LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE p. fi. Brown. FRIENDSHIP OUIDA'S NOVELS. Uniform edition, crown Svo, cloth extra, ^s, each. HELD IN BONDAGE. STRATHMORE. CHANDOS : A Novel. UNDER TWO FLAGS. IDALIA : A Romance. TRICOTRIN. CECIL CASTLEMAINE'S GAGE. PUCK : His Vicissitudes, Adventures, etc. FOLLE FARINE. A DOG OF FLANDERS, PASCAREL : Only a Story. TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. SIGNA. IN A WINTER CITY. ARIADNE. FRIENDSHIP, CHATTO &- WIND US, PICCADILLY, W. F R I E N D S H I P A STORY, 3e (oSVoorr'- A^t_ . «^v By OUIDA,pSjtt(cC AUTHOR OF "puck." "ariadne," "signa," etc. "Si I'emploi de la Comedie est de corriger les vices, je ne vois pas par quelle raison il y en aura de privilegies."— MoLiiiRE. A NEW EDITION. Honbon: CHATTO AND WINDUS, PICCADILLY. ?Rf537 /s*?^ PRINTED AT THE CAXTON PRESS, BECCLES, A PEOPOS. A FROG that dwelt in a ditcli spat at a worm that bore a lamp. " Why do you do that ? " baid the glowworm. " Why do you shine ? " said the frog. AYANT-PEOPOS. When Zeus, half in sport and half in cruelty, made man, young Hermes, who, as all Olympus knew, was for ever at some piece of mischief, insisted on meddling with his father's work, and got leave to fashion the human ear out of a shell that he chanced to have by him, across which he stretched a fine cobweb that he stole from Arachne. But he hollowed and twisted the shell in such a fashion that it would turn back all sounds except very loud blasts that Falsehood should blow on a brazen horn, whilst the im- penetrable web would keep out all such whispers as Truth could send up from the depths of her well. Hermes chuckled as he rounded the curves of his ear, and fastened it on to the newly-made Human Creature. "So shall these mortals always hear and believe the thing that is not," he said to himself in glee — knowing that the box he would give to Pandora would not bear more confused and complex woes to the hapless earth than this gift of an ear to man. viii AVANT-PR0P08. But he forgot himself so far that, though two ears were wanted, he only made one. Apollo, passing that way, marked the blunder, and resolved to avenge the theft of his milk-white herds which had led him such a weary chase through Tempo. Apollo took a pearl of the sea and hollowed it, and strung across it a silver string from his own lyre, and with it gave to man one ear by which the voice of Truth should reach the brain. " You have spoilt all my sport," said the boy Hermes, angry and weeping. " Nay," said the elder brother, with a smile. " Be comforted. The brazen trumpets will be sure to drown the whisper from the well, and ten thousand mortals to one, be sure, will always turn by choice your ear instead of mine." FRIENDSHIP. CHAPTER I. "It is a pull, sister," said the elder Miss Moira^ of Craig Moira, to the younger. " It is a pull, sister. But we promised Archie." " We promised Archie, and I'm wishful to see how she gets on wi' the man that sold carpets." So the carriage, bearing the Misses Moira, of Craig Moira, their plaids, pugs, car-trumpets, and courier, continued its course across the Eomau Campagua, and up the steep and wooded roads that led to the old Castle of Fiordelisa. The Misses Moira, of Moira, lived on their own lands in Caitlmcss, were very rich, very ugly, very eccentric, spoke with a strong native accent, and delivered their opinions uncalled for ; two of their sister's children were respectively the Duchess of Forfar and the Marquis of Fingal ; the younger was the eclio of the elder — both wore spectacles, both were deaf; and neither ever forgot that the Moiras, of Craig Moira, had the right to sit before their sovereign, and were allied with half the bluest blood and highest names in Great Britain. They were now aboiit to call on one of their connections, and gazed anxiously through their spectacles for the Castle of Fior- delisa, where she dwelt. Fiordelisa came at last in sight, a grey, rambling, and ancient pile, set amidst cypress and ilex woods, with its gardens straying down into its farm-lands in Italian fashion, covering hills and plains with corn and vine and olive. " A braw place this, but ill-kept," said the elder Miss Moira, as they entered a dark avenue of ancient oaks, " and has the idolatrous emblems even at the very gates." She shut her eyes not to seethe Pietu let into the wall und-r the woods, and kept them shut lest she should see any more such signs. They had been brouglit into the land of such mummeries n IS 2 FRIENDSHIP. under protest by the daugerons illness of a beloved sister, mother "of her young Grace of Forfar, at Naples, and the sister being restored 'to health, they were hastening away from the scene of abominations, only pausing a few days in Eome because the younger of thorn was somewhat of an invalid, and unequal to rapid tiavelling. The sudden stoppage of the carriage made the elder Miss Moira open her eyes. They had arrived at the entrance door of Fiordelisa. . Between the centre columns of a beautiful loggia, built by Bramame, there was standing a handsome, black-browed woman, a little in advance of two gentlemen, who stood one on each side of her, awaiting the arrival of the guests. She was the Lady Joan Challoner. With ardour and cordial eagerness of welcome she rushed down the stone steps and darted to the carriage. " Oil, dearest Miss Moira, how kind of you! And dear Miss Elizabeth, too. How sorry I am not to be in Eome ! We go down for good the day after to-morrow. If I had only known you were coming there, of course I should have gone in last week, Let mo present them to you— Mr. Challoner; Prince loris, Come in, pray, out of the sun. Yes, even in November it n oppressively warm. You must be overladen with all those l^laids. Robert lo " " Enchante d I'honneur de vous voir, mesdames," murmured a tall, graceful, dark-eyed person, with a sweet smile and a low bow, coming forward on to the first step, and offering his arm to the old gentlewoman. " Hoot toot, man ! Canna ye speak yor own tongue ? " said tho elder Miss Moira sharply, accepting the arm of her host, as she thouglit, and entering tho house with him, whilst her sister followed with their hostess, who was talking eagerly into her ear-trumpet; the other gentleman, who had a Scotch face and a Gorman manner, and looked like a fusion between a Leii)zig philologist and an American senator, made a feeble attempt to offer his arm as well, but hesitated, not seeing very well how to do it. and lialtod midway, making believe to hold back a barking Clumber spaniel. The whole party passed into the loggia, and thence into the first great apartment opening out from it, whore some twenty other people, English and American rosiilents of Eome, had been gathered to do honour to the Misses Moira, of Moira, and woro taking tea, eating grapes, and looking at pictures and china. Seated, the two ladies l<)oke(I round the noble tapestried guest-chamber with some bewilderment and some vague dis- pleasure. „ .- ,, ,, "So ye're Joan Berth-Douglas that was?" said the elder Miss MoiVa, bringing her spectacles to bear on her hostess. " Ye FRIENDSHIP. 3 wore a blip of twelve when we saw ye last— twenty years ago, aye, twenty years and more. Will ye tell me why your good husband talks French to us ? " " Allow me, madam," murmured the gentleman who looked like a Leipzig philologist and an American senator, offering to relieve her of her plaids. " Don't be officious, man ! " said Miss Moira, sharply. " My sister's no richt in the lungs, and your master's house is cb-aughty." The gentleman shrank back. " I never saw a Scot so dark as your good husband, Joan," pursued the elder Miss ]Moira, adhering to her original thoughts, sternly fastening her glasses upon the graceful and dark-eyed personage, who murmured a soft and perplexed "Plait-il, Madame ? " " Have you lived among Papists till you've forgot every word of the tongue you were born to, sir '? " asked Miss Moira of him, believing that she was addressing a fellow-countryman. " You must be inconvenienced by all those plaids, madam. Do allow me " commenced in a kind of despair the other person who had been scouted. " Canna ye wait till ye're spoke to ! " said the lady, turning on him in wrath at the interference. " Canna ye teach your servants better ways, Leddy Joan, than to gird at a body like that? A very brown man for a Scot your husband, though extraordinary well-favoured. How comes it he canna talk his own tongue ? " " That is not my husband," said the Lady Joan hui-riedly, with a flush rising on her face and a laugh to her eyes. " You are mistaken, dear Miss Moira. I introduce people so badly ; this is only loris, a friend, you know. My husband, Mr. Challoner, you've been taking for a servant, and scolding about your i)laids." The well-bred twenty people who were taking tea at Fior- delisa were not so perfectly well-bred that they could help a little titter as they listened. " Prat-tut I " cried the elder Miss INtoira, with her head higher in the air, being a person who never recognised her own errors, let them 1)0 made manifest as they might. " This man received us, certainly he received us, at the door (I am correct, sister?). Certainly he received us, Leddy Joan. If yon bo master here," she demanded with sudden vigour of the gentle- man whom she was informed was Mr. Challoner, as he returned with a cup of tea and a cream-jug — " if you be master here, why don't you behave like it ? Are you master, eh ? " Jlr. Challoner, conscious of the'twenty well-bred people nnd the irrepressible ill-bred titter, begged Miss Moira to tell him if she took much sugar or little. FRIENDSHIP. a I can sugar for myself! " said that lady with asperity, " So you are Leddy Joan's husband, are you? You don't seem to conduct yourself like it. But I thought the other was very dark for a Scot." " Do you take cream, madam ? " murmured Mr. Challoner, bending his back stiffly over the silver jug, whilst Miss Moira stared with stony gaze at the coronets and coats of arms on the chairs. " Whose quarterings are those ? " she denlanded. " They're none known north o' Tweed, nor north o' Thames either for that matter ; the shape o' the shield " " Dear Miss Moira, allow me ," said the Lady Joan, avoiding heraldry by bringing up a small division of the twenty well-bred people for presentation. But Miss Moira was not to be so lightly diverted from her purpose. Having bent her head as many times as politeness required, she retained her grasp on Mr. Challoner, and returned to her original investigations. " A fine place," she resumed, letting her spectacles rove from the timber roof to the mosaic floor ; " a fine jjlace ; is it your own ? " Mr. Challoner murmured inarticulately, and stooped for the sugar-tongs. " Bought it ? " said Miss Moira sharply. " No — not precisely." " Hired it ? " " Not exactly. That is, at least " Mr. Challoner shifted his eyeglass, and, being an exact man, paused to find an exact word. " Oh, my gnde soul, then if ye've na bought it and na hired it, it's na yours at all, and what for be ye specring to ask us into it?" Mr. Challoner wondered to himself why an unkind Provi- dence Avould move old maiden ladies from their own safe ingle- nooks by grey Atlantic shores, and muttered something of " a friend, an old friend." "Oh, it's the dark man's, is it? He don't look old," said Miss IMoira, "and you and your good leddy live in it out of friendship. Is that the custom in this papistical country, pray, sir ? " Mr. Challoner murmured that ho thought it was the custom — " the houses were so large, the nolniity were so poor " " And has he a good lady? What does she say to it ? Cer- tainly, Leddy Joan a.sked us out here as to her oivn place. Quite ckarly — her own place. I am correct, sister?" " Quite correct, sister. Her own place." " loris is not married," said Iilr. Challoner, wondering if ho could drop the sugar-tongs again without too much awkward- ness. " He is a good fellow. We are very much attached to FJilENDSTIIP. 5 liim, Will you like to see my greenhouses? I am curious in the Nymjjhxaa — ajanea — cairuha — ruhra." " A poud-lily's a puir feckless tasto for a man," said Miss Moira severely. " Archie asked \is to come and see his daughter, and so we came. But certainly when she wrote to us she said her 'own place ' — most distinctly her own place." " Oh, she has got into the habit of calling it so, she has dono so much for it " " But if it be the young man's " Lady Joan Challoner begged at that moment to present to Miss Moira an Anglican clergyman. The Anglican clergyman disposed of. Miss Moira, of Craig Moira, returned to the charge. "Eh, but it must be a perilous experiment — twa masters under one roof." " Eh, it must, indeed," murmured the younger Miss Moira. "Mony voices make muckle strife." " Ay, they do. Tell me now, do you twa good gentlemen ■ never fash one another ? " " Never," said Mr. Challoner cordially, but his cold light eyes fell as he spoke. "Then ye're just no human, sir," said Miss Moira with emphasis ; " and Joan Perth-Douglas had always a sharp tongue of her own. Perth-Douglas women never were easy to live with. You seem a quiet body yourself, but still " " Let me show you my wife's fowls. The fame of the poultry of Craig I\Ioira ". commenced Mr. Challoner. " Still, I think you're no wise, and so I'll tell Archie," con- tinued Miss Moira, not to be moved even by praise of her poultry-yard. " It's a queer way of living, and certainly she said her own place, ' her own place ; ' and ye'll take no offence, for I always speak my mind, but that Papist's a deal too bonny to look at, and Leddy Joan's a young woman still." " My dear madam ! I have not the most distant idea of your meaning " " Then ye're just a fule, sir," said Miss Moira sharply. "Will you look at my wife's poultry ? She has some spangled bantams that " " Eh ? Joan Perth-Douglas has taken to cocks and hens and bubbly-jocks, has she? Weel, there's no accounting for con- versions. Perth-Douglas women were always a handful. I've known three generations of them, and they always were master- ful. Dear douce Archie never daurcd say his soul was his own. Yes, I'll come and see your chicks and stove plants. But how can they be yours if the place is the Papist's ? " " It was a tumble-down old barrack. "We have spent a good deal on it. One is always glad to do good to a friend," mur- mured Mr. Challonei', a little vaguely, offering his arm to his tormentor. 3 FEIENDSniP. , " Humph ! " said the elder Miss Moira with a sniff. " We are quite farmers here, you know/' ]\Ir. Challoner con- tinued, leading the way through courts and chambers to the open air. " The whole thing had gone to rack and ruin when we took it in hand. Italians are so improvident, and the national habits are so wasteful. But my wife's energy is "wonderful ; whatever she undertakes prospers " "Humph ! " said the elder Miss Moira once more. " And the handsome Papist, is he grateful to ye for her energy ? " "Oh, don't talk about gratitude. There is no question of that ! "We are always glad to be of use to our friends, and loris is an excellent fellow. Ask Lord Archie." Lord Archie was an idol of Craig Moira, and his word was law there. Miss INfoira was softened by it, and her suspicions were mollified. She consented to be conducted through the greenhouses, praised the bantams, and only sniffed a little as she passed the open door of the castle chapel, where some peasants were going in for vespers. She returned in a more amiable frame of mind to her sister and her sofa, and relented enough to take a fresh cup of tea and some fruit, which was handed her with exquisite grace by the Prince loris. Miss Moira's eyes through their spectacles followed the Prince loris to the otlier end of the large reception room. " He's an elegant-made man and a taking one," she said to her host ; " and I think yc'rc no wise to live in the same house witli him. Oh, ye've no need to glower and look glum : an old body like me can tell truth without fashin' anybody, and ye know that we and Archie's people have foregathered all our lives, and it never was hid from us that Joan Perth-Douglas was masterful, and had her cantrips. Lord, man ! Do ye tliink they'd liave wedded her to a mere decent body like you, if she hadn't been a handful? Not they; tliey're proud-stomached, and ye sold carpets and the like in Bagdad." " Eeally, madam " Mr. Challoner shifted his eyeglass, and felt that this kind of amiability was worse to bear than the jjrevious antagonism. " Hoot ! it's no sort of use giving yourself bobberies with us. Wc know all about you," said Miss IMoira pleasantly. " Your forebears were decent folks, dwellers on my cousin Allandale's lands on tlie Border for mony a generation, pious canny bodies, but snia' traders all. I mind well wiien I was a bit lassie, and staying at Allandale's, buying tapes and pins and what not, at your grandmother's little shop. She sold suulf and letter jiajiers, and liatl tlie post, and sold stamixs as weel — twa ba\vl)cc stamps they were in those days. Yc mind it too, don't ye, sister ? " " llicht well, sister. She .sold sweeties too." "Lord, man, it's sma' blame to yo. Your folk were all decent folk in tho Chcviot.^i, and true believers. But Til not FRIENDSIUT. t deny that •W'hcn ye stuck up on your countiii'-hoiise stool so high that yo mated with Archie's daughter, we did set our necks stitf, and-^ " Mr. Clialloner threw down a piece of majolica. It lielonged to tlie house, and would cost him nothing, and the crash of the falling vase spared liim more recollections of Allandale. " Sister, we must be going. The sun's well-nigli down," said the elder Miss Moira, when tlie majolica was picked up. " Now, sir, take an old woman's word, and don't disremember that your good Icddy's a Perth-Douglas, and Pertli-Dougias women are always like bucking fillies ; and the Papist's got a face o' grace and a pretty way with him. Oh, you may get on your high horse as ye like! Sense is sense. Still, Pm glad to see ye liave such a trust in your wife, and it speaks well for ye both, and shows she's given over her cantrips ; and I'm sorry I fashed yo about your grandamc, but there's nothing to be ashamed of, nothing at all. She was a good clean religious body, and I'm not one to look down on ye because ye are not what we are, though I'm free to own when they married Joan to ye wo quarrelled with Archie, as far as anybody ever can quarrel with him, the fair sweet-spoken soul " Mr. Chal loner, conscious of a sudden silence that had fallen on the twenty wull-bred people scattered about, behind and around him, in which the voice of his torturer fell horribly loud and distinct, wished that the mosaic floor would open as the gulf for Curtius. " Joan's a fine-featured woman," pursued Miss Moira, rising in all her plaids, "but she's a Perth- Douglas, and she's got a wild eye. You mind my word when I'm gone. Look after her well with tlie Papist. And now, gude day, and many thanks to ye, Leddy Joan. I'm miglity glad to see ye've taken to such a sober thing as tillin' laud ami fattin' fowls, and I hope ye'll keep steady at it; and, yes, to bo sure, I'll remember ye to my niece Forfar, though she's never seen ye, and I doubt if she's ever heard o' ye, and ye're scarce cousin to her, as ye're sayin' — • it's very far away, indeed ; one of your forebears in the last century married the then duke's seventli daughter, and tliey were Archie's father's great-grandfather's cousins-german — still it counts, oh yes, it counts, and I'll give her your love for certain ; and so I'll bid ye fareweel, and many thanks to ye, and we'll return it in kind whenever ye come north again. And I suppose ye don't travel with the Pajjist, but ye can ex])lain to him that we'd bo glad to see him in Caithness, for it might bo the saving of his soul if he came in reach of the true doctrine, and our minister would weary the Lord for him night and day, for lie is a personable man and a courteous, and it is sad to think he will burn in the life everlasting." " Miile remcrcimcnts, Mesdames, et a revoir," murmured tlio 8 FniENDSniP. Prince Tovis, vaguely gathering that they were wishing him well, and offering them a bouquet of autumnal heliotrope and Louise de Savoie roses. The Miss Moiras accepted the flowers, and drove away in state, pugs, plaids, ear-trumpets, courier, and all, on theii- return journey towards Rome. " There is a deal in manner, sister," said the elder Miss Moira, as she smelt the heliotrope. " There is, sister. What were ye meaning ? " " That the Papist has a manner, and that the carpet man hasn't," replied the elder Miss Moira. " Let us hope that Leddy Joan canna see the difference, and has steadied down. But I have my doubts, sister." " And ye do well to have your doubts, sister. Ye were ever very sharp o' sight." The elder Aliss Moira sniffed with scorn the bland air of the Eoman twilight. " It needs but half an eye, Elizabeth, to see that a Perth- Douglas woman loves her cantrips, and that the Papist is a deal bonnier to look at than the person that sold carj^ets. But she was very civil, and her gude man seems a well-meaning douce body, and she's steadied down ; I shall say so everywhere; she's steadied down, and we must do all we can for Jier, sister. She is Archie's daughter." " She is Archie's daughter, sister." The elder Jliss Moira would have changed her amicable intentions if she could have seen her hostess dancing a war- dance in the loggia, and snapping her fingers after the vanishing carriage. " The hateful old cats ! " cried the Lady Joan, " I thought they'd never go ! Wretched old women ! Why didn't you stop their tongues, Robert ? And what an ass yon were, lo, receiving them like that. Of course they couldn't help finding out the house was yours, and old idiots like those will never under- stand " " They were good harmless people," said the Prince loris, in his own tongue, a little timidly, standing under the arch of his loggia, and watching the sunset. " Stuff! They are the most horrid old harridans in existence. But every old hag seems good to you. I do believe you see good in everybody ! The idea, too, of wasting those roses on 'em ! Eoscs sell for half a franc apiece now. And giving them your- self, too! They've been boring l\Ir. Challoner to death about what you are here, and whose the house is. But you're always doing something ridiculous. Only remember this. Give your head away with the roses next time, if you like, only all I insist is — don't compromise m-; .' " The Prince loris was silent. He leaned against a column of the loggia, and watched the sun go down behind the hills. FRIENDSHIP. d Lady Joan Clmlloner and her husband went witliin to the twenty well-bred people, and busied themselves pleasantly with them, and gave jDartiug smiles and Muscat grapes to some, and retained a few to dinner. Meanwhile, the Miss Moiras rolled onward to Eome through the descending mists of evening, and nodding amidst their cushions, fell asleep, until roused by the cessation of all move- ment, and a voice they knew, tlicy were startled to find that the carriage was entering the gates of Eome. A gentleman, old, bent, feeble, smiled and nodded, came up and shook hands, as the horses were stopped for a moment by the pressure of traffic. This gentleman was Lord George Scrope-Stair, an old acquaint- ance and a privileged person. " You have been to see Pope Joan ? " he said, with a little laugh. " Did you like Fiordelisa ? " and he nodded and lauglied again. " Ah ! yes, we always call her Pope Joan ; I do, at least, when my daughters don't hear nie ; Pope Joan keeps the keys of both heaven and earth and ousts Peter out of his own palace, you know ! Only my little joke ; don't tell the girls. Good night." And the old man, who had been once a dandy and a beau in days when George the Fourth was King, walked onward in the twilight, chuckling feebly. " Pope Joan ! " echoed Miss Moira of Moira, as their carriage rolled over the stones. " Sister, I wish we had not gone to the place ! " " So do I, sister," said the echo. They went peacefully home to their hotel and dined, with misgivings weighing on their souls; and then being tired slept again until the elder Miss Moira awoke from a blissful doze with a start. " I wonder whose the place really is, sister ? " she mumnied as she yawned. " I wonder, sister," said the echo. 10 feli:ndseip. CHAPTER 11. It was sunset on the Pincio on the first day of December. Beyond St. Peter's there was that sky of purple and of gold which always seems so much more marvellous here than it does anywhere else ; that roseleaf warmth and soft transparency of flame-like colour which those who have looked on it never will forget so long as their lives shall last on earth. Below, loud, cracked, discordant bells were cliiming one against another; near at hand a military band was playing, very fast and very much out of tune, waltzes of Strauss's ; a monk, the worse for wine, was screaming homilies from a bench, and guards were vainly striving to arrest him amidst the laughter of the crowd ; but nothing spoiled the grandeur of the scene, or could destroy the sublime calmness of the declining day, as the broken green lines of the hills grew black against the burning scarlet of the clouds, and the vast expanse of roofs and sjiires, cui)olas and towers, obelisks and gardens, ruins and ])alaces, colossal temples and desolate marshes, that is all called Piome, stretched away wide and vague and solemn as a desert ; with a sun, nearly as red and rayless as the desert's, hanging above the cross on the great dome. It was four o'clock ; and there was the customary crowd of fashionable idlers, fretting horses, emblazoned carriages, saunter- ing dandies, handsome artists, tired invalids, black-robed priests and scarlet-clad janitors, cuirassed soldiers and curly headed children, violet-gowned seminarists and pnr])le-gowned scholars, and, first and foremost, fashionable ladies chattering at the top of their voices about the first fox-hunt of the year, the first court ball, the new arrivals, and the Pope's state of health. The sun was going down in majesty behind the round domes raised to lay the restless soul of Js'ero; but up here on the hill nobody scarcely looked at it, but idling and laughing and talking peoj)le turned their b;i«ks to the west, to hear the music better, and kept looking instead at one woman as she passed, and murmured to each other in a little flutter : " Dear me ! There is Etoile, and the Coronis 1 " and then reassured each other, and taid, " Yes, indeed — oh yes, really — that is Etoile with tho Coronis! " in a certain tone of disapjiointmcnt because she was only like any other well-dressed woman after all, and humanity considers that when genius comes forth in the flesh the touch of the coal from the altar should have left some visible stigmata on the lips it has burned, as, of course anybody knows, it invariably leaves some smirch upon tho character. FRIENDSHIP. 11 Humanity feols that genius ought to wear a livery, as Jews and loose women wore yellow in the old golden days of dis- tinction. '' Tiiey don't even paint ! " said one lady, and felt herself aggrieved. Nevertheless the lady and all the rest of the crowd continued to look. Dorotea Coronis they had all of them seen many scores of times through their opera-glasses at Covcnt Garden, the Grand Opera, and the theatre at Baden ; but Etoile they had hardly any of tliem ever seen, and they stared hard with all the admirable iminulence of a well-born mob. " Tliey don't seem to see us ! " said the aggrieved lady who had wondered they did not paint. "Look deuced proud," muttered an Englishman who had lifted his hat eagerly, and put it on sulkily, being unnoticed. The carriage swept by again, and both the women in it looked at the sunset, and not at the crowd. The crowd began to feel neglected, and to grow ill-natured. Sovereigns took the trouble to l)ow : why could not these two whose only royalty was that of art? " Who is Etoile ? " said the crowd. " An enigma without an CEdipus," said one of its items, who thought himself a wit. " There is no enigma at all, except in your imaginations," said another item, who was old and grave, which was a foolish remark, no doubt, because an enigma that is purely imaginary must bo of necessity the most puzzling of all, since it follows as a matter of course that nobody ever can solve it. The carriage paused, and its occupants bought Parma violets. The crowd was disposed to think there must be some motive for the action, as it eyed dubiously the boarhound trotting behind the carriage, and would fain have believed that his tongue hanging out meant a mystery, and that he broke a command- ment in wagging his tail. It is one of the privileges of celebrity that the person cele- brated can never wash his hands or open an umbrella without being accredited with some occult reason for his proceedings. "Is it really Etoile?" said the crowd. Generally speaking people were disposed to believe that she was not herself, but somebody else. She did not see them. She had a sad habit of not seeing those who surrountled her. When, recalled to a sense of her negligence, she begged the pardon of others for having over- looked them, she was not readily forgiven. People would rather be insulted than be unporceivcd. Her equipage, with its long-tailed Roman horses, went the round of the Pincio, past the cactus and aloes, the water clock 12 FRIENBSmP. and the kiosques for toys, the music-stands and the garden chairs and the various other embellishments placed here, where Augustus mused, and Cnssar and Pompeius supped. She gazed at the lovely light, rosy as blown pomegranate leaves, with little puffs of golden cloud upon it, light as a cherub's curls. " How matchless it is ! " she said, with a sigh. " It is Rome," said Dorotea Coronis. And for them both, the crowd ceased to exist. They only saw the slow-descending sun. To be wise in this world one should always be blind to the sunset, but never to the people that bow. The sun, neglected, will not freckle us any more than if we had penned him a thousand sonnets as the lord of light. A man or a woman, slighted, will burn us brown all over witli blistering spots of censure indelible as stains of iodine, and deep as wounds of vitriol. " Is it really Etoile ? " said the crowd eagerly, and scarcely looked at the brilliant Gitana-like loveliness of her companion, the great Coronis, because it was familiar, but turned and stared with all the stony-hearted inquisitiveness of Society at the little they could sec of the one whom they called Etoile, which was indeed only a heap of silver-fox furs, a pile of violets, a knot of old Flemish lace, and dreaming serious eyes that watched the sunset. She herself scarcely saw that any crowd was there. This kind of oblivion was usually her deadliest sin, and she was un- conscious that she sinned, which made it very much worse. People blew their bubbles, or threw their stones about her, and she never heeded either, though indeed, the stones came so thickly sometimes that she ought in common gratitude to have been flattered : calumny is the homage of our contemporaries, as some South Sea Islanders spit on those they honour. Popularity has been defined as the privilege of being cheered by the kind of people you would never allow to bow to you. Fame may be said to be the privilege of being slandered at once by the people who do bow to you, as well as by the people who do not. "Who is she?" said the crowd on the Pincio. Nobody there knew at all. So everybody averred they knew for certain. Nobody's story agreed with anybody's else's, but that did not matter at all. The world, like Joseph's father, gives the favourite a coat of many colours which the brethren rend. "She says herself— " hinted the old grave idler, member of many clubs*; but nobody wanted to hear what she said herself. Pur si held Of course siie told a story well and laid on the right colours; nobody had talents like hers for nothing. FBIENDSniP. 13 The old idler got no listeners, and went away pensively to lean on tlie parapet. He was so far in the minority as to believe wliat she said herself; which was quite simple and comparatively uneventful, and, therefore, evidently improbable. If she had said she had new lovers every night, and killed them in a back garden every morning, like the Jewess of the French Eegency, people might have believed ; there would have been nothing staggeringly and audaciously impossible about that. The crowd on the Pincio, when tlie whisper of her name had first run through it, had been alive witli admiration and cordiality ; but the crowd felt that it had had cold water thrown on its enthusiasm, and so began to hiss, as fire under cold water always does. " Very clever, indeed," said the crowd. " Oh yes, no doubt. Oh, wonderful, quite wonderful, every one knew that ; but who was she ? Ah ! nobody could tell. Oh yes, indeed, it was quite well known. She was a beggar's brat found on a doorstep ; she was a cardinal's daughter ; she was a princess's 'petite faute ; sho was a Eothschild's mistress ; she was a Cabinet Minister's craze ; she was poor De Morny's daughter ; she had been a slave in Cu'cassia ; she had been a serf in White Eussia ; she had been found frozen, with a tambourine in her hand, outside the gates at Yincennes ; her father was at the galleys, her "mother kept an inn. No, they were both Imperial spies and very rich ; no, they were both dead ; no, nobody ever said that, they said this. The poor Emperor knew, beyond doubt ; and the secret had died with him. She was quite out of society, she was in the highest society ; she was not received anywhere, she was received every- Avhere. Oh, that was not true, but this was. Well, the less said the better." When the world has decided that the less said the better, it always proceeds directly to say everything in the uttermost abundance that it can possibly think of, and it did so on the Pincio this day at sunset, and asked a A'ariety of questions as well. "Why had she come?" " AVas slie going to remain ? " " Would she go out at all ? " " Would she receive ? " " Would she be received ? " " Would she go the legations? " " Were those Eussian furs? " " Was that dress Worth's ? " " Why did she stop her horses there, with her back to every- body, where she couldn't hear a note of the music ? " So they chattered iu much excitement, gazing at her through their cyeg'asscs, or from under tlieir parasols. Nobody there happened to know anything, except that she 14 FRIENDSniP. had come to Eome from Paris, by Nice and Genoa, the previous night ; but there was a general feeling tliat there was probably something wrong. Why did she turn the back of her carriage to them and buy Parma violets ? In a little while, as the sun grew into a solemn red ball behind the purple dome, and the sluulows became longer, the throng began to go down tlio great winding stairways towards the square below, where the waters fell from the maa-ble mouths, and the grave sphinxes were couched beneath the drooping boughs. A lady, wrapped in sealskin, with a sealskin hat set well over her brows, began to move also with the two persons who formed her escort. The trio was composed of Lady Joan Challoner, and her husband and the Prince loris. " Is that Etoile ? " said the Lady Joan eagerly, as the carriage dashed past them, and she caught the name spoken by some bystanders. "Is that reely Etoile, now? Do tell," said a fashionable American of her acquaintance joining her, by name Mrs. Henry V. Clams. " They say so. I've never seen her myself," answered Lady Joan. " lo, and I, and Mr. Challoner have just been to call on her, but she was out. She has 1)rought me letters." " Eeely, now ! How interestin' ! " said the fashionable American. "Well, it's a very elegant turn-out, now, aren't it? My word ! " " You can get anything you like to pay for in Eome," said the Lady Joan with much contempt — she herself was on foot. " I must be civil to her. Voiglitel begs me to be so, and my father too; I must have her to dinner. Will you come, Mrs. Clams V " "Oh, thanks, now; that's reel kind!" said Mrs. Henry V. Clams. "I'm dyin' to see her, dyin", and I've got a bet in N'York about the way she wears her hair. But they do say she's so rude, you know; Cyrus C. Butterfield — as works the Saratoga press, you know — wrote to ask lier to send him every particular of her life from her baptism upwards, and would you believe it? — her secretary — a female, I believe — sent him back his own letter ! There ! " The Lady Joan laughed shortly. "Isliouid say Cyrus C. Butterfield's inquiries would bo particularly inconvenient to hr\ I wonder why on earth sho has come to Home! " " Is there anything .strange in coming to Eome?" sa-id the Prini-e loris in his soft lioinan tongue. " No, of course no ; wliat silly things you say ! Only, ol course she's got some motive. Shc'a with Corouis too."' FBIENDSniP. 15 " The loveliest woman in Europe," said Mr. Challoncr with solemnity and unction. " Wretched creature," said the Lady Joan. "My word, now, what's sht up to? " inquired Mrs. Henry V. Clams with lively interest. " Why, she's Duchess Sautorin, aren't she ? " " And the Duke is going to divorce her." " Mv ! You don't say so ! " " Santorin is very thankless : she has paid his debts again and again," murmured tlie Prince loris. " Oh, everybody that sings is an angel to you, lo ! " said Lady Joan, with some irritation. " If she's paid his debts, he's paid by the nose ! Everybody knows what these professional women always are. I dare say Etoile herself is no better." "My dear love," said Mr. Challoner with serious reproof, " surely you forget. Would your father ever ". " My 'father's an ass where a petticoat's concerned, and he'd swear it had all the virtues inside it if it had only taken his fancy. He makes a great fuss about her; Voightel, too, who believes in nobody, believes in her. It's so queer! I suppose she's only sharper than most people." " I never heard a word " began the Prince loris. " Stuff," said the Lady Joan, " there are heaps of stories- hideous stories. And there's no smoke without fire, that's certain. What day shall we ask her to dinner ?" " Well, now, I did read years ago, in our country, that she lived with a stoker as she'd taken a fancy to in the Lyons cars once," said Mrs. Henry V. Clams reflectively, searching into reces.ses of her memory. Mr. Challoner and 'the Prince loris laughed outright. "I never heard of the stoker, but I dare say there are things quite as fishy," said the Lady Joan. " What night shall we fix ? Will the sixth suit you, Mrs. Clams?" They sauntered on by the stone balustrades with the scattered groups, who were all making for the Corso, or walking under the Tempietto, Babuino-way, and who were all more or less talking of Etoile and of Dorotea Coronis. The groups seldom said anything that was amiable of cither, still less seldom anything that was true. But to be thus spukcn of at all constitutes what the world calls Fame, and ever since the days of Horace the world has wondered that the objects of it are not more grateful fov the distinction of detraction. " Wiiy do you spit ? " says the glowworm. ■ " Why do you .shine? " says the frog. 16 FMIENDtilUF, CHAPTER III. At the entrance of tlic Corso, Mr. Challouer recollected an appointment with a friend ; his wife and the Prince loris strolled on down the Corso together. It was the hour when the street was at its fullest and prettiest ; the irregular casements were half-lighted, half-dark ; the painted and gilded signs swung in the shadows; lamps hung above balconies draped with red ; in a church doorway white priests were chanting v/ith torches flickering ; at the corners stood great baskets of violets and camellias, rose and white ; knots of piffe- rari droned the wild, sad monotones of the music of the hills ; at a quick march a file of hersacjlieri, with their plumes streaming, were coming up the narrow way as up a mountain pass ; horses were trampling, drums were beating loud. " I wonder how you will like Etoile, lo; you always do like queer people ! " said the Lady Joan, as they moved down into that picturesque chaos and luminous mingling of the night and day. Her companion answered with gallant grace, " Whatever she is, she will be only for me — la terza incommoda ! " The Lady Joan laughed, well pleased, as she pushed her way through the lively and laughing crowds down to the Palazzo di Venezia. In an angle near the Eipresa dei Barberi, where two streets crossed one another in that populous and convenient locahty, there was a small house squeezed between two grim palaces, and known as the Casa Challoner to the society and the tradespeople of Eome. The Lady Joan climbed the stone stairs of the Casa Challoner with agility, and her companion followed with the accustomed matter-of-course air of a man who returns home. The house was dusky, there was only one lamp lighted in the anteroom, but she pushed her way safely into a little chamber heavy witii the smell of Turkish tobacco, and hung with Turkish stuffs, and fitted witii Turkish couches. On one of the divans the Prince loris cast himself a little wearily. The Lady Joan lit a cigarette, stuck it between her teeth, cast aside her sealskins, and began to look over a pile of letters. " I wish she hadn't come, bother her ! " she muttered. " Here's pages more eulogy from that old Tartar, Voightcl. She seems lo be perfection. I hate perfect pco[)le." The Prince loris stretched liimsclf out, and closed his eyes ; FRIENDSIIIIK i* his friend continued her examination of her correspondence. There was ten minutes' silence, only broken by the ticking of a Flemish chime-clock. At the end of ten minutes Lady Joan looked up impatiently. " Don't lie there, lo, doing nothing ; tell me what we've got for next week, that I may settle this dinner." He sighed, raised himself, and took out a set of tablets from his pocket. " You have the English bishop and bishopess to-morrow." " ' Bishopess ! ' Well, go on." " The Echeance soiree on the 3rd." "Can't miss that. Well?" " You take more English to the Opera on the 4th." "AprisV " Fifth, masked ball at the Greek Legation ? " " Sixth, Saturday ? " " Two teas — names English that I cannot pronounce." "We'll throw over the teas. Sixth will do. Get some cards, and fill 'em up." He obeyed and went to a little writing-table. "She's a sensational creature to have," continued his frictid ; " it's best to have her seen here first, before anybody else takes the cream off it. Whom shall we ask ? Clever people they must be, and people that go in for that sort of thing. Ask Lady Cardiff ; she won't mind if Etoile does startle the proprieties." He filled in the card obediently ; and she dictated some dozen other names to him, leaning over his shoulder as he wrote. "Now fill in Etoile's," she said. " I'll send a little note with it, too, to be civil. That old beast Voightel and papa make such a fuss " " I cannot put — Etoile on the card ? " " Of course not. You must put Comtes?e d'Avesnes. Did ever you hear such rubbish ! And pupa and Yoightel believe in her, title and all." " Why should they not ? " said the writer, as he slid the cards into their envcloi)es. The Lady Joan thrust her tongue in her cheek, and jumped a step of the hornpipe. " As much countess as the cat ! Now do draw that triptych that old Norwich wants so — make haste. We dine at seven, you know, because of the theatre. Send Ansclmo with the notes to- morrow morning. Etoile's you might leave to-night. She's on your way home. I'll write her note now." She crossed over to her bureau, and wrote a pretty epistle, which ended : " Pray kindly waive ceremony, and come to us on Saturday ; my dear father and so many of our common friends have spoken fco much of you that I cannot even think of you as a stranger, u 18 FBIENDSHIF. and my Inisbancl will be as glad as I to liave the honour of receiving Etoilo in our Eoman home." Then she wrote another which began : " Dearest Yoightel, — The hint of a wish of yours is a delight and a command to mc ; you know how I love and honour all genius, etc. etc." Then she scampered through half a dozen more letters with the pen of a ready writer ; jumped up and crossed over to where her friend sat sketching by the light of a reading-lamp, and ran her fingers through his soft dark hair. " How slow you are, lo ! You've only drawn one wing yet, and I've written fifteen letters." That night the Prince loris, after escorting the Lady Joan to and from the broad fun of the Valle Theatre walked through the white Pioman moonlight to his own little ancient palace in the street of the Piipctta, and pausing, as he went, at the Hotel do Eussie, left the Lady Joan's note there for the Comtcsso d'Avesnes. " Etoilc ; it is a pretty name," he thought to himself; " whoso star is she beside her own ? A great artist, all the world knows ; what else may she be, I wonder ? " Now, to wonder about any woman was a liberty and a luxury forbidden to him. The key of his very thoughts hung to the girdle of the Lady Joan as she moved, and lay under the pillow of the Lady Joan as she slept — or she believed it did, which satisQed her quite as well. FBIENDSHIK 19 CHAPTER IV. Who wasEtoilc? The world in general said it as often as the crowd on the P incio. They never attended to what she said herself. Nobody wants facts. Facts are hardly more amnsing than mathematics. Unless, indcctl, they are the kind of facts that you can only just whisper under your breath. And of this kind of facts — the only kind that can in any way be diverting to others — the life of the great Belgian artist remained conspicuously, absurdly, incon- sistently, and inconsiderately barren. The world supplied the deficiency. The world supplies you with history as our great tailor supplies us with dresses : he surveys our face and figure and selects for us what is appropriate. The world cuts out its gossip on the same judicious lines — whether you like what is given you is of no moment either to Worth or the world : you have got to wear it. Be thankful that you are Somebody. Neither Worth nor the world would trouble themselves to fit you if you were not. In the morning. Society that had been on the Pincio read in its papers that Etoile was in Eorae on account of her health. Physicians had advised perfect repose and a warmer winter than Paris or Brussels can offer. Society read the paragraph, and putting down the papers wondered what the paragraph was meant to cover. Something, of course. Heaps of things, probably. Health, indeed! What rubbish! Wasn't it a sculptor ? .... No ; money ! . . . . Ah, money ? . . . . Oli, indeed, much worse than that .'.... Exile was ordered, quite ordered from the Elysee. You understand? Everybody whispered, nodded, seemed to understand, because nolody did understand in the least ; and nobody, of course, could endure to look so ignorant. When a name is on the ]uiblic mouth the public nostril likes to smell a foulness in it. It likes to think that Byron committed incest; that Milton was a brute; that Piaflaclic's vices killed him ; that Pascal was matl ; that Lamartine lived and died a pauper, that Scipio took tlie treasury moneys ; that Thucydides and Phidias stole ; that Heloise and Ilypatia were but loose .women after all— so the gamut runs over twice a thousand years; and Piousseau is at heart the favourite of the world because he was such a beast, with all his talent. 20 FRIENDSHIP. When the world is driven to tears and praj'ers by Schiller it hugs itself to remember that ho could not write a line without the smell of rotten apples near, and that when he died there was not enough money in his desk to pay his burial. They make him smaller, closer, less divine : the apples and the pauper's coffin. Etoile kept no rotten apples by her, and the world sniffed in vain. Had she worn men's clothes, travelled with a married duko, and had a caprice for a drunken painter, no doubt the world would have better understood her genius. As it was it felt exasperated, and thought her ostentatious. After all, the innocence of a woman is no amusement what- ever to anybody. It only gives nothing to be said about her. In any case, whenever the woman is celebrated, the world will not put np with nothing. It cuts out the garment of her history to its own fancy. It is like the great tailor : it knows better than she does what she ought to wear. Etoile rose and strolled through the courts and galleries of the Vatican, unconscious, or inditierent, of the babble that went on concerning her. Society saw her servant and the big dog. Tsar, sitting out- side with the Swiss Guard. It was almost inclined to think there must be something wrong with a Cardinal. AVhat a nasty savage-looking creature that dog was ! At noon she went back to her hotel, found a few cards awaiting her, and at two o'clock was seen to be driving with tho Princess Vera von Ecgonwalde, an ambassadress and a wit. Princess von Eegonwalde, or Princess Vera, as her friends called her by her ]n'ctty girlish title, was an Austrian by birth, and the wife of a Minister of another great Power, not Austrian. She was one of the loveliest women that ever brightened a court ; she had a face like the Cenci, a walk like a young Diana's, a smile like a child's, a grace like a flower's, eyes like a fawn's, fancies like a poet's, and a form that Titian would have given to Venus. Slic had beautiful children, that clung round her in Correggio-likc groups; and she always looked like a picture, whether sliining in velvet and cloth of gold in a throno-rar!son outwai'd on the highroads to France or Prussia, the red lurid glow far away in the evening sky, which told where the iron- blasters of stern, fierce Liege were at work — tliese were wou'lers 24 FEIENDSHIP. enoTigh for a thousand years, or at least for a young child to think them so. Etoile thought so, and her childhood went by like a fairy tale told by a soft voice on a summer day. The house she lived in was very old, and had those charming conceits, those rich shadows, that depth of shade, that play of liglit, that variety, and that character which seem given to a dwelling-place in ages when men asked nothing better of their God than to live where their fathers had lived, and leave the old rooftree to their children's children. The tiling built yesterday, is a caravanserai : I lodge in it to-day, and you to-morrow; in an old house only can be made a home, where the blessings of the dead have rested and the memories of perfect faiths and lofty passions still abide. This house stood in a green old shady garden, and at the end of the garden the trees hung over the beautiful river. Etoile used to think that in just such a garden must have passed the long slumbers of the Sleeping Beauty. All happy childhood is like an April morning, but hers was beyond most children's haijpy by reason of its simplicity, its nnclouded peace, and the fair, gay, shapeless dreams that were with it always like light golden clouds about the sun. There were sadness and mystery near, but neither were allowed to touch her. She only knew peace and joy. If she had been told that she had droiiped from the stars on a mid- summer night she would have believed it quite easily : no healthy child's life will ever wonder whence it comes or whither it drifts. It is enough for it that it is. This is the one felicity that the innocence of infancy and the trance of passion sliare in common. TIic immediate moment is the heaven alike of the child and of the lover. She was very happy always in this, her green birth-country, by the river-side. liut she was never happier than when she went out of the sweet summer sunshine, from the murmur of tlic street fountain, and from the smell of the blossoming orchards into the quiet dusky den that was her study, and bent her curls over the ponderous tomes and the intricate exercises with which her tutors delighted in trying her patience and her powers. Out of doors she was the merest child, happy in all a child's pleasure of new-born days, and new-found berries, and new- made cakes, of the old swing in the sycamore, and the first swallow, that showed summer, and the ]iromise of a long day in the woods to bring homo violets, or any other of the many simple things which made her childhood beautiful. She knew the wliereabnuts of every rare wild flower; she knew every l)ird that liaunled the Avoods or the streams; s!io was friends with all the peasant folk, ami would find their stray FEIENDSHIP. 25 sheep for them aucl tamo the dogs they were afraid of; sho loved the wind and the wikl weather as she loved the heat that nncnrled the carnation-buds, and the still moonshine when the nightingales sang in the orchards; she was not dismayed if evening fell as she ran alone down a lone hill-side, or if sho boro down through the swift wild rain like a little white boat through a surging sea ; she had the love of nature of a German and the unconsciousness that she loved it of a Greek. " Tn es folk," said her old teacher to her because she laughed and cried for joy to see the first i)rimrose break out of the bleak brown earth, and kneeled down and kissed the flower, and told it how glad the birds would be, and would not to have saved her life have taken it away from its shelter of green leaves. " Tu esfoUe," said the old teacher — it is what the world always says to the poet. In the forests on the Meuso river there lived an old man who did not tell her she was foolish. Ho was a German, who had been a noted artist in his day, until paralysis of his right arm by some accident had put an end to his career and his hopes of fame. He was sad and alone ; was harsh of temper and taciturn ; but he took a fancy to this child who was always out of doors trying to learn the secrets of the clouds' movements and tho waters' hues, and he guided aright her passionate instincts towards the arts. By the time she was fifteen she had created things that tho old master thought more marvclloiis than he would confess to her. She painted all the day in the open air, on the hills and by the torrents ; she studied all the evenings and half the night. She was perfectly happy. There was another world, of course, where the hay-wagons went and the barges down the river ; but she wanted no other. Now and then there would come to the black-and-white house on tho river a person for whom the ways of the house were changed, and who was always whispered of in words of awe by the village people. He would kiss her carelessly, bid her do a problem or write a poem, stay a few days, and go. Sho was told that he was her father — the Count Raoul d'Avcsnes. In the old fighting days tho Counts d'Avesncs had been a fierce and mighty race, reigning in lofty regions of the wild Ardennes, Catholics always, and warriors rather than courtiers. Little by little, in strife and conspiracy, and internecine wars, they had lost their lands and greatness, until little save their traditions were left in modern times. This, their sole living representative, was a man of many ambitions, of no achieve- ment. A political gamester, a political conspirator, his life was spent in the treacherous seas of political intrigue, and he at the last perished in their whirlpool. Little was known of him — by his daughter almost nothing. He had broken his wife's heart and spent her money. His own death was mysterious, like his life. lie passed away and made no sign. 26 FlilENDSIIIP. There is so much mystery in this world, only people who lead humdrum lives will not believe it. It is a great misfortune to bo born to a romantic history. The humdrum always think that you are lying. In real truth romance is common in life, commoner, perhaps, than the com- monplace. But the commonplace always looks more natural. In nature there are millions of gorgeous hues to a scarcity of neutral tints; yet the pictures that arc painted in sombre semi-tones and have no one positive colour in them are always pronounced the nearest to nature. When a painter sets his palette, he dares not approach the gold of the sunset and dawn or the flame of the pomegranate and poppy. Etoile's short story had this gold and red in it, and so no one believed in it any more than they do in the life-likeness of Turners Hes- perides. She, a happy and thoughtful child, lived in the little Ardennes village with her mother's mother, and her two old servants, and knew nothing of all this heritage of wonder and of woo. Occasionally the wonderful person who was called her father came and brought a wonderful breath of the outer air with him. That was all she knew. One day his shadow passed for the last time up the sunny street between the aisles of aspen and was seen no more there ever after, and his letters ceased, and silence fell upon his fate ; and in time they came to know that he was dead and she was the last that lived of the once famous race of the Counts d'Avesnes. It scarcely seemed strange to her — she had always known so little. He had been a black bead in the golden rosary of her happy childhood ; she barely missed it when it dropped. In after-years people would never believe that Etoile, beyond the fact of the patrician name she bore, had known so little ; they forgot how completely natural and matter of course the strangest circumstances seem to one who has been rocked in them, as it were, in a cradle from birth upward. Her father had conic and gone, come and gone, as comets do. Ho ceased to come ; it did not seem f^trange. Sho studied in the big books, and strayed about in the chestnut woods and orchards, and lived in her own fancies more than in anything around her. Vague desires would ofttinies touch her, as sho used to stand on the brow of the reajied fields, and watch the sun go down, red and beautiful against the dusky masses of the far-off woods. But tlicy were desires whose wings were still folded ; like those of ficdgliiig birds, that flutter a little way through the green leaves, and then arc frightened at their dreams of flight. For the rest, her grandmother and the old servants took all FRIENDSHIP. 27 care of things bodily and temporal. Etoile was free to think and dream and study. The treasures of scholarship are sweet to all who open them. But they are perhaps sweetest of all to a girl that has been led both by habit and by nature to seek them. The soul of a girl whilst passions sleep, desires are unknown, and self-consciousness lies unawakencd, can lose itself in the impersonal as no male student can. The mightiness and beauty of past ages become wonderful and all-sufficient to it, as they can never do to a youth beset by the stinging fires of impending manhood. The very element of faith and of imagination, here- after its weakness, becomes the strength of the girl-scholar. The very abandonment of self, which later on will fling her to Sappho's death, or mure her in the cell of Heloise, will make her find a cloudless and all-absorbing happiness in the meditations of great minds, in the myths of heroic ages, in the delicate intricacies of language, and in the immeasurable majesties of thought. The evil inseparable from all knowledge will pass by her unfelt ; the greatness only attainable by knowledge will lend her perfect and abiding joys. Whilst they were only scholars be sure that Sappho and Heloise were calmer and more glad than any other women ; it was when they looked up from the written page to the human face that their woes surpassed all others'— because beyond all others' was their loss. A year after the tidings of the Comte d'Avesnes' death had come to the Ardennes, her grandmother, reflecting that at her death the child would be solitary, with a slender patrimony and a name whose past nobility was of no present use, resolved to sacrifice her own peace and move to a great city. They went to Paris, leaving the green Mouse w^aters and those bright woodland villages that lie out of the beaten track and are so still and fresh and charming. Etoile sobbed bitterly : yet she was full of ecstatic wonder and hope. She forgot that thousands have had such hope before her, and had only perished miserably in the vast press of life. If youth did not thus forget, maturity would have no fame to record. They made their home in a nook of old Paris within sight of the trees of the Luxembourg. A tumult of great ideas and vague ambitions was in the mind of the child who had studied moro than many men, and had the poetry of many nations all alivo witliin her. In the city of pleasure Etoile uninterruptedly pursued both art and study. Friends they had but few ; those few were of the proud impoverished tamilies of a nobility that had nothing left except its traditions of honour; and such as these thought the pursuit of art a degradation. One day Etoile, however, made a friend of her own. Chances 28 FRIENDSHIP. broiiglit lier across tlio path of an old man whose name was very glorious to her : a great master whose genius had been nurtured amidst the mighty storms of the First Empire. The old man looked long in silence at her, the harsh lines of his face softening and changing; then he turned to her and uncovered his white head. " My sun has long set," he said ; " I rejoice to see yours rise." The word of David Istrion was still a law in Paris and all the worlds of art. He kept her secret and sent her first picture to the Salon himself. " One of my pupils," was all he would say when questioned as to the painter. The picture was only the study of a gleaner returning by sunset over naked fields ; but it had an instant and xuiques- tioned success. It was followed by greater and stronger works signed " Etoile." The pictures were' for some few years always thought to be the creations of a man, were treated as such ; and when the rumour was first current that the painter was a woman— a girl — the great world of Paris laughed aloud in derision and utter disbelief. Their force, their depth of tone, their anatomical accuracy, and above all their profound melancholy, made it impossible — • — so they said. Nevertheless the world, which has lived to see many impossible things pass into the limbo of incontestable facts, lived to see this pass also. " It is time they should know the truth," said David Istrion, and told it, Etoile regretted that it should be told : to the pure ambitious of the true artist creation is paradise, but the praise of the crowd seems profanity. But David Istrion had not had his own way unresisted for two thirds of a ceutary to consider sixch a trifle as any one's personal desires. lie made the truth known; and witliin a year or two, sho sprang at once into the fierce light that beats upon a throne — the contested and bitterly begrudged throne of genius. David Istrion lived long enough to sec lier triumphs — not long enough to protect her from the dark shadows that slink in the path of all triumphs. Etoile became a name on the tongues of all Paris, and so on all the tongues of the world. She had a fame as great and as pure as is i)ossible in tliis ago, when fame is too often awarded by the mere screams of the vulgar. To her house, in the Paris winters, came many of the greatest men of her time. Sho influenced thciu much more than tliey influenced her. She had a life that was brilliant and rich in all fruits of the intellect. As recreations of her leisure she wrote a comedy iu veric FBIENDSniP. 29 whicli had a tuuniltuons success on a groat stage, and some poems were printed in great reviews, all signed " Etoile." " Sho has all the talents," said the world angrily. If she had only had all tlie vices too the world would not, perhaps, have minded so mnch. Unfortunately for her reputation, no one could find out that she had as much as one vice. Few women could boast of being her friend, but no man could boast of being her lover. Ten years now had gone by since she left the Meuse river ; they had been ten years of brilliancy if not of happiness. Genius is seldom happy — except in its dreams or the first hours of its love. With a woman, the vulgarity that lies in pubhc adulation is apt to nauseate ; at least if she be so little of a woman that she is not vain, and so much of one that she cares for privacy. For the fame of our age is not glory but notoriety ; and notoriety is to a woman like the bull to Pasiphae — whilst it caresses it crushes. Fame brought Etoile its sweet and bitter fruits together. " That is Etoile," said every one when she passed by. People who creep by in obscurity think this notice from mankind must be paradise. All at once she gi-ew tired of the brilliant success that sur- rounded her; it seemed tame, stupid, a twice-told tale. "Oh! old world, have you nothing better?" she said thanklessly to the world which had been too prodigal of its laurels to her. She lost zest in it all. A cough settled on her lungs. When her physicians bade her rest and go to Italy she was glad. They said she had caught cold from working in clay. Sho had had that desire to create something excellent in sculpture which comes to most true painters ; but her malady was not due to cold or clay ; it was rather the fatal revenge entailed on any mortal who has exiled the passions and the affections, and who will sicken for them unconsciously ; the most splendid structure of the intellect will always have this danger at its base. 30 FBIEl^LSHir. CHAPTER V. On the night when the Prince loris took the little three-cornered note of his friend to the Comtesse d'Avesnes the note was carried upstairs to a large salon on the first floor, of which the windows were standing open, giving to view the masses of trees on the Pincio and the Medici gardens and tlie brilliant stars of a winter's night. The naked and tawdry splendour of an hotel apartment was redeemed by masses of flowers that the present occupants of it had brought there — pale violets, snowy camellias, and early narcissi, born under glass, and showing their tender heads coyly, as if cold. Against one of the open casements leaned Etoile, wrapped in her furs — for the night was chilly— looking at the stars of Orion, which had arisen above the dark lines of the ilex trees, and listening to the fall of the fountain water in the square below. She was fair of skin, and in form slender and snp}i]e, from living much out of doors and taking much exercise in the saddle and on foot ; she had bright-hued hair that was lifted a little from her forehead, and eyes like the eyes of the boyish portrait of Shelley; her velvet skirts fell to her feet in the simple undu- lating folds that Leonardo da Yinci loved to draw. People were vaguely disappointed when they saw her ; they would have liked her better in a man's coat, with her hair cut short, and generally odd and untidy-looking. An artist that you miglit by accident mistake for a duchess is annoying. "What are you thinking of, Etoile?" said her companion, who was that wonderfully beautiful woman, brilliant as a pome- granate flower or a sapphire, who was at once Dorotea Corouis and the wife of the Due dc Santorin. " I believe I was thinking of Actea." From the hotel she could see the dark masses of the trees on the Pincio, and the round dome of the church raised to lay the unholy spirit of Nero to rest. "Poor Actea! The slave-girl redeems the ago she lived in " " Rich Actea ! happy Actea ! " said Dorotea Corouis, with a sigh. " Iler beast was god to her. She never saw him as ho was. No doubt she thought him, too, a great artist and a perfect poet. Love is blind." " Not the highest love, surely." " Wliat do you know about it? Yon love nothing but vour FRIENDSHIP. 31 " That is Voiglitel's complaint." " VoiKhtel is quite right. Why have you never cared for any man, Etoile ? " " Cared ? IMcn are so admirable as friends ; when they speak of warmer things than friendship they weary or they revolt mo ; I lose my regard for them and my patience with them. It is hard to give a reason for these things." " You are fortunate to be so cold." " Is it coldness ? And is it fortunate ? I am not so certain." " Whatever it is, it makes you many foes. You seem to say to men, 'You are too stupid to succeed,' and to women, 'I am stronger than you.' " " I do not mean to say anything of the kind. It is true most people tire me. There is so little profundity in them, and one reads them so soon. A new acquaintance is like a new novel : you open it with expectation, but what you find there seldom makes you care to take it off the shelf a second time." " I am glad I am an old friend." Etoile smiled. " Oh ! old friends arc our Homers and Horaces, our Shakc- speares and Molieres : we cannot read them too often, and we find something in them to suit all our moods. Why will you go away from mc, dear Dorotea ? " The Duchessc Santorin laughed a little wearily. " My dear ! when M. le Due must have two hundred thousand francs as his New Year's etrmncs I You forget I am not my own mistress, and the Petersburg engagement was signed this time last year." " I would give him no more. Surely your marriage contract protects you a little ? " " Entirely. But only so can I purchase his absence. He has outraged mc in every kind of way, but he has not lost his legal riglits. He never struck me before witnesses ; and though lie had mistresses all over Eurojie he did not bring one under the same roof with mc. You see he is blameless." Tlie lovely dark face of the great Spanish singer grew weary and full of scorn; she rose and walked to and fro the room restlessly. " I wish you were not going to Eussia," said her friend, in a low tone, leaving ilie open window. Tlio Duchessc Santorin looked up quickly and paused in her rapid and passionate walk. '•■ You think I shall meet Fedor. You mistake. He has left the Imperial Guard and had himself ordered to the Caucasus by my wish. He is tliere, and he will be there all winter." " But who will believe that ? " " It docs not matter what is believed. It matters what is." "To ourselves and the God wc hope for — yes." 32 FRIENDSHIP. " And what else matters? When we are 'in the light that beats npon a throne ' we are at once condemned nnheard — for Envy and Mediocrity sit on the judgment-seat, and whenever did they wait for truth ? " In brave old Cordova, twenty years before, a tiny child with some gitafia blood in her had danced the 7:aronrja with twinkling feet whenever a castanet clicked or a tambourine sounded— a child so beautiful that when her father, a picador, lay dying in the sand of the bull-ring he kissed her on the eyes and said, " Though I go where I shall see the faces of the children of God, there will be no face so fair amongst them as my Dorotea's." She was only five years old then, but she never afterwards forgot the circle of sand, the stream of blood, the sea of faces, the great dead bull, the dying man whose last breath was a kiss to her. His brethren of the tribe, unasked, took the burden of her, shared between them the cost of her small wants, and housed her safely with good women, and even had her well taught by a priest ; or taught, at least, as much as it is ever thought a Spanish girl can want to know apart from her lore of fan and rosary. The little Dorotea danced in evevj ixitio where the guitar was sound- ing, and sang in every church where the litanies were chaunting — a wild, gay, most lovely child ; proud, too— so proud that the Cordovans would say to one another that perhaps the fables were true which had given to the picador the blood of an old kingly stock. When she was growing a little out of childhood some one travelling through Cordova chanced to sec and hear her sing. The traveller was an oldJew whose errand in life was to find great singers for great theatres. He was an honest man and virtuous, though he loved money. He persuaded her protectors to sell him the little Dorotea. He took her away with him, and dealt gently with her, training her wonderful powers aright, and letting her know and hear nothing to lier hurt. At sixteen she Hiing in Italy, at seventeen in Paris. She had one of the purest voices that had been ever heard ujiou the stage, and her mar- vellous beauty and brilliancy made lier fume even more than her voice. Dorotea Coronis was one of the wonders of the world. Slie had reached as great heights of perfection as any singer can, and every note that fell from her lovely lips brought a shower of gold. Amongst her countless lovers came the Due dcSantorin, P<(ir lie France, with his heart and his conronne in his liand, to lay at licr feet. For it was well known that, to bo won, she must lio wooed, with due honour. After some reluctance and long refusal she became his wife. His ])assion for herself wa.s hot but brief; liis passion for her golden harvests lasted. The pride in her which the jieople of Cordova had seen in the FBIENDSHIP. 33 baby dancing the zaronga in their courts and gardens inade the dignit}' and ancientness of his name allure her. She had no love for him, but neither had she any dislike. Those about her urged and persuaded her. " I do not care for you, but you never shall be ashamed of me," she said to him. He swore gratitude and devotion. He did not keep his word, but she kept hers. She had now been Duchesse de Santoiyn for some years, singing in all the cities of Europe to supply his demands, and with a right to a tahouret at the Court of France whenever Court of France there might be. The contrast sometimes made her laugh as she had used to laugh above her tambourine in the 2iatios of old Cordova, only not with the same mirth. For five years they had been virtually separated, though still nominally of good accord. She had kept her word to him — she had been faithful. But of course the world did not think so. Men were in love with her wherever her beautiful gazelle-like eyes rested, wherever her pure lark-like voice penetrated. The world knew very well that some of these — oh, yes, of coui'se — and the world was inclined to pity the Due de Santorin. " She was a gitana, you know, a gipsy ; a little bare-legged, brazen thing, telling fortunes and rolling in the mud," said the world feminine, jealous of that sovereign grace and that incom- parable art which Heaven had given to Dorotea Coronis. Meanwhile there were many who loved and honoured her, and amongst them was Etoile. They had become friends at the house of a famous Minister one night in Paris, after a representation of the " Flauto Magico," and their friendship had endured. "But the Caucasus," said Etoile this evening, "the Caucasvis is not so very far that men cannot come back from it. Are you sure that Count Souroff " " Will do what I wish him ? Yes." " No ; I meant rather you of your own strength. When you are in his own country, when you know him amidst a half-savage people, in sickness and peril, wounded even, perhaps ; — can you be sure that you will not yourself recall him ? " " Yes, I am sure. Because my resolve is for his sake, not my own. Listen, Etoile." She paused in her feverish movements to and fro the great chamber, and stood before her friend. " A woman who thinks for herself is weak, but the woman who thinks for another is strong. I will not let Fedor Souroff be my lover because I adore him with all my heart, all my soul, all my life. I am a Spanish woman if I am anything ; 1 have fire, not water, in my veins; I have no duties tov/ards my husband, because he has insulted me, robbed me, outraged me, beaten me, D 84: FRIENDSHIP. aud told me a hundred times a year that I am only his bank, which he honours only too much by plunging his hand into it to seize its gold ; only his mechanical nightingale, of which he keeps the key, with the title to wind it up and set it singing when he wills ; or break it if it fail to sing. And yet — yet I "will not be what they say I am to the man whom I worship, and who thinks holy the very stones or sand that feel my feet, and gives to me the noblest, tenderest, most loyal love that was ever given to a woman, for her joy and pain. I will not — for his sake " "For his?" " For his. You have seen him so little, else you would know why without asking. In the first place, Santorin would shoot him dead. Santorin is base, but not so base as to sink to the cocu content of the modern world; — and Fedor would let Santorin shoot him. That would be what he would call only just. But this is the least thing. Fedor would gladly die so to purchase one hour with me. What would be far worse for him would be to live. What man is more wretched on earth than the bond slave of another man's wife. Fedor is young; he has a great name ; he comes of a great family, who adore him ; he is a fearless and devoted soldier. I will not riiin him — I will not. He would break his career for me ; he would incur exile, confiscation, even the shame of a deserter for me; yes, and adore me the more because I. doomed him to them. I will not take his sacrifice. My love, my love ! — he is but mortal. He will not love for ever thus; not when love is but another name for disappointment. Men are not hke us. In time he will forgi ;- me ; he will be free ; he will be happy." She ceased suddenly ; a convulsion of violent weeping passed through her ; she threw herself prostrate on a couch and buried her beautiful head in her hands. Etoile looked at her with tears in her own eyes ; she forbore to speak ; she knew that all the passionate, pioud, and vehement nature of Dorotea Coronis was centred in this great passion, whose temptations it yet had strength to resist. The windows were open and the stars shone in the dark ; the sound of the fountains below came on the silence with the dull rumbling of the night traffic of Home ; the air was sweet and heavy with the smell of forced heliotrope with which they had filled a large bowl on a marble table. "To love like that!" thought Etoile. "It must be worth even all that pain." And for tlic first time in her life she felt solitary. At that moment the servant brought her the note from the Casa Clialloncr and a bouquet of white flowers, lilies of the valley and narcissi, which the Prince loris had purchased in the flower- shop of the Via Condotti as he passed in the moonlight, and sent FBIENDSIIIP. 35 tip T\ith his own card, on one of those unthinking impulses which sometimes imperilled all his prudence. " What sweet lilies ! " said Etoile, and forsook the stars for them, bending her face over their fragrance. Flowers were her earliest loves, and had never been displaced in her affections. Then she opened the Lady Joan's letter. A few evenings before, in Paris, Voightel, shrewdest, keenest., and most merciless of wits and men, had been with her to bid her farewell. " Go and see Archie's daughter, since he wishes it; go and see my Lady Joan," had said the great Voightel— traveller, philo- logist, past- master in all sciences and all tongues, standing on her hearth, and glowering through his green spectacles, and his grizzled beard, till he looked like a magnified and cynical tom- cat. " I have often talked to Joan of you. What is she like ? Not a whit like Archie, but a handsome woman, and a clever woman in her way, which is not your way. Merimee calls her his 2'etroJeuse. It is inexact. Petrohuses burn with no idea of ultimate booty: she would never waste her oil so. Cleopatra crossed with Dame du Comptoir were nearer, I think. I admire her very much. I always know she is lying, and yet I am always pleased when she lies to please me. How contemptible! But all men are weak. I am inclined to respect women who live every hour of their lives. She does. You do not. You dream too much ever to live very vividly, unless you ever fall in love. I do so wish you would. It would make you so many friends. Men dislike a woman who will not be wooed. Believe that, my disdainful Etoile, who will be wooed by nobody. When a woman is 'kind' to various men, each favoured mortal is bound, in honour, to arm cap-a-2)ie and swear she never was ' kind ' to anybody. Whereas, when she repulses and rebuffs them all round as you do, her lovers become her enemies, and will be more than human if they do not take her character away, out of the sincerity of their conviction that somebody must have been beforehand with them. Seasoning by analogy, I have very little doubt that Faustina was a wife of remarkable purity, and St. Agnes and Agatha very little better than they should have been. Go and see our dear Joan. She is a faggot of contradictions ; extra- ordinarily ignorant, but naturally intelligent; audacious, yet timid ; a bully, but a coward ; full of hot passions, but with cold fits of prudence. Had she your talent the world would have heard of her. As it is, she only enjoys herself. Perhaps tho better part. Fame is a cone of smoke. Enjoyment is a loaf of sugar. I am not sure what she is doing in liome, but I am quite sure she is in mischief, and quite sure she is making money. When the moon on the Forum has filled your brain with schivdrmerei, go and see Joan. She is an admirable tonic for all poets. She will be the Prose of Home for you. You will want prose there." 36 FBIENDSHIP. CHAPTEE VI. At eight o'clock on the sixth of December, Etoile, Comtesse d'Avesiies, went up the many stairs of the Casa Challoner, to see for the first time the woman who was to be to her the Prose of Eome. She herself was tired, and had little colour; she wore no jewels and had only a knot of pale yellow tea-roses at her breast ; her dress trailed softly, it was made up of black Chantilly laces and pale maize hues, and the deftest hands of Paris had cast the easy and simple grace of it together. She went carelessly, indifferently, wondering if she should like these people as much as she liked Lord Archie ; went to her fate as every one does, unwitting that in the commonplace passage of the hours Destiny was striking. As she entered the ante-room, and laid aside her furs, she heard a voice singing a ritornello of the Eoman populace, to the deep dulcet chords of a mandoline. As her name was announced the voice ceased, and from between two curtains of Oriental silk, that shaded the inner doorway, there advanced, with outstretched hands, the singer, clad in black velvet, with a little collar of diamond stars at her throat, which sparkled as she moved. She had a classic head, fitly shaped for a bust of Athene, an Egyptian profile, brilliant eyes, green by day, black by night, thick eyebrows, and a cordial smile, that showed very white and even teeth. " How charmed I am ! At last we meet ! How many many times I have tried to see you in Paris and Brussels ! " cried the Lady Joan, with eager welcome, and with honest warmth. "Your father's daughter can be nothing but my friend," answered her new acquaintance, with sincerity. Lady Joan, her guitar still in one hand, led her guest with animated and eager compliment to the hearth ; pushed a low chair nearer the wood fire, said some pretty words of her own father, and of their dear old Voightel, asked after other friends they had in common, spoke of the weather, and tlicn, as hy a mere careless after-thought, or accident, turned suddenly and presented a person who had all the while been standing close by, erect, calm, and unnoticed, like a lord in waiting beside a throne. "Prince loris— the Comtesse d'Avesncs. loris is a great friend of my husband's, his dearest friend, indeed. Oh, of course, ho has heard of you. ■\Vho has not ? Only, of course, FRIENDSHIP. 37 too, he knows you best as Etoile. We all do that. It is such a charming name ! " The Prince loris looked like a picture, and bowed like a courtier, and, leaning his arm on the mantelshelf, began to speak graceful nothings, in his melodious voice. At that monitnt there entered, a little hurriedly, like an actor not on the stage in time for his cue, the gentleman with the Scotch face and the German manner, whom Lady Joan, with a little frown on her darkling brows, presented as Mr. Challoner. 'Mx. Challoner, the excellence of whoso countenance was its unalterability under all circumstances whatever, stared through his eye-glass, bent himself stiffly, and in solemn phrase assured his guest of the supreme honour that he felt she had done to his threshold. Immediately upon him there followed another of his guests, Mrs. Henry. V. Clams, gorgeous in a gown that imprisoned her so tightly that it only permitted of the garb of a circus rider underneath it, and weighty with a perfect Golconda of rubies. " No stones on her ! — my word, and she must have got lots ! " reflected Mrs. Henry V. Clams, staring at the tea-roses of Etoile, iind settling in her own mind that artists were the most disap- pointin' people to look at, except princes, that ever she saw. She was accompanied by the Marquis de Fontebranda, a Piedmontese about the Court, a fair, graceful, and good-looking man, who had trained her in the way she should go, and still suffered many things from her love of colours and her need of dictionaries. Her husband had been invited, of course, but it was understood everywhere that he never came anywhere ; he had always a cold, or letters in from N'York. Fontebranda had trained him as well. The other guests arrived— an English Chief Justice, famous for his wit ; a lady known to all Europe as the Marchioness of Cardiff, some Italians, some Eussians ; fuially, a mature pet of the Lady Joan's, a white-haired and cosmopolitan Englishman, by name Silverly Bell, who was a most popular person at all the English tea-parties of the Continent, for nobody sugared your tea more prettily, or told you nastier stories of your neighbours more sweetly. Dinner announced, Fontebranda was allotted to Etoile, Mr. Challoner offered his arm to Lady Cardiff, and the hostess went in with Mr. Challoner's dearest friend. " What do you think of her, lo ? " she murmured in his ear. " Pas grand' choice I " he murmured back indifferently, with a little shrug of his shoulders. The Lady Joan's grey-green eyes sparkled happily. She believed him. The dinner was well appointed, quiet, and unpretentious ; the dishes were not too numerous, and were all good; the 38 FRIENDSHIP. flowers were in old Faenza bowls ; the china was old white and gold Ginori, the glass Venetian, the fruit superb. All went well, and there was only one discord, the vjice of Mrs. Henry V. Clams, but that is a kind of discord which in the present construction of society is to be heard everywhere, from mountain-tops to throne-rooms. Mrs. Hem-y V. Clams thought again and again what " disap- pointin' people " artists were. Etoile chanced to say very little. Sometimes in society she was very silent, sometimes very eloquent. Minds like hers resemble running brooks : they reflect what they pass through ; they are still or sparkling, dark or radiant, according as they flow over sand or moss, under black cloud or sunny sky : the brook is always the same ; it is what it mirrors that varies. Mrs. Henry V. Clams — who herself was quite independent of circumstances or surroundings, and whose torrents of questions and bubbles of curiosity and chatter never ceased on any occa- sion, and never had been known to cease, except once at a Drawing-room in London, and once at a total eclipse of the sun, on both of which occasions she had owned to being " that cowed she was right down mum " — stared at Etoile across the tabic, and said to her next neighbour that " sure??/ there was nothing like clever people for being daft." Her neighbour being the English Chief Justice, a very clever and merry person himself, assented heartily to the proposition, but begged her to reflect. " My dear lady, if talent weren't a little daft as you say, how on earth would the great majority ever be got to stand it at all ? Consider the enormous utility of genius looking now and then like a fool." Mrs. Henry V. Clams stuffed her mouth with a houchee, and smiled vaguely. She did not understand, and Fontebranda was too far off to be telegraphed to for explanations. " If that be Etoile, why don't she talk and amuse us ? " mused meanwhile, like Mrs. Henry V. Clams, a very different person, the Marchioness of Cardiff, whose heart and soul had been bequeathed to her unaltered from an ancestress of the days of Louis XIV., and who never could see why artists wanted Christian burial, or were asked to dinner, or any of that sort of thing. "Is that really Etoile, did you say? the Etoile, you know?" she asked of her host. " Yes, yes," assented Mr. Challoner, not being certain whether ho ought to be very triumi)liant over his giiest, or somewhat ashamed of her. " Dear Lord Archie is fund of her — begged us to do what wo could — you know his good nature — my wife inherits it. Dear Lady Cardiff, do try these larded quails." " She looks a much better bred one than yon do, my dear FRIENDSHIP. 39 sir," thought her ladyship, withdrawing her eyeglass from Etoile to the quails. " You said you liked to meet celebrities — that it amused you/* said her host with an accent of apology in his voice. " Of course, of her great genius there cau be no question." " Of course, of course ! and I am charmed," said her ladyship, occupied with her first mouthful of a larded quail. " Tell her to come to my Mondays. I'll tell her myself after dimier. She's very well dressed. Is it Worth ? " " Most likely ; she is said to be extravagant." "I am sure she has a right to be; how nice it must betO' make your own money, and spend it, and never be bothered with trustees ! Oh yes, Worth, beyond any doubt. The way he ties a bow one never can mistake. And just that tea-rose too — very pretty, very pretty indeed. What different things he gives people he likes, to what he will do for mere millionaires like our dear Mrs. Henry V. Clams." Etoile, unconscious of the criticism, ruffled the tea-roses amongst her old lace, divided her few words between Fonte- branda and a Count Serge Eoublezoff who sat on the other side of her, looked often at her hostess, whose bright eyes flashed back honest kindly smiles to hers, and, without knowing very well why she did so, watched the man whom Lady Joan had installed in the seat of honour. He was very tall and slender, with that look of distinction which, though not always attendant on a great race, is never found outside it; he had high delicate features, and an oval beardless face, a soft olive skin, thoughtful pensive brows, and those eyes which at once allure and command women ; he had a beautiful voice, infinite grace and softness of manner, and in aspect might have stepped down off any canvas of Velasquez or Vandyke. Etoile noticed that he was scrupulously alive to every want of the Lady Joan's ; he bowed his head in resigned silence whenever she contradicted him, which she did twice in every five minutes; he called her Madame with the strictest ceremony, and addressed Mr. Challoner across the length of the table as " mon cher," with more fiuendly effusion than seemed needful, on more occasions than were natural. Occasionally he looked across at Etoile herself. His eyes were thoughtful, dreamy, when he chose, absolutely unrevealing; they had the drooped languid amorous lids and the long dark lashes of his country. Wherever his eyes lighted. Lady Joan's followed and lighted too. As he looked he was thinking, as long afterwards he told Etoile— " That woman is half a saint and half a muse, " She has never loved. " She is full of idealities. 40 FRIENDSHIP. " She has strong passions, but they sleep. " Her dreams are the enemies of men. " She does not care for the world. " She has been used to her own way, and she has treated all men with indifference; some few with friendship; none with tenderness. " She seems cold ; but I think she is only uninterested. " She is all mind. Her senses have never stirred. She does not belong to oui* world. " She has thoughts that go far away from us. " She has not enough frivolity to enjoy her own generation. " She has lovely eyes : they say so much without knowing that they say anything. " She has beautiful hands. " She is dressed perfectly. " I shall detest her. " Or I shall adore her. " Which of the two ? I do not know. " Perhaps both." So he thought of Etoile, watching her across the table whilst he talked with polite attention to his hostess, who snapped him short with her curt, sharp, bright humour, and seldom allowed him to finish a sentence. He looked very much like a grave slender deerhound held down under a keeper's leash. There was pride in his eyes and high spirit on his aquiline features, but at the table of the Challoners he was subdued and silent; or at other moments over-assiduous to please. Etoile noticed this ; and wondered what relation he bore to them. She gathered from what was said by him and to him that ho was a noble of Eome ; a courtier ; and the owner of an estate to which they constantly referred as Fiordelisa, but which seemed by some inexplicable arrangement to be the Lady Joan's property also. " What beautiful grapes ! " the Chief Justice chanced to say, " finest where all are fine. They arc your own growth ? " The Lady Joan nodded assent. " Yes ; they're all off my vines — down at Fiordelisa." " You like grapes, Madame '? " said loris to Etoile, who was opposite him. "Oh! you must allow me to send you some — from Fiordelisa." "What is Fiordelisa?" thought Etoile. She did not know that, although Fiordelisa was the property of loris, loris was still more absolutely the property of the Lady Joan. "What a pretty name Fiordelisa!" she hazarded as she thanked liim. Lady Joan interrupted his reply. " Yes; it was a beastly old barrack when we went in it : but FBIENDSEIP. 41 we have done no end to improve it inside and out," said the hostess, cracking a walnut. Etoilc fancied that the face of the Eoman Prince grew a shade paler still, as with anger, but she thought it might be only her fancy; all artists are fanciful. He drew a flower out of one of the bowls near him, and busied himself fastening it into his buttonhole. Dinner over, they sauntered into one of the three or four little salons of the house ; a little room with Smyrna carpets and comfortable couches, and a great many pictures, and a great deal of china. Here the Lady Joan opened her cigar-case, threw herself back at ease, and expressed her hope that everybody smoked. Everybody did, except Etoile. " Ah ! Comtesse, you are right and wise not to do so," said the Prince loris, as he crossed over to her. " Smoking has no grace upon a woman's lips, and little sense on ours." The Lady Joan hastily crossed over also, her cigar in her hand. " What things you do say, lo," she muttered, crossly. " You know Lady Cardiff smokes hke a steam-engine. How stupid you were at dinner, too ! Go and amuse the Chief Justice ; you see jVIr. Challoner's boring him to death." He went obedient, bxit not resigned, to address the Chief Justice, with all the warm and charming courtesy of his habitual manner,which, en vrai Italien, was never warmer or more charming than when he was somewhat annoyed and very much wearied. The Lady Joan presented Lady Cardiff to the Comtesse d'Avesnes, and, content with the diversion she had effected, repaid herself with joining her male guests, and receiving a person who just then entered, and whom she saluted delightedly as her " very dear old Mimo ! " The very dear old Mimo — otherwise Count Burletta — was a very shrewd person, of some fifty years old, fat and fair, smiling and serene. Fate had given him a meagre purse and a keen eye ; he rambled about Eonie, in and out all sorts of odd places, and about three o'clock might be found at home any day, surrounded with the fruits of his rambles, ivories, enamels, tarsia work, china, cloisonne, lac, anything and everything that garrets and palaces, cellars and convents, could be pursuaded to render ; in society he was a gentleman, and could lie like one ; in his shop he was honest— unless he met with a fool : fools, he thought, were sent by the saints as food was sent by Elijah's ravens ; he was a very good Catholic. The very dear old j\Iimo, dropping now down on the divan beside her, murmured to her many things in a low tone, unheard by ears profane, and then drew out her guitar from under a pile of music. 42 FEIENDSHIP. " lo ! " called the Lady Joan ; " where's that last song of the Trastcvere yoii Tvrote down for me ? — the one we heard the girl sing as we came homo from the Valle the other night? " loris left the Cliief Justice and searched for the song. Being found, the Lady Joan would not sing it — she sang something else ; the riband of her old Spanish guitar hanging over her shoulder ; her sweejiing velvet and her shining stars making a fine study for a joainter ; her handsome teeth gleaming and her eyes flashing up to her listeners with an amorous glitter- ing gaze that burned its way straight up to the face of loris, who leaned towards her and beat the time softly with his hand, and gave back the answering glance that it was his due and his duty to give. But " That man is only feigning ; why does he have to feign ? " thought the Countess d'Avesnes, and looked to see if Mr. Challoner observed what she did. Mr. Challoner was too well drilled by thirteen years of wedded life ever to observe anything ; Mr. Challoner at the other end of the room discussed political news with the Chief Justice in an imdertone, so as not to disturb his M'ife's singing. He never disturbed his wife ; he was the marital model of the nineteenth century. There are many like him ; but not perhaps many quite so perfect. His wife's singing was agreeable, though she sang out of time and her accent was harsh ; still she had a rich voice naturally, and could give the songs of the populace, and the erotic lays of the streets and fields, with a force and a brio hardly to be surpassed by the Eomans themselves. It was not pure execution nor perfect phrasing, and it used to set the teeth of real musicians on edge, but there was something contagious and intoxicating in it as she struck deep vibrations from the chords and poured from her glances a passionate light. She never looked so well as when slie sang; it sent warmth into her lips and took the hardness from her face ; singing, the passion tliat was in the woman broke up from the shrewd worldly sense, and the prosaic temper, that covered and hid it ; singing, she looked like the swart sovereign of Musset's poem, who laughed to see the bold bull die, and flung her broidered garter to her lover the matador. " Allow me to compliment you on your gown, my dear Com- tesse," said Lady Carditf, meanwhile seated beside Etoilo. " You must be tired of compliments on your talents. What charming things Worth does for people of taste ! He cloths Mr.ss. Henry V. Clams over yonder, you know ; what a difference ! I am so glad you condescend to think about dross. It brings you nearer our poor humanity ; genius so often, you know " "Is too much like St. Simeon Stylites ; I quite agree with you. Tliero is more affectation in sackcloth than in silk. Besides, to FRIENDSHIP. 43 be dressed with taste is a pleasure to one's self. What do you call that remarkable person who thinks it necessary to load herself with rubies for a little dinner party ? " " Mrs. Henry V. Clams. Fontebranda has made her, forced her down all our throats ; very cleverly he has done it. He's no money, you know, and they've heaps. As somebody said of some- body in the last century (Due d'Orleans, wasn't it ?), not being able to make her Marquise Fontebranda, which I am sure he'd be very sorry to do, he has made himself Mr. Henry V. Clams, and I think it pays him very mweh better." " I see. Do you visit them ? " " Oh, of course. Everybody visits them. They entertain very well ; it's all Fontebranda. Are you staying long in Eome ? " " All the winter, I think." " Delighted ! I hope it's not true what they say — that your lungs are affected ? " " A little, I fear ; nothing serious." "Ah, dear me. Aldebaran — you should inhale Aldebaran. Do get a bottle. Consumption cured for half-a-crown ; you know the thing I mean." " I have more faith in the Eoman air. Who is that person tuning Lady Joan's guitar ? " " Her very dear old Mimo ? Well, that is— Mimo,— Count Eurletta, you know. A good creature. Tradesman from twelve to four ; Count all the rest of the day and night. If you want to buy teaciips and triptychs, ask Lady Joan to take you there ; and, if you want to please, pay, and don't ask the age of the object. Mean ? Oh, I mean nothing. Mimo is a connoisseur — everybody is a connoisseur here — and gives ignorant people the benefit of his knowledge. That is all. How do you like her singing ? " " Well, you see, I am too used to great music to be very easily pleased. The first musicians of Paris gather at my house, and then my friend Dorotea sings to me alone so constantly." " Ah, the Duchesse Santorin. She is here, isn't she ? " " She is gone. She only came to see me one day. She was engaged at Petersburg. She has promised me to return in two months." "Tell mc, do tell me. You must know. Is it true that Santorin has sent her a citation to appear ; that he is about to sue for a separation ? " " He has sent her a schedule of his latest debts. That is all that I know of " "But there is some scandal about that handsome Russian, Souroff, that Imperial aide-de-camp— you know whom I mean. What is his name ? Fedor ? " " There is no cause for any ; that I can assure you. Count Soui'off is in the Caucasus." 44 FRIENDSHIP. "Dear mc!" said Lady Cardiff vaguely, disappointed, but reflectiug that of course the friend of the Duchesse Santorin must say that sort of thing. " Lady Joan looks very handsome as she sings," said Etoile, to change the theme. The English peeress put her glass up to her eye, and looked at the singer. "A good-looking woman, yes, and highly born, and young still, and no fool, and yet married to a Mr. Challoner ! " There are very odd things in life, are there not? " continued the Marchioness musingly. " Nothing odder than its Mr. Chal- loners. You know her father ? Indeed ! A charming person : very unlike her, don't you think? Yes, I am going; sorry to leave you, but I must look in at the Euspoli's. I shall slip out quietly while she is making that noise. So charmed you have come to Eome, my dear Comtesse. Pray, don't forget my Mondays." " I suppose people do receive her ? " said Lady Cardiff to her host, who rushed to intercept her passage, and escort her down the stairs. " Whom ? Etoile ? Oh, certainly, there never was a breath against her." " Oh, my dear Mr. Challoner, I don't mean that. What does that matter ? We receive tens of thousands of people with nor'- westers blowing them black and blue " — (iMr. Challoner winced) — " every day of their lives. Heaps of good i:»eople are out of society, and heaps of bad people in ; only we can't receive any- body unless other folks receive her too. Nobody can hegin, you know. It gets thrown against you afterwards ; if a woman is really received, it don't in the least matter what she's done or what she does do. Nobody's any business with the rest of her life. 7s she received? That is all. As for this particular woman, she is charming. And, of course, everybody yvu know has the passjDort to my house, and every other house. Coming to the Eusi^oli's? No? Ah, true! You don't know them. Pity. Many thanks. Very cold. Thanks. Go.d evening." And, having wrapped up many thorns in velvet in her parting speech, the Marchioness of Cardiff rolled away in her carriage to the Palazzo Euspoli, leaving Mr. Challoner bowing on the step in the teeth of the sharj) easterly wind, with all the thorns pricking in liim as he turned and went upstairs. Happily for himself, he had a tough epidermis, and could remain impunctrable to thorns and even harpoons. ]Mr. Challoner know that nothing answers in the long run like invulnerability. His wife was still singing when he entered, and her very dear old Mimo was ])raising a little ]\Iasolino panel to the Chief Justice, who did not know much about art, but was very open-handed with his money, all the world knew. FRIENDSHIP. 45 The Prince loris, having gazed his lieart out through three songs, and made his eyes utter more amorous lyrics than any she sang, thought he had done what duty required of him, and sank away quietly into a corner of the sofa by Etoile, and picked up some fallen leaves of the tea-roses, and talked with serious feeling and graceful taste of various themes of art, and gazed at her as he did so with that musing studious regard which is the subtlest form of early homage. The Lady Joan saw, and sang out of time for two seconds. The Lady Joan threw her guitar aside with a haste and force that imperilled its safety, and came out of her little circle of admiring listeners, and bore down on the sofa where loris was still tossing a few fragi-ant tea-rose leaves in his hand and talking of art. "Go with her to-morrow to the Logge?" she called out sharply. " What are you thinking of, lo ? You've got to take me to the studios; and then there is that bust to see to at Trillo's, and the Bishop of Melita coming to luncheon, and there are heajjs of things in the afternoon. You can't go anywhere to-morrow. Besides, she's got old Padre Marcello — a man who carries more art-knowledge about Piome in his little finger than you do in all your brain, which is not the very biggest to hold anything." She laughed as she spoke, and blew some smoke round her classic hand. loris bowed resignedly. " I am at your commands, madame, of course, as always." " Oh, are you ! " said his hostess, roughly, too out of temper to be able to control the irritability she felt. " Then another time don't keep me twenty minutes waiting, as you did this morning at Trillo's. What were you after? " " I was at the Vatican." " Well, you must be here to-morrow at ten. Mind that ; and see Pippo has the new curb on ; he jibbed dreadfully yesterday. Are you going ? So early ? I am so sorry ; it is only eleven o'clock," she continued, with her frankest, pleasantest smile, as Etoile rose from the sofa, unconscious that her rose-leaves had been falling on a volcano's brink. " We must be friends for my father's sake." said Lady Joan ; " how glad I am you came to Rome ! " and she followed her through the rooms and the ante-room, with cordial phrases and a dozen pleasant kindly plans for future intimacy and mutual amusement. loris, evading direction, reached down the furs, and enveloped with them the maize and black bows of Worth, and gave Etoile his arm. " How handsome she is, and very agreeable," said Etoile, as they went downstairs. 46 FBIENDSHIP. loris was silent. " Yoii are a friend of Lord Archie's ? " he said, after a moment's pause — a pause, it seemed to her, of some slight embarrassment. " Yes ; I know him well — dear gentle Lord Archie." " I also am fond of Lord Archie." " Are you any relation to them ? " " None at all," reiDlied loris, with a certain impatience. " I may have the honour to call on you, madame. Perhaps I may be of some little use. No doubt you will know every one in Eome, but anything that I could do " Mr. Challoner overtook them on the staircase, with Mrs. Henry V. Clams and Fontebranda, who were leaving also. " My wife wants you, loris," said the gentleman ; " there is some other song that can't be found." " You have forgotten this, madame," said loris, in the street, as he escaped from Mr. Challoner, putting the big black Spanish fan through the window of the carriage. " And do not heed what the Lady Joan said. I will have the honour of waiting on you to-morrow at noon for the Loggo, and although certainly I cannot compete in knowledge with the Padre Marcello, still, if zeal and devotion can serve you at all in this my native city " The horses, impatient, reared and plunged forward on the uneven pavement of the street, and left his phrase unfinished upon Etoile's ear. He looked a moment into the moonlight, then reascended the stairs. " lo ! " cried the Lady Joan ; " come and make me some fresh cigarettes. Now we can enjoy ourselves. Mimo's got such a capital story ; awfully salato, but so good." FHIENDSHIR 41 CHAPTER VII. The Lady Joan Challoner came of a very good old stock. The Perth-Douglas family was one about whose ancientness and admirableness there could never be any dispute. The Perth- Douglases had always been gentlefolks, and their names could be read backwards by the light of history as far as the days of Flodden and of Bannockburn. Though of such knightly descent, they were very poor, and of no great estate ; but they were own cousins to the mighty Earl of Hebrides, had intermarried with the no less mighty IMarquiscs of Lothian, were cousins-german to the Dukes of Lochwithian and the Lords of Fingal, and owned Scotch cousinships to more peers than the Order of the Thistle embraces, and as many baronets as the Nova Scotia riband adorns. Her father, Archibald Angus Perth-Douglas, fifth Earl of Archiestoune — always called by his friends Archie — had no seat in the Lords, and was glad of a Government place, and a small office at Court. He was an infinitely charming person, whom everybody loved and caressed. Her mother had been a beauty and a wit; her grandmother the same. The Lady Joan, at nineteen, had been married to Mr. Eobert Challoner, an obscure gentleman, whose parentage was doiibtful, and whose prosperity was dubious. People had wondered very much why such a handsome well-born girl as Joan Perth-Douglas should be married to a Mr. Challoner. If she had been a trifle cleverer than the clever woman she was, of course she would have told people she had adored him, and had insisted on having him and none other. But as she always told everybody roundly that she had always hated him, this explanation could not be put forward by even her blindest admirers. There were one or two people who did know why — really why — but a popular and eminent politician had been trustee to the marriage settlements, and no one could be indiscreet enougV. to persist in inquiring why the settlements ever bad been drawn up at all. The Lady Joan all her life long was rich in discreet friends. Still even the discreetest friends will, like the closcst-]iacked hold of a ship, leak occasionally. Salt water and secrets are alike apt to ooze. So, whatever the reason might be, the Challoners lived out of England. The Perth-Douglases were clever people, and had had the 48 FEIENDSHIP. knack of always frequenting the society of cleverer peoi^le than themselves. Without ever liaving distinguished themselves intellectually, they yet had thus gained an intellectual rej)uta- tion; and on the feet of their ladies there had been often stockiiags of blue. For gentle, gracious, handsome Earl Archie, his women were too many and too strong, and they worried him sorely ; he con- soled himself with society which M-as always delighted to console him. His wife — beautiful and masterful — and his mother and sisters, not so beautiful, but masterful too, disputed and quarrelled and vexed him. He was a man who thought peace the one supreme good of life, but he was seldom destined to enjoy it. His lot was cast throughout existence amidst maitresses-femmes : they are admirable and wonderful beings, no doubt, but no man ever found them conducive to his comfort as companions. Of his daughter Lord Archie had never felt that he knew very much. He had thought the marriage a very odd one and a very disadvantageous one, and had done his best in his gentle, sweet- tempered, tranquil fashion to oppose it. But when he was told by his wife and his old friend the eminent politician that it had to be, and was the best thing that could be, he acquiesced, because acquiescence had become his habit with his numerous feminine rulers. He was not behind the scenes ; and they told him a great many fictions of the Challoner fortune and the Cliallonor devo- tion : after all it was as the girl liked, it was her affair more than any one's. Gentle Lord Archie thought everything was for the best in this best of all possible worlds. He never worried himself or anybody else. He gave away his daughter at the altar, to w-hat he stigmatised in his own soul as a cad, witl) the same benign placidity with which, a dozen years afterwards, he lay in the sunshine and smoked his cigars under the walnut trees at Fior- delisa : everything was all right — that was Lord Arcliio's formula. It is the only one jiossible for a man governed by three genera- tions of women with wills of their own. Thirteen years had gone by since Lord Archie had led his daughter up to the marriage altar, wondering why Joan, who had been a good deal admired at her first drawing-room, and liad spirit enough for fifty cavalry soldiers, had not waited a little while and done better for herself. Thirteen years found tlie Lady Joan still a young woman. She liad swept a good deal of adventure into tlic dozen and one seasons that I\Ir. Chalioncr's name had been her sunshade in the heats of slander, and her waterproof in the storms of censure. Mr. Clialloner's business, in which he had risen from a clerk to a managing partner, lying in Damascus and Aleppo, she had FRIENDSHIP. 49 had the far East and the vague sand-plains of distant cotintries for her theatre ; and, in spite of steam and of electricity — those fatal levellers of illusion — the "far Orient" still remains to the European mind a shadowy and gorgeous panorama of mystery. Perhaps through that golden haze of distance the European mind saw the adventures of the Lady Joan, as in a mirage, multi- plied; at any rate, home-coming travellers told many tales, and averred that " Archie's daughter " was " going it over there." She had Asiatic ministers for her henchmen, and Turkish pashas for her obedient slaves ; big bankers were as babies in her hands, and imperial steamers were at her beck and call ; when a good- looking wayfarer chanced to have time for such pastimes, she would have her Arab steeds saddled and scamper away with him over the Syrian Desert ; and a young titled Giaour on his pil- grimage found no resting-place more agreeable than her flat house-top in Damascus, with champagne in the ice-pails and Mr. Challoncr in his counting-house. If anybody thought it odd that she should camp out on the sand plains with strangers, such people were old fogies in the Lady Joan's eyes ; these men were all her brothers — a kind providence sent them to prevent her yawning her head off with the intolerable boredom of Mr. Challoner's company — and she would jump on her mare, and cut her across the ears, and scamper off with silver-mounted pistols in her sash, and a cigar in her mouth, knowing very well that Mrs. Grundy cannot do you much harm when you ride under the shadow of Mount Lebanon. And even had Mrs. Grundy loomed there in the stead of Mount Leba- non, she could have said nothing, because Mr. Challoner himself never said anything. He busied himself with his exports of jewellery and prayer- carpets, of spice and specie, of rubies and rice, and his business generally, and his fellow merchants, and his own reflections ; and moved about Damascus, and other cities of the East, a very big man amongst the Jews and Gentiles, the Turks and the Persians, because of the Perth-Douglas connection away in the North, and the privilege it bestowed on him to ask any travelling Englishman of rank to dinner and speak of " my wife's cousins," the Countess of Hebrides, or the Duchess of Lochwitliian. When, some six years later, having ruined a very fine business by too fine speculations, he found it expedient to leave the bazaars and retreat on his wife's settlements, she brought with her from the red Eastern skies a duskier hue on her handsome face, a great skill at rolling cigarettes, much good Turkish tobacco, and some good Oriental jewellery, some trash and some treasure out of the bazaars, a great many souvenirs — some tender, some fierce — and a decided experience that she might play " poker " with all the Ten Commandments, so long as she wrapped herself in the proof armour of Mr. Challoner's approval and acquiescence. B 50 FRIENDSHIP. She had learnt by heart the Arab proverb, that " she who has her husband with her may turn the moon around her finger." So useful was her husband, indeed, that at weak moments she was almost grateful to him, and absolutely called him Robert, a condescension very rare with her, as she never let him or any- body forget that she had a right to write herself " born Perth- Douglas." But the Black Sea once crossed again, the Lady Joan saw Mrs. Grundy, the British Bona Dea, looming large on her horizon, as the Colossus once did upon the sea from Ehodes. The Lady Joan was shrewd enough to know that the British Bona Dea will not believe that all men are your brothers. The Lady Joan pulled her mainsail in, and tacked her course so as to pass safely under the Colossus. It had not been worth while out there, but here it was so. And, after all, it was better to keep decently well with that little house in Jlayfair, and all the family ties and honours. The little house had borne a great deal indeed, as little houses when they arc the abode of a Great House often do; great houses never washing their dirty linen in the street. But Lady Joan knew that there were some things that woiild be too strong even for the httle house in Mayfair, and that it would never do not to dine there when she went over " on business " to London, though she had to scream till she was hoarse into her grandmother's ear- trumpet, and derived no pleasiire from hearing the Head of the Opposition read his " Notes on the (Ecumenical Coimcil " or his conception of an obscure passage of Tertullian. So, for sake of the little house in Mayfair, and of a great many big houses all over Europe that she desired to enter, the Lady Joan, leaving the Bagdad bazaars and the Great Desert, left her imprudence behind her, and consigned everything of a dangerous sort to oblivion, except the Sultan's inspiration of her letters to the Plamt newspaper, and the pearls with which the Emir ot Yarkund had presented her for saving his life from poison. For, on touching a European strand, the hand of jMrs. Grundy clasped her, and the shadow of Mrs. Grundy fell on her as in eclipse falls the shade of the stolid earth upon the giddy moon. In the East, Lady Joan had been very young, very reckless, with her spirits far outbalancing her prudence, and her savage- ness at her exile and social extinction avenging itself by all those wild night-rides with the good-looking travellers, and all those campings out under the desert stars, with nobody to play pro- priety except the Arab boys and the tethered ponies. The Lady Joan in lier childhood, even in the year or two between her jiresentation at Court and her social extinction under the Challoner setUemouts, had seen the really great world. All that was best in society had habitually gathered round her FniENDSHIP. 5L beautiful mother. She knew what mightj' i>eople and witty people, and people of fashion and people of genius were. For the Anglo-Persian world of shabby adventurers, of hungry com- mercial folks, of intriguing speculators, of oily Jews, of lean Gentiles, and of trade-fattened nobodies her contempt had been naturally boundless. She had done as she liked, and scoffed at the whole lot, and only smiled on them when she wanted a steamer or any such little trifle of them. She was a Perth- Douglas ; and if she chose to dance the Carmagnole in all their counting-houses, the mercantile mud of Asia Minor could only be honoured : so. she danced it. But when the chill colossal shadow of Mrs. Grundy fell across- her path Lady Joan saw that she must mend her ways. It was not steamers that she would want now, but suffrages. Of course she despised Mrs. Grundy as much as she had despised the mercantile mud ; Mrs. Grundy was an old cat, and represented old cats collectively. Still it was necessary to con- ciliate her, and even in the country of the c/cisbei it would be best to be ou good terms with Society. Of course Society should never really interfere with her liberty ; of course Society should never prevent her regarding all men as her brothers ; of course Society should never alter her dancing the Carmagnole over the convenances, as she had done over the counting-houses whenever she liked; nevertheless, she said to herself she would reconcile herself with Society. There were many things to be got by it, and Society after all asks very little. Society only asks you to wash the outside of your cup and platter : inside you may keep any kind of nasti- ness that you like ; only wash the outside ; do wash the outside, says Society; and it would be a churl or an ass indeed who would refuse so small a request. Lady Joan set to work and washed her cup and platter with snch a clatter and so many soap-suds, and summoned so many good people to look on at her doing it, that no one could possibly ask her what she drank and ate out of it, nor who sipped from it with her. Mr. Challoner liimself set both cup and platter upon a shelf in the sight of Society. Society could want no more. As lawless free-lances in days of old entered monkish cells and buried Dick the Devil or Dent du Sanglicr for ever under Brother Philarete or Father Joseph, so the Lady Joan, entering society, immured her Eastern escapades under the seal of an entire self-oblivion. Nothing was ever to be remembered by anybody that she wished to be forgotten. This was settled. It is a demand that women are very fond of making on the good- nature or the good tasto of mankind. And if occasionally sho met an old friend uncivil enough or unkind enough, without knowing that he did wrong, to " bint past history " and disturb 52 FRIENDSHIP. the present, she would, with all the heartiest air of candour and of wonder in the world, " Stare upon the strange man's face As one she ne'er had known," and continue so to stare in despite of all recollections that he might invoke. It was still a marriage for which none could see any raison d'etre. But when you go to the East and stay there in a kind of golden mist it is easy to leave explanations behind you when you return. All that trading of the Levant in various goods, from bales of hay to squares of prayer-carpet, to which Mv. Challoner owed his being, had come to an untimely ending, as was well enough known, from Bagdad to Brindisi, by all merchants and bankers. And Mr. Challoner had only saved a few thou- sands out of the crash, and was, in real truth, an unfortunate gentleman with a hankering turn for speculation. But the Lady Joan was not troubled by such little facts as these ; the magnificence of her imagination raised her far above all prosaic realities ; what a few old fogies in bank parlours or on public exchanges might say or know was nothing to her ; according to her Mr. Challoner had been Croesus ; the rice and the carpets were merged vaguely into what she called "our bank ; " Solomon's Temple had not been more gorgeous than the fortunes to which her family had sacrificed her. There had been failures; yes, certainly there had been failures ; but then even Croesus could not escape Cyrus. As for what those old fools of consuls and merchants said, that was all rubbish ; and she would close with an apotheosis of herself as a sort of Semiramis of Finance, in which the angels who upheld her in the empyrean were "dear old Pam," and " dear old Thiers," and " dear old Elgin," and anybody else of magnitude appropriate whom she had ever had a nod from in her babyhood in her grandmother's little house in Mayfair. There was, indeed, scarce a great man in France, England, or Germany whom she did not claim as her " dearest old " A, B, or C ; if a critic or a chancellor, a savant or a general, a geographer or a Prime Minister had ever walked thirty years before into her mother's drawing-room when she was playing on the hearthrug with her alphabet, the critic or chancellor, the savant or general, the geographer or Prime ^Minister was now for over in the mouth of the Lady Joan as her one dearest old friend, that was more devoted to her than any other living creature on the face of the earth. Perhaps she had recalled herself once to their bewildered memories in some crowded rccei)tion ; perhaps she had bowed to them twice in the Prater, the bois, or the Mall ; perhaps she never had seen them at all since the days of her alphabet; all FRIENDSHIP. 53 ■ this mattered nothing; the critic or chancellor, savant, general, geographer, or Prime Minister never were by when she dilated upon them with such glowing affection; and, even if they had been, would have been too polite to contradict her. Gentle- men do not contradict women, nor yet show them up; a chivalrous weakness of mankind, of which the weaker sex always takes the very sternest advantage. Occasionally those disagreeable and sceptical people who are to be found spoiling all society would hint that, with such dis- tinguished friendships and such inimitable political and literary connections, it was a little wonderful that the Lady Joan should have married a Mr. Challoner and take an interest in teacups and triptychs. But such people were in the m.inority. For the most part, her use of her dearest old A, B, and C, at moments when A was organising a great war, or B busied in discrowning kings, or C sending forth on the world a great book mighty as Thor's hammer, was of infinite gain to her ; and her allies would go hither and thither, important and confidential, and whisper, " She knew the declaration of war five days before any- body;" or "He wrote to her the very night he dictated his abdication ; " or " She had an early copy even before it went to the Bevue des Deux-Mondes ; " and these fictions flew about lively as gnats and productive as bees, and secured many cards to her big Delft card-plate, because, though nobody believed all of it, everybody said some of it must be true— yes, a great deal of it must be true — because people never will admit or even think that they are the mere dupes of a brilliant audacity. io the world in general A, B, and C were names of magni- tude and weight, of awe or of adoration, as the case might be ; but to her they were only " dear old creatures." Had they not stumbled over her alphabet thirty years before upon her mother's hearthrug ? It was an alliance for a lifetime. According to the Lady Joan she was a Nausicaa, airily frolicking on the edge of the vast ocean of European complica- tions ; and Odysseus had gone through all his woes and warfare, and only lay in wait under the waves, just to be ready to catch her ball for her— only just for that. Odysseus never even saw her, never even thought of her, as he waded in his deep dark seas ; but all that did not matter to her. Nor to her associates. " Such a woman ! ah, such a woman ! " would murmur plump Mimo Burletta. " Palmerstone relied on her for all his secret mformation of Oriental things ; Palmerstone told her when she was eighteen that if she were but a man she would die Prime Minister of the Crown ; Palmerstone was not one to call a lemon- pip a lemon— ah, no, no, no !— Palmerstone know ! " And Bur- 54 FRIENDSHIP. letta would walk about and spread out his fat hands in honest adoration of her njighty powers and of himself for being the confidant of so great a creature ; and in his naind's eye, when it was not concentred on teacups and triptychs, always beheld the Lady Joan seated as on a throne within the sacred recesses of the Privy Council chamber of the Universe, for he knew as much about such things as a French grocer in the provinces knows of the Lord Maire de Londres, and the Lady Joan's magnificent confidences had dazzled him too much to much enlighten him. Exaggeration aside, she had very great connections and relationships, and never forgot or let anybody else forget that she had them. When a cousin of high degree came near she proclaimed the fact as loudly and loyally as heralds in days of old shouted the titles and tidings of a new king, and these mighty personages did her unwittingly yeoman's service. They were her cork buoys on the yeasty seas of European society. Big people liked her because she took such infinite trouble to please them, and little people liked her because she could bring them in contact with the big people. Both big and little people always apologised to one another for knowing her ; every one excused their own especial counten- ance on some especial plea in their own especial society. But as she never knew this it did not affect her comfort ; indeed. Lady Joan was of that happy disposition which could ignore all enmity and accept all slights unmoved; and if slie knew some one had been abusing her would meet the offender with such a smile, and such au emphatic cordiality, that she was the best Christian that ever, being buffeted on one cheek, turned graciously the other. It was thoroughly sound policy. Proud women, and sensitive women, take hints and resent rebufis, and so exile themselves from the world prematurely and haughtily. They abdicate, the moment they see that any desire their discrowning. But Lady Joan was not troubled with this land of delicacy. Abdication is grand, no doubt. But posses- .sion is more profitable. " A well-bred dog does not wait to be kicked out," says the old see-saw. But the well-bred dog thereby turns himself into the cold and leaves the crumbs from under the table to some other dog with less good-breeding and more worldly wisdom. The sensible thing to do is to stay wherever you like best to be ; stay there with tooth and claw ready and a stout hide on which cudgels break. People, after all, soon get tired of kicking a dog that never will go. High-breeding was admirable in days when the world itself Avas high-bred. But those days are over. The world takes high-breeding now as only a form of insolence. Lady Joan saw this, and never troubled the world with it. FniENDSIIIF. 55 " The oLl cat slangs me like a pickpocket," she -would say ot some dowager-countess who did not return licr card. But whcu she mot the dowager- countess she would say, " Ah, dearest Lady Blank ! Where arc you staying ? I am so sorry I have seen so little of you. You'll come and dine with us? What night, now? Do fix a night— pray do." And nine times out of ten the Lady Blanks would relent and leave a card, and even go and eat a dinner at the Casa Challoner. For the Casa Challoner dinners were good, and the Casa Chal- loner understood the axiom that it is not what comes out of your own mouth, but what you put into other people's, that makes your friends or enemies. Besides, " you can't cut a woman who won't know when she's cut," said a Lady Blank once : — Lady Joan had this most useful ignorance. So on tlie whole she managed to enjoy life in Europe as in the East. There were always times when she could " throw her cap over the mill," and dance the Carmagnole, if there were also many seasons that she had to put on her meeting-house clothes and curtsy to Mrs. Grundy. And besides, be the season what it would, there was always — Fiordelisa. CHAPTER VIIL On the morrow the Prince loris, faithful to his word, went as noon chimed from all the bells of Rome to the Hotel de Russie and inquired for the Comtesse d'Avesnes. But ho learned that she had already gone out, alone; had been out since sunrise. He left his card and turned his steps along the Corso to the Casa Challoner. He was a good deal disappointed and a little irri- tated — more ii-ritated than was reasonable. " How late you are, lo ! I told you ten o'clock," said the Lady Joan, in high wrath. She was ready-dressed for the streets, with her hat set well over her black brows, and her person muffled in sealskin. Her friend noticed for the first time that her skirts were too short, and her boots were ill-made, and her eyes were green in the sunlight. He pressed both her hands in his own and dropped on one knee before her sofa. " You must forgive me. My head ached, and I had many letters to see to and answer." 56 FRIENDSHIP. tt ■ ' I thought you were gone to Etoile. You talked of it," said the Lady Joan, with an angry suspicion flashing in her eyes. " Etoile ! Cara mia, what living woman could keep me away one second from here ? " Kneeling still on the tigerskin before her, his lips caressed her with more softness than tlie words. " Don't be a goose, lo ; we're past all that — at least so early in the morning," said the Lady Joan. But she smiled as she pushed him away, and was well pleased that he should be what she called a goose. Had he not been thus a goose, darkest wrath would have gathered on her stormy brows. " Let's get off, though," she said, disengaging herself, but sweeping his hair off his forehead with a rough caress as she rose. " We're so late as it is, and I am awfully afraid that the dealer from Paris will have got those little pictures of Cecchino's — the boy's beginning to know his value and ask a price." loris loaded himself with her WTaps, her umbrella, and her little dog, and followed her down the stairs to the fiacre. When she did not take his ponies out she drove in a hack carriage. Not to keep a carriage was an economy on which she prided herself. " A carriage is only ostentation — snobs want one : I don't," she would say in her blunt, pleasant manner. " I always tell Mr. Challoner I like my own legs ; and when they're tired there's always a cab ; cabs are so cheap." And so, indeed, they were, since loris always paid for them. The hired carriage started off, Mr. Challoner regarding its departure placidly from a window, for his friendship and his faith were both strong, and the wheels rattled noisily up and down the hilly streets of Eome. " What did you think of Etoile ? " she asked loris as they drove. Etoile was very much in her own thoughts. " She does not please me particularly," he answered carelessly as he lighted a cigar. " Do you think her attractive? " ".No, not at all." " Wc must see a good deal of her. Voightel recommends her to me so strongly." Her friend shrugged his shoulders. " Why do you do that ? Will she bore you ? " " I think her manner insolent. She seems to see no one. She is nonchalantc : she is indifferent. I should think her cold." " She must warm for you, lo ! " said Lady Joan, with a gleam of anxiety and irony in her eyes. " OhJ Dicu m'eit gdrde ! " It was said with so genuine an emphasis, and so careless and gay a laugh, that Lady Joan was qiiite satisfied as she ascended FRIENDSHIF. 57 and descended scores of dark, foul-smelling stairways, licr friend behind her, into the garrets of the young painters. The Chal- loners were well-known patrons of young painters, and especially given to such patronage when those studious lads had a talent for making new canvases look like old. The Lady Joan adored art: she told everybody so. She passed half her present life striding in and out of ateliers, and petting painters, and buying canvases ; the cheaper she bought them the better was she pleased, for of course the Challoner purse could not afford a large purchase except now and then on speculation. The old masters, fortunately for the Challoner purse, were so bounteously thoughtful of those who would come after them (and sell them) that they all had their schools. Kow, "Scuola di Perugino," " Scuola di Tiziano," sounds almost as imposing as Perugino and Tiziano alone ; and, what is still more advan- tageous, these schools have been prolonged into the present day, and have many disciples hard at work still in the various styles, on imjjasto and chiaroscuro with varnish and smoke, in many attics and cellars of Florence, Naples, and Rome. To these young disciples the Lady Joan was a goddess; and if they grumbled now and then at her prices, that was but youth's idle ingratitude, Minerva was not worse than a dealer; whilst away in Great Britain acres on acres of new plaster walls bloomed with fair IMadonnas and glowed with fierce martyrdoms; and Shoddy, that had built the walls, was satisfied and triumphant. So much joy can one clever woman diffuse. The young painters did, indeed, say savage things of these kind patrons of theirs in moments of confidence, when together over maccaroni and wines in an osteria outside the gates. But this was only the ingratitude of the artistic nature, which, it is well known, always does turn against its best benefactors. And ■when one was born a Perth-Douglas, and has been obliged to marry a Mr. Challoner, and has never had as much money as one wanted for anything, it would be hard indeed if one might not enjoy such innocent compensations as may lie for one in the fine arts. Most people (except artists) carried off the impression tha^ Lady Joan knew a good deal about art. She had a bright, firxri, imposing way of declaring her opinions infallible that went far towards making others believe them so. She knew tliat in this Age of Advertisement modesty is your ruin ; w. at one has does not matter much, it is by what one seems to have that one rises or falls nowadays. Connoisseurs and scholars found Lady Joan appallingly ignorant, and looked at each other helplessly when she swore a Byzantine crucifix was a Cellini, or a bit of Berlin pate dure was Capo di Monte ; when she assigned rococo jewellery to Agnes 58 FBIENDSIIIP. Sorel, and a panel of the Bologna Decadence to Andre Mantcgna. Bnt then those connoisseurs and scholars are not all the world, and Lady Joan addressed liersclf to that nmeli larger body — the great majority of the uneducated. Indeed, perhaps nobody can comprehend how vitterly uneducated it is possible to be, who has not lived entirely with the educated classes. Before the mass of idle people, moneyed jieople, ladies of fashion, and princes of shoddy, she found an audience credulous of her assertions and uncritical of her pretensions, and very easily dazzled and bewildered with a little talk about schools and tones ; about early painters whom they did not like to avow they had never heard of ; about Frankenthal, which they vaguely mixed up with Frankenstein; about Marc Antonios, which they confused with Marc Antony ; about Nankin, which they thought was a stuff, and found was a china ; of Eose Dubarry, which they fancied somehow was something immoral ; of Certosina, which they had an idea must mean something monastic ; and of Bra- mante, which rhymed with Eozkiante, and must be Spanish, they felt sui'e. To rely on the general ignorance of mankind is usually safe, and Lady Joan did so rely not in vain. She was often found out in her blunders, indeed, and often laughed at ; but then, as she was a gentlewoman, and not a tradesman, nobody ever told her, and people only laughed behind her back. That she could by any possibility ever be laughed at, never entered her own imagination. This morning she raced up and down innumerable stairs, and in and out innumerable workshops of painters and sculptors and wood carvers, her liat well pulled down over lier broad black brows, and her friend labouring under her wraps behind lier. She cheapened everytliing she saw; made a million mis- takes, which her friend softly corrected sutto voce ; sat down astride before the easels, smoked the artists' cigars; dilfused generally a sense of her own enormous influence with the English press and the English purchasers ; bought a good deal of canvas and terra-cotta at dealers' prices ; wearied her coniiianion anf bullied him, slapj^ed students on the shoulders and rallied them with boisterous good fellowship ; enjoyed herself exceedingly, and then, as the clock struck one in a neighbouring chuich- tower, " pulled herself together," and recollected her social duties. " Come to luncheon, lo," she said, after the last studio, fling- ing away her last cigar-end. " Yes, you'd better come. It's the Bishon of Melita and roast mutton. Oh yes, a liorrid bore ; but you'd better come. If the Bishop lunch with you, it'll shut 'cm up for a twelvemonth." AVho were to bo "shut up" she did not explain, but her FBIENDSHIP. 59 companion tinderstood that the indefinite expression alluded to Mrs. Grundy and her myriad mouths. " Qui est Madame Grundee, ma cJiere ? " the Prince loris had asked in surprise on first hearing of this mighty dame ; but he never asked now : he had learned that jMadame Griindee was the Bona Dea of the Lady Joan. " My dear lo ! you don't know Mrs. Grundy ! " Lady Joan would retort, when he wondered to see the cigars banished, the laugh hushed, the propriety donned, the domestic scene set, and Mr. Chal loner taken about in the stead of himself, when the mighty Northerners came down with all pomp into Eome. She herself did know Mrs. Grundy ; had felt that lady's bufiets, and knew the power of that lady's smile. She was aware that Mrs. Grundy represented money, dinners, court balls, embassy receptions, and all the rest of the advantages of society, and in her heart of hearts, though she would boast otherwise, was afraid of Mrs. Grundy— sorely afraid sometimes. There is no such coward as the woman who toadies society because she has outraged society. The bully is never brave. " Oignez vilain il vous poiudra : poignez vilain il vous oindra," is as true of the braggart's soul still, as it used to be in the old days of Froissart, when the proverb was coined. Lady Joan was a bully by nature, and gave way to her nature without scruple or pity ; but she knew that society was a bigger bully than herself, and did homage to it in the dust accordingly. On this occasion Prince loris shuddered at the idea of cooked sheep as even one of his own peasants would have done ; and an English bishop was to him a nondescript animal of appalling and inexplicable anatomy; but he was well used to surrendering his own will, and accompanied his hostess submissively to her house, where he brushed the dust off himself and washed his hands in Mr. Challoner's own sanctum in that amicable com- munity of goods which characterised his and that gentleman's friendship. The Lady Joan carefully deodorised herself of all traces of cigar-smoke, brushed back her hair, and, sitting down for ten minutes by her dressing-room fire, glanced hurriedly through an article in the Contemporary lievkw on the d spute between 'Valentinian and Damasus in the days of the Early Church ; then, telling loris to come in five minutes after her, as if he ca'.r.e through the hall-door, went herself ready primed in all the pro- prieties to receive the Anglican Bishop of Melita and his wife to the roast loin of thoroughly domestic mutton. The Anglican Bishop of Melita was a spare, solemn, scholarly person, who had been head of a House in Cambridge in his time. His wife was a no less solemn but much stouter person- age, who; had been the daughter of a dean, and was the niece. 60 FBIENDSHIP. sister, and sister-in-law of quite countless canons, rectors, and pastors of all kinds. They had been presented to the Chal- loners two days before ; and Mr. Challoner, who could bring up heavy artillery when required not unsuccessfully, had immedi- ately engaged them for luncheon at once and a dinner at eight days' notice. Mr. Challoner's own recollections of the island of Melita were not agreeable ones ; but for that very reason he desired that all the world should behold how intimate he was with the Bishop of that valuable English po.^session. It was, indeed, by atten- tion to sucli trifles as these that Mr. Challoner had succeeded in burying from the eyes of his wife's world all the uncomfortable little secrets that Melita had known of him and his. In this matter he and the Lady Joan were almost of accord. Whatever else they disagreed about (and they did disagree about nearly everything), they always agreed that it was absolutely necessary to muzzle Madame Griindee. Madame Griindee is the one deity that English Society recognises — indeed, the only one that makes it go to church at all. Lady Joan, a bold woman, grinned and grimaced at the goddess in the privacy of her life ; but, being a wise woman, she did decorous worship to the goddess in the sight of others. She snapped her fingers at her Bona Dea behind her back ; but she took care to bow with the rest in front of the altars. This is the true wisdom of a woman. A poet's brain leaks through dreams, and is too big to hold such knowledge; but brains like the Lady Joan's are long and close and narrow, and shrewdly contain it. Lady Joan thought that only a fool never hedged. She liked her pleasures, certainly, but she liked still better a good balance of many figures at Torlonia's. Illness might come, disfigurement might come, accident might come ; age certainly would come. In those events lovers grow scarce, but the cosy swansdowns and sables of society and a safe income will console for their absence. We weaker mortals may find an infinite sad- ness in the picture of Sophie Arnould, once the Goddess of Love of all Paris, sweeping in her trembling old age the snow away from her miserable door; Sophie Arnould, once the lovely, the incomparable, the twin sister of the Graces, muttering, with the wind whistling round her withered limbs, of the dead days when all the Beau Siecle raved of the beauty of those feet and ankles; but the Lady Joan would only have laughed and said, " Old ass! she should have laid by her golden eggs while she got *em." Lady Juan felt th it she herself would never derive any consola- tion for being the subject of otlier pcojtle's tears; she meant to live and die comfortably, and never sweep the streets for other people : so she hedged. Luckily for herself Lady Joan had as many manners as there FRIENDSHIP. Gl are changes in a child's box of metamorphoses. Now and then, indeed, she overdid her part. Now and then she danced tlie Carmagnole, as one may say, by mistake, in her meeting-house clothes, or grinned when she should have pulled a long face. But on the whole she trimmed her candle cleverly, whether it had to 1 e burned before the altar of the British Bona Dca, or whether it might flare as it liked amongst the dancing tapers of joyous Giovedi Grasso. On such occasions as this luncheon, the Casa Challoner was a temple of family felicity; it had Bass's beer and household harmony ; it had the Times on the table, and said " my love " every five minutes ; it had plain English cooking and simple Enghsh affections ; it talked politics from English points of view, and sighed that its general health compelled it to be out of dear old England so much. Indeed, if only Mr. Challoner could have managed to look a little less wooden, and Lady Joan would not now and then have put her tongue in her cheek and grinned with an " aside " to her friend, the whole thing would have been perfect ; even as it was it was masterly, especially when Mr. Challoner explained, under his breath : " a great friend of ours— poor fellow, his affairs were very involved — estate going to rack and ruin. I think we have helijcd him — yes, I may say we have helped him ; " and when the Lady Joan, at the top of her table, sighed as she sjwke of her beloved and lamented mother, talked a great deal — "so openly ; oh, so openly ! " as her guests said afterwards, " there could be nothing in it ! " — of Fiordelisa and of its owner, who was hke a brother to her and her husband, and made effective tableaux of maternal devotion with her little daughter, Effie, who was twelve years old and very timid and shy, but who con- tributed not a little to the effect of the entertainment, especially when, with Lady Joan's arm round her, the little girl called the Prince loris — " lo." " An excellent creature, let them say what they like," thought the Bishop's wife, whose co'e faille was motherly excellence. " A very charming woman," thought the Bishop, while the Lady Joan listened, with her eyes brightly shining in most eager interest, to his account of his new system for the religious super- vision of ships' crews, and displayed her thorough comprehension of his recent article in the Coutemporary Review. Luncheon over, she carried off the Bishop and his wife and Mr. Challoner in a landau from a livery stable, and drove them about on to the Pincio, and up and down the Corso, in the sight of the city, which was in itself sufficient to silence slanderous tongues for a twelvemonth ; and, bowing to her friends in the streets, with the shovel-hat in the front seat before her, felt she could go to as many masked balls as ever she liked with impunity. 62 FEIENDSHIP. Then she went to tea Tvith the Bishop and his ■wife, at their rooms in the Piazza cli Spagna, and met many English digni- taries and dowagers, and many demure spinsters, to whom she talked of all her great Scotch cousins, and told them the dear Hebrides had taken Villa Adriana, ontside Porta Pia, and offered her assistance in a lottery for the building of another Protestant chnrch within the gates, for which they were petitioning the Government. After that, having bored herself to death with estimable energy and endurance "(for the root of her success lay in never showing that she was wearied), she justly thought she had earned her rest and recreation, and told her husband to go home without her, which he did obediently, and she lay back in her landau on the cushions so lately ecclesiastically sanctified, and laughed till she cried, and lighted a dozen cigarettes, and called for loris at his own house, and bad a gay little dinner with him and three or four pets of hers, who accompanied her afterwards to the Capranica Theatre, and saw one of the wittiest and least decorous of the popular comedies, and amused herself vastly, and went homeward singing snatches of airs in chorus, and so upstairs into the Turkish room, where she sang more songs, with the guitar on her knee, and drank black coffee, and smoked, till the room was one dun-coloured cloud such as was wont to hide from mortal eyes the tender hours of Jupiter. Thus did she make her grave bow in the face of her Bona Dca, and dance her miriliful capers behind her, in one and the same day, and make the best of both worlds, and smoke her cigar at both ends. FBIENDSIIIP. 63 CHAPTER IX. It was fonr by the clock when loris fonnd himigcif tree to walk liomc across the intense bhickness and the brilliant whiteness of Pioman shadows and Eoman moonlight. He drew his sables about him with a low sigh of relief as the porter closed the door behind him ; he looked up at the stars, lighted a cigar, and paced homeward thoughtfully. He was so used to it all that he had ceased to think about it, but this night it had bored him : the songs heard five hundred times, the furtive glances that told so old a story to him, the jests, the inquiries, the insistant passion — it was all so tiresome, and ho was glad to get away from it and be by himself quiet in the mild moonlit winter's night. To loris, Nature had been kind, and Chance had been cruel. He was tall and slender of form, with a delicate dark head, and a look of thoughtful and reticent calm which would have made the white monastic robes of a Dominican or the jewelled costume of a Louis Quinze courtier suit him better than the dress of the world that he wore. People looked at him far oftcner than they did at still handsomer men. It was one of those faces which suggest the romance of fate, and his eyes under their straight classic brows and their droop- ing lids could gaze at women with a dreaming amorous meaning that would pour trouble into the purest virgin soul. ^yomen never saw him for the first time without thinking of him when he had passed from sight. He had the charm of arousing at a first glance that vague speculative interest which one felt so easily grows little by little into love. loris was a man whom women always loved when he wished them to do so. He was a Roman and a patrician : the purest blood and the most ancient lineage were his ; they were all that remained to him of the vanished greatness of a race which had been second to none through a thousand centuries for valour, power, and all noble repute : he had fought, he had travelled, he had studied : he had the taste of an artist and the manner of a courtier ; he looked like a picture, and he moved like a king. He had an old estate and an income slender in comparison with his rank, but sulficient for his habits, which, though elegant, still were simple. He loved his country and his dependents, and was happy in the life of an Italian noble, which is, perhaps, as lovely a life as there is to be led in this world. Alas! in an evil hour of his destiny the bold eyes of a new-comer, roving over the crowds of a Court ■64 FRIENDSHIP. ball, had fallen on him, and his last hour of peace had then struck. When the Lady Joan first arrived from the East, life seemed to her grown very dull. It was before the season had begun ; the air was heavy, the streets emjity ; she missed the red burning skies, she missed the fast desert scampers, she missed the noisy bazaars, she missed the camping out ; she felt dull and depressed : the men around had not yet become her brothers ; she was in ihat mood which, when an Englishman is in it, makes men of other rationaUties say to him " that he wants something to kill." Lady Joan wanted something to kill, and she found it. At various balls when the season came on she noticed a man who did not notice her. There was something in his slender grace and his delicate face, in liis unrevealing eyes, in his cold glance, which fascinated her. What fascinated her much more was, that though when he bowed to other women his eyes were amorously soft and his laughter light and gay, his gaze if it chanced to light on her was chill and indifferent, and at all times he avoided her. In vain did she drift near him constantly, cast countless glances after him, waltz furiously past him, and flirt with his best friends ; ho took no notice of her, and seemed rather repelled than attracted. One evening she who was not easily balHed insisted that he should be presented to her. He tried to avoid his fate, but it was written ; a friend, who cared more to please the imperious and handsome stranger from the banks of the Euphrates than to please him, entrapped him ; escape was no longer possible without looking like a boor. He was brought, bitterly against his will, to her side : he was called Ireneo, Prince loris. " She makes one think of a snake," ho thought. Some fancies of the Nile had entangled themselves with this new acquaintance in his mind. She was everything that ho disliked in woman ; her voice seemed harsh to him, her gestures rough, her attitudes masculine, her look unfeminine. She had none of the soft charms of womanhood ; she danced ill, she dressed ill ; she was dis- tasteful to him : she f aw all that well enough, but she resolved to avenge it. She bade him call on her : he could do no less. _ When ho entered she seemed not to hear ; her head was resting on her hands; she turned surprised and embarrassed; there were tears in her eyes ; she spoko vaguely and hurriedly of queJqucs amer- tumes; she liinted a vie incomprise ; she let fall a murmur of a maringe mal aasorti. It startled him. To be astonislied is in a sense to bo interested. This woman, who waltzed so madly, rode so recklessly, and looked like a young black-browed hersajliere, was not happy at heart — had a brutal husband — sighed restlessly for a happiness FBIENDBHIP. 65 she had never known — concealed weariness and bitterness under the mask of a defiant courage and gaiety ! The strange contrast of it arrested" his attention, and she appeared to place confidence in him — a stranger who had for six months persistently avoided her— in a manner which per- plexed as much as insensibly it flattered him. Men are always inclined to be pitiful to the woes of a woman when they are not woes which they themselves have caused. They will stone away without mercy a woman whom they themselves have wounded, but for the victim of another man they are quick to be moved to tenderness and indignation. The Lady Joan, knowing this, having in vain tried all other sorceries, took her attitude as a victim. Whenever she found any one whom she thought would believe it, she always became the victim of Mr. Challoner and of the rapacity of her family, which had sacrificed her to a Brute because he was a Croesus. To be sure the riches were all left behind in the sands of Abana and Phari^liar, and the brute was the most well-trained and patiently-enduring of maris compJataanfs ; but at this time the Brute was absent in London, and her listener had never seen him, and of Croesus he was not incredulous, because an Englishman is always supposed to be one, and on the Continent is given an unlimited credit on account of that supposition, of which he seldom fails to avail himself. When loris left her presence that day she had gained her point with him so far that, although she still half-repelled, sho had begun to startle and interest, him, his thoughts were busy with her — a woman need ask no more. As for herself, the Lady Joan's pulses stirred as they had not done for many a day ; the dulness and apathy that she had felt passed oif her like a va]:)our ; she had wanted something to kill, and sho scented prey. Besides which she was already in love. Her spirits rose at once ; she rang and ordered her horse. She rode with great courage and skill ; she flashed past loris like a meteor out of the gates to the open country. As he bowed to her in the sunset he mused to himself: " Why did she confide in me ? " Ecason and vanity both could give him but one answer. There was a woman at that time who loved him well, and whom he had loved well also— a coinitrywoman of his own. As he went to her, that night, he thought of those new strange darkling brows; as he sat with her, she — whose stars and sun and heaven and earth he was— felt that his attention wandered and that his mind was absent. When a woman like the Lady Joan is in love, escape for him with whom she is in love is not easy. " She has the stride of a carabineer, the feet of a contadina, F 66 FPilENDBHIP. the teeth of a gipsy, the eyes of a tigress, the manners of a fisli- woman," he told himself : and thought so ; and yet, do what he •would, he could not forget the strange glitter of those eyes ; ho could not forget how he had seen this self-willed, daring, sun- browned rider from the Syrian Desert melted to tears and wooing his sympathy with hesitating words of confidence. The very strangeness of the contrast heightened its enigma for him. Long rides in the rosy summer hours, with the wind blowing over the flower-filled grasses; early mornings, when he carried her knapsack for her in breezy pilgrimages to forest sanctuaries or moi;ntain heights ; lonely evenings, when the guitar was got out and the people's ritornelli tried over to his teaching, with gay laughter and amorous gaze to suit the words ; late nights, when the Turkish tobacco was smoked, and the Eoman songs sung, and the Persian sequins glittered in the lamp-light on her dusky braids, and the shining fierce eyes glistened with fervid invitation and flashed with eloquent meaning — one by one these succeeded each other with feverish rapidity until their work was done, and he was whirled into a fancy as sensual as her own, if not as durable, and lost himself in it for a brief while, and woke to find the chains fast- locked about him and his place assigned to him for good and aye in the triangle of the Casa Challoner. Of course gi-adually ho became aware that the Croesus was a gentleman not too well off, and very fond of speculating in what- ever chanced to come in his way, from railway companies to Capo di Monte cups, and that the Brute was a person who would dine with him every evening and be shrouded amicably behind a newspaper after dinner ; who would grumble and quarrel certainly about the soup or the salt or the servants, but who would never by any chance ask him if ho had a preference for pistols or swords. Of course little by little ho became aware that a good many fictions had been spread oiat for his attraction, and that if any one were a victim in the household it certainly was not the Lady Joan. Little by little he saw all this byplay and all the shifts and straits with which the Casa Challoner was kept straight in the world's eyes ; and he gi'ew so used to the iuventiveuess of his mistress that when she did chance to speak the truth ho never believed her. But to all this knowledge he only came by such slow degrees that he grew used to it as it stole ujion him ; and in lier pa.s.sion for him he could not choose but believe — it was too jealous, too violent, too exacting, too terribly ever-present with him, for him to have a chance of doubting its vitality and reality. There were times when his own exhausted passion roused itself, with infinite effort and with a weariness that was almost FRIENDSHIP. 67 repugnance, to respond to tho unending insistance and nndyiug fii"es of hers. A woman wlio is ice to his fire, is less pain to a man than the woman who is fire to his ice. There is hojDe for him in the one, but only a dreary despair in the other. The ardours that intoxicate him in the first summer of his passion serve but to dull and chill him iu the later time. loris, in certain passing moods, would think almost with a shudder, " Heavens ! will she insist on these transports for ever?" This evening, walking homeward, he felt tired of the day, tired of the evening. He had had so many like them. He knew the songs by heart and the smiles too. The routine of the hours, so carefully balanced between the decorum that imposed on the little world she studied, and the amusement and abandonment that were tlie real delights of her nature, seemed to him wearisome and vapid. It was always the same thing. She could take a genuine zest in the small Tartufferies of the tea-parliament ; she could take a sincere delight in the jokes of the Capranica and the jests at Spillman's. She had this supreme advantage — she loved the life she led in both its extremes. But he did not. He had a contempt for the conventicle ; he was tired of the theatre. He bore his share in both psalm and play because he had grown into the habit of doing anything that she dictated to liim. But all the same he had too much good taste not to be tired of both. He walked through the dusky shadows and across the wide white squares to his own little house on the bank of the river, down by the Piazza del Gesu. He let himself in, took the lamp that was burning in the entrance, and went up the staircase to his own favourite chamber. Tho house was cumbered with busts and bronzes, and rolls of old tapestries, and rococo bits of china and carving, and broken fragments of sculpture. For it was iu a manner the warehouse of tlie Casa Challoner, which could itself not decorously be strewn about with more things than would look natural. He went up to his own room and threw his coat off and lighted a cigar. It was a pretty room, looking on a garden that iu spring was green with lemon and orange trees, and had an old statue or two in it, and a wide-arched loggia hung with creeping plants. There was one portrait on the wall among landscapes and weapons and etcliings, relics of the time wlieu he had been an art-student at San Luc's and a duellist in grey old Pisa. It \Yas a portrait with an Egyptian profile, a classic head, a cruel jaw, and a hard mouth; he glanced up at it and turned away with a sort of restless impatience at its presence there. 68 FBIENDSHIP. Indeed, it had no place of right there — being, as it was, the portrait of another man's wife. Bnt it was not this scruple which troubled or distracted him. It had hung there for several seasons. What made him feel impatient of it now was, that for the first time it occurred to him, with a chill, that throughout all the days of his life he would never be able to escape from the staring watchfulness of those menacing eyes. He was like one of those magicians of fable who, having mastered spirits of good and evil for many a year in safety, at last summons from the nether world a spirit that defies his sjiells to banish it again, and abides with him, to his misery, growing stronger than himself. This night he turned restlessly and uneasily from the 'gaze of the portrait, moved his lamp so that the jiicture was left in darkness, and took out from his bookshelves some old numbers of a great European review. He searched through them until he fovind certain poems signed " Etoile." He sat reading until the lamp grew dim and the sparrows in his garden below began to twitter at the ai^proach of dawn. " Can it be possible that this woman has never known what love is ? " he said to himself as he shut the book and went to his bed. The morning had risen. CHAPTEE X. "I WONDER what Yoightel has told her?" thought the Lady Joan to herself on the morrow. She felt a little uneasy : just as she had used to feel under the gaze of the great explorer's green siDcctacles on the housetop in ])amascus, when the champagne was in the ice-pails and Mr. Challoner in his counting-house, and Voightel's little cynical, sclf-coniplaisant chuckle had sounded scarcely more welcome to licr than if it had been the hiss of a cobra, yiie was uncomfort- ably conscious that Yoightel knew nuicli more of her than was agreeable to herself; besides, ho was the bosom friend of that brilliant politician who had been trustee to her marriage .settlements. " I dare say .she knows everything, and I'm sure she's good for nothing," she reflected at noonday ; thereupon she dressed herself FRIENDSniP. 69 in her best, took out of her wardrobe with her Astracan furs an acliiiirable nianucr— frank but not free, blunt but not bokl, cordial and good-natured and higli -spirited— which she kept on hand for people with whom it was not necessary to d. n the meeting- house clothes, yet with whom it might be dangerous to dress quite en debardeur ; and thus arrayed, with her pleasantest smile shining honestly in her grey eyes, she drove herself across the city to the old palace by the Colonna Gardens, in which the Comtesse d'Avesnes had established herself on the previous day ; and finding her at home, would take no denial from Etoile, but insisted on the friend of her father and of dearest Yoightel pass- ing the rest of the day with her. It would be such "a charity. She was quite alone, she said : Mr. Challoner was gone to Orbetello, and lo— poor lo— was obliged to bore himself alfday at the Court with some newly-arrived foreign potentate. "Of course she nuist have led the very deuce of a life, but nobody would ever think it to look at her," the Lady Joan re- flected in ])erplexity as she surveyed her guest at her own break fast-ta 1)1 e. She was quite honest in her conviction. Given a woman with every opportunity to — amuse — herself, why, of coiu'se the woman had — amused — herself: every idiot knew that. She did not like her guest. She coiild not make her out ; she was irritated by her own suspicions that Voightel had told her disagreeable things ; and though she liked patronising artists she did not care for artists of European celebrity when they were of her own sex, and were as proud as Lucifer, as she said angrily to herself, and looked round her rooms with eyes that seemed to her to detect at a glance the china tliat was mended, the canvases that were restored, the antiquities that had been made yesterday, and the certosina that had been glued together last M-eek. Never- theless she made herself charming ; got out some really good things, which she was never without in case any real connoisseur should happen to call ; and over the plump quails, and light wines, of her breakfast-table was the very model of a clever, good-humoured, candid, and hospitable hostess. No one could play the part better than she when she liked ; and Etoile, won by her cordial good humour and bright intel- ligence, reflected that Voightel, when he was prejudiced could be very unjust. Great men can bo so, as well as little ones, sometimes. " Dear old Voightel ! " said the Lady Joan fervently. " I am so fond of him. People call him a cynic, but I'm sure his heart's in the right place. He was like a father to me in Damascus." She had hated Voightel ; as a woman who loves adventures, yet wishes nobody to know that she has any. does hate a grim old ii-onical onlooker, with keen eyes watching through liis 70 FRIENDSHIP. spectacles and the raciest liumour in Cliristendom, on whom all her prettiest fictions and sharpest devices fall harmless as feathers on bronze. But she had always met Voightel with both hands extended and the pleasautest of smiles. " Ah, mir zu liehe, mein Herri" she would always say to him with the frankest delight when they crossed each other in any of the cities of Europe; and Voightel would go and dine with her and enjoy his dinner — as, indeed, there was no reason that he should not ; for it does not matter if you think very ill things of a woman, so long as she is good-looking and makes a fuss with you. " She would pounce on me like a tiger-cat if she dared," Voightel would think to himself as she smiled on him and gave lum mocha, Turkish fashion, and prepared with her own hands for him his water-pipe ; — and it tickled his fancy so much that he was always at his pleasautest with her; so that though she knew that he did not believe in her one bit, she was quite sure that he liked her. So runs the world away; and so, amongst all the spiders cheating all the flies, a spider makes a meal for another spider now and then. Etoile, as she heard Voightel's praises, felt almost guilty for the guilty and absent man who had called this ardent and grateful friend of his the " Prose of Rome." Before she could reply there entered the Count Mimo Burlctta, plump and busy, his mouth full of new scandals and his hands full of new laces. "Am I in your way ? Is that your tailor? " asked Etoile ot her hostess, in perfect good faith, not recognising him by day- light, and only seeing the filmy heaps of the laces he carried. Lady Joan laughed, frowned, whispered hurriedly tliat ho was an old friend — very poor — snubbed the ill-timed visitor and his lace.s, and dismissed him ; then, thinking better of it, ran after him into the ante-room and consoled him, and told him, with a smile, that the Comtcsse d'Avcsncs had taken him for a man-milliner. " Maladelta sia ! " swore Burletta, dropping his laces in his rage, till lie looked like a large fat ram dropping its fleece. " Mahidetta sia I " " With all my heart ! " laughed the Lady Joan, and returned to her drawing-room, taking a piece of yellow Venetian point with her as a reason for her absence in the ante-room. "A collar of Marino Faliero's," she said as she entered. "Isn't it interesting? Perhaps the very one ho was executed in — who knows ? " " Who knows, indeed ? " said Etoile, with a smile. " But why not say Desdemona's at once? It would be more poetic." The Lady Joan threw the lace aside crossly. She had a FRIENDSniP. 71 suspicion that Toightcl's friend was laughing at her, and she did not like to be laughed at ; moreover, she preferred pcojile ■who believed in Faliero, or in anything else that she might choose to tell them. She had some odds and 'ends of real art and real history jumbled together in her brain like the many-coloured snips and shreds in a tailor's drawer in Spain. But they were all tumbled about pell-mell, and the wrong colours came up at the wrong time ; and she had so unfortunate a preference for always drag- ging in the very biggest names and the very grandest events upon every occasion, that her adorer, Mimo Burlctta, who really was learned in such matters, was constantly made very nervous by her blunders. "La Clialloner is beautiful, noble, chaste — a very pearl and queen of women," he would say in his enthusiasm' alxmt her. "But she makes one little, vcVy little mistake— a pot baked yesterday is always a vase of Maestro Georgio's; all her fiddles are Cremonas ; all her sprigged china is Saxe, all her ugly plates are Palissy's ; all her naked people are Michael Angelo's f all her tapestries are Gobelin; all her terra-cottas are Pentclic Marbles. Now, that is a mistake, you know ; the world is too little for so very much treasure. She forgets that she makes her diamonds as cheap as pebbles. But she is a divine creature for all that," would the loyal Mimo always cry in conclusion. At this moment she looked at the lace with regret. It was very yellow, very full of holes, and not very much coarser than what the women make every day along the Eiviera. Why would her guest not believe in it? "Would you mind driving me about to-day?" she said, glancing at the clock, reflecting that she might as well get something in return for this breakfast. " The ])onies are tired. Mine?— no, they're not mine exactly : they're lo's; but of course I have them whenever I like. Yes, they're nice little beasts — little Friuli nags— fast as steam and surefooted as goats. They're very useful. Will you drive me? Thanks. Perhaps you will go with me to a few studios, if you don't mind? Of course it will bore you. You'll find it all second-rate, but to have your opinion will be such a treat to me and such an honour to them ! Are you ready ? " Of course .she carried her point and got into her guest's car- riage and began a round of visits. She was not quite the Lady Joan of the bib-and-tucker, nor was she quite the Lady Joan of the loup-and-domino, but the same adroit mixture of the two, that she had been throughout luncheon. She was sincere, in her eager invitation ; she had a genuine zest in exhibiting any celeljrity in her companionship. It gave her a cachet of talent. She liked to afiect artistic society, her 72 FBIEND8HIP. family had always done so ; only, where they had had all that was greatest in all Europe to choose from, she had to take such offshoots of intellectual power as she could obtain. Sculptors who thought it high art to imitate in stone, schoolboys and sucking babes, cloth trousers jind silk gowns; painters who cut colour like butter and like butter spread it with a knife, then called the mass a chord iu colour or a prelude in carmine; clever writers who appraised their age aright, and saw that it needed not high purpose nor high thought, and trained their gifts accordingly, and, instead of dying like Keats or Buckle, took good incomes from great newspapers, and were not too clever for their jDcace or price — these and their like she would get round her, and make them useful to her in many ingenious ways. But when a great fame came within her reach, she grasped it eagerly, and always was the tirst to ask it out to dinner. These pastiles of art and intellect burned in her rooms gave it a fine aroma, and she liked' people to run about and say, " I met Pietra Infernale there last night ; he means to have his illustrated Furioso ready by Kew Year;" or, "I dined at the Clialloners', to see the Russian novelist, Sacha Silchikoff — wicked, if yon like, but then how witty!" or, " I lunched yester- day with Lady Joan, and met Tom Tonans : he says there is no art nowadays in the E.A. — nothing but millinery and nursery elegiacs." This kind of thing gave her house a smell of the Muses and the Graces, and took off any possible likeness it might otherwise have had to a In-ic-a-hrac shop. Therefore, having now secured the friend of Voightel .for all the remaining daylight of a fine mild afternoon, she drove up and down many streets, and went in and out many studios ; smoked a cigarette here and there ; and finally, at five o'clock, thought it better to wind up Avith a little tableau of respectability and begged to stojD before an old dark house, in an old dark quarter. " I must make you know my dear friends the Scrope-Stairs," she said, cntreatingly. " It's their day, and I promised I would bring you if I could. You won't mind coming, to oblige me f I've told them so much about you. They're such dear, good, clever people ; and they're dying to see you — dying ! " "With which she went through the dusky doorway and began to mount steps innumerable and very steep and dark. Etoilc followed her, unwilling to seem discourteous in such a trifle, and willing to plcaso Lord Ax-chic's daughter when she could. "I've told lo lo meet mo here. The Scropc-Stairs are so fond of him," said the Lady Joan as she clamlicrcd up with agility to the fourth floor. "Oh yes— it is an awful height; FlilE^DSniP. 73 but tliey are so very ill off, poor dear people. Dear old Lord George managed to make ducks-aud-drakcs of five fortunes." She interrupted herself to put aside a dingy tapestry, and led the way through ill-lit passages to a large, dim, naked-looking chamber, where there were congregated in solemn congress somo forty or fifty ladies of that ageTnce described as somewhcro between twenty and sixty, whose centre of attraction was a tea- table, about which they revolved as planets round a sun. " How do you do, dears ? " cried Lady Joan, kissing a gi'eat many of them one after another with ardent effusion. " Is lo come ? No ? Oh, just like him ! Ah, I beg your pardon ; how careless I am! Yes, I have persuaded her, you see. Let me present you to my friend the Comtesse d'Avesnes. You know her best as Etoile. Allow me " Lady Joan saw an electric shock of amazement, a nervous thrill of curiosity mingled with terror, palpitate through all her assembled friends at the name of Etoile — such a tremor of trepi- dation as thrills through a dovecote when in the blue sky hovers a hawk. She enjoyed it amazingly. Though so careful to conciliate Mrs. Grundy she cordially detested that august personage, and loved to " tie a cracker to her tail," as she phrased it, whenever she could do so with impunity. " So honoured, so enchanted, so more than flattered ! For years you have been our idol ! " murmured the youngest of the Scrope- Stair sisters in a twitter of excitement, whilst old Lord George wandered in and made his dignified old Regency bow, and put his glasses to his dim eyes and turned a pretty compliment for sake of Etoile. " But will not people think it a little odd to see her in our house?" murmured the youngest sister, Marjory, a thin, eager person, with a fringe of hair above a nervous face ; whilst her fother occupied Etoile. Lady Joan filled her mouth with tea- cake. " Oh no, dear ; she goes everywhere ; she's hand-and-glove with Princess Vera. Of course there are very queer stories ; but you know I'm never censorious. Where on earth can lobe?" Marjory Scrope coloured; she always did so at a certain name. " We have not seen him yet to-day," she murmured. " As for your friend, I am delighted. Only I thought Mrs. Middleway looked a little— a little— astonished. But you know best always, darling Joan; and any one dear Lord Archie recom- mends " Mrs. Middleway was the wife of one of those Anglican clergy- 74 FniENDSIIIP. men whose flocks are all the straying Protestant sheep, black and white, who dance their cotillons, enjoy their masquerades, play their roulette, drink their pick-me-ups, propitiate heaven with their bazaars, and shriek at trumpery French plays, all over Italy in the winter-time, and of whom the Eoman shep- herd, or the Neapolitan beggar, or the Tuscan vinedresser, staring sullenly at them as they fly by on horseback, will generally mutter, " Non sono Christani." Mrs. jMiddleway was a large, faded, shabby woman, with two daughters to marry. She was extremely particular as to whom she visited, and had a very small income. She would stay at Fiordelisa in the summer, and if any one hinted that, " Well, yes — well, was it not rather — rather strange, you know? " IMrs. Middleway would reply, "The dear Challoners? Oh! what a cruel censorious world we live in ! As if the very openness of the friendship were not sufficient guarantee ! Why, Lady Hebrides lunched there yesterday — I met her ! " But Mrs. Middleway being the soul of i^ropriety, and having two daughters to marry, looked askance at the entrance of a celebrated person, whose name she was inclined to think synonymous with Tophet ; wondered what that brown velvet gown had cost, drew herself up a little stiffer than usual, and murmured to her neiglibour that that sweet Lady Joan was always so imprudently kind-hearted; Lady Joan, judging by her own noble self, never would believe there could be anything wrong anywhere. The neighbour, who was a very solemn spinster, with blue spectacles, who had written a very learned book upon the Privileges and Penalties of the Vestals, murmured back that society was so mixed nowadays that it was nally dangerous to enter it at all ; one never knew whom one might not be exposed to meeting. " Ah, no, you may well say so. There is no lino drawn," said the clergyman's wife, with a sigh, as she broke a tea-cake. "What can society be without a line ? " And she smoothed her shabby silk gown, and, good Christian though she was, could not help disliking a woman who wore brown velvet, silver-fox fur, and silk-embroidered cashmeres, and had old Mechlin lace at the hem of her skirt. To the Countess of Hebrides such vanities were permissible ; they were, like other evidences of the favouritism of Providence, not to bo questioned in justice or propriety. But on only an aiiist ! " When one thinks how they rami have been purchased ! " she murmured to the spinster who had written the learned book on the penalties of the Vestals. The spinster shook her head. FRIENDSHIP. 75 " Very wrong of Lady Joan to have brought her," she said, in a severe and cliolcric whisi^er. " Ihre one always was safe." " Dear Lady Joan ! she is so impriulent and so good- natured ! " sighed Mrs. Middleway, and had her feelings further harrowed by a glimpse of the old Mcehlin lace of the bulayeuse underneath the immoral brown velvet of Etoile. The glimpse she got of the Mechlin halayeuse filled her with a kind of savage pain. Real old Mechlin ! — sweeping the dust ! These were the kinds of things that made it at times almost hard even for a cha])lain's wife to believe in a beneficent Creator. Meanwhile Etoile, vinconscious of the emotions she excited, smiled on the antiquated homage of Lord George, wondered why she had been brought to this parliament of dames, and remained as indifferent to the stare of the fifty ladies as slie was to the crowd on the Pincio, or to the monstrari digito at all times. The millclack of tongues grew very quiet round her; the tea did not circulate briskly, the muffins were not buttered with honeyed welcome; they did not like to talk before her; she had come from Paris, and had the reputation of a wit. Altogether she made them very uncomfortable. " So kind of Lady Joan," whispered the clergyman's wife. "And so kind of the Stairs — they always were kindness itself — but it is a pity, because to this house every one has always thought they were quite safe in bringing their daughters. Yes, a mistake certainly, though well meant, no doubt; but when ono has young girls can one be too careful ? " "Delighted to have had the honour of receiving so much genius and so much brilliancy into my sad old house," said quivering old Lord George, with a bow of Brummell's time, and his hand on his heart. Ho was a feeble old man, but had been very handsome in his time, and still knew a woman to his taste when he saw one. Lady Joan was not to his taste : only ho never dared say so in his daughters' hearing. " So charmed to have had such an honour, and any use we can bo, — and we may be allowed to call, may we not ? — and pray remember our Thursdays — every Thursilay till June — tliough we may hardly hope that you will deign," etc., etc., said Marjory in her most fervent manner, her beads, and her trinkets, and her spare figure, and her little rings of hair all eager with courtesy. Under these cordial valedictions Etoile went to her carriage •wondering why she had been taken to these excellent folks. Lady Joan's brow was stormy ; it was half-past five, and her friend, tlie Prince loris, had not come. She loved to take him there — in the first place, because it wearied him to death, and in the second because it amused her extremely to stride into that circle of " goody-goodies," as she 76 FRIENDSHIP. termed thein, with lier bands iu her j^ockets and her Prince at her heels. The incongruity of it tickled her fancy, and she knew how well it served her for all these matrons and spinsters to cry in choriis to any calumniators that she might have, " Oh ! the purest friendship ! The most innocent intercourse ! "Why, those excellent Scrope-Stairs receive them together — as if they ever u'ould, if there were," etc., etc. The Scrope-Stairs sisters were charmed to have him brought there at any price ; he was their one court-card, their one riband of grace and honour. The " sex of valour " was never repre- sented in their rooms save by some clergyman, or missionary, or unwary traveller caught in his ignorance, or on occasion by Mr. Silverly Bell, if he had any particular enemy that he desired to drown in the teapot, with Mrs. Grundy to say the De Profundis over the defunct. Lord and Lady George Scrope-Stairs, with their daughters, were the chief mainstay and prop to that Temple of All the Virtues which Lady Joan had set herself to build. They were, indeed, very poor, but iu compensation they were so eminently, so pre- eminently — respectable ! Not because their names were in " Debrett " and " Buj-ke " — plenty of scamps are in both, who will hurt you very much if you are seen with them — but because from their fourth floor there went out an eternal odour of the very severest morality. To have sipped of the tea from their teapot was to have been baptised with the waters of respectability for life, and to have eaten of their muffins was to have been scaled with the seal of purity for all time. True, their tcaj^ot was terrible as the cauldron of Macbeth's weird sisters, and hissed till youth and innocence, excellence and genius aud honour were all stewing, cold, drowned things, in its steam. But what of that ? Mrs. Grundy does not mind a little scandal— if you will only whisper it. Lord George had been a dandy and a beau when the century and himself were both young; he had had big fortunes and spent them all, and had lived many years iu exile, a sad and broken man ; shivering by his chilly stove, and tottering out when the day was fine to have a mild little joko, when his daughters were out of hearing and any chance word awoke the old memories in him, as a trumpet-call wakes the spirit in the worn-out charger waiting death wearily between the waggon's shafts. In his own house liis daughters cowed him ; tlicy were iron to him though wax to the rest of the world ; taking in the world's eternal comedy tlioso indispensable but subordinate rules known iu stage-talk as "utility i)arts." They were plain, imssks, perfidious ; but the people they FRIENDSHIP. 77 toadied, and tbo friends they flattered, rather liked them the better for tliis. If anybody wanted a shoolgirl looked after, a bore taken off their hands, a disagreeable errand done, or a train met on a rainy day, there were the Scrope-Stairs to do it. Provided you were only quite a i">roi-)cr person, yon could always have a Scrope-Stair to do what you wanted — from ringing your bell to slandering your enemy, from pouring out your tea to escorting your coffin. Their usefulness was of an elasticity quite inexhaustible, and their ingenuity in consolatory sophisms was as great as that of the chamberlain of Marie Leczinska, who, when she longed to play cards on the. day of a funeral, assured her that the game of piquet was deep mourning. And, consider- ing what a comfort they were, the Scrope-Stairs were not expen- sive — some drives, some dinners, some visits to you in the summer, some boxes at the opera in the winter — with these trifles these treasures were secured. Lady Joan, whose unerring eye for her own advantage never misled her, had discerned the capabilities and the advantages of friendship with these excellent young persons when first she had wintered in Italy. She saw that they had not, like her, the power to make all men their brothers, but that they were exactly what was wanted to induce Society to let her enjoy herself with her brothers. Determined, like the spirited woman she was, to dance her Carmagnole over the conventionalities, she saw the necessity of having somebody to swear that she was only curtsying, and not dancing at all. So she instantly rushed into devoted friendshii?, kissed them all at every meeting, and wrote them a dozen times a week sugary little notes beginning " Dearest darling," and ending " With a tliousand loves." It was not the style that suited her best, but she could do it when it was wanted. This effervescence had cooled down a little by this time, but it had left a valuable residuum ; the froth was gone, but the wine remained. The Scrope-Stairs had found out what her " thousand loves " were worth, but they kejit their knowledge to themselves ; and, pouring out her tea on their Thursdays, continued to kiss and be kissed. The loyalty of the Scrope-Stairs (whom the profane jesters of Society would call the Sweep-Stairs) was quite ]iriceless in its unutterable value to the Casa Challoner. Indeed, but for the Scrope-Stair friendship Society might jicrhaps never have been friendly. But these young persons were so well-born, so decorous, so eminently estimable, so sternly respectable, and so stiffly irreproachable, that they really could have made Society accept even odder things than Fiordelisa, and stranger things 78 FBIENDSEIP. than the Lady Joan, with her hands in her coat-pockets and her lovers behind her, striding in to a clergjnian's tea-party. They were, it is true, very jealons, very curious, very cruel, could slander viciously, toady rapaciously, and injure irrepar- ably ; but these were trifles, and were, indeed, quite lost siglit of iinder the throng of amiable qualities which they developed for people richer than themselves. Their moral qualities were their strong point; they were armed cap-a-pie in every kind of virtue ; they had even charity — when they were paid very well for it. The old folks did not very cordially join in the charity. They belonged to an old-fashioned school, and did not understand the comiirehensiveness of modern friendship, which means anything anybody likes, from rapturous love to deadly hate. But their money was spent, their daughters were formidable, their home was dreary, and so they obediently did as they were told, and the old courtier put on his faded red riband to grace Lady Joan's respectable parties, and the old wife carried her knitting-needles and lambswool on to the terrace at Fiordelisa : and all was as it should be, and their venerable names and persons were as towers of strength built up beside the Casa Challoner. A bolder woman would not have cared for these things, and a sillier woman would not have known their value; but Lady Joan was not above using these triiles and turning tliem to good account. Even an old red riband, and a pair of knitting-needles, she knew were not weapons to be despised in her battle of life. Lady Joan was like that well-trained elephant which can at will root up an oak or pick up a i)in ; and Lady Joan knew that there are many more pins than oaks, and that a pin stamped on too hastily may lame even an elephant for life. So nothing was too small for her, wise woman that she was. A pattern of a new pinafore for an anxious mother ; a damascened scimetar lent for a tableau vivant ; a compliment at the right minute to an ugly woman; a young baritone allowed to scream himself hoarse over her guitar; a shoddy Crccsus dazzled with the statesmen and the duchesses in her photograph book ; a frank, beaming smile in the face of a bore ; a jDressing invitation to a nervous nonentity ; a flattering deference to a wealthy pomposity ; a pretty set of conventionalities put on stiff and new liku her ruffs and her cuffs; a i)resent of fruit to folks rich enough to buy up llesjjerides ; a loan of tlie jiony-carriago to people who owned great studs and rare racers in Suffolk or Norfolk ; nothing wasted, notliing thrown away, every one con- ciliated, cverytliing remembered — herein was her success. She beamed on the old folks and the rich folks, no matter how they Ijorcd her, because they were solid as bullion, bought pictures. FRIENDSHIP. 79 and were the St. Peters of the gates of Society. And she beamed on the young ones and the poor ones, because who could tell •what they might not turn out to be some day ? The corporal's knapsack may hold the marshal's truncheon, and a little lad once trotted about with baskets of washed linen who lived to be King of Sweden. Thus she got her pceans sung in all stages of society, and broke down her oaks and picked up her pins and made her path clear, and endured an amount of ennui incalcul- able, and listened radiantly to platitudes interminable, and made herself as agi'ceable to poor little Doremi screaming his cadenza and talking of his theatrical future, as to solemn Sir Joseph, with the face of a pig and the art-knowledge of a butler, and a huge art gallery in England, smelling of paint and plaster, and requiring many framed acres of " Guidos, Correggios, and stuiT." Of course all this cost her trouble, unending trouble. But she kept foremost before her the final words of Candide : " II faut cultiver notre jardin." She had a passion-flower in her garden, of course ; but her real care and culture were her cabbages. She enjoyed her cabbages as much as her i^assion-flowers. Whether she were sending her horse at racing pace across the grass that covers the dead Etruscan cities ; or waltzing at topmost speed down the vast palace ball-rooms ; or bargaining for old gems in dusky cellars of the Trastevere ; or outwitting the Ghettos in the purchase of brocades and canopies; or smiling in the faces of haughty or witty women whom she hated ; or swinging through the feathered maize to call the lazy peasants to their duties; or launching shaits of malice through her black satin vizor at the Veglioue — whatever it was that she was doing she did it with zest and force, and with a reality of enjoyment that was contagious. Here was the secret of her success. To her nothing was little. This temper is always popular with Society. To enjoy your- self in the world, is, to the world, the prettiest of indirect compliments. The chief offence of the poet, as of the philosopher, is that the world as it is fails to satisfy them. Society, which is after all only a conglomerate of hosts, has the host's weakness — all its guests must smile. The poet sighs, the ])hilosopher yawns. Society feels that they depreciate it. Society fuels more at ease without them. To find every one acceptable to you is to make yourself acceptable to every one. Hived bees get sugar because they will give back honey. All existence is a scries of equivalents. " What do you think of my dear friends? " asked Lady Joan, as they drove away. 80 FRIENDSHIP. Etoile hardly knew what to say. " No doubt they are very estimable persons," she answered. " But I admit, a society like tliat is liardly what I am used to. I counted thirty-eight ladies, very ill-dressed, who I am sure were all muttering Apage Satanas, and most of them looked in a fierce state of warfare with a world which had failed to ai^pre- ciate and — to marry them." Lady Joan laughed. " Oh, they're horrid old cats; I quite agree with yon there. But cats scratch, you know. It's best to coax them. As for the dear Scrope-Stairs, I assure you to know them is to admire them ; they are so indefatigable, so true, so charitable. I love them all so much ! " she added, with an irrepressible grin on her handsome face. "Besides, you know, women are so useful — haven't you ever found that out yet ? " " No ; perhaps because I want nothing of them." Lady Joan decided in her own mind that Yoightel must have told her everything. Voightel never had ; — but conscience is a magic-lantern that throws distorted figures on any white blank- wall. " I think you are wrong," she answered aloud, with the odd candour which sometimes characterised this woman, who perhaps had been born for better things than she had achieved. " I think you are wrong. Nobody knows what they may want. Things hinge so horribly on accident. People who used to snub Louis NajDolcon thought themselves quite safe; they were always afraid he should borrow a sovereign. I knew a man who gave liim a drop of sherry out of a flaslc in a hunting field after he had had a heavy fall one day in Leicestershire ; and twenty years after- wards that very drop of sherry got the man a concession for public works that brought him in half a million of money. There ! " " But surely he gave the sherry out of good nature, not calculation ? " " Humph ! I don't know. ITe was not the sort of man to stop his hor.sc to jiick up a farmer. At any rate he did the civil thing, and see what he got by it. Now, that is just what I mean by being civil to womon. They bore you; well, they bore me. I don't deny that. But they can do one so much good — just for a drop of siierry they can get you such a big concession." " You would make a good political leader," said Etoile, with a smile. Lady Joan was flattered ; thongli perhaps she would not have been so miicli so had she seen into her cninpanion's thoughts. Etoile descended at her own restiug-])Iaco and sent her horses homo with Lady Joan, wIk^ when out of Jicr hearing, had them turned in the direction of the house of loris. FRIENDSHIP. 81 " The Priuce not home yet ? " she said sharply to his servant. " Well, tell him I've been here ; and tell him if he's not in at half-past seven he'll get no dinner ; we shan't wait for him," The servant bowed humbly, and in his soul prayed heaven to send his master's dama an accidtnfe. Then she had herself borne again along the twilit Corso homeward, and laughed as she lay back amongst the cushions recalling the faces of the thirty-eight matrons and virgins around the sacred sun of the tea-urn. " How scared they looked ! " she thought to herself. " Well, it may all come in useful some day." For Lady Joan was a long-sighted woman. When Etoile went up her wide steps into the great palace, pale and melancholy with Overbeck's frescoes, she saw a coat lined with furs lying on the couch of the antechamber, and in the dusk of her rooms, that were filled with the aromatic scent of the wood fires, and burning pine-cones, a slender hand was held out to her, and a soft melodious voice said : "Will you forgive me that I ventured to wait for you? I could not bear to be turned away a second time." The dark, delicate head of the Prince loris was seen fitfully in the gloom of the evening light. Dinner at the Casa Challoner that night was on the table at half-past seven. The husband and wife sat down alone. Her brow was as the thunders that rest on the brow of Soracte. At a quarter to nine loris entered. " I was kept late at the Casa di Pusparmio," he explained. He endeavoured to awake their interest in that excellent institu- tion, but vainly. Lady Joan ordered up for him the shreds of the fish and the Jcgs of the woodcocks. Such discipline she considered to be good for hini. Mr. Challoner grumbled over his claret that the sauce had been ruined by waiting ten minutes for nothing. It was a silent repast, only varied by scolding from the top of the table, as a long dull day of rain may be varied by muttcrings of thunder from on high. They had many such. Life, when it runs on three castors, seldom runs upon velvet. She was of oijinion with SganarcUc, that "cinq ou six coups do batons entre gens qui s'aimcnt ne font quo ragaillardir I'affection." But, like Sganarelle also, she always ijremised that the right to give the blows should be hers. 82 FUIENLBUIP. CHAPTER XI. " You must come up to Fiordclisa," said the Lady Joan with much urgency, a few days hiter. Prince loris looked uneasy and ill-pleased, but added with courteous effort : " Fiordelisa may bo so haj^py as to interest you, perhaps, by its age and its story; its greatness has long dejmrted." " What can Fiordelisa be ? " thought Etoile. The Lady Joan explained, unasked, as she drove over the Campagna. She was always explaining. Explanation is a blunder usually: whoever explains is, by self-implication, in error ; but she was a mistress of the art, and found it answer with most people. She lived in a state of perpetual apology. The meeting-house clothes were a standing apology for the cakes and ale. It half-amused Etoile as she began to perceive it, and half- disgusted her. To a woman who was utterly indifferent to what the world said of her at any time, this struggle in another to combine self-indulgence with self-justification seemed the drollest of anomalies. " Why not be Messalina, if it ])loasc her; or why not be St. Cecilia, if she liked it V " thought Etoile. " But why pass her life trimming up wrong as right, in sipping brandy and declaring it is cold tea?" Put that was the mistake of a careless and conterai)tuous temper ; Lady Joan knew better. She knew that it was much wiser to pass off your cognac as souchong, and that you may take as much brandy as ever you like, if only you can convince everybody else it is tea. When Theodore Hook wanted to get drunk, not to scandalise the clul) he was in, he called for lemonade — the waiters knew what to bring him. Lady Joan called for cold tea so loudly that she might have been heard from the banks of Tiber to her own old hunting grounds by Abana and Pharphar. Those who waited on her knew what to bring her. Meanwhile that overgrown club. Society, was quite sure it was only tea. Society will believe anything rather than ever believe that Itself can be duped. If you have only assurance enough to rely implicitly on this, there is hardly anything you cannot induce it to accept. FRIENDSHIP. 83 Her society, having ouce decided to believe that Lady Joan only drank cold tea, "svere ready to go to the scaffold in a body rather than admit that she even knew the colour of brandy. Her society M'as limited, indeed ; but then it was the club she was in — the only one that mattered to her : all her dear passers-by that wanted teacups and triptychs, and all her small gentilities and freeborn republicans that asked her to dinners and dances. Besides, her brandy would not have tasted half so good if she had not had the fun of persuading everybody else it was tea. There is an indescribable dclightfulness to a certain order of minds in smuggling. She now proceeded to explain elaborately: Fiordelisa was loris' old castle, but they lived there ; it helped him a little. lo was so poor ; lo was so weak ; they were so fond of him — poor lo! without her eye over him and Mr. Challoucr's counsel he would be ruined to-morrow. Yes, of course, it did aid him very much, their living there ; and they had done no end of good to the place. Such a wretched old barn as it had been when they had gone there first of all ! Nobody could imagine the trouble she took ! But then when she went in for anything she always did do it thoroughly ; not like lo — poor lo ! — who would never have a centime off the estate if she did not get it for him. How she slaved 'over those silkworms, for instance! such beastly- smelling things as they were; and she scarcely stirred out of the house for three months, she had to watch them so ; but then she made three hundred pounds nearly by the raw silk in the year; and only think what three hundred pounds meant to poor lo ! Thus she discoursed, whipping the ponies. She was so used to making the discourse that it ran oft' her tongue like her raw silk off the reels of the winder. More or less varied, according to her auditors, it did duty to a thousand listeners in the twelve- mouth's time, and induced Mrs. Grundy to submit to Fiordelisa, and even sometimes to visit there. " The place was quite poverty-stricken when we came," she said, with a cut of the whip to the pony Pijjpo. " When we knew him first he was on the brink of ruin ; v:e pulled him straight. Through extravagance? — oh no, weakness. lo's as weak as water — give his head away if he'd got nothing else to give. Just like St. Martin and his cloak. He is like a child about business, too ; a baby would wind him round its finger ; he can't say no. If it wasn't for me he'd maintain all the ague-shaking souls of the Agro Romano, I'm sure he would." " Is he duly grateful to you '? " — Etoile, lying back in the carriage, began to pity the absent man vaguely. Lady Joan shot a glance at her. " Oh, I don't know," she muttered, a little sullenly. " Ho knows he couldn't keep straight without rue, if you mcau that. 84 FRIENDSHIP. We've spent a great deal on the place too ; but then we've got very fond of it. I've made three new vignas this year ; got my vines ont from Portugal. I gnibbed up an old garden and planted it with Xeres. I shall make sherry in three summers more." "And if your friend ever marry?" said Etoile, with the indifference she felt, only hazarding a natural conjecture. The Lady Joan's eyes flashed as steel does in the rays of the sun. " Marry ! " She drew her breath and set her teeth, but in another moment she smiled. " Ah, yes, I do so wish he would, if he married properly. But, you see, poor lo — well, he's very silly about me ; thinks there's nobody like me, and all that. But it's all nonsense, I'm always telling him not to be a goose." " He lives in hopes of Mr. Challoner's euthanasia ? And yet he lets Mr. Challoner plant his vines ? " " Bother you ! How much has Voightel told you ? " thought the Lady Joan, with wrath in her soul ; but she laughed and grinned pleasantly. She had a trick of grinning, but then she had very handsome teeth to show. " Mr. Challoner die! My dear, he'll live for ever ! I believe he was cut out of a tree of lignum-vitas. I'm sure he looks as if he had been. By-the-by, he wanted to come to-day, but some telegrams came in and kept him — heaven be praised for all its mercies ! We get rid of him in the summer, you know. He goes to the German baths somewhere or other with little Effie ; and Eflie's Swiss governess. Have you seen that Swiss girl ? Horrid little upstart; I believe she came out of a cafe-chantaiit at Vevey. Jlr. Challoner chose her. Of course Effie's taught to disobey me, and lie, and be rude in all kinds of ways that she can. Oh, my dear, you don't know half the troubles /have to put up with." " And people think Mr. Challoner such an excellent man ! I suppose you did also once ? " " I — I always thought him the most odious cad in the whole universe. I've never changed about that," responded his wife, with one of those sudden bursts of temper and truthfulness which occasionally upset all her best plans and tallest card-house of con- ventionalities ; then, conscious of a slip of the tongue, she coloured, and was glad that Pippo took to pulling. " lo's very unhajipy about you," she said suddenly, " Ho declares you don't like him — is it true ? " "Not at all; ho has beautiful manners, I think him an admirable laqitais dc pilace." Lady Joan screamed with laughter, well pleased. " Won't 1 tell him that ! Poor lo ! I supjiosc you wonder lo see him about our house so much ; but, you see, he's very useful to us and we're useful to him, and he's all alouo at home, and BO " FEIENDSHIP. 85 " I do not wonder at all." Lady Joan was silent. She was revolving in her mind whether it was worth while to try and impose the fiction of friendship on a woman who lived in Paris and who knew Voightel. There were persons before whom Lady Joan threw off her meeting-honse clothes and danced her Carmagnole in all the frank and boisterous abandonment natural to her. She wondered whether it would be safe to do it here. Etoile made her uneasy ; she could not tell what manner of woman this great artist was. A grave, studious, contemptuous contemplation that seemed to gaze at her from the eyes of her new acquaintance worried her, and made her feel unsafe and uncertain. Like all cowards, she was occasionally nervous. Etoile made her so. She desired to conciliate her ; but she did not know how to do it. She desired to blind her, but she had a restless feeling that it would not be safe to do so. All the weapons with which she was accustomed to fence with most people, and all the ruffs and farthingales with which she arrayed herself to please the meeting-house and Mrs. Grundy, seemed all of a sudden blunt and useless, coarse and foolish. She could not take tliem np and put them on with the fortunate mixture of swagger and propriety common to her. " I wish slie had never come near me," she thought with a useless irritation, as she turned the ponies up the rough grassy road which led to Fiordelisa on this balmy and sunny morning of earliest winter ; and she said aloud : " I sent lo up after breakfast ; he'll have everything ready, unless, indeed, he's given the luncheon to the dogs and the wino to a pack of beggars — which would be very like him," she added, with a laugh that was not easy or good-tempered, as she rattled the ponies up the sloping way between the reddening maples and the leafless vines. loris came out of the wide-arched doorway to meet them as the ponies — his ponies — were pulled up before the entrance. He wore a black velvet dress ; he had a broad-leafed felt hat in his hand; lie had a red ribbon round his throat, and a hound at his side. He looked like an old Velasquez picture as the sun fell on his face and the depth of the shadow of the door was still behind him in tlie background. " Take my furs, lo. Oh, how stupid you are ! " cried the Lady Joan. " Do you know what the Coratesse d'Avesnes says of you? She says — (now, mind that basket!) — she says she thinks you are an admirable Jaqnais de place! " loris reddened under his delicate dark skin, but bowed low. " I am glad that the Comlesse d'Avesnes can think that I have even so much small merit as that in me," he answered, lifting eyes of soft reproach. His eyes obeyed liis will and uttered 86 FrxIENDSHIP. what he wanted for him more eloquently than most men's tongues will do. " M. le Prince," said Etoile, with a smile, as she gave him her hand, " when I see you mounted higher in the social scale, I will accredit you with it. At present — mind that basket ! " loris gave an impatient gesture, and Lady Joan laughed, not altogether well pleased at the imitation of her tones and her order. " How he will hate her ! " thought the Lady Joan, consoling herself with the reflection as they strolled through the house on to the terrace, with the dusky wooded hills and the heights of Eocca di Papa behind them, and, before them, beyond the now leafless vineyards and the gardens golden with orange fruit and bright with Bengal roses, the width of the green Campagna, with the sun shining on the far yellow streak that was Tiber, and the purple cloud which they knew was Eome, dusky with her many roofs and ruins. But for once Lady Joan was mistaken : loris was rather inclined to hate himself. " Do I indeed look such a fool to her? " he thought constantly as they went through the house, showing her the various old pictures, and marbles, and tapestries, and Etruscan treasures found in the soil without. The old castle had lost much of its whilom mag- nificence, but it was very ancient, and had a noble and honourable melancholy in it which ill-accorded with the Lady Joan's cigar- boxes and ulsters, crewel work and caricatures, coats of new paint, and panes of crude glass ; it looked profaned and disturbed, and had that air of resentment at its own profanation which ancient places do seem to wear under sacrilege, as though they were sentient things. They lunched in the dining hall, where Lady Joan had arranged all her china, pottery, porcelain, and the rest on shelves, to bo handy for the eye and purse of that much-suffering and largely- spending class of society, " the people passing through Rome." loris sat at the bottom of his table, but Mr. Challoner's wife sat at llie top, and gave all the orders of the day, and chattered throughout the meal of her wines and her pheasants, her fowls and her fruits. There was a portrait of the dead mother of loris on one of the walls. Etoile Avondercd that he left it there. " IsFiordelisa really yours? " she said suddenly to liim when the Lady Joan had for a moment left them, her voice alone being heard from afar olT in violent altercation with the henwife, who had let the last score of fowls be sold too cheap in the market. " Fiordelisa!" ho echoed in surprise. "Yes, certainly — it has been in my family twelve centuries." "i\Ir. Challonerhas a lease of it, I suppose? " " Oh no ; I would never let it." FBIENDSTIIP. 87 "Yon lend it to tliera, then?" "Lady Joan docs me the hononr to like to use it— yes." " And do yonr people like to be scolded ? " " Oh, that is nothing ; they do not mind." " But what right has she to scold them ? Becanse she scolds you; is that it?" " Because she scolds everybody and everything. Some women do/' said loris, with a shrug of his shoulders. Etoilc smiled, and the smile made him restless. It was only amusement, but he thought it contempt. From the other side of the tall cypress hedge the voice of Lady Joan came in strong anger, high above the cackle of poultry and the shrill outcries of the peasants. In another moment she appeared in sight, a mangled mass of feathers dangling from one band and a hunting-whip in the other. " "Why will you let that beastly dog loose? " she said to loris. " He has killed two of my best Brahmas. I bought them only last week — forty francs a pair, and such layers ! I have told them if I catch him loose again I'll hang him." loris looked up with a flush on his face. " You have never beaten Imperator again ? " "Haven't I? — within an inch of his life. He won't forgot killing the Brahmas. AYhat did you let him loose for ? I {old you he never was to be loose — great clumsy brute, breaking the plants to i")icces." "Cara Joanna! It is impossible to keep a dog always chained." " Don't keep him at all, then. I shall hang him if I catch him loose, that's all. I have just told Pietro so, and he's sobbing liko a baby, and Mariannina screaming! — I should think you lioard them here. Break Imperator's heart? Bubbish ! Break his bones, if you like. I shall if he kills my poultry. You are such an idiot, lo, about tliat dog." And she went back as she came. " Will you forgive my leaving you a second ? I must look at the dog," said loris hurriedly, with the colour still in his cheeks. "1 will come and sec him too," Etoile answeral him. " But why do you let him bo beaten ? Sho can have no right to do that." _ loris gave one of those gestures with whicli an Italian says, better than by all words, that what the gods will be must suffer, and their fiat is stronger than ho. They found the hound in his kennel, and he crept out timidly, and shivering still, with pain as with fear, and fawned upon his master. loris caressed him, kissed him, called him endearing words, and did his best to comfort him. " But why not have sooner protected him ? " thought Etoilo, 88 FRIENDSHIP. wtitching tho mutual affection of the man and the animal, and making friends with the hound herself, whilst loris called to his laud-steward : " Tista, will you see to this ? Take care that when the Signora is here Imperator is kept always in kennel. Of course he is to be loose at all other times ; and if he kill or break any- thing, do you replace it, and keep it out of the accounts. I will pay you for it apart. Only take care that the Signora does not see him free, and that she never hears it if he hunts anything. You understand ? " " I understand his Excellency. But in the summer ? " " There are months before that," said loris impatiently ; and, ttiruing to Etoile, he excused himself for giving orders before her, and asked her to come round with him to see from another point of view where Eocca di Papa hung above in the fir- woods. " Will you not let Imperator loose to come with us? " she asked. " I could not do that. She would not like it." " Is the dog hers, then ? " "No, mine." " And you cannot do as you like with your own ? " He was silent. "I heard all your orders to your bailiff," she pursued. "Forgive me; but, instead of all that compliratcd arrangement with him about the dog, would it not be straighter and simpler just to say to Lady Joan that you do not allow him to be beaten, and that you always wish him to be free ? If she be only a guest, how can you object ? " loris sighed impatiently. " Oh, that would not do with her. You scarcely compre- hend. She is so used to have her own way — I could not dis- please her." " Poor Imperator ! And yet you seem fond of him." " Imperator only bears what I do." lie nuittered the words low, as if they csca])ed from him against his will, as they reached the little i)ath that wound up into the hills amongst the myrtle-bushes, and the tufts of tramarina, and the wild growth of oleander which made the mountain-side a blaze of rose-colour in tho days of June. " What is the secret of Fiordelisa ? " Etoile wondered, as the ladies of Craig Moira had wondered before her. Fiordelisa was the Lady Joan's fee-simple of loris. Had he never let lier within the walls of Fiordelisa, Liberty would not have outspread its wings and fled away from him. Fiordelisa, crowning its hillside amidst cypress woods and olive groves warm in the light of the western sun, and facinc FRIENDSHIP. 89 the opal and amclhyst lines of tho mountains — Fiordelipa was the last bead of a long chai)lct of noble strongholds once belong- ing to the great Princes of loris. When Lady Joan had been seven months in Eonie, still languid from the heats of tho East, the summer in the city alarmed her. She averred that she would die of malaria, and that her lord was such a churl he would never give her the means to get a breath of fresher air. Tho churl had but recently joined her, and could be repre- sented in any colours she chose ; and she, and the churl also, had breakfasted and lunched several times at that sunny solitary palace standing empty on the fair hillside, and the lust of desire for it had entered into her soul. Therefore she wept, she went into hysterics; she had even a week's fever. loris laid the keys of Fiordelisa at her feet. What less could he do? She affected reluctance ; suggested danger from the wrath of the churl ; but in the end relented and accepted. It was but a dreary old place, said its master, and he sent up from the city all the modern necessities oi daily life ; had its mighty old chambers swept out, the wild garden put a little in order ; sent his horses up there, and welcomed the wife of Mr. Glial loner to a viUeggiatura. Figuratively, he had put handcuffs on his own wrists. " What a madman !" thought Mr. Challoncr when he heard of the arrangement ; but aloud he said merely, " You are very good. Will it not bore you ? No ? I fear, indeed, my wife is not strong enough for travel. It is most unfortunate." For Mr. Challoner of the unchanging countenance always bore himself to loris as he had done to his wife's friends in tho East, with the grave face and the ceremonious manner with which one Eoman augur of old addressed another augur in imblic. Mr. Challoner was like Mrs. Siddons : he never left off the stage face and the stage tone even if ho were only buying a yard of huckaback and inquiring if it would wash. " Go to the castle," he said to his wife ; " go to the castle, since yon wish it, but take some good girl or other with you. Mind that." And having thus made due provision for the safety of appearances, he departed for the baths in Germany, leaving his wife on tho hillside — to recover her health. People wondered at the husband's complacency. They would not have wondered if they had been able to see into his recollec- tions. Everything is comparative. Fiordelisa, as compared with Orontes and Euphrates, Abana and Pharphar, seemed to IMr. Challoner propriety itself, lie himself wondered very much 90 FBIENDSniP. at loris. But this is a bad compliment that husbands will always pay their wives. Lady Joan's eyes sparkled as she crossed the threshold. Here was an occupation of territory that meant (to her far- seeing eyes at least) an annexation for life. Like Prussia and Eussia, she only wanted to get her foot once across the frontier, and the soil was hers for ever and aye. Once installed in Fiordelisa, who should live, bold enough, or shrewd enough, ever to turn her out of it ? There are some women so happily constituted that they con- sider that for the gifts of themselves all the treasures of earth would be scarcely recompense enough. Lady Joan was one of these. "When he surrendered Fiordelisa he had surrendered his future into her hands. He had not known it. But she had. To dislodge a tenant unwilling to go is at all times difficult; the tiles must be taken off ere even law can aid. But a woman like the Lady Joan would sit still, bareheaded and fast-rooted, under the open skies till the tiles were put on again, and defy heaven and earth and all their elements to move her. Possession is nine points of the law ; and with nine points it would have been odd indeed if Lady Joan should not have managed, by hook or by crook, to obtain the tenth. loris, with that touch of simplicity that a man's finest astuteness is always mingled with, imagined that he only lent Fiordelisa for a summer or two. Lady Joan laughed to herself to think how easily she had drawn away this trump card from him. " Get me out ! " she thought to herself. " Not when I'm once let in." A great statesman being once asked what was the surest method of success, replied, " Immovability." Lady Joan understood the wisdom of the saying. "When she installed herself at Fiordelisa gaily as one who only bivouacs for a midsummer picnic, she hung her cashmere upon the first peg ?\\(i saw in the hall. " There is my fee-simple for life," she thought. "What can any man do against a woman who, long ere a hint be given her, has resolved that she never will take one ? loris, who thought of his country as Musset did — " Que les Rolcils de Juin font Vamour passager "—in tho midsummer months looked forward to a romance bright and brief as the liio of the fireflies amongst the corn ; a midsummer madness befit- ting the months when the oleander burns on the world like fire, and the nightingales sing under flowering myrtles. But Lady Joan knew better. FRIENDSHIP. 81 The castle was ancient, liononrablo, majestic : like an oM greybeard who has lived long enougli to see his children and friends all die before him. These old jilaces, grand with the art and architectnre of a statelier and freer time than ours, touch strangely poets, artists, thinkers— asses, as the Lady Joan would have said. Its antiquity could not " scare " her, nor its sanctity silence her. She entered on its possession with the zeal of an encamping gipsy and the ruthlessness of an army of occupation. She drew on a big pair, of untanned boots, strode over the lands, marked the waste there was, and said to herself that she would soon alter all that. Before the summer was gone she had installed herselt mistress there; before the winter had come she had taught its master that she meant to be mistress and master both. When next the springtime came round she did not consult his pleasure, or feel any necessity for hysterics ; she took for granted that she should go to Fiordelisa. She did go. This time Mr. Challoner accompanied her, and took with him some packets of English seeds and the model of a kitchen boiler. The family installed itself at Fiordelisa audaciously as Tchiganes, sagaciously as Prussians. They cut walks, levelled trees, made the garden a fair imitation of the gravelled parallelograms of South Kensington, closed in the loggia with doors of coloured glass as nearly like a railway station as they could manage to make them ; asked out English and Americans to dinner and breakfast, and began to interest themselves in breeding pigs and chickens. " We've done so much for the old place ! " said the Lady Joan, working a chair-cover, while her husband brought up Tegetmcier on Poultry. " L' ail dace, I'audace, tovjours de Vandace," was her motto; and it is wonderful how very far one may manage to go by a diligent adherence to it in the world, as in war. Five years and more had now passed by since that first mid- summer day when she had gone up as an occupant to Fiordelisa, and had turned out all the old pottery, and tapestries, and artistic lumber it was full of, with the zeal and zest of a victorious trooper ransacking a wine-cellar ; and by this time the Lady Joan honestly considered herself the legitimate occu- pant of it, and would have looked on the establishment of any more lawful mistress there as an invasion of her rights as grave as an Irish peasant regards a writ of cvictment to be. She had stuck her staff in the ground at Fiordelisa, and never henceforth discoursed of it but as hers. When obliged to acknowledge the fact of its master's presence and possession 92 FRIENDSHIP. she -would allude to " poor lo " airily, as thougli he could not have afforded a dinner unless they had been there to givo him one. She set the china that she meant to sell on the shelves, spread the carpets he paid for on the floors, and then talked of how much she had done for him ; invited people under his roof, and got credit for " such hosi^itality ; " gave away his fruits, and eggs, and flowers, and wines, and was cited as "so generous;" and, further, amused herself throughout the spring with having out there to dine and to sleep every good-looking man who lingered in Eome and was glad to come and smoke under tlio stars in the old grey cor tile. Fiction is a greyhound and Truth is a snail. She set Fiction flying over the course. She had, indeed, once ordered out from England at her own expense two peach-trees and a Berkshire pig. It was all she ever had done; but, as everybody ate a peach and tasted the ham, and heard what she had done, every- body took all the rest for granted. " I do so love my bees, and my beasts, and my pigs, and my poultry ! " she herself would echo gushingly to the goody-goodies, to whom she was careful to appear as a kind of Harriet Martineau with a model farm of four (thousand) acres that was always, sleeping or waking, upon her mind. "I am sure, most laudable," said the goody-goodies, quite impressed with the spectacle of a person born a Perth-Douglas absorbing herself in bees, and beasts, and pigs, and poultry. Higher society, less reverent and more debonnuire, laughed till it cried. But, whether leaving admiration or ridicule behind her, to Fiordelisa she went when the April narcissus was in bloom. She conceived a kind of loassion for the place, it was so useful to her. That dual character in her, wliich \'oightel had chuckled over, had full luxury of expansion both ways at Fiordelisa; all the various and opposing passions of her nature found vent therein at Fiordelisa — she could bo Cleopatra at sunset and a huckster at sunrise. With a guitar on her knee and amorous eyes shining under the passion-flowers in the court by moonlight, one side of her temperament had its sport and play; with her skirts tucked about her knees, a memorandum-book in her hand, and a fierce vigilance in every one of her searching glances, striding through granaries, wine-cellars, and cattle-stalls; pursuing missing cen- times tlirough columns of figures, and making the baililY wretched for a lost franc, the other side of her had its fullest and sweetest sway also. To be sure, she never reflected that one view of her might spoil the other to the person by whose permission she was there ; FRIENDSniP. 93 she never reflected that the prosaic God of Business might take Love by the shoulders and turn him out of doors. If Antony had seen Cleopatra squabbling for a coin over a basket of fish or a basket of dates, he might probably have recovered his senses and avoided Actium. But she did not think of this. She had become so used to loris, and so certain of her dominion over him, that she had altogether ceased to preserve for him those graces of appearance which the woman who is truly wise never neglects before the man whose passion she desires to keep alive. Familiarity breeds contempt in the lover, as in the servant. Lady Joan's vanity made her too forgetful of one supreme truth — that the longest absence is less perilous to love than the terrible trials of incessant proximity. She forgot that love likes to preserve its illusions, and that it will bear better all the sharpest deprivations in the world than it will the cruel tests of an unlovely and unveiled intercourse. She had committed the greatest error of all : she had let him be disenchanted by familiarity. Passion will pardon rage, will survive absence, will forgive infidelity, will even thrive on out- rage, and will often condone a crime; but when it dies of familiarity it is dead for ever and aye. The Lady Joan in her Oriental jewellery and her Asiatic dresses was a woman for Velasquez to paint, and most men to admire, and some to sigh for with ardour and desire. But the Lady Joan with thick untanned leather boots on, hair pulled tight from her face, and a grey skii-t tucked up about her legs, or astride upon a donkey in a waterproof in muddy weather, counting the artichokes and tomatoes before they went to market ■ — Lady Joan was not a woman to adore or to portray; and loris, artist as Nature had made him, and lover as he was ex- pected to be, opening his window in the lovely rosy dawn and looking down on her thus occupied, would sigh and wonder whatever he had seen — why ever he had sacrificed himself; — and so, tired, and nerveless, and discontented, and afraid to show his discontent, he would go down his staircase and into the radiant balmy morning that itself outshone all the dreams of all the poets, and would hear her delighted voice ring out, " Seven robins and a nightingale shot before break- fast, lo! What do you think of that?" and dared not say what he thought of it, but had to smile and praise her skill, and look at the little x>rctty ruffled blood-stained heap of feathers ; and submit to have the hand that was black with the cartridges passed through his arm to draw him into the loggia, where the morning meal was spread ; and had to take his coffee and fruit seasoned with stories of how Nauuia had been caught 94 FBIENDSHIF. sneaking o£f with a stolen cabbage, and how Pcpe had been detected filh'ng his pockets with green peas as he had weighed them ; and all the while to himself watched drearily the silver threads that the light found out in his mistress's hair, and wondered wliy she dressed so shabbily because she was in the country, and thought how large her hand looked as it plunged amongst the strawberries, and felt vaguely that this was not the companion fitting, to that old sunlit, air-swept, flower-scented loggia, with the roses round its columns, and beyond its arches the wide blue hills. But she did not dream of this ; she dug and planted, and bought and sold, and iDlanued and bargained ; she kept a sharp eye on the weights and measures, she ran up model styes and breeding-pens; she got up at five to count the potatoes and melons, the cherries and cabbages that went to the market ; she rode his horses, and ordered his baililfs, and strode about in grey linen and big boots, and did on the whole most admirably — for herself. No doubt if he had overheard her explaining to her English and Americans how all this was done only out of charity, to help, " poor lo," it would all have speedily come to an end. But then he never did hear — excej)t just what was meant for his ear. He had an uncomfortable feeling that it was all disagreeable, and tedious, and noisy ; and he prized the affection of his jieasants and fanners, and their irritation under the new reign oppressed and saddened him. In his remembrance there miglit have been a great deal of waste, but there was a great deal of feudal affec- tion. In other years at his annual vit^its there had been only smiles, laughter, music, rejoicing ; now there were often rebellion, discontent, imprecations, and sullen silence. Of course, however, she, like all other great improvers, was not to be daunted by such a trivial thing as poor folks' devotion and mere clinging to old landmarks. She brought her new brooms and swept away with them vigorously ; and if the brooma caught at such old trumpery tajiestries as custom, tradition, and loyalty, and pulled them down in fragments, so much the better, slie thought ; she cared for no old rubbish — that wouldn't sell again. lie siglicd and let her sweep on. Meanwhile Mr. Clialloner was always careful to set the seal of liis presence, with liis flower seeds and his kitchen lioilers, on the private life of Fiordelisia, and at the beginning of each summer was always to be duly met with by any passing visitors gravely contemplating his wife's poultry-pens or solemnly watering his own stove-plants, and in his pursuit of those innocent occupatiouis would always find some occasion to say, in FHIEyDtiBIP. 95 an abstracted manner, leaning over a niodtl pig-stye, " Yes, yes, we have done a good deal for the place ; my wife is never so happy as when she is doing good ; yes, we brought over those Bcrkshires. Nothing like English breed, nothing." Society thought Mr. Challoner veiy amiable and strangely blmd. Mr. Challoner suffered neither from amiability nor blindness. He quarrelled incessantly with his wife about everything else, little and large ; biit he never quarrelled about loris. What could a blade of steel in a wintry dawn have given Mr. Challoner of vengeance comparable to that which he smiled grimly over as he saw another man, daily and hourly, bullied, ridiculed, stormed at, ordered about, driven to account for every absent hour, and deprived of every vestige of a will of his own ? Mr. Challoner was like the Dauphin who kept the luxury of a whipping-boy. Vengeance ! — " N'allous pas clifrclitr a faire une quorclle I'our uu airront qui n'est que pure bagatelle ! " There was no one living on earth to whom Mr. Challoner owed so much comfort as he did to loris. And, indeed, he would say, with quite a cordial ring iu his voice, " loris ? Oh, a very good fellow — the best friend we have ! " A quiet, excellent woman, who was his father's widow and no relation to him, but whom he called his " mother," because it is always so respectable to have a mother, would occasionally, on visiting at the Casa Challoner, observe with disquietude the Lady Joan disporting herself in a break full of masks on Giovcdi Grasso, or going out shooting, with her gun, and her hessians, and her Eomau nobles ; and on such occasions old Mrs. Chal- loner M'ould murmur to the master of the establishment, " Puir laddie ! it's a great name and a braw house to have married into, and that there's no denying ; but I'm thinking, my poor llobcrt, that you have paid a nuickle price for the gentility." "Joan has high spirits; it is merely high spirits," Mr. Chal- loner would return, with an austerity that closed the dis- cussion. For Mr. Challoner never told anybody what price he had paid, wlietlier muckle or mickle. lie had never given any living soul the right to say that he was other than a most con- tented husband. lie had made his bargain with his eyes ojien, and the bargain had been that he was to keep his eyes shut. And he fulfilled it loyally. Now iind then he winced— now and then he smiled. But it 96 FRIENDSHIP. was only to himself. Lady Joan, 'wlio quarrelled with him to his face, and railed at him behind his back, could not resist a sort of admiration for his impassibility. " The creature might be cut out of wood ! " she said often. Now, a wooden husband is the most convenient of all lay figures. This winter afternoon the real master of Fiordelisa, with his guest, strolled ujjward by the hill-paths bordered with aloe and cactus, and shaded with cereus and cistus, towards the yet higher lands of Fiordelisa, where the stone-pines reigned alone with the tall Ulac heather at their feet. He strove to understand, to interest, and to amuse Etoile, and he succeeded. He had at command graceful thoughts and picturesque diction ; he loved art, and had studied it pro- foundly. He had been irritated because this stranger, herself eminent in the world's sight, seemed to think him a slave with- out power or purpose, and the unlikeness of her to any other woman that he had ever known stung him to interest and moved him to exertion. loris, like many men before him, had sunk into an existence in which his mind had no share. It was as nearly brainless as a naturally intelligent man's hfc can ever be. To obey all his ruler's desires ; to attend to the thousand and one trivialities that she daily imposed ; to see that what she ordered 'was done, and what sho wanted found; to follow her hither and thither ; to avert the tempest of her temper by pre- vision of her wishes, and to be careful that his servants, his horses, his house, his patience, his presence, his endurance, his exertions were all ready to the moment that she might call on them — all this made his day one incessant and joyless routine of obedience. He woke in the morning with the dreary round before him, and he lay down at night seeing nothing better for the morrow, or for fifty hundred other morrows, if he lived long enough to have them dawn on him. Such a life killed his intelligence. The pure impersonal ciforts of the mind may be heightened by a great joy and may be deepened by a great sorrow ; but a life of perpetual triviality, yet of perpetual conflict — a life, in a word, which has been condensed into the one common com- prehensive word of v:orrij — does so irritate and yet benumb the faculties that all intellectual effort dies out under it. It had been so with him. Lady Joan was no fool ; but sho was one of those women wlio lower all they touch more than many fools. No delicate thought could live under one of her loud laughs ; no impersonal discussion could survive her boisterous person- alities. Art itself looked ridiculous beside her pretentious patronage of it and mercenary trafllc in it. And the obliquity FRIENDSHIP. 97 of her mental vision seemed to commxinicate itself to those about her till in her presence a praying angel of Mino da Fiesole's soilless marble looked no better than a squat bonze from a Chinese temple. As there are women who exalt all that comes in contact with them, so did slie lower all things. It was not her fault. Nature had made her so. But the eflfect on the mind of loris had been that of smoke on painting : it had dulled all the colour and obscured all the lines. A certain lassitude crossed by a certain irritation had grown on him; and the scholarship of his early youth, and the pro- ficiency of art which had distinguished him at one time, had died down into silence and olvscurity. They were not needed for the wrangles of the house he fre- quented, and the scenes of barter that he was called upon to assist at in antiquity shops. With Etoile they awoke. For the man who is a scholar by culture will never altogether lose delight in it, and the temper that is born with the poetic element in it will never absolutely fail to answer to the right touch. It becomes like a harp whose silver strings are covered Avith dust, entangled, jarred, and mute; but are still silver, and still keep song in them when they are struck aright. Not such a song, indeed, as when the chords first were strung, for time and wrong usage have done much to mar them; but still a song — a song sadder than tears some- times. The hill-paths were steep and the way long, but it seemed to have been short to them both, when at last they reached the pine-wood, where Eocc a di Pai^a was visible. High above hung the little grey tower 0:1 the rock where Juno once stood to watch how the battle went ; at least, we believe so, if we hearken to Yirgil ; and if wo will not believe Virgil what right have we in Home at all ? The sun was bright on the Volscian hills, and the snow on the line of the Leonussa and on the heights of the Sabine moun- tains glowed like an opal in the light. TIic low lands looked dusky and bronze-hued from clouds tliat liung above them, and a ]iurple cloud shrouded the wild dark mountain of Soracte and floated midway between earth and heaven — far, far away was a glancing line that showed where the soa was beating on the sad sands l)y Ostia; and aloft, white and stern as an Alp, rose Monte Gennaro, who wraps his mantle of frost around him till the maize is tall in the plains, and \\\r. girls arc singing amongst the poppies. And in tiie centre of it all was Eomc, with the cross of St. Peter's clear against the light, and all the vast cloud-world around it. n ■98 FRIENDSHIP. There is no view on the earth like this from one of the heights of the mountains of Rome. Etoile looked and was silent. The great tears gathered in her eyes, but did not fall. He watched her. " You feel thiugs too much," he said softly. She had forgotten him ; and she looked up with the surprise of a sleeper awakened from a dream. " Oh no, I think not," she answered him. " I pity those to whom the world is not so beautiful as it is to me." " And yet there are tears in your eyes." " Are there ? I cannot tell you — you, who have always lived here, cannot know, I think — all that one feels in looking so on Eome. One seems to see as God sees— all the hosts of the dead arise." He was silent. The words moved him. He bowed his head and stood in silence, like one who will not break in upon a woman at prayer. At that moment his name echoed shrilly on the clear air. He started and listened. " Forgive me," he said quickly. " She is calling us. In a little while it will be dark." " Whereon earth have you been ? " said the Lady Joan, with her face black as a lowering thundercloud as it loomed upon them through the lines of the tall polished laurel trees. " Where on earth have you been, lo? The idea of climbing up here! and without me! I asked for you everywhere. The coffee is cold, and we sliall have it pitch-dark to drive home ; and there is that young idiot's opera to-night. What could you be doing Tip here all this time ? " " We have consoled Imperator ; and we have trodden in the steps of Juno," Etoile made answer for him; and she looked Lady Joan straight in the eyes as she spoke. There was something in the look of contempt and of challenge : she herself was unconscious of it, but the other was alive to it. " If she dare to cross me here ! " thought Lady Joan ; and her brow darkened in storm and her eyes glittered till they were green as an angry cat's. She was sullen and silent as they descended to the house and drank the coffee which was awaiting them in the square stone court. Fiordelisa was the apple of her eye. It was not, perhaps, very dignilied work — squabbling with peasantry, counting potatoes and beans, ousting old folks from little territorial riglits, kcepi'ig a sliarp eye on the olive-i^resscs and the wine-tubs, and hunting up the Cochin China eggs out of the straw and thatch. FRIENDSHIP. 99 But what would you ? John Vatices, Emperor here in Eome, gave his wife a costly crown of emeralds and diamonds that was bought with the proceeds of his poultry, and why should not the hens of Fiordclisa lay rings of sapphire and earrings of turquoises ? Lady Joan pulled on her thick driving-gloves with a jerk before the coffee was fairly drunk. loris and Etoile were talk- ing gaily and laughing together. "I am sorry to hurry you," she said coldly. "But the moment the sun goes down the nights are so bitter. And lo has a fancy, you know, for us to hear the new opera. A boy, who lived in a dirty little poking town of the Maremma, has dreamt that he is Mozart and Rossini combined, and lo devoutly believes in him. lo's geese are all swans." " A more amiable optimism, at any rate, than the common one, which swears there are no swans at all — only a few ducks in a pond," said Etoile, taking her coffee from him. She smiled at him as she sj^oke. Almost insensibly she felt drawn into defending him against these persistent mockeries, which had so little wit or wisdom in them. "Perhaps we are only ducks," she added. "But we are always grateful to anybody who will believe in our snowy plumage, and who will vow for us that our stagnant little pond of vanity is a lake in which the mountains of the world are miiTored. Who is this young composer come out of the Maremma ? " " A boy of great genius," said loris ; " very young — only twenty-two. He has had no education, except a year in Bologna ; but he has, with many faults, many excellences. This is his first opera. It is on the theme of Persephone. Parts of it are very fine; and I think the choral renderings " " It is hideous rubbish," said Lady Joan, roughly.' " Just singsong out of Verdi and Gounod, and the ' infernal ' part of it all borrowed wholesale out of ' Lohengrin ' — growl, growl, growl — bang, bang, bang — that's all. Besides, it's been done in Orphee aux Enfers." "■ That is not quite the same thing," said loris, with an involuntary smile. " The same story," said Lady Joan confidently, turning to Etoile. " The opera's stuff. But the boy happened to get hold of lo last year ; and lo thinks he knows counterpoint and all that ; and so he's flattered, and believes in the trash, and uses all his influence to get the opera put on the stage of the Apollo. I dare say, if the truth were known, the dresses and things have come out of his own pocket. If he'd only a crust he'd give it to the first creature that squealed out for it. Oh, you know you would, lo, if I didn't keep you straight. Give me a cigar. No, 100 FRIENDSHIP. there's no time for more coffee. See they put those grapes iu ; I want tliem for the Bishop of Melita. And they're to kill that sheep for me to-morrow. Mind Tista don't forget. And they'd better shoot a few hares and send me tliem with the mutton in the morning ; there's that big dinner we have to-morrow, and Marjory wants one to jug for her father. And mind you tell the man to' get that fence done by Monday ; and if the blacksmith don't come and put the padlocks on those gates directly I won't pay him one farthing — not one farthing ! " " If I didn't see to the things he never would," she explained as she took the reins of the ponies. " He'd let people dawdle on for ever, and pay 'cm just the same for doing nothing. They know I won't stand that nonsense. I've had all the gates put up and padlocked : the whole land used to lie open." " The people here must be very fond of you," said Etoile. Lady Joan did not feel the satire. " Oh, I don't know. They ought to be. I physic 'em when they're ill. Such wry faces tiiey pull ! Of course I'm very kind to 'em all ; but first of all one must make a thing pay — in lo's interests, you know." " And you are of opinion with Zoroaster that to reap the earth with profit is of more merit than to repeat — or win — ten thousand prayers ? " " I am rather of Plutarch's," said loris, joining them, and stroking his ])onies. "Was Plutarch an ass, then?" asked the Lady Joan with supreme scorn. " YoH would have thought him so; he could never bring himself to sell in its old age the ox which in its youth had served him faithfully. Voila tout." " That is just the sort of sentimental stuff to please you. The ox would make very good beef," retorted the Lady Joan. " Mind ! my sables are over the wheel." She cut the ponies sharply over their heads with the whip and started them off full gallop down the rugged slo]ic, leaving their master to spring up behind as best he might. The ponies were his own : spirited little cobs from Friuli, with jingling silver bells, and swinging foxes' tails hung at their ears ; but no sort of possession was he allowed to enjoy of them, " I want Grillo and Pippo to-day," he would say of a morning ; and his groom would answer, "I am very sorry, Excellence, but the Signora has ordered them." loris had to shrug his shoulders and see iiis ponies depart to the Casa Challoiier. Why did ho never rebel ? He began to ask it of himself, loaning witli his arms on the front scat of the carriage, looking at the profilo of Etoile before him in the twilight. " I do so wish you would come to the theatre to-night. Do FRIENDSHIP. 101 change your mind. There are only the Plinh'mmons at dinner — bores, I know ; but we should cut it short with the Opera," urged Lady Joan as she stopped the ponies to set her guest down in the Quirinal Square, and pressed an invitation which she knew was quite safe, since she had chanced to hear that Etoile would pass that evening with the Princess Vera, who had " two or three people " — i.e., about two or three hundred. " The idea of her going to Princess Vera's ! " she muttered as she drove away. " Preposterous ! " " Why that ? " said loris, lighting a cigar, as the ponies dashed down the street of Four Fountains. " Good gracious, lo ! can you want to ask ? But Princess Vera will know any artistic trash that takes her fancy — rude ap she can be to every respectable person." And she slashed Pippo across the ears again. She herself was among the respectable persons whom the Princess Vera treated with a calm ignorance of their existence very exasperating. The ponies rattled up the steep stones to her house; and her husband, who was just then going in at the door, stopped, aided loris to unload her furs, and hoped they had had a pleasant day at Fiordelisa. " Are you disposed to let Lady Norwich have your tur- quoises ? " asked Mr. Challoner, ten minutes later, following his wife into the privacy of her own room. " Yes, she may have 'em. I only bought them to sell again." " I thought of saying two thousand fiancs ? " " Yes — that won't be bad. 1 gave eight hundred ; but then the woman was hard up at Homburg, you remember, and glad to let 'em go cheap. I grudge 'era to that old cat. Mind, she thinks we brought 'em from Persia, and had 'em polished in Vienna." " You'll never do better with them : I think it is a very good price." "Tolerable. And they don't suit me. Bine's for blondes. Besides, they're nasty uncertain things : one never knows they won't change colour. What about the Urbino jar?" "I got it. It is genuine. An incomparable bit. You always make horrible mistakes, but you did not blunder there. Tlie fellow had no idea of the value of it. I bought it like a common bit of kitchen pottery." "Yes, I know — the man kept his sugar in it." "By the way, old O'Glennamaddy wants an antique altar- screen." " Very well. We haven't one ; but Mimo shall draw one, and little Faello can carve it. It can be ready in twenty days. O'Glen is a goose — he'd take anything." " Yes. But people are not all geese that will go to visit him. Remember that. You had best show him good things." 102 FRIENDSHIP. " Don't yoti preach. I know O'Glen as I do my alphabet. He used to give me burnt-almonds when I was a baby. I say — mind you go yourself about that little Pieta to that man in Trastevere. lo was going, but I wouldn't let him ; he never beats the people down ; and he talks some rubbish about the man's wife being iil with the ague — as if that had anything to do with it ! That's just like lo. He bought a little plate of Gubbio ware yesterday ; the woman that owned it asked him fifteen francs, and he went and gave her seventy — seventy! — just because the thing was worth it — so he said ; but I believe it was only because she was crying about her landlord pressing for rent. That's just like lo — cry a little, and his hand goes in his pocket in a second." Mr. Challoner smiled grimly. His wife was very fond of airing her contempt for her friend's weaknesses before him. Not that there was the slightest occasion to do so. Mr. Challoner had left all remnants of jealousy long buried in the delta of Orontes and Euphrates, of Abana and Pharphar. And besides, there was such perfect confidence between his wife and himself that there was never any need for explanations. " I have boundless trust in her," he would say austerely with injured dignity if some old friend, too officious, ventured to hint that Lady Joan was a little — a little — perhaps a little too original. And, like all people who have boundless trust, he would shut his eyes when bidden. This kind of business- conference was a closer tie between them than any the marriage-altar could forge, and at discussions of this sort they were always good friends, finding each other's views and principles often identical. Indeed, so sound were his wife's ideas about business, that Mr. Challoner could use his pet phrase with pcrect veracity when speaking of her. " You'll come to the Opera to-night ? " asked the Lady Joan now. "No— no." " Oh, you'd better. The Norwiches will be there, and that old cat Plinlimmon is coming with us. They'll all talk if you don't." " Very well," said Mr. Challoner : ho was always resigned to self-sacrifice for the pulilic good. " You told them at Fiordelisa that 1 should bring Lord Norwich up to shoot on Monday ? " "Yes. Mind, though; Norwich thinks we've bought the place. You'd better make a party and take up a cold luncheon. Echeanco will go, and Plunkett, and (iualdro Malestrina, and perhaps some of the attaclies would if you asked 'em, though I hate all that diancellene lot— stiff as pokers ! By-the-by, since we put up the trespass-boards all round, the game's in much better order. lo protests, and says the people will knife him for FRIENDSHIP. 103 it some day, because they've always netted tlie hares and birds as they wanted them ; but that's all rubbish, I think. Anyhow, they shan't get a head of game if I can help it. There's such heaps of partridges ! I shall have 'em trapped for market when we've had the pick of the shooting. I wish you'd write to England about those pigs ; and tell 'em to send out some pink kidney potatoes for planting — the Early Emilys are the best, lo settled that bill for the last, and never struck the wharf-duties off it, though I told him the shipper ought to pay them; but he's always so careless about money. That's the door-bell, isn't it? — that horrid Plinlimmon woman — she's got up like a parrot, green and red and yellow and blue, I dare say. What a nuisance it is to have to do the polite! Go in and say all sorts of things to her while I dress." Mr. Clialloner went in, obedient, and welcomed the Plinlim- mons, who were very rich people, who had made a vast fortune by a new kind of candle, warranted never to melt or to splutter, and fulfilling its warranty nobly. He apologised for his wife's tardy appearance; and quite affected the Plinlimmons, who were simple, sentimental folks, oppressed with the extent of their own wealth and their own ignorance, by the tender manner in which he regretted his wife's imprudence in being out so late in the cold, thereby endangering her lungs and his ha])piness — but she was so wilful, and so fond of art, and so charitable — and she had been visiting a poor painter, who had been laid up with fever, etc., etc., etc. From painters to painting is a natural transition, and led naturally to the sight of some landscapes wliich were on sale for a charity, and which the Plinlimmons fell in love with, and begged might be sent to tliem at the Hotel Constantia ; and so the time was whiled away until the Lady Joan entered, radiant in amber, and black lace, and Etruscan ornaments, and greeted her dearest Mrs. Plinlimmon with that cordial ,and honest ■warmth whicli was her greatest attraction to shy women and timid men. Then there entered silently without announcement one whum Mr. Challoner presented to the good Monmouthshire folks aloud as " our valued frien