, alluding to the subject under discussion, which was the aggression of a petty Duke, who might chance to embroil Western Europe ; European tempests not seldom being brewed in a Liliputian teacup. , " But others gained, too, by the treaty," suggested an English Minister, " and grapes shared are poisoned to most gatherers. With a whole bunch to ourselves, we grudge the broken stalk that we leave behind." "He.in! c'estvrai!" laughed a Prussian statesman, apply- ing himself to his tabatiere: "Still if he were decently wise he would be content." " Is it wise to be content?" smiled the English Minister; and his smile was a cold and moqueur sneer: " What duller .atmosphere possible than Contentment? A satisfied man has nothing to desire, gain, or contest; he is a mould-grown carp in stagnant waters " " Which are the quietest," added the Prussian, who had too much slow Teuton blood in him not to relish " stagnant waters : " "I suppose Y. thinks with you, or he would never thrust forth such claims ; he knows the Federation will never acknowledge them." " But they will foment disturbance ; they will draw the eyes of Europe on him for half a dozen months, :.ad wany WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 343 would rather be decorated like Midas than move unnoticed and unknown in the Sccretum Her, et fallentis scinita vitae," paid the English statesman, with a contemptuous laugh, cold, slight, and clear. "Et puis," said the Ambassador, with a slight shrug: " the opportunity was tempting. Man was created a dis- honest animal, and policy and civilization have raised the instinct to a science." "And what he seeks now is for ' Patriotism.' * Let none of us forget that: ' Pro Patria' is so admirable a plunder- cry ; I don't know a better, unless it be ' Pro Deo,' " smiled the British Minister, whose own cri de guerre was, with but little disguise, " Pro Ego." Standing at a little distance, wedged in by the titled and decorated mob, a man looked at him as he spoke ; the words were inaudible where the other stood, but the smile he saw and knew of old ; he had seen it on his lips when the sun sank down beyond the purple shroud of mist, seen it as the duellist stooped to watch the dark blood slowly trailing through the grasses, with the merciless and brutal lust which branded him Assassin. Raoiil de Valdor had long forgot that hour, from the indifference of custom to a life so taken, and by long years passed in a fashionable whirl. At the time it had chilled and revolted him from the man who, with deliberate purpose, had slain his friend with the pitiless aim and greed with which a tiger darts upon his prey, insatiate to destroy and indifferent to destruction. But their intercourse had remained the same, and the remembrance had drifted into the mist of long past things. It rarely recurred to him, yet it did so now, standing in the thronged ante-chamber of the palace, when glancing at the successful Statesman, with the Ribboa crossed on his breast, and the cold, courtly smile on his lips, there arose before him, sudden and distinct, the memory of that summer night, with the h Doting of the * The above conversation must in nowise be imagined a sneer at the claims of the Duke of Augustenburg, whose legitimate birth- right I sincerely desire to see restored to him. The Aulb^r oj Strathmore. 344 STRAT11MORE ; OR. shrill cicada, and the sullen surge of the noisome waters as the reptiles stirred amongst their reeds, and the last rays of the evening sun gleaming above the storm-cloud as the dying man reeled and fell. lie looked at Strathmore as he stood among his peers ; and, strange, dissimilar, unbidden, the scene rose up before the memory of the inconsequent and thoughtless French- man, as he stood among the Court crowd of St. James's. Yet he had been present at many such scenes, and the value of life taken had never weighed on him, nor its memory ever remained with him before. In his creed of honor duels were blameless; in his country's custom they were habitual. What long ago had revolted the dashing and daring spirit (which, with many faults and many follies, had something of the old code of the gallant gentle- man who had fought and died for the White Lilies) had been the pitiless purpose which he had read ere the shot had been fired, and which had borne in his sight the fixed and treacherous intent of the murderer. It was this which he remembered now. The throng parted, the knot of ministers separated, Strathmore came forward to go to his carriage, and Valdor moved also ; they met, as they had done a hundred times, since that night by the Deer-pond of the old Bois. "Ah ! you Valdor? Charmed to see you. I had no idea you were in England, much less at the Levee. In- sufferably warm, isn't it ? Such a press !" said Strath- more, giving his hand to the man who, sixteen years before, had whispered in his ear, "Foyez! il est mort," unheeded as he stooped to sever the gold flake of the hair which trailed among the dark dew-laden grasses. " Such wretched rooms !" laughed Valdor, as he glanced contemptuously through the reception-chambers, unaltered since Queen Anne : " I only arrived yesterday. I have come to town on family matters a disputed inheritance affair. But permit me, mon ami, to offer my congratula- tions on your recent honors ; never was a finer political victory won. Your coup d'etat was supreme !" Strathmore smiled. " You give me and my party too much distinction ; we only effected, dully and slowly, by speeches and leaders, what you over the water would have done in a week by a WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND J4J few cannon-balls and closed barrieres. But the British mind refuses the quick argument of a fusillade as if it were not as wise to be convinced by a bullet as bj a newspaper ! Will you do me the pleasure to drive home with me ?" They pioneered their way through the aristocratic mob, and reaching the air at last, after the heated atmosphere of the densely-packed palace, passed to Strathmore's carriage, while the crowds without, waiting to see the courtiers leave the Levee, crushed themselves close to the wheels, and rushed under the horses' heads, and pushed, and jostled, and trampled each other, in eager curious haste to see the favorite Minister he, who, could he have had his way, would have ruled them with a rod of iron, and swept his path clear from all who dared dispute his power by the curt Coesarean argument of armed hosts ! " Have you any engagements for to-night, Valdor?" he asked, as the carriage moved. " None. I was going to dine at the Guards', and look in at the Opera." " Give me the pleasure of your society, then. I have a State dinner this evening; the cruellest penalty of Place! Though truly it is selfish, perhaps, to ask you to throw over that most graceful of all sylphs, La Catarina, for ministerial proprieties." " The egotism, at least does me much honor. I shall be most happy. Your season is pretty well over, Strathmore ; you eat your farewell whitebait soon ?" " To-morrow. I shall leave town in a week or two ; the session will virtually close then." " Where are you going, apres ? White Ladies ?" " Not yet. I shall be there the last days in August, when I hope you will join us. Volms and plenty of people will be down ; and by all they send me word, the broods are very abundant and the young deer in fine condition. No ; I go from town into Devon to see my mother, stay there three or four days, and then start for Baden, give a week coming back to Fontaincbleau with His Majesty, your execration, and to White Ladies by the First." " You go into Devon next week?" " Or the week after. Why ?" " Because I am bound there. Perhaps you remember I 34o STRATIIMORE ; OR, have English blood in me by the distaff side ? and there is a property down there which ought, I think, to be mine by rights, at least it needs looking into ; pas grand" 1 chose, but valuable to a poor wretch, a million or two of francs in debt. I must make investigations at your Will Office (' Doctors' Commons' n'est ce pas ? l Doctors',' because it has the testaments of those the doctors have killed ; and ' Commons', because it is common to nobody who hasn't the money to pay the fees. You English have a grim humor!). We can go down to the south together, Strathmore ?" " Certainly." (Valdor did not note that the answer was slightly constrained, and halted a moment.) " Where is this property you name?" " Bon Dieu ! I don't know ! The place is peste ! it is in my papers, but it is out of my head! wait a moment is is Torlynne, surely, or some such title." " Indeed ! That is close to niy mother's jointure house of Silver-rest. I remember it is a disputed title, an old moated priory with fine timber, but wholly neglected." Valdor twisted his scented moustaches with a yawn of ennui: " Tu me fais fremir ! What on earth should I do with a ' moated priory ?' It sounds like a ghost-story ! How- ever, I shall go down and prove my title if I can ; for I suppose it will sell for something?" " Undoubtedly. Since you will require to be on the spot, I am sure I need not say that Lady Castlemere will be most happy to see you at Silver-rest if you like to stay with us." Valdor thanked the kindly Fates which thus, by a fortu nate chance, preserved him from the horrors of Devonian hotels, and accepted Strathmore's invitation, proffered from a cause he little guessed. Strathmore had heard of his in- tended visit to the South with annoyance, almost, for the instant, with apprehension ; it was this which had made him hesitate, and but coldly consent to the suggestion that they should travel together. He knew that Valdor had heard th^e last words breathed with a broken sigh, " Lucille ! Lucille !" and he dreaded to see the child of Erroll in the presence of the one who had been with him in that hour But as instantly he remembered that, do WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 347 what he would, Yaldor, compelled to visit Torlynne, would certainly pay a visit of compliment to Lady Castlemere, and, living on the same solitary shore with Silver-rest, could not fail to meet Lucille. Therefore, with that policy which he used in trivial as in great matters, he disarmed all danger by meeting it d'avance ; any act unusual on his part might have wakened Valdor's curiosity or wonder concerning the lovely child whom he would find there as his ward ; to invite him at once beneath the same roof with her was to avoid entirely exciting that piqued interest which, though no link remained to guide him by any possi- bility towards the truth, might yet have induced him to inquire much that would have been difficult to satisfy. The foresight was wise, the reasoning just, the inference and expectation both rightly founded ; yet woe for us, rnes freres ! the surest barriers raised by men's provision are even but as houses builded on the sands, which one blast of shifting winds, one sweep of veering waves, may hurl down into dust. "What spell have you about you, mon cher?" said Valdor, two hours later, in the drawing-rooms of Strath- more's residence, as he threw himself into a dormeuse. Time had passed lightly over Valdor, and left him much the same a gay, debonnaire, brilliant, French noble, whose fortunes were not equal to his fashion, in whom a transparent impetuosity mingled in odd anomaly with the languor of the world, in whom the fire of the South out- lived the indifferentism of habit, and who, with many follies and some errors, had honor in his heart and truth in his tongue. He looked younger than he was, with his delicate brunette tint, his soft, black eyes, his careless and chivalrous grace ; and the man in whose society he now was looked on him disdainfully as " bo'n enfant," because his hot passions were short-lived, and the nonchalance of his nature made him candid as a child. Strathmore raised his eyebrows : "' Spell !' What a romantic word! How do you mean it?" Yaldor laughed, throwing back the dark waves of his hair he was a little vain of his personal beauty: " I mean to account for your perpetual success. You command ?uccess as if you had all the genii of fablo to 348 STRATIIMORE; OR, back jrou Men censure you, oppose you, hate you, inveigh against you, and you have a strong party of foes, but they never contrive to defeat you." " Well ! I am not very tolerant of defeat." "Pardieu! who is ? But most of us have to swallow it sometimes. What I want to know is how you succeed in perpetually compelling your enemies to drink it, and avoiding one drop of the amari aliquid yourself!" Strathmore smiled ; the frank expression of curiosity and opinion amused him ; he had himself the trained reticence of the school of Machiavelli, and years had of necessity polished his skill in the knowledge " how to hold truth and how to withhold it," once laid down by him as the first law of wisdom and of success. " You ask for a precis of my policy ! You know I inva- riably contended that what men choose to accomplish they may compass sooner or later, if they use just discernment, and do not permit themselves to be run away with by Utopian fancies or paradoxical motives. Let. every one make up his mind to be baffled in what he undertakes nineteen times, but to succeed on the twentieth ; I would warrant him success before be has" reached half the score." " That tells me nothing !" said Yaldor, petulantly, though, in truth, it was this very inflexible and long-enduring will, which nothing could dissuade or daunt, that was the key of Strathmore's rise to power: "Well! you must keep your secret, mon ami, and I dare say it has too much science and subtlety in it to lie in a nutshell. But as for your theory, which makes one think of the Bruce Spider- tale peste ! it won't answer always. Look &t us ; we persevere for ever, and never succeed !" Strathmore smiled slightly ; he knew Yaldor referred to the efforts of his own French party, and the loyal Utopia of a Quixotic and chivalric clique, found little sympathy with a statesman the distinguishing and most popular characteristic of whose politics was their entire freedom from all idealogy or vagueness : "Mon cher! I spoke of a man who pursued a certain definite goal and power for himself, not of those leagued together for the chase of a shadowy chimera. To seek a palpable aim and a palpable ascendancy is one thing; to embrace a visionary crusade and an ideal flock of theories WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 349 Is another. 1 mean blasting a rock with rational materials and science ; you mean climbing the clouds with ropes of sand !" " Then," said Valdor, impatiently, with a dash of envy and a dash of intolerance " then it would appear that the wise man consecrates his labors and his ambitions to the advancement of himself; it is only the fool who wastes both on mankind !" " Certainly," smiled Strathmore: "Who ever doubted it?" At that moment the doors of the vestibule were thrown open, and the first of the guests bidden to his State dinner was announced; further tete-a-tete was ended. Strathmore was not popular among his colleagues; his personal coldness and his consummate indifference to how he wounded, repelled men; the generosity of feeling and the cordiality, which in earlier years had been very strong to the few whom he liked, were gone. Although his liberality was as extensive, it seemed rather to proceed from disdain of wealth than any kindlier feeling, and though at times great and even noble deeds were traced to him done in privacy, they appeared rather to come from some rigid law set unto himself than from any warmer feeling toward humanity. 33ut his ascendancy was indisputable, his intellect priceless to his party, and the brilliancy of his career without a rival ; and men rallied about him, and confessed his influence as the most prominent politician of his day, and the assured leader of the future. Valdor looked at him as he sat that night at the head of the table entertaining many of the most distinguished men of his country and time, fellow-Ministers and foi'eign Ambassadors, while the light from the chandeliers above, flashing off the gold and silver plate, the many-hued exotics, the snowy Parian statuettes, and the bright-bloomed fruits, fell upon his face with its peculiar Vandyke type, in which were blent the haughty melancholy of Charles Stuart with the pitiless power of Strafford, the serenity of a fathomless repose with the darkness of passions untamable if aroused. Vdldor looked at him as Strathmore drank his Red Hermitage and exchanged light witticisms with the French Representative, and again, unbidden and unwelcome before the thoughtless mercurial mind of the dashing and languid 30 550 STRATIIMORE ; OB, lion, 'ose the memory of that night in the Bois cle Boulogne, and cf the tiger-lust with which the death spasm had been watched to slacken and grow still. "He has forgotten !" thought Yaldor, with marvel, admi- ration, revulsion, loathing, all commingled: "He slew without pity ; and he lives without remorse." So rashly do men judge who draw inferences from the surface ; so erringly do they condemn who see not the solitude wherein the soul is laid bare. CHAPTER XL. AMONG THE LILIES OF THE VALLEY. THE afternoon sun was warm on land and sea, and a light amber haze lying on the soft outline of tbe hills, the stretches of golden gorse, and the glisten of the moistened sands, as a steam-yacht which had come down channel from the Solent, and rounded tbe coast, anchored in the little bay of Silver-rest, where nothing was ever seen save the fishing-smacks and tiny craft of the scattered popula- tion, whose few rough-hewn shingle cottages nestled under one of the bluffs. " There is your Torlynne, Yaldor," said Strathmore, pointing to some gable-ends which arose some mile or two off in the distance above masses of woodland, as they walked up from the shore. They were expected at Silver- rest, but the day of their arrival had been left uncertain, as he had not known when he might get finally free. Strathmore allowed himself little leisure in office ; he never appeared either hurried or occupied, but he burnt the candle of his life at both ends, as most of us do in this age, and must do if we would be of any note in it. "Ah, pardieu! I wish it were an hotel in the Rue de Grammont instead 1" laughed Valdor, as he glanced across : "Not but that, I dare say, I shall never get it, unless 1 languish through your Chancery till I am eighty. , I shall WROUGHT BY ITIS OWN HAND. 351 boar the verdict is given in my favor, just when I aio receiving the Yiaticum !" ' I hope better things ; it is a vast pity it should moulder unowned. Meanwhile, the litigation befriends me with a most agreeable companion during my exile at Lady Cas- tlemere's. I fear you will be terribly bored, Valdor; my mother lives in strict retirement." ''Another instance of those who once ruled the world abjuring it in advancing life ! What years it is since I hud the honor of seeing her. I was a little fellow a court-page, proud of my blue and silver! Does she live alone, then?" "Oh, no; merely away from the world. She has a grandson with her, a lad at college; and also a ward of hers and of mine, little more than a child as yet, Lucille do Yocqsal." " De Yocqsal? An Austrian name, isn't it?" " No, Hungarian ; it may be Austrian too, however is, indeed, I think, now you name it. You must expect to find Silver-rest dull it has nothing to boast of but its sea-board." " And its country," added Valdor, as they passed through the lodge gates. Strathmore glanced carelessly over the magnificent ex- panse of woodland and moorland, hill and ocean, which stretched around : " Yes ; but that has not much compensative attraction for either you or me, I fancy." They went on in silence, smoking, through the grounds, which were purposely left in much of the wildness and luxuriance of their natural formation, with here and there great boulders of red rock bedded in the moss, and covered with heaths and creepers, and Strathmore looked up in surprise as a sudden exclamation from Yaldor fell on his ear. " Bon Dieu ! Look there. How lovely !" Strathmore glanced to where Yaldor pointed, marvelling that the landscape should rouse him to so much admira- tion, for the fashionable French Noble was not likely to L>e astonished into any enthusiastic adoration of the fastora 1 beauty of nature, or the sun-given smile on the se-ae 35$ STRATH MORE; OR, What ne saw was this: A rock of dark sandstone overhung the turf belo /, forming a natural chamber, which it roofed, Avhose walls jvere the dense screen of tangled creepers and foliage pen- dent from its ledges, or the great ferns which reared to meet them, and whose carpet was the moss, covered with lilies of the valley, which grew profusely where the tem- pered sun rays fell through cool leaves and twisted bough*, flickering and parted. And under its shelter from the heat, half buried in the flowers, lying in the graceful abandon of a child's repose, resting her head upon her hand in the attitude of Guide's " Leggiatura," her eyes veiled as they rested on her book, one sunbeam stream- ing through the fan-like ferns above, touching her hair to gold and shining on the open page she read, was Lucille. The steps of both were involuntarily arrested as they came upon her in her solitude ; there was something of sanctity in that early loveliness, " Soft, as the memory of buried love ; Pure, as the prayer which childhood wafts above " that silenced both him to whom it was familiar, and him to whom it was unknown. Then Strathmore turned to move onward through the grounds; he felt repugnance to break in on her repose, or to meet her in the presence of the one who had heard the dying lips faintly whisper the name she bore, in their last farewell to her lost mother. But Valdor put his hand upon his shoulder. " Wait, for Heaven's sake ! Who is she ?" " A lovely child, but no more than that as yet. My ward, Lucille de Vocqsal." " Mort de Dieu I She is the most beautiful poem, picture Heaven knows what that ever I beheld. Make her lift those eyes ; what must the face be when they are raised !" " You will see her later on,'' answered Strathmore, coldly: "I shall not disturb her now; she is very young, and would not understand our having pryed on her in her haunt. And pray do not use that flowery language to her; youth flattered into vanity is ruined, and you would talk in an unknown tongue there." * He moved away, and Valdor, somewhat surprised and WROUGHT BY IITS OWN HAND. 353 somewhat annoyed, prepared to follow him with a linger- ing backward gaze. But it was too late ; a squirrel swinging downward from the boughs above made Lucille raise her eyes. She saw Strathmore, and, with a low cry, wild in its gladness, sprang from her couch among the lilies, and flew to meet him. Midway, she saw, too, that he was not alone ; and paused, hesitating, with the color, delicate as the rose flush on a sea-shell, deepening in her cheek. She knew by instinct that Strathmore was haughtily reticent before all auditors, and although too highly bred and nurtured to know embarrassment, she had something of the beautiful wild shyness of the young fawn with those who were strange to her. A shudder ran through Strathmore's veins as he per- ceived her standing before them there in the sultry mellow haze ; while the eyes of his companion rested on her the eyes which had watched with him the shadows steal over the lace, and the convulsion shiver through the limbs of her father in the summer-night of years long gone. Then he moved forward and greeted her with all bis accustomed gentleness, less tenderly than when they were alone but to that she had long been used when any other was present at their meeting and led her towards Valdor: " Lucille, allow me to introduce to you one of my oldest and most valued friends. Mad'lle de Vocqsal ; M. le Conte de Yaldor." " Pardieu !" thought the Frenchman ; as after a graceful acknowledgment of his salutation, none the less graceful, but the more, from that delicate proud shyness which was like the coy gaze of the deer, Lucille turned to Strathmore with low, breathless words of joyous welcome, and the radiance of that smile at which the sadness fled from off her face, as though banished by a spell : " Pardieu ! when was anything more exquisite ever born ; it is not mortal ; it is the face of an angel. I have seen something like it, too, somewhere; now she smile it looks familiar. Per- haps it is some head of Guido, some fantasy of Carlo Dolci, that she makes me remember. She seems to love her guardian : is she the only thing on earth he does not ice ? The last man living, I should have supposed, who would have taken such an office ; however, it may be done from generosity here. Strathmore would ruin his friend without 30* 854 STRATHMORE; OR, mercy if he stood in his way, or awoke his passions ; Imt he would give royally to his deadliest enemy who asked him in need. A bad man sometimes ; a dangerous man always ; but a mean man, or a false man, never !" Which fugitive thoughts flitting through the volatile and reckless mind of Valdor, which seldom stayed to sift or criticize, were just enough in their deduction, drawing one of those haphazard truths by instinct for which patient and shrewd observation often toils half a lifetime in vain. " What were you reading there, Lucille ?" asked Strath- more, as they passed onward through the grounds, while her head was ever turning with a graceful, upward move- ment to look on him, and her eyes were ever seeking his with their loving, reverent regard, as though she could scarcely believe in the actual joy of his presence. They were but few and rapid visits \vhich he paid her, but they were remembered from time to time as the young jirgins of Hellas remembered the smile of the Sun God" The fairest summer lost its beauty if he came not with its golden promise ; the dreariest winter was glad and bright with all the warmth of spi-ing in her sight if it brought her but a few hours of his presence. From the moment when as a little child on the sea-shore she had asked him his name that she might say it in her prayers, Lucille had clung to the memory of Strathmore with a strange and deepened fondness far beyond her years. "I had taken Jilschylus and Euripides," she answered him ; " how sublime the rich and musical Greek is !" " You can read them in the original then, mademoi- selle ?" asked Valdor, in surprise. " Lucille learns very rapidly, I believe," answered Strathmore for her: "She has been taught chiefly what she fancied to study, and one of those fairy fancies was Greek. I believe merely because she had heard how the sea she loves was loved in Hellas was it not, Lucille ?" She smiled, and looked over to the sunny waters: "Well ! I can fancy how the ten thousand clashed their bucklers for wild joy, and shouted ' Thalassis ! ThalassU ! : to the beautiful dancing waves. I love the ocean ! It is a music that is never silent, a poem that is never ex- hausted. When I die I should like my grave to be the sea." WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND 355 " Death for you, mademoiselle !" broke in Valdor, wmle his eloquent southern eyes dwelt on her with admiration: " The gods have lavished on you every fairest gift, but they will be too merciful to those who look on you, tu in that humility and self-doubt which a great guilt may well leave upon the proudest and most self-sustained nature ; he had set it before him as he had set the ambitions of his public life, as a purpose to be wrought by his own hand, and effected by his own foresight and his own will, guarded by him alone from all chance of miscarriage, all touch of opposing will, all danger of human accident, as his strength of steel and his unscrupulous force bore down all that was antagonistic to him, and pioneered his road to power. Prostrate and chastened by a stricken remorse, he had vowed to fulfil the trust be- queathed him an hundred-fold beyond all which that trust enjoined ; but to the fulfilment of his oath he had risen in the same spirit with which he had dealt out death and meted vengeance ; the spirit which relied on the masterly skill of his own hand to mould what form it would, and still conceived that Life would bend and bow to his haughty fiat: "/will this!" " You gave me leave to hope ; but what chance of hope, sir, is there for me with all these ?" said young Caryll, bitterly, one day, as he glanced at the knot of titled and famous men gathered about Lucille in the cedar drawing- room. Strathmore had extended his invitation to the young man, true to his promise, to give him opportunity to advance his love on her affection, for he was scrupulously just, and never broke his word in private or public matters. Strathmore smiled that smile under which young Caryll winced as under the cut of a knife : " 1 gave you leave to hope, certainly ; it is for you to WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 409 give your hope a basis. I never told you I deemed it well founded; but you should know how to make it so. If you have so little of the necessary love-lore, I cannot help you; ce n'est pas a moi!" " But but how, when she has so many to teach her her power ?" began the youth, hesitatingly. Strathmore raised his eyebrows: " ' How !' If you be such a novice in the art, it is wiser you should abandon it altogether." He spoke with that slight laugh which was more chill than most men's sneer; but, though his words had stung his nephew as the young alone can be stung by the light contempt of a man of the world, Strathmore's disdain for nim was not unmixed with a wish that his suit might prosper. If Lucille's heart was fastened on young Caryll's love, and could be content in it and with it, his happiness might be more surely and safely secured than with those more brilliant in station, who now sought her, and over his nephew, who would be his debtor, and whose career would be moulded and checked by him, he would have still a sway, where, if she wedded any other, he would lose his influence for her and over her life forever. Yet the same bitterness which had arisen when his mother had first spoken of marriage for her, rose in him now, as he looked across to where she stood in the conservatories, caressing a bright-plumaged bird, and trying to lure an- other from the topmost boughs of an orange-tree, too ab- sorbed in her wayward favorites to be conscious of the glances bent upon her by the group around. " Can they not let her alone for a few brief years, at least?" he mused, with an acrid impatience : " That bird's wing which brushes her lips is fitter caress for them than men's kisses. Marriage! Faugh! it is profanity to speak of to think o for her!" " Stratbmore, if you are disengaged just now, give me five minutes," said the Duke of Beauvoir, touching him on the arm at that moment. His Grace was a heavy, cheery, generous gentleman, to whom Mark Lane Express panegyrics on his prize short- horns were dearer than European encomiums on his poli- cies, and who in the Cabinet was utterly under the lead of his subtle and astute colleague, though the reins ,vcre 35 410 BTRATHMORE; OR, so excellently managed that he was wholly unconscious of his own docile obedience. " I want to talk to you about a merely personal matter," went on the Duke, as Strathmore led the way into the bil- liard-room, just then empty; "in fact, about your young ward, Mademoiselle de Vocqsal. Have you any marriage in view for her?" " None, my dear Duke." " Well ! Bowdon has lost his head about her," went on his Grace, in bis usual sans fa9on, good-humored style, which flung dignity to the winds as humbug, and yet somehow or other never entirely lost it : " Never saw him so much in love in my life ! You've remarked it, of course, eh ? He has asked me to-day to speak to you. In point of fact, I should be very glad to see him married myself, and I have so high an esteem for Lady Castle- mere, that I should have been perfectly satisfied if I had known nothing more than that the young lady he sought had been reared under her tutelage, so I told him that I would mention the matter to you this morning. I pre- sume the alliance would have your concurrence ?" " A more brilliant one it would be impossible to find for her! You do me the highest honor in soliciting her hand for Lord Bowdon," answered Strathmore, with his suave, chill courtesy, which was never startled into suprise as it was rarely warmed into cordiality : " His proposals, then, have your full sanction ? May I ask what has been said on the subject to my ward ? "Nothing! nothing definite at least. She is so ex- ceedingly young not brought out, indeed that Bowdon and I both concurred in seeking her hand from you first. Will you mention it to her as you think best ?" "With pleasure. We may postpone, then, any furthet discussion of your wishes or mine until we are aware how Mademoiselle de Vocqsal receives your most flattering proposal ?" " How ?" His Grace looked fairly astonished a little amazed moreover; it was so very new a suggestion to him that his son, the future Duke of Beauvoir, could possibly be rejected ! WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 41 1 Strathmore smiled, that suave, courtly smilo which always a little worried his noble colleague: " My dear Beauvoir, I need not say that alliance with your House surpasses the most splendid aspirations which my ward could have indulged in for herself, or my mother and I, as her guardians for her ; at the same time, I do not prejudge Lucille's answer, since I should never seek to sway her inclination. But there is little fear, doubtless, of what that answer will be ; Lord Bowdon could not woo in vain." His Grace's pride and consternation were both soothed, and he passed on to speak further of his proposals in his son's name with that hearty au point, straightforwardness, which in the Cabinet made so strong a contrast to the fine finesses and inscrutable reticence of one who, from his earliest years of public life, had- recognized the essential art of success to lie in knowing " how to hold truth, and how to withhold it." " I must be the first, then, to taint her mind with mar- riage offers!" thought Strathmore: " Rank more brilliant could not be given her; every woman in England will snvy her her lot; he is a handsome, amiable, inoffensive fool ! Such men make the kindest husbands. There will be no fear for her happiness, if if she love him. And yet, that soft, delicate, innocent life I Good God ! it is defilement !" The thoughts flitted, scarce shaped, through his mind ; the sudden offer of the Duke's alliance had struck him with keen, though vague pain the same pain, but more intense, which had smitten him when his mother had first spoken of Lucille's future. Young Caryll's love for her had been some distant thing, viewed by him with some contempt, and subject to long probation; he had not realized it in connection with her; but the Duke's words had set sharply and vividly before him the inevitable cer- tainty that, ere long, the loveliness to which so many testified would be sought and claimed in marriage, and that, once given to another, his right over the life which he alone now protected, and directed, must pass utterly and forever from him. She might be happy in her hus- band's home, and in that happiness he would have no share; looking on it, he would no longer see in the beaut/ 412 STRATH MORE; OR, of her days the symbol of his own atonement ; or she might be wretched in the union which bound her, or in the grief of a wronged womanhood, and he would be power- less to give her freedom and consolation, and must see the life he had sworn to the dead to keep her unstained and unshadowed, consume hopelessly before his sight ! To the man who, high in power and arrogant in strength, had a scornful unbelief in the power of Circumstance to overthrow Resolve, the sense of the impotence of his will here was as bitter as it was strange. For the moment, maddened by it, he felt tempted to exert his title as her guardian to forbid all marriage for her, all love for her; but this, again, he was forced to surrender ; to secure her happiness, free choice must be left her, in that which, thwarted, often makes the misery of a life ; and Strath- more's nature, merciless to others, was one to the full as inflexible to himself in any ordeal self-chosen, any sacrifice self-imposed. It smote him with pain, with aversion, with loathing, to be the first to speak to her of what must lead her across that boundary she had told him wistfully she feared to pass, which oftentimes parts Childhood from Womanhood by a single step. He revolted from his office ; but it devolved on him as her guardian ; as such he had accepted it, and went to fulfil it. As he descended before dinner, he saw her upon the terrace leaning over the parapet in the warm glow of the western light, which slanted across the broad flight of steps, and fell about her where she stood ; strange contrast, in the bright and aerial glow of her youth, to the gray, monastic walls of the Gothic fa9ade behind her, and the dark massed branches of the cedars above her head. He approached her, and laid his hand gently on her hair, turned simply back from her brow in its rich, silken waves : "Where are your dreams, Lucille?" She looked up, and the warm light, which ever came there at his presence, beamed upon her face : "I was thinking of all those who have lived and died here ; of all the histories those gray stones could speak ; of all the secrets which lie shrouded in those woods since they saw the Druidic sacrifices, and heard the chant of the white-robed Dominicans ; the dead days seem to rise WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 413 rrom their graves, and tell ine all that is buried with them. She spoke only in the fanciful imagination which loved to wander in the poetic mysteries of the past, but her words now, as often, struck him with that deadliest Nemesis of crime the doom which compels the guilty to hear reproach in every innocent speech, and feel a blow on unhealed wounds, in what without that remembered sin had been but gay jest or soft caress. "You are too imaginative, Lucille," he said, quickly: " Why dream of that dark past, of unholy sacrifice and insensate superstition ? The past has nothing to do with you ; live in your own fair present, my child. Your sunny sea-shore suits you better than the monastic gloom of White Ladies." She lifted her bright head eagerly: " Oh ! I love White Ladies best." " Surely ? But Silver-rest is your home ?" "Yes ; but this is yours." He smiled ; all expression of her affection was dear to him, not because affection was ever necessary to him, but because hers was like the pardon and purification of his crime. Then the office which he came to execute, recurred to him ; they were alone, no living thing near save the deer, which were crossing the sward in the distance, and the peacock trailing his gorgeous train over the fallen rose- leaves on the marble pavement. But that solitude might be broken any second ; he employed it while it lasted : " Lucille ! you may command another home from to-day, if you will." Her eyes turned on him with a surprised, bewildered look, while a happy smile played about her lips : "Another home! What do I want with one, Lord Cecil?" " Many will offer one." The surprised wonder in her eyes deepened, she looked at him hesitatingly, yet amused still : " I do not understand you." A curse rose in his throat on those who made him destroy the yet lingering childhood, and awaken thoughts which ne himself would have bidden sleep forever. " I am not speaking in enigmas, Lucille ; I tell you 85* 414 STRATHMORE; OR, merely a necessary truth," he answered her gravely : "As your guardian I have the disposal of your future ; of that future those who love you will each seek the charge ; it is for you, not me, to decide to whom it is finally entrusted. His Grace of Beauvoir has to-day sought your hand from me for his son. What answer shall I return to Lord Bowdon ?" Her eyes had been fixed wistfully on him as he spoke, as if scarcely comprehending him ; at the clearness of his last words a blush, the first he had seen there, flushed her cheeks, her lashes drooped, her lips parted, but without speech, and he fancied that she shuddered slightly. His task revolted him, he loathed it yet more in execu- tion than in anticipation ; but Strathmore let no trace of repugnance appear, he addressed her calmly and gravely, as befitted one who filled to her, in her eyes and the world's, her father's place : " I do not need to tell you, Lucille, that such an alliance is almost the highest in the country, and one of the most brilliant it would be possible to command. His father tells me that Bowdon loves you as much even as the fancy of youth can wish to be loved. To exaggerate the rank of the station you would fill would be impossible, and youi happiness " " Oh hush ! hush ! it seems so strange." The words were spoken rapidly under her breath, and almost with an accent of terror, while the flush was hot on her cheek, and her head was drooped and slightly turned from him ; it might be the startled shyness of girlish love, the momentary agitation of a flattered pride ; he took it for these, and a pain, keen and heavy, smote him, and made his tone more cold, though as calm and even as heretofore, as he went on : " Nay, you must hear me, Lucille. I but repeat to you what the Duke has said, and it is no light matter to be dismissed hastily either way. I am no ambassador of a love-tale; but I should err gravely in the place I hold towards you, if I did not put fully before you the eminence of the rank for which your hand is sought, and the splendor of the alliance into which you may now enter He paused suddenly, for she turned towards him with a swift movement and that caressing grace witli which WROUGHT BY HIS OWN IIAND. 415 as a little child upon the sea-shore she had leaned against him, thinking she had done Avrong to touch a stranger's* dog: " Hush ! you pain me. Why do you speak to me so ? Are you tired of me, Lord Cecil ?" The color was still warm in her face, but her eyes, as they questioned his, were pleading and reproachful, and there was a naive plaintiveness in the words and in the action, with which she turned and clung to him, which touched him, even while they struck him with a sense of keen relief, of vivid pleasure; it would have cost him more than he had counted to surrender his right to gladden, to guide, and to control this young life; it would have been the surrender of Erroll's trust, and of his own atonement. He drew her gently towards him with that tenderness which existed only for her, begotten of circumstance, while foreign to his nature : " Why does it pain you, my love ? Have you heard me aright? I but speak to you of a marriage for which my consent has been sought, and which is so exalted and unexceptionable a one, that as your guardian I should be deeply blameable if I did not fully set before you all it offers. I should never urge your inclination, but I must state truly all which may await you if you accept it. Decide nothing hastily ; to-morrow you can give me your reply." A look of aversion and of pain shadowed her face, she clung to him with that caressing reliance as natural and unrestrained now as in her childhood, and lifted her eyes in beseeching earnestness : " Oh, no! Why? What need? Tell them at once that 1 could not I could not ! " A gladness, which had never touched his life since Marion Vavasour destroyed it, swept over him for a moment at her words ; he loved her for the sake and in the memory of the dead, and he rejoiced that he was not yet bidden to bestow her on her lover, to give her up from his own keeping: " It shall be as you will, Lucille. I have no other aim save your happiness. But are you sure that you know what you refuse; that you may not desire to speak of it 4l<5 STRATIIMOUE ; OR, further with my mother? You arc very young, and a station so brilliant " Something proud, pained, wistful, perplexed, which came into her eyes, again arrested him ; the delicate and spiritual nature shrank from the coarser ambitions imputed to her, the worldly bribe proffered to her : "Why do you tell me of that, Lord Cecil?" " Because it is my duty as your guardian, not because I think that it would sway you. I do not. Yours is a rare nature, Lucille." His answer reassured her, and the shadow passed from off her face as the warm sunlight of the west fell on it, the smile upon her lips, so like her father's in its gladness and its sunny tenderness, that it smote Strath more as on the night when she had wakened from dreaming sleep on the bosom of her dead mother. " Then then whenever any others speak to you as the Duke has done, you will answer them without coming to me ? You will say : ' Lucille has no love to give strangers, and needs no guardian save the one she has ! ' " He smiled, moved to mingled pain and pleasure by her words : " I cannot promise that, my child, for I fear they would not rest content with such an answer. And, Lucille, the future must dawn for you as for all, and you will find other loves than those you now know." She put her hand up to his lips to silence him, and her eyes grew dark and humid: "Never! Never! If the future would differ from the present, I pray God it may not dawn. Are you weary of Lucille, Lord Cecil, that you would exile her to other care ? " " Never ask that ! I wish to God my care could shield you always." His answer sprang from the poisoned springs of a deep and hidden remorse ; she beard in it but a sure defence and promise for the future, as he stood resting his hand upon her shoulder in the evening silence, while the sun sank from sight behind the elm-woods, and the shadows of twilight stole over the terrace, where the winding waters glistened through the gloom, white with their countless river-lilies, as on the night when Marian Vavasour nad WROUGHT BY HIS OWN HAND. 41T been there beside him, wooing from his lips the first words of that guilt-steeped love in which all the beauty of his manhood had been cast and wrecked. Laughing in soft, childlike gaiety for his words had made her very glad, and banished even from memory th momentary vague pain and fear which had fallen on her, she scarce knew why Lucille stooped and wound her hands in the luxuriance of the late roses, which still blos- somed in profusion over the steps and balustrade of the cedar-terrace, covering the white marble with their trailing leaves and scarlet petals, and filling the air with their odor. Her hands wandered among them with that delight in their beauty which was inborn with her artistic and imaginative nature, and drawing one of their richest clusters from the rest, she held them to him in their fragrance : "I do not wonder that the Greeks and the poets loved the roses best, and that the Easterns gave them to the nightingales as the burden of their song and the choice of their love ! How beautiful they are the Queeu of Flowers ! The words, the action, the sight and scent of the roses, as she held them upward to him in the twilight, recalled, in sudden vivid agony, the memory of the woman who had stood there with him on that very spot, with th subtle, poetic lies upon her fragrant lips, which gave the flower that she loved value and sweetness in his sight because their kiss had rested on its leaves; it was among the roses that he had seen her in the morning light at Vernon9eaux ; it was among the roses that he had seen her in the summer noon, when he had spared her from death only that she might live to suffer ! And the flower was accursed in his sight. Those scarlet roses, with their heavy fragrance and their clinging dews, gave him a thrill of horror as he saw them lifted to him by the innocent hands of Lucille ; they were in his eyes the bloodstained symbol of the assassinatress, of the destroyer ! With an irrepressible impulse he seized them from her, and threw them far away, till they fell bruised and scat' tered on the turf below. Her look of surprise recalled him to himself: 418 STRATIIMORE ; OR, "Resets b