moiiiomoii I OHIO 111 :0tl I BY THE SAME AUTHOR. FOR HONOR'S SAKE. 12mo. Extra Cloth. $1.50. " No one who takes up this novel will be likely to lay it aside until the denouement shall have been reached. It is so far above the current fictions of the day, that it is a pleasure to read it." New Orleans Picayune. " The story is cleverly told, romantic in incident, bright in dialogue, and graceful in style." Boston Gazette. J. B. LlPPlNCOTT & Co., Publishers, Philadelphia. IN SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. BY MRS. B. SIM CUNNINGHAM. " Remorse is as the heart in which it grows : If that be gentle, it drops balmy dews Of true repentance." " Delights so full, if unalloyed with grief, Were ominous." "Just Heaven instructs us with an awful voice That Conscience rules us, e'en against our choice." COLERIDGE'S Remorse. PHILADELPHIA: J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO. 1883. Copyright, 1882, by J. B. LlPPINCOTT & Co. CONTENTS. CHAPTER PAGE I. FATHER AND SON . 7 II. AMY . . . 13 III. AT BAY . 19 IV. THE WHITE ANGEL 29 V. ADRIFT 39 VI. CHESWICK 50 VII. AN IDYL 63 VIII. TURNED WEAPONS 7 1 IX. A LANDMARK ... . . . 7$ X. IN HIDING . .83 XI. SANS PEUR 9 2 XII. " FIDELIS AD URNAM" 98 XIII. "JocELiN OF BRAKELAND" 103 XIV. PERSEPHONE 112 XV. " WITCH FINGERS" 120 XVI. TITHONIUS .132 XVII. " CLARCHEN" 141 XVIII. " MAIEN-DUFT !" 159 XIX. ARCADIA 168 XX. LES BIEN SEANCES 175 XXI. A MYSTERY SOLVED 188 XXII. FATALITY 195 XXIII. THE WORLD WELL USED 202 i* 5 2061866 CONTENTS. PAGK XXIV. "CARPE DIEM" 2O 9 XXV. FAREWELL 21 5 XXVI. " ROSELEIN" 228 XXVII." HONI SOIT QUI MAL Y PENSE" . . .240 XXVIII. AN INVITATION 247 XXIX. Cui BONO? 253 XXX. A GHOST FROM THE PAST . . . . .258 XXXI. RENUNCIATION 264 XXXII. CANCELLED 269 XXXIII. AT LAST! 273 XXXIV. "FORGIVE ME!" 284 XXXV. FRUITION 291 IN SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. CHAPTER I. FATHER AND SON. " The sole succeeder to his wealth and fame, The last remaining pillar of his house !" AYLMER'S Field. THEY were alone in the library at Cheswick Hall, the father sitting upright in an easy-chair, the son standing by one of the long, deep-seated windows looking out into the garden. The father portly and disabled by gout, that inevitable foe to your bon viveur all the world over, the son tall, slender, supple-limbed, a worthy scion of the old race that had counted princes in its line before the timbers had been seasoned for the fleet that bore Co- lumbus to the green shores of that New Western World where the old hall reared its chimneys to-day. The father, contrary to long-established custom, was ignoring his post-prandial nap. There were heavy lines about his mouth, and a deep, lowering frown above his brows that were naturally stern and severe. Cedric so named after a Saxon progenitor, for Robert Cheswick clung to the traditions of his race with a zeal 7 g IN SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. worthy a better cause stood erect, his frank face flushing, his eyes blue and open as those of a child, filled with indignation and anger. The wonderful resemblance between the two was markedly traceable at that moment, for anger brings out the strong points of one's physiognomy as no other passion does. In both were the same well- opened blue eyes, the straight, sensitive nose, the finely- curved mouth and square, determined chin ; but where the father's eyes were cold and unbelieving, those of the son's were warm and frank, and while the lines of the older face bespoke intolerance and a sort of resentful querulous- ness, the younger one was fresh and unworn, entirely des- titute of lines, unless we except that almost imperceptible curve between the upper lip and the base of the nose, which Victor Hugo assigns peculiarly to feminine organ- izations, but which, observation teaches us, is quite as often bestowed, with the quality it indicates, upon those of the opposite sex. Cedric looked out over the garden paths, and as he looked the unquiet fire in his eyes died down, and a dreamy pleasure awoke in them instead. There was the golden warmth of an autumn atmosphere outside the window, and fading rose-leaves were drifted hither and thither by soft, vagrant breezes. "Rick, will you give me your attention, sir?" Cedric turned at the sound of his father's voice, raised from its ordinary pitch. " I want the truth of this disgraceful report." Cedric hesitated, his hand at his throat as though his collar choked him. "If I tell you anything, father, it will be the truth, you know !" The father did not feel disposed to quarrel with the spirit that dictated that answer ; instead, the lines of his . FATHER AND SON. g face thinned a little, for he felt a certain pride in his boy's pride, inherent as he knew it to be. " It is true, in part, what Jacob Martin heard at the Valley Farm sale. I did not say I would knock Rabys down if he ever dared speak to me again, but I fear I shall, father!" His last words rang with a sharp note of defiance. " Listen, father !" for he saw the portentous lines gath- ering afresh beneath those heavy brows : " Rabys Holme is without honor ; he enjoys your confidence, he influences you to indulge him, but he is without honor. The smallest stable-boy on the place could tell you that ; though God knows I would be the last to say it, only that my conduct needs some justification." Whether it was that Mr. Cheswick resented the sudden manhood of this dreamy-eyed boy, who until now had never dared question his lightest command, or whether Cedric had unwittingly pierced a joint of his armor of impassability it is impossible to determine, but certain it is that he grew bitterly, unreasonably angry. The lad bore it quietly, that wild, menacing storm of words that he had braved a few times in his life before, for as little apparent reason, looking over the garden-walks, and won- dering drearily if many sons had known so little fatherly justice as he; as for love, he had long ago ceased to hope for that from his father. "And pray, my pseudo-Galahad, my Quixote of the thirty wind-mills, who is this Dulcinea whose wrongs you have chosen to redress?" The blue veins stood out like cords on Cedric's temples, for he had all his father's passionate sense of what was due him. " I think her wrongs should be as much to you as they are to me, father, my cousin Amy's !" 10 Iff SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. The old man's eyes fell for an instant before the keen scorn of his son's glance; but only for a moment ; then he rose from his chair and took a step towards him, con- fronting him with a face purpled by rage. "Toasted her, eh? and for that you make a fool of yourself, and get your name bandied all over the country. Now, sir, listen to me ! You'll do the apologizing, do you hear? You, instead of Rabys Holme!" " You are surely not in earnest, father?" But as he spoke all the ruddy, healthful tinting died out of his face. "Disobey me, sir, and see !" A silence reigned in the wide, lofty room. The curtains swayed fitfully in the soft air floating in from the open windows. What a superb old room it was ! every nook and cranny filled with books, and above the mantel a quiet golden landscape of Lorraine's charm- ing one, with its beauty and truth. From his childhood Cedric had lived his happiest hours there, dreaming over some Minnesinger ballad in the broad, low window-seat, or searching the musty chronicles on the lower library shelves for the traditions of his ancestors, and later the loveliest hopes had come to him there, the fairest antici- pations that had ever visited the heart of youth. " I cannot do it, father," he said at last, turning from the window towards the easy-chair where Mr. Cheswick sat rubbing his lame foot. "I cannot do it, and you would not respect me if I did. Wait ; hear me out, father, I claim the privilege to judge for myself for the first time to-day. You offered us Rabys and me the career we chose. There are reasons why I would prefer life at home, but Rabys has chosen to stay ; he has preju- diced you, influenced you, usurped my place in your life, as I doubt not in your heart, since you first brought him FATHER AND SON. H here a little fellow in blouses. I suppose it will be so always, but I do not choose to submit to it any longer. I am not a stone, that I can bear to see a stranger close my own father's heart against me; so I choose my career abroad." There was an appeal in the wide blue eyes of the lad, from which his father shrank as from the prick of a sharp sword-point. Just such mute, patient pain had looked out from other eyes long years ago, eyes that had been mere dust for many years, but that lived in his memory, and looked at him every day from the proud fair face of his boy. "A career abroad !" he echoed, with a short, mock- ing laugh, crushing the persistent memory, and harden- ing his heart anew. "I should like to understand how much of a career you expect to achieve, unaided by my money and influence." It amused him to try the grit of the boy, the while it angered him. "A Cheswick to the backbone!" he said to himself, with a thrill of pride. But the demon of imperious will that had warped and wrecked his best impulses through so many years was not to be aroused with impunity. It angered him the while it elated him to find his boy so dauntless. Unreasonable ? Yes ; the son who had inherited his father's resolute strength, his physique and pride, owned a right as indubitable to the complement of will and te- nacity of purpose that went along with his father's nature. But Mr. Cheswick was too old-fashioned to be analytic. He had read Sterne, it is true, but not Swinburne ; and, like the bird -haunted mariner of Coleridge's quaint "Rime," he "had penance done, and penance more would do" on account of this very lack. 12 IN SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. The man who is not metaphysical has to suffer a great deal from feeling, and from the dire mistakes he is apt to perpetrate, mistakes which, like the roc's egg in the fairy tale, are easy to take down, but impossible to re- place. " You will get no help from me/' reiterated his father. "Then I go without it, that's all! A man need not starve in the world because God has given him an unjust father !" And he leaped out of the low window into the garden below. If Prince, the meek, mild-eyed setter on the lawn out- side, whom he had cuffed and petted alternately for the last five years, if Prince had suddenly rushed in at the window and flown at his throat, Mr. Cheswick could not have experienced more complete surprise than he did. That Cedric should defy him like that Cedric, who had endured his most ungovernable fits of fury without flinch- ing, Cedric, who from his very babyhood had never failed to yield him the most unquestioning obedience ! He lifted his lame foot to a higher cushion with a groan. "The absurd young rascal!" he muttered. "Well, let him go ! He'll get sick of his career abroad soon enough, and come back willing to eat as much humble- pie as I choose to set before him. Gad ! but the boy stuck to his ground ! Ah, well, my fine fellow, it won't hurt you to try your wings a little; you can go 1" CHAPTER II. AMY. " If there be A devil in man there is an angel too." Sea Dreams. WHEN Cedric landed in the tulip-bed beneath the library window, he was greeted by a ringing peal of laughter. A young girl in a wide garden-hat ran down the broad stone steps of the portico to meet him. A sheet of music fluttered in one hand, the other she linked in his arm with the freedom of a familiar companion. This was Amy Randolph, his father's great-niece and ward, a very young girl, with the dreamy fancies of a child shining as yet in her soft brown eyes. Wonderful eyes they were, with above them the even brows that Spenser loved, and the white, smooth forehead, gently arched at the top, was shadowed by masses of gold-glinted brown hair that bore the ruddy gloss of the chestnut in its abundant waves. The nose was of the Grecian type, which means nothing, it is true, but is the nearest approach to perfection among noses. The lips were fresh and rosy, pensive when in re- pose, but more often wearing the smiling curves of a sunny nature, and the chin, slightly pointed and velvety as an infant's, bespoke a nature not easily satisfied with the types of humanity one meets in every-day life. Lavater would have delighted in the harmony of Amy Randolph's features and their strict dependence upon each other in their maintenance of the perfect character 2 *3 , 4 IN SANCHO PAKZA'S PIT. indicated thereby, but to the many, ignorant or careless of physiognomic combinations, Mr. Cheswick's niece was only a very gentle, sweet-faced young girl, possessing a graceful figure and remarkably delicate features. Even Cedric, given to analyzing impulse itself, with his cool, wide gray-blue eyes, was wont to accept the sense of completeness he had ever derived from Amy's nearness as the natural concomitant of his love for her, or, perhaps, the reflex of that peculiar sympathy which had existed from the first between the two. I think it makes our best enjoyment always when we feel the beauty of an object before that object has been named beautiful by our phys- ical discernment. It is an old but a very true maxim that man fails to appreciate present blessings, but it is untrue in an equal degree that lack of appreciation detracts from his enjoyment thereof. As well say a man does not enjoy the freedom of health because he fails to value it rightly. Cedric was to learn later just how much inspiration and happiness he had drawn from Amy's essentially harmoni- ous nature, as the invalid looks back with amaze upon the unacknowledged blessings of strength and health that had once been his own. "Truant!" she cried, "I have been waiting for you a half-hour, and the shadows in our Academia growing longer and darker. I don't think you will find fault with my slovenly execution this evening, it bears the test of the organ," waving the printed score before his eyes. They were on the portico now ; beneath them stretched the wide expanse of the pleasure-grounds, brilliant with a parti-colored display of geraniums, dahlias, and late- blooming roses. The house was built of gray stone, a rambling pile that was at once large, cheerful, and con- venient. A broad drive swept past the portico, bordering a circular parterre, which had been the delight of Cedric's AMY. 15 heart from his boyhood. Within it grew great forest- trees, old-fashioned smoke-bushes, deutzias, and honey- suckles trained to conical lattices that shot past the Ches- wick chimneys. Fronting the portico, beyond the parterre and drive, stretched an ample sodded plateau which Ce- dric had converted into a croquet-ground since his return from college. There were numberless rustic seats dotted about it here and there, a wide gravel path bordered it on three sides, and the deepest green^hade reigned there throughout all the heat of summer. Midway the grounds, stood a mulberry-tree of luxuriant growth, with a bamboo lounge leaning against its lusty trunk. A large stone vase of curious form, filled with shade-loving begonias and fuschias, bloomed like a gorgeous bouquet among the cool, green shadows, and in convenient proximity to the bamboo lounge stood a small round table of scroll-work, painted green. It looked like a fairy's boudoir, and Cedric, shading his eyes with his hand, let his gaze linger longest there, while he strove in vain to swallow the hard knot swelling in his throat. Suddenly Amy caught sight of his face, white and stern, with a smothered flame in the eyes. " Oh, Cedric !" she asked, in a half frightened under- tone, "what has happened?" He turned, but avoided her gaze. " Where is Aunt Bab ?" His voice sounded strange to himself. "Aunt Bab is in the basement," she answered, re- garding him with eyes grown wide and questioning. " Then come to the parlor with me, Amy; I have some- thing to say to you." She followed him across the hall, flecked with slanting beams of sunset light, and into the long, old-fashioned apartment known as "the parlor." He threw himself into the first chair, a choking in his X 6 IN SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. throat that nearly ended in a sob. The privileges of his manhood were all forgotten now, poor lad ! Amy flung her garden-hat upon a chair, and went over to him. "Oh, Cedric, my dear!" she cried, taking his hand between both her own, " you are ill, I know, your hands are so cold !" His hand closed on hers convulsively. " I am going away from Cheswick, after all, Amy; I have reconsidered my decision." Around the fresh rosy lips ran a white circling line, and the soft, peach-like bloom drifted en- tirely out of her cheeks. " But something is driving you away, Cedric, and I should like you to go of your own will," she said, with abortive attempts to keep the tears out of her voice. He shook his head : he did not intend that she should know. There was a long silence between them. "What does it matter that nothing is gained by your confiding your trouble to me, so that nothing is lost?" she asked at length, regarding the resolute sternness of his face with something like dismay. He looked up in surprise that she should have so divined his thoughts. But he should not have been surprised : it was not the first time that Amy, with those dark-veiled eyes, had revealed unto him his thoughts before he had well put them into shape himself. "As to that, Amy, my confidence would ill repay you for what you would have to lose in temper and comfort. There is scarcely anything to tell. My father is angry with me, unjustly, not for the first time, as you well know. But his anger will not endure, for he is sure to find out the truth. Jus- tice isn't half so blind as she is painted," with an attempt at his old light manner. " I will get my rights some day. But I cannot comply with father's conditions and stay at Cheswick, so I am going to try my luck in the world.'' AMY. 17 " But where will you go?" she asked ; " has your father settled you in any position ?" He laughed a little mock- ingly. "You don't seem to understand that I go under the ban of his displeasure, and will have my own way to make. But I shall know always where to find you /" He drew her to him, laying his cheek against the soft braids of her hair, with an odd compound of pain and joy in his heart. They had grown very dear to each other, very close familiar friends, in this year they had spent to- gether at Cheswick, but never before had Cedric held her thus, and never, oh, never before had her whole being thrilled with such sweet pain. Ah, they are fleet racers through these lives of ours ! " Pain is slow and pleasure fleet," sings the poet, but they run not unfrequently on parallel tracks. They were in the old-fashioned parlor. An organ and a piano stood in opposite corners. On the organ -rack Bach's Well-Tempered Harpsichord stood open ; but it was not from that Cedric drew such heavenly strains when, the bitterness of that first moment with Amy over, he went to fortify his spirit with a draught from those pure fountains of immortal youth and freshness that flow through the boundless realm of music. The tender, throb- bing vox humana of the organ spoke to the human heart of the girl as she knelt in a bitter agony of unrest by the chair he had vacated. " Be still," said the tender " human voice" of the organ, as the flexile fingers strayed from one theme to another, interpreting naught but soothing, hopeful messages; "be still, foolish human heart, so tender yet so selfish. Let your love, your faith, your prayers, aye, even your tears, follow him whither he goes on his unknown way ; but give him your smiles now, your comforting, hopeful words. See !" and the vox humana wailed, a very spirit 2* !8 IN SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. of flesh behind the gilded pipes " his heart aches not one whit less than yours that his eyes are so dry !" She went over to his side, unselfish Amy ; her eyes were wet, it is true, but the smiles were making rainbows of the tears. "A robin singing with wet wings" in- deed ; but what matter ? There was the robin's song to cheer you, fearless, sweet, and true, amid all the rush and whirl of pelting shower and swirling bush. " That sounds like an answered prayer, Cedric, my dear," she said, in her quaint, serious way, with her hand on his shoulder; "and I know now, I feel that you will come back very soon." Was it in human heart not to experience some sort of courage from such hopeful smile and word ? Cedric went out with her into the grounds, tossing the sunny hair from his brow with the old careless gesture. It would all come right ; he was young, he was strong, and who knew but his father might relent, and he need not leave Amy and Cheswick after all ! CHAPTER III. AT BAY. " What is it that has been done? O dawn of Eden, bright over earth and sky, The fires of Hell broke out of thy rising sun, The fires of Hell and Hate." Maud. IN the basement Aunt Bab was ordering supper, a middle-aged maiden lady, with corkscrew curls on either side her temples, and very keen black eyes peering at you over gold-rimmed spectacles. Aunt Bab was factotum at Cheswick, and there was nothing else she enjoyed so much. She was wont to say, " We need beggars at Cheswick to make it just what it ought to be," whereupon Rick teas- ingly declared that Aunt Bab's generosity, upon analysis, resolved into the mere instinct of saving, since beggars were only wanted at Cheswick to clear away the crusts that the dogs could not manage. But Rick was much too good- hearted a fellow to have said it had he really thought it, and, indeed, there was a tradition in the household to the effect that years ago Aunt Bab had caught a delinquent housemaid in the act of stealing, and that when she dis- charged her upon the score of her dishonesty she not only allowed her to carry her booty away with her, but made her a present of a very gay calico dress in the bargain. Aunt Bab was without knowing it, to her credit be it said a disciple of Rauch, who says, " The thing is not whether a deed is honorable in itself, but whether it agrees with our own notions of honor." 19 20 IN SANCHO PANZA-S PIT. In the basement Aunt Bab was ordering supper, "A good mould of smearkase, 'Manda, for Rick, you know, and some fresh Maryland biscuit, not too much lard, mind ; and there's a leaf-sausage boiled that'll do sliced. Did you scald the crocks, as I told you, 'Manda? and are the cows coming up in the milk since they were turned out in that new pasture?" "Aunt Bab ! ho, auntie !" " It's Rick ; step to the door, 'Manda, and see what he wants. His clothes gathered up, and a lot of the new socks I've been knitting? Why, what in the land's up? Just tell him I am coming, will you?" In the upper hall Rick stood at the top of the steps awaiting her. " Where are you going, Rick, so suddenly ?' ' she asked, panting a little for breath, for the basement stairs were rather steep, and stooping to brush the lint off her cash- mere skirt. "I scarcely know myself, auntie; but it isn't sudden. I've been revolving the matter in my mind for a week.'' She could not see his face plainly, down here at the remote end of the long hall, but something in his. voice struck her as strange. She settled her spectacles care- fully and peered at him, through them this time. " That's odd, Rick 1" she said. " Yes, it is odd, auntie ; and the oddest part of it is, I am not coming back." Then he told her the whole story, prefaced by a request that she would keep the cause of his going a secret from Amy. " She would only distress herself unnecessarily about it," he added. Miss Barbara Cheswick inherited also the quick temper of her race. She left Cedric standing at the top of the basement stairs and burst in upon her brother, sitting portly and comfortable at his library-table, like a withered AT BAY. 21 and indignant pythoness. A stormy scene ensued, it was not the first time Miss Barbara had spoken her mind out freely to her brother, but the result was nil. The father, inflamed to renewed anger by what he chose to term the obstinacy of his son, refused to yield one jot or tittle of his authority. Poor Miss Bab ! She forgot the cream for the smear- kase ; she forgot the biscuits that awaited her careful in- spection. And, oh ! how she wept, poor old soul, as she hastily disemboweled closets and drawers of Cedric's possessions and packed them in the great trunk he had used at college ! And how many prayers she folded away with the pantaloons, the waistcoats, and coats ! Ah, Cedric, with gentle Amy's love and Aunt Bab's motherly affection following you out across the unknown fields whither you go, surely you are sheltered as though by an segis thrown round you ! He did not wait until dark to leave. The station was a full mile away, and the last passenger-train passed at eight o'clock. He stopped at the stables to bid good-by to Duffer, the horse he called his own, a bright chestnut bay, that gave a low whinny of delight when he heard the familiar voice. Poor fellow ! you will not blame him when I tell you that in the dark stable-stall he leaned his head against his horse's mane and let the tears drop, one after another, down the glossy arched neck. So many glad, free days they had spent together, rushing like the wind along the leafy lanes and breezy hills of his ancestral acres ; so many wild gallops they had taken among the dark, green solitudes of the pine cliffs, unearthing Reynard and chasing him tirelessly to cover ! The sun was down when he left the stables and went through the yard to the road that led winding down to- 22 IN SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. ward the cliffs and the creek. At the gate marking the terminus of the drive stood Amy, and the fitful red light of the sunset contrasted sharply with the pallor of her cheeks. He stopped in front of her, looking up toward the par- terre that had been his pride since when in pinafores he had dug up the bulbs and mutilated the rose-trees, and proven himself even then a very determined young scion of the old stock, from which he was thrust out now for no reason but that a stranger had won the heart of his father from him. It was a bitter thought, for pride of race was strong in Cedric's breast, and he had always loved to think that, tyrannical and imperious though his father might be, there was still that inherited chivalry in his veins which had ever been the boast of the Cheswicks. There were chronicles treasured upon the library shelves that gave to a Robert of Cheswick in the olden days the title of Rob- ert the Just, because he had chosen to redress his sover- eign's wrong by sword and lusty blows, and later, when travelling merchantmen were waylaid, crossing the river that ran by their demesne, and throttled in the cold, dark waves for the sake of their booty, a Cheswick had built the bridge over the dangerous ford, though he died for the deed by the sword of his people. Had the brave old blood run out in these late centuries, or turned thin and watery, mere craven blood after all? You will see what a passionate, foolish young aristocrat he was, and how unfit for the age he lived in. Well, he was to learn how purposeless had been his dreams and his theories in the world whither he was going, in the world that asks not if you have proud blood in your veins, but if you have position ; that asks not if you are chivalrous, but if you are capable ! What recks it AT BAY, 2 3 to the world that in Henry the Second's reign a Ches- wick earned a chivalrous pseudonym by brave deeds, if the Cheswick of to-day possesses not the wherewithal to invite the world to dinner? "Have you much money, Cedric?" asked Amy, in a hesitant voice. " Enough for a while, Amy; don't trouble about that part of it, I shall get along." " But but if you would but take this, Cedric," push- ing a morocco pocket-book through into his hand where it rested on the gate. " Ah, do not look so angry, Cedric ; you might let me lend it to you, at least." "I am not angry, Amy; how could you think so? but I do not need your money. Keep it, darling, and, if I do not come back for years, buy Duffer a tombstone with it, should he die in the mean time. Come, sweet- heart, cheer up," for the tears were falling down her cheeks, " I shall be back before Duffer has time to for- get me ; my father will find out the truth, and when he does, ah, I shall not be too proud to come back to Ches- wick. I will write to you every week, and you will answer punctually, I know. Don't you see, it is only a little trip I am taking, after all. Good-by, pet, keep up the ' ap- passionata,' and, whatever you do, don't grieve after me. This is only one of father's caprices, which will not sepa- rate us long. Good-by !" He kissed her over the gate, then vaulted into the meadow, intending to take the " cross-cut" into the woods that was the nearest route to the station, and as he leaped the second fence he turned and waved his hand to her gayly. An unselfish action brings with it its own reward. Cedric had felt miserable enough when he left Duffer in the stable and walked out towards the highway, with 24 IN SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. the spacious grounds of his loved old birthplace looking never so fair and tempting as it did to him then, its lineal inheritor. A hot anger was fomenting steadily in his brain towards his father, unjust and tyrannical as never was father before him ; but at the first glimpse of Amy, with her pale, patient face and sorrowful eyes, love usurped the place of hate in his heart, and pity for her loneliness impelled him to " wear a brave face in the front of things." And in doing so he had not only comforted her but had lightened the burden for himself. What more natural to suppose than that his innocence would vindicate itself? The chivalric faith of the dead and gone Cheswicks blossomed anew in his being, the faith that had trusted, vainly too often, to the sympathy of Man and the blind dominion of Chance. A piece of woodland lay between the meadow-lands of Cheswick and the county road, and into it Cedric plunged, baring his head to its grateful shadows. From a clearing in its midst was to be gained an unintercepted view of the old gray stone house and its spacious grounds ; from thence the road declined, making a grade of at least twenty feet by the time the creek and the mill were reached, and along the turnpike for miles the traveller caught occasional glimpses of the noble old pile standing out like a bas-relief from its background of shadowy blue mountains, or shining through the night like a beacon above the dark pine cliffs. Cedric did not stop in the clearing for a parting glance at Cheswick ; he chose rather to bear away with him his last memory of it with Amy, white and patient, smiling a farewell to him over the gate, striving for his sake, just as he had for hers, to be hopeful and brave. He walked onward rapidly, his valise slung across his shoulders. The September evening was warm, and he wiped his forehead more than once. AT BAY. 25 The dead leaves rustled beneath his feet, off in the shades of the wood an owl was hooting, and an axe was ringing merrily among the green glades. Old Jacob Martin, his father's faithful servitor, was at work beyond the clearing. He noted the different sounds unconsciously, never dream- ing how the after-years were to be haunted ever by the sound of rustling leaves, the dismal cry of an owl, the metallic ring of a woodman's axe ! " Hav you my sweetheart seen?" rang out a manly voice in the distance, a voice clear as a bell and resonant as an orga_n-tone. Cedric Cheswick uttered a low cry and stood still. Ah ! is it true, I wonder, that two angels walk with us always, the black and the white, between whom are continual wrestlings and warfare? If so, then I think the poor white angel must often grow weary of a conflict in which he so rarely finds himself a match for his foe. "Have you my sweetheart seen?" The rich, rolling tones were as so many devils' jeers to the pale youth standing alone in the woodland path, with his back to his home and his heritage. Had the chivalric blood grown craven ? the proud brave blood that had won for that Cheswick in mediaeval ages the title of The Just ! He moved slowly, as though impelled by invisible hands, down the bridle-path in the direction of the voice. "Have you my sweetheart seen?" Nearer, nearer, chanting joyously, fearlessly ! In a moment more a young man bounded into sight, flinging his cap in the air and catching it, like a boy let loose from school. " Hey, Rick !" he cried, coming to a stand-still a few feet in front of him. "Out on another scout ? Well," with a laugh indescribably mocking, "it is good to know that Achilles is vulnerable, if only in his heel !" But Cedric stopped his mouth with a blow that sent 3 26 IN SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. him reeling backward, and as he fell he struck his temple sharply against the jagged, projecting root of a tree. Look at him as he lies there : the wide, white brow, the full eyes and long lashes, the lips curved into lines of sweetness and candor, you would say. Physiognomy for- sooth ! we all know that Macklin had the face of a fiend and the soul of a saint. Cedric stooped to where he lay pallid as marble and nearly as pulseless. A great horror stole upon him ; what if he were dead ! He hated him, it is true, but he would not murder even the man he hated. How still he was, and it was getting dark here in the depths of the wood- land. " Rabys ! Rabys Holme !" Cedric shook his arm and shouted his name in his ear, but the prostrate figure did not stir, and the blood trickled in a thin stream from his wounded temple. He endeavored vainly to stanch it with his handkerchief; he lifted the right hand from its convul- sive clutch among the dead leaves ; it was cold as ice and pulseless. He let it drop as the horrible truth dawned upon his brain. Rabys Holme had worked his worst upon him, he had made him a murderer ! It was a curious evidence of how soon a sense of guilt can make a coward of the bravest when a step behind him struck such terror to his brain that he started to his feet and made a vain attempt to fly. But the hand of Jacob Martin was upon his shoulder, and Jacob Martin's eyes were questioning his own with a scrutiny and pene- tration that opened them at once to the very worst facts of the case. "My God! Mr. Rick, have you killed him?" and he dropped on his knees by the motionless figure with a groan. " God knows, Jacob ! He maddened me with his in- AT BAY. 2 7 solent taunts, and I struck him a blow a single blow ! Have I killed him, Jacob? I hated him, but I never meant to kill him !" There was a silence that seemed to Cedric like the si- lence of the grave while Jacob Martin peered between the closed lids of those great dark eyes and felt among the linen over his heart for some faint pulse-beat to dispel the horrible doubt that assailed him, but in vain ! There was no hope in his face when he lifted it blanched and gray to meet the haggard eyes of his employer's son. "God forgive you, Mr. Rick, he is dead!" Cedric threw up his arms with a great cry, and at that old Jacob Martin clambered to his feet and drew the lad into the deeper shades of the wood with the most reckless haste. " Get away with you, boy, get away. No, I can't stop to listen ; some one will come along presently, and then you'll be lost. You didn't mean it, I know, but what' 11 that stand for in law? you've killed him. I know you didn't mean it. You don't need to tell me. Go, my boy, go, or it'll be too late!" Cedric lifted his haggard eyes to his old friend's face. "Go! where shall I go? to the village, Jacob, and give myself up? What need to fly? murder will out, the very stones will cry out that I have killed him. Jacob, I will not go!" Then the old man broke down and blubbered aloud like a boy who has been whipped. " And you will stay here to be hung, when you never meant to harm him, and he has been your only enemy since you left school ! There ain't a boy in the stables but has heard you have your tiffs ; even if you hadn't done it there'd be evidence enough to hang you, and yet you're innocent as a babe. Oh, my boy, for justice's sake, for your family's, for Miss Amy' s sake, go !" 28 Iff SANCHO PANZAS PIT. Ah ! Jacob Martin had touched the right cord. He leaned on the old man's shoulder and trembled in all his supple, sinewy frame, for to fly looked to him like dis- honor, and to stay was surely death ; and " what will not a man do for his life ?" "Jacob, will you tell her the truth all? I never meant to harm him. Oh, God ! I would not kill a fly !" "Yes, yes, my boy, I will tell her all; go quick, God bless you ! Oh, my boy, my boy, that I've taught to ride and row and hunt, that ever you'd 'a come to this ! God keep you ! /'// stand your friend ; no one shall know but tier," in a low, impressive whisper. Out from the green glades into which he had so lately gone with at least no shadow of guilt on his soul, he fled a murderer now. Oh, pity him all ye who have passionate blood in your veins, for henceforth his crime will darken the brightest skies for him, will taint the richest perfumes, will embitter the sweetest draught, will stain his hands, his life, his soul : " Cursed shall he be in the house, and cursed shall he be in the field." CHAPTER IV. THE WHITE ANGEL. " Drink to Fortune, drink to Chance, While we keep a little breath; Drink to heavy Ignorance, Hob and nob with brother Death !" The Vision of Sin. CEDRIC, after two days' travel by rail, found himself at a small village station, entirely ignorant of his where- abouts, and physically so reduced by mental suffering that it was with difficulty he could drag his stumbling feet into the clerk's office and make an intelligible in- quiry of the man seated in the operator's chair. The fellow looked at him with a dubious expression that set Cedric, in dread of detection at all moments, upon the alert at once. "Don't know where you are, sir? That's odd! Hadn't you better have studied your geography a little before you set out ?" The swift blood of the Cheswicks fired his face at that. " If it is any trouble to set me straight, sir, I absolve you from it immediately," he said, with a haughty movement of his head, and, suiting the action to the word, he turned on his heel and went out into the glowing light of the Sep- tember day. It was a desolate place in its aspect, all country stations are that, but this was exceptionally so. Cedric stood on the long, narrow platform, looking up and down the rails, with his head burning, his limbs trem- 3* 29 30 IN SANCHO PANZAS PIT. bling, and in his heart a deadly, sick loathing of him- self and life that to his healthy, strong nature was bitter as crime itself. Behind him stood the long, low depot building, painted red-brown, with its smell of plaster and guano; opposite a white house, encircled by dilapidated palings, stared at him with its shutterless windows. In the yard, half filled with old shingles, the roof shone obtrusively with a patch of new ones, two dirty children pumped alternately into a battered tin bucket, and laughed in boisterous mirth when the water, plashing on the out- side, spattered their bare feet, standing sorely in need of some friendly ablutions. No shrubbery, no trees except a few stunted pines, and he looked in vain for the relief of woodland verdure beyond the hills, whither the train had just rushed madly out of sight. Into the first road Cedric turned, not knowing, scarcely caring, whither it would lead him. He had not tasted food since he left Cheswick. His one thought had been to hurry away as fast as steam could carry him from that bosky dingle near his old home where he had yielded to the temptation of Cain and shed his brother's blood. And as he stumbled along the unfamiliar road he heard, as he had heard every moment since the glad, gay voice dropped into silence, the words of the sweet German love-song as Rabys Holme had chanted it, never dream- ing what it was to cost him, " Have you my sweetheart seen f" Ah, why had he taken that backward path that had led him face to face with his foe ! It would have been so easy to have gone on, to have passed by that rich, mocking voice, and left it to sing in the nest from which it had ousted him ! So easy, with all that hate and love and longing running riot in his breast ? So easy to have passed him THE WHITE ANGEL. 31 by he, the heir on his way out from the home of his forefathers, from the presence of the purest love of his life? So easy to make way for this laughing Judas, this handsome scoundrel, his bitterest foe, who in his last hour had worked him ruin irretrievable ? "Oh, my God ! did I mean to kill him?" he cried to the solitude around him, for by reason of trouble and long fasting his brain was growing bewildered. Then he covered his face in terror, for a hundred voices seemed repeating it in his ears, and his cry of anguish reverber- ated in thunder tones about him. Can you see how he was suffering, what torture he was undergoing, from a gentleman of honor and ease suddenly to have become a fugitive, subject by his own act to the extreme penalty of the law ? On the Sabbath before he left home he had attended divine service in the village with Amy. The discourse had treated of the majesty and justice of God's law as represented by the great White Throne of the Reve- lator's heaven, and the infinite mercy that modifies that law, as symbolized by the pale-green rainbow that encir- cled the throne. Was it only a week ago that he had walked, with Amy's light hand upon his arm, through the dear familiar ways and talked of God's mercy, and believed in it as a steady, bright reality? Only a week ago ! and already the pale-green rainbow had faded in the light that dazzled, blinded him, the light of the great white throne, from whence God meted out the justice of his law to murderers. The garish sun faded suddenly, the dust in the road arose and choked him, the very stones at his feet cried out as he sought to hide among them, "Man, where is thy brother?" 3 2 IN SANCHO PANZAS PIT. After interminable wanderings in all lands, beside all waters, through all space, himself a phantom, pursued by phantoms, Cedric Cheswick found himself one day lying in a quiet chamber, lit only by the fire in the grate and a transom open above the door. Where was he ? What was he? He tried to think, groping feebly with weak fingers among the white folds of what seemed to him his grave-clothes, so chill and spotless were they. He turned his eyes hither and thither about the room : a chair by a closely-curtained window, in the chair a book ; a little table near the grate, some bottles thereon, a glass, a flask. The flame in the grate shot up with a momentary radiance ; among the snowy vestments about him a crimson ray flickered. He stretched his hand out in an uncertain way to where the red flame danced. Oh, horrors ! his fingers were bathed in blood, warm red blood ! The fire died down, the chair and table and curtained windows were suddenly blotted out, and he knelt in Cheswick forest, with Rabys Holme's dead face gleaming chill and white among the dank leaves at his feet. "It is blood !" he shouted, and the Naha-like echo took up the cry, until he laughed, as devils laugh, to find the echo so faithful : "It is blood!" "It is blood!" "It is blood!" * ******** " I am sure he has not moved, Herbert. I left the room for a moment, it is true ; but he cannot have moved, for see poor fellow ! his very hands lie just as I left them." It was a woman's voice that spoke. Cedric, hearing it, opened his eyes, and surprised her with her face bent close to his own. " Are you the white angel ?" he asked. And the sound of his own voice shocked his ear, coming, as it seemed, THE WHITE ANGEL. 33 from such an incalculable distance. " Are you the white angel?" Then he moved his head uneasily, and a faint color stole into the pallor of his face, for he saw the sur- prise in the woman's eyes, and he fancied, poor fellow ! that he was not acting with just the amount of dignity, perhaps, that the occasion required. " There, my dear, you are mistaken. Now get some wine-whey, will you? and leave the poor boy with me for a little." Then there was a sound of softly-trailing skirts, and of a door opened and closed. " In all my travels," volunteered Cedric, making a stu- pendous effort to say something commonplace and polite to the elderly gentleman who presented himself at this juncture, " in all my travels I never heard a door open or close. Has she gone ?" " Has who gone, my boy?" asked the gentleman, taking his hand in what seemed to Cedric a very cordial grasp for a stranger. " The white angel? no, I mean the lady." "Ah, that's better; yes, she's gone, but she's coming back. Now are you right comfortable?" Cedric turned a questioning glance upon the kindly, grave face. " Well, yes, except if you would be so kind " then he paused from sheer exhaustion. " I should like to take off my shroud, sir ! I mean" with a dim discernment of inaptness in his mode of ex- pression, engendered, doubtless, by the amusement evi- dent in the stranger's face "I would like to put on my pants, if you please, sir." Cedric felt aggrieved at the unequivocal mirth with which the gentleman received this announcement. "There's no hurry, my boy, no hurry; just you lie quiet a while ; your ' white angel 1 will be in with an appetizer directly " 34 IN SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. "The lady, sir!" interrupted Cedric, with a sigh of irritation and weakness. " I am aware I made a mis- take I thought " "Ah, well, no matter what you thought, lie still now; look around you and tell me if you have ever been here before." Cedric obeyed with an effort ; the vigorous will that had once said to the brain "do this," and it was done, was a master shorn of authority to-day. It took him a long time to take in his surroundings, but he recognized them at last: a chair with a book in it, a closely-curtained window, a table standing near the grate with a glass and a flask thereon, and a small army of medicine-bottles. Long, long ago he had been here, in some half-forgotten time when he lived in the body, but under what circum- stances he could not even dimly remember. "Well, have you ever been here before?" questioned the gentleman, with his fingers on his wrist. " Once, perhaps, a hundred years ago, or in a dream," panted Cedric, burning with impatience to understand his position, and beginning to regard his elderly friend in the unflattering light of an inquisitor. "A hundred years ago ! my dear boy, Ninon de 1'En- clos didn't divulge her secret to you, no matter how she made it serve herself, that is very evident. You saw this room for the first time just five minutes ago. Come, now, don't fret, you'll understand it little by little. Ah, here comes your ' white angel' with the whey, and now for ' a long pull, a strong pull, and a pull all together !" But Cedric ignored the whey impatiently. " I want to know " " Not now, not just now, my boy ; you have been very ill, and if you want to get well you must be quiet, and submit to my directions in all things. Edith !" THE WHITE ANGEL. 35 Cedric heard the trailing skirts swish softly over the carpet and pause at his bedside. He had closed his eyes to hide the tears of anger and weakness that the inquisi- tor's denial had brought there, but at the sound of that low, bell-like voice so close to his ear he opened them again. "Will you not drink this to please me? I made it with my own hands, and I should feel so disappointed if you refused." The sweet, motherly face, with its tender eyes, wrought like a charm upon his weakened senses. He smiled up into her eyes, poor boy, a faint, patient smile, and drank the potion at a single draught ; and still wondering vaguely at the kind face bent above him, he fell into the first conscious sleep he had known for many days. ********* When Cedric had fallen by the wayside, imagining in his keen remorse that he was forsaken alike by God and man, he had in reality fainted from sheer physical ex- haustion. Dr. Sinclair, returning late in the day from his professional round, found him lying but a few yards from his gate, flushed and delirious, and with the keen eye of his profession knew him instantly for what he was, a very ill man. For many days Cedric lay unconscious beneath the doctor's sheltering roof, attended by the doctor's sister, the " white angel" of his fever dreams. In the village, upon the outskirts of which Dr. Sinclair's stuccoed villa reared its pretentious gables, comment and curiosity were rife concerning the stranger who lay sick unto death at the doctor's. The clerk at Willams Switch had added his quota of information concerning the fugitive's appearance and his strange ignorance of his whereabouts when he left the train at Willams, and that 3 6 IN SANCHO PANZAS PIT. was enough of itself to set the village "on its ears" for more. He had been seen once since his convalescence walking in the garden with the doctor's little daughter, and was reported to be a tall, very thin young man, with yellowish curly hair and eyes that were both tired and proud-looking, and there all knowledge of him ended. Speculation took up the theme, enlarged upon it, and made it the one absorbing topic of the day. Willams, like Tennyson's "Village," though it looked so quiet and small, bubbled o'er like a city with gossip and scandal and spite. "Oh," cried old Mrs. Pry, across the back-yard fence to her neighbor, Miss Mundane, who was shelling Lima beans on her kitchen stoop, " I read of an awful embez- zlement last night; did you see it? A tall, yellowish- haired young man beat in a cellar-door somewhere down in the country, and cudgelled the life out of a poor old woman, then run off with her steel-framed spectacles, and the Lord knows what all !" " Sakes alive !" cried Miss Mundane, letting the beans fall out of the basin in her consternation. " What is the world a comin' to ?" "Ain't it?" shrieked Mrs. Pry, tying her apron-strings tighter, and complacently taking out a side-comb to give her salt-and-pepper tresses an extra dressing. " And what I started to say was that, who knows but it mightn't be that chap at the doctor's. The description suits him to a p'int; and beatin' in of cellar-doors, runnin' off with spectacles. It don't look so onlikely, do it?" Down went the beans in Miss Mundane's lively collapse of horror. It was not long until that worthy philantho- pist, arrayed in her best gown and bonnet, set out on a tour of the village in order to convey the startling intel- ligence to her neighbors. And so the ball rolled along, THE WHITE ANGEL, 37 gaining in proportions as it went, until it stopped at the doctor's gate, and Cedric stumbled out upon it. In the mean time " the sick fellow," unconscious of the dire dismay his vicinity was creating among the mystery- loving denizens of Willams, felt his strength come back to him slowly, so slowly, indeed, that he wondered if ever again he would be able to move without feeling the weary weight of his limbs dragging him down like an in- cubus. And yet in these seasons of weakness and pain he enjoyed the nearest approach to peace that his life was to know for many days. He had lost none of the horror of his crime, but he sought in his mind a means for atonement in some sort. He made an effort to straighten out the tangled snarl for future use. The threads were broken, it was not to be wound in straight, smooth skeins, that life of his, whereof he had prospected such glorious possibilities ; but it might serve, in spite of rough knots and frayed ends, to piece out some scheme of future use- fulness, and so with the hopefulness inherent in his brave nature he sought to look his future in the face. And the brave mood buoyed him until one day when the doctor's sister, the white angel whose features bore an intangible, shadowy resemblance to some other face he had known, though it was in vain he strove to catch and fix it, the doctor's sister questioned him delicately con- cerning himself, and he knew he dared not even divulge his name. Then Hope eluded him. With a mocking laugh she turned her back upon him, the fugitive, the murderer, whose only safety lay in concealment. " I can tell you nothing," he answered, while all the light and youth died out of his face. " It is all summed up in this, dear lady: 'I have sinned, and I have suf- fered !' " 4 38 IN SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. " But you have repented ?" And there was such subtle sympathy in the kind low voice that Cedric's eyes filled with a sudden rush of tears that, ashamed, he strove to hide. " No ; do not be ashamed of tears ; be thankful, rather, that you can weep. We are united by a common bond, for I, too, have ' sinned and suffered,' though for my sin I have no tears, for I sinned against my heart and killed it !" said this strange woman, a horror as of memory gathering in her eyes. "It is the heart that weeps ; so, boy, be thankful you have not killed your , heart." CHAPTER V. ADRIFT. ..." Being observed, When observation is not sympathy, Is just being tortured." Aurora. Leigh. " EDITH, I am growing tired of that boy !" "You don't mean it, Herbert?" The doctor's sister looked up from the book in her lap with expostulation in her eyes as well as in the tones of her ever-gentle voice. "I don't? Well, I should like to know why? Here have we been nursing him for over three weeks, and he has never given us the slightest clue to his history, not even a name to call him by. Can you understand it?" The lady's eyes grew dreamy, looking past the doctor's chair into some thought-realm that he could not pierce. " He may have reasons, Herbert: who knows? I cannot afford to blame him in that he has not confided his name to us." The doctor fidgeted in his chair ; he was a very brave man, but I do not think the direst extremity of pain or peril could have so disconcerted him as that appealing note of his sister's voice, that dark shadow in her eyes that looked like some horror of memory. " Nonsense !" he cried, assuming his usual tone, and rustling the paper in his hand to cover his confusion ; " I know what you are doing, Edith ; you are investing him with beggary, after the style of your favorite Euripidean heroes, and 39 40 Iff SANCHO PANZAS PIT, making a romantic subject of him generally. I suspect if the truth were known he is a worthless young scapegrace enough. Find out, if you can, what are his plans; he is growing stronger every day, and this sort of thing can't go on forever. I'd have asked him myself, but con- found the boy ! he is non-impressionable as mercury, and you'll go about it in a better way than I can. Suppose you try it now." She arose with a directness that was characteristic of her, and went up into a little room above stairs, where Cedric sat, near the window, with his head leaning for- ward on his hand. He was very pale and thin, and, apart from the natural dejection of ill health and spirits, there was a hopeless weariness in the wide blue eyes looking out now over the faded autumn landscape with a gloomy, preoccupied glance, as of one who sees, perforce, but takes no pleasure in the action. He looked around as the lady entered, and, seeing her, smiled a wan smile; then, with a natural impulse of gallantry, rose to his feet, and stood there until she chose to be seated. "Would it not be more cheerful for you to join my brother and me down-stairs sometimes now that you are stronger?" she asked, commiserating the loneliness of his situation. It was not that she had forgot her errand, but she mistrusted her ability to perform it ; the boy was very young, but there were latent reserves of pride and dignity behind his impassable demeanor that, with her womanly quick-sightedness, she looked into ; and then she pitied him, poor, blue-eyed, fair-faced lad, he looked so lonely, he seemed so friendless. Her heart yearned towards him, the heart of a woman who had suffered. " You offer me the liberty of your house ! That is imprudent, Miss Sinclair. How do you know that I will not abuse it?" ADRIFT. 41 The slight, chill smile upon his lips lent to his words a bitterness they might not else have borne. Miss Sin- clair's pale face softened yet more ; she went over to his side, and put back the falling locks from his brow with a touch tender as a mother's. "Suffering has made you morbid, my boy ; frank na- tures never indulge in suspicion, and yours is frank, or I am no physiognomist." " You believe in that? a shallow theory ! Ah, madam, there are influences at work in our natures by which we bid defiance ofttimes to every line of our faces. I wonder that you trust to it." He spoke with the dreary hopelessness of youth. To the young misery seems so relentless ; with hearts open to all the gentlest aspects of life, with spirits that are ready to embrace all the boundless capacities of enjoy- ment that a gracious world affords, suddenly to see the pall flapping down, down to your very feet, to feel the glad, gay sounds gradually dying away, the sunshine fading, fading ; and the paralyzed heart of youth says, "It is forever." For youth is selfish, and Magna Mater is as selfish as her blind young children, let poets sing as they will of nature's subtle sympathy. Ah, the sunlight gilds, the pipes blow, and the glad, gay merriment of the world goes on all the same though hearts be breaking. It is only to the stricken one that the sunlight looks like the darkness of Cimmeria. " Physiognomy does not govern nature, perhaps, but nature governs physiognomy." The lady's hand still lifted the errant locks from his forehead, and under the gentle tenderness of the action, Cedric, who had long missed the touch of a mother, felt the gloom of his mood lighten and disperse. He shook his head, however, in reply. " I doubt that 4* 42 IN SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. when we remember the head of Socrates and the beauty of Danton." "You illustrate by exceptions, my boy; but I have come to ask you a question, not to discuss an oft- mooted subject. Come, don't flush up like that ! Won't you trust me, child? I am old enough to be your mother." "You?" "Yes, I; past all the dangers if all the joys of youth. Listen, if you had a tempestuous channel to cross would you refuse the aid of a pilot?" " There is no harbor for me /" he muttered under his breath, his eyes reverting again to the waste of field and forest outside his window, the dull grays and browns of whose shifting colors seemed to harmonize with the dreari- ness of his thoughts. "Oh, do not say that ! What though you sail on the open sea all your life, if at the last you find the harbor?" But Cedric was silent, with his chin on his breast. "I am going away!" he cried at last; " it does not much matter where, but I am going. Do not think I shall abuse your goodness and be hard to shake off. I have only waited to gather a little strength." Poor boy ! he was so wretched and sensitive, and he did not see how the injustice of his words was the bitter- est ingratitude of which he could have been capable. But the patience of his companion's glance was the most powerful reproof she could have administered unto him. He grew very confused and ashamed. She stopped his halting apologies with a very gentle, pitiful smile. " Never mind ; you know, I am sure, that we have no wish to be rid of you until you are quite able to help yourself. All we ask, my brother and I, is enough of ADRIFT. 43 your confidence to enable us to help you as far as lies in our power. We deserve so much, do we not?" Her generosity overcame him ; his eyes filled with tears that he trusted her to excuse on the score of his bodily weakness, and the bitterness was gone from his voice when he spoke again. "You saved my life between you, and I know I should thank you for that ; but, oh, you do not see that my life is the very poorest possible gift 1 could receive at your hands ! I am puzzled what use to make of it. A single act of sin and folly has destroyed all its possibilities for- ever. I owned but yesterday, it seems to me, so much, father, friends, a wide inheritance ; to-day I am nameless and penniless; worse, I am under a ban that can never be lifted. Do not make me repeat it, dear lady, do not ask me more." His face was white as death, and the hand that he reached for his hat trembled with the violence of his emotion. He went from her presence, stumbling down the darkened hall with his fingers at his throat, the old irrepressible gesture of his boyhood when intensely moved or annoyed. And the woman whom he had called Miss Sinclair sat on where he had left her, the tears she had lacked for her own troubles flowing freely enough for his. Down in the garden Blanche, the doctor's little daugh- ter, was playing with a pet kitten, teasing it with a pine cone fastened to the end of a string. Cedric, on his way down the sunny path, stumbled upon the string, and the frail silken bond snapped. Little Blanche was not to be propitiated. "Go away, bad sick man!" she cried. "Were you blind to break my kitty's string? Go away !" " There, it is quite strong again. See, Blanche, I 44 IN SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. have made it stronger than before," he pleaded, his mis- ery forgotten momentarily in his vain efforts to appease his benefactor's little daughter. " I won't have it, it is ugly ! Who wants an old knotted, broken string?" screamed wilful Blanche. "Stop!" And she snatched it from him, winding it around her soft baby hands in a vain endeavor to break it, until the silk cut into her dimpled flesh, and made her cry more with the pain now than anger. "See, it is strong enough to hurt you, if you will not play with it; for shame, little one !" "Go away!" the embryo tyrant shrieked, infuriated and humiliated in all her baby body. "Go away ; I hate you, bad, ugly, thin, sick man ! Your legs look like lad- ders, nursie says so, and your eyes are are ugly big ! I quite believe what nursie says, I do !" " And what does ' nursie' say, you small tigress?" asked the "thin sick man," his "ugly big" eyes catching a gleam of their old-time laughter. " She says she says you killed somebody ' way down in the country, and you have runned off here to keep from getting hunged,' and I know it's true. All the people in Willams say so. Ugh, ugly, thin man ! you'd better not let my papa hear it, he'd, he'd make a jail to hung you in himself, and I'd help him ! Oh, I would, you needn't look so white with your big eyes I would, I would! and I'd get a string much, much tougher than this to put around your neck," rubbing her own bruised hands with infinite relish. Blanche watched the "ugly thin man" as he turned from her and went down into the bottom of the garden, and in her little heart felt some distinct qualms of re- morse, his face had turned so white and his "long legs" shook so as he walked. There he leaned against the ADRIFT. 45 grape-arbor, and he did not put up his hands to pick a single grape. She crept a few paces nearer him and cried in a high, defiant voice, "Eat the grapes if you will, nobody cares!" but he did not seem to hear her. Then, after a long, thonght- . ful pause, she darted to where he stood, and, catch- ing his sleeve, implored, with her two wistful, regretful eyes, notice of her small self. " Well, little one, what is it ?" "They are all saying so, everybody, but I told a story when I said I believed it, for I don't .' and and you ain't, ugly, only thin and sick!" He touched the brown curls with fingers that quivered. " Thank you, little Blanche !" And Blanche ran to find her nurse, surprising her by a remarkable decorum for some hours thereafter. How the old myths repeat themselves in every age, in every generation. In vain did Midas by innumerable devices seek to hide his secret : the very reeds shaking in the wind babbled of it, the very ground beneath his feet betrayed him. Up in the chamber that had sheltered him during the long, weary days of his fever and delirium Cedric Ches- wick sat long after the household had retired for the night. By the dawn he must be far away from Willams, but he would fortify himself by a moment of steady thought before he set out on his unknown path. He had not accepted little Blanche's angry babble literally, but it served to open his eyes to his danger. People were beginning to talk about him and to speculate concerning him. That he could ill afford ; a man under a ban as he was, whose only safety from the grip of the law, which is unerring and relentless as a sleuth-hound on the scent 46 IN SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. of its prey, lay in his concealed identity. He had given the doctor's man the clothes in which he had left Ches- wick, and substituted for them a rough suit of brown ; his watch he would leave behind him, a plain hunting-case that his father had given him on his sixteenth birthday. He was emaciated and weary-eyed, as little Blanche had said, " ugly, thin." With the huge, flapping felt hat he had bought in Willams pulled down over his brows, in his rough clothes and altered aspect, surely Jacob Martin might have passed him by as a stranger. For Rick, at Cheswick, had often been obliged to take some banter concerning his fastidious habits. " Rick's a swell !" Rabys had said once, at college, with that underlying venom that had characterized his relations with his foster- brother from their earliest connection. "But Rick can afford to be; he has the principle of all those boshy old chronicles in the library to sustain. Rick is a patrician ; I'm a plebeian, perhaps; but if he don't look out I'll play a trick on him yet, for I'm my father's Jacob !" Yes, Cedric to-day worn by illness and despair, in his uncomely apparel looked little enough like the Cedric of old, clear-eyed and resolute in the graceful guise of a gentleman, with the bonhomie and beauty of a whole race of Cheswicks blooming anew in his person. He leaned his head on his hand and pondered, while the darkness grew deeper, what he should do, what path of honorable pursuit lay open before him. Or, rather, he thought when he sat down that he would, before he left, ferret out a way to help himself. He meant, by dint of determination and shrewd judgment, to strike upon some plan by which he might hold his life in some sort of shape. And after this fashion he set about his cogitations: He had barely enough money to meet the exigencies of life for a short time. Where would he be safe ? safe from ADRIFT. 47 the law for a while, for, sooner or later, that tragedy enacted in the depth of Cheswick wood will be traced to its source, and he, the last of the Cheswicks, would be called upon to expiate his crime as though he were the veriest beggar on God's earth ! That was the end of his cogitation. When CEdipus sought to stifle the memory of his crime in the narrow Phocian way with the splendors of his The- ban kingdom, did he dream of the pestilence that was ap- proaching on the wings of the wind, slowly though surely, and of the voice that would cry therefrom for the blood of murdered Laius? Perhaps not, but it came at last, retribution, and he who of all the world alone had un- riddled the mighty mystery of the Sphinx, he who in the noonday glory of his pride and strength had aspired to a place among the gods, came at last, blind and miserable, to die in the Cave of the Furies ! Why did those idle fables arise in his memory to sting him? "It was mur- der !" he groaned, looking down into the fading embers that gave back to his glance but that one unfading scene in Cheswick wood of Rabys Holme bleeding and dead, killed by his hand ! "It was murder ! I turned back to meet him in the wood-path, and I knew if he dared open his lips to me I would strike the craven breath out of his body. " It was murder, and for murder there is but one ex- piation, a life for a life, the old law ! Yet if I could bring you back, Rabys ; if I could but awake to find it a hideous dream, I would be willing to endure toil, pain, privation, oh, what not of bodily anguish ! But to what purpose shall I struggle, to what purpose shall I endure, with this sin on my soul, whose wages is death !" From his breast, where his fingers had involuntarily closed on the treasure hid there, he drew forth the single 48 IN SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. souvenir he had dared keep of his pure and happy youth, a ring, Amy's gift to him on his twenty-first birthday, his last. " Why did you choose this ominous Nemesis, little one, for my constant guide and companion?" he had asked, when, with dimpling smiles all over her sweet face, she had slipped it on his finger six months ago. "Ah, it is just as you choose to make it, Cedric," she had said, wise little Amy, whose conceits were so quaint. "It is only to the bad Nemesis wears a frowning aspect ; the good she rewards. See, I chose it because I want you to think always how one or the other of the angels wins in the soul of man. So when you follow the lead of your white angel Nemesis will reward you with good gifts, and if if at any time the black should con- quer, you would all the same be unable to escape her, for she. is inviolate on sea or land; her fingers close over the helm and the wheel." And he had listened with boyish phrases of delight, and had called her a " wise little woman." " But your Nemesis shall only have good gifts for me, sweetest, because I mean to keep my white angel always just where she is now," and with that he had whispered an epithet into her ear that had brought the bright blood in torrents to her face. It was later than he thought when he turned from these bitter-sweet memories to the realities in the midst of which he sat. There was no longer any time to decide what to do. It was past the midnight, and by morning he must be far enough away from Willams. The taunts of little Blanche had served to open his eyes to his dan- ger. Only the innocent could sit down in safety the guests of honest people; for the fugitive, the homicide, there was but the hastening step, the listening coward ear ADRIFT. 49 that hears in the rustle of every leaf the step of the exe- cutioner. He moved about his room, and with his old instinct of order and fastidiousness set it all carefully to rights. He wrote a brief note of thanks, and left it with his watch on the table where " Miss Sinclair" would not fail to discover them. He covered up the embers on the hearth, thinking the while how all the glowing aspira- tions of his youth were blotted out beneath the ashes of desolation gathered by his own hand ; then he stood on the threshold of the hospitable chamber that had sheltered him in his weakness and desolation, and invoked a bless- ing upon his benefactors, the honest, kind doctor, gentle "Miss Sinclair," the imperious baby Blanche. "O God, my hands are blood-stained !" he cried, as horror at the thought of so great a sinner as he daring to address the All-Righteous One entered like iron into his soul. Then he went quietly down through the sleeping house and out through the gate of the garden into the white, frozen road, again a fugitive, again adrift, with no hope in the present, no goal in the future. CHAPTER VI. CHESWICK. " A past foretells a future." IT is meet, after having taken you in through the great hall and introduced you to the master and son in the li- brary and the lady in the drawing-room, that I pilot you along the different corridors of this fine old mansion, lest at any time you lose your way therein. True hospi- tality consists in making your guests free to come and go at will in your households, and yet the best regulated families would not care to admit visitors into their kitch- ens at all hours. However, the time is come, now that you have seen the state apartments of Cheswick, forme to take you into the remote chambers that the world never sees. Eleven years ago Cedric's mother died, and Mr. Ches- wick called in to the care of his only child his sole sur- viving sister, Miss Barbara Cheswick, a maiden lady of fifty, who attended to the boy's physical wants, and pet- ted him injudiciously as the most doting father could have desired. Not that Robert Cheswick was a doting father, or even an affectionate one, in the general sense of the term. He was satisfied that Cedric's rights to be a Cheswick were indubitable by an inheritance of the Ches- wick traits, as well as the blood, and there he fancied his feeling for his son ended. But if the boy had been killed by one of the colts he was forever "breaking in," or So CHESWICK. 51 carried off by one or another of the epidemics that constantly prevailed in the marshy little village at the foot of the mountain, Mr. Cheswick would have experi- enced a more fatherly pang than he supposed possible to himself, for the bold brave nature inherent in the boy bore a strange ring of his own, and, whether he knew it or not, Cedric's future was a matter of vast importance to him. The boy, accustomed to the gloomy quiet of his father's moods, or the much-to-be-dreaded though infrequent bursts of his anger, kept out of his way generally and grew up without knowing much more of him than did the world at large. His mother had been his sole companion and teacher, and he surprised the neighborhood with the violence of his grief when, on the day of her burial, he had flung himself on her new-made grave and resisted all efforts to take him away for hours. Robert Cheswick's heart had been stirred by some un- wonted emotions at sight of his motherless boy's sorrow, but he did not encourage the tender mood, and, immersing himself afresh in his books and his business, he left the child to Miss Barbara's guardianship, and thrust away from him the haunting memory of the sad-faced woman, his mother, whom he had never loved. A year after the death of Mrs. Cheswick an event oc- curred that changed the whole tenor of the future for the inmates of Cheswick Hall. The family, consisting of Mr. Cheswick, Cedric, and Miss Barbara, was at tea. Jacob Martin brought in the letter-bag, gave it into his master's hand, and retired. Jacob's wife, Amanda, Miss Barbara's chief assistant, stood behind her mistress, quietly attentive and on the alert. Mr. Cheswick emp- tied the papers out upon the table ; a letter slipped to the floor. He stooped with a reddening face and picked 5 2 IN SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. it up. Cedric, taking advantage of his father's absorp- tion, slipped from his place at the table and escaped to the library, where he had left a very interesting problem in chess only half worked out. " Barbara," said Mr. Cheswick, when he had folded the sheet carefully and readjusted it in the envelope, " I have something strange to tell you." Miss Barbara settled her spectacles and looked at him inquiringly above them. " Rabys Holme is dying, and he writes for me to come and take his boy." "You, Robert, you /" cried old Miss Cheswick, fiery gleams in her sunken black eyes. " He dares ask that of you ?" Mr. Cheswick stirred his coffee mechanically. "And his wife? what does he say of his wife?" A flush crept slowly up to Robert Cheswick's temples, where gray hairs mingled with the fair curling locks of his closely-cut hair. " She left him years ago, and it has been the one aim of his life to keep the knowledge of her child's whereabouts a secret from her." "He took her child!" Some womanly commisera- tion was making Miss Barbara's eyes soft. " He asks me to take his child and keep him, as he has done, from all knowledge of his mother." "And you?" Miss Barbara's voice, low and quiet as it was, rang like a challenge. " I will do it !" he answered, bringing his clinched fist down upon the table with a force that made the china and silver jingle. "I will do it !" " You may go, "Manda," ordered Miss Barbara to the Abigail behind her chair, and when the door closed be- hind her, she leaned over the silver, the little black curls on either side of her temples shaking with the vehemence of her warning. "Take care how you do this thing, CHESWICK. 53 Robert Cheswick, take care ! Your vengeance may recoil upon yourself." " Nonsense, Barbara ! I will bring him here, treat him as my own son, and give him equal chances with Cedric ; what better could happen to the boy?" "Nonsense!" echoed Miss Barbara. "You will care for him not through any generous feeling to your foe, Robert Cheswick, but because you will like to think of her desolate in her old age as she made you in your youth." Mr. Cheswick pushed back his chair with a mighty clatter and rose from the table, his forehead crimson. " Are you mad, to revive that old folly of my youth, Barbara ! It matters little to you, I should think, with what motive I shall undertake the care of Rabys Holme's boy. He comes, that is a certain fact. If you think the additional charge will be too much for you, you have only to say so." And he did come one stormy December evening, when Miss Barbara and Cedric were bidding each other good- night on the upper landing of the hall. There was the sound of a door opening, a great rush of wind that nearly extinguished the light Cedric held, and he turned to see his father leading in from the porch a boy of about his own size, so wrapped and muffled that nothing was to be seen of his face but a pair of large black eyes that looked frightened and irritable at once. "Come down, Rick!" shouted his father. "Now shake hands, youngsters!" as Cedric came, obedient to his call, and stood before him. Cedric boldly extended his hand, but little Holme shrank farther back into the angle of the hall. "What! won't make up? That's because he's hun- gry and tired. Take him off to Aunt Bab, Rick, and, 5* 54 IN SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. see here, his name is Rabys. Off with you now, and be good friends." But Rabys declared he was not hungry, in a sulky way that was a revelation to the little Cedric, sunny and in- souciant himself, except when moved, which was not often, to the quick anger of his race. It was dull work propitiating his father's ward on that first night, but Cedric noticed that, notwithstanding his avowal to the contrary, he was hungry, and ate unre- strainedly of the bountiful lunch Aunt Bab set for him, making repeated raids upon the preserve dish. Cedric further observed that he was a very handsome boy, with well formed and regular features, and hair soft and silken as a girl's. But he met all his smiling over- tures with silence and an ominous frown above his soft dark eyes, so that it was a relief when Miss Barbara came and took him off to bed. Rabys did not improve upon acquaintance. The two boys were antagonistic from the first. They might have been of different species so far as their sensations and perceptions were concerned. There was the difference of the eagle and the mole between them : the light shone alike in the eye of both, but while the one gloried in it and sought to draw nearer ever the divine source of effulgence, the other burrowed on blind and unconscious. It did not help him in his honest effort to make a com- panion of Rabys when he found his father making a pet of him ; his father who, beyond the slightest concern for his welfare, had never appeared to notice him. And Ra- bys, who was wilful and insolent to everybody about the premises, and from the first defiant of Miss Barbara's gen- tle rule, never failed in strict obedience and respect to his foster-father. Miss Barbara, angered one day by some un- usual defiance on Rabys's part, made a remark in Cedric's CHESWICK. 55 hearing that he never forgot, and that added to his preju- dice of Rabys in after-years when, as was natural, his father's partiality to the son of a stranger came to be talked about in the neighborhood. " The young ras- cal !" she had said, " he knows on which side his bread is buttered, and he's shrewd enough to keep that side up!" Cedric was not conscious of the fact, but this remark of his aunt, made thoughtlessly and in anger, rendered him suspicious of Rabys, where before he had only been intolerant. The boy was frank and open as light, but he was very lonely, and when he saw Rabys revelling in the warmth of his father's favor, of which so little had been vouchsafed him during his lonely boyhood, he grew angry and suspicious of the intruder, the more that his behavior was so questionable. The years went on, and if Cedric had not come to make the query that Locke thought inevitable under such train- ing, " Father, when will you die?" he had at least come to the conclusion that the task of trying to win over his father was a thankless one, and might as well be given up. If Mr. Cheswick, suffering with gout by this time and sevenfold harder to please in consequence, had even sur- mised the struggle going on in his son's breast, he would have been more surprised than words could have ex- pressed. He believed that the proper plan to rear a child was at arm's length. Respect was an all-important ingredient in a child's relations with a father, respect amounting to veneration, which ingredient, if the child be allowed the familiar footing of a companion, falls a sacrifice, of course. He congratulated himself upon the success of his theory, and was very proud of Cedric as he grew to manhood. True, the boy had some soft, girlish ways that he had inherited from his mother, a trick of 5 6 IN SANCHO PANZAS PIT. gazing at sunsets and reading poetry, and a wild love of music, which he had given him time and means to culti- vate. There were some stray notions of delicacy and harmony in his head more befitting a woman than the last of the Cheswicks, but on the whole Cedric was a success in his father's mind, and had developed wonder- fully from the thin, fair-faced child into the tall, athletic stripling that brought back to the gloomy, gray-haired man faint bitter memories of his own proud and gracious youth. And with these thoughts in his mind he would look at his boy gazing up into the sunsets from his library window, little dreaming that his heart was aching with its weight of affection thrust back upon it. When at his mother's piano in the lonely parlor divine harmonies would float out across the hall and arrest Mr. Cheswick's attention in spite of himself, he little thought that the deep longing for sympathy in the boy's soul drove him to the solitude that was teeming with the memory of his mother's love, and that in the affluence of his home his only son stood a very beggar, hungering for the love his father denied him. Oh, foolish human hearts that cover up your tenderest impulses with a mask of indifference, and deem you act wisely in so doing, if you could but know of the direful results that too often follow ! Rabys was a sprightly fellow, a happy-go-lucky sort of a lad, who alw'ays brought a bright face into his guar- dian's library, and interested him by dint of his persistent demands upon his time and attention. Then, as the boy grew older, his avowed preference for his guardian, his obedience and ready compliance with all his commands flattered him, and so, more because Rabys managed it than that Mr. Cheswick preferred it, this state of affairs had come about. CHESWICK, 57 Absorbed in his books and the business of his estates, Mr. Cheswick failed to observe how gradually the boys were becoming estranged from each other. Occasionally Rabys complained of Cedric's coldness, whereupon Cedric was severely reprimanded ; but no complaints were made of Rabys, except, perhaps, at the stables, where his im- perious temper was dreaded alike by horse and groom. To these Mr. Cheswick generally turned a deaf ear, conciliated beforehand by Rabys's excuse: "Rick moons his time away over books, you know, and what use would my vacation be if I didn't get some sport out of the horses?" But Jacob Martin could have told his master, had he chosen, that the sport often ended in Rabys riding home half-drunk in the early gray dawn, with the mare reeking with foam, and marked with the whip from wether to flank. It was when the boys were both nineteen that a widowed cousin of Mr. Cheswick died, and he found himself called upon out of common humanity to offer her only child, a girl of tender years, an asylum at Cheswick Hall. He was generous as a prince with his means, and, won by the lonely, sweet face of the orphan, made her very welcome at Cheswick ; ordered a new piano in place of the old one that had so long occupied the niche opposite Cedric's organ, and bought a pony phaeton so that she would not find it too dull at Cheswick. Miss Barbara was scandalized at the thought of another orphan to rear, "and a girl, with frowzy head and fur- belowed pinafore!" for, like most old maids, she enter- tained a suspicious scorn of her sex; so to Miss Barbara Amy Randolph was a pleasant surprise. "To think I dreaded your coming!" she would say, looking over to where Amy sat, plying some dainty feminine work, and 58 IN SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. flushing up to her gentle eyes with pleasure at the old lady's approval. "To think I dreaded you! why, my dear, I have not had as much real comfort since I came here!" It was just at this time that an open rupture occurred between Cedric and Rabys. Miss Barbara was called into the library one evening soon after the mail had been brought in. She found her brother fluttering an open letter in his hand in one of his moods of positive vexation, which Miss Bab, from long experience, had learned to dread. "Read this," he cried, "and tell me is the boy a fool or mad !" The old lady looked up after its perusal with a flush on her worn face. " If you mean Rabys," she said with emphasis, " I should say he was a fool." "Tush!" said her brother, "that is of a piece with the tricks he has always played, the boy means nothing ; but Rick, the arrogant young scamp, what does he mean ?' ' "Well, do you believe the half of this statement," asked his sister, quietly, though her keen old eyes were flashing. It angered her to see her brother always unjust to his own flesh and blood, and ever so ready to make excuses for the strangers. "Believe it! Why should I not? Rabys never lied to me." "And did Rick?" " No !" thundered Rick's father, indignant at the bare insinuation that a son of his and a Cheswick could stoop to dishonor; "I have not heard from Rick on the sub- ject, unless that ridiculous request of his about coming home before his course is ended has something to do with it." " You may be sure it has, else why would Cedric wish CUES WICK. 59 to leave? He has had no trouble with the professors. I can see straight through it," added Miss Bab, as indeed she might with those keen bright eyes, which, as Proctor said of Charles Lamb's, " looked as though they might pick up pins and needles." " Rick wants to get away before the trial, because he fears his evidence may help to condemn Rabys." " Rabys says all the Seniors were in it," and Mr. Ches- wick read from the letter on the table: "It was a lark, we meant no more than if we had taken the grapes from a vine outside the window ; the deuced thing of it was that we broke the lock" (Rabys neglected to mention the fact that his own knife was the sole accomplice with him- self in that deed). "All the Seniors were in it, and now Rick turns luny and means to run away." "The young scamp!" cried Miss Barbara. "He would make us believe by his half-truth that our Rick was of the party. Oh, I told you, Robert, that no good would come of your bringing Rabys Holme to Cheswick." " Don't be silly, Bab. You were prejudiced against the boy from the first. Why can't Rick write his own statement: confound the boy, he is as reticent, as stiff, and distant with me as though I were the veriest stranger !" "And whose fault is that, Robert? I would like to know," interrupted Miss Bab, warm in the defence of her darling. "You have held him at arm's length all his life ; you never encouraged his confidence in the smallest degree. Why, I have seen you notice Rabys Holme more in a day than you would Rick in months." "Go along, Bab! I see I have all I will get of you; your partiality blinds you as it does with women. I might have known your advice would be worth nothing." Miss Bab laughed, rising from her chair and scraping an imaginary spot off the cuff of her sleeve. " And you 60 IN SANCHO PANZAS PIT. relish hearing the truth of yourself as little as most men ; but my advice, if you care for it, is let Rick come home, or go see about it yourself, for I know Rick, and he'll stick to that thankless young scapegrace while there is breath in his body !" Well, the trouble ended in Mr. Cheswick's having busi- ness up North, which called him college-way, and the affair was settled satisfactorily, though in a manner known only to the parties concerned. The boys resumed their course, which was to terminate with diplomas that year, and Mr. Cheswick refused to regard it in any other light than as one of Rabys's larks, though he found less fault than usual with Cedric's part of the proceedings. In- deed, he inwardly exulted at the brave, generous nature of the boy, who, to save his foster-brother from the mer- ited consequences of his reckless behavior, would have sac- rificed his ambition, if not his reputation, for there were those among the college renegades who would gladly have held him up to view as a coward, seeing that he chose to leave rather than implicate Rabys by a confession of how he had warned him and in every way endeav- ored to induce him to give over the absurd piece of folly he contemplated. Encouraged by his father's kindness, Cedric ventured to remonstrate with him on the subject of his indulgence of Rabys. "Forgive me if I seem to dictate, but indeed, sir, you are much too generous in your allowance to Rabys. We are thrown with a wild set here, and his unlimited means are often, I fear, a source of temptation to him." " Well, I'll think of it ; meanwhile keep an eye on him, Rick." " No need to tell me that, father; but Rabys will not brook anything like interference from me; he would be CHESWICK. 6 1 sure to set it down to the meanest of motives. We never have been able to assimilate in a single idea." The boy said it with a sigh. His father laid his hand on his shoulder for an instant, looking down upon the strong brave face with genuine fatherly pride. "Ah, well, my boy," and Cedric's heart bounded at the epithet that sounded like a caress, "you are a Cheswick and he a Holme: perhaps it is not so astonishing as you think that you do not assimilate," and the haughty old aristocrat turned on his heel and left his son to ponder on his meaning. Late on the evening of Mr. Cheswick's departure, Rabys came up to the dormitory which he shared with Cedric, flushed and scowling, a dangerous evil light in his handsome black eyes that were usually soft and laugh- ing as a girl's. " So you have been set up as a sort of custus morum over my character, eh, my fine fellow ? You . a phicken- hearted coward, who would have run away rather than have stayed to help an old comrade through a scrape !" And the oath that ended the sentence rang strangely from those fresh young lips. " I am to have my allowance short- ened, am I ? I am to be kept an eye upon by you, I, a Holme, and you, a Cheswick, who cannot assimilate !" Cedric had looked up at his entrance, his eyes still wearing that new look of happiness that his father's tone had brought there ; but as Rabys poisoned the pure air of the room with the reeking fumes of his breath and the bitter oaths with which he emphasized his sneers, the happy light died out of them, and swift anger leaped to them instead. "Go to bed, Rabys; you are not yourself," he said. " I think had my father realized your situation he would not have left you here." 6 62 IN SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. " He knows more than enough, thanks to your tat- tling 1" cried the infuriated young man. " If you heard me tell him of your danger you must have been in hiding, for I do not remember that any one beside ourselves was in the library at the time. But you were welcome to what you heard, Rabys, and just here I warn you that if you do not mend your ways I shall en- lighten my father next time concerning the nature of some of your ' larks/ so that he may see for himself the danger you are in of disgracing yourself. And as regards your insults to me, sir, I further warn you to conduct yourself like a gentleman in the future, unless you are quite ready to abide by the consequences of not doing so." When Cedric regarded him with those steady eyes of his grown cold and stern, and spoke to him in that unfaltering tone of voice, Rabys dimly comprehended through the fumes of the liquor that confused his brain that his foster-brother was thoroughly in earnest. He sat in utter silence, angered, it is true, but also surprised and dismayed. In all these years Cedric had never come to an open rupture with him. His long-suffering endurance had found a limit at last, and, dazed as he was, Rabys under- stood that his peccadilloes, major and minor, must hence- forth be concealed from his foster-brother if he would continue in favor with his guardian at Cheswick Hall. As Miss Bab had said, years ago, " He knew which side his bread was buttered on," and while he hated the bold nature that had dared set terms to him and force him into even a seeming compliance, he also feared it, and he and Cedric were foes from henceforth d outrance. Thanks to the hand that held him thus in leash, Rabys passed his examination, and at the end of the scholastic year the two went home to Cheswick. CHAPTER VII. AN IDYL. " Time is eternity, love is divine, and the world is complete !" Rhapsody on Life's Progress. AND now, for the first time since his mother's death, Cheswick seemed home to Cedric. He was no longer the silent, reserved lad, seeking companionship only with his beloved organ and the volumes in his father's library, or Duffer out in the paddock. The light that his father's kind words had brought to his eyes on the memorable oc- casion that had called him to visit his son and ward at the university came there often now, imparting such warmth and gladness to his face that the dullest servant of the house might have remarked upon the change. Not that his father was more fatherly toward him, for Rabys was more constantly with him now than ever before, and that of itself would have kept his son aloof. But the atmos- phere of the place seemed changed. In Aunt Bab's sitting-room Amy was sure to be found during the long, warm morning hours, ready for any demands upon her time or attention ; and who could retain a memory for troubles in the presence of that bright, soft, sympathetic creature, who, when he came in fresh from an encounter with Rabys, openly insolent now, or annoyed at his father's impatient demands that he should make more of a companion of his foster-brother, would laughingly as- sail the shadows on his face, or, like a dainty, smiling 63 64 IW SANCHO PANZAS PIT. Diogenes, if such a conception be possible to the imagi- nation, would order him out of her sunshine. Of course it was only after weeks of companionship that he thus began to feel dependent upon the new in- mate of Cheswick, his father's ward and distant cousin's child. Little Amy was frightened at the idea of Ches- wick's being invaded by two such tall, wise-looking young men as the coupe set down before the portico on the lovely June evening that brought them home. Of the two she found Rabys less formidable. His insouci- ance and careless merriment were very reassuring to the timid little girl, who until her mother's death had never passed a moment of her life alone. But she was not long in discovering the basis of egotism that sustained his easy temperament, and while she was too young and inexperi- enced to read the concomitants of his character, she found him altogether unsatisfying as the days went by. It puzzled her to understand Cedric's relations with his father, for discreet Miss Bab had forborne to bring to light a single skeleton in the family closet, and she won- dered the more when she noted the gentle caressing nature of his manner to his old aunt, who smoothed his hair and kissed her boy's cheek twenty times a day, as she had used to do when he was a little fellow in pinafores. It was not until they discovered that they shared a taste in common that the ice of reserve was broken between this young pair. Amy, never having heard that the heir of Cheswick claimed the niche where the organ stood as his own peculiar province, was given to monopolizing the opposite corner so persistently that Cedric had found small opportunity to indulge in his favorite recreation. It happened that she became enlightened after this wise : Feeling lonely and homesick for the gentle mother's love she missed so often and so sorely, she stole in the twilight AN IDYL. 65 to the piano as to a haven of refuge. Like all true musi- cians she knew something of that "divine circle" where- of Schumann writes, for as the waves of harmony closed around her she forgot her loneliness, and the tears that had blinded her eyes when she sat down cleared away gradually until in her heart remained only gratitude and peace. "Nearer to God in my art am I than others," said the great Beethoven. " It is but of Him I think, it is all to His glory," said Handel, with tears streaming down his face, as he labored through the mighty strains of the " Messiah," and Amy, to whom music was as dear, as exalting and ennobling, if more limited in its meaning, as it ever was to one of those old masters, played on in the twilight as I have told you, until all the aching lone- liness left her heart, and it became filled with a sweet sense of security. Cedric, who was lying on the sofa at the farther end of the long room, and whom the evening shadows concealed, watched her through her different phases of emotion, and heaved a deep sigh of relief when she struck the opening chords of Beethoven's Sonata in A, for he was musician enough to feel that her mood must be softening indeed, else she had never launched so bravely into those hopeful strains. He listened delightedly until she reached the appassionata movement, then arose and went over to her side. "You here !" said Amy, with a little start of dismay; "I did not see you when I came in." "Your eyes were too full of tears, little one," he said, playfully, covering her confusion with a candid smile. "You are better now, so let us leave the appassionata for another time, it would set you to weeping again. I am glad, indeed, you understand this language, it will be a bond between us, little cousin. Listen, now, and tell me 6* 66 IN SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. what does this say to you?" Whereupon he moved over to the organ, and much to her wonderment sat down be- fore it, sweeping the keys with a masterly hand. "That is new to me," said Amy, when he had finished, " but it sounds very hopeful and full of comfort." "So it always has to me," said Cedric, his eyes glisten- ing with pleasure. " It is Chopin's Polonaise in C minor ; you will find it in that stack of music if you care to study it." Then, after a pause, " Who superintended your music, my small cousin ?" " Mamma; I had a master a few months only before her death," tears filling her eyes at the memory. " Why do you ask, am I very far wrong?" she queried, with a little very natural trepidation, this tall young man seemed very wise and superior to foolish little Amy. " I think, if you will, we will study together. That appassionata, for instance; would you mind trying it on the organ?" "I am afraid," said Amy, "but if you really wish it " and she proceeded to obey him. " What is it ?" he asked, laughing at the perplexed face she lifted to view. " Why, it is all disjointed and unconnected, not my favorite appassionata at all." "It is just this, Amy, you have lapsed into a careless habit of execution, and while to most ears you can cover the deficiency on the piano, the organ betrays it. You have exquisite taste, but your execution is scarcely as neat as it should be. That is a fault, however, that judicious application will soon mend, so don't look so miserable over it, or \ shall be obliged to take myself to task for interfering officiously," "Indeed you need not," protested Amy, emphatically, forgetting she had ever felt frightened at this tall, serious AN IDYL. 67 young man, who stood there looking down upon her so kindly. " Mamma always said I was a lazy little thing, but she never exacted much of me. If you will help me, indeed, I shall feel so grateful, and will try not to give you much trouble." " Nonsense !" said Cedric, "the trouble will all be on your side. It will be pleasant to me to think that I can be of use to somebody." As the days grew longer Cedric and Amy studied other things than music out under the great mulberry on the lawn, while Rabys lolled on the sward and anathematized the heat, the country, everything that had to do with humanity in the dog days. "Our Academia," Amy called it, laughingly, the rustic reat under the mulberry, with its green, cool shade and vase of bright, blooming flowers. "And Rick's Plato, is he?" sneered Rabys, with his insulting laugh. " Rare old prig he was, too. What did he do, anyway?" "Why," said Amy, answering literally, "he sat under the sacred olives, you know, and talked to the people among the statues and sepulchres of the great, away from the din and dust of the city. He taught them wisdom and gentleness out there by the river banks with the beautiful sights and sounds of nature always about them." And Rabys, to whom " the beautiful sights and sounds of nature" meant only unmitigated boredom, and who would have given "all the statues and sepulchres of the great," had they been his to give, for " the din and dust of the city" Amy had so pathetically decried, treated them to one of his rich, ringing peals of laughter, and left them to their readings, their amicable arguments, and steadily-growing delight in each other's society. 68 IN SANCHO PANZAS PIT. " How beautifully you read !" she said to him one day. " I think you must fill Austen's requirements for a perfect reader; ' the words fall from the lips like newly-minted coins, deeply and accurately impressed, and perfectly finished.' " And praise was new to Cedric, as it had been to the young Buonarotti, when at the Magnifico's smile he threw himself in almost servile admiration at his feet. And sweeter to him even than her praise was this growing feel- ing that at last he was necessary to some one's happiness. When he heard her asking his Aunt Bab in her clear, girl- ish tones, "Where is Cedric?" when, after a day's hunt among the cliffs, he caught a glimpse of her sweet face on the portico, evidently watching for him, life took on an entirely different aspect to any it had ever worn for him before, and every day brought its full meed of intense pleasure, were the skies dark or fair. As I have told you, he was given to analyzing even im- pulse itself, but he did not pause to analyze this feeling that was growing stronger with the days. He only knew that " he had nothing to wish for beneath the sky," and that while Thekla had sung that from despair, to him it was an utterance of his heartfelt joy. He did not go farther and say, with Thekla, "I have loved and been loved;" that was left for another day ; now he had quite enough to do to enjoy the present and what it brought, the sense of companionship and sympathy and unison with another in thought and feeling, to all of which he had been a stranger all his life. Young, impulsive, loving, the train- ing he had undergone ought reasonably to have fostered in him a taste for solitude, but it seemed only to have served to quicken all the importunate demands of his na- ture, and he told himself he had been starved of such aliment all his life that he might enjoy its full flavor in AN IDYL. 69 one delicious draught when his time came, as it surely had come now. The heart of his young companion was so simple and noble; as he came to know her better he saw into her nature as she little dreamed, recognizing such fair proportions as he had scarcely credited humanity with. For, like most lonely, disappointed youth with opportu- nities in their own experiences of observing the incon- sistencies and contradictions in character, he held a lofty sort of disdain for human nature in the abstract, and looked out upon it as Dante might have done when, with- out the gates of his idolized Florence, he was fain to listen to the triumphs of the factions or the gay music of the festa, feeling only that he was outside, debarred from the life of the city for which he hungered ; or, as Savonarola, before the hand of destiny was upon him, might have looked in his lonely youth from the convent windows, looked down with those resplendent blue eyes growing sad and pain-stricken over the wickedness and shameful riot of the fair city. It was with this sad, wondering semi-disdain that our Cedric was given to contemplating the world. He was to discover, as did that animo sdegnoso of the twelfth century, that the world, well used, yields to us some of our highest, choicest blessings, and that he who ignores its just claims has too often to pay the penalty in some added suffering to his life. But now there was no thought of future discipline, there was only the splendid con- sciousness of the present. You may smile if you will, but you will not dare mock this idyl of young innocent love. You may be old, earth-worn, weary; you may be sneering, scoffing, cynical, but you can remember oh, yes, you have not forgotten the strength and fervor of the love that long ago, in your early youth, per- haps, made life so fair and joyous unto you. You know 7 o IN SANCHO PANZAS PIT. that in all the years you have not been offered a sweeter draught than that, in all your endeavors you have found no earthly prize as well worth the winning. You were happy then, with a secret, unowned gladness that made the humblest thing in God's great world an object of reverence to you. And if you have carried that first un- worn love in your heart through all the years, feeling it grow stronger, sweeter, purer as your life wears on, then indeed have you found Enna meads amid the stubbles of daily experience, where Peace and Joy have attended as handmaidens upon your footsteps. CHAPTER VIII. TURNED WEAPONS. " Who hunts doth oft in danger ride ; Who hawks lures oft, both far and wide ; Who uses games shall often prove A loser." The Anglers Song: IZAAK WALTON. AND so the summer hours danced into their very graves, filling their receding footsteps with flowers like those fair painted forms that smile down upon us from Correggio's shadowy canvas. Miss Bab, looking well to the ways of the household and eating not the bread of idleness, saw nothing of the tender idyl that was being lived before her eyes. Mr. Cheswick, Aristotelian in all his doctrines, save where his temper was concerned, buried himself in his peripatetic indulgences, and never came quite out of them except when he was forced to do so by Rabys, whose complaints of the dul- ness of Cheswick were growing " fast and furious." When the boys came home from the university they were offered by Mr. Cheswick a year of freedom, in which each should come to a definite conclusion in regard to his pur- pose in life; "for," said this very consistent old gentle- man, making a quotation in point from Pindar touching upon the value and necessity of riches, "every young man should start with a legitimate aim in life, else are his energies dwarfed and his possibilities unawakened. Come to me at the end of the year and let me hear your con- clusion. If I think it the best, all things considered, I 72 IN SANCHO PA-NZA'S PIT. shall not withhold my approval and assistance." So, conceiving that he had done not only his duty, but a very generous thing also in offering Rabys Holme's son an equal chance with his own, he left them to their own devices. In the early autumn Rabys left Cheswick for a visit to one of his classmates. He returned more discontented and restless than ever. This year, which so far had been replete with pleasure and improvement to Cedric, was very tiresome and slow in passing to him. While he fretted and fumed and chafed in the lonely atmosphere of Cheswick, Cedric grew strong and cheerful as he had never done before. " What is it they do in the parlor all through these long evenings," he wondered, "while Aunt Bab goes to sleep over her knitting? I will stay and see." For he had grown utterly sick of the public room at the Catoctin House, the miserable tavern in the village, having tested its resources thoroughly in the months since he had left college. " I should like to know what satisfies him so entirely that he seems content to be buried like this." It was the old story of the mole burrowing in the dark. It was not given to Rabys to discern that it was because Cedric attached its due importance to the very least monad in his small world that he rested so well satisfied ; that to his keen, just perceptions was to be attributed the measure of his content ; to the strong, capable nature that made the most of everything that came in its way ; and least of all did he know of the secret influences at work with his life. "I will stay and judge for myself," he said. And so it happened that Rabys was introduced a foreign element into the harmonious atmosphere of the long parlor, where Miss Bab, a very unconscious, drowsy duenna, sat half dozing over her knitting in the ruddy glow of the hearth. TURNED WEAPONS. 73 A foreign element, albeit he was witty and pleasant and on his best behavior; for evenings at the piano or organ were impossible subjected to the frequent interruptions of his comings and goings, and the tragedy of the Phcedra, the pathos of the Tristia were dumb oracles to their un- welcome auditor, who had a sneer for all sentiment, and expressed open contempt for those conceited old prigs the Latin poets. Yet Rabys could talk after his own lead. Indeed, the very facility of his conversation, in which irrelevant thoughts found vent, awakened by no lightest apparent link of sequence, proved his powers of discernment to be naturally blunt at the edge. One never is so impressed with the fact that wit and judgment are rarely related as when subjected to the repartee of such an one as Rabys Holme, in which no slightest principle of order prevails ; in which the ideas are light and frothy, if as bright and scintillating as the foam of a summer cataract. The winter passed at Cheswick, and Rabys's whim out- lived the most of its predecessors. He shuffled up and down the carpet to the time of Amy's gravest adagios, and almost pushed Cedric to the verge of distraction by deftly- whistled accompaniments to his best-loved sonatas. He continued his strictures on the readings, and interposed his handsome presence and chill banter between every attempt of Cedric's to revive that interchange of thought which had been wont to characterize his relations with Amy. At first it had only amused him to play the part of in- terloper, but as he observed the palpable annoyance his continual presence caused Cedric, he conceived the bril- liant idea of paying off by the same means what he was pleased to designate as "old scores." Consequently he changed his tactics somewhat, paid great deference to 7 74 IN SANCHO PANZAS PIT. Amy's lightest action, and insinuated a plea for sympa- thy, inasmuch as he was with them but not of them. Amy's solicitude rose in arms at this. " He feels his lack, poor fellow !" she said to Cedric, " and if we are cautious, we may be able to help him to some remedy for it." And Cedric, seeing her gentle with Rabys, giving to him more consideration than even to him, casting about for means to awaken his interest, fell to making a "real mis- ery out of a vague phantasm," and afforded Rabys some chuckles of infinite delight over his discomfiture. The year was drawing to its close, the year that in after- life more than one of them would revert to in thought, as birds fly to the shelter of their nests when night makes dark the clustering boughs above them. Ah, it is well we do not know when we send our loved ones from us with kisses of farewell and our prayers following them, what paths their footsteps are destined to tread ; it is well we do not know, else what would life be but a long death- knell ! Would we grasp the rosy fruit of the present if we could see the larvae of sin and pollution breeding de- cay at its core? Would we launch our hopes, like birds in rainless atmospheres, if we could know how soon they are doomed to fall lifeless on Dead Sea shores, their plu- mage sullied by the black bituminous waters? In every age, in every life the old myths repeat themselves, until we are fain to believe the metamorphosis of the pagan poet holds some deeper meaning than we dream. Rabys had laughed his most moquer laugh at the story of Dejanira, Hercules' wily wife, who had dipped his jacket in the gall of the wild boar, so that it might resist all shots, unwitting that the poison would enter the veins of him she loved, and more surely sap his life than winged barb or arrow. And he would never have dreamed of applying the lesson of the fable, even though he began to TURNED WEAPONS. 75 reap a certain amount of pleasure from Amy's nearness, for, with the egotism peculiar to him, he was slow to discover that his weapons had been turned against him. His passion was of the very earth, earthy, a mere pleasure of the senses, a languid delight in the beauty of her features, the whiteness of her skin, the grace and freedom of her movements, love that was not worth the name, perhaps, but enthralling, beguiling to his ease- loving nature, and rather more to be depended upon than most of his selfish impulses. Cedric recognized it for what it was, mere insensate emotion, gauged it exactly with his scrupulous, just per- ception, and felt Amy insulted by it. And to Amy, Rabys was not positively disagreeable. What woman, however young, fails to feel some slight sympathy with a pair of handsome eyes belonging to the opposite sex, that follow her every movement with very evident if languid satisfac- tion? He made larger demands upon her sympathy every day. " What has Rick done that all the good things of life should gravitate his way?" he said one day, meeting her on her way home from a visit to a sick neighbor; "that is the problem I am trying to solve at present. In what is he so much more deserving than I that he should own so much more?" And Amy, knowing nothing of his escapade at school, forming no other estimate of his character than as its dif- ferent phases were revealed to her though her own daily experiences, commiserated with his mood, although she taxed him with its ingratitude. " Ungrateful ! perhaps I am ; but the bread of charity is growing bitter in my mouth, and I don't mean to eat it much longer. Thank heaven, this tiresome year is nearly past 1" 76 IN SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. That night she said to Cedric, " Show a little sympathy with Rabys in his project for the future ; he seems in a bitter, lonely mood." Cedric's brow darkened. "You set me a vain task," he said ; " Rabys would not believe in the sincerity of my motives. Has he confided to you his choice of a voca- tion?" "No," and Amy sighed. "He has an overplus of energy if he will but worthily bestow it." " Few of us do that, as witness the number of failures on record. The great difference with men, the great and the insignificant, according to Goethe, is energy ; invin- cible determination wins the victory, he says." "And you believe that?" " With all my heart ! I believe that with inflexible purpose, an honest heart, and strong hands obstacles may not only be surmounted but made to become the stepping- stones to ultimate success!" His eyes flashed as he spoke. It was the creed of un- tried, high-hearted youth. So might Angelo have declared when those mighty marbles, fresh from the quarries of Carrara, were laid at his feet, and he was bidden carve upon them an imperishable record that might preserve through all ages the fame of the Medici and the match- less cunning of his own hand. How was he to conceive in his proud and gracious manhood, smiled upon by prince and prelate, of the years that awaited him wherein heart-hunger and exile were to be the only price of his toil, of the day when, amid the brazen streets of the city he loved, he was to bring forth with mighty throes of shame and indignation a David worthy his skill from the huge, ill-proportioned mass already misshapen by an inferior hand? " How brave you are !" she said. " Between you and TURNED WEAPONS. 77 Rabys I am, as Plato said of his will, between the two wild horses of earth and heaven, now dragged down and again lifted upward. Rabys pulls me to earth, the very nether earth, he is my body, while you, ah, I am led always to strive after better and higher things by you !" "It is an ominous simile, Amy," he said. " I would not have Rabys become necessary to you." "Oh, there the simile ends," she said, the laughter leaving her lips; "for, though I 'gave my body to be burned,' my soul must live alway." CHAPTER IX. A LANDMARK. " The choice perplexes; wherefore should we choose?" THOMSON'S Summer. " OUR probation ends to-day, Amy." "And you have chosen?" the question was asked breathlessly. She was eager to fasten the spurs on her young knight's heels and send him out to the lists of the world. " You may not call it a choice, but I have come to a conclusion." And somehow he hesitated, for her eyes were very bright and eager, and he disliked to admit even to himself that his conclusion might occasion her some pang of disappointment, inasmuch as she rated his capaci- ties so highly. " I am not going from home at all. My father has more land than he can manage, and I have always pre- ferred a country life to any other." There was no mistaking the blank expression of dismay on her face. "Well, Amy?" " The position would be a sinecure, Cedric," she said, gently, but very firmly, " and the last thing I should have expected of you. You have some ulterior motive, I am sure ; it cannot be the life that you would choose from all others." He turned his eyes away, flushing a little. The truth is he was loath to give up his fair idyl, and he was foolish enough to think that it would endure. What more natural 78 A LANDMARK. 79 than that he should elect to spend his life doing good in the home of his youth, with Amy always at his side to encourage and delight him ? What need to break up the harmony of this ideal life which their love and congeni- ality had created about them, and to take her where the encroaching customs of the world would be forever in- truding to separate and distract them ? He was aware of the alloy of selfishness in his plan ; far too keen-sighted was Cedric not to understand the quick responsive emo- tion that leaped to Amy's face and made it a power of reproof to him. " Why, Cedric," she cried at last, waiting vainly for his usual ready defence of the question under discussion, "what can have come over you? Only yesterday you were triumphing over imaginary obstacles and planting for yourself a standard that but few can ever dare hope to attain ; to-day you are content to throw all your possi- bilities away and degenerate into the mere country gen- tleman, seeking your highest pleasures in the chase, and finding your capabilities limited by the merest trick of wind or weather. I cannot understand it all ; there is surely something behind it." "There is something surely beside it, darling!" he cried, charmed out of reason by her flashing eyes and the indignant beauty of her face. He had never called her so before, and now he repeated it, " My darling !" throw- ing his arms about her with a glad boyish laugh. "I cannot leave you, I will not, and I do not mean to put a stop to our delightful days here. You are content to be with me always, are you not, little cousin ? You have learned to love me in this year that we have lived to- gether?" But Amy, silly little thing, was so altogether over- whelmed that she could not keep the tears back. 8o IN SANCHO PANZAS PIT. " I think you must have discovered my secret before I did myself," she said, when she could control her voice ; " but how could I help it? You were so good and so kind, and I was so lonely -" " And what would have become of me had you suc- ceeded in helping it, you absurd little thing ! for I am not at all convinced that ' men have died and worms have eaten them, but not for love.' ' " You would never die for love, Cedric," shaking he r head. "I think the lack of it perhaps might afford you that stepping-stone that you seem to need for ultimate success. Indeed, indeed, you must not bury your pros- pects here, less than ever now that I know all," with a pretty blush and smile, very sweet and deprecating. But he shook his head, and the resoluteness of the movement filled her with dismay. " It would not result well for you, Cedric. We would have you echoing Cowper's sentiment in no time, " ' Prospects, however lovely, may be seen Till half their beauties fade.' And your father surely will be disappointed, Cedric." " I think not," said Cedric, having no means of know- ing the hopes that his father had based upon his talents and his calm, superior way of surmounting difficulties. " He is eminently fitted for a career in the world, and he shall not fail if means and influence can aid him," thought his father when the two youths, his son and ward, stood together before his library table that fair June day that was to end their year of probation. And he was grievously disappointed when Cedric announced his decision. It eked out in the tones of his voice, in the lines that straightway puckered his forehead ; but as he had offered him freedom to choose he did not remon- A LANDMARK. 8 1 strate. After all, it was very necessary that his son, the heir-presumptive of Cheswick and its outlying farms, should become early acquainted with the duties pertain- ing to his estates, and relieve him in his advanced age of the cares appertaining to a large landed property. So it was settled, Rabys for the law, and Rick to up- hold the honors and emoluments of Cheswick. " He will be the great man of the county," mused the father, taking more and more comfort in the thought that his son had chosen to live his life at home. "And some day he will marry, perhaps, and keep up the name as well as the lands of Cheswick. Lucky young dog ! I don't know where he'd find a more indulgent father," which last he applied as a sort of soothing salve to the conscious- ness awakening slowly within him. Well, there remains little more to be told of that sum- mer. Rabys, observing more than his wont of what was passing before him, led thereto by the light of his own suspicious fears, became every day more openly insolent and overbearing. He began the study of law with a re- tired judge of the district, so that his home still remained at Cheswick, and Amy found him more than ever the wild horse of Plato's metaphor, drawing hei; soul earthward. And more distressing to the girl than any annoyance his nearness created was the vaguely-hinted revelation he made to her in these days of the state of his feelings to- ward her. The time had passed when Rabys's handsome eyes following her every movement with half-veiled de- light had power to rouse her vanity. She read his char- acter more clearly now that she was growing into woman- hood so rapidly herself, for she had made wide strides in experience since that day when Cedric had surprised her with his boyish caress and avowal of love. Wayward, impulsive, unprincipled she knew him now to be, a 82 IN SANCHO PANZAS PIT. human ignis fatuus, leading with its dazzling light to the very edge of a precipice, a young Buffon, looking ever at the worst side of humanity, finding his chief pleasure always in the " chronique scandaleuse" which even Ches- wick's nearest village afforded. At last came the finale whereof you know. Cedric, meeting him one day flushed with liquor in the public room at the village, very unwisely ventured to remon- strate and coerce him into returning to Cheswick with him. "See here !" he cried in his drunken fury, drawing the attention of the bar-room loungers to his foster-brother, " there stands a Fellow of Yale, who, for the sake of a girl, a little country chit not seventeen, means to stay at home all his life and live in 'vain inglorious ease. 1 Hurrah for Amy Randolph ! I'll bet you ten to one, fellows, that my chances are even with his; what say you?" I think if ever a demon entered Cedric's soul it was then. Not even in that last scene in Cheswick wood, when he smote the breath out of Rabys Holme's craven body, was murder so near being in his heart. Amy, that pure little angel at home, dreaming her sweet, girlish idyls, making the hearthstone of his lonely home a sacred spot to him, Amy, whom he had enshrined in the very penetralia of his being, to be jeered at among a set of half drunken rowdies, his love for her exposed to their ridicule, as though it were a mere worthless rag! You know the sequel following upon such a simple train of events. Ah, well, little things make the mass, after all ; little words dropping from our lips in a careless moment, little links forming one after another the chain of our ex- istence, until we look back and behold a great bridge spanning past and present, and we may feel ourselves secure or insecure upon it only as we have built it. CHAPTER X. IN HIDING. " A sinful man, and unconfessed, ****** He, slumbering, saw the vision high He might not view with open eyes." Search of the Holy Grail. "THERE is a town to those that dwell therein well known." This town well known to the inhabitants, as that particular one whereof Butler writes, is a local habi- tation, although it need bear no name to you, dear reader. About a mile to the northwest lie the populous copper-mines, which give importance and prosperity to the village and afford an abundant field for honest labor- ers in the vicinity. The mines were owned by a wealthy English company, and at the time whereof I write all its operations were in full swing. Under the cold January skies the grounds looked dreary and uninviting, though the tramways were rumbling day and night to the cease- less echo of the cars, and at the washers the deposits came out by bushels, glittering with fine prismatic colors in the cold winter sunlight. On a clearing in the heart of a noble forest stood the buildings of the mining company. First in rank was the "captain's house," rather pretentious with a wing and porticoes; next came the commissary building, with its long platform and three or four small rooms for lodgers attached ; then the eating lodge, a two-storied rude log 83 84 IN SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. building, with "bunks" in the upper story for "the men;" next the rude shanties of the mining craft who had families to provide for, and lastly on the outskirts of the clearing a very obtrusive white-pine Gothic building, wherein the Church of England service was read every Sabbath. The great engine at the pump throbbed ceaselessly night and day; the huge pipe dripped, dripped; the water trickled away in a hundred little rills, frozen black a foot from the tanks. The great weighted boxes vibrated now up, now down like a gigantic scale of justice, only that the blind goddess never held the balance so evenly. Be- yond were the machinery-rooms, where the wheels turned ceaselessly, the pistons worked, the hammers jumped in the vast sieves, until the brain whirled in contemplation of this iron metaphor of destiny, that, never hasting, never resting, bore all the while a purpose so inexorable, so unfaltering. And still beyond, on the very edge of the clearing, there lay long low mountains of what the miners called "skiffins," quartz-gravels of different grades, the refuse from the washers and grinders, varying in kind from the pebbles with which the dirty little denizens played "jacks" and "hull-gull" to the fine powdery sand which the housewives used in polishing their floors andjables. White and dazzling stretched these long, uneven hills in the winter sunlight, blockading the view from the captain's house and lightening the landscape on dark winter days. In summer, when the naked arms of the trees were leafy and alive with the wingy fluttering of birds, when the rills from the pump sparkled in the flickering sun- light, when the men sung at their work above ground, and the pretty village girls came out for Sunday walks with their lovers, it was picturesque and interesting as any practical work-day scene can ever be ; but now, with the streams all IN HIDING. 85 black and frozen, with the smoke from the engine hang- ing gloomy and black over the circle of shabby houses, it looked dispiriting and dreary in the extreme. The dark was coming on fast and the night-gang was making ready to relieve the laborers in the shaft. In the captain's house a light twinkled like a fixed star above the very edge of the "skiffins' " bombardment. From the open door of the eating lodge the mistress called querulously after her oldest girl, gone shivering to the pump with the tea-kettle. At the lowest pile of the "skiffins" a man halted with a loaded cart, and, backing his horse up to the edge, with a dexterous tilt of the cart sent the powdery, sand-like substance out on the mound with a soft grating sound, then proceeded to unharness the tired horse preparatory to giving him his night-feed. The light from the open lodge-door shone full upon him, a tall, firmly-knit fellow, with hair growing close and thick over his face from ear to chin, a workman in a working-man's guise, but in the eyes beneath the shadow of the hat, in the hands, ungloved now and busied with the gear, there was much that contradicted his position, a curious evidence of unfitness for his work. Captain Hollis, on his way to supper and his young wife in the porticoed building beyond, stopped and took his cigar from between his teeth. " How careful you are of that old horse, Chester !" he said pleasantly. " I had a horse of my own once, a brave old fellow !" with a curious suppressed cadence in his voice that es- caped the captain, who had only an ear for palpable sounds. "Yes, and that makes you tender to his kind. Will you go with the men to the village to-night?" Chester looked up inquiringly. 86 IN SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. "There is a fair in the town hall, you know ; most of them consider it great fun." Swift anger lightened the subordinate's eyes. "I to the village fair!" he began, but as suddenly the anger died down, and he touched his hat respectfully, waiting to hear his captain's orders. "Man alive! you're a queer fellow, Chester," cried the good-natured superior ; " come over after supper, I have business with you." And he walked off in the grow- ing darkness, vainly puffing at his cigar that had gone out in the frosty air. The subordinate picked up his gloves and went off with his horse to the stables. He pushed his hat back from his face, sighing wearily. His limbs ached ; the fine pow- dery dust had got into his throat and eyes and made them smart and burn ; his head was heavy with fatigue, and in the darkness he heard the slow even throbs of the engine, the quick, sharp thumps of the hammers; and beyond this circle of noise and dinginess and discomfort lay the dark shadows of the leafless forest. "Are ye sick, mon?" asked one of the men at the stable, observing, dolt as he was, the strained, baffled expression in the young man's eyes. "Tired mebbe, eh? supper'll set you up. The missis's got some prime baked beans, I smell 'em off here." After the lodging-house supper, bacon and fried mush, flanked by the "prime baked beans" aforesaid, Chester took his hat down from its peg, and made his way across the " skiffins" to the captain's house. His wife with- drew at the entrance of one of the men. "Sit down, Chester; what's the hurry? Well, my business is soon told. I want to get a check for a large amount cashed in the Huntsville bank," leaning forward and speaking in a confidential tone. " Inskip will be busy IN HIDING. 87 for several days yet with the books, and the day super- visor has his hands about full. It will be a small matter to fill your post, so you're my man for the job." But Chester's brow flushed, and as much of his cheeks as were above the encroaching beard. " Have you con- sidered the matter well, captain?" he said. "Do you think it safe to trust a stranger with a large amount of cash? Are you quite sure I shall have no temptation to make away with it, or that my prospects are so fair as to preclude the possibility of any such temptation present- ing itself." His back was turned to the flickering light of the hearth, he stood in the shadow. The captain could not deter- mine whether he spoke in earnest or in jest. "What squeamish nonsense, man! I tell you, your voice, your manner are so many letters of credit. I shouldn't fear to trust you to the end of the world." And the captain, who spoke out of the kindness and unsuspicion of his own sound nature, was not pre- pared for the fervor with which his subordinate wrung his hand, nor for the glowing gratitude stamped on every feature of his face when at last he turned to the light "Thank you, captain, for your trust, it is sweeter than you dream," said this peculiar young man in tones so husky from emotion that the captain's young wife, who had been an auditor to the colloquy, though unseen, ven- tured to peep very cautiously through her chamber-door opening into the parlor. Such a figure as that wearing a workman's blouse ! such hands as those slender, supple, betokening the nervous strength of the scholar condemned to shovel at the refuse piles day after day for a bare subsistence ! And on the proud, high-bred features was stamped such an ex- 88 IN SANC1IO PANZA'S PIT. pression of unrest that, added to her curiosity, she expe- rienced a pang of genuine womanly solicitude. "I gave you the lightest job on the ground," her husband was saying, "and yet you're growing thinner every day. You are not equal to the exposure and all that." Chester laughed drearily, but he volunteered no other reply, as he stood before his employer, his eyes luminous with some strange emotion. " It is not that ; I have been inured to endurance," he said. And he spoke but the truth, for in days that were past he had executed gymnastic feats that had had the effect to knit his muscles into steel, and he had tested the power of every trick of wind and weather in that exhilarating sport that has enlisted the hearts of men since the days when Nimrod was a mighty hunter before the Lord. He was inured to endurance by the superb training to which he had been subjected. But this dual task, this Sisyphus- like labor of the mind, this travail of fruitless effort to expiate for a single rash and weighty deed, for this his experience furnished him no parallel. He could interpose no power of mind or body to resist such an influence. The captain followed him out upon the portico: "Of course, Chester, you'll not mention your errand. You don't club enough with the men to be popular among them, and they might see fit to resent my choice of an emissary. We make a small microcosm here, Chester, and the riff-raff is an inevitable ingredient you know." The captain returned to his parlor in a very complacent mood. " Some comfort in talking to a fellow like that," he said to his wife, who had resumed her seat in front of the hearth ; " one grows terribly rusted in a heathenish place like this. I shall have Chester over, if you don't mind ; he is a gentleman, one can see that at a glance." But Mrs. Hollis, being a shrewd and calculating little IN HIDING. 89 woman, was, as a natural concomitant, suspicious. "If, on the other hand, he is a villain, you have offered him a splendid chance, my dear," she said, with a sapient nod of her small head. Chester walked on to his room at the lodge, a tiny dor- mitory of rough boards, with a hard, clean bed, a small wash-stand, and a chair. He hung his hat on a nail, and drawing the single chair up. near the stand, sat down and leaned his arms upon it, supporting his head between his hands. It was bitterly cold, his breath curled like vapor about his head, but he preferred this chilly solitude to the noise and riot of the dining-room below, where the fumes of tobacco and beer reeked in the close atmosphere. Here at least it was quiet and clean. For a long time he sat looking into space with dreary, wide-opened eyes, a long time, while the winter night grew colder, and the miners' voices came noisily up to him as a door was opened or shut between them. At length, stirred by the cold that seemed penetrating to his very heart, he thrust his hand, aching and partially benumbed, in the breast of his blouse. In an instant his eyes lost their strained, weary stare, his face from its apathy quivered and broke into warmth, and he drew into the light a shining, gleaming thing, and looked at it with a rush of tears blinding his eyes. Was it an amulet holding some magic, mysterious power by which that stern, haggard young face was so suddenly softened? Only a ring, but he held it as dying hands hold those that have life and warmth in them. A magic power it owned, indeed, for as he held it he seemed also to hold all the beauty and promise that his own life had once owned ; it brought back to him soft, thrilling tones, innocent, sweet glances, the sacredness of love, the balm of sympathy, a cameo bearing the figure of a woman with wings, and in her hands a helm and a wheel. 8* 9 o IN SANCHO PAA'ZA'S PIT. "Ah, that I could have forgotten!" he cried under his breath in the silence of the miserable chamber, with the winter cold striking like death to his very heart, and he hastily hid the ring in his bosom, and, flinging off his uncouth garments, got into bed, shivering with more than bodily cold, a very coward before the memory that rushed back into his brain. Nemesis became angel- guide or avenger just as a man's actions decided. Of what avail was it that he had chosen to bury himself in this dark Northern forest, where there were none to sus- pect, none to watch him ? Nemesis, the avenger, held inviolate sway over sea and land alike. It made no part of his misery that he, who had been reared in the soft- ness of luxury, who had known " the luscious sweets of plenty, Every night had slept with soft content about his head, And never waked but to a joyful morning," was reduced to the common wants of the laborer who must earn his meal by the sweat of his brow before he ate it ; that, still weak from illness, he was overtaxing his physical powers to such an extent as threatened disability, if not to-day, very soon in the near future. He was wil- ling to suffer in the body ; he felt a stoical sense of justice in the aches and pains that assailed his hitherto untired limbs. He would gladly have taken upon himself any work of penance could he have believed in its efficacy to atone for past sins. He would, like St. Britius of old, have en- dured the ordeal of the burning coals to have proven his in- nocence of sin in thought, in heart, when he yielded to the temptation of the first brother and was stamped like him with a brand that even God's mercy would never wipe off. But his heart, so long denied its natural aliment, only just begun to feel the awakening influences of love and con- IN HIDING. gl geniality, his heart, hungry, rebellious, lonely, cried out with fierce, importunate cries that would not be stilled. He had forsworn the world that he might not suffer a separation from the dearest joys of his life. With his own hand he had erected an invincible barrier between himself and their influences. He had sacrificed all the prospects of his opening manhood upon the altar of his own selfish inclinations ; he had not been guided by father or friends in this reckless pursuance of what he had chosen to consider his highest earthly good, and the re- sult was what it too often is when we dare to say, as did Canute, "come hither" to the waves, or "roll yonder at my bidding." Methinks He who sits aloft and marks the destinies of the nations allows us to try our petty strength ofttimes against His own, only that we may come to know and understand its puerility in the end. Thus his reveries were wont to end, in conceding to his merciless perception of what was true and just the ver- dict which his heart refused to sanction ; for his heart, lonely, sin-burdened, cried out unceasingly, " How shall I live ? how shall I bear this weight of anguish?" After awhile, when the lights were out in the long dining-room and the miners had all sought their homes, sleep came to him; such sleep as came to the Ancient Mariner when, in the midst of Polar ice and snow, with those lank corpses all about him, he dreamed of the kirk-yard and the moon shining on the familiar waters of the bay that lapped the shores of his own dear land. From the dreariness and desolation of the present he had escaped to the affluence of the past. But, like poor Soui-hong when he dreamed of Pu stirring the water with her slender lacquered wand, the cold moonlight di- vided him from the love he so longed for, divided and "lay between them like the sword of the cherub !" CHAPTER XI. SANS PEUR ! " Though weak with pain he plunges in, And to the hillock's brow Is come ; they wondered much before, But more they wonder now." Ballads from English History. CHESTER presented himself at the captain's parlor-door next morning at the appointed hour. Mrs. Hollis, at the pretty breakfast-table, regarded him stealthily, not know- ing that those eyes, preternaturally large and hollow, were taking in with one hungry glance the whole aspect of the pretty little room, with its comfortable adjuncts and cosy, home-like atmosphere. She surveyed him keenly as he stood there in his ill- fitting suit of coarse gray cloth, his hat in his gloved hands, his comforter well bundled about his neck, and, even more distinctly than on the night preceding, ob- served those unmistakable contradictions in his appear- ance to his position that had struck with more or less force every single individual with whom he had been thrown in contact at the mines. There was a nameless, delicate air of refinement about the man that betrayed him. He caught the shrewd though cautious scrutiny of those keen bright eyes and shifted his position uneasily, and she, being a truly kind-hearted creature, commiserating his con- fusion, smiled pleasantly and invited him to take some hot 92 SANS PEUR ! 93 coffee before he set out on his bleak ride. This courtesy he refused with a grace and ease of manner that argued him no stranger to the habits of polite society, and, after receiving the captain's last orders and some cautionary directions, went out from the lady's presence. "You won't tarry, Chester?" was the captain's parting injunction from the portico. "I positively must have that money before the evening mail is closed." Chester promised, vaulting lightly upon the captain's horse standing ready for him beyond the gate. " By the middle of the afternoon I will surely be here, depend upon it," and he struck into a swift canter down the frozen road that led to the pike. " I'd wager my life he's a Southerner by the way he rides!" exclaimed the captain, resuming his seat at the table and allowing his wife to refill his plate with all sorts of steaming edibles. "Poor fellow! poor fellow ! what can have brought him here?" " How much sympathy you waste, Hugh !" laughed his wife. " Doubtless the fellow is in hiding ; we have plenty of that sort here, I have heard you say so. Do drink your coffee, it is growing cold again, and I have no more to offer you. If he comes back with that money, it will be more than I would dare prophesy." In happy ignorance of the captain's wife's suspicions Chester pursued his way. It was bitterly cold, the heavens of that fine clear gray when the weatherwise predict " we shall have snow when it moderates." The leafless trees along the pike swirled their naked boughs wildly in the sudden gales, whistling shrilly for a few seconds then sinking to quiet again, a dreary, hopeless day, in tune with the traveller's mood ; no light in the heavens, no beauty on the earth, no comfort in the monotonous reach of moorland or the barren range of hills that stretched 94 IN SANCHO PAA'ZA'S PIT. to right and left of him. It is with the heart that we see rather than with the eye, after all, for he remembered when just such gray, ice-cold days as this one held infinite resources of enjoyment for him ; when the winds whistling fiercely without, the gray clouds, the bleak winter view had served but to heighten by contrast the delicious in- door warmth and harmony. Ah, surely if "memory of things precious makes warm the hearts that hold them," then ought his to have glowed forever. But, ah, it is not so; not often. Human hearts, the noblest of them, are too selfish in their pain. We who have held the rich prizes of life in our hands, and have suffered their loss, may cherish warmly in our hearts the belief that such prizes exist somewhere, if lost to us, but memory becomes a haunting regret, and regret, no matter how vague, is chilling and blighting as a first frost to late blooms. His memory had become a keen regret to him, and so it brought no warmth to his heart. He did not tarry in Huntsville when his business was once accomplished. Resuming his homeward track, his mind also resumed its gloomy train of thought. He rode slowly, with slack rein, the captain's money in his bosom. And step by step, with the horse's pace, he reviewed the ground that had led him to his present path. He could see now, as he would not allow himself to do then, the flaw in his plan, the root of self-love at the bottom of it, the weak pandering to that fastidiousness which demanded constantly its highest meed in the perfect sympathy of thought and feeling which she, and she alone, had ever given him. Well, his plan had failed ; the admirable, altogether worthy plan that he had conceived of sacrific- ing her youth, her intellect, her rare young charms to the Juggernaut of his inordinate exactions. You may judge of his increasing morbidness by his SANS PEUR ! 95 growing tendency to distort the facts of the case ; and yet, surely, he was almost justified when we consider his peculiar suffering, for " An orphan's curse would drag to hell A spirit from on high ; But, oh, more horrible than that Is the curse in a dead man's eye !" Better to have stayed where the evidence of his crime might have convicted him at once than live to feel all expiations useless. He threw up his arm with a great cry in the lonely road, whereat his horse stopped, uttering a low neigh of terror. This brought him to his senses; he gathered the slack reins in a firm grasp and started off at a brisk trot. The winter day was darkening rapidly, and in front of him a dense clump of woodland threw shadows black as night upon the road. He must move on more rapidly or the evening mail would surely be closed before the cap- tain got his money. While yet the thought was in his mind a strange thing occurred. Selim, the captain's horse, spirited, though gentle as a lamb, came to a com- plete stand-still, immovable as the statue of a horse ; his ears pointed, his nostrils dilating, his forefeet planted firmly, indicating in every line of his powerful form fear and determination combined. It was in vain that Chester coaxed, soothed, threatened, and at last had re- course to the whip. Selim stood like a horse in a picture, his quivering nostrils and flashing eyes affording the sole indications of life about him. At length he dis- mounted, thinking to lead him past the fancied dan- ger, when, in the twinkling of an eye, he felt himself caught in a powerful grasp from behind, and the horse, with a shrill scream of defiance and terror, broke from 96 IN SANCHO PANZXS PIT. his hold and set off at a mad gallop down the road. With one powerful effort Chester wrenched his right arm free and grappled with his foe face to face. He knew him on the instant for O'Reilly, a saturnine, dark-visaged Irishman, one of the underground workers in the night-gang. For a moment his heart failed him ; the Irishman had the strength of the lion in those big brawny arms, and he fought and strained in their cruel embrace with the desperation of a madman. "Begorra, I don't want to kill ye at all, at all! It's the money I want, ye white-faced young fool !" cried the ruffian, relaxing his hold, and Chester, availing himself of that brief respite, made a plunge for the pistol the captain had thrust into his bosom at leaving ; but the Irishman, with a volley of oaths, knocked it out of his hand before he had time to cock it, and caught him afresh in his deadly embrace. This time he knew it to be but a matter of seconds which should win ; those brawny blackened arms were closing like a vice about his chest, and, weakened by illness and despair, he must soon succumb. Death ! It had come in answer to his prayer ; and when life held nothing for him but misery and exile, why should it suddenly become so precious unto him ? He fought with the frenzy of a tiger, straining, biting, and tearing like a wild thing for the life that had seemed so barren at noon. His arms were failing ; the blood began to rush in mad surging waves against the drums of his ears ; a hundred pulses were beating in his temples ; slowly, mercilessly in that black, brutal clasp the life was being pressed out of his veins, when, oh, blessed sound of wheels bowling down the quiet road ! oh, heavenly tones of human voices vibrating on the icy air ! nearer, nearer, until, as in a dream, Chester felt the vice-like grasp relax, and himself SANS PEUR! 97 flung out into the road, simultaneous with a blinding flash in his dazed and bewildered eyes and a benumbing, crash- ing pain that darted along his left arm ; flung almost un- der the wheels of the wagon bowling rapidly down the darkening road. It stopped at his side ; he heard voices, saw strange faces, and realized that they were conveying him to the wagon. It all seemed a dream in his state of exhaustion, that slow drive down the white road, with the black heavens above and the strange voices in his ear ; a dream the torch-like light that flitted like a will-o'-the- wisp, and grew and grew until it stopped right in front of them, in reality the lamp-post of the country inn, whose wagon had brought him to its hospitable shelter, and, last of all, a silent procession, in which he found himself faintly puzzled to understand why all those alien eyes were so persistently turned upon him. CHAPTER XII. " FIDELIS AD URN AM !" " Yet life I hold but idle breath When love or honor's weighed with death." Lady of the Lake. AT the mines the evening was far advanced, and the snow was falling, covering the frozen rills, the weights, the "skiffins," the pretentious roof of the captain's house, and the lean-to of the shanties with the same white mantle of beauty and softness, like God's dear bounties that come to us all, whether we deserve them or not. Captain Hollis had just completed a tour of the grounds with the day supervisor, and stood now at the edge of the gravel-hills, nervously consulting his watch and glancing up the road that Chester had taken in the morning. It was long past the hour that he should have been back. What could be keeping the fellow? The captain had been more than human not to have felt un- easy, obliged as he had been to listen to his wife's specu- lations concerning the chances of Chester's return ; but it is only doing him justice to add that it was a very faint doubt as yet, and an unwelcome one, as was evidenced by the quick gleam of relief upon his features at the sound of distant horse-hoofs ringing down the frozen road. " Heavens, how the fellow rides !" he ejaculated, as the sound advanced. But the horse swung round the curve of the wood at a thundering gallop, riderless, with the empty stirrups clanging noisily against his sides ! 98 "FI DELIS AD URNAMr 99 "Well, my dear, you would not listen to me," said the captain's wife, when her husband burst into the par- lor half wild with excitement and dismay. "To send a stranger like that on such an errand ! What could you expect ?" " Something has happened to him, I'd be willing to swear; and I tell you what it is, Milly, you'd rather see me humbugged ten times over than risk the chance of your prediction's failing." "How silly you are, my dear!" Milly's voice was positively angelic. " I really think it is very hard on you that you should have to pay so dearly for your cre- dulity," enjoying not a little her evident advantage over her twelvemonth lord, the more that he was given to air- ing his authority on certain occasions. " I only hope you'll not have to settle with the company for Chester's delinquencies," with which last little thrust Mrs. Milly turned to her crocheting and sorted colors as indifferently as though no such person as Chester existed and large checks were to be cashed every day for the depositors. "Great Heavens! are there no honest men?" cried the captain, nettled with anger, and a little dubious also as to the defence he should be able to make for his im- prudence, should things occur according to Milly's proph- ecy and Chester not return. " Selim may have slipped the bridle and come home ; in that case he will walk from Huntsville, and we will see him here by seven or eight at the farthest." But it was a forlorn hope at best, and when at last ten o'clock struck and the lights were out all over the grounds, even that was relinquished. "Well, it is all my own fault," said this generous, whole-hearted man. " He warned me that I had no war- rant to trust him, and he never meant to betray me. If I0 o IN SANCHO PAA'ZA'S PIT. you could have seen his face when he accepted the job you would know that, Milly. As for the company, I can settle it with them ; but for him, poor fellow, I put the temptation and opportunity in his way, and they were too much for him, too much for him, and I shall never forgive myself." After all, the true Jtest of generous emotion is the readi- ness with which it responds to a demand made upon it. A man may feel in his heart a sudden glow of generosity, but stifle its expression in a corresponding deed, and that is like listening to an exquisite strain of music, feeling the soul expand under its harmonizing influence, while the body sits silent, giving no evidence of the perception it enjoys. When the Yorick of Sterne's reminiscences shakes his purse aloft as though eager to share it with the world, his generous ardor receives an instant check in the mendicant whine of the Franciscan monk at his shoulder, who is fain to stand by and see the precious purse safely lodged in its owner's bosom, and himself supplied instead with an ex- tensive homily upon the wants and miseries of the world at large. But in the captain's breast generosity was not only an emotion to be experienced, but one to be expressed. It was easy to say in the morning, looking into his subord- inate's honest-seeming eyes and reading truth therein, if ever he read it in human features, " I believe in your hon- esty ;" but to-night, with Selim come home riderless, with appearances entirely against him, it was not so easy, per- ha'ps, to believe it, though he did, as you have seen, and, moreover, attached the greater burden of culpable error to his own shoulders, inasmuch as he had been the tempter. His rest was broken that night. He awoke near dawn with a strange sound in his ears, the sound of Chester's "FIDELIS AD URNAMT loi voice calling faintly, "Captain! Captain Hollis!" Well, it was very natural that, under the circumstances, he should dream about the fellow. "Captain ! Captain!" This was no continuation of his dreams. He was fairly awake now, and sprang out of bed in a trice, crossed the little parlor in two or three strides, and darted out into the hall. He flung open the door in a fever of suspense, and there on the portico, looking shadowy as a ghost in the glimmering dawn, stood Chester. "Is it you? Is it you?" grasping his hand and pulling him into the hall; "thank God, my boy !" He struck a light in the little parlor and turned to him for an ex- planation of his strange delay, but at sight of him he could only exclaim with dismay. Milly, aroused by the ejaculations, thrust her bare feet into a pair* of slippers and crept to the parlor door. There was Chester lying back in her own easy-chair, where yesterday she had uttered her nonchalant- prophe- cies concerning him, his lips blue and shaking, his eyes glazed and strained as though rallying by one supreme effort the forces of his will, lest the mists of delirium should blot out all the familiar outlines about him, his left arm hanging limp and nerveless by his side. She went back and dressed hurriedly, her womanly instincts thoroughly aroused. He told his story from the beginning to the end, with frequent pauses, his lips shaking more and more as he concluded, the mists creeping gradually up over the tired blue eyes. " Here it is, captain, the money," searching his breast, smiling the while unsteadily, and bringing to light the package of bills in their brown paper wrapper. " They would have brought me, they said, if I would wait till 9* 102 IN SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. daylight ; but I could not, I had lost enough time as it was, and I knew what you would be thinking, and and I could not bear that /' ' 11 Milly ! Milly !" roared the captain, and Milly, dressed in the nick of time, rushed in. "See," cried he, great tears running down his honest face, " see, he is brave as a lion and true as steel, and I believe he has killed himself in his haste to vindicate his honor !" And at the sight of that still, senseless face, so young and yet so worn, Milly lost all suspicion, all pique, and all womanly zeal for the safety of her prediction. CHAPTER XIII. "JOCELIN OF BRAKELAND." " He smiled as men smile when they will not speak, Because of something bitter in the thought. 1 ' " Get leave to work In this world, 'tis the best you get at all." Aurora Leigh. THERE was but one theme at the mines next day, de- spite its being the Sabbath and the fact that the rector of a distant parish was to hold service in the little pine structure on the edge of the clearing. Chester's errand, Chester's escape, Chester's bravery were in every mouth. One remembered that he had met O'Rielly coming from behind the "skiffins," near the captain's portico, at a late hour on Friday night ; several testified to having re- marked upon his absence when the night-gang came down the shaft to relieve the day-workers ; the day supervisor affirmed that he had exempted him from duty on the plea of sudden sickness, and very certain it was that he had been absent from the grounds since noon the day before. Chester was the hero of the hour. " He showed plenty of grit, for all his white hands and uppish ways," said one of the roughest of the men, and the tide turned in his favor steadily. Little recked Chester of what was going on in that mi- crocosm, as the captain had called it, outside the little parlor, where he lay on an improvised couch, with the vil- lage doctor feeling his pulse and regarding gravely those 103 104 IN SANCHO PAJVZA'S PIT. ominous red spots on his cheeks above the short thick beard. The long day passed in utter unconsciousness for him, wandering in the mazes of disordered feverish dreams, with no single ray of reason shining in his glittering restless eyes. Milly's own, keen and watchful as ever, grew dim as they fathomed some of the secrets he had so closely guarded. " How he keeps searching about his breast as though he had lost something ; look, dear," she said to her hus- band as he entered the parlor after an absence of a few moments. "He is thinking of the money, poor fellow!" mur- mured the captain, bending over him and pushing the falling locks back from his temples. " Chester, my poor lad, don't you know me?" . But Chester gave no heed, only continued to fumble about his breast with his right hand, breathing the short labored breaths of pain and fever. " Do you think he could be hurt there, Hugh? some wound that the doctor did not discover?" suggested Milly. Whereupon the captain subjected him to a thorough examination. It was not a wound he found, but a ring hung about his neck by a silken guard, and they looked at each other wonderingly when, conveying it to his feebly wandering fingers, he clasped it eagerly, and in his vacant restless eyes a dreamy expression of content dawned. "Amy! Amy!" "He has called her all day," whispered Milly; "just Amy, all the time. Oh, if we knew where to find her, Hugh, and it is her ring he hides !" ********* A serious time Chester had of it for days, while his " JOCELIN OF BRAKELAND." IO 5 fever ran high and the doctor talked gravely of gangrene, looking at the great red jagged wound in his left arm, a serious time, but, aided by his strong and vigorous con- stitution, and nursed constantly by the captain's wife in her own little parlor, from whence they had never at- tempted to remove him, slowly Chester came round again, very slowly and feebly, for the strain upon his powers, both physical and mental, had been long and se- vere, and nature was demanding a penalty for his disregard of some of her most stringent exactions. The keen black eyes of the captain's wife, which he had once dreaded to encounter, and which even now aroused in him a vague suspicion that they were piercing some of his disguises, were ever vigilant where his comfort was concerned, and unfailing to detect the first signs of approaching fatigue or unrest, and with her ever kind and ready hands prompt in administering the remedy, she won his gratitude long before he gave her his confidence. As Chester grew stronger it became a pleasure to him to watch her flitting about his room. She was sharp and self-assertive, but very fresh and pretty, by right of her royal dower of youth and happiness, and he did not pause to consider that the sharpness might degenerate into acidity, the self-assertiveness into shrewishness, with the years; while her husband, to whom she was genuinely de- voted, was of too careless and easy-going a nature to ex- ercise the necessary restraint over her faults, so that there was nothing to hope for from his influence. Like Jocelin of Brakeland, the genial captain of the mines was " a grown man with the heart of a good child." In all the little mining colony there was not one, man, woman, or child, in whom he did not discover some rare distinguishing trait worthy of the highest admiration, and in a quiet, unobtrusive way that you would never have 106 /A' SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. suspected, he found means of serving them each in the peculiar way best adapted to his nature, and, from the day supervisor to the humblest worker underground, all loved and respected our " Cap'n." Like most men of his mould, with a modicum of what the world calls talent, he owned a rare power of judgment and simple habit of di- rectness that eminently fitted him for the position he held in the company's service. He came in one evening when Chester, promoted to the dignity of pillows and an arm-chair, was looking almost like himself in the flattering glow from the hearth ; came in rubbing his hands vigorously, and stamping his feet in a manner intensely suggestive of the pleasure of indoor warmth, as contrasted with the winter night outside. "Eh, Chester, enjoying poor health? as the girl said in the Sunday-school book Milly was crying over last week. Milly is a prime little nurse, eh? Whew! but 'tis cold out, you've no idea," standing with his back to the grate and gathering the frock of his coat in front of him. "Queer lot we have here, Chester," he said, after a pause, with that benign look of satisfaction in his eyes that Chester had grown to understand and enjoy. " I stopped at the lodge on my way up to see Gough about the loads, and there was Jim, Stable Jim, you know, crying with frosted feet, and Mrs. Gough down on her knees feathering 'em with turpentine, and the potatoes frying for supper just ready to burn, so Gough said, if he hadn't gone to the rescue. Bless my soul ! I don't know when I had any- thing to touch me so, Gough lookin' so ashamed of help- ing his wife, and that old shrew mothering Stable Jim as though he'd been her own. Riff-raff and all that, you know, Chester, but touch them in the right place and there they are!" And the captain pointed with such earnestness in front of him, that one might have supposed " yOCELIN OF BRAKELAND." 107 Gough, his wife, and Stable Jim to have been directly within the range of his vision. "Ah, but not every one could touch them in the right place, captain ; it is not given to any but the most skilled artisan to detect the joints in the armor," said Chester, looking up from his bolstering pillows with a gentle smile on his thin face. " Humanity is like the snail, I often think : prick it with the pin-points of curiosity and per- sistence and it resolutely withdraws into its shell, but give it the sunlight of confidence, the warmth of trust, and see how soon it comes creeping out to bask in its rays." "True enough," and the captain dropped his coat- frock to stroke his beard complacently. Thus he stood for a while, evidently pondering some weighty thoughts, then went over to where Chester leaned among his pil- lows. "My lad," he said, laying his hand heavily on the sick man's shoulder, " you won't deny I've given you my confidence and trust, and I won't deny that you've paid me well for my faith in you, but I am afraid you will accuse me of pricking your snail-shell with pins if I ask you an honest question, boy." "Ask what you please, captain," but he felt the shoulder under his hand flinch ; " you have a right to ask, only you will not be displeased with me if I cannot answer." "So you give me credit for curiosity only !" and the captain laughed his broad, good-humored laugh, while Milly, sitting at the window to catch the failing light upon her work, gathered it up and made a motion to leave the room. "Stay, Mrs. Hollis, will you not?" pleaded Chester, whose quick eyes had caught the movement. "Yes, stay, Milly," echoed the captain. "I have nothing to ask Chester concerning the secrets he chooses 108 IN SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. to guard, they do not in the least concern me ; what I do want to know is what he means to do in the future, if he has any prospects or any friends to whose influ- ence he can trust. Why, boy, you don't expect to go back to work on the grounds ; it was slowly killing you before, and now with that disabled arm you look like handling a shovel or loading the weights." He turned to him almost fiercely, this gentle-hearted Jocelin, who could not bear to see a dog suffer a pang that might be allayed ; for there was a dumb expression of dis- may mingled with some other emotion that he could not fathom in the blue eyes of " the lad." " And is there no work here that I can do?" The captain fell to stroking his beard again, and Milly sewed on in the fading light, but it was growing too dark to see, and she pricked her fingers sadly. "Captain," said Chester at length, sitting upright in his chair and shifting his disabled arm to an easier posi- tion ; " captain, I have no friends, no plans, no prospects. I had a blind belief once in that influence men called fate, but I know now that fate in this life is but the working out of our own impulses, good or bad. In fact, I have proven myself a humbug out and out. That evening that I started on my way home from Huntsville, with your money in my breast, I told myself that my fate was an evil one, because I had commenced with succumbing to an evil impulse at the outset. I chose to follow the lead of that impulse and make it my fate. But I was far from realizing that then. Even God seemed against me. I know my mood was morbid, but I had suffered so much from the result of my error that I had lost the power of judging clearly. I told myself that I could not live. I asked God to shorten my miserable life, and on that lonely bleak road I taxed Him with injustice. Well, He showed " JOCELIN OF BRAKELAND" ^9 me then how little I knew my own heart after all, for when O'Reilly threatened my life with annihilation, I found suddenly that it was of invaluable price to me. Great heavens, how I fought, like a fiend, for life after all was dear to me ! I used to prate finely of energy and deter- mination and the surmounting of obstacles on the road to success when I owned all those vaunted advantages, friends, influence, prospects. I will see if I am as strong to fight in the face of impossibilities as I once idly dreamed I was." "Well, you must get some physical strength, boy, be- fore you set to testing your powers," speaking bluffly to hide his emotions ; " mean time we'll see what we can do for you here." "You are not in a position to judge me, knowing, as you do, nothing of my life," he resumed. " I shall bear like an incubus all my days the terrible consequence of my sin ; not for a moment shall I be able to shift its weight ; I am doomed to perpetual exile on account of it, to a living death as far as all those are concerned whom I have known and loved." And as he spoke his face grew ghastly, and drops of moisture stood on his forehead. " But God, who sees all things, who pierces the most hid- den motives, looks into my naked human heart and sees it guiltless of the intention to have committed such a crime ; yes, even when I followed the impulse that led me into temptation I was ignorant as you are of what the result would be." "I can believe that! I can believe that, my lad!" cried his simple friend. " I have no blame to cast upon any living creature but myself," he concluded; "but I shall no longer be able to cheat myself. The life that I fought O'Reilly so wildly for must be turned to some account, if I would retain a 10 no 'IN SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. single morsel of respect for myself. Oh, my friends," he cried, after a moment of exhaustion, in which Milly held a draught of strong cordial to his lips and tenderly wiped the drops from his forehead with her own little embroi- dered handkerchief, " it is bitter to feel that there is no purification for one's sins, no atonement that will avail, either in this world or the next. It makes the travail and the toil of life seem mere thankless tasks !" " Can he have forged a note?" whispered Milly to her husband that night. "Forged a note!" in high indignation, echoed the gentle Jocelin ; " it looks like it, a man who would risk his life to save a stranger's money entrusted to his hands !" "Could it have been MMtn&rthen?" in a still more subdued whisper queried the captain's undaunted wife. "What other crimes would entail such consequences as those he hinted at this evening?" And the captain, remembering his tender care of the cart-horse, the gentle hand with which he stroked the leanest cur in the colony, felt additional anger at the suggestion. "It is queer," was his final remark to his wife, "queer as sticks!" though what particular sticks the captain meant to describe I shall have to leave to your imagination; "but, whatever it is, the poor fellow went into it blindfolded, and it seems a rank injustice for him to have to suffer the penalty." But then, as Chester had observed, the captain was not in a position to judge. "I'll tell you what it is, Chester," he said next day, when the invalid had finished his late breakfast and been helped into the easy-chair again, " we need a clerk at the commissary. Inskiphas enough to do with the books and helping the day supervisor at his rounds. Suppose you take that for a while, old fellow, when you get strong " JOCEL1N Of BRAKELAND." Itl again ; 'tisn't the pleasantest job in the world, but there is no rough hard work. And I'll tell you what, my lad, Milly and I have grown so used to you, haven't we, Milly ? that we are loath to give you up ; there's that little room above the hall, snug and tight, suppose you just call that your own and stay on with us, my boy." Chester threw up his hand with a passionate gesture, clutching the collar at his throat as though it were chok- ing him. " I don't deserve it," he said, in a husky voice ; " I have forfeited all claim to a home, and that is what you offer. Oh, God bless you both !" Milly escaped into her bedroom, and the captain went out the front door, stumbling over the " skiffins" by rea- son of the dimness of his eyesight, as if that dazzling mountain, like Aladdin's palace, had been reared in a single night. CHAPTER XIV. PERSEPHONE. " Regret, Remorse, Shame; three Hell-hounds that ever dog my Steps and bay at my heels." Robert Burns Letters. " Her looks were like a flower in May, Her smile was like a summer morn.'' ROBERT BURNS. IT was Sunday at the mines, a beautiful June Sunday ; the little rills ran sparkling from the tank, the great pipes dripped sleepily and monotonously, the gravel-hills shone white as Albion's cliffs in the sunlight, and out from the miners' shanties freshly-dressed men and women were fol- lowed by chubby-faced, laughing children on their way to afternoon service in the Gothic chapel at the edge of the wood. Peaceful and picturesque looked the noisy work-day miners on this Sunday. The branches of the huge old trees were stirring with soft breezes, a balmy odor was afloat in the air from the wild pink honeysuckles that were blooming so profusely in the wood, and that filled every fireplace in the colony with color and fragrance. Be- tween the woodland aisles there were to be had bewitch- ing glimpses of pasture land and wide fields waving with the emerald green of the growing wheat. Leaning against a mammoth oak-tree near the engine- house, with a book open upon his knee, sat the clerk of the commissary. He was not reading, his eyes were fol- 112 PERSEPHONE. l x 3 lowing the circling course of some swallows seeking quar- ters in the chimneys of the captain's house. The cart- man, with his promotion to the post of clerk at the com- missariat, had assumed some of the habits of a gentleman. Instead of the dark ill-fitting clothes, he wore a light suit of tweed, and the whiteness of his linen, the conventional set of his necktie, proclaimed him quite within the pale of gentility again. No need to adopt the guise of a work- man any longer, for the colony looked up to him ungrudg- ingly nowadays ; indeed, there had been a tacit understand- ing between them since that cold winter morning when, more dead than alive, he had presented himself at the captain's door with the money hidden in his breast. He had been "le chevalier sans peur et sans reproche" ever since to them. As he sat there, following with his eyes the gyrations of the swallows above the chimneys, his thoughts flew off in a wild flight of their own. The book on his knee was a much-tattered brown volume of Ovid. He had been reading it with a faint sense of the likeness in his own to the fate of the Latin poet. His heart, always sensitive to the slightest suggestion of memory, drew a dreary com- parison as he sat there with the vagrant breezes lifting his hair, and the scent of the pink honeysuckles smiting his senses. At desolate Tomi, on the wild Euxine shore, where no flowers grew, no birds ever sang, where the very sun itself shone but fitfully through the gray misty clouds, the Augustan poet had dragged his existence through long years, pining in vain for the golden skies of his beloved Italy and the familiar beauty of the garden near the Flaminian way, where in his happy youth he had loved and sung. But he pined in vain, for the recall never came ; amid the pomp of the Augustan court the name of the once favored poet was never mentioned, and he 10* II4 IN SANCHO PANZAS PIT. who had won their applause at the fasti, whose songs had lent a charm to the most triumphant occasions in those royal days of his prosperity, was doomed never again to see the beauty of his native land, and dying, in a desolate old age, was buried in the alien Scythian soil, afar from all he had loved so faithfully and vainly. Those plaintive appeals of the Tristia, those mournful memories, those pining barren regrets found an all too faithful echo in his own heart, himself an exile, now and forever ! But the likeness soon ended, for the poet had never de- served the misery of his exile. Condemned by a tyrant king, to suit his own ends, the poor mourner of the Tristia never knew what he had to expiate. And for him ex- piation was unavailing, for him there was no escape, as there had been none for Orestes when the relentless Eu- menedean chorus pursued him sleeping or waking. He checked the maddening torrent of thought by a supreme effort of will, flinging his arm aloft, as of the soul within him making a mute protest against the burden that the body imposed upon it. "Foul! foul!" he groaned. " Oh, my God ! what would I not give if to-day I could lift up clean hands to Thee ?" Absorbed in his bitter thoughts, his ear had taken no note of the sounds about him, the smooth bowling of carriage-wheels down the graded road that led from the village, nor the rustling of footsteps among the last year's leaves that filled the wood-paths. So he started, letting the little brown volume of the Tristia fall to the ground, when a strange voice accosted him, and he found himself confronted by a party of people, evidently come on a Sunday tour of the grounds. " Will you kindly introduce us to the captain ?" asked the owner of the voice, a middle-aged man with a pair of keen eyes and salt-and-pepper whiskers. PERSEPHONE. H 5 Chester stooped for his hat, his heart beating rapidly. It made a part of his punishment that he should dread to find in every stranger some acquaintance of his old life. " Captain Hollis is with his wife at service," he said ; " but if you come to inspect the works I will show you around with pleasure, and it will not be long until service is over." The gentleman accepted his offer with a polite bow, noting his embarrassment as a very natural emotion, and following him with the rest of the party into the engine- house. There, during a pause in his explanation, Chester inspected them, and drew a deep sigh of relief when he found all the faces unfamiliar. Besides the gentleman who had spoken were two ladies, one exceedingly frail in appearance, a young gentleman scrupulously dressed and a girl wearing a riding-habit. It was at this girl that Chester looked more than once, seeing so much that was distinctive about her that, with his usual habit of satisfying his judgment, he made a vain effort to understand in what it consisted. She intercepted his searching glance with a quick flash of those large bril- liant eyes of hers. Such eyes ! imperious, level lidded, and black as night. Surely they would exhaust her very life some day with the demands they made for constant light and warmth and beauty. " Were you not reading the Tristia ?" she asked, speak- ing to him for the first time. The young man who was carrying her riding-whip touched her arm. She drew away from him impatiently. "Don't, Alfred," she said, with the petulant manner of a spoiled child ; " you don't know how odious you are when you squint. I am reminded irresistibly of the origin of the word and its corruption nowadays. ' View of holy things' indeed ! Imagine in those mediaeval days the little !l6 IN SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. hole in the gallery and the reverent eyes that peeped through at the great ceremony of the sacrifice !" " Call it by some other name then, coz ; but whatever you do don't forget yourself," he answered in an undertone. "Small fear of my doing that," she answered, with a half-sneer that made her young face very cold and unsym- pathetic; then she turned to the guide. "Was it the Tristia you were reading ?" A flickering color came and went in her cheeks. "It was," said Chester, standing with his hat in his hand. "And you enjoy it ?" "No." "Ah ! why, then, do you read it?" "To learn how men have suffered and endured." The brilliant color leaps up anew in her cheeks. " Few read Ovid for the lessons he teaches," she said, demurely. " Julia !" It was the voice of the delicate lady, slightly elevated and vibrant with well-bred horror. "Coming, mamma!" And she turned, gathering up the folds of her riding-skirt, and throwing him a half- laughing, half-defiant glance over her shoulder. "It is the Heroides you should read for its lessons," she said, in tones which bore a covert sneer. " My dear Julia !" This time it was the young exqui- site, Alfred of the "squint." "Don't bother, Alfred !" cried the self-willed demoi- selle of the riding-skirt. "If I thought there was the smallest hope of your benefiting thereby, I would advise you to a diligent study of ' De Remedio Amoris,' by the same author, only I can't consign you to depths in which you would flounder miserably !" The delicate lady looked at her companion, shook her PERSEPHONE. 117 head, and sighed lugubriously. Alfred switched his trou- sers with the riding-whip he carried, and betrayed his discomfort in an ill-concealed flush that stole up to his Hyperian curls. But the middle-aged man of the salt-and- pepper whiskers looked over at the girl warningly, albeit his keen eyes were brimming over with laughter. She went over to his side, and Chester heard her say, with that brilliant flickering color in her face, " Nonsense, papa ! he is only mystified ; do you think he has the most distant idea of what I meant? Not a bit of it ! Alfred possesses an cegis in his obtuseness." Chester led the way over the grounds, half-angered at the mockery in that sweet silvery voice. Captain Hollis and Milly returning from service en- countered the party at the mouth of the shaft. Chester introduced his captain, glad to be absolved from a duty that was growing momentarily more distasteful to him, and he turned back with Milly. But they had scarcely reached the gate beyond the hills of gravel when the cap- tain's voice was heard on the other side, and in a moment he emerged into view, accompanied by the young lady in the riding-habit. She had taken it into her wilful head to go underground, and the captain, inwardly disgusted with his own weak- ness, had brought her to Milly for some protective dis- guise. "They are visitors in the neighborhood, Chester," he said to his clerk when the two had disappeared indoors, "and they leave to-morrow, or I should never consent to their going below to-day. The Vosburghs, from New York, visiting the Courtneys. They are fine people ; he is a banker on Wall Street ; my brother has had dealings with them. That black -eyed young witch is their daugh- ter, and the delicate-looking woman his wife. What an n8 IN SANCffO PANZAS PIT. unmitigated young fop Alfred Courtney is, and that little imp quips him unmercifully. Ah, here they come. Ju- piter! ain't she pretty?" "She looks like Clarchen," said Chester. And she did make a very piquant Clarchen in one of Milly's short linen morning dresses, with a fanciful cap of Milly's pinned over her dusky braids. " Persephone returning to the shades !" she cried gayly, " only I will come back, good people, for I have not eaten of the pomegranate seeds," laughing up into Milly's mysti- fied face, not observing how "that remarkable-looking guide," as she had called him to her father, was flushing as he looked at her. The captain and Milly were not in the secret, neither being mythologically posted, so to speak, but it was to Chester the language of his past. She threw him an audacious quizzical glance en passant. "You read the Tristia? well, so do I ; and it is not often that a girl reads the Tristia, but not for the lesson, never ! What has youth to do with remorse and regret and shame ? Au revoir!" " Goodness !" ejaculated Milly, when they passed around the " skiffins," "what a queer girl ! and she can't be over sixteen." "Chester," said the captain at supper, "that odd little lady sent you a message. She said I should tell you that she had picked up your book where you let it fall, and would keep it as a souvenir of her visit to the mines. She said you would not miss it as you did not care for it, and if ever you should meet in the future you should claim your own price for it." Chester laughed with some surprise. Milly expressed strong disapprobation of the action: "She is a born flirt ; why, my dear, she regularly ogled Chester, she did indeed. I can't think how girls can be so bold !" PERSEPHONE. 119 Chester spoke then : ' " It did not seem boldness to me, Mrs. Hollis ; she had a brusque, original way about her that was most unusual, and a too slight regard for the feel- ings of others perhaps, but she is so young!" and then Chester fell into a revery, as was usual with him, with that half-smile, sad and wholly perplexing, on his face. " Well, what's your idea, my lad?" The captain was regarding him with his broad genial smile. " I have strange fancies, captain, sometimes, and to-day that bright, fearless face filled me with a vague sort of pity. There was so much that was contradictory in its expressions. If the tenderness of those eyes do not tri- umph over their imperiousness, she has scant chance of a happy future." "Oh, I don't know, Chester, I don't know; you are apt to be fanciful, my lad," said the honest captain, taking refuge in the commonplace. Milly said nothing ; she not only did not know, she did not understand. Chester often talked in enigmas to her. CHAPTER XV. "WITCH FINGERS." " My fortune leads to traverse realms alone, And find no spot of all the world my own." GOLDSMITH. AFTER the same fashion the months went on at the mines. Chester at the commissary was faithful to his trust, as he had been on that winter evening in the frozen wood- land road when he had fought with O'Rielly for his life and for his employer's money. If weighing out sugar and measuring quarts of kerosene did not quite comprehend his ideal of life and its possibilities, it at least afforded him an honest means of livelihood, and he had not earned the right to be fastidious. As from the outset, he was quiet and reserved among the miners, but they had since his adventure with O'Rielly yielded him a willing respect, and he numbered among the younger men some very warm adherents. But amid this prosperity which he did not deserve, amid the comforts of his home at the captain's, came ever the haunt- ing regret of his past, and memory kept his eyes hollow and weary. Some days, sitting behind the low counter of the com- missary, with the odors of tobacco and coal oil and mo- lasses all about him, with the light entering dimly through the small panes of the two windows, barricaded by narrow shelves of candy-jars filled with mint-sticks, sour-drops, and brown taffy, he would ask himself with a sort of incredu- 120 " WITCH FINGERS." I2i lous wonder if this life he was living could be real. To have barely contemplated such a possibility in the old days would have sent a shudder through his entire body. That it was real he had the evidences of his senses ; and he was not only meeting it, bearing it, braving it, but accepting it with a feeling of devout thankfulness as far beyond his just deserts. Such latent resources do we, each and every one of us, bear within us with which to meet the reverses of life. And yet there were days when his mind revolted at the monotonous details of his work as too utterly disgusting to endure ; days of weighing sugar, of drawing molasses, of counting out sticks of candy to the dirty-faced urchins, and of sweeping the floor, making the fire, and dusting the bales and boxes in the miserable dingy room. He was young and very human and fastidious to the heart's core ; it must be forgiven him that occasionally he forgot his forfeited claims upon humanity, and chafed at what in his moment of clear, calm judgment he acknowledged to be far above anything he had a right to expect. Such moments of forgetfulness were rare indeed, poor lad, and for them he paid a heavy price, as one might have read in the hollow, weary eyes, in the haggard lines on his young worn face. But thoughts of his past obtended ever as he sat in the dingy shop or walked to his meals at the captain's ; and the faces of those who were dear to him looked out from every winding in the familiar grounds. He pondered upon them sadly, " Did they feel how the moments were going, Were they weary or slow?" In his thoughts, as in his heart, there was one memory that had a niche to itself, and his waking dreams became ii 122 IN SANCHO PANZAS PIT. almost tangible, devoted to that memory. He lived in them as in a real present, the delusion ofttimes so perfect, so alluring as to afford him for the moment a solid joy, a sort of unreasoning delight. But he would awaken ; ah, yes, he would awaken soon. Vain were these happy dreams of a prodigal past, for the past was dead, a putrid body bound to his own with clanking chains, that, willing or not, he was doomed to drag along through all the years of the future. The miners' wives came and went with their coal-oil cans, their baskets of eggs and butter, and wondered among themselves what kept "t'clerk" so thin and the shadows beneath his eyes so heavy. "If he ain't goin' into consumption I don't know t'signs," suggested the lodge mistress, Mrs. Gough. " Poor lad'n, he'll have naught 'o say on the subjec', and shakes his head when I'd'vise Pulmona, and for all his stiff ways ther' ain't no huppishness about him." With which rather disjointed sentences Mrs. Gough usually dismissed " t'clerk" from her mind and proceeded to look over her purchases. September was waning now ; the nights were growing almost cold here in the shadow of the woodland. Sep- tember, and Chester had come to a landmark, bearing in graven letters the record of his past year. September, and for the commissary clerk the fading woods re- sounded with the Naha-like echo of a woodman's axe, the leaves rustled even in his fitful midnight dreams, the mournful "tu-whit, tu-whoo" of the owl sounded dismally in his ear every hour of the night and day. "Hugh, I believe Chester is going to be ill. What is wrong with him ? He eats nothing, and see how thin he grows." Milly was preparing for visitors, and the entire house was undergoing a revolutionary period which was to result WITCH FINGERS: 123 in the utter extirpation of cobwebs, dust, and dirt. The servants were rushing about in a wild frenzy of haste and disorder, making pugilistic assaults upon mattresses, car- pets, and curtains, and indulging in frantic ablutions with mop and pail. Milly herself, in her husband's old gloves and towering pink-cambric dust-cap, gave orders like a tyrannical female Phalaris condemning her faithful sub- jects to inexorable banishment, until, as her gudeman expressed it, " he didn't know where he'd stop." "What is the matter with Chester?" she repeated, making a running jump at the cornice with a brush at the end of a pole, and bringing the brush on its return in unpleasant proximity to her impudent little nose, as though bent upon enumerating with mathematical pre- cision the number of defunct flies the demolished cobwebs had harbored. "I don't begin to know," replied her husband, thus importuned ; " but don't notice it, Milly, there's a good girl. It gives him additional trouble, I am sure, when we observe him too closely. Well, aren't you most through? To watch your proceedings, one would imagine you were expecting a health board on a tour of sanitary inspection instead of your uncle and aunt." The captain, good fellow, had accepted the inevitable condition of affairs in his home with the best grace he could summon, but the draft upon his equanimity had been heavy and frequent, and his resources about exhausted. "If I were not so good-natured, I should be tempted to grumble, Milly, as the cook said in Collins's ' Frozen Deep.' " " As though you were not as inveterate a grumbler as John Want himself!" Milly replied. But the captain heaved a deep sigh of relief when he came home one evening and found the Milly of old, in a 124 IN S^A'CHO PANZA'S PH. becoming home-dress, plying her worsted needle by the parlor grate. " Dear, dear, but this is comfortable !" cried the " mar- tyr in deed but not in will," tilting back in his favorite chair and elevating his boots to somewhere near the region of his eyebrows. " Next time, Milly, give me fair warn- ing, and I'll escape to some haven of relief until the tur- moil is over. After all, what does such an expenditure of soap and water and physical force amount to? Do you see any difference in the aspect of things, Chester?" And Chester, after a careful survey of the premises, missing the dingy hollands of the summer, and observing the pristine freshness of carpets and curtains, felt bound to admit that he did, whereupon Milly gave him a glowing smile and turned a contemptuous face upon the captain. " What an odious married man your confirmed bachelor makes! a sort of Mormon husband, who divides his alle- giance between his old habits and his new wife. Truly, Chester, I do not believe the captain would change his linen once a week if I were not here to insist upon it." "Absent-minded, little one ; nice enough, but absent," laughed the good-humored liege. "So was Goldsmith when he vowed to his wife, who could not account for his empty valise, that he had donned a clean shirt each day of his visit." Goldsmith's life was one of the few biographies with which Mrs. Milly had fortified her busy little brains. "Well, and what became of 'em, my dear?" inquired the captain, anxious for the moral that adorned her tale. " Why, he had put them on, one atop of the other, and brought them all home on his back'' " Ha ! ha !" laughed the captain, " but I should never have done that. What ! why, he must have felt uncom- monly tight about the arm-pits. Chester, to hear my " WITCH FINGERS." 125 wife talk you'd imagine I never wore shirts until I was married. You wouldn't have Chester believe I visited you in Leander's guise, my dear !" "I don't know anything about Leanders," said Milly, resenting the amused gleam in the clerk's blue eyes, and feeling called upon thereby to express her mind more de- cidedly even than usual ; "but there is one thing I do know, and that is, whenever a man marries he suddenly affects a supreme indifference for not only fresh linen, but even the order and cleanliness of his home, only supposing he has married an orderly wife. It is upon the principle, no doubt, that wives and servants are not to be spoiled by encouragement. Now if I were a slattern, allowed things to lay at six's and seven's, was less careful of my coffee or the captain's linen, what a martyr he would feel him- self! how he wottld sputter over the coffee and demand perfect linen ! I think it is contemptible for a man to sneer at the comforts that his wife sacrifices time, patience, and bodily ease to provide !" The captain leaned over and patted the glossy braids with his great gentle hand: "Tut, tut, little girl! who sneers? who won't praise his little wife when she deserves it ? Only, my dear, I have felt uncommonly like a refugee this past week, and I am glad we will have something more appetizing for dinner to-morrow than a cold joint and baked beans. No doubt these semi-annual renova- tions are entirely necessary, but, like discrimination and discretion, they don't come natural to every one. See, I've a bruise on four fingers and a cut on my thumb, and as for this," holding out his left hand, much the worse for wear, " I can only be thankful I have escaped with it whole. Those little carpet-hammers, innocent as they look, play the deuce with a fellow's nails, and I wouldn't like to submit my cranium to a phrenologist's inspection u* 126 IK SANCHO PANZAS PIT. just now for fear he would be puzzled to find names for all its remarkable developments. When a fellow from the superior altitude of a step-ladder essays to nail a 'lamb- kin,' as our gentle Bridget dubs it, beneath a cornice that affords you just two inches moving room, it isn't to be wondered at if one's foretop falls a sacrifice." By this time the captain had gained his point, and Milly was laughing heartily. She led the way to supper in the best humor imaginable. " And now, Chester, what do you think of my contri- bution to the 'comforts' my wife takes such credit for?" "I think, as Jarvis said of Sir William Honeywood in your wife's favorite author, ' it is not without reason that the world allows thee to be the best of men.' ' The captain stammered, looking utterly confused. " Bless me, boy, you've always a quotation cut and dried for every occasion ; how do you remember 'em all, and where do you find 'em?" "You should rather condemn me for that, captain. I believe it is considered out- of taste in literature, but to answer you with another, Burns says in one of his letters have you read them ? ' I like to have quotations for every occasion ; they give one's ideas so pat, and save one the trouble of finding expression adequate to one's feelings' ; and again, in another letter, he says, ' I pick up favorite quotations and store them in my mind as ready armor, offensive or defensive, amid the struggle of this turbulent existence.' ' " Then your memory doesn't play you tricks?" "Not often." And the captain wondered at the shadow that suddenly darkened the face of " the lad." "Milly," said her husband at supper, resuming the mooted subject with that peculiar persistence that be- " WITCH FINGERS." 127 longed to him, " I venture to say that, after all your work and trouble, your Aunt Edith will not notice whether your carpets are clean or dusty ; she's always looking miles ahead with those strange eyes of hers." "Yes, she will; auntie notices everything, little as you think it ; but even if she did not, I shall enjoy them all the more from knowing that everything is ' spick and span.' Try some." This last to Chester, who had drawn a large glass bowl towards him and was looking into it with in- genuous curiosity. " Try some, they are perfectly charm- ing ! ' Witch-fingers' and ' tangled-breeches' we call them at Willams. I made them specially for Blanche, Uncle Herbert's baby-girl. ' Cousin Milly's witch-fin- gers,' she used to call them." They might have been veritable witch-fingers, judging from Chester's face as he held the snowy, sugar-encrusted dainty and gazed at Milly with that dazed look in his eyes. "Willams!" he echoed, shaken out of his habitual self-control. "Willams! why, what do you know of Willams?" Milly looked at him curiously. " I was born at Willams, and married from there, and all my people live there. Dr. Herbert Sinclair, the chief physician in Willams, is my uncle." " And it is they you are expecting?" "Yes; I thought you knew." She felt curious to know what his emotion meant, but a warning glance from her husband checked the query on her lips. Chester finished his supper in silence, eating every crumb of the delicate white morsel, draining the last drop in his cup unconsciously, then sitting on at table while Milly and her husband chatted leisurely over their tea, white, immovable, as Curtius might have sat when be- 128 IN SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. neath him in the heart of old Rome that black abyss yawned at his feet. "Please, sir, Mister Chester sez as how you'll please ter walk down ter the shop hif you haint gone to bed." Thus Stable Jim at the captain's elbow, as he walked up and down the piazza smoking his nocturnal cigar. "Well, I haven't gone to bed, Jim, as you see; run in and tell Mrs. Hollis I will be back soon, and not to wait for me. ' ' And he set off around the gravel-hills and along the moonlit grounds with a warm glow in his heart, engen- dered by the mild beauty of the night. At the shop he found Chester behind the counter, his head leaning on his hands, his whole attitude indicative of weariness of body and dejection of mind. "Why, Chester, what's wrong?" asked the captain, coming to a stand in front of the counter. "Captain," and the voice matched the attitude, "I am tired and troubled, and I don't know which way to turn. You've been such a friend to me, captain, such a true, kind, generous friend, and I was tempted just now into making you a cowardly return for it all." " Don't speak in riddles, my lad." The " lad" leaned over the counter, looking eagerly into the puzzled face of his friend with eyes that pleaded for forbearance as never eyes pleaded before. "I've got to leave, captain, and I was tempted to sneak away like a thief, only I remembered what you and Mrs. Hollis would think of such a return for all your kindness, and I could not. I value your opinion, captain, even more than I did when you trusted me, a stranger, with your money." "You've got to leave?" "Yes; it is a part of my punishment that I am safe nowhere long ; but I did think to rest here, and, oh ! it is WITCH FINGERS: 129 bitter to leave, for never again shall I find such friends as you and your wife have been to me." "And you will not trust me with your secret?" " No, I cannot ; you are a law-abiding man ; your heart is gentle as a woman's, but your judgment could not with- hold its condemnation. You believed in me when every- thing was against me, but you could no longer believe in the face of evidence that would convict me twice over. If ever the day comes when I can clear this mystery " but he interrupted himself, flinging his arms up with the old curious gesture. Between him and his friend came the ghastly face of his past, and he knew that the day would never dawn when the weight of that black secret would be lifted from his life. Captain Hollis walked behind the counter unsteadily ; there were blurring mists before his kind eyes. " Ches- ter," he said, laying his hand on the clerk's shoulder, "look up, boy, don't take it like that; I believe you; I trust you in spite of all. Didn't I tell you that I did not seek to discover your secret, and remember, boy, you said yourself it was not crime in intention. But to leave now when your services are all but indispensable, surely you won't have to do that, boy?" Chester lifted a blanched face from his hands and wrung his benefactor's hand with unconscious strength. " Cap- tain, after a few days it will be as much as my life is worth, perhaps, to stay here. I would have said a year ago that my life was worth nothing, but you see I promised not to cheat myself on that score again." The captain pressed his lips together in perplexed silence. If he had his own conjectures concerning the nature of his subordinate's crime, he forebore to give them expres- sion, but he did not again seek to shake his sudden deter- mination to leave. 1 3 o 7A r SANCffO PANZA'S PIT. "If it is as you say, then you must go, Chester," and the captain stroked unsteadily his abundant silken beard ; "but where? have you considered?" "I have had no time to consider," a dreary apathy in his voice. Then after a long pause, arousing himself with an effort, straightening his tall figure and drawing his breath quickly : " Well, captain, don't bother about me, I'll pull up somewhere, the worst is over for the present. You are willing to trust me still ; you know that I do not play you this shabby trick of my own will. Come along," taking his hat down from its peg and extinguishing the lamp, " Mrs. Hollis will be imagining that you've gone below, and you know she doesn't fancy that." But as they struck into the white moonlight beyond the shanties, Chester wheeled round and laid his hand on his captain's shoulder with a tenderness that turned the action into a caress. "It is a poor return for all your goodness, but you know it is not in my power to stay, and one last request I have to make, my friend, that you do not mention my name or refer to such a person having existed at the mines to those people who are coming, and that you will ask the same for me of your wife. You look surprised, small wonder ; but it would not avail you any- thing to know my reasons. They did me a great service once, those people ; the lady, Miss Edith Sinclair, has lived in my memory and dreams ever since, a white angel, and it causes me a bitter pang that she was forced to con- demn me as utterly unworthy her charity. The last thing I have to ask is that you will not allow thoughts of me to give you uneasiness. You knowmyold faith, a man makes his own fate. I shall pull up somewhere, and I have a neat account against the company, enough to keep me going until I can find a lodgment. You will promise, captain ?" " Yes, my lad ; I promise not to speak your name to my " WITCH FINGERS." ! 3 I wife's people, though if it is they from whom you are fleeing I would advise you to stay where you are. Dr. Herbert, philosopher and philanthropist, as well as phy- sician, would no more use his knowledge of your secret against you than he would encourage the process of vivi- section ; and Edith, ' auntie,' as Milly calls her, whose name, by the way, is not Miss Sinclair, but Mrs. Holme, and whose life was blighted in the very outset " " Holme? did you say Holme?" Chester was leaning up against the gate, white as the wraith of a man. "Yes, my lad. Did you ever hear of her husband? a worthless foreign attache whom she met in her youth at Washington, and, succumbing to his beauty and wit, he was a clever dog, she eloped with him beyond seas, leav- ing a noble young lover in the lurch. She came back to her brother after two years, wan and heart-broken, a mis- erable, forsaken wife at twenty, with a baby in her arms; and when the babe, a boy, was about ten years old he was missing one day from the garden at the doctor's, where he had been sent to play, and has never been heard of since, kidnapped by that renegade, no doubt. But if ever a woman has atoned for the folly of her youth it is Edith Holme. Your secret, if she knows it, is a sacred thing to her ; for, as she has so often said, she is in fel- lowship with all who have sinned and repented." "Mrs. Holme, Mrs. Rabys Holme," he repeated, under his breath, "and she took me in, gave me a mother's care and comfort, nursed me back to strength, bore with my weakness so patiently, while I !" He turned and fled down the white moonlit glades of the woodland as one who is pursued by a fiend, and the captain looked after him with a heavy heart, "Poor lad! poor lad!" CHAPTER XVI. TITHONIUS. " Dust are our frames, and gilded dust our pride." AYLMER'S Fuld. A WILD evening in March ! The trees in the belt cii cling the carriage-drive at Cheswick were flinging naked, pleading arms to the piercing gales that swept across the country from the mountains; black battle- ments of clouds overhead sent down a stinging shower of frozen rain at intervals, like the advance shots from an enemy's intrenchments. A pitiless, fierce March day, whose icy blast was death to the early snowdrops springing to life in the borders, and when occasionally a sunbeam ventured to dart from a crevice of the windy clouds it was dashed to instant death " 'gainst tower and tree." In the library, before a roaring, old-fashioned fire of hickory logs, sat Mr. Cheswick, his right foot bolstered upon yielding cushions, and at his right hand a small circular table containing the adjuncts of his evening meal. The movement of his hand as he lifted his cup to his lips was strangely unsteady, and on his brow were deep furrows that ten added years of life ought not to have wrought there. Opposite the fireplace, erect and precise, sat Miss Bab knitting. The little silver side- curls fell glossy and well-kept as ever on either side the sunken temples, the bright black eyes flashed keenly as of old behind her spectacles, and the glittering needles, 132 TITHONIUS. '33 guided by those withered hands, clicked steadily through all changes, all troubles, though the line of her cotton might have been the cord of Ocnus for all the comfort she derived from her work nowadays. The socks were multiplying to such an extent in that top drawer of the bureau in Miss Bab's room that a casual observer might have suspected her of a secret design to rival the Balbrig- gan manufactory. Strong, yellow pairs she knitted for the deserving poor about Cheswick, but these exquisitely- shaped, soft, white hose, smooth to the touch as satin, and ribbed and clocked to a nicety, were always carefully deposited in that "top drawer" of the old-fashioned bureau, with what tears, with what prayers, with what motherly agony of pain and suspense only the faithful old soul herself knew. As they sat there on either side the hearth, Miss Bab's fingers flying, her old eyes grown dreamy looking over the spectacles into the fire, faint echoes of music reached them, muffled strains that mingled with the voices of the wind outside in a weird din of sound. Mr. Cheswick set his cup on the tray and reached for the evening paper, looking up and down its columns list- lessly. " Did your tea suit you, Robert ?" "Very good." "Are you comfortable? It is very cold. Jacob says the ice is an inch thick on the pond." "Humph!" " Did he tell you Duffer will not eat?" "Humph!" After which abortive attempt at conversation Miss Bab lapsed into silence. The logs crackled fiercely ; a grand pyrotechnic display went on behind the fire-dogs unheeded by either of them. 1 34 I^ SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. The muffled strains came stealing in again, soft yet distinct as the voice of conscience when, in the still- ness of the night, it makes itself heard in our souls. Hauntingly, persistently the weird tones found an echo in the lofty room and in the heart of the lonely, stern- visaged master, sweet as the memory of happy days, sad as the barren regrets that follow in the track of wasted joys. How they mourned, how they plained, those heavenly sweet voices ! He leaned his head on his hand and listened, while the dark shadows outside pressed closer and blacker, and the rude winds lashed the branches of his brave old trees. But the faint, echoing voices broke forth as he listerjed into a sob, a wail, disjointed, dying, like the fortunes of his house and name ! " Barbara, call Amy, will you?" The old lady started at the high, rasping tones. "Tell her I want her, and send Jacob to make the fire." The fire had burned down to the last log, and the twinges of pain in his foot were exasperating. Miss Bab arose, folded her knitting, and went out into the hall with her old firm step. It was not long until Amy appeared, carrying a little lamp, and the rays shining upward into her face revealed it much the same, except that the clear eyes were wistful and the corners of the mouth slightly depressed where once the curve was so firm and joyous. She set the lamp on the table at his elbow. " Did you want me, uncle?" she asked, stooping as she spoke and busying herself with the cushions about his foot. "Yes, I want you to read me that table of the foreign markets, the print is so confoundedly fine ! Why did you stay so long over there in the cold ? I have told you to have Jacob build a fire." TITHONWS. 135 There was no answer. The long parlor, where Amy had lived out her brief idyl, was by common consent a tabooed spot. It was only when the fever of unrest raged highest that she ventured there, though she as often thought that, as to the pilgrim on Mount Hor, the fair height to which her memory led her only served to reveal to her more clearly the wretchedness and barren extent of the El Ghor Valley that stretched below. As she sat in the Cheswick library waiting for Jacob to mend the fire, looking so fair and patient and home-like in her dainty attire, with the light-brown waving hair coiled in burnished plaits coronet-wise above her fore- head, how little they guessed, old Aunt Bab, who had resumed her knitting, and Mr. Cheswick, scanning the columns of his paper, that her heart was smothering per- petually the one cry, " Where shall I find him?" Jacob knelt in front of the fender, disposing his splin- ters with the precision of an artist. Amy went over to the window opening upon the garden. How drear it looked, the broad old-fashioned garden, with its bare hedge of currant- and raspberry-bushes, its empty beds, its deso- late, wind-swept paths ! She leaned among the crimson curtains, a pretty creature, young and graceful, making so fair a picture as she stood there that even old Jacob Martin, rising stiffly from his knees before the fender, heaved an honest sigh of pleasure as he looked at her. There was nothing in common with grief and suspense about her. She seemed only a womanly child to those two old people sitting by the fire, a little serious for her years perhaps, but still a child, with a child's light fancies, a child's ready forgetfulness ! They did not see the little hand clinching a fold of the curtain, nor the dreariness of those soft eyes as they looked out over the wild March waste outside the win- 136 IN SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. dow. They did not know how in her heart she was moaning, "Where are you, my dear, my dear? Do you suffer? do you live? Is there no help for you?" "Come, Amy." "Yes, uncle." In a moment the quiet little figure was at his side, the gentle, sweet face within the range of his vision. Strange what comfort it gave him to see her sitting there in front of him, with the firelight shining on the bright braids of her hair ! That was one act of his life he need not repent, that fair young flower flourished in the upas- soil of his home. "Does your foot hurt much? Oh, uncle, I am so sorry !" For he had covered his face with his hands and groaned. " There, go on with the markets !" And Amy plunged at once into that startling array of dry statistics. From one topic to another she passed, pausing only long enough to receive her uncle's dictates as to what was next most worthy of a hearing. Most of her evenings were so employed, the only variety arising from her uncle's moods, which, when subjected to those madden- ing twinges of pain in his foot, were for the most part unappeasable. Sometimes her heart sank at the dreari- ness of her life. It would have been dreary in any case. The monotonous days, each one the counterpart of the other, passed at Cheswick with those two old people, even had she never known the pleasures of congenial intercourse and companionship, even had she not been burdened with that deadly weight of trouble whereof you know, for she was young and a creature of natural impulses and healthy imagination. Cheswick was the one place of importance in the country, isolated from its plain, comfortable neighbors TITHONIUS. 137 by the reserve and exclusiveness of its master, and so there were no resources in the neighborhood. Unlike the generality of country estates, rich and extensive as it was, Cheswick had not for many years dispensed a grace- ful hospitality nor opened its wide doors with a carte blanche invitation to the world outside, as it might well have done. Perhaps to the delicate health of Cedric's mother might have been attributed this lack of hospital- ity, or it might have been that Robert Cheswick, who was never known to have evinced any partiality for the world at large, had arbitrated the matter at the outset after a peculiar fashion of his own. At all events Cheswick was without neighbors in a thrifty, thickly-settled county, where the farms were plentiful and fruitful, flanked by substantial dwellings in brick and stones, to whose in- mates its customs, as seen from afar, savored decidedly of " uppishness. " And so in this trouble that had over- taken him, this disgrace that had darkened his staunch old name, Robert Cheswick was not enriched by the sympathy of the people among whom he had lived all his married life. They were alone, as they had been always. But in those glad days last year, when the hours flew by on wings, when the sunset followed the sunrise all too soon for the joys to be lived through, what had Amy missed from the outside world? Nothing, for each day had unfolded some new delight that the yesterday had held not in its royal sway. What had they missed, then, those two at old Cheswick, their hearts and souls bound in a union of completeness, with the future cloudless in anticipation before them ? Could she dream that the winds were but asleep in their caverns? that the light in the eyes she loved had blinded her to the darkness that was coming on apace? 12* ! 3 8 IN SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. But now, sitting there day after day, learning lessons in housekeeping from Jacob Martin's wife, nursing and amusing her uncle, taking long, solitary walks through the lonely country, she began to long for something from outside, no matter what, so that this severe implaca- ble silence might but be broken. There was nothing of the stoic in the soft tender nature of the girl, though she bore her own pain bravely and carried a patient spirit to confront the duties of the lonely days. She was young, a very child, and she longed inexpressibly for a friend, some creature near her own age to whom she might dare go with her troubled thoughts and seek comfort in her companionship. " Mandy, do you mind Miss Amy ?" Jacob had said to his wife that evening, while she was preparing her master's supper and he waiting to serve it, " she's that white and spirit-like one can e'en a'most see through her. The girl's breakin' her heart, I tell you. She ought to be sent away from this place; t'squire, for all he makes things uncomfortable with his cussin' and groanin', ain't beginn'n* to feel't like Miss Amy. The way she use ter laugh and sing ! Oh, my Lord ! how things does turn out !" And his busy wife had paused in her preparation of " t'squire's" supper long enough to lift the corner of her apron to her eyes. " It all comes along o' that rapscallion bein' brought here," she said, blowing the coals beneath the chicken broiling on the gridiron. " I heer'n Miss Bab tell him that ; she know'd what she meant. I didn't ; but you see she did !" ********* Amy had read until her throat ached ; Miss Bab had fallen asleep over her knitting, when Jacob Martin sud- TITHONIUS. '39 denly presented himself in the doorway, looking disturbed beyond his wont. "Squire, Duffer is dead !" he said, abruptly. "I've had the horse-doctor over from Catoctin for the last hour; but he's clean gone, sir." Miss Bab and Amy looked at each other with white faces. There was an interval of silence following Jacob's announcement, then the "Squire" spoke, but the effort to appear indifferent and unconcerned was a vain one. "Well, Martin, it can't be helped, I suppose; order the boys to drag him out in the morning." But old Miss Bab threw up her withered hands, the very picture of consternation. " Drag Duffer out ! No, no, Robert! Rick always said he should have a decent grave and a head-stone !" Old Jacob started, for that name had not been spoken at Cheswick in many months, and his master, forgetting his bandaged foot, turned upon his sister with a muttered imprecation, his eyes flashing such unholy fires of rage and menace as would have daunted the bravest. What sudden power smote the lightnings from those flashing eyes, the nerve from that extended arm, the speech from those quivering lips that lapsed suddenly into inarticulate murmurs, while a horror of dismay and something that looked like fear broke over his face, grown old and gray in these few moments as with the weight of years? Amy flew to his side with a low cry, for he fell back among the cushions of his chair, with that mute expression of horror frozen, as it were, upon his features. "God forgive me!" cried Miss Bab, starting to his side, but falling helpless upon the first chair in her way. " Run, Jacob, for the doctor ! it is a stroke !" This was the second time in the last twelvemonth the 140 IN SANCHO PANZAS PIT. physicians had been called to Cheswick in hot haste to battle with that insidious foe, "a stroke." ********** After many days he came back to life, a sort of life in death, in which the mind alone remained unscathed. It was long before those around him grew accustomed to the piteous spectacle. That menacing sentence ad- dressed to Miss Bab were the last distinct words his lips ever uttered. The scarcely articulate murmurs by which he strove to make himself understood were intelligible to none save Amy, and more to her from the spirit than the letter. How the haughty, unchafed spirit struggled to break the bondage of the senses ! how the stern will, dominant as ever, burned in the sunken blue eyes ! with what feverish, restless impatience it beat against the prison-bars of the miserable, distorted body in a vain effort for liberty ! but ..." the strong Hours indignant worked their will, And beat him down and marred and wasted him, And though they could not end him left him maimed. Alas for this gray shadow, once a man !" CHAPTER XVII. "CLARCHEN." " Voiceless and stern before the cloudy throne, Aye, Memory sits." VOLCANOES in the ancient world were the battle- grounds of the gods. What does that mean, in the mythological language of old Greece, more than this, that where we see great power of will and strength there also do we find fierce passions and contradictory impulses waging warfare in the soul of man? When Robert Cheswick started life, with his hasty, generous temper and impetuous will, there were those who predicted for him failure as well as success, the latter, premising from his unyielding principle, his lofty honor; the former, from the force of his passions, the untamed, wayward spirit of that will to which most had succumbed since his babyhood. Had different influences been at work, it were needless to say, Robert Cheswick's life had been different, though there are always the gods of good and evil contending for the mastery in the soul of man. And who shall dare say, while yet the issue is at stake, which shall be the winner? Love, that inevitable condiment, sneered at by many as but a minor ingredient in the world's diet, had exerted a subverting influence upon his life. He had loved in his early youth a woman who had betrayed his trust, scarcely a woman, a gay girl-butterfly, eager to try her wings, who jilted him for a handsome foreign charge 141 142 IN SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. d'affaires, and fled with him beyond seas. The betrayed lover, who had lavished all the wealth of his passionate soul upon this his first love, who, with the prodigality of such a nature, kept not one heart-beat of affection in reserve, found himself at that early age utterly bankrupt, as far as those warm impulses go, so turned straight to the opposite extreme for substitution. Well, when in the crucible of events honest love is turned to honest hate, a great many genial attributes of the soul evaporate in the process. Robert Cheswick grew into an old-young man, whose nature and habits still were lofty, but whose heart was cold and hard as the nether millstone. When at middle age he took a wife it was for no love of the gentle fair -haired woman who became Cedric's mother, but merely to keep up the customs of Cheswick and save the old line from decay. The gentle lady endured a fungiform existence through all those years she called Robert Cheswick master, for she was not slow in discovering that she owned no legiti- mate place in her husband's heart, and served but as an adjunct to the estate of Cheswick, along with its plate, its butler, and its handsome carriage with the family coat of arms on the panels. And when the father was shown his son, the open-eyed baby, with its mother's soft rings of sunny hair, he only said, motioning the nurse to relieve his arms of the light weight of flannel and lace that cumbered them strangely, "It is well: I have a son to step into Cheswick after me!" Eleven years lived the gentle mother of his child from that day, eleven years amid the dreariness and solitude of Cheswick, from which even the old customs departed as its master grew gouty and irritable, eleven years, in which the child grew into the beauty and strength of " CLARCHEN." 143 boyhood, inheriting the lofty honor of his father's early youth, the gentle sweetness of his mother's nature, eleven years! twenty-two now since that day when he had motioned the nurse away with his child, yet distinct in his memory to-day as then, was the look in those patient, sad eyes, the eyes of his child's mother, when from the pillows where she lay she had turned their glance upon him, and he had read therein the breaking of her heart ! Twenty-two years, and the despairing eyes haunted him yet ! Well, if we sin, opposed to all dic- tates of conscience and reason, dare we hope to escape the day when that sin shall clamor for its reprisal ? March was over, the bitter winds had exhausted them- selves, and there was the odor and the freshness of the advancing springtide in the air. Amy came in one morning with a handful of daisies and pale-blue Neapolitan violets. "I gathered them in the borders, uncle," she said, as she arranged them in a little vase and set them on his desk, where their faint, sweet perfume might reach him. " The winter has been so long, but it is over now." He looked up at her with a grateful smile, the poor old man, who would never walk along his garden paths again, and his lips made faint, murmuring sounds that she trans- lated as no one else at Cheswick could. She sat down on a cushion at his side and brought his right hand to her hair, where it rested, feeble and shak- ing, but with a caress in the fumbling fingers that she had learned to love. "Now, uncle, what is it ? I shall understand, do not be uneasy," for the sunken eyes were impatient and eager. She followed the inarticulate sounds steadily, comforting him with her unerring interpretation of them. "You are lonely? Yes; you want to get away from 144 IN SANCHO PANZAS PIT. Cheswick ? We miibt ask the doctor where it will be best to go." But as she spoke the roses that the April wind had put into her cheeks paled suddenly. She had promised to wait for him here ; he had said with almost his last words, "I shall know where to findyvu." What if he should come and find the old home empty ? The palsied fingers fumbled with her hair, the eager, sunken eyes read her face keenly. " You will go, you and Bab, and Jacob?" mumbled the shaking, indistinct tones. "Yes, I will go," she said, taking the feeble fingers in her own and chafing them softly ; " my duty is to you first of all ; you have been a father to me, and I owe you a child's obedience. Do not trouble about anything ; Aunt Bab and Jacob will arrange all, and I will go with you wherever you go." He leaned back among his pillows with a deep sigh of content, and Amy sat there in silence, soothingly chafing his hand. She looked up at last with a smile, though her eyes were full of tears : "We are very weak and forgetful, dear uncle, all of us; we almost fear to trust our hopes in God's hands, as though we with our own petty human ones could turn them into the mould that best pleases us. I have just re- membered that all our plans are safer left to His guidance, so I am not afraid to leave Cheswick.'' He groaned, looking down upon his lame foot as though he would have her believe the expression of pain to be wrung from him by an extra twinge there, but the girl knew better. His past was an unwritten page to her, but she knew that no physical anguish could bring that haunt- ing fire of remorse so often into those sunken blue eyes. " My plans are all of the devil's fostering," he thought, with another groan as his niece went out to consult his sis- CLARCHEN." 145 ter in regard to his sudden decision to leave Cheswick, "of the devil's own, and they're turned out of a fine mould." Then he sneered with those withered trembling lips, for the habits of a lifetime were not to be overcome by a few months of pain and illness: "Bosh! what put that in the girl's head I wonder. It is time I had something to direct me. I am growing silly and full of fancies as an old woman !" And leaning back among his pillows he tried to sleep, but the faint perfume of the spring flowers wooed his senses too ardently, and that sentence of her's, " I owe you a child's obedience," echoed in his ears per- sistently. It sounded strange to him, old and childless amid the loneliness of Cheswick, to hear his doctrine ring so sweetly from those fresh young lips. To him, who had believed that obedience was all a father need require of his son. Old and alone, with the vigor of his mind mock- ing the impotence of his body, he felt a chill of some- thing like fear as he reckoned the pitiless fruits of his cruel creed. It has been a mooted question if the sophist of Syracuse deserved his fate when the Spartan magistrates hurled him from the city at the point of his own bayonet ! When the days grew longer and warmer, and the broad outlying meadows were ripening for the harvest, Miss Barbara and Amy made ready to accompany the invalid on his search for health among the mountains of old Vir- ginia. "There they go, for all the world like a rettynoo," exclaimed Jacob Martin's wife, watching the party off, Mr. Cheswick bolstered in the big family carriage, with Jacob, much to the coachman's disgust, insisting upon guiding the horses until they were well over the Cliff-road, mindful and tender of the burden he carried ; Amy driving Miss Bab in the pony phaeton, and a trim Buttons following on the gentle-riding pony that had been set aside for her 13 146 IN SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. use since her advent at Cheswick. The day was most pro- pitious. The clear waters of the creek wore the pale-green hue of the sea, and the atmosphere about the mill was misty with the white simoon that floated out from the low-droning burs. By the doctor's advice they made the entire journey by private conveyance, crossing the Poto- mac by the ferry that lay at the foot of the picturesque town of W , with its panoramic views from either bank, its gray old aqueduct, its canal and sluggish lock that gave you no hint of its vicinity until the boats came gliding down with tarantella of horn, and were lifted safely through the gates on their way to the market town. Fair and peaceful the green and brown fields of Berke- ley and Frederick lay in the gray summer haze, and Amy drove along the white road behind the slowly bowling carriage, feeling the ceaseless pain at her heart lulled by the exceeding calm of the landscape. The partisan fury that had so lately raged in those quiet valleys had left its traces upon the gray walls of the old churches that here and there crowned the slopes of the hills, but the gloss of green leaves, the glow of scarlet berries did their best to hide the ravages made by fire and steel, and over all stretched the fairest sky, through all floated the balmiest atmosphere. It was like Eden restored, that exquisite valley of the Shenandoah, on that bright June day, and the bloody memories of the near past were far away from the longing, loving heart of the girl as she drove along it, cheered by the bounteous aspect of our Magna Mater, who, with all the pain she inflicts, still holds such golden treasures of air and sunshine for her sorrowful children. At Winchester they stopped overnight, but a persistent summer rain kept them prisoners there for several days. The black mud waxed in the streets, and for all its his- toric traditions the invalid voted it "a dingy old place," " CLARCHEN." ! 47 and Miss Bab decided that " the old town needed a coat of whitewash well laid on." But Amy knew better. On the last evening of their durance therein, when the clouds had lifted just in time to give them a glorious bit of Lor- raine color in the sunset, Amy, well protected by rubbers and water-proof, and followed by Buttons, who was as- signed the willing task of waiting upon her every footstep, made a tour of the picturesque old town and came back to tea enchanted. "The view from Mount Hebron Cemetery would recon- cile you to anything, uncle," she said. But the invalid, more irritable than usual after his three days' enforced quietude, was in no mood to test the validity of AnTy's conclusions. The fourth day saw them moving along, despite the miry condition of the roads and the unreliable aspect of the clouds. Do you know that delightful little resort, only a few hours' drive from Winchester, set in a semicircle of hills, with the most charming walks in its vicinity, where the waters are varied and sparkling, and the menu anything you may desire it, from fried chicken and mashed potatoes to courses in endless varieties and entremets as surprising as French cookery can make them? It was here our travellers pitched their tents, figuratively speaking, and Mr. Cheswick found himself installed in a roomy ground-floor apartment, the second-story rooms being misnomers as to space, not much the worse for his week's campaign in the fresh air, with limitless hopes in regard to the benefit to be derived from the pure air of the hills and the medicinal quality of the peculiar spring to which his physician had assigned him. Our party attracted much attention in the dining-room, the old gentleman wheeled in to table by Jacob, clerical- looking in habit and demeanor; Miss Bab in her stiff 148 IN SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. black silk and creamy lace cap, and Amy with her graceful figure, her sunny brown hair, and those perfect features that Lavater would have loved to study. Few of the habitues had come in as yet. At the time I write of, Washington's pet chef had charge of the menu, and there followed him out to those green solitudes detained embassies from the great capital, foreign visitors, a diplomat or two, some of the heads of the nation, who had tested his abilities at those creme de la creme of State dinners, and who during the interregnum of duties owed the country were not unwilling to fortify the brain through the body, and some charming people from all parts of the Old Dominion. The change was very apparent in the invalid before a fortnight was well over ; his hands trembled less, even Miss Bab could begin to divine his meaning as his mumb- ling grew more distinct, and Jacob Martin assured Miss Amy that "t'squire helped hisself a heap with his legs to what he'd done at first." Amy, to whom gayety was impossible with that yearning anxiety in her bosom, held herself aloof from the society of the place, but unconsciously gained fresh tone of mind and spirit under the varied influences to which she was exposed from her stand-point as observer. More relieved from anxiety on her uncle's account than she had been for many weeks, and finding his demands upon her time less constant than they had been at Cheswick, she spent much time rambling with Buttons among the rocky hills and cantering the little pony along the leafy lanes of the country roads. And under these restful new influences her heart was gaining a quiet peace more like hope than any feeling she had experienced for many months. She paid heavy penalties too often for this lapse, which her fond heart called forgetfulness, for here, where nature was " CLARCHENS 149 so rich and varied, she was reminded too often of him who was wont to dive with her into its hidden depths and draw therefrom its choicest treasures. But the strange peace came back to her heart, and she did not hold it a heresy against him she loved. Pure- minded, honest Amy, her creed was very simple, and she rested upon it with a sense of conviction and security that she might have sought for in vain among the much- mooted, the unsolved problems that are disturbing so many of our noblest and highest lives, alas ! What availeth it, this vast waste of thought and energy on a subject so simple " if a man would but learn it and heed" ? It is like reaching out impotent hands to grasp the snows of the Matterhorn, when here at our feet in Grindelwald lie snows of a purity as absolute, only in looking so far be- yond and above we stumble over the pure, unmistakable evidences of the truth lying in our very paths, and stamp them out of sight beneath our hurrying, groping feet. But, thank God ! though " the times are evil and the days are waxing late," there are still those who cling to the old moorings, amid the conflicting beliefs and turbu- lent doctrines that are shaking the very earth's founda- tions ; still those who hold with unfaltering hands to the creed that the twelve carried from that " upper room" through all pain, all privation, all patient martyrdom of suffering to the world that lay beyond; the faith that Athanasius thundered in the ears of princes as boldly as to^ the hermits amid the desolate wastes of the desert ; to the high, pure simple faith that sustained Savonarola when, in the fair Italian sunlight of that May morning, four centuries ago, he went to his death in the sight of the assembled multitudes, as his Master did before him, "for because he died for others he could not save himself!" Ah, thank God ! there are still those to whom heaven is 13* 150 IN SANCHO PANZAS PIT. a real and abiding city, with golden streets, a shining river, and a Tree of Life bearing in its fruits healing for all the nations, despite the formidable array of isms drawn up to wage battle against the old beliefs, last and most pagan of which stands that which prates of a body to be made comfortable and fed on all unctuous juices, while the soul, " borne on the wings of restless winds, goes roaming all abroad !" Still those, thank God ! even in these degenerate days, who, rather than renounce the old paths, would, like Poly- carp of old, defy the threat of the wild beasts and lift an undaunted brow even to the cry of " Christianas ad konest" There is much heresy, much skepticism, much auda- cious fruitless questioning and open unbelief, but there are also many to whom Eu-angelion still carries the happy and blessed message, and to whom unity of doctrine is more than a memento of the ever-receding centuries. "He knows my needs," said Amy in her simple un- questioning faith in Him who had dealt such largesse of bounty to earth and sky, " and if the blessings I covet are best for me they will come in His good time." And so she grew content, helped to patience by the beauty and glow of the summer and the varied interests that sur- rounded her. At Cheswick budding bough and emerald sward were fraught with associations that brought her only pain ; she would not have been so brave there. Among the later arrivals, Amy grew interested in qne couple from the persistency with which circumstances threw them in her way, a grave middle-aged man and a girl in deep mourning, who from her extremely youthful appearance seemed to have barely escaped the bondage of the school-room and short dresses. She stumbled upon them constantly, at the springs, in her solitary walks among "CLARCHEN." 151 the hills, in her attendance upon her uncle when Jacob wheeled his chair out into the shade upon the lawn. They came to speech one day, Amy and the young girl in black. It happened in this wise : Amy was sitting be- neath a tree near the croquet-ground, watching a group of young people engaged in the game. Opposite stood the girl in mourning, so often her vis-a-vis, aloof, as was Amy, from participation*in the game, but, unlike her, following its course with interested eyes, and aiding a de- linquent now and then by timely advice. She turned her back upon the game, however, before it was half played out, and came sauntering over to where Amy sat, a book in her lap, and her face half shaded by her wide garden- hat. "Excuse me, please," she said, throwing herself on the soft sward at Amy's side, "I can fight with destiny no longer ; it has thrown me four feet in front of you a dozen times a day for the last week. My name is Julia Vos- burgh," and she held out her hand with a peculiar, quiz- zical smile. Amy accepted the frankly-proffered hand with a cordial smile in return. What curiously bright, imperious eyes and what rich flickering color were in this youthful face ! " My name is Amy Randolph, and I am very glad to know you." "Amy Randolph! what a harmonious sound it has! but really now," with that quizzical smile, "am I to un- derstand that you mean what you say, or is it merefafon de parler about caring to know me?" "It is not/afon de parler ;" laughed Amy, commisera- ting the worldliness of this very young girl ; " I meant it, indeed. Ever since you came I have been regarding you half wistfully, I believe, for I have known so few near my own age." 152 IN SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. "Why, how is that?" asked Miss Vosburgh, regarding Amy curiously with those brilliant dark eyes. " We lived alone, my mother and I, in a very retired country home in Fauquier County, Virginia, and she taught me books and music until she died." "Then you went to school?" " No ; then I went to my uncle, the invalid over there in his chair. I never went to school a day in my life, but I have studied a good deal, notwithstanding," and her eyes clouded over with the memory of those days under the mulberry at Cheswick. " Oh, well," said Miss Vosburgh, with the air of one who settles a mooted question, "one doesn't learn the half of what one knows at school." "No, I should think not," said Amy. "Well, don't you play croquet and dance?" continued her catechist, " or do any other of those foolish things that girls delight in doing?" "I play croquet, but I have never learned to dance." " Ah, I wish I could teach you ; I do so love to dance, but," with a glance down at her mourning dress, "I couldn't now: mamma died nearly nine months ago; not my own mamma, oh, no, but papa's second wife, a very sweet delicate woman, but I knew her so little ! I am sorrier for papa than for myself. My mother was French ; Julie D'Angennes of Rambouillet fame was her ances- tress, and mamma had her name, which has been given to the eldest daughter of every generation since. I am named Julie, only they call me Julia here with their love of long syllables. Papa says 'Juke,' as mamma did. But I am talking all about myself. Well, and are you not very lonely ?' ' " But I like to hear you talk of yourself. And you are really a descendant of sweet Julie D'Angennes of the CLARCHEN." 153 salon, who loved her Huguenot lover so well, and made him such a noble wife after long years of waiting ! I shall fancy you have inherited her noble qualities." " Julee" laughed a little scornfully. " How long do the psychologists allow for traits to run out, how many gen- erations ? I believe I inherit nothing from the fair lady of the salon but my predilection for banter, which most people with French blood in their veins inherit along with me. But you have not told me, are you lonely ?" " Not now ; I enjoy the new scenes and fresh faces. I am not lonely now." Ah, girl, with your shining imperious eyes you cannot look back over the dark and lonesome road that young soul has travelled : " So lonely 'twas that God himself Scarce seemed there to be !" "I should die of ennui compelled to read and ramble and follow that old man's chair !" Amy smiled a little dubiously. " It is impossible to gauge the extent of other's blessings by comparing them with one's own," she said; "and yet it is a mistake we often make." Miss Vosburgh regarded her new acquaintance curiously. " I am not used to making these nice shades of distinc- tion." And there was a clearly scornful ring in the high silvery tones. " It is necessary in order to be just." "Then justice obtains so rarely because we allow our personality to color our judgment, is that what you mean, Miss Randolph ? What a nice little lesson you have read me." "I had no such intention," said Amy, coloring under the sarcasm in the laughing tones. '54 IN SANCHO PANZAS PIT. " Then I shall consider it in the light of a gratuity and thank you all the same. There, did I not warn you of my unlucky inheritance? but, seriously, it is so diverting to meet one like you, serious and and ingenu. Indeed, you are very queer. Oh, don't go, please ! I know I have been impertinent, but I have an honest desire to be your friend. What do you mean to do with these long days here ? I am tired of them already." " Pursue the routine that looks so obnoxious to you," replied Amy, mischievously ; " read and ramble and fol- low my uncle's chair." "Won't you let me come to see your uncle some day, and that withered little black-eyed woman, who surely has not Penelope's excuse for knitting so continually as she does." Both girls laughed; but Amy's eyes grew very grave thereafter, for Miss Vosburgh's simile was apter than she knew. Poor Miss Bab knit faster and harder than ever to escape the importunities of bitter memories. " I do not know about taking you to my uncle. I am distressed to be so rude, but he never sees strangers, and Aunt Bab, I think you would scarcely care to know Aunt Bab." "Ah, well," and "Julee" threw her lissom figure into graceful Hogarthian curves on the yielding turf be- neath the tree, " you can do as you choose about that, of course, but I am not to be tabooed your society," with an irresistible accent of pleading in her silvery voice that very few were able to withstand. " When the monotonous hours pall upon me you will let me come to you and refresh my- self in these cool green solitudes?" " Indeed," said Amy, laughing at the hyperbole of her speech, " you will give more pleasure than you receive, for to you I am but one of the myriad girls you have met " CLARCHEN." 155 and have been amused by, while to me you are a single revelation, the first of its kind." The girl jumped to a sitting posture, with that rich flickering color coming and going in her cheeks. "You delightful creature!" she cried, "positively, you inspire me with new energy on this hottest of June days. You have given me an impulse to my life here, an actual aim to my existence ! See if I don't teach you what a fine thing it is to be one of the rosebud garden of girls, and as you progress in your study of your species you will give me, in exchange for the experience I shall afford you, a few of those quaint, serious thoughts that you suspected me of sneering at a moment ago. Is it a bargain ?" " A very unequal one," smiled Amy ; " but if you are satisfied I am." "What book is that you have? Ah, Heine. My grandfather knew Heine. My father is German, not only by descent but by birth ; so you will please observe that, though I am an American citizen, I have unadulterated foreign blood in my veins." " I thought there was something peculiar about you," said Amy, candidly, regarding her new friend with naive interest. " Well, apropos of your book. My grandfather knew Heine, and paid him a visit a very short while before he died. I have heard my father talk of it. Heine was querulous from pain and lethargic from opiates, and scarcely recognized my grandfather when he entered ; but before he left he awoke, began discussing a subject, and became so interested and enthusiastic that he talked su- perbly and brilliantly for hours. Do you know German? I heard you singing ' Seid meiner wonne stille zeugenj from 'Stradella,' did I not, last evening?" "Yes; my uncle is fond of the German words; he taught !56 IN SANCHO PANZA'S PIT, me their proper pronunciation, but I know very little of the language." " It is a joyous strain, fit for such a morning as this with its azure skies !" And Miss Vosburgh trolled the refrain in a rich silvery mezzo-soprano that rang through the green alleys like a chime of bells, " 'Allu theile unser Cluck !' " " How wonderfully you sing !" Amy heaved a sigh of delight when the beautiful voice ceased. "I have had the best tuition, both at home and abroad," said this singular young woman. " I took vocal lessons at Milan a long time, but it was labor wasted. What a fool- ish idea Americans have that they must go abroad to study music ! I accomplished more than as much again in Boston as I did all the while I was trying the foreign schools, and for a poor girl to go to Italy for a musical career, I can't conceive of any scheme so fruitless, unless of course she owns a phenomenal voice, and is picked up by some manager's agent. We have led a very roving life, papa and I, until he met mamma and married again ; but it was what I liked, for we gained an immense fund of ideas as well as amusement." " You are very young to have lived such a varied life." " Older than you, I dare venture, Miss Randolph : nine- teen last month. I am a May-bird, ' unlucky month for babe and bride,' the old rhyme runs; but I look so young, perhaps, because I have never in my life known a sorrow, except when mamma died, and that was so long ago that I can only remember the pretty dresses she wore, and her soft voice when she called me 'Julee. ' So you see I am a very wholesome refutation of all that superstitious twaddle about the unlucky month of May. Now, what " CLARCHEN." 157 do those people want? Go back, Alfred!" she cried, as a gentleman started from the croquet-ground, evidently deputized by his companions to fetch her. " Go back, sir ! There's no such thing as justice to be expected when you are captain of the opposition, and I am tired of being umpire, it is a thankless vocation. I shall have to go ; or wait, won't you let me introduce some of them to you ? They are all friends of mine, and might serve to amuse you when you tire of studying the genus in me. Very well," reading the mute protest in her new friend's eyes, " I don't want to influence you against your will. But you will not refuse to let me make a second at your seances under the trees ?' ' She stood for a moment watch- ing Amy pass from the shadows into the sunlight, and again into the shadows, until she reached her uncle's chair, then she went over to her friends. " She is the loveliest creature ! But she has refused to know any of you. Don't look so forlorn, Mr. Marshall; let us hope that her decisions are not as unalterable as Persian edicts. And wily "Julee" laughed in her sleeve, knowing in her world-wise young soul that to have thrown a halo of mystery around her new friend was to have created an innovation in her favor. "Uncle," said Amy, late that evening, when with a low chair drawn to his side she sat ready to read to him from his evening paper, "I met a very interesting young girl this morning, a Miss Vosburgh, who has lived on the wing, as it were, nearly all her life, but has learned all her best things, she says, in America. She is very interesting, and reminds me constantly of Clarchen in the play of 'Egmont,' the only play I ever saw. It was when mamma and I visited Cousin Helen Agnew in Baltimore, years ago." Then, after a pause, "I wish you would let me bring her to see you some day. 158 IN SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. She has seen so much, and talks well ; she would amuse you." "Like Clarchen !" Another had said that of " Julee;" but how was Amy to know that ? and had she known, what interest would it have created in her, to whom all were strangers beyond the pale of the little world in which her young life had been spent ? As she knelt that night and prayed, "Oh, God! keep him by Thy guidance, save him from further sin wherever he is, and bring us one day to meet again, if such be Thy holy will," and arose from her knees com- forted, patient, resigned, how little did she dream that "Juice's" bright-shining, proud young eyes had looked him over but nine short months ago, that in "Juice's" book-case at home lay the old brown volume that they two had studied together when, under the mulberry-tree in the pleasaunce at Cheswick, he had laughed at her eyes grown sad over the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, and the tragedy hid in the heart of the purple fruit ! CHAPTER XVIII. "MAIEN-DUFT !" " I will drink life to the lees." TENNYSON'S Ulysses. IT was a pleasant surprise to Amy the next day when Mr. Cheswick bade her invite Miss Vosburgh to pay him a visit in his room. Jacob was sent immediately with a note, and in a few hours afterward he announced the young lady, who was accompanied by her father. Miss Bab met them with hearty old-fashioned hospitality. The good old creature was pre-eminently social, and enjoyed meet- ing strangers with a keen relish, an indulgence she had denied herself many long years. The call lengthened unfashionably. Miss Bab drew out her knitting, lending the while a very attentive ear to the conversation between her brother and Mr. Vosburgh, surprised and delighted that the stranger found no difficulty in understanding her brother's muffled sentences. "Your aunt would be called a tricoteur in France," Miss Vosburgh said sotto voce to Amy. "And what is a tricoteur ?" asked Amy, half laughing, warned by the mischief in those dark flashing eyes. " A tricoteur is a female who knits during a political discussion. Come, go over to the parlor and sing that 'Stradella,' won't you?" But Amy protested ; it was only to please her uncle that she ever sang. Miss Vosburgh interrupted her in her bright, imperious way. "Allans /" she cried, leading the 160 JN SANCHO PANZAS PIT. way to the parlor. It was empty ; the guests were out in the grounds or in their rooms. Amy sat down to the piano and launched into the strain bravely after the first few lines, for she was slightly abashed at singing for this travelled young woman, who had criticised the schools of Milan. " Seid meiner wonne stille zeugen /" There was no straining after effect in the round full tones, but the voice was music's own, true and clear in every note and flex- ible to a surprising degree. Miss Vosburgh laughed gayly, sweeping her off the stool with a little gesture of delight. "You sing delightfully, as the birds sing," she cried, turning the leaves back hastily until she found the strain she wanted. " ' Oh, trocknet nicht /' " she quoted : " why did you look so sad when you came to that ? Don't answer if I am imper- tinent." "Did I look sad?" faltered Amy what keen eyes this girl had ! " it is a vain plaint ; how can we expect to keep the 'dew-drop on the floweret's tress?' ' "Who wants to? The dew-drop is very fresh and pure and all that, but for me, I like the high noon best !" The flying fingers chased each other up and down the key-board in a wild Irish galop, and the dark eyes glowed, the rich lips laughed with the undaunted spirit of happy youth, youth that had never known a sorrow. Ah, it was likely to be "high noon" with her for many a day to come. She played on at Amy's earnest solicitation, for never had the country girl heard such music as that, fluent and expressive, with the brilliant and faultless technique that betrayed the artist. Jacob came to the door and put an end to this season of delight. Mr. Vosburgh was waiting for his daughter, and so this unconventional call came to an end. "MAIEN-DUFTT 161 "What a beauty she is!" cried old Miss Bab in a rapture the moment the door was closed upon them. "And her father a gentleman, and a clever fellow," mumbled her brother. Amy said nothing. " Oh, frock- net nicht!" The strain rang in her ears. Were these new scenes and new faces blotting out the memory of those happy days that had vanished like "the dew-drops on the floweret's tress?" "Oh, vanish not!" It was a vain plaint, as she had said. * "Ah," cried "Julee" next morning from her seat at a near table, "good-morning, Miss Randolph! This is ' Morgen sonne? if it is not ' Maien-duftj 1 " with her white hands curved over her arch laughing eyes to shield them from a too persistent sunbeam, "and I think you will scarcely have your dew-drops long to-day." Many in the room turned to look at her as she spoke, the beautiful, imperious creature, who seemed indeed the very "breath of May." And old Miss Bab nodded to her cordially and whispered to her brother, " Jsn'tshe a beauty, Robert?" "Please, Miss Cheswick, won't you let me carry your niece off to my room for a while this morning? it would be such a charity to me if you would," pleaded Miss Vosburgh, after breakfast, following the old lady on her way across the hall to her brother's room. And Miss Bab, bewildered at the bare supposition that she was supposed to exercise authority over any one, least of all over Amy, conceded with a deprecating eagerness that brought the lurking dimples around Miss Vosburgh's mouth into full play ; for a shrewd, keen reader of faces was this cosmopolitan young lady. "Aliens!" she cried, with her favorite exclamation, " I shall shock you with a sight of my room, which when 14* !6 2 Iff SANCHO PANZAS PIT. I am not at home is always in a chaotic condition. Bah! how little Rauch knew about women when he said order was their chief prerogative. My possessions stand in the same beautiful relation to each other as the guests at a Fejee feast, there is no particular place for any one of them." And indeed she had not exaggerated the existing condition of things, as Amy soon perceived. The win- dows, the tables, and brackets were loaded with all sorts of belongings in antagonistic collections, bangles and bric-a-brac, crayons and chess-board, bonbon boxes and bonnet-pins. "See! here are papa's bitters where my Florida-water should be, and a pack of lead-pencils reposing in my hair- pin basket ! Alfred, that is my cousin, Mr. Courte- nay, sharpened them for me yesterday. I could not refuse him that meagre opportunity of airing his superi- ority. Men crow over the strongest of us in the matter of sharpening lead-pencils, and justly, for I wonder if, from the days of Sappho down, there ever lived a woman who could round a pencil-point? Rounding periods is nothing to it !" "Your book-shelves match the rest of your collections. I should say your mind was a cosmopolite also." Amy had turned to the swinging shelves in an alcove and was looking over its contents. What queer, whimsi- cal taste the girl must have if these shelves were any indication. These were odd themes for a summer-day amusement. "Yes; I read everything. For instance: I cannot expect to escape the tender passion, so I read that 'Re- medio Amoris' in case the god should not be propitious and I might find myself devoid of a remedy." But Amy scarcely heard the gay, careless words ; she "MAIEN-DUFT!" T 63 was turning over the leaves of the book she held with a strange dreamy pain at her heart. The familiar lines of the old poet wore the aspect of her past, and it is not with a smile that we look upon the cold features of our dead. There came a light tap at the door. "Am I intrud- ing?" asked a girlish voice, followed by a slight, fair- haired figure in blue, whom Amy recognized at a glance as one of the party whom she had refused to know. "It is highly probable you are, Miss Randolph, Miss Harper, but I suspect it would be time wasted to ac- knowledge it." Miss Harper took a rocking-chair, evidently accus- tomed to "Juice's" impertinence. Then the three girls lapsed into animated talk, as girls will on a hot summer day, given time and place, no matter how new to each other. "Do you ever come to Baltimore, Miss Randolph?" asked the fair-haired intruder during a pause in the con- versation. "Years ago I visited a cousin of mamma's, a widow, but have never been there since." "And your cousin, who was she?" " Mrs. Agnew, Helen Agnew ; she lived with her father, Major Duncan, near the Monument." "She is a widow no longer, but Mrs. Holborne, a gay society leader, who keeps open house all the season through. You would do well to revive your relationship, Miss Randolph. It would be pleasant for you, perhaps." But Amy waived the subject gracefully. She did not wish to appear singular to these young girls, who both seemed to consider life only as a means of amusement. She could not explain to them the difference between her life and theirs. 1 64 IN SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. "Miss Randolph," said her hostess at parting, "I really begin to suspect that you make a scapegoat of your poor old uncle for all your sins of omission. I think I shall take him by storm, as I did your aunt this morning, and gain carte blanche for you to favor my whims." And some time later she made good her threat. The invalid had grown to watch for her coming ; she was a pleasant companion even for him, arraying her graphic pictures of varied scenes lived through against his ex- periences, that were gained mostly through books, and reaping a very satisfactory result from the process, both for herself and for him. To Mr. Cheswick, chained to his chair the long hours through, it created a diversion in the monotony of the days to follow her eager, glowing speech as she recounted personal interviews with some of the celebres that he had only known from books, or depicted foreign customs and criticised the peculiarities of different 'nationalities with a graphic power of description that lent them the charm of faithful portraits. It was amusing to hear her strictures on " d'une societe polie" in the land of her adoption, and to watch her betray her French blood in the indignation with which she scouted his ex- pressed opinion that Frenchwomen had retrograded in all of woman's fairest attributes since her lofty ancestress's day, when the salon bleu erected its standard of perfec- tion and purity in the midst of the most dissolute court in Europe. "The stilted formal life at Rambouillet," she said one day, with the color coming and going in her face, indignant at his charge of absurdity against her ancestors, "was but the natural reflux of the looseness and informality of the times, not but that it was the better extreme of the two, but, like Arthur's round table, it was destined to dissolution, for only in Arcadia do we find the requirements necessary to such a condition "MAIEN-DUFT!" 165 of things. It is that now," and again the errant color flickered in her cheeks, "we see something of the juste milieu preserved in polie Paris, unless, indeed, you ac- cept Emile Zola's portraitures. Papa will not allow me to read his books, but he has given me all their salient points, and he assures me that he deals in monstrosities and illustrates by exceptions." "I am come to prefer a request of you," she said to him one day. " I have pondered the matter seriously, and have come to the conclusion that your niece shifts her disinclination to join us young folks upon a pretended or shall I say fancied? obligation to you." The merry light in the dark eyes disarmed the words of any imper- tinent meaning. "Amy has grown very necessary to me," said her uncle, looking at the girl with a kind smile, " but I have no wish to debar her from any pleasure she may wish to take." "Then you will join us to-morrow in our picnic?" "Indeed, you must excuse me; I cannot." "My dear Miss Randolph, have you absolutely no designs upon society infuturo ?" "None whatever," and the glance of the clear brown eyes was very steady. " My uncle knows that I have no desire to follow in the prescribed path of young ladies in my position. It is not only that I will not leave him, but I do not wish to extend the circle of my pleasures." For a single instant of time the dauntless young for- eigner looked dismayed, but she recovered herself with a gay laugh. "White and soft and gentle as you look, you're a hard little piece of flint after all !" she said. " People have a disagreeable fashion of designating my peculiar charac- teristic of tenacity as obstinacy : they will never call it that 1 66 IN SANCHO PANZAS PIT. \nyou, Miss Randolph, but only because you have not black eyes that flash, and odious little foreign gestures that make one seem angry and imperious when one is only very deeply in earnest !" Amy took the firm white hand in her own. "You cannot understand," she said; "how should you?" Her uncle called her to his side when their visitor had left. " Why did you refuse that girl?" he asked, queru- lously. "You heard me give her my reason, uncle: I did not wish to go." "But you have another reason behind that, Amy; I should like to know it." " Uncle, is it strange that I should avoid strangers ? What strangers have I ever met at Cheswick? The world is odd and foreign to me. I have not been reared after its fashion ; I have not been educated to meet its requirements; and besides oh, uncle! could we find peace in the world, you and I?" Then she turned from him in a sort of fright, but he caught a glimpse of her face, and saw it white, from the clustering brown hair to the tremulous lips. Then he knew ! then he understood ! and he had thought that she had escaped the upas-taint ! He reached out one trembling arm and drew the girl to his side. Tears came into his eyes, tears that all the fiery griefs of his own life had failed to bring there. He held her close to him, miserable, broken-down old man, and let the tears fall down upon her hair. "God forgive me!" he murmured, "I thought you had forgotten, or, if not forgotten, that you had lived it down." But she did not hear ; she only knew that he under- stood and was not angry ; that he too loved and mourned " MAIEN-DUFT!" 167 the proud, rash lad that had been his only one. "I could not go," she said at last; "you will not let them ask me ; my heart is sore," with a shudder, " and I have more patience to wait with you." "What is the good of waiting?" and his arm fell away from her; in his eyes gleamed the old fires of unrest. "You are young, child, you may wait; but I am old, and there is no reward for a life ill spent." He leaned back among his cushions with a sharp, deep sigh. " Call Jacob, I am tired." When she saw him again he had resumed his usual man- ner. There was not a trace of that wild storm of emotion on his face. He called her to his chair and looked at her coldly, almost critically, and she was surprised beyond measure at his words when he spoke. "I think young girls scarcely know what is best for them," he said. "You must let me be the judge of what you owe yourself and others. Write to that little ' Maien- duft' and tell her you will go to the picnic. I insist that you obey me in this matter, Amy." And she knew when he spoke in that hard cold voice there was no appeal from his resolution. But she could not look in his heart and see how it was yearning toward her, nor could she know that he took this step with the purest motives for her welfare. CHAPTER XIX. ARCADIA. " Under the greenwood tree, Who loves to lie with me, And tune his merry note Unto the sweet bird's note?" As you like it. AMY joined the picnic next day as her uncle had com- manded, and found, after the manner of girls, a good deal to amuse and interest her in the day's diversion. But the young people did not presume upon the incident. Only Julia made free to come and go at her will. " My foreign effronte carries me through; I wouldn't advise you to try it on though," she said laughingly to Emma Harper, who marvelled at her intimacy with " that re- served and distant Miss Randolph." But Julia, to shield her friend, did herself injustice, for she was very sure of her welcome, either in Mr. Cheswick's sitting-room or out under the trees where Amy sat long hours through with her sun hat shading her features and a favorite book in her lap. A warm friendship was growing between them, a friend- ship which was destined to resist the heaviest strains, to endure the severest test. But they did not know that, those two, as they exchanged their girlish fancies under the spreading shadows of the trees, the one chastened beneath the weight of a present and abiding sorrow, the 1 68 ARCADIA. i6g other untamed, unfettered, with no vague fear of what the future held in its gift for weal or woe. "I think I should have been an Arcadian had I lived in France in those days before Rambouillet !" cried Julia, one warm July day, when the mercury coquetted with the nineties and the two were in their favorite haunt near the croquet-ground, " ' Under the greenwood tree, Who loves to lie with me ?' " Yes, I should have been a fervent disciple of D'Urfe, and have led my lambs with the airiest crook imaginable, tied with my favorite color." "And what is yuour favorite color?" "Red; not Pompeiian or dingy cardinal, but glowing blood-red, the color of the ruby in the English crown." "Red!" laughed Amy, "you would have set the aesthetic Arcadians shuddering!" " Nevertheless, it should have been red, not pale-pink or cerulean blue as the fashion went. Imagine it ! al- ways to lie on greenswards, with the tinkling lute of your shepherd swain waking the drowsy echoes, or to follow him as he led by a silken string the snowiest lamb of the ' milk-white flock' and discoursed on the beauties of ' honnete amitie. ' ' ' Had "Julee" figured a decade later, she might have found anchorage among the transcendental philosophies of Oscar Wilde, and instead of languishing for the role of gentile amie, with a Des Ivevaux to skip by her side in silken hose, to the gentle twanging of his lute, she might have achieved a happiness as refined in " A walk down Piccadilly, with a poppy and a lily In (her) mediaeval hand !" 15 1 70 IN SANCHO PANZAS PIT. But the "fourteenth century frenzy" had not reached its crisis as yet. Artificial bouquets de corsage had not been tabooed as barbarous infringements of a special law ; there were no indications of faint lilies in the wholesome atmosphere; and the girl, though clairvoyant in much, could not have predicted the developments which awaited high art in the near future. It was with nothing of the Lady Jane's contempt that Amy echoed "red!" when " Julee" chose that color for her Arcadian costume. "Red and yellow, primary colors! O South Kensington!" The pen had not been sharpened for that denunciation of the dragoon uniforms, supposing that Gilbert writes with a "gray goose quill," or, as would be more sugges- tive in this age of dilettanteism, with a Roman stylus! Ah, well, as our patriotic "Julee" said in extenuation of the affectations and stilted extremes of the "Astree," it led to the enlargement on a higher plane of its best features in the organization of the distinguished salon bleu; so, let us hope, may our present aesthetic trans- figuration bring about the juste milieu in the pursuit of true art, which is so sad a desideratum to-day. "Yes; I should have made a very devoted Arcadian, only I doubt if I could have supported life in a garden of the Faubourg until I was ninety, supposing I had lived as long as that silly old ex-Governor of Caen." "To say nothing of the rain," said Amy, "and the increasing infirmities engendered thereby, rheumatism, lumbago, and last, though not least, a very un-Arcadian, unaesthetic cold in the nose from a too long continued practice of sitting on damp banks of muddy ponds : there were such in Arcadia, were not there?" " What matter, they were called lakes. Everything's in a name, by Shakspeare's leave. I have a friend in ARCADIA. 171 New York who prizes a very worthless faded rag of tapes- try as genuine Gobelin that has never seen the famous loom. She also has a quantity of china judiciously labelled that I verily believe she values as far ahead of the Cesnola collection. There are wonderful latter-day en- amels that she will tell you are genuine Limousins, bear- ing the date of Francis I.; Palissy plates taken from the gazettes only yesterday ! and marvels in sculptured faience, certainly no older than your own American Haviland, who has caused American industry to become a proverb at Limoges. Don't you see they called the pond a lake, that made all the difference." "And in your friend's case, were you imposed upon by the 'judicious labels ?' ' " Often, of course ; therein lies the safety of the frauds. But papa fathomed the secret of the Palissy plates. In our migratory periods he has picked up crumbs of in- formation on every topic under the sun. He has adopted Confucius's recipe for happiness and wisdom." "And what is that?" " ' They must often change who would be constant in happiness or wisdom.' ' "Amy !" The girls had advanced beyond the period of formality. Amy looked at her friend inquiringly. The bright dark eyes were reading her own with a baffled expression. " I should like to know what brings that shadow on your face so often. It looks like care, anxious care. You are too young to have known sorrow." "You know I do not inherit Arcadia, as you do." She spoke half playfully to hide the tremor of her lips. Julia clasped her hands above her black braids and in- dulged in a girlish yawn of half ennui, half content. " I could not bear trouble !" she exclaimed, giving her whole 172 IN SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. lithe figure a defiant shake and settling back comfortably against the broad tree-trunk. "It would prove the cold in the nose that would blunt my every perception of Arcadia's beauties; I should die under trouble !" Amy shook her head incredulously. " It is not so easy to die, nor is it easy to live patiently, believe me." "I would not live, patiently or impatiently. I am a cosmopolite, you say, a butterfly, perhaps you think, but when the sweets are all drawn from the flowers, and the warmth dies out from the air, the blue and gold from the skies, who wants to live ? where would be the good in life? It is not in a nature like mine that 'despair sublimes to power.' The efforts to recover its lost energy might not be wanting, but the strength to renew it. There are such organizations, don't you think? capable of being crushed beyond all resistance by over-weight." She was vitally in earnest now, and as she spoke, with those deep stains of color on her cheeks, with the curious lamp-like light in the great dark eyes, that con- veyed to the most disinterested observer their importu- nate demands for all that life can give, it did not seem at all improbable that should those imperious demands be unanswered the frail young body might fail in strength to sustain the passionate, disappointed soul. "Eh bienf" she added, with a little lazy laugh, the passion and the force dying out of her voice, "if trouble come, apres? It has proved fatal to more than one of my race. I think I may safely trust to the taint in my blood for deliverance at the right moment !" "O Julia!" cried Amy, shocked at the pagan utter- ance, " you talk as though death were oblivion, but you know better; you know that death is an escape from trouble only as we find ourselves prepared for its coming." ARCADIA. 173 " I don't know anything about it, Amy. I only think, with Lorenzo, that it is better to eat, drink, and be merry, and get the very richest cream of life from its mantling surface, but when it comes to death I do not know anything." "Do you know how he died, that Lorenzo whose creed you adopt?" "Something about it, yes; but tell me what you re- member of it, I have a poor head for history." "You remember that Savonarola was preaching at the Duomo, and that while the Magnifico's courtiers all went to hear him, Lorenzo held himself studiously aloof from all his services. He grew ill amid the olive groves of his beautiful Correggi, where were all the luxuries and art objects that he prized most. He sent for the prior of San Marco, who, hearing that the Magnifico was dying, left his beloved cloisters and walked up the sunny slope to carry consolation to him who had sung, ' Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die!' There was guilt on the great ruler's soul, from which he sought absolu- tion before death should come to him. He had sneered at the truths thundered from the Duomo when he walked with his courtiers under the olives in his garden; but when death came to him it was not to his courtiers he turned, but to the despised preacher for consolation and relief." "And was he absolved?" asked Julia, and her voice was very grave. It looked strange and out of pfece, this dark cold episode of the Middle Ages against the warmth and brightness of the hot July day. " No ; it was not in a moment the hardening influences of years were to be softened, the tyrannical sway of a life- time renounced. He went to the grave, mocking and skeptical, as he had lived, and the preacher went back to 15* 174 IN SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. his cell with a deeper shadow on his life, already heavily weighted with the burdens of others." Julia slid off her elbow and leaned her hot cheek against the long cool grass. " It seems a comfort to you, Amy, this belief that death opens the gates to an inherit- ance of rest ?" The girl's voice was lingering and wist- ful. " It does indeed, Julia. I can think of no other thought so comforting." Julia shuddered. "It is only a deep black grave to me," she said, half under her breath, "with nothing at all beyond it." "O Julia! I am so sorry," and then they lapsed into silence for a while ; Julia thinking who shall say what ? with the latent wistfulness softening the fire of the splen- did dark eyes, and Amy striving vainly with the reticence of her nature to find fit words with which to express the faith that was the very foundation of her life. " Julee" recovered first. " del! what a memento mori turn our conversation has taken. Carlyle would have called you a death's head, Amy, which, after all, he preferred to a fashionable wit. What a dismal detour we have made from Arcadia, my garden of soft delights and honest loves, to the grave !" CHAPTER XX. LES BIEN SEANCES. " Behind no prison grate, she said, Which slurs the sunshine half a mile, Lie captives so uncomforted As souls behind a smile." MRS. BROWNING. " GOOD-BY," said Julia, "I shall not expect you to write to me, because my Meccas by the wayside are too numerous to bear cataloguing, but I shall not forget you, questa gentilissima, with your brave sad smile ; and when I come home, famous, for I mean to distinguish myself, I assure you, before I am many years older, why, you will come to me, will you not?" A beautiful October morning, and the "Maien-duft" as Mr. Cheswick invariably dubbed her, was bidding them adieu. She was to set sail with her father for Europe in a few days, and the color was riotous on her cheeks, the light in her dark eyes imperious and unfailing. Amy watched the carriage bear them away with a warning lump in her throat. How dear the companion- ship of the bright beautiful creature had grown ! The very trees rustled mournfully as the gates closed on the carriage, and the sward by the croquet-ground looked gloomy and deserted. She should not care to visit the old haunts now that that young lithe figure and gay ringing laugh would be missed from them. Maien-duft indeed, the very breath of May, and she had taken it with her when she left. 175 I7 6 Iff SANCHO PANZAS PIT. That evening her uncle handed her a letter. "Read it," he said, and Amy read, scarce comprehending, an account of all the arrangements that had been made for their winter residence in Baltimore. It was the first intimation she had received of his designs. Another letter from Mrs. Holborne the "cousin Helen Agnew" of her childish recollections gave a very satisfactory description of the menage on Monument Square, as fitted out and scrupulously directed under her own personal supervision. " And we do not go back to Cheswick, uncle ? Does Aunt Bab know?" "Yes," her uncle nodded, looking a little restless and uneasy. It was a great surprise to Amy. She had dreaded the loneliness of Cheswick during the winter season, but now that she knew they were not to return, with the perversity of human nature, she was seized with an indescribable longing to go back there. Then the old fear took a new shape : what if any chance should take him there to find the old house closed ! Amanda, Jacob Martin's wife, was to follow them to the city, and only the gardener and his withered old dame were to be left to look after the safety of the old place. Mr. Cheswick watched her as she walked slowly out of the room, and felt greatly relieved. " Girls can't know what is best for them," he pondered. "Helen Agnew will take her about and bring company to the house, and in time she will forget, all women do." But he did not believe this one would. Those eyes, true and clear as the heavens that stretched above his head, did not belie the nature of the girl : she would not forget ! ******* The new home looked very strange and unhome-like LES BIEN SEANCES. 177 on that chill October evening when the three weary travellers mounted its marble steps and followed Mrs. Holborne into the vestibule. It was raining, and the clouds hung gray and heavy above the Monument. It was chill and lonely and silent, not a soul moving on the broad pavements, not even a child's face peeping out from one of the iron-guarded windows. Cheswick itself, lying so near the mountains, shut in by fading foliage from every glimpse of the outside world, could not have looked more desolate. "It is all owing to the evening," Amy said to her sinking heart as she took off her damp wraps and made herself tidy by the time the bell should ring. At table Aunt Bab looked uncomfortable with the solemn strange butler moving behind her chair, and Jacob's post behind his master seemed destined to become that of a sinecure. Certainly Mrs. Holborne's choice of a cook displayed the most admirable discretion, if the well-served meal was a test, but poor Miss Bab could scarcely distinguish one entrite from another, so absorbed was she in the problem of what duties she should assign Amanda when she came. The good old soul felt doubly bereft in this new home, because she divined that her housekeeping offices, which were considered so important at Cheswick, would not even be called into requisition here. After dinner Miss Bab and Amy followed Mrs. Hol- borne on a tour of inspection through the house. They found everything comme il faut, from the guest-chambers with their every accessory for comfort to the servants' rooms in the third story, from the cabinet-shelves in the drawing-room to the china-closet in the store-room. Evidently Mrs. Holborne was a woman of taste, except that in the drawing-room there was a too profuse orna- mentation in crimson and gold, a too lavish breadth of picture-frames and cornice, and the paintings were not I y8 IN SANCHO PANZAS PIT. just the subjects that appealed to the eyes througli the heart, but there was no fault to be found with her arrangements. "Did uncle order all these beautiful things?" asked Amy. Mrs. Holborne smiled. She had a habit of smiling, a sort of flimsy mask that only the most superficial failed to pierce. She was not pleased with her young cousin's query. An old man from the country to know what was needed in a recherche city salon ! " Oh, no ; he gave me carte blanche to furnish, so I had Godey do everything." "A fashionable upholsterer, Miss Cheswick," answer- ing the inquiry in Miss Bab's eyes; "and the ornaments and bric-a-brac I selected myself for the most part." Amy glanced around with a vague sigh of uneasiness. Everything was so garishly bright, the cushions so new, the marbles so stainless, every little Sevres vase and Dresden figure looked fresh and unworn, as though just from the hand of the designer. Evidently visitors would not be tempted by the formal ensemble of this Godey-furnished apartment into prolonging unconventionally a morning call. Poor Miss Bab inspected everything with growing dis- may. It was all so fine, so bright and "spick and span" that she was reduced to the most sepulchral of monosyl- lables, as was Amy to the dreariest fit of homesickness she had ever known. The climax was reached when the housekeeper was called in, a very erect personage in a black bombazine that rustled as though with a sense of the dignity and importance of the wearer's position. Amy, knowing Miss Bab so well and understanding her expression of surprise and dismay, felt the first gleam of mirth that she had experienced since those heavy doors of her new home had closed her in. LES BIEN SEANCES. I?9 "I had expected to superintend the housekeeping!" exclaimed the poor lady when they were again alone with their guide ; " and certainly Robert meant that I should." Mrs. Holborne lifted her eyebrows superciliously. She was a handsome woman, passe, but well preserved, and dressed to perfection ; she had the repose and style of the world ; she was rarely betrayed into an indiscreet dis- play of emotion on any occasion. She spoke very quietly now, " My dear Miss Cheswick, you will find Mrs. Giles in- valuable ; she knows all that is needed in an establish- ment of this sort, and you will be very grateful for her assistance before the season is over, I venture to predict." "The season!" Amy heard the words without a single pang of apprehension. " Miss Harper said she was a society woman, a leader," she mused : "that is why she speaks of the season as un fait accompli, as 'Julee' would say. She will learn that one season is quite as much as another to us, and that the word as she defines it has no place in our vocabulary." She went over to Miss Bab's room across the hall from her own that night before retiring. The old lady, in her night-wrapper and cap, was seated by the register turning over the leaves of her Bible with a very miserable, care- lined face. "O Amy, ain't it dreadful?" she cried, raising both withered hands in emphasis thereof. "What, auntie?" and the girl laughed as she drew a hassock to her feet and leaned her arms in her lap. "Why, everything, child! the house all glitter and show and not a real homely place in it, and the strange servants, and that stuck-up-looking housekeeper, and Mrs. Holborne, your cousin Helen, with her everlasting !8o IN SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. smile, that has no more heart in it than the fine furniture and jimcracks she has scattered all over the house. A pretty lot of bills Robert will have to pay ! My ! what has come over him? as penny-wise as he has been all .his life, now in his old days to turn pound-foolish ! What does it mean, I wonder, Amy, all these servants and so much stuff that we don't need? I wonder if she has fooled him? She doesn't look like one to be trusted." "O auntie, what nonsense! Haven't you often told me that uncle is very rich? I don't suppose this house is one whit finer than any one of its neighbors. We have grown accustomed to the old-fashioned furniture at Ches- wick, that is all." " I wish we were back 1" heaved poor Miss Bab, with a sigh. " I like the old comfortable belongings there better than I ever shall these new fine things that look too fine to be used. Why, child, the great velvet chairs in the parlor at home are nearly a hundred years old, and strong to-day as ever ! ' ' " Never mind, auntie, we will soon make it home- like here, though I too love Cheswick best. But when Cousin Helen goes we'll reorganize, and perhaps we shall coax uncle to let us give up Mrs. Giles. I don't see the use of her myself, with Amanda coming. ' ' Thereafter a pause, in which Miss Bab read her Bible with a percep- tible thinning of the lines on her forehead. "Auntie, did you not tell me that years ago uncle kept up consid- erable state at Cheswick ?' ' "Yes, in his early wedded life; why do you ask, child?" "I wondered why he had ever dropped the old cus- toms, and why he should revive them now." Miss Bab closed her Bible and proceeded to do up the shining short ringlets for the night. " I shouldn't LES BIEN SEANCES. 181 wonder if the same reason would answer for both whims, child," she said, with a heavy sigh, and she sat gazing steadily into vacancy for a brief lapse of time, her eyes dim with the memories of the bygone years, but she roused herself soon and gave Amy a good-night kiss. "Maybe we can make it homelike, honey," she said, recurring to the old topic, "but old people grow so to places ; it's like tearing my heart-strings to take me away from Cheswick." Dear, patient, unselfish Aunt Bab ! when had she ever said so much about any preference of her own ? Amy's heart smote her as she went over to the big lonely room that had been assigned to her use, and, oddly enough, her memory went back to one day in that happy summer, when Cedric was marking off the croquet-ground, and with Jacob Martin's assistance had succeeded in wrest- ing from its hold upon the soil a huge round stone that had served him as a child for many interesting exploits. Clinging to its mouldy sides were lichens and tendrils of plant-life and a thousand white thread-like fibres that had grown and matted about the granite while the young master was shooting up into a tall lad. "What a shame, Jacob!" he had said as he stood with flushed face and sparkling eyes, "like the young god Baldur," she had said in her silly, romantic young heart, for he loved all things in heaven and earth, "what a shame, Jacob, to have broken all these clinging tendrils and poor dependent lichen-roots !" And it was with Aunt Bab as it was with the old gray mound of granite, except that her true old heart was warm and human, and so Amy was obliged to acknowledge her metaphor faulty. Next day Mr. Cheswick was wheeled in his arm-chair through the house his means had enabled Godey and 16 1 82 IN SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. Mrs. Holborne to display their vaunted taste upon. He mumbled a little about women's extravagance and asked Miss Bab if Helen Agnew suspected him of having amassed and hidden treasure at Cheswick, but his com- plaints were not formidable, and on the whole he seemed very well content. "Do you know why I have done this?" he asked of Amy, who came to his side in the drawing-room with a pretty trifle in bisque for his inspection. "Aunt Bab and I have been wondering, uncle." " I have told Helen Agnew to bring company to the house and pilot you into society, and I want you to make things gay and pleasant for the people that come here, do you understand ? I want you to forget everything but my wishes in the matter." This last he added defiantly, stung thereto by the wistful appeal in the gentle eyes turned toward him, eyes, strange to say, that brought to mind in these days those others that had looked at him twenty- two years ago with a look that he would never forget. Poor Amy ! Could " Julee" have seen her in the days that followed she would have marvelled more than ever at the strange white calm of her features, that bore upon them the unmistakable stamp of pain. Mr. Cheswick fixed upon the apartment back of the parlor for his library, and it was there Amy exercised her creative powers, seeking to impart that home-look to its aspect which was so painfully lacking in the rest of the house. It became the pleasantest room of the mansion ; even Mrs. Holborne, though she objected to the warm tone that pervaded the place, a library needed the pre- vailing color to be a soft emerald green, restful to the eye as a June sward, she had said, even Mrs. Holborne, it was observed, fell a victim to the comfort and beauty of the room. LES BIEN SEANCES. ^3 A good many books had been brought up from Ches- wick, all the family portraits, and a favorite landscape of Amy's that had hung over the chimney-piece in the long old-fashioned parlor. And the southern window an am- ple bow was filled to overflowing with the blooming pots and vines that she had brought thither after repeated trips with Jacob to different florists in the city. Crimson cur- tains shed warmth on the dreariest days, and at one or two art stores on Charles Street she had discovered just what she wanted in the way of gods and graces for her unsupplied niches. Mr. Cheswick read from his favorite books, took slow drives through the park, attended by the ever-careful Jacob, and entertained a small coterie of old gentlemen an evening or two out of every week, finding infinite relish for the political and personal on dits they brought him from the world at large. How great was the change in him ! He who had scouted the bare idea of human companionship as a necessity to man showed a singular, almost childish, aversion nowadays to being thrown upon his own resources for the shortest period of time. His habits of to-day furnished a mocking satire upon the cold philosophies of his life : and he knew it, sank abashed under the consciousness of it at times, the while he strove to excuse his weakness upon the score of his increasing infirmities of the body. The dreaded day had been tided over for a long while, but it came at last. Mrs. Holborne, with that chill insinuating smile that Miss Bab found so rasping, sug- gested that as so many had called, and as it was about time to make some sort of step in the matter, what would Mr. Cheswick say to Amy's accepting some of the in- vitations that had been filling her receiver for the past weeks ? r 84 Iff SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. " You had not told me, Amy ; I did not know that you had received a single invitation." Her uncle's mumbling tones conveyed displeasure, as well as the lines of his face. Amy was silent. " I hope you wrote regrets, Amy ?" " To most of them, Cousin Helen." "Ah, well, then there's no harm done." The cold smile had never impressed the girl so disagreeably. "If she meant something kind by it," sighed poor Amy; "but it is only a sort of picket she sends out to guard the position, and warns me to be on the alert. I am afraid I shall grow secretive and suspicious if I have much to do with Cousin Helen." Then Mrs. Holborne suggested what would be a much better plan after all, that a party should be given by Amy's uncle, which would serve to return her obliga- tions and introduce her as well. " Miss Cheswick is scarcely au fait in these matters ; so, if you will allow me, I will gladly save her all trouble of that sort, and take the responsibility entirely upon myself." " I am sure I will be glad to have her do it !" cried old Miss Bab to Amy and her much-prized Amanda, who had come up with the books and pictures from Cheswick. " It's just the work to suit her, and she's welcome to know more about it than I do. Good gracious ! what would you have thought of me, 'Mandy, if at fifty I'd have gone about with a Tower of Babel on my head and my scrawny arms and neck bare ?' ' " My dear," said Mrs. Holborne to Amy one day, "I hope you will trust me with the selection of your winter outfit, we are fastidious in such matters here!" And on another occasion, "Your uncle tells me that you play, and sing too. It is not possible that you have learned to sing in the fashion of the day without a LES BIEN SEANCES. 185 signer ?" And still again, " My dear, can't you manage to appear a little less indifferent, or more interested ? I am afraid you will never ' take' in our set." But the whole truth came out one day when Mrs. Holborne suggested a little manual for her careful peru- sal, entitled " Les Bien Seances" "You are not guilty of more culpable gaucheries, my dear, than most country- bred girls ; but I take a great pride, absurd perhaps, in knowing everything I recommend to be faultless of its kind, I bear that reputation ; now you wouldn't like to endanger my reputation ?" with the old smile, intended to be playful. I think she did not read aright the emotions expressed by the rare color that began to glow in Amy's cheeks, the fire that began to burn very steadily in the surprised brown eyes, or she had scarcely gone on so calmly. " You see, we society people," pursued the soft passion- less voice, "soft with fashion, not with feeling," " apparently the most nonchalant and unconstrained of any class, are guided by fixed rules, which govern the tones of our voices and I might almost say the corre- sponding expression of our features as arbitrarily as they do the style of our clothes. It is very necessary in the world to feign an interest that you do not feel, and that I find you not inclined to do, my little cousin." But she was interrupted by another Amy than any she had ever seen, an Amy with glowing cheeks and eyes that were haughty and angry alike. " Nonsense, Cousin Helen!" she exclaimed, "who is imposed upon by the fraud after all? Is there no intuition among society people that they should not detect the feigned interest and gauge it at its worth ? I am quite new to your ways and your world, and yet I am able to judge of it pretty surely through the one exponent I have met with." 16* 1 86 Iff SANCHO PANZA'S PIT. " Bravo, Amy !" " Julee" would have cried, and would have accused her of using vera pro gratis with a vengeance, but Amy proceeded without any such encouragement, her Southern blood fairly aroused at what looked like a slur at its innate purity. She was as proud a little aristo- crat, for all her gentle ways and calm, unruffled demeanor, as was the lad before her, who went out into the world depending upon the credentials he had drawn from the old chronicles in his father's library. " Take back your book on les bien stances / as though a lady should ever need to use it ! I have no belief in the theory that one's speech and manner should be governed by fixed rules ; as well say that we are capable of governing the influences at work with our lives. Have you never read that action hangs, as it were, dissolved in speech, in thought, whereof speech is the shadow and precipitates itself therefrom ? How do I know what thoughts contact with your world will induce in my brain, and you would have me prepare a set formula, guided by your bien seances ! Bah ! such rules and regulations may serve auto- mata, not human beings who have a part of their own to play!" " What a strange, unreasonable creature !" mused Mrs. Holborne, as her carriage bore her homeward, "with a temper too, as I live ! Well, if I don't find her more tract- able, I fear I shall rue my bargain." Does it strike you as rather improbable that Mrs. Hol- borne, a leader in society, should go to all this trouble merely for the sake of a nameless debutante ? You may read her motives by the light of her own revelations. Surely a woman who maps out beforehand every smile she means to shed during an evening is not unsupplied with a motive for such an ordeal as she is at present undergoing. A trying one it must have been, if we judge by the listless LES BIEN SEANCES. 187 weariness of her voice when she reaches her own home : "James," to the footman who carried sundry purchases from the carriage to her boudoir, " if Doctor Duncan calls this morning send him up, but no one else, remember: I am fatigued to death." Some hours later the tapestry that guarded this luxu- rious lady's portal was swept aside, and a very hearty manly voice woke the rose-hued stillness of the boudoir. " I have not a minute to stay, Helen, what is it?" and a tall dark-eyed man followed the voice to the foot of the couch where lay " Helen," resting from her prodigious labor of the morning. " It is nothing, Douglass, except that I depend upon you to free yourself of engagements for the evening of the zyth." "Ah, the little girl from the country! Poor Helen! do you find her still such a hopeless task?" " Don't laugh, Douglass ; my only hope is that she will ' take' because she is so odd, stupid I would say only that her speech is really quaint and full of all sorts of con- ceits ; and she has a temper, for all her white gentleness." " Have you conflicted already ?" But his sister did not notice the question. " Silly little goose !" she murmured, half to herself half to him. " As if all the cavalier blood of the Old Dominion could stand at this day without a knowledge of "lesbien seances /' ' CHAPTER XXI. A MYSTERY SOLVED. " Ich habe gelebt und geliebet." SCHILLER. " IT is pleasant to wear such pretty things !" Amy stood in the centre of the library, blushing naively, and her uncle surveyed her with unqualified approval. Miss Bab walked around her with delight, surveying the graceful filmy skirts, and touching the pale pink leaves of the roses that garnished the costume, to make sure they were not real blooming ones. It was no desecration to true art to wear artificial roses ten years ago. "They look as though they'd smell," whispered the enraptured 'Manda to her faithful consort, Jacob Martin, who in spotless linen and broadcloth looked more grave and clerical than ever on this important evening. "Ain't she just a angel ! If Mr. Rick could ha" seen her so!" Then the two old servants exchanged glances of dis- may. It was an unlucky memory to recall on this festive evening. Mrs. Holborne swept into the library, magnificent in amber satin and topazes. "It is quite time we were in the drawing-room, my dear. Doesn't she look beau- tiful, Mr. Cheswick ? Her neck and arms are perfect enough to have inspired Phidias. Come, Amy. Now, my dear, do try to be interested." iSS A MYSTERY SOLVED. i8g "1 shall not have to try, I am already interested," laughed the girl. " It is all very odd to me, but I don't mind it nearly so much as I had supposed I would ; be- sides, I expect to find some genuine people, despite your opinion to the contrary, Cousin Helen." " I never passed such an opinion, my dear. You do look most beautifully ! Now,