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 CHANDOB 
 

 '^ .1^. 
 
 OUIDA'S NOVELS. 
 
 Crown Hvo clcth extra, 3^^ 
 boards 
 
 Held in Bondage. 
 
 Tricotrm. 
 
 Strathmore. 
 
 Chandos. 
 
 Cecil Castleniaine' s Gage. 
 
 Under Two Flags. 
 
 Puck. 
 
 Idalia. 
 
 Fall e- Far i7ie. 
 
 A Dog of Flanders. 
 
 Pascarel. 
 
 Signa. 
 
 Tivo Little Wooden Shoes. 
 
 In a Winter City. 
 
 Ariadne. 
 
 6d, each ; post 8vo. illustrated 
 , 25'. each. 
 
 Friendship. 
 Moths. 
 Pipistrello. 
 A Village Commune, 
 In Maremma. 
 Biiiibi. 
 Syrlin. 
 Wanda. 
 Frescoes, 
 Othinar, 
 
 Princess Napraxine. 
 Guilderoy. 
 Ruffi.no. 
 
 Santa Barbara. 
 Tivo Ojfenders. 
 
 Square 8vo. cloth extra, 5.V. each. 
 
 Bimbi. ^^'ith Nine Illustrations by Edmund H. 
 
 Garrett. 
 
 A Dog of Flanders^ &^c. 
 
 Edmund H. Garrett. 
 
 With Six Illustrations by 
 
 Wisdo?n, Wit, and Pathos, selected from the AVorks 
 
 of UuiuA by F. Sydney Morris. Post Svo. cloth extra, 5 j. Cheap 
 Edition, illustrated boards, 2j. 
 
 London: CHATTO& WINDUS, in St. Martin's Lane, W.C. 
 
C H A N D O S 
 
 A NOVEL 
 
 By OUIDA 
 
 AUTUOR OF 'CECIL CASTI.EMMNe'S GAr.E,' 'HELD IN BONDAGE, 
 ' A DOG OF FLANDEKS,' ' PASCAREL,' ETC. 
 
 " God and man and hope abandon rae, 
 But I to them and to myself remain constant." 
 
 Shelley 
 Treason doth never prosper. What's the reason? 
 Why, when it prospers, none dare call it treason." 
 
 Sir John Harrington 
 
 A NEW EDITION 
 
 LONDON 
 CHATTO & WINDUS 
 
LONDON : 
 PRINTED BY J. S. VIRTUE AND CO. 
 CITY ROAD. 
 

 i^n 
 
 CHANDOS. 
 
 PEOEM. 
 
 TWO VOWS. 
 
 It was the sultry close of a midsummer night in the heart of 
 
 London. 
 
 In all the narrow streets about Westminster there were the rciar 
 of traffic and the glare of midnight ; the throngs were jostHng each 
 other, the unscreened gas-jets of the itinerant stalls were Sariog 
 yellow in the stiUness of ^q air, the screaming of ballad-singors 
 pierced shrilly above the incessant noise of wheels, the shouting 
 of costermongers, butchers, oyster-vendors, and fried-fish-seU/ers 
 added its uproar of the pandemonium, and the steam and stench of 
 hot drinks and of rotting vegetables was blent with the heaviness 
 of smoke borne down by the tempestuous oppression of the night. 
 Above, the sky was dark ; but across the darkness now and them a 
 falling star shot swiftly down the clouds — in fleeting memento aind 
 reminder of all the glorious world of forest and of lake, of rushing 
 river and of deep fem-glade, of leafy shelter lying cool in moTin- 
 tain-shadows, and of soa- waves breaking upon wet brown rocks, 
 which were forgotten here, in the stress of trade, in the strife of 
 crowds, in the cramped toil of poverty, and in the wealth of mingled 
 nations. 
 
 Few in town that night looked up at the shooting star as it flashed 
 its fiery passage above the dull, leaden, noxious, gas-lit streets; 
 none, indeed, except perhaps here and there a young dreamer, with 
 threadbare coat and mad but sweet ambitions for all that was im- 
 possible — or some woman, young, haggard, painted, half drunk, 
 whose aching eyes were caught by it, and whose sodden memory 
 went wearily back to a long-buried childhood, when the stars were 
 out over the moorland of a cottage home, and her childish wonder 
 had watched them rise over the black edge of ricks through the little 
 lozenge of the lattice, and sleep had come to her under their light, 
 happily, innocently, haunted by no terrors, to the cleai* music 
 of a mother's spinning- song. Save these, none thought of the 
 •tax as it dropped down above the jagged wilderness of roofs * 
 
 8 
 
 853 
 
f Chandos. 
 
 the crowd "was looking elsewhere — to the Kghted entrance of the 
 Tjower House. 
 
 The multitude had gathered thickly. There had been, as it was 
 known, a powerful and heated debate, a political crisis of decisive 
 eminence— of some peril, moreover, to the country, fi'om a rash war 
 policy urged upon the existing ministry, which must, it had been 
 feared, have resigned to escape stooping to measures forced on it 
 by the opposition. The false position had been avoided by the 
 genius of one man alone ; the government had stood firm, and had 
 vanquished its foes, through the mighty ability of its chief states- 
 man—one who, more fortunate than Pitt in the brilliant success 
 of his measures at home and abroad, was often called, like Pitt, 
 the Great Commoner. 
 
 Yet it was a title, perhaps, that scarcely suited him; for he was 
 patrician to the core — patrician in pride, in name, in blood, and 
 in caste, though he disdained all coronets. You could not have 
 lowered him; also, you could not have ennobled him. He was 
 simply and intrinsically a great man. At the same time, he was 
 the haughtiest of aristocrats — too haughty ever to stoop to the 
 patent of a present earldom or a marquisate of the new creation. 
 
 The crowds pressed closest and densest as one by one his col- 
 leagues appeared, passing to their carriages; and his name ran 
 breathlessly down the people's ranks: they trusted him, they 
 honoured hkn, tliey were proud of him, as this countiy, so 
 naturally and strongly conservative in its instincts, however 
 radical it be in its reasonings, is proud of its aristocratic leaders. 
 They were ready to cheer him to the echo the moment he ap- 
 peared; specially ready to-night, for he had achieved a signal 
 victory, and the populace always cense success. 
 
 At last he camie — a tall and handsome man, about fifty j'-eara 
 of age, and with a physiognomy that showed both the habit and 
 the power of command. He was satiated to weariness with public 
 homage ; but he acknowledged the greetings of the people as they 
 rang on the night air with a kindly, if negligent, courtesy — the 
 courtesy of a grand seigneur. 
 
 At his side was a boy, his only son, a mere child of some seven 
 ^ears. Indulged in his every inclination, he had been taken to 
 tlie House that evening by a good-natured peer, to a seat under 
 the clock, and had for the first time heard his father speak — heard, 
 with his eyes glittering, and his cheeks flushed, and his heart 
 beating, in passionate triumph and enthusiastic love. 
 
 ** That boy will be a great man, if— if he don't have too much 
 genius," the old peer who sat beside him had said to himself, 
 watching his kindling eyes and breathless lips, and knowing, like 
 a world- wise old man of business as he was, that the fate of Pro- 
 inetiieus is the same in all ^es, and that it is Mediocrity which 
 
 The 
 
 le boy had a singular ^ beauty ; it had been a characteristic 
 of the race through centuries; woman's fashionable fancies were 
 shown in the elegance of his dress, with its velvets, and laces, and 
 daiicate hues ; ajid the gold of hi© hair, felling over hM shouldei-s 
 
Two Tows. 
 
 in long clustering curia, glittered in the lamp-light as, at his 
 
 father's recognition of the crowd, he lifted his cap with its eagle'a 
 feather and bowed to them too— a child's bright, gratified amuse- 
 ment blent \\dth the proud, courtly grace of his father's manner, 
 already hereditary in him. 
 
 The hearts of the people warmed to him for his beauty and for 
 his childhood, the hearts of the women especially, and they gave 
 him another and yet heartier cheer. He bowed like a young 
 prince to the right and to the left, and looked up in the grave 
 statesman's face with a joyous laugh ; yet still in his eyes, as they 
 glanced over the throngs, there was the look, dreamy, brilliant, 
 half wistful, half eager, which was beyond his age, and which had 
 made the old peer fear for him, that gift of the gods which the 
 world does not love, because— most unwisely, most suicidally— it 
 fears it. 
 
 Amongst the crowd, wedged in with the thousands pressmg there 
 about the carriages waiting for the members, stood a woman ; she 
 was in mourning-clothes, that hung sombrely and heavily about 
 her, and a dark veil obscured her features. Her featui^es could not 
 be seen, her eyes alone shone through the folds of her veil, and 
 were fixed on the famous politician as he came out from the 
 entrance of the Commons, and on the young boy by his side. Her 
 own hand was on the shoulder of a child but a few years older, 
 very strongly built, short, and muscularly made, with features of 
 a thoroughly English type— that which is vulgarly called the 
 Saxon ; his skin was very tanned, his linen torn and untidy, his 
 hands brown as berries and broad as a young lion's paws, and his 
 eyes, blue, keen, with an infinite mass of humour in them, looked 
 steadily out from under the straw hat drawn over them ; they too 
 were fastened on the bright hair and the delicate dress of the little 
 aristocrat, with some such look as, when a child, Manon Phlippon 
 gave the gay and glittering groups of Versailles and the young 
 Queen whom she lived to drag to the scaffold. 
 
 The woman's hand weighed more heavily on his shoulder, and 
 she stooped her head till her lips touched his cheek, with a hoarse 
 whisper, — 
 
 ' ' There is your enemy ! '' 
 
 The boy nodded silently, and a look passed over his face, ovei 
 the stui-dy defiance of his mouth and the honest mischief of his 
 eyes, very bitter, very merciless— worse in one so young than the 
 fiercest outburst of evanescent rage. 
 
 Life was but just opening in him ; but already he had loame"' 
 man's first instinct — to hate. 
 
 Where they stood, on the edge of the pressing throng, that had 
 left but a narrow lane for the passage of the ministers, the little 
 patrician was close to the boy who stared at him with so doi^^f^ed 
 a jealousy and detestation in his glance, and his own eyes, wdh a 
 wondering surprise, rested a moment on the only face that had 
 ever looked darkly on him. He paused, the natm-ally generous 
 and tender temper in him leading him, unconsciously, rather to 
 pity and to reconciliation than to offence: be had never seen thi? 
 
^ — Chandos. 
 
 etranger before, but his mstinct was to woo him out of his an^ 
 solitude. He touched him with a bright and loving smile, giying 
 what he had to give. 
 
 ** You look vexed and tired : take these ! " 
 
 He put into his hand a packet of French bonbons that had been 
 given m the Ladies' Gallerj^, and followed his father, with a glad, 
 rapid bound, into the carriage, by whose steps they were. The 
 servants shut the door with a clash, the wheels rolled away with a 
 loud clatter, swelling the thunder of the busy midnight streets. 
 The boy in the throng stood silent, looking at the dainty, costly, 
 enamelled Paris packet of crystallised sweetmeats and fruits. 
 Then, without a word, he flung it savagely on the ground, and 
 stamped it out under his heel, making the painted, silvered paper, 
 and the luscious bonbons, a battered, trampled mass, down m the 
 mud of the pavement. 
 
 There was a world of eloquence in the gesture. 
 
 As his carriage rolled through the streets in the late night, the 
 great statesman passed his hand lightly over the fair locks of his 
 son. The child had much of his own nature, of his own intellect, 
 and he saw in his young heir the future security for the continuance 
 of the brilliance and power of his race. 
 
 "You will make the nation honour you for yom'self one day, 
 Ernest?" he said, gently. 
 
 There were tears in the child's eyes, and a brave and noble 
 promise and comprehension in his face, as he looked up at his 
 father. 
 
 "IflHvelwill!" 
 
 As ttiey were propelled onward by the pressure of the moving 
 crowd, the woman and her son went slowly along the heated 
 streets, with the gas-flare of some fish or meat-shop thrown on 
 them, as they passed, in yeUow, flaring illumination. They were 
 not poor, though on foot thus, and though the lad's dress was torn 
 and soiled through his own inveterate activity and endless mis- 
 chief. No pressure of any want was on them : yet his glance fol- 
 lowed the carriages, darted under the awnings before the mansions, 
 and penetrated wherever riches or rank struck him, with the hungry, 
 impatient, longing look of a starving Eousseau or Gilbert, hounded 
 to socialism for lack of a sou— a look very strange and prematurf 
 on a face so young and naturally so mirthful and good-humoured. 
 
 His mother watched him, and leaned her hand again on his 
 shoulder. 
 
 '• You will have your revenge one day." 
 
 ''Wont If' 
 
 *' The school-boy answer was ground out with a meaning in tec- 
 sity, as he set his teeth like a young bulldog. 
 
 Each had promised to gain a very diS'erent arisieia. When they 
 came to the combat, with whom would rest the victory ? 
 
BOOK THE FIRST. 
 OHAPTER I. 
 
 PYTHIAS, OR MEPHISTOPHELES . 
 
 It was the height of the London season. Town filled. Death had 
 made gaps in the crowd ; but new-comers filled up the rents, and 
 the lost were unmissed. Brows, that the last year had been stain- 
 less as snow, had been smirched with slander or stained with 
 shame ; but the opals crowning them belied their ancient fame, 
 and did not pale. Light hearts had grown heavy, pioud heads 
 had been bent, fair cheeks had learned to cover care with pearl- 
 powder, words had been spoken that a lifetime could not recall, 
 links had been broken that an eternity would not unite, seeds oi 
 sin and sorrow had been sown never again to be uprooted, in the 
 brief months that lay between "last season" and this phoenix ol 
 the new ; but the fashionable world met again with smiling lips, 
 and bland complaisance, and unutterable ennui, and charming 
 mutual compliment, to go through all the old routine with well- 
 trained faces, befitting the arena. 
 
 It was April. The last carriages had rolled out by the Comer, 
 the last hacks paced out of the Eide, the last sunlight was fading ; 
 epicures were reflecting on their club dinners, beauties were study- 
 ing the contents of their jewel-boxes, the one enjoying a matelote, 
 the other a conquest, in dreamy anticipation; chandeliers were 
 being lit for political receptions, where it would be a three-hours' 
 campaign to crush up the stairs ; and members waiting to go in on 
 Supply were improving their minds by discussing a new dancer's 
 ankles, and the extraordinary scratchiiig of Lord of the Isles for 
 the Guineas. The West, in a word, was beginning its Business, 
 which is Pleasure ; while the East laid aside its Pleasure, which 
 is Business ; and it was near eight o'clock on a spring night in 
 London. 
 
 Half a hundred entertainments waited for his selection ; all the 
 loveliest women, of worlds proper and improper, were calculating 
 their chances of securing lus preference : yet alone in his house 
 in Park Lane, a man lay in idleness and ease, indolently smoking 
 a narghil§ from a great silver basin of rose-water. 
 
 A stray sunbeam lingered here and there on some delicate bit ot 
 ^tuary, or jewelled tazza, or Cellini cup, in a chamber luxurious 
 
6 Chandos. 
 
 enough for an imperial bride's, with its hangings of violet velvetj 
 its ceiling painted after Greuze, its walls hung with rich Old 
 Masters and rdltfi Maiires, and its niches screening some group 
 of Coysevox, Coustou, or Canova. It was, however, only the 
 " study," the pet retreat of its owner, a collector and a connoisseur, 
 who la J'' now on his sofa, near a table strewn with Elzevirs, Paris 
 novels, MSS., croquis, before-letter proofs, and dainty female notes. 
 The fading sunlight fell across his face as his head rested on his 
 left arm. A painter would have drawn him as Alcibiades, or, more 
 poetically still, would have idealised him into the Phoebus Lyke- 
 genes, so singularly great was his personal beautj . A physiogno- 
 mist would have said, ** Here is a voluptuary, here is a profound 
 thinker, here is a poet, here is one who may be a leader and chief 
 among men if he will; " but would have added, *' Here is one who 
 may, fifty to one, sink too softly into his bed of rose-leaves ever 
 to care to rise in full strength out of it." Artists were chiefly 
 attracted by the power, men by the brilliance, and women by the 
 gentleness, of this dazzling beauty : for the latter, indeed, a subtler 
 spell yet lay in the deep-blue, poetic, eloquent eyes, which ever 
 gave such tender homage, such dangerous prayer, to their own 
 loveliness. The brow was magnificent, meditative enough for 
 Plato's; the rich and gold-hued hair, bright as any Helen's ; the 
 gaze of the eyes in rest, thoughtful as mi^ht be that of a Marcus 
 Aurelius ; the mouth, insouciant and epicurean as the lips of a 
 Catullus. The contradictions in the features were the anomalies 
 in the character. For the rest, his stature was much above the 
 ordinary height ; his attitude showed both the strength and grace 
 of his lunbs ; his age was a year or so over thirty, and his reverie 
 now was of the lightest and laziest : he had not a single care on 
 him. 
 
 There was a double door to his room ; he was never disturbed 
 there, either by servants or friends, or any sort of pretext; his 
 house was as free to all as a caravanserai, but to this chamber only 
 all the world was interdicted. Yet the first handle turned, the 
 second turned, the portiere was tossed aside with a jerk, and the 
 audacious new-comer entered. 
 
 "My dear Ernest! you alone at this time of the day? What 
 a mii-acle !^ I have actually dared to invade your sanctum, your 
 holy of holies ; deuced pleasant place, too. What is it you do here ? 
 point your prettiest picture, chip your prettiest statuette, make 
 love to your prettiest mistress, write your novels, study occult 
 sciences, meditate on the Dialectics, seek the philosopher's stone, 
 search for the Venetian colour- secret, have suppers d la liegence to 
 which you deny even your bosom Mends ? or what is it ? On my 
 honour, I am veiy cui-ious ! " 
 
 ** ToU me some news, Trevenna," said his host, with an amused 
 emile, in a voice low, clear, lingering and melodious as music, 
 contrasting forcibly with the sharp, ringing, metallic tones of his 
 visitor. " How came you to come in here ? You know -" 
 
 ** I know; but I had curiosity and a good opportunity: what 
 ttortal, or what moralsi eyor reei»tod ewHa, a combiuatioii r I am 
 
Pythias, or Mepfiistopheles. 7 
 
 weaker than a woman. >7o principle, not a shred. Am I respon* 
 Bible for that ? No ;— organisation and education. How dai^k you 
 are here ! May I ring for lights ? " 
 
 " Do you want light to talk by ? " laughed his friend, stretching 
 his hand to a bell-handle. ** Your tongue generally runs on oiled 
 wheels." 
 
 " Of course it does. It's my trade to talk ; I rattle my tongue 
 as a nigger singer rattles his bones ; I must chat as an organ- 
 grinder grinds. I'm asked out to dine to talk. If I grew a bore, 
 every creature would drop me ; and if I grew too dull to get up a 
 scandal, I should be very sure never to get a dinner. My tongue's 
 my merchandise ! " • i_ j 
 
 With which statement of his social status, John Trevenna jerked 
 himself out of his chair, and, while the groom of the chamber 
 lighted the chandelier, strolled round the apartment. He was a 
 man of six or eight-and-thirty, short, a little stout, but wonder- 
 fully supple, quick, and agile, a master of all the sciences of the 
 gymnasium; his face was plain and irregular in feature, but 
 bright, frank, full of good-humour almost to joviality, and of keen, 
 alert, cultured intelligence, prepossessing through its blunt and 
 honest candour, its merry smile showing the strong white teeth, 
 its hmhomie, and its look of acute indomitable cleverness —a. clever- 
 ness which is no more genius than an English farce is wit, but 
 which, sharper than intellect alone, more audacious than talent 
 alone, will trick the world, and throw its foes, and thrive in all 
 it does, while genius gets stoned or starves. He loitered round 
 the room, with his eye-glass up, glancing here, there, and every- 
 where, as though he were an embryo auctioneer, and stopped at 
 last before a Daphne flying from ApoUo and just caught by him, 
 shrouded in rose-coloured curtains. , i t 
 
 "Nice little girl, this! Eather enticing; made her look alive 
 with that rose-light ; tantalising to know it's nothing but marble ; 
 sweetly pretty, certainly." 
 
 "Sweetly pretty? Good heavens, my dear fellow, hold your 
 tongue ! One would think you a cockney adoring the moon, or a 
 lady's maid a new fashion. That Daphne's the most perfect thing, 
 Coustou ever did." , .^ « ,.^ 
 
 ** Don't know anything about them ! Never see a bit of diller- 
 ence in them from the plaster casts you buy for a shilling. Won't 
 break quite so soon, to be sure. She is pretty,— nice and round, 
 and all that ; but I don't care a straw about art. Never could.' 
 
 " And you are proud of your paganism ? Well, you are not the 
 first person who has boasted of his heresy for the sheer sake of 
 appearing singular." 
 
 " To be sure ! I understand Wilkes : let me be the ugliest man 
 in Europe, rather than remain in mediocrity among the medium 
 plain faces. There's not a hair's difference between notoriety and 
 fame. Be celebrated for something, and, if you can't jump into a 
 Mt like Ourtius, pop yourself into a volcano like Empedocles : the 
 foolery's immortalised jusi as well as a heroism ; the world talks 
 <tf you» that's all you want. If I couldn't be Alexander, I d b© 
 
ft Chandos 
 
 Diogenes ; if I weren't a great hero, I'd be a most ingenious 
 mui'derer. There's no radical difference i*between the two ! But, 
 I say, do you ever remember what a fearful amount you throw 
 away on these dolly things ? " pursued Treyenna, interrupting 
 himseK to strike his cane on the Daphne. 
 
 ** The only things worth the money I spend ! My dear Trevenna, 
 I thank you much for your interest, but I can dispense with your 
 counsels." 
 
 ** Pardon 1 I'm a brusque fellow, and eay what comes upper- 
 most ; wiser if I kept it sometimes. If you do live en prince^ who 
 wouldn't that could ? I don't believe in renunciation. He is a 
 shrewd fellow who, forced on abstinence, vowa he Ukes it and saya 
 he does it for digestion ; but I love the good things of life and say 
 80, though I can't afford them. I should sell my soul for turtle 
 soup ! By the way, monseigneur, before we eat your soup there's 
 a little business "' 
 
 "Business? In the evening! Do you wish to give me dys- 
 pepsia before dinner ? " 
 
 *' No; but I want to digest mine by feeling I've done my duty. 
 There's something we want you to sign; Legrew does, at the 
 least " 
 
 ** On my honour, Trevenna," cried his host, with a gay, careless 
 laugh, "you are abominable I How often have I told you that I 
 trust you implicitly, — you are fit for Chancellor of the Exchequer, 
 — and that I never will be worried by any nonsense of the kind ? " 
 
 "But, caro mio," pleaded Trevenna, coaxingly, "we can't do 
 without your signature. What's to be done? We can't give 
 leases, and draw checks, and get bonds and mortgages, without 
 your handwriting." 
 
 The last words caught the indolent listener's inattentive ear, 
 fle looked up surprised. 
 
 "Bonds? Mortgages? What can I possibly have to do with 
 them?" 
 
 " Moneys are lent out on mortgages , I only used the words as 
 example," explained his prime minister, a little rapidly. "We 
 trouble you as little as we can ; only want your name now. Ee- 
 member, the Guineas let you in heavily this time , one can't 
 transfer those large sums without your authorisation Just let 
 mo read you over this paper ; it's merely " 
 
 " Spare me ! spare me ! " cried the lord of this dainty art-palace, 
 to whom the ominous crackle of the parchment was worse than the 
 fiinging of a rattlesnake. " Smindyrides felt tilled if he saw a man 
 rft work in the fields ; what would he have felt if he had seen a 
 modern law document ? " 
 
 " Just sign, and you won't see it any more,'* pleaded Trevenna, 
 who knew the facile points of a character he had long made his 
 special study, and knew that, to be saved farther expostulation, 
 his chief would comply. 
 
 He did so, raising himself with slow, graceful indolence from his 
 cushions, and resigning the mouth-piece of his hookah reluctantly. 
 The oompliaQce was most insouciant ; the wiiJingnesa to sign, in 
 
Pythias, or Mephistopheles ? g 
 
 Ignorance of what he signed, a trustful carelessnesa that was 
 almost womanish. But life had fostered this side of his character, 
 and had done nothing to counteract it. 
 
 *' Stay ! you haven't heard what it is," put in Trevenna, while he 
 rattled off, with clear, quick precision that showed him a master of 
 prScis and would have qualified him to explain a budget in St. 
 Stephen's, a resume of what he stated the contents of the document 
 to be ; a very harmless dociunent, according to him, merely revert- 
 ing to the management of the immense properties of which his 
 friend was the possessor. His hearer idly listened two minutes, 
 then let his thoughts diift away to the chiaroscui^o of a Ghirlandajo 
 opposite, and to speculation whether Reynolds was quite correct in 
 his estimate of the invariable amount of shadow employed by the 
 old masters. 
 
 Trevenna'e exposition, lucid, brief, and as little tiresome as 
 legalities can be made, ended, he took the pen without more 
 opposition or reflection, and dashed his name down in bold, clear 
 letters, — 
 
 •' Ernest Chandos." 
 
 He pushed the paper to Trevenna with the ink still wet on the 
 signature. 
 
 "There! and remember henceforward, my very good fellow, 
 never to trouble me with all this nonsense again. I might as well 
 manage my own affairs from first to last, u my men of business 
 must come to me about every trifle. I would not trust the lawyers 
 without looking after them (though if a lawyer mean to cheat you 
 he mil, let you have as many eyes as Argus) ; but with you to give 
 them the check they can't go wrong. By the way, Trevenna, were 
 you not touched on the Heath, yourself P" 
 
 ** Well, Lord of the Isles let us all in, more or less," said Trevenna, 
 crumpling up his papers, "but, you know» poor hedgers like me 
 can't ever risk more than a tenner or so." 
 
 ** Still, your inimitable book-making failed you at the Guineas ? 
 I was afraid so. Draw on me as you need : you have blank checks 
 of mine ; fill one up as you like." 
 
 "No, no ! oh, hang it, monseigneur ! You put one out of coun- 
 tenance." 
 
 " Impossible miracle, Trevenna ! " laughed Chandos, looking on 
 him with kindly eyes. " How can any little matter like that ever 
 repay all the time and talent you are good enough to waste in my 
 service ? Besides, between old friends there is never a question of 
 obligation. Nine o'clock? "We must go to dinner. I promised 
 Claire Eahel not to miss her supper. She is enchanting I She has 
 the sonrire de la Regence and the wit of Sophie Arnauld." 
 
 " And the smiles cost you an India of diamonds, and the wit is 
 paid a cashmere each mot ! If Moiide deigned to recognise Demi- 
 Monde, how would the Countess admire being outrivalled by the 
 actress ?" 
 
 "The Countess is like Crispin, rivale de soi-meme alone. All 
 pretty women and all dull men are vain ! The belles and the borea 
 always worship at their own shrines," laughed Chandos, as bia 
 
^i© Chandos, 
 
 groom of che chambers announced the aiTival in the di-awing-roomi 
 of other ^lests from the Guards and the Legations, to one of those 
 " little dinners" which were the most coveted and exclusive enter- 
 tainments in London. 
 
 "We must go, I suppose; Prince Charles might wait, but the 
 turbot must not," he said, with a yawn, — he was accustomed to 
 have the world wait on and wait for him, — as he held back the 
 portiere, and signed to John Trevenna to pass out before him, dowii 
 the lighted corridor, with its exotics, statues, and bronzes glancing 
 under the radiance from the candelabra. He would have k^t a 
 Serene Highness attending his pleasure ; but he gave the pas witli 
 as much coui'tesy as to a monarch to that Tery needed man- 
 about-town, his dependent, hanger-on, and Jidm Achates, John 
 Trevenna. 
 
 CHAPTEE n. 
 
 "LA OOMETE ET 8A QUEUE." 
 
 ' * Did you see Chandos' trap in the ring to-day ? Four-in-hand 
 greys, set of outriders, cream-and-silver liveries, — prettiest thing 
 ever seen in the park," said Winters of the First Guards. 
 
 " Chandos has given six thousand for Wild Geranium, — best bit 
 of blood out of Danesbury ; safe to win at the Ducal," said the 
 Marquis of Bawood. 
 
 " Chandos has bought the Titians at the Due de Valler^'s sales ; 
 the nation ought to have bidden for them," said the Earl of Rouge- 
 mont. 
 
 "Nation's much better off ; he's given them to the country," said 
 Stentor, a very great art-critic. 
 
 ' * You don't mean it ? " said the Duke of Argentine. ' * That man 
 v/ould give his head away." 
 
 "And if the Cabinet bid for it they might keep in office," said 
 George Lorn, who was a cynical dandy. 
 
 " Flora has been faithful three months : Chandos is a sorcerer ! " 
 yawned Sir Phipps Lacy, talking of a beautiful sovereign of the 
 equivocal world. 
 
 " Chandos has a bottomless purse, my dear Sir Phipps : there's 
 the key to Flora's new constancy," said John Trevenna. 
 
 "You have read ' Lucrece,' of course? There is no writer in 
 Europe like Chandos, — such wit, such pathos, such power. I ha4 
 the early sheets before it was published," said the Duchess of Bel- 
 amour, proud of her privilege. 
 
 " * Lucrece' is the most marvellous thing since ' Pelham.'** 
 
 " The most poetic since Byron I" 
 
 ** Oh, it is a poem in prose ! " 
 
 ** And yet such exquisite satire !" 
 
 ** Alfred de Musset never probed human nature so deeply !**, 
 
"La Comkt et sa (^ueue." ii 
 
 •* Shelley never attained more perfect art." 
 
 " Certainly not ! you know it is in the sixth edition already ?" 
 
 " Of course ! every one is reading it." 
 
 So the talk ran round at a garden-party near Bichmond, among 
 the guests of a Bourbon prince, and for once the proverb was wron^, 
 and the absent was found by his friends in the right, with an uni- 
 versal vote of adoration. When the sun is at his noon, and they 
 are basking in his light, the whole floral world turn after him in 
 idolatiy ; if he ever set, perhaps they hang their heads, and hug 
 the nis-ht-damp, and nod together in condemnation of the spots that 
 dimmed their fallen god's beauty ; they have never spoken of them 
 before, but they have all seen them ; and then the judicious flowers 
 eigh a vote of censure. 
 
 He of whom the world chattered now was the darling of Fortune ; 
 his sins and stains, if he had any, were buried in oblivion, or only 
 cited tenderly, almost admiringly, as a woman puts her diamonds 
 on black velvet that their brilliance may be enhanced by the con- 
 trast. For to women he was the most handsome man of his day, 
 and to men he was the leader of fashion and the donor of the best 
 dinners in Eui"ope. Friendship is never sealed so firmly as with 
 the green wax of a pure claret, and our Pati^oclus is sacred to us 
 after sharing his salt and his bread, at least if it flavour clear soup 
 and be pain d la mode /—black broth and black bread might not have 
 such sanctifying properties. 
 
 ** How late you are !" cried the Countess de la Vivarol, making 
 room for him beside her in a summer concert-room, as the idol of 
 the hour appeared at last for half an hour in the prince's grounds. 
 A faii-er thing than this fairest of fashionable empresses was never 
 seen at Longchamps on a great race-day, or in the Salle des Mare- 
 chaux at a reception ; yet, such is the ingratitude or inconstancy 
 of nature, Chandos looked less at her than at a strange face some 
 distance from him, although he had for the last two years been no 
 more rivalled near the charming Countess than if she had worn a 
 silver label or a silver collar round her neck to denote his pro- 
 prietorship, like his retriever Beau Sire, or his pet deer down at 
 Clarencieux. Madame noted the lese-majeste : she was not a woman 
 to forgive it, and still less a woman to complain of it. 
 
 " They are talking about * Lucrece,' Ernest. They worship it," 
 she said, dropping her lovely, mellow, laughing, starlike eyes on 
 him. They had fallen on him with effect, twenty months before, in 
 the soft moonlight on a certain balcony at Compiegno. 
 
 He laughed. He cared little what the world said of him , he had 
 ruled it too long to bo its slave. 
 
 ** Indeed ! And— do they read it P" 
 
 '* Yes. They do read yoic," laug;hed Madame, too, " though they 
 would swear to you on hearsay just so warmly All the world 
 idolises the book." 
 
 " Ah ! I would prefer half a dozen wiio coidd criticise it. 
 
 *' Tais-toi. How ungrateful you are !" 
 
 *♦ Because my head does not get turned ? That was Sulla's worst 
 crime to mankind. They say • Lucrece* is a masterpiece because it 
 
1% Chandos, 
 
 it is in its fifth edition, and thoy expect me to be intoxicated with 
 euch discerning applause," said Chandos, with his melodious, 
 amused laugh, clear and gay as a woman's. Fame had come to 
 him so j^oung, he had gained the world's incense with so little effort, 
 that ho hold both in a certain nonchalant mockery. 
 
 " To be sure ! when men go mad if they got one grain of applause, 
 't is -very discourteous in you to keep cool when you have a hun- 
 ired. "What a reflection it is upon them ! Where are vou lookiner. 
 Ernest?" ' ^ 
 
 " Where can I be looking?" he said, with a smile, as he turned 
 his eyes full upon her. It would not have done to confess to the 
 Countess that he was scarcely heeding her words because a face 
 rarer to him had caught his gaze in the fashionable crowd. 
 
 The Countess gave a little sceptical meaning arch of her delicate 
 eyebrows. "She is very beautiful, mon ami, but her beauty will 
 not do for you." 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 " Because the passagato it will be terrible,'' said Madame de la 
 Vivarol, with a shiver of her perfumed laces. Her teeth were set 
 in rage under the soft, laughing, rose-hued lips, but she could play 
 her pretty, careless vaudeville without a sign of jealousy. 
 
 ' ' Terrible ! you pique my curiosity. I have no fondness, though, 
 for tempests in my love affairs. 
 
 *En I'amour si rien n'est amer, 
 Qu'on est sot de ne pas aimer I 
 Si tout I'est au d6gr6 suprgme, 
 Quand est sot alors que ron aime ! 
 
 Terrible, too P In what way ?" 
 
 ''Par la porte du marriage" said La Vivarol, with a silvery 
 laugh. 
 
 Chandos laughed too, as he leaned over hor chair. 
 
 " Terrible indeed, then. It were too much to pay for a Helen ' 
 You have disenchanted me at once ; so tell me now who she is." 
 
 *' Not I ! I am not master of the ceremonies." 
 
 There was a certain dark, angry flush ujider the curl of her silky 
 lashes that he knew very well. 
 
 ' I am a little out of your favour to-day, Heloise ?" said Chandos, 
 amusedly. The passing storm of a mistress's jealousy was the 
 darkest passage his cloudless life had encountered. •' I know my 
 2rime : I was not at your reception last night." 
 
 •' Weren't you ?" asked La Vivarol, with the most perfect air of 
 indifferent surprise. '* I could not tell who was and who was not. 
 How I detest your English crushes ! ' ' 
 
 "Nevertheless, that was my sin," laughed Chandos. 'What 
 oxcuse can I make ? If I tell you I was writing a sonnet in your 
 jiame, you would tell me we solace ourselves more materially and 
 4».nfaithfully. If I said I feared my thousand rivals, you would not 
 be likely to believe that any more. There is nothing for it but th« 
 truth." 
 
 ''*WeU teWit than/ 
 
** La Comkte el ta Queue.'* 13 
 
 *• Ma belle, the truth Trill be that I was at Alvarina's dSbut in 
 Rigoletto, and supped afterwards mth her and Rahel." 
 
 ** Alvarina ! that gaunt, brown Eoman ? and you call yourself 
 fastidious, Ernest ? " cried Madame la Comtesse. 
 
 "A gaunt, brown Eoman, — Alvarina ! The handsomest singer 
 that ever crossed the Alpsl So much for feminine prejudice,'* 
 thought Chandos ; but he knew the sex too well to utter his thoughts 
 aloud. 
 
 "Pygmalion was nothing to you, Chandos," said Trevenna, 
 swinging himself up the perch of the drag as a schoolboy up a tree, 
 while the other men on it were owners of some of the highest coro- 
 nets in Europe. There was this that was excellent and manly in 
 this penniless man-upon-town ; he never truckled to rank ; peer 
 or day-labourer alike heard his mind. *' He put heart into a 
 statue; you've put it into a woman of the world, — much the 
 more difficult feat. ^ Madame la Comtesse is positively jealous. I 
 do believe she divines we are going to have Demi-Monde to 
 dinner." 
 
 "Not she! she would not do me so much honour. But every 
 woman has a heart, even the worst women, — though, to be sure, we 
 forget it sometimes, till — we've broken them." 
 
 "Broken them? Poetic author of 'Lucrlce'! Hearts never 
 break, — except as a good stroke of business, as sculptors knock a 
 Umb off a statue to make believe it's an antique. Every Musette 
 we neglect vows her desertion is her death, but she soon sings Resur- 
 gam again, to the tune of the Cancan at the opera-baU." 
 
 " So much the happier for them, for we give them no De Pro- 
 fundis ! There are exceptions to the Musette rule, though. 1 
 remember " 
 
 " Don't trouble yourself with remembrance, Ernest. She soon 
 supplied your place, take my word for it." 
 
 "My good fellow, no : she died." 
 
 " Not out of love for you ! She had aneurism, or disease of the 
 heart, or sat in a draught and caught cold, or ate too many cherries 
 after dinner ! There was a substantial basis for your picturesque 
 hypothesis, I'll wager." 
 
 "Graceless dog ! Have you never had a doubled-down page in 
 your life ?" 
 
 " I don't keep a diary ; not even a mental one ! Reminiscence is 
 utterly unpractical and unphilosophical : agreeable, it dissatisfies 
 ou with the present ; disagreeable, it dissatisfies you with the past. 
 . say, they are taking five to three on your chestnut at the Corner. 
 ' don't see what can beat you at Ascot. There's a good deal whis- 
 pered about Lotus Lily : she's kept dark." 
 
 "They always train closely at Whitworth, but rarely bring out 
 anything good. You are quite safe, Chandos," said His Grace of 
 Ardennes, a gay, vivacious young fellow. 
 
 ' ' Queen of the Fairies is the only thing that could have a chance 
 with Galahad," put in the Due de Luilhieres : " she has good breed 
 in her by double strains ; fine shoulders " 
 
 " Leggy!" objectod Trev«ima, contemptuously, flatly contradict- 
 
14 ChandM ■. 
 
 ing a peer of Franc©. ** Not well ribbed-np ; weedy altogether, 
 
 Chieftain was her sire, and lie never did anything notable except 
 to break a blood-vessel on the Beacon Course. The touts know 
 what they're about, and they're all for the Clarencieux horse." 
 
 *' Galahad wiU win if he be allowed," said Chandos. " Ah ! there 
 is Plora on the balcony ; they are before us." 
 
 * * I wish they weren't here at all ! " cried Trevenna. * * You should 
 never have women to dinner ; they shouldn't come till the olives. 
 You can't appreciate the delicate nuances of a flavour if you are 
 obliged to turn a compliment while you are eating it ; and you 
 never can tell whether a thing is done to a second, if, as jou discuss 
 it, you are pondering on the handsome flesh-tints of a living picture 
 beside you. The presence of a woman disturbs that cool, critical 
 acumen, that serene, divine beatitude, that should attend your 
 dinner." 
 
 ** Blasphemer !" cried Chandos. '' As if one touch of some soft 
 Ups were not worth all Brillat-Savarin's science ; what flavour 
 would wine have if women's eyes didn't laugh over it ? You Xing 
 of Epicures ! you'd adore a Vitellius, I believe, and hang Pausanias 
 for his Spartan broth ! " 
 
 *' Certainly. A man who could capture Xerxes's cooks and not 
 dine off their art deserved nothing less than the gallows ; _ and 
 Vitellius was a very sensible fellow ; when he knew he must die he 
 took care to finish his wine first. Hero versus Gourmet. Why 
 not ? Careme benefited France much more lastingly than Turenne ; 
 and Tide's done the world far more good than Napoleon. I'd rather 
 have been the man who first found out that you must stuff a tui'key 
 with truffles than have won Austerlitz, any day. Youi* hero gets 
 misjudged, blackguarded, whitewashed, over-rated, under-rated, 
 just as the fit's hot or cold to him ; but the man who once invents 
 a perfect sauce is secure for all eternity. His work speaks for itself, 
 and its judges are his apostles, who never name him without bene- 
 diction. Besides, fancy the satisfaction to a cosmopolitan, amiable 
 creature like myself, of knowing I'd prepared a delight for genera- 
 tions unborn!" 
 
 "Sublime apotheosis of gastronomy!" laughed Chandos, as he 
 threw the ribbons to his groom before the doors of a summer villa 
 at Eichmond belonging to him, where most of these Bohemian 
 dinners and suppers d la Regence were given ; a charming place, 
 half- covered in flowering trees and pyramids of May blossom ; with 
 glimpses of wood and water from its windows, and with the daintiest 
 and cosiest banqueting-room in the world, hung with scarlet silk, 
 drawn back here and there to show some beautiful female pictui-e 
 by Titian, Greuze, Eegnault, or La Tour, large enough to hold 
 twenty people, but small enough to feel a huis dos like a cabinet ; 
 j^th the air scented by dreamy incenses, and dishes and wines 
 inder the mellowed light that would have entranced even Lucullus 
 2ad he been throned there on his ivory chair. Of this villa, and this 
 banqueting-room, rumour ran high, accrediting its reveh-ies as wild 
 as Medmenham or as Bussy-Babutin's " Abbey" of Eoissy. They 
 who to^d most precisely what positively took place there were, oi 
 
* La Comete et sa Queue.'* 15 
 
 course, always those wlio had never been through its doors ! And 
 the world loved to take their stories with spice, and whisper un- 
 imaginable naughtiness of this pleasant bonhonniere of a villa buiied 
 away in its acacias and guelder roses and flowering chestnuts, 
 whore laughter rang out on to the young summer dawns, and beauty 
 in neglige outshone all the jewelled beauty of courts. 
 
 ** ^e art of life is — to enjoy ! " cried Chandos, that night, lifting 
 up to crown the sentiment a deep glass of glowing red Eoussillon. 
 
 ** Toast worthy of Lucullus and Ovid! and you are a master of 
 the science," said John Trevenna, who was perhaps the only one 
 who saw quite clearly through that intoxicating atmosphere of 
 pastilles, and perfumes, and wines, and crushed flowers, and bruised 
 fruits, and glancing tresses, and languid eyes, and lips fit for the 
 hymns of a Catullus. 
 
 "He is the darling of the gods ! " cried Flora de I'Orme, that 
 magnificent Arlesienne, with her cheek like a peach in the sun, 
 while she leaned over him and twisted, in the bright masses of his 
 golden hair, a wreath of crimson roses washed in purple Burgundy. 
 
 Chandos shook the wine from the rose- crown as he bent and 
 kissed that glowing Southern loveliness, and laughed under his 
 diadem of flowers. The roses themselves were not brighter or more 
 luxurious than the hours of life were to him. 
 
 He enjoyed ! Oh, golden siun of this world's sweet content ! 
 Supreme Iruth of Faust ; when he should 
 
 " To the passing moment say, 
 Stay ! thou art so fair ! " 
 
 then alone the philosopher knew that he could claim to have tasted 
 happiness. When once we look back or look forward, then 
 has the trail of the serpent been over our Eden. To enjoy, we 
 must live in the instant we grasp. 
 
 It is so easy for the preacher, when he has entered the days of 
 darkness, to tell us to find no flavour in the golden fruit, no music 
 in the song of the charmer, no spell in eyes that look love, no deli- 
 rium in the soft dreams of the lotus — so easy when these things 
 are dead and barren for himself, to say they are forbidden ! But 
 men must be far more, or far less, than mortal ere they can blind 
 their eyes, and dull their senses, and forswear their nature, and 
 obey the dreariness of the commandment ; and there is little need to 
 force the sackcloth and the serge upon us. The roses wither long 
 before the wassail is over, and there is no magic that will make 
 them bloom again, for there is none that renews us — youth. The 
 Helots had their one short, joyous festival in their long year of 
 labour ; life may leave us ours. It will be surely to us, long before 
 its close, a harder tyrant and a more remorseless tasbmaster than 
 ever was the Lacedemonian to his bond-slaves, — bidding us make 
 bricks without straw, breaking the bowed back, and leaving us as 
 our sole chance of freedom the hour when we ahall turn our faces 
 to the waU— and die. 
 
 Once, some twenty years or more before, down at the stately pile 
 €d darencieux. in me heart of the Devon woods, Philip Chandn? 
 
t6 Chan dot. 
 
 the great minieter, had paused a moment -wherG his yoting son 
 leaned out of one of the painted oriel casements of the library, 
 hanging \rith a child's faith and lore over the eternal story of 
 Arthur. The boy's arms were folded on the vellum pages, his 
 head was drooped slightly forward in dreamy thought, and on his 
 face came the look that there is in the portrait of Milton in his early 
 years. 
 
 His father touched him on the shoulder, 
 
 " Where are your thoughts, Ernest ?" 
 
 The child started a little. 
 
 '* I was thinking what I shall be when 1 am a man. '* 
 
 ** Indeed ? And what will you be ? " 
 
 " First, Chandos of Clarencieux ! " 
 
 He could not have spoken with air more royal if he had said, 
 ** Augustus Imperator ! " 
 
 "But besides?" 
 
 ** Besides ?" his voice fell lower, and grew swift and warmer, a 
 little tremulous in its enthusiasm. "Why, I will be a poet and 
 a statesman. I will have palaces like the Arabian Nights, and 
 gather the people in them and make them happy. I will defend 
 all the guiltless and protect all the weak, like lung Ai'thui*. I will 
 rule men, but by love, not fear ; and I will make my name great, — 
 80 great that when I die they will only write * Chandos ' on my 
 grave, and the name will tell the world its own tale ! " 
 
 They were strange words ; and, where he leaned against the oriel, 
 the light from the setting autumn sun feU full upon his face, deep- 
 ening there the lofty and spiritual exaltation of thoughts too far 
 above his years. His father looked at him, and something that was 
 almost a sigh passed the haughty lips of the great minister. The 
 sigh was for the future of those heroic and pure ambitions, for the 
 world which would break them as surely as the pressure of the iron 
 roller crushes out the flowers of spring. And he could not utter to 
 the child, in the proud gladness of his young faith, the warning 
 that rose to his own lips : '* Keep those dreams for other worlds, 
 for they will never find fruition here." 
 
 Yet, for the boy to whom these dreams came, untaught and in- 
 stinctive, in all their superb impossibility, their divine unreality, 
 his father could not but hope himself a future and an ambition still 
 loftier than his own. 
 
 * ' The darling of the gods ! " said Flora de I'Orme, to-night, as 
 she wound the crown of scarlet roses in her lover's hair; and she 
 had said very truly. Fortune and the world never combined to 
 flatter any man more than they combined to shower all gifts and 
 graces on Ernest Chandos. When he had been but a child in his 
 laces and velvets, princes had tossed him bonbons and royal women 
 caressed his loveliness. Tutors, parasites, servants, indulged all 
 his fancies, and never controlled or contradicted him. At Eton, 
 uK'knamed the Dauphin, he bore all before him, was noted for his 
 champagne breakfasts, and had a duke for his devr»ted fag. At 
 seventeen he was his own master. His father died grandly as Chat- 
 httm, falling back, without a sigh or struggle, after one of the finoet 
 
"La Comite et sa Queue." ij 
 
 speeches of his life, in the full career of his mao;nificent and feai-leasi 
 leadership. The boy's grief was intense, Doth passionate aijd 
 enduring, for he had worshipped his father and his father's fanii\ 
 By his own wish he went abroad : he would not hear of a college. 
 His only guardian was his grandfather by the distaff- side, the Duke 
 of Castlemaine, an old soldier and statesman of the Regency time : 
 his mother had died years before. The Duke let him do precisely 
 as he chose, which was to remain abroad four years, chiefly in the 
 East, where life, whether waiting for the lion's or leopard's step 
 through the sultry hush of an Oriental night, or learning soft love- 
 lore from the dark eyes of a Georgian under tiie shadows of a palm- 
 grove, enchanted and enchained one who, whatever after-years 
 might make him, was in his youth only a poet, and a lover of all 
 fair things, — especially of the fairness of women. Life seemed to 
 conspire to idolise him and to ruin him : after a boyhood of limit- 
 less indulgence, limitless tenderness, and limitless enjoyment, he 
 passed to the enervating, poetic, picturesque, sensuousness of life 
 in the Eastern nations, where every breath was a perfume, eveiy 
 day was a poem, and every lovely face was a captive's, to be bought 
 at pleasure. He returned, to become the idol of a fashionable 
 world. His beauty, his wit, his genius, that showed itself, half 
 capriciously, half indolently, in glittering Jeux d'esprit, his gene- 
 rosity, that scattered wealth to whoever asked, the magnificence 
 of his entertainments, — these became the themes of the most 
 exclusive and moat seductive of worlds; and while men cited 
 him to the echo, with women he had only to love and he had 
 won. He was the comet of his horizon, and fashion streamed after 
 him. 
 
 Some romances, and some poems, were traced to him, — dazzling, 
 vivid, full of glowing, if sometimes extravagant, fancy, and of that 
 easy grace which is only heaven-bom in authors or in artists. They 
 were raved of in Paris and London ; he foimd himself twice famous, 
 by literature and by fashion ; and his invitation was far more coui'ted 
 than one to Windsor or the Tuileries : those only conferred rank, his 
 gi\.Ye a far higher and subtler distinction, — fashion. 
 
 For the rest, his fortune was large, his estates of Clarencieux 
 were as noble as any in England, and he had a house in Park Lane, 
 an hotel in the Champs Elysees, a toy villa at Eichmond, and a 
 eummer-palace on the Bosphorus ; and, costly as were both his 
 pleasures and his art-tastes, even those did not cost him so much 
 as a liberality that none ever applied to in vain, a liberality that 
 ^ras the only thing in his life he strove to conceal, and that aided 
 men of talent to a fair field, or lifted them from the slough of 
 narrowed fortunes, by a hand that often was unseen by them, that 
 always gave, when compelled to ^ve openly, with a charm that 
 banished all humiliation from the ^ft. 
 
 Thus was Chandos now. 
 
 How far had he borne out his childish promise of the night in 
 Westminster ? He could not have told himself. He was the most 
 dazzling leader, the most refined voluptuary, the most splendid 
 patron, tbe fmet courtecl aum, of his times ; and in the sort ease, 
 
 
 
i 8 Chandos. 
 
 the lavislied wealth, the unclouded successes of his present, he 
 asked and heeded no more. He was at the height of brilliant 
 renown, and not even a doubled rose-leaf broke his rest. 
 
 ""Who ever said that we cannot love two at once? It is the 
 easiest thing in the world to love half a dozen ; to love but cv". 
 were to show a shocking lack of appreciation of nature's fairest 
 gifts. Constancy is the worst possible compliment a blockhead can 
 pay to the heait sexe," thought Chandos, the next morning, as ho 
 breald'asted, glancing through a pile of scented delicate notes, 
 cream, rose, jpale tmdre, and snow-white, perfumed with varioiis 
 fragrance, but all breathing one tone. Woman had done their 
 uttermost to force him into vanity from his childhood, when queens 
 had petted him. Women always coax their favourites into ruin ii 
 they can. His temper chanced to be such that they had entirely 
 failed. Of his personal beauty Chandos never thought more than 
 he thought of the breath he drew. 
 
 It was twelve o'clock as he took his chocolate in his dressing- 
 room, a chamber fit for a young princess, with its azure hangings, 
 its Eussian cabinets, and its innumerable flowers. Perfumes and 
 female beauty were his two special weaknesses, as they wore 
 Mahomet's. He was a man of pleasure, be it remembered,^ with 
 the heart of a poet and the eyes of a painter, — a combination to 
 make every temptation tenfold more tempting. 
 
 ** Cool you look here ! " cried a resonant, lively, clear voice, tell- 
 ing as a trumpet-call, as that privileged person John Trevenna 
 pushed lightly past a valet and made his way into the chamber. 
 
 " My dear fellow ! Delighted to see you. Come to breakfast ? " 
 
 "Breakfast? Had it hours ago, and done no end of business 
 since. We poor devils, you know, are obliged to walk about the 
 streets in the noonday ; it's only you grands seigneurs who can lie 
 in the shade doing nothing. Peaches, grapes, chocolate, and claret 
 for your breakfast ! How French you are ! The public wouldn't 
 think yo I a safe member of society if they knew you didn't take 
 the orthodox British under-done chop and slice of bacon virtually 
 undistinguishable from shoe-leather. I wonder what you would do 
 if you were a poor man, Ernest ? " 
 
 Chandos laughed and gave a shudder. *Doi glide away in a 
 dose of moi-phia. Poor! I can't /arjcy it, even." 
 
 Trevenna smiled as he tossed himself into the softest lounging- 
 chair. He had known what poverty was, — known it in its ugliest, 
 its blackest, its barest, and had learned to hate it with a loathing, 
 unutterable, and thoroughly justified; for poverty is the grimmest 
 foe the woth.i holds, a serpent that stifles talent ere talent can rise, 
 that blasts genius ere genius can be heard, thnt sows hot hate by a 
 cold hearth, and that tTU*ns the germ of good into the giant of eviL 
 
 "Trevenna," went on Chandos, taking one of his hot-house 
 peaches, "who was that new beauty at the Due's yesterday? I 
 never saw anjrthing lovelier." 
 
 " There are twenty new beauties this season,— in their own esti'- 
 mation, at least ! Be a Uttle more explicit, please." 
 
 " She was with the Ciiesterton. Eeally beautiful ; beautiful as 
 
" La Comete et sa Queue." '9 
 
 a Giorgione. There were plenty of men about her. I should have 
 asked who she was, and have been presented to her, but I had no 
 time to stay, even for her." 
 
 *♦ With the Chesterton ? Why, Ivors's daughter, of course." 
 
 ** Ivors ? Died last year, didn't he ? — of losing the Guineas, they 
 said, to the French colt. Why haven't I seen her before ?" 
 
 " Because she has been in Ivome. She's the thing of the year is 
 my Lady Valencia. You'll see her at the Drawing Room to-morrow," 
 Baid Trevenna. He was a walking court-newsman and fashionable 
 directory, being able to tell you at a second's notice who was at the 
 bottom of the St. Leger scandal about the powder in Etoile's drink- 
 ing-water, what divorces were in train, what amatory passages 
 great ladies confided to their Bramah-locked diaries, and whose 
 loose paper was flying about most awkwardly among the Jews. 
 •* I noticed you looked at her yesterday," he pui'sued : " so did the 
 Countess. She's fearfully jealous of you ! Take care you don't get 
 a note chemically perfumed a la Brinvilliers. I wonder what on 
 earth she would do if you were ever to marry ! " 
 
 ' ' Shrug her pretty shoulders, pity my wife, and console me, to 
 be sure. But I shall never try her. Twenty years hence, perhaps, 
 if I have nothing better to do, and ever see the woman of my 
 
 ideal " 
 
 " That impossible she, 
 Wherever she be. 
 Id meerschaum dreams of fantasie ! * 
 
 praphrased Trevenna. " What a queer idea, to be longing for 
 ideal women when there are all the living ones at your service ! 
 That is preferring the shadow to the substance. What can you 
 want that Flora and all the rest have not ? " 
 
 Chandos laughed, nestling in among the cushions of his sofa at 
 full length. " My dear Trevenna, it would be talking in Ai-abic 
 to you to tell you. Indeed, you'd understand the Sanscrit much 
 quicker, you most material of men." 
 
 "Certainly I am material! A material man dines well and 
 digests weU. A visionary man enjoys his banquet of the soul, and 
 has a deuced deal of neuralgia after it. Which were best ? — 
 LucuUus's cheiTy-trees, or Lucullus's conquests? The victories 
 are no good to anybody now. Asia and Europe have been mapped 
 out again twenty times ; but cherry brandy mU last as long as the 
 world lasts. Conquerors suppUnt each other like mushrooms, but 
 cherry tarts are perennial and eternal as long as gmierations are 
 bom to go to school. Material ! Of course I am. Which enjoyed 
 life best, — your grand summum honumf — Dante, or Falstaff? 
 Milton, or Sir John Suckling ? " 
 
 ** And which does posterity revere ? " 
 
 " Posterity be shot ! If I pick tbe bones of ortolans in comfort 
 while I am aUve, what does it matter to me how people pick my 
 bones after I'm gone ? A dish of truffles or terrapin to tickle my 
 oalate is a deal more to my taste than a wreath of immortdles 
 hung on my sraye. I detest posterity ; ey^nr king hates bis heir ; 
 
lO Chandos. 
 
 but I dearly love a good dinner. If I could choose w&at should 
 become of my bones, I'd have myself made into gelatine ; gela- 
 tine's such a rascally cheat, and assists at such capital banquets, 
 It's the most appropriate final destiny for any human being that 
 was ever devised. But what's the good of my talldng to you ? We 
 look at life through different glasses." 
 
 '♦ Bather ! " 
 
 " A disdainful enough dissyllable. Well, we shall see which is 
 best content of us two, after all, — I, the animal man, or you, the 
 artistic. You've tremendous odds in your favour. I shall deserve 
 great honour if I make any head against you." 
 
 A shadow ]passed slightly over me face of Chandos ; he had the 
 variable and impressionable temperament of a poetic nature, a deep 
 thoughtfulness, even to melancholy, mingled in contrast with the 
 gayest and most nonchalant epicureanism. 
 
 " Content ? at the end ? How is it to be secured ? -ffimilianus 
 led a noble and glorious life, — to fall by an assassin's dagger. Ovid 
 led the gayest and the brightest life, — to go out to the frozen 
 misery of Pannonia. Africanus was a hero, — to be accused oi 
 feteaUng the public money. Petronius was an epicurean, — to die 
 by a lingering torture." 
 
 Trevenna laughed as he took a cigar from a case standing near, 
 lighted it, and rose. 
 
 " Hang Petronius ! It could have been no frm to torment him . 
 the fellow died so game, — wouldn't wince once I As for the end oi 
 the farce we play in, 
 
 "Tis not in mortals to deserve success ; 
 But you'll do more, Sempronius ; you'll command it I* 
 
 I like that mis-quotation. Only * deserve ' success, and I should 
 like to know who'U give you your deserts ! But 1 must go. There 
 are no end of poor devils waiting outside : working authors and 
 working jewellers ; mute, inglorious Miltons, and glorious, talk- 
 ative tailors ; dealers with cracked antiques, and poets with cracked 
 novelties; sculptors with their bronzes, and young Chattertons with 
 
 their brass 1 beg pardon, I forgot! one mustn't laugh at genius, 
 
 even in a shabby coat, here." 
 
 *' No : Le Sage had no coat on in his attic when he refused the 
 millionnaire's bribe. ' Tout compte fait, je suis plus riche que vous, 
 otje refuse !' " 
 
 '* And you think that sublime? to tell the truth and starve? 
 Faugh ! I'd have taken their cheque, and written a ten times more 
 stinging Turcaret afterwards ! But, on my word, Chandos, youi 
 ante-rooms are as thronged as any Chesterfield's or Halifax's of a 
 hundred years ago." 
 
 <* Nonsense ! There is no patronage nowadays. A man makes 
 himself." 
 
 * ' Pardon me, his bank-balance makes him ! If it be heavy enough, 
 it will cover all sins, — intellectual, moral, and grammatical, —and 
 <)oat him as high as heavep Well, what are your command* 
 
*' L-' Comete et sa Queue** 
 
 to-day F I know what to do about securing those genre pictures , 
 and I'm now going to the Corner to see what the mid-day hotting 
 IS for us ; and I sent the cabochon emeralds to Mademoisello Flora, 
 and grudged her them heartily ; and I have seen to the enlargii;:,' 
 of the smoking-room of the Anadyomme. Anything else ? " 
 
 "My dear fellow, no; I think not, I thank you. Unless 
 
 ^hey tell me there are some good things in Delia Eobbia at tbo 
 Vere collection : you might look at them, if you don't mind tl.o 
 trouble; buy, if they are really perfect. And bring me ^\-oi(l 
 round, if you can learn, what houses this daughter of Ivors will 
 show at to-night. I never saw a lovelier face; but there is a 
 quality above beauty that probably she has not. Eahel is not 
 absolutely handsome ; but that woman has such sorcery in her 
 that you could not be ten minutes with her without being m love." 
 
 With which tribute to the great actress's power, Chandos, a con- 
 noisseur in female charms, from those of a Greek grape-girl to 
 those of a Tuileries princess, from the grace of a Bayadere to thr 
 glamour of a Rosiere, resumed his purpose of glancing through 
 the innumerable little amorous notes that accompanied his break- 
 fast, while Trevenna sauntered out, pausing a moment to put in 
 his head at the door — 
 
 ** I lamed my horse over that wi-etched heap of stones in Bolton 
 Elow. May I use one of your horses ? " 
 
 " My dear fellow, what a question! My stables are yours, of 
 course." 
 
 And John Trevenna went out on his morning's work. He callod 
 himself a business-man ; but what his business was, beyond boiog 
 prime minister, master of the horse, and chancellor of the exchequer 
 to Chandos, and knowing all the news before anybody else whispered 
 it, was what was never altogether ascertained. Bo his busines? 
 x^'hat it might, in amusement Trevenna brought his own welcome 
 to every one ; and he entertained Society so well that Society was 
 always ready to entertain him. 
 
 Society, that smooth and sparkling sea, is excessively difficult to 
 navigate ; its surf looks no more than champagne foam, but a thou- 
 sand quicksands and shoals lis beneath; there are breakers ahead 
 for more than half the daintj^ pleasure-boats that skim their horn- 
 upon it ; and the foundered lie by millions, forgotten, five fathoms 
 deep below. The only safe ballast upon it is gold dust ; and il 
 stress of weather come on you it will swaUow you without remorse. 
 Trevenna had none of this ballast ; he had come out to sea in as^' 
 ticklish a cockle-sheU as might be ; he might go down any moment, 
 and he carried no commission, being a sort of nameless, unchartered 
 rover : yet float he did, securely. 
 
 Twelve years before, one hot night at Baden, a penniless young 
 Englishman had lost more than he had in his purse, — had, indeed, 
 in the world ; the bank arrested him ; his prospect for life was to 
 ^anguish in German prisons, the prey of the debts which he could 
 not liquidate and none else would pay for him. For he was alone 
 in life, and had, for aU he knew, not a solitary friend upon the faco 
 of the earth. A boy of twenty, throwing Ms gold about to th« 
 
Chandos 
 
 eiiohaiitress of Play, heard the story, paid the debts, and freed the 
 debtor. The boy was Chandos, the young master of Clareacieux. 
 It was the last dilemma into which astute John Trevenna ever let 
 life betray him ; and it was his first step towards social success. 
 His boy-benefactor was not content with letting his good servicea 
 begin and end at the prison of the duchy : he made the prisoner 
 his guest then and there. He was infinitely amused, too, with a 
 companion sufficiently near his own age to enter into all his 
 pleasures, and who was the first person he had ever met who told 
 him the truth with frank good nature and never annoyed him by 
 flattery. From that day, through Chandos, John Trevenna was 
 welcomed in the World ; and the World soon kept him in it as a 
 sort of Town Triboulet. 
 
 He was a privileged person : every one knows how immense a 
 carte hlanche is given by those words. Chandos was the fashion ; 
 he pleased himself by doing all good services to Trevenna that cir- 
 cumstances would allow of; fttid the world petted Trevenna because 
 Chandos befriended him. He lived so very near the rose that much 
 of the tender dews so lavishly poured down on the king flower fell 
 of necessity upon him. He was often rude, always brusque, sa7is 
 fa^on, sometimes even a little coarse ; but he was so frank, so im- 
 perturbably good-humoured, told stories so admirably, and had 
 such a thorough spice of true wit, that he was as good with wine 
 as anchovies or olives, and men had him with their wine accord- 
 ingly. Was a chateau dull on the shores of Monaco or Baise, or a 
 countiy-house dull in the recesses ; was there a dearth of news in 
 a hot club-room at the fag-end of a season , was the conversation 
 dragging wearily over an aristocratic din»er-table ; or was a duke 
 half dead of ennui in the midst of a great gathering, the bright, 
 laughing face of John Trevenna, with the white teeth glancing in 
 a meriy, honest smile, always fi^esh, never faded, never bored, but 
 always looking, because always feeling, as if life were the pleasant- 
 est comedy that could be played, was the signal of instant relief 
 and of instant amusement. The legions of blue-devils flew before 
 his approach, and no enimi could withstand the tonic of his caustic 
 humour and his incessant mirth. 
 
 Even His Grace of Castlemaine, haughtiest of Garter knights, 
 most hard to please of all Eegency wits,— even that splendid old 
 man, who had set his face against this stray member of society, 
 could not altogether withstand him. 
 
 ** Chandos' homme d'affaires ? An interloper, sir, an adventurer, 
 and I detest adventui-ers :— tell you a first-rate story, make you a 
 first-rate mot, but always have a second king in their sleeve for 
 your ecartS ! Society's a soil you can't weed too vigorously. StiU, 
 a humorous fellow, I must confess ; a clever fellow, — very." 
 
 So John Trevenna had laughed his way into the world, and, 
 laughing, held his own there. No one ever heard the story of the 
 Baden debts from Chandos, but Trevenna openlj^ confessed himself 
 a poor man ; he never teased people with reminding them of it, but 
 staled the fact once for all without disguise. He made a little 
 tnoney on the tmf, and doubled tJiat little now and then by in- 
 
''La Comete et sa Queue.** 4 1 
 
 genious traJBSc here and there in the commercial gambling that the 
 world sanctifies ; but nobody knew this. IIo was simply a man- 
 upon-town. He lived very inexpensively, dining; out eveiy night 
 of his life ; he had no "sdces ; he was an epicure, but that taste lio 
 only indulged at other people's tables ; and he had no weakness for 
 women ■ U you had offered him a beautiful mistress or a dozen of 
 Imperial Tokay, he would without hesitation have taken the 
 Tokay. 
 
 As regarded his intellect, he had talent enough to be anything,— 
 from a jockey to an ambassador, from a head cook to a premier. 
 
 "The Queen of Lilies will be at the Dos Vaux to-night, 
 Chandos," said he, that evening, in the green drawing-room at 
 Park Lane, where, some dozen guests having dined with him, in- 
 cluding S.A.E. the Due de Neuilly, and H.S.H. the Prince Carl of 
 Steinberg, Chandos was now playing at baccarat, half a hundred 
 engagements being thrown over, as chanced inevitably with him 
 every night in the season. Trevenna himself was not playing ; he 
 ne^or touched cards at any game except whist, which he had 
 studied as — what it is — a science. He stood on the hearth-rug, 
 looking on, taking now and then a glass of Moselle or Maraschino 
 from a console near. 
 
 ' ' What a chaiToing name, — The Queen of Lilies ! WTio is she ? " 
 asked his host, having already forgotten the commission he gave. 
 
 "The Queen of Lilies? Ah, she is exquisite! you have not 
 seen her, of course, Ernest?" asked the French prince. "The 
 Laureate gave her the title." 
 
 "In a sonnet, made instantly public by being marked Private. 
 If you want a piece of news to fly over Europe like lightning, 
 whisper it as a secret that would infallibly destroy you if it ever 
 got wind," put in Trevenna, who among princes and peers never 
 could keep his tongue still. 
 
 "But who is she? A new dancer, I hope. We haye nothing 
 good in the coulisses." 
 
 " A dancer ? No ! She is Ivors' daughter." 
 
 "Ah! I remember, I saw her yesterday. The Queen of Lilies, 
 do you call her ? The name is an idyl I " 
 
 "Ah!" said his Grace of Crowndiamonds, with a cross between 
 an oath and a regret. " She is a great deal too handsome ! " 
 
 "Too handsome? How charming a blemish! They generally 
 sin the other way, my dear Crown." 
 
 " Too handsome ; for — she is ice ! " 
 
 "Never find fault with women, old fellow ! We may all of us 
 think that each of those dainty treasures has a flaw somewhere ; 
 but we should never hint a doubt of them, any more than of their 
 Dresden." 
 
 " Though the best Dresden is only soiled earth, just painted and 
 glazed!" broke in Ti-evenna, taking out his watch. "You told 
 me to learn where she went. At nine she dined with the French 
 Ambassador ; at twelve she was at Livingstone House ; at one she 
 was at Lady BelHngham's ; and now, fifty-five minutes past one, 
 sne is at the Countess des Vaux's." 
 
«4 
 
 Chandoi. 
 
 "Do you find out everything, Monsieur Trevenna?" laughed 
 the French due. 
 
 Trevenna looked at him with a certain saucy triumph in his bold 
 Saxon-blue eyes — blue as forget-me-nots, and keen as a knife. 
 
 •* Yes, monseigneur— if I wish." 
 
 The answer was quiet, and, wonderful for him, without a jest ; 
 but the prince turned and gave him a more earnest look than he 
 had ever bestowed on this flaneur, this rodeur of the English clubs. 
 
 " He will be a successful man, a gi'eat man, ten to one, when 
 ftar brilliant Chandos, who has the genius of a Goethe, will have 
 died of dissipation or have killed himself for some mistress's infi- 
 delity," thought the duke, a keen man of the world, while his eyes 
 glanced from the sagacious, indomitable, fresh-coloured face of 
 Trevenna to the delicate, proud, dazzling beauty of Chandos, with 
 the light in his deep-blue eyes and the laughter on his insouciant 
 lips.; 
 
 ' ' We should all of us have been at those places, if your baccarat 
 had not beguiled us, Chandos," said the Comte de la Joie; "but 
 social entertainments are a crying cruelty." 
 
 '* And a great mistake. Society is ruined by 'the roture, which 
 has nothing to recommend its entertainments but the cooking, 
 and has made the cooking the measure of the entertainments. 
 St. Fond's verdict of English banquets remains true to the letter : 
 'lis se saoulerent grandement et se diverti rent moult tristement ! * " 
 
 "Oh, wo all know what you are, Chandos," cried Trevenna. 
 " You'd exchange your own cook — though he is priceless, were it 
 onh'^ for his soups — to be able to eat a dried date with Plato, and 
 would give up White's for the Scipionic circle or the Mermaid 
 evenings ! " 
 
 ' ' Pel haps. Though I admit you are a more practical philosopher 
 than any in Academus, and are 6£i good a companion as LuciUus 
 or Ben Jonson." 
 
 " I hope I am," said Trevenna, complacently. "I bet you the 
 philosophers flavoui'ed their dates, as we do our olives, by dis- 
 cussing Lalage's ankles and the Agora gossip. Scipio talked fine, 
 wo know; LuciHus laughed at him for it, and fine talkers are 
 alwaj's bores ; and as for the Mermaid — Ealeigh whispered wicked 
 things of the maids of honour, and Shakspeare wondered what old 
 Combe would leave him in his will, and Ben joked him about the 
 Crown Inn widow over mulled posset. The Immortals were as 
 mortal as we are, every whit." 
 
 With which Travenna washed down their immortality by a glass 
 of golden water. 
 
 "Shall we all go and criticise this Lily Queen, Chandos ?" asked 
 the Due de Neuilly. " She will not be believed in till you have 
 given her the cordon of your approbation." 
 
 Prince Carl was willing, the baccarat was deserted, and thej 
 went to the crowded rooms of the Countess des Vaux. 
 
 "There she is I" said Neuilly, on the staircase, that was still 
 thronged. 
 
 She was beautiful as a young deer, and had something of tho 
 
** La Comete et sa Queue,** 25 
 
 «tag*8 lofty grace. Her eyes were a deep brown, large, thouglitful, 
 proud, swept by lash.es a shade darker still ; her lips were sweet as 
 naif-opened roses ; her hair, the same hue as her eyes, was di'awn 
 back in soft floating masses from a brow like a Greek antique ; she 
 was very tali, and her form was simply perfect. It was in its fullest 
 loveliness, too, for she had been some years in Eomc, and suc- 
 Gcssivo deaths in her family had kept her long in almost comparative 
 seclusion. 
 
 "You said she was cold! Such beauty as that can never bo 
 passionless," said Chandos. 
 
 As though his voice had reached her thi'ough the long distance 
 that severed them, she turned her head at that moment, and their 
 eyes met. 
 
 Corals, pink and delicate, rivet continents together ; ivy tendrils, 
 that a child may break, hold Norman walls with bonds of iron ; 
 a little ring, a toy of gold, a jeweller's bagatelle, forges chains 
 heavier than the galley-slave's: so a woman's look may fetter a 
 lifetime. 
 
 ** Passionless ! with those eyes ? Impossible I" said Chandos. 
 
 ** Oh, she will have two passions," said Crowndiamonds, dryly — 
 ** two very strong passions — vanity and ambition ! " 
 
 "For shame!" laughed Chandos. "Never be cynical upon 
 women, Crown. It is breaking butterflies upon the wheel, and 
 shooting humming-birds with field-pieces. Well, let the Lily 
 Queen's sins be what they may, she is lovely enough to make us 
 forgive them." 
 
 And ha made his way at last into the rooms with the French and 
 English dukes, to be detained right and left, and make his further 
 way with difficulty into his hostess's presence. 
 
 When he was at all free, and sought to look for the Queen of 
 Lilies, he found that she had left. 
 
 " I shall see her «;t the Drawing-Eoom," thought Chandos, 
 whom too many were ever ready to console, for him ever to be left 
 to regret an absent loveliness. Men of his temperament, the tem- 
 perament of Goethe, are incessantly accused of inconstancy, because 
 the list of their loves is long. On the contrary, they are most con- 
 stant — to their own ideal, which they unceasingly pursue in every 
 form which has its outward semblance. What their dreams long for 
 is not there — in that beautiful shadow that looked so like it, but 
 which was but a transparency, only bright thiough borrowed 
 light; then they cease to love till again they pursue a shadow ; 
 and fools call them libertines. 
 
 That night, or rather in the dawn, Heloi'se, Countess de la Vivarol, 
 looked at her own face in the mirror, while her attendants were 
 taking the sapphires and onyxes from her hair. It was well worth 
 looking at, with its glancing falcon radiance of regard, its inde- 
 scribable witchery of coquetry, and its rich, delicate tints, indepen- 
 dent, as yet, even of pearl-powder. Her mother was the Princesse 
 Lucille Viardort, who had married an English baronet ; her fathei 
 none was ever so bold as to name, — the baronet himself put in no 
 daim for her ; he lived apart from his \dfe, who was a handsome, 
 
^5 Chatidos. 
 
 gunny, good-tempered creature, as happy in the midst of the blander 
 to wliich she gave rise, as a sea-anemone in a rock pool. It was 
 her normal element : the Yiardort, that restless and dominant race 
 who had played at bowls with nothing less than all the rolling 
 diadems of Europe, always had scandalised the world ever since 
 they burst, meteor-like, upon it. AH the Viardort love sovereignty, 
 and get it, though none are bom to it. Heloise, who at sixteen had 
 married the Count Granier de la Yivarol, was not behind her race. 
 She plunged eagerly, up to her lovely throat, in European intrigues, 
 —so eagerly that she was now banished from France. Her lorcl 
 did not foUow her,— there lives not the man who could prefer a 
 wife to Paris,— but allowed her richly, so richly, ^indeed, that she 
 never called him anything worse than *^ce petit drole'' when speak- 
 ing of him in connection with her money-matters. With any other 
 affairs he never came under discussion. 
 
 Before her banishment fi'om Paris, Chandos, at the same time 
 with herself, had been among the First Circle of autumn guests at 
 Compiegne. In the torchlight curees, in the moon-lit terraces, in 
 the palace theatricals, in the forest hunts, she had fascinated him, 
 he had attracted her. M. le Comte was a thoroughly well-bred 
 man, who knew the destinies of husbands, abhorred a scene, and 
 neither sought a duel nor a divorce : besides, he was not at the 
 court. Their love-passages went silvery smooth, and were quite a 
 page out of Boccaccio. Now Madame was disposed to be jealous, 
 and Chandos was a little disposed to be tired. Studies after Boccaccio 
 often end thus, — in bathos. 
 
 To-night she looked at her face in her mirror, and her tiny white 
 teeth clenched like a little lion-dog's. Perhaps the love she had 
 taught mercilessly so often had revenged itself here on its teacher ; 
 perhaps it was but pique that made her so tenacious to keep the 
 sway she had held over the handsomest man of his age ; be the 
 spring love, vanity, passion, or envy, what it would, her eyes glit- 
 tered with a dangerous gleam under her curling lashes, and ehfl 
 muttered, between her set teeth — 
 
 ** if he ever love another, if it be twenty years henc 
 
 CHAPTER m. 
 
 A PRIME MINISTER AT HOME. 
 
 Over and over again John Trevenna had been pressed to take up 
 residence in the stately suites of the Park Lane house ; but this he 
 had always refused. He dined there, lunched there, ordered wliat 
 he chose there, and stayed for months each year at Clarencieux ; 
 but he had his own rooms in town, in a quiet street near the clubs. 
 He liked to retain a distinct personality. Besides, people came to 
 see him here who could never have shown themselves before the 
 porter of the gi-eat leader of fashion ; men with bulldog heads and 
 close-cut hair, known as " sporting gents;" men with the glance 
 f *■ a ferret and the jewellery of Biirlington Arcade, utterly and un- 
 
A Prime Minister at Home. 2} 
 
 mistakably "horsy;" men who always had **a lovely thing clos^ 
 by in the mews, — go in your 'and, and only thirty boys.," to sell, 
 but who traded in many things besides toy terriers; men very 
 soberly dressed, hard-featured, hard-headed members of trades- 
 unions ; men with long floating beards, the look of Burschen, and 
 "artist" written on them for those who ran to read, without the 
 paint-splashes on their coats ; men with clean-shaven faces or white 
 pointed beards, but, shaven or hirsute, Israelites to the bone : all 
 these varieties, and many more came to see Trevenna, who could 
 never have gone into the hall of the fastidious and patrician 
 Ghandos. 
 
 On the surface, Trevenna nad but one sot of Mends, his aristo- 
 cratic acquaintances of the clubs and the Clarendon dinners ; suh 
 rosa, this bright Bohemian was thoroughly versed in every phase 
 and, indeed, every sink of London life and of human nature. It 
 was "his way" to know everybody, — it might be of use some day; 
 he went now — in the same spirit of restless activity and indomitable 
 perseverance which had made him as a boy ask the meaning of 
 every machine and the tricks of every trade that he passed— to the 
 probing of every problem and the cementing of every brick in life. 
 The multitudes whom he knew were countless ; the histories he had 
 fatliomed were unrecordablo. Men were the pawns, knights, 
 bishops, and castles of Trevenna's chess, and he set himself to win 
 the game with them, never neglecting the smallest, for a pawn 
 sometimes gives checkmate. 
 
 Trevenna sat now at breakfast early in the morning, — half-past 
 eight, indeed, — though he had not been in bed until four. He slept 
 the sound, sweet, peaceful sleep of a child, and very little of that 
 profound repose sufficed for him. His rooms were scrupulously 
 neat, but bare of everything approaching art or decoration ; Chandoe 
 could not have lived a day in them, if he had been a poor man ; 
 condemned to them, he would have hung an engraving here, or a 
 cast from the antique there, that would have gone some way to 
 redeem them in their useful ugliness. Trevenna was utterly indif- 
 ferent to that ugliness ; as far as his eyes went, he would have been 
 as happy in a gaiTet as in a palace. 
 
 His breakfast was only coffee and a chop; he exercised the strictest 
 economy in his life. It was not, to be sure, very painful to him ; 
 for he had the run of all the wealthiest houses in England, and was 
 welcomed to every table. Still, it was significant of the man that, 
 well as he liked aU goui-mets' delicacies, he never by any chance 
 squandered money on them, and if he had to go without them from 
 year's end to year's end, never would have done. Naturally he 
 was very self-indulgent, but he had schooled himself into consider- 
 able control. 
 
 The coffee was something rough, the chop was something tough, 
 — English cookery pure ; but Trevenna, who would know to a T 
 what was wanting in the flavour of a white sauce at the best club in 
 Pall MaU, and who could appreciate every finest shade in the most 
 masterly art of the Park Lane chef, took both chop and coffee with- 
 out a murmur. In the first place, he had the i(ood appetite of a 
 
28 Chandvs. 
 
 thorougnly healthy and vigorous constitution ; in the second, he 
 would compensate himself by the daintiest and most delicious of noon 
 dejeuners at Chandos' house. 
 
 While he ate and drank he was looking at some memoranda, and 
 talking to a man before him,— a man who stood before him as an 
 inferior before his employer ; a tall man, lean, venerable, saturnine, 
 tvith iron-grey hair that floated on his shoulders like a patriarch, 
 and down his chest in a wa\4ng beard,— a man in his sixtieth year, 
 with his shoulders a little bowed, and his hands lightly clasped in 
 
 front of him. .,,,„« •,- -. 
 
 This was Ignatius Mathias, of the firm of Tmdall & Oo., which 
 firm was woU known Citywards, in a little, dark, crooked, stifling 
 lane, -vhere their dusky, sullen-looking, rickety door was only too 
 familiar to men in the Guards, men in Middle Temple, men in the 
 Commons, and men in nothing at all but a fashionable reputation 
 and a cloud of debts. Tindall & Co. dealt in damaged paper 
 chiefly ; they bought up most of the awkward things that floated in 
 the market, and, it was said, were making a ^eat deal of money. 
 This was but guess-work, however , for the httle grimy den of an 
 office told no secrets, however many^ it guarded; and who was 
 Tindall, and who were Co., was a thing never known; the only 
 person ever seen, ever found there as responsible, was Ignatius 
 Mathias, a Castilian Jew, and most people considered that he was 
 the Firm ; they never were surer on this point than when he shook 
 his head gravely and said he •* could but act on his instructions^ 
 his principal had been very positive : his principal could not wait." 
 
 But, be this as it might, Ignatius Mathias was no common Jew 
 lender; he never sought to palm off a miserable home-smoked 
 Bembrandt, a cracked violin christened a Straduarius,_ or a case of 
 wretched marsala called madeira, on a customer, Tindall & Co. 
 had none of these tricks ; they simply did business, and if they did 
 it in a very severe manner, if when they had sucked their orange 
 diy they tlu^ew the peel away, something cruelly, into the mud, 
 they still only did business thoroughly legitimately, thoroughly 
 strictly. Their customers might curse them with terrible bitter- 
 ness, as the head and root of their destruction, but they could never 
 legally complain of them. 
 
 '« Sit down, Mathias ; sit down, and pour yourseK out a cup of 
 coffee," said Trevenna. " I'll run my eves through these papers ; 
 and when you have drunk your coffee, be able to account me the 
 receipts of the month. I know what they should be ; we'll se« 
 what they are." 
 
 •• You will find them correct, sir," said Mathias, meekly ; " and i 
 need no coffee, I thank you." 
 
 Neither did he take the proffered seat ; he remained standing, 
 his dark brooding eyes dwelling on the parchment-bound receipt- 
 book open before him. 
 
 The papers supplied the sauce which was wanting to Trevenna's 
 underdone mutton ; as he glanced through them, his humorous 
 lips laughed silently every now and then, and his light-blue, cloud- 
 less, dauntless eyes eparUed ' ,^th a suppressed amu«»inent. These 
 
A Prime Minister at Home. 
 
 39 
 
 papers, and their like, brought him as keen a pleasure and excita- 
 tion as other men find in a fox-hunt or a deer-drive ; it was the 
 chase,^ and without the fatigue of dashing over bullfinches or 
 watching in sloppy weather for the quarry ; it was a hattue, into 
 which all the game was driven ready to hand,— through and 
 through under the fire of the guns. The beaters had all the trouble ; 
 the marksman all the sport. 
 
 ••Chittenden:— dined with him at the Star and Garter last 
 Thursday : we'll soon stop those dinners, my boy. Bertie Braba- 
 zon : — oh ! he's going to be married to the Eosefleck heiress : better 
 let him alone. Grey Graeme :— who would have thc-ght of hh 
 being in Queer Street ? Jemmy Hau^hton :— little fellow,— bar- 
 rister,— got a bishop for an uncle,— bishop will bleed,— won't see 
 him screwed ; Church hates scandals, — especially when it's in lawn 
 
 sleeves. Talbot O'Moore — Wareley— Belminster Very good,— 
 
 very good," murmured Trevenna over details of paper floating 
 about town, that those whom it otherwise concerned would have 
 rather characterised, on the contrary, as very bad. He meditated 
 a little while over the memoranda, — amused meditation that washed 
 down the flavourless coarseness of his breakfast ; then he thrust 
 his breakfast-cup awry, pocketed the lists, and went steadily to 
 business. Not that he looked grave, dull, or absorbed even in 
 that ; he was simply bright, intelligent, and alert, as he was in a 
 ducal smoking-room , but Ignatius Mathias knew that those saga- 
 cious, sparkling glances would have discovered the minutest flaw 
 in his finance, and that the man who listened so lightly, with a 
 briar-wood pipe between his lips, and his elbows resting on the 
 mantel-piece, would have been dowii on him like lightning at the 
 slightest attempt to blind or to cheat one who was keener even 
 than that keen Israelite. 
 
 ••All right," said Trevenna, as, having come to the completion 
 of his monthly accounts, the Portuguese closed his book and waited 
 for instructions. Trevenna never wasted words over business, 
 rapidly as he chatted over dinner-tables and in club-rooms ; and 
 Ignatius and he understood each other. •• You take care to keep 
 Tindall & Co. dark, eh P " 
 
 ••Every care, sir." 
 
 " Encourage them to think you Tindall & Co. by the charming 
 aad expressive character of your denial, your inflexible austerity, 
 your constant references to your principal. The more you refer to 
 him, you know, the more they'll be sure that he doesn't exist. 
 F-yerybody takes it for granted that a Jew lies." 
 
 There was a cheerful, easy serenity in the tone, as though utter-* 
 *og the pleasantest compliment possible, that made them sound a]f 
 the more cutting, all the more heartless ; yet they were spoken with 
 ench happy indifference. 
 
 The Jew's dark and hollow cheek flushed slightly : he bent his 
 head. 
 
 ••I observe aU your commands, sir." 
 
 ** Of course you do," said Trevenna, carelessly. "The first yoH 
 dldobcy will set the poUce after Young Hopeful. TeU him it'a ik? 
 
30 Chandos. 
 
 use to hide: I know he's at that miserable little Black Forest 
 village now. He may just as well come and walk about London. 
 He can't escape me. When I want him, I shall put my hand on 
 him if he buries himself under a Brazilian forest ; you know that." 
 
 A change came over the unmovable, impassive form of the Cas- 
 tilian, — a change that shook him suddenly from head to foot, as a 
 reed trembles in the wind. What little blood there was in his dark, 
 worn face forsook it ; a look of hunted and terrible anguish came 
 Into his eyes. With the long-suffering patience of his race, no out- 
 burst of passion or of enti-eaty escaped lum ; but his lips were dry as 
 bones as he m.urmured faintly, * ' Sir, sir, be merciful ! I servo 
 faithfully ; I will give my body night and day to redeem the lad's 
 sin." 
 
 Trevenna laughed lightly. 
 
 *' Tliat's the compact. Keep it, and I don't touch the boy," he 
 said curtly. 
 
 " You are very good, sir." 
 
 " You may go now," said Trevenna, with a nod. " You knoT 
 what to do in aU cases ; and don't forget to put the screw on to 
 Fotheringay at once. The next time come a little earlier, — seven 
 or so ; if I'm in bed, I'll see you. It's rather dangerous when people 
 are about ; your visits might get blown on. All my people — the dainty 
 gentlemen — are never up till noonday, it's true ; but their servants 
 might be about. At aU events, ' safe bind, safe find.' They might 
 wonder what I borrowed money of you for ; it would hurt my cha- 
 racter." 
 
 He laughed gaily and merrily over the words ; they tickled his 
 fancy. The Jew bowed reverentially to him, gathered up his 
 papers, and left the room. 
 
 " The best organisations are sure to have a flaw," thought Tre- 
 venna, leaning there still with his elbows on the mantel-piece, 
 smoking meditatively. "Now, there is that Jew; marvellous 
 clever fellow, shi-ewd, got head enough to be a finance -minister ; 
 grind a man as well as anybody can ; take you in most neatly ; a 
 magnificent machine altogether for cheating, and hard as a flint ; 
 and yet that Jew's such a fool over his worthless young rascal of a 
 son that you can turn him round your finger through it. There 
 he's as soft as an idiot and as blind as a bat. Incomprehensible 
 that a man can let such trash creep into him ! It's very odd, men 
 have so many weaknesses; I don't think I've got one." 
 
 He had one; but, like most men, he did not imagine it was 
 weakness, and in truth it was not a very tender one, though it was 
 very dominant 
 
 "Not at home to all the dukes in the world, my dear, till 
 twelve," said he, as the maid-servant of his lodgings (he kept no 
 man-servant of any kind, except a miniature ti^er to hang on 
 behind his tilbury) cleared away the breakfast-seiwice. That done, 
 Trevenna sat down to a table strewn with blue-books, books on 
 political economy, books on population and taxation, books ou 
 government, books English, French, Germai^. and American, ali 
 tending to tbe eame dirootfon of study. 
 
A Prime Minuter at Home, 31 
 
 He certainly did not need to ponder over the statistics of nations 
 to conduct his affairs with Ignatius Mathias, however intricate 
 they were, and he had received every benefit that a first-rate educa- 
 tion can confer. But he was one of those wise men who remember 
 that the longest and most learned life, spent aright, never ceases 
 to learn till its last breath is di-awn ; and, moreover, far away in 
 limitless perspective in Trevenna's ambitions lay an arena whera 
 the victory is not to the strong, nor the race to the swift, but to the 
 ablest tactician in such rare instances as it departs from the heredi- 
 '<;ary winners, — an arena where adventurers are excluded as utterly 
 as men of the foreign states, though they were princes, were ex- 
 cluded from the games of EUs. So for thi'ee hours and a halt that 
 idle, gossiping flaneur ^ that town -jester whom the toT^Ti called 
 Chandos* Chicot, plunged himself deep into political subtleties, and 
 the science of statecraft, and the close logic of finance, bringing to 
 their problems a head which grew only clearer the tougher the 
 problem it clenched, the deeper the ground it explored. ^ Hard 
 study was as thorough a reveliy to Trevenna as plunging into the 
 cool, living water is to a great swimmer. Like the swimmer, his 
 heart beat joyously as he dived only to rise a^ain the fi-esher and 
 the bolder. Like the swimmer, his soul rose triumphant as he felt 
 and he measured his sti'ength. 
 
 Twelve struck. 
 
 He, who was as punctual as if he were made by clockwork, got 
 up, changed his dress in ten minutes, and rang for his tilbury to 
 be brought round. " I will, indemnify myself for my ascetic chop 
 in Park Lane, but I will see how the wind is blowing for Sii 
 Galahad at the Corner first," thought Trevenna ; and thither he 
 went. 
 
 The mid-day betting was eager, for it was within a month of the 
 Ascot week. "The gentlemen" were barely out yet; but the 
 bock-makers were mustered in full force, from the small specu- 
 lators, who usually did a little quiet business only in trotting- 
 matches and quiet handicaps, to the great gamblers of the ring, 
 who took noblemen's odds in thousands, and netted as much in 
 lucky hits as those other great gamblers of the 'Change and the 
 Bourse whom a world that frowns on the Heath smiles on so 
 benignly when they are successful. All the vast genus, flashy, 
 slangy, sharp as needles, with a language of their own, a literatuie 
 of their own, a world of their own, whom marquises and earls are 
 eagerly familiar with in the levelling atmosphere of the Lawn an.d 
 the Downs, and give a distant frigid nod to, at the uttermost, if 
 they pass them in Piccadilly, were there ; and amidst them, in the 
 terrific babel of raised voices, Trevenna pushed his way,--as : 
 pushed it everjrwhere. 
 
 Sir Galahad was higher than ever in public favour. All the 
 fihrewdest men were aSraid to touch him. The Clarencieux stiblea 
 had been famous since the Eegency. Trevenna bet but very little 
 usually, he was known to have but little money to risk ; but men 
 were eager to have his opinion of the favourite. None bad such 
 opportunities of telling to a nicety the poiutS; powers, gtay, and 
 
3 a Chandos. 
 
 pace of the Clarencieux horse in its prime. He gave the opinion 
 frankly enough. Sir Galahad was the finest horse of the year, and 
 to his mind would all but walk over the course. The opinion went 
 for a great deal, especially from one who was a master of stable- 
 Bcience, but who was no betting man himself. He had laid heavy 
 bets in Chandos' name, backing the favourite for considerable sums 
 so long as any could be found rash enough to take them. 
 
 There was one little, spare, red-wigged, foxy, quiet man who 
 ofiered bets on a chestnut — Diadem, an outsider, unknown and 
 unnoticed, generally looked on by the touts as fiddle-headed and 
 weedy. The colt had trained in an obscure stable northward, and 
 was a •' colt " only to his breeders and owners in familiar parlance, 
 having been known as a Plater in northern autumn-meetings, 
 though having earned no sort of renown anj'-where. 
 
 When Trevenna left Tattersall's, this little leg, a worn-out, shat- 
 tered creature, who had ruined himself over one St. Leger and 
 collapsed under it, was walking slowly out in the sun, having 
 backed nothing except this ill-conditioned colt. Trevenna paused 
 a second by him : 
 
 " Drop Diadem's name, or they'll be smelling a rat," he mur- 
 mured. "Take the field against the favourite with any fools 
 you like, as widely as you can." 
 
 " Wonderfully dark we have kept that chestnut. He's so ugly ! 
 that's the treasure of him ; and we've trained him so close, and 
 roped him so cleverly, that the sharpest tout that ever lay in a 
 ditch all night to catch a morning gallop doesn't guess what that 
 precious awkward-looking brute can do, thought Trevenna, as he 
 got into his tilbury. 
 
 And he went to eat a second breakfast with Chandos. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE QUEEN OF LIUES. 
 
 Lady Valencia St. Albans stood beside one of the palms in the 
 conservatory of her sister Lady Chesterton's house. It was the 
 day of the Drawing-Room ; she waited for her sister, with her 
 white train carelessly caught over one arm, and a shower of lace 
 and silk fiilling to the ground and trailing there in a perfumy 
 billowy cloud. She was a picture perfect as the eye could ask or 
 the heart could conceive in the glowing colours of the blossoms 
 round ; and a painter would have given her to his canvas as the 
 OrdeUa or the Evadne of Fletcher's dramas in all their sweet and 
 delicate grace, or, if passion could pass over those luminous, 
 thoughtful eyes, as Vittoria Corrombona in her royal and imperious 
 beauty. 
 
 Passion had never troubled their stillness as yet. Some touch 
 of calamity had indeed cast a shadow on her ; the pressure of im- 
 providence and of impoverishment had sent her father to the Roman 
 fur that she had breathed so long^ and his decease had left her, for 
 
The Queen of Liltes. _53 
 
 an mvVs daughter, almost penniless, while his title and estates had 
 passed away to a distant heir male. Her poverty was bitter, 
 terribly bitter, to the Queen of Lilies, daughter of the once splendid 
 house of Ivors. She was little better than dependent on the gene- 
 rosity of her brother-in-law, Lord Chesterton, and the natui-e in 
 her was born for the magnificence of dominion, the consciousness 
 of inalienable power. 
 
 She stood now under the emied, hanging loaves of the palms, 
 their pale Eastern green contrasting, as though she had been posed 
 there by a painter's skill, with the exquisite colouring of her own 
 beauty, and the snowy, trailing robes that fell about her. Of that 
 beauty she was too proud to be vain ; she was simply conscious 
 of it as an empress is conscious of the extent of the sway of her 
 sceptre. 
 
 *' We're rather early," said her sister, a brusque, abrupt, showy 
 woman. ** Who sent you those flowers ? Clydesmore ? Admirable 
 person, veiy admirable; great pity he's such a bore. How well 
 you look, Valencia ! On ne pouvait mieux. Chandos will be at the 
 palace, you know, this morning." 
 
 "Are you sure?" 
 
 *' Perfectly. He is everywhere. It is the most difficult thing 
 to secure his presence at any time. He is so fastidious, too I He 
 has sent me a most courtly note, however. I wrote to say you 
 had just arrived from Eome, and that I would bring you with 
 me to his ball to-night ; and there is his answer. It is an immense 
 deal fi-om him!" 
 
 Lady Valencia took the white, scented paper her sister tossed to 
 her, and a faint, gratified flush passed over the pure fairness of her 
 face ; her lips parted with a slight smile. She had heard so much 
 of the writer — of his fame, of his conquests, of his homage to 
 beauty, of his omnipotence in fashion. 
 
 ** He is very rich, is he not ?" 
 
 "Eich!" said Lady Chesterton. "A thousand men are richj 
 money's made so fast in these days. Chandos is very much more 
 than only rich. He could make us all eat acorns and drink cider, 
 if he chose to set the fashion of it. He rules the ton entirely, and 
 lives far more en roi than some royalties we know." 
 
 "Yes; I heai-d that in Eome. Men spoke of being 'friends 
 with Chandos,' as they might speak of being invited to the court." 
 
 " Chandos gives much greater fashion than the palace ever 
 confers. Bores and parvenus go there, but they never visit /iim," 
 responded Lady Chesterton, with an impressive accentuation almost 
 thrilling. "Nothing will ever make him many, you know. He 
 would hold it in absolute horror. The Princess Marie of Albe is 
 terribly in love with him — almost dying, they say ; very beautiful 
 creature, she is too, and would bring a magnificent dower." 
 
 The lily Queen smiled slightly, her thoughtful, haJf-haughty 
 smile. She knew, as though they were uttered aloud, the motives 
 of her sister's little detour into this little sketch of sentiment. 
 
 "With so much distinction, he could be raised to the peerage 
 any d^, of ^urse?" she inquired, half abssaUir, di'awing to her 
 
34 Chan a OS. 
 
 the deep purple bells of an Oriental plant. She declined to pursue 
 the more poetic track, yet she looked a poem herself. 
 
 *' Eaised ! " echoed her sister. " My dear, he would call it any- 
 thing but raised The Chandos were Marquises of ClarencieuXj 
 ?ou remember, until the title was attaindered in the Forty-Five, 
 'hilip Chandos, the premier, could have had it restored at any 
 time, of course; but he invariably declined. Ernest Chandos is 
 like his father ; he would not accept a peerage." 
 
 "■ Not a new one. But he might revive his own." 
 
 "He might, of course; nothing would be refused to him; they 
 would be glad to have him in the Lords. But he has often replied 
 that, like his father, he declines it. He has some peculiar notions, 
 you know ; there has been some oath or other taken in the faniily, 
 I believe, about it— great nonsense, of course— utter Quixotism. 
 But men of genius are Quixotic : it never does to contradict them. 
 They are like that mare of mine. Million : give them their head, 
 and they will be sweet-tempered enough — take you over some 
 very queer places sometimes, to be sure, but still tolerably even 
 goers; but once give them a check, they rear and throw you 
 directly. I never disagree with authors, any more than with 
 maniacs." 
 
 With which expression of her compassionate consideration for 
 genius. Lady Chesterton, who was very well known acrofcs^ the 
 grass- countries and with the buckhounds, shook out her violet 
 velvets and black Spanish laces, well content with the warning 
 she had adi'oitly conveyed to her sister never to disagree with the 
 eminent leader of society, whom women idolised as they idolised 
 Jermyn and Grammont in the splendid days of Hampton Court. 
 
 The Queen of Lilies did not answer ; she stood silent, looid^ig 
 still at the note she held, as though the paper could teU her of its 
 writer, while her other hand ruthlessly drew the purple bells of 
 the flower down in a shower at her feet. 
 
 '* Is he so much spoilt, then ? Can he not bear contradiction ? " 
 she said at length. 
 
 " My dear, he has never tried it," retorted her sister, with some 
 petulance. " Bear it ! of course he would bear it : he is the first 
 gentleman in Europe: but the woman who teased him with it 
 would never see him again. He is so used to being followed, he 
 would not know what it was to be opposed. Ho is the most gi-ace- 
 ful, the mo»8t brilliant, the most generous person in the world : at 
 the same tame he is the most difficult to please. Guess, yourself, 
 whether a man whose ideal is Lucrece is very Hkely to be easily 
 enslaved. But it is time to go." 
 
 And having cast that arrow to hit her sister's vanity or pique 
 her pride, as it might happen. Lady Chesterton floated out of the 
 drawing-rooms, followed by the Lily Queen, who laid the note 
 down with a lingering farewell glance as she swept away. She 
 had heard much of its writer some years past in Eome, although 
 they had never met ; and she had seen his eyes give her an 
 eloquent mute homage the night before — eyes that it waa said 
 looked on no woman without awakening love* 
 
The Queen of Lilies. j s 
 
 ** How beautiful his face is ! " she thouglit, recalling the night 
 
 Inst passed, and that momentary glance of one long famous to 
 ler by reputation. ** Lord Clarencieux — Marquis of Clarencieux : 
 — it is a fine title." 
 
 "Going to the Drawing-Room?" said Trevenna, entering one 
 of the morning-rooms in Park Lane to take his meditated second 
 breakfast. Chandos was taking his first, the chamber scented and 
 chaded, and cooled with rose-water, and his attendants, Georgian 
 and Circassian girls he had bought in the East and appointed to 
 his household. The world had been a little scandalised at thoss 
 lovely slaves ; but Chandos had soon converted his friends to his 
 own views regarding them. **Why have men to wait on you," 
 he had argued, " when you can have women— soft of foot, soft of 
 voice, and charming to look at? To take your chocolate from 
 James or Adolphe is no gratification at all ; to take it fi'om Leila or 
 Zelma is a gi-eat one." And his pretty Easterns were certainly 
 irresistible living proofs of the force of his arguments. They were 
 fluttering about him now with silver trays of coffee, sweetmeats, 
 liqueurs, and fi'uit, dressed in theii- Oriental costume, and serving 
 him with most loving obedience. A French duke and two or three 
 Guardsmen were breakfasting with him, plajdng a lansquenet 
 at noon, from which they had just risen. Men were very fond 
 of coming to take a cup of chocolate from those charming young 
 odalisques. 
 
 •* Cards at noon, Chandos ?" cried Trevenna, as he sauntered in 
 the room, regardless alike of the presence of fashionable men who 
 looked coldly on him, and of the channs of the Turkish attendants. 
 '* Fie ! fie ! The only legitimate gaming before dinner is the sanc- 
 tioned and sanctified swindling done upon 'Change." 
 
 '* Business is holier than pleasure, I suppose," laughed Chandos. 
 "Business ruins a host of others; pleasure only ruins yourself: 
 of course the world legitimates the first. How are you to-day ? 
 Yes, I am going to the Drawing-Eoom ; I am going to see the 
 Queen of Lilies. I will endure the crush and ennui of St. James's 
 for her. Take something to eat, Trevenna ?" 
 
 "All too light and too late for me. I'm a John Bull," said 
 Trevenna, taking a glass of cui'a9oa, nevertheless, with soma 
 Strasbourg ^ai/. " Have you heard the last news of Lady Caral- 
 lynne?" 
 
 " No. Gone oflP with poor Bodon ? " 
 
 " Precisely. Went off with him from Liliingstone House last 
 night.^ Never missed till just now. Carallynne's started in pursuit, 
 swearing to shoot poor Bo dead. Dare say he will, too : * bon sang 
 ne peut mentir ; ' it must break the criminal law rather thau 
 break its word." 
 
 " Hard upon Bo," murmured Cosmo Grenvil of the Coldstreams. 
 " She made such fast running on him, and a fellow can't always 
 say no." 
 
 " Well, the mischiefs her mother's fault ; she made her marry a 
 man she hated," said Chandos, drawing one of th© bright braids 
 
56 Chandos, 
 
 of the Circassian near him through his hand. "Poor Cat! he ia 
 quite a Vantique: that sort of revenge has gone out with hair- 
 powder, highwaymen, patches, and cock-fighting." 
 
 '* Beauty of a commercial age : we can turn damaged honour 
 and broken carriage-panels into money, nowadays," said Tre- 
 vonna. " Carallynno's rococo. Liberty all, say I. If my wife runs 
 away with a penniless hussar, why the douce am I to make a 
 fuss about it ? I think / should be the gainer far and away." 
 
 *' Noblesse ohlige" said Grenvil, softly. "Car don't like his 
 name stained; Old-World prejudice; great bosh, of course, and 
 Mr. Trevenna can't understand the weakness — very natuially." 
 
 ** Mr. Trevenna doesn't understand it, Lord Cosmo. Why stand- 
 ing up to have an ounce of lead shot into you across a hanclkorchiel 
 should be considered to atone to you for another man's having the 
 amusement of making love to your property, is beyond my prat- 
 tical comprehension. If I were a bellicose fellow, now, I should 
 call you out for that pretty speech." 
 
 *' I only go out with my equals," yawned the handsome Guards- 
 man, indolently tui*ning to resume his flirtation in Turkish with a 
 Georgian. 
 
 *' Whore do you ever find them— for insolence ?" said Trevenna, 
 ti'anquilly. 
 
 ** Clearly hit, Cos," laughed Chandos, to arrest whatever sharper 
 words might have ensued. *' So Lady Car has gone off at last ! I 
 declare, Trevenna, you are the most industrious chiffonnier for col- 
 lecting naughty stories that ever existed. You must come across 
 Bome very dirty tatters sometimes. I do believe you know every- 
 thing haM an hour before it happens." 
 
 '* Scandals are like dandelion-seeds," said Trevenna, with the 
 brevity of an Ecclosiasticus. '* A breath scatters them to the four 
 winds of heaven; but they are arrow-headed, and stick, where 
 they fall, and bring forth and multiply fourfold." 
 
 '* And scandals and dandelions are both only weeds that are 
 relished by nothing but donkeys." 
 
 "You know nothing at all about either. You don't want 
 Bcandal for your j^astime, nor taraxacum for your liver ; but when 
 you are septuagenarian, dyspeptic, and bored, you'll be glad of the 
 Bseistance of both." 
 
 "My dear fellow, what unimaginable horrors you suggest! 
 Whenever I feel the days of darkness coming, I shall gently 
 retire from existence in a warm bath, or breathe in chloroform 
 from a bouquet of heliotrope. The world is a very pleasant club ; 
 but, if once it got dull, take youi- name off the books. Nothing 
 easier ; and your friends won't dine the worse." 
 
 " Eather the better, if your suicide is piquant. Something to 
 oensui-e, flavours your cuiTy better than all the cayenne. We 
 never enjoy our entre-mets so thoroughly as when we miu-mur over 
 it, ' Very sad I terribly wrong ! ' Apropos of censure, even the 
 Jly-per critic won't censure you : there are three columns of superb 
 lity^,ation to Lucrece." 
 
 *<= Never road critiques, mjr dear Trevenna,— ^ 
 
The Queen of Lilies. 
 
 * Snch is onr pride, our folly, or onr eruj 
 That only those who cannot write, review !' 
 
 I am Bony to hear thej praise me. I fear, after all, then, I must 
 write very badly. Keviewers puff bad books, as ladies praise plain 
 women." 
 
 " To show their own superiority : very likely. However, whether 
 you please it or not, Jim Jocelyn is so lavish of his milk and honey 
 that the Hypercritic will have to atone for his weakness by chopping 
 up novels in vinegar all the rest of the season. I am sm-e he will 
 expect to dine with you at Eichmond." 
 
 " Indeed ! Then he may continue to — expect it. I neither buy 
 a Boswell with a houillahaisse, nor play Maecenas b^ giving a mate- 
 lote. Praise hired with a pdtS t what a droll state of literature I " 
 
 "Not at all. Everything's bought and sold, from the dust of 
 the cinder-hoaps to the favour of Heaven — which last little trifle ia 
 bid for with all sorts of things, from a piece of plate for the rector, 
 to a new church for St. Paul, it being considered that the Creator 
 of the Universe is peculiarly gratified by small pepper-^ots in 
 silver, and big pepper-pots in stucco, as propitiatory and dedicatory 
 offerings. Pooh ! everybody's bribed. The only blunder ever made 
 is in the bribe not being suited to the recipient." 
 
 '* You have suffered from that ? " 
 
 Trevenna, the imperturbable, laughed as Gronvil dealt him that 
 hit d la Talleyrand, murmuring the question in his silkiest, sleepiest 
 tone. The Guardsman was a dead foe to the Adventurer. 
 
 •* I wish I had, Lord Cosmo. I should like to be bribed right 
 and left. It would show I was a * man of position.' When the 
 world slips douceurs into your pocket, things are going very well 
 with you. I can't fancy a more conclusive proof of your success 
 than a host of bribers trying to buy you. But, to be sure, 
 the aristocratic prejudice is in favour of owing money, not of 
 making it." 
 
 Which hit the ball back again to his adversary, Cos Grenvil 
 being in debt for everything, from the thousands with which he 
 had paid his Spring Meeting losses to the fifty-guinea dressing- 
 box he had bought for a pretty rosiere the day before, as he 
 brought her over from Paris. 
 
 *' Let that fellow alone, Cos," laughed Chandos, to avert the 
 stormy element which seemed to threaten the serenity of his 
 breakfast-party. " Trevenna will beat us all with his tongue, if 
 we tempt him to try conclusions. He should be a Chancellor of 
 the Exchequer or a cheap John ; I am not quite clear which as 
 yet." 
 
 "Identically the same things!" cried Trevenna. "The only 
 difference is the scale they are on ; one talks from the bench, and 
 the other from the benches ; one cheapens tins, and the other 
 cheapens taxes ; one has a salve for an incurable disease, and the 
 other a salve for the national debt ; one rounds his periods to put 
 off a watch that won't go, and the other to cover a deficit that 
 won't close ; but they radically drive the same trade, and both 
 are 'successful if the spavined mare trots out looking sound, and 
 
3$ Chandos. 
 
 tlie people pay up. * Look what I save you,' cry Cheap John and 
 Chancellor; and while they shout their economics, they pocket 
 their shillings. Ah, if I were sure I could bamboozle a Tillage, J 
 ehould know I was qualified to make up a Budget." 
 
 "And my belief is you could do either or both," laughed 
 Chandos, as he rose with a farewell caress of his hand to the bright 
 braids of gazoUe-eyed Leila. " Are you all going ? To be sure 1 
 — the Drawing-lloom, I had forgotten it : we shall be late as it is. 
 Au revoir, then, till we meet in a crush. Nothing would take me 
 to that hottest, dullest, drowsiest, frowsiest, and least courtly of 
 courts if it wero not for our lovely — what is her name ? — Queen of 
 the Lilies." 
 
 And Chandos, who glittered at the Tuileries and at Vienna as 
 magnificently as Villiers ever had done before him, and who had a 
 court of his own to which no courts could give splendour, went to 
 dress for St. James's as his guests left the chamber, pausing a 
 moment himself beside Trevenna. 
 
 " Are you coming ? " 
 
 **I? No! Mr. John Trevenna is not an elegant name for a 
 court-list. It would look very hourgeois and bare beside the 
 patrician stateliness of Chandos of Clarencieux." 
 
 For a moment he spoke almost with a snarl, the genuine, bright 
 serenity of his mirthful good temper failing for an instant. Sur- 
 prised, Chandos laid his hand on his shoulder and looked at him. 
 
 " Nonsense ! what is the matter with your name ? It is a very 
 good one, and I would bet much that you will one day make it 
 a known one. Why should you not attend at the palace to-day ? 
 I presented you years ago." 
 
 "Yes, you did, mon prince" laughed Trevenna, whose ill- 
 humour could not last longer than twenty seconds. " You took 
 me out of prison, and you introduced me to court: — what an 
 antithesis I No ! I don't want to come. I always feel so dread- 
 fully like a butler in silk stockings and tights ; and I don't care 
 about creeping in at the tail of a list in the morning papers. It's 
 not elevating to your vanity to bring up the rear, like the spiders 
 in a child's procession of Noah's Ark animals." 
 
 "Poor fellow! He has braina enough to be premier, and he 
 is nothing but a penniless man-on-the-town," thought Chandos, 
 as he entered the dressing-room and put himself in the hands of 
 his body-servants to dress for the coui't. "A better temper never 
 breathed, but it sometimes galls him, I dare say, not to occupy a 
 higher place. I have been too selfish about him : giving him 
 money and giving him dinners is not enough to deal fairly by 
 him : he ought to be put forward. I will try and get him into the 
 House. I could have a pocket-borough for him from some of 
 them ; and he could be trusted to make his own way there. His 
 style would suit St. Stephen's ; he would always be pungent, and 
 never be metaphorical ; he is too good a scholar to ofi'end theii 
 taste, and too shrewd a tactician to alarm them with genius." 
 
 And revolving plans for the welfai'e and advancement of his 
 fidm Achates, Chandos dresaed and went down to hie carriage. 
 
The Quc\n oj Lilies. |^ 
 
 Trevenna looked out of one of the windows, and watcnea the gay 
 elegance of the equipage as it swept away. 
 
 "Go to the palace, my brilliant courtier," he said to himself, 
 while his teeth set like the teeth of a bulldog, strong, fine, white 
 teeth, that clenched close. '* Men as graceful and as glittering 
 even as you went by the dozens to Versailles in their lace and 
 their diamonds, to end their days behind the bars of La Force or 
 on the red throne of the guillotine. My dainty gentlemen, my 
 gallant aristocrats, my gilded butterflies ! * Eira bien qui rira le 
 dernier.' Do you think I amuse you all now not to use you all 
 by-and-by ? We're not at the end of the comedy yet. I am your 
 Triboulet, your Chicot, whose wit must never tire and whose blood 
 must never boil; but I may outwit you yet under the cap and 
 bells. * La vengeance eat hoiteuse ; elle vient a jpas lents ; mais — elle 
 vient ! ' And what a comfort that is ! " 
 
 This was the solitary weakness in his virile and energetic nature 
 — a nature otherwise strong as bronze and unyielding as granite — 
 this envy, intense to passion, morbid to womanishness, vivid to 
 exaggeration of all these symbols, appanages, and privileges of 
 rank. Chiefly, of course, he envied them for that of which they 
 were the insignia and the producer; but, beyond this, he envied 
 them themselves, envied every trifle of their distinction with as 
 acute and as feminine a jealousy as ever rankled in a woman's 
 heart for the baubles and the flatteries she cannot attain. It was 
 a weakness, and one curiously and deeply graven into his tem- 
 perament, in all other respects eo bright, so shrewd, so practical, 
 and so dauntless. 
 
 As he turned from the casement, the retriever. Beau Sire, stand- 
 ing near, fixed his brown eyes on him and growled a fierce, short 
 growl of defiance. Trevenna looked at him and laughed. 
 
 "Curse you, dog! You needn't be jealous of me, Beau Sire* 
 I don't love your master." 
 
 Nevertheless, Trevenna rang the bell, and ordered some of the 
 best clarets of Beau Sire's master to be brought for his own drink- 
 mg, and took his luncheon in solitude. He ofi'ered Beau Sire the 
 dog's favourite honne bouche, the liver-wing of a pheasant; but 
 Beau Sire showed his teeth, and refused to touch it, with a superb 
 canine scorn. 
 
 " You've more discrimination than your master, you Lavater 
 imotig retrievers ! You know his foes : he doesn't," laughed Tre- 
 venna, while he finished his luncheon with the finer appreciation 
 of Dubosc's talent, and of the oily perfections of the hock and the 
 mareschino, because of his previous asceticism over a mutton-chop. 
 
 "You are safe for the Cup, Ernest?" said his Grao6 of Castle- 
 maine, as they encountered each other in the press of the reception- 
 room at the palace. The duke was a very old man, but he was as 
 superb a gentleman as any in Europe, a gallant soldier, a splendid 
 noble stni, with his lion-like mane of silken silver hair and his 
 blue and flashing eyes, as he stood now in his Field-Marshal's 
 uniform, with the Garter ribbon crossing lua chest, and stan' And 
 
4© Chandos. 
 
 orders innuinerable on his heart, above the scars of breast- WotmcLf 
 gained at Yittoria and in many a cayalry- charge in Spain. 
 
 *• Safe ? Oh, yes. There is nothing in any of the establishments 
 to be looked at beside Galahad," answered Chandos, between 
 whom and the duke there was always a sincere and cordial aflfec- 
 tion. They were aHke in many things. 
 
 * * No : at least it must be kept very dark if there be. By the 
 way, there was a man — a thorough scamp, but a very good judge 
 of a horse — offering veiy widely at Tattersall's to-day on a chestnut. 
 Diadem. I know the fellow : he got inft) difficulties years ago, at 
 the time of the White Duchess scandal : she was carted out stiff as 
 a stake on the St. Leger morning, and it was always suspected he 
 poisoned her ; but he would know what he was about, and ho 
 offered long odds on the chestnut." 
 
 "Diadem?" repeated Chandos, whoso eyes were glancing over 
 the many-coloured sea about him of feathers, jewels, floating trains, 
 military orders, and heavy epaulets, to seek out the Queen of the 
 Ijilies. " Diadem ? You mean an outsider, entered by a York- 
 shire man ? My dear duke, he is the most wretched animal, I 
 hear. Trevenna tells me he could not win in a Consolation 
 scramble." 
 
 *• Humph! may-be. You never scarcely go to the Corner 
 yourself? " 
 
 '* Very rarely. I like to keep up the honour of the Clarencieux 
 establishment ; but of all abominations the slang of the stable is 
 the most tedious. Trevenna manages all that for me, you know." 
 
 ** Yes, I know. Clever fellow, very clever; but I never liked 
 him. Nothing but an adventurer." 
 
 ** For shame, duke ! You should not use that word. It is the 
 last resource of mediocrity when it can find nothing worse to cast 
 against excellence." 
 
 ' ' Believe in people, my dear Chandos ; believe in them ! You 
 will find it so profitable ! " murmured his Grace, as the press of 
 the crowd swept them asunder. 
 
 From the Guardsmen, who, to their own discomfiture, had 
 formed the escort, and were drawn up with their troop outside to 
 catch but fugitive glimpses of fair faces as the carriages passed, 
 \o the ministers in the Throne-room, whose thoughts were usually 
 too prosaically bent on questions of supply or votes of want of 
 confidence to turn much to these vanities, there was one predomi- 
 nant and heightened expectation — the sight of the Queen of the 
 Lilies. Eumour had long floated from Eome of her extraordinary 
 loveliness ; poets had sung it, sculptors immortalised it, and artists 
 adored it there. Chandos now waited for it impatiently where he 
 stood among the circle of princes, peers, and statesmen about the 
 throne. His loves had been countless, always successful, never 
 embittered, intensely impassioned while they lasted, swiftly 
 awakened, and often as rapidly inconstant. The very facility with 
 which his vows were heard made them as easily broken : he loved 
 passionately, but he loved so many ! The eyes that he had last 
 looked on were always the stars that guided him. A woman 
 
The Queen of Lilies, 41 
 
 HO'olci VGiy liktely have told him that he had noyer really loved: 
 he would hsvo told her that he had loved a thousand times. And 
 he would have been more right than she. Love is no more eternal 
 than the roses, but, like the roses, it renews with every summer 
 sun in as fair a fragrance as it bloomed before. 
 
 Women only rebel against this truth because their season of the 
 roses — their youth — is so short. 
 
 At last the delicate white robes swept by him ; thrown out from 
 the maze of gorgeous colour, of gloaming gold, of diamonds and 
 sapphires, of pui'ples fit for Titian, of rubies fit for Eubens, of 
 azure, of scarlet, of amber, filling the chamber, like a cameo from 
 the deep hues of an illuminated background, the Athenian -like 
 fairness of her face glanced once more on his sight : she was close 
 to him as she swept towards the throne. 
 
 *' She is fit, herself, for the throne of the Caesars," he thought, 
 as he followed the slow soft movements of her imperial griice. 
 Once again their eyes met , she saw him where he stood among 
 the royal and titled groups about the dais, and a slight flush rose 
 over her brow — a flush that, if it betrayed her, was hidden as she 
 bowed her proud young head before her sovereign, yet not hidden 
 80 soon but that he caught it. 
 
 ** Passionless ! They must wrong her; they have not known 
 how to stir her heart," he thought, as he followed her with his 
 glance still as she passed onv.ard and out of the Throne-room. 
 Her remembrance haunted him in the palace : for the first time he 
 thrust such a remembrance away. "Bagatelle! " he thought, as 
 ho threw himself back among his carriage-cushions and drove to 
 Flora de TOrme's. " Let me keep to beauty that I can win at no 
 cost but a set of emeralds or a toy- villa : the payment for hers 
 would be far too dear. Heloiso was right." 
 
 "Brilliant afiair ! More like a/e^e a la BSgence than anything 
 else. How the money goes! The cost of one of those nights 
 would buy me a seat in the House," thought Trevenna that evening, 
 as he passed up the staircase of Park Lane. 
 
 The dinners and suppers of the Eichmond villa, in all their 
 gaiety and extravagance, were not more famous with Anonyma 
 and her sisterhood, than the entertainments to the aristocratic 
 worlds with which Chandos, in Paris and Naples, revived all the 
 splendour of both Regencies, and outshone in his own houses the 
 gatherings of imperial courts, were celebrated in that creme de la 
 creme which alone were summoned to them. The fetes that he 
 gave abroad he gave in England, startUng society with their 
 novelty and their magnificence. Chandos showed that the Art of 
 Pleasure was not dead. To-night all that was highest in both the 
 French and English aristocracies came to a costume-ball that was 
 also at pleasure a masked-ball, and professedly in imitation of 
 the Veglione of Florentine carnivals. 
 
 Trevenna paused a moment near the entrance of the reception- 
 rooms, where he could see both the constantly increasing throng 
 that ascended the stairs and the long perspective of the chambers 
 
beyoad, that ended in the dark palm-groups, the mo-sdes of tropic 
 Qowers, and the columns and sheets of glancing water foaming m 
 the light of the winter-garden in the distance. Masked himself, 
 and dressed simply in a dark violet domino, he looked down 
 through the pageant of colour, fused into one rich glow by the 
 lustre that streamed from a hundred chandeliers, from a thousand 
 points of illumination, till his eyes found and rested on Chandos, 
 who, with the famed Clarencieux diamonds glittering at every 
 point of his costume, as Edward the Fourth, stood far off in an 
 inner drawing-room, receiving his guests as they arrived. 
 
 "Ah, my White Eose ! " said Trevenna to himself, "how the 
 women love you, and how the world loves you, and how lightly 
 you wear your crown ! Edward himself had not brighter gold in his 
 bair, nor fairer loves to his fancy. Well, you have some Plantagenet 
 blood, they say, in that sangre azul of your gentleman's veins, and 
 the Plantagenets were always dazzling and — doomed." 
 
 With which historical reminiscence drifting through his thoughts, 
 Trevenna drew himself a little back, farther into the shelter of an 
 alcove filled with broad-leaved Mexican plants, and studied the 
 scene at his leisure. There was a certain savage envy and a certain 
 luscious satisfaction mingled together in the contemplation. 
 
 ' ' The fools that go to see comedies, and read novels and satires, 
 while they can look on at Life ! " thought Trevenna, who was 
 never weary of watching that mingling of comedy and melodrama, 
 though his genius was rather the loquacious than the meditative. 
 ' ' I can't pictui-e greater fun than to have been a weather-wise 
 philosopher who knew what Vesuvius was going to do, told nobody 
 anything, but took a stroll through Pompeii on the last day, while 
 his skiff waited for him in the bay. Fancy seeing the misers 
 clutch their gold, while he knew they'd offer it all for bare life in 
 an hour ; the lovers swear to love for eternity, while he knew their 
 lips would be cold before night ; the bakers put the loaves in the 
 oven, while he knew nobody would ever take them out; the 
 epicures order their prandium, while he knew their mouths would 
 be chokefuU of ashes ; the throngs pour into the circus, laughing 
 and eager, while he knew they poured into their grave ; the city 
 gay in the sunshine, while he knew that the lava flood woufd 
 swamp it all before sunset. That would have been a comedy 
 worth seeing. Well, I can fancy it a Httle. My graceful Pom- 
 peian, who know nothing but the rose-wrf^aths of Agl^p and 
 Astarte, how will you like the stones and the dust in your teeth ? " 
 
 And Trevenna, pausing a moment to enjoy to its fullest the 
 classical tableau he had called up in his mind's eye, and looking 
 still at the friend whom he had alternately apostrophised as Plan- 
 tagenet and Pompeian, left his alcove and his reverie to mingle 
 with the titled crowd in his dark domino and his close Venetian 
 mask, casting an epigram here, a scandal there, a suspicion in this 
 place, a slander in that, blowing away a reputation as lightly as 
 thistle-down, and sowing a seed of disunion between two lives that 
 loved, with dexterous whispers under his disguise that could never 
 be traced, and as amused a malice in the employment as any Siamese 
 
The Queen of Lilies. ^3 
 
 monkey when lie swings himself by his tail from bough to bough 
 to proToke the crocodiles to exasperation. True, as monkey may 
 get eaten for his fun, so Trevenna might get found out for his 
 pastime ; but, to both monkey and man, the minimum of danger 
 with the maximum of mischief made a temptation that was irre- 
 sistible. Trevenna had been the most mischievous boy that ever 
 tormented tom-cats ; he was now the most mischievous wit that 
 over tormented mankind. 
 
 He was a moral man ; he had no vices ; he had only one weak- 
 ness — ^he hated humanity. 
 
 *' How extravagant you are, Ernest ! " said the Duke of Castle 
 maine. *' Do you think these people love you any the better for 
 All you throw away on them, eh ? " 
 
 " Love me ? Well, the fairer section do, I hope." 
 
 The Duke gave another little growl to himself as he brushed a 
 moth off his broad blue ribbon. 
 
 "Ah ! women were always the ruin of your race and of mine: 
 you have the weakness from both sides, Ernest. There was your 
 father " 
 
 "Who was a deucedly proud man, wasn't he, duke?" asked 
 Trevenna, with scant ceremony, as he came up by Castlemaine's 
 side, without his mask now, and having glided into a blue domino, 
 that his gunpowder- whispers might not be traced to him. 
 
 The Duke looked down on him fi-om the tower of his height, 
 scarce bent more than when he was a Colonel of cavalry at 
 Salamanca. 
 
 "Proud? Perhaps so, sir. Adventui-ers thought him so. He 
 put down impudence wherever he met with it. It is a pity he is 
 not alive now." 
 
 "To put nie down? I understand, duke," laughed Trevenna, 
 impervious to satire, and impenetrable even to a cut direct, who 
 caught every bullet sent against him, gaily and coui'ageously, and 
 played with it unharmed as a conjurer will. (What magic has the 
 conjurer ? None ; but he has one trick more than the world that he 
 baffles.) " Ah! I can't let myself be put down ; I'm like a cork 
 or an outrigger ; aU my safety lies in my buoyancy. I have no 
 ballast; I must float as I can. Storms sink ships of the line, and 
 spare straws." 
 
 "Yes, sir, rubbish floats generally, I believe," said his Grace, 
 grimly, turning his back on him as hs took out his snuff-box, 
 enamelled by Pettitot and given him by Charles Dix. Trevenna 
 bowed as low as though the silver-haired Sabreur had paid him a 
 compliment and had not turned his back on him. 
 
 " I accept your Grace's prophecy. Eubbish floats ; / shall float. 
 And when I am at the top of the wave, won't every one caU my 
 dirtiest pebbles fine pearls ? " 
 
 " I think he will float," munnured the Duke, passing outward 
 through the rooms to the noiseless, shut-off, luxurious chamber 
 dedicated to cards, which had an altar in Chandos' house, as if 
 they were its Penates. " Sort of man to do well anywhere ; be a 
 privileged wit in a palace, and chief demagogue in a revolution ; 
 
44 Chandos, 
 
 be merry in a bagne, and give a pat an8"wer if he were tried for 
 his life ; hold his own in a cabinet, and thrive in the bush. A 
 clever fellow, an audacious fellow, a most marvellous, impudent 
 fellow." 
 
 ** An insufferable fellow! I wish Chandos wotud not give him 
 the run of the house, and the run of the town, as he does," said my 
 Lord of Morohampton, wending his way also to the card-rooms. 
 " The man has no idea of his place." 
 
 " I think he has only too good a one: he imagines it to be — 
 everywhere. But the fellow will do well. He plays so admirable 
 a game at whist ; leads trumps in the bold French manner, which 
 has a great deal to be said for it ; has an astonishing recuperative 
 power ; if one play will not serve, changes his attack and defence 
 with amazing address, and does more with a wretched hand than 
 half the players in the clubs do with a good one. A man who can 
 
 Elay whist like that could command a kingdom ; he has learnt to 
 e ready for every position and for every emergency. Still, with 
 you, I don't like him," said his Grace, entering the card-room to 
 devote himself to his favourite science at guinea points, where, 
 despite his inherent aversion to Trevenna, he would have been 
 willing to have that inimitable master of tho rubber for a partner. 
 
 The Duke was quite right, that a man who has trained his intel- 
 lect to perfection in whist has trained it to be capable of achieving 
 anything that the world could offer. A campaign does not need 
 more combination ; a cabinet does not require more address ; an 
 astronomer-royal does not solve finer problems; a continental 
 diplomatist does not prove greater tact. Trevenna had laid out 
 tho time he spent over its green table even more profitably for the 
 ripening and refining of his intelligence than in the hours he gave 
 to his blue-books ; and the Duke's eulogy was but just. 
 
 His rooms were nearly full, but Chandos still glanced every now 
 lind then impatiently towards the entrance-doors that opened in 
 the distance to the staircase. Eyes that might well claim to be 
 load-stars wooed him through coquettish Venetian masks, and 
 faces too fair for that envious disguise met his gaze wherever it 
 turned. On his ear at that moment was the silvery ring of La 
 Vivarol's gay raillery, and at his side was that bright exile of the 
 Tuileries, fluttering her sapphire-studded wings as a Fille des Feiix, 
 Still ever and again his eyes turned towards tho entrance as he 
 moved among his guests, and suddenly a new look glanced into 
 Jhein. She who held him captive at that moment saw that look, 
 and knew it well. She had seen it lighten for her in the forests of 
 Compiegne when the summer moon had streamed down through 
 the leaves on a royal hunting-party sweeping through the glades 
 to the mellow music of hunting-horns, and they had lingered 
 behind while tho bridles dropped on their horses' necks, and only 
 the wooing of soft words broke the silence as the hoofs sank noise- 
 lessly in the deep thyme-tangled grasses. 
 
 She knew the look of old, and followed it. It rested on the 
 Queen of Lilies. 
 
 If that poetic loveliness had been fair in the morning light, it 
 
The Queen of Lilies. 45 
 
 was fai faii'er now. By a delicate flattery to her host the Lily 
 Queen had chosen as her impersonation the role of his own Lucrece, 
 a Byzantine Greek ; and her dress, half Eastern, glowed with the 
 brightness of Oriental hues, while the snow-white barracan floated 
 round her like a cloud, and Byzantine jewels gleamed upon her 
 bosom and her hair — jewels that had seen the Court of the Com- 
 meni and the sack of Dandolo — jewels that had once, perhaps, 
 been on the proud, false brow of the Imperial Irene. 
 
 La Vivarol looked, and did not underrate one in whom she 
 foresaw her rival. 
 
 "Ah, there is your living Lucrece! It must be charming to 
 sketch characters and find them come to life." 
 
 Chandos lost the ironic and malicious contempt with which 
 jealousy subtiloly tipped the tone of the words, as, leaving the 
 Countess to the homage of the maskers about her, he did for the 
 Queen of Lilies what he had not done for any other— passed out 
 of the inner drawing-room, where he received his guests, and 
 advanced to meet the impersonation of his Lucrece. 
 
 That moment was fatal to him — that moment in which she came 
 on his sight as startling as though magic had summoned the living 
 shape of his own fancies and breathed the breath of existence into 
 the thoughts of his poem. He could never now see her as she was ; 
 he would see in her his own ideal, not asking whether she only 
 resembled it as the jeweller's lily with petals of pearl and leaves 
 of emerald, which gleams equally bright in every hand, resembles 
 the forest-lily with its perfume and purity, growing fair and free 
 under the sunshine of heaven, which dies under one ungentle 
 and alien touch. 
 
 The lilies may be alike, leaf for leaf, beauty for beauty, but the 
 fragrance is breathed but from one. 
 
 "Necromancers of old summoned the dead; you have done 
 more. Lady Valencia, you have caught and incarnated an idler's 
 dream. How can he ever thank you ? " he said, later on, as he 
 led her into the winter- garden, where the light was subdued after 
 the glitter of the salons, and the hum of the ball with the strains of 
 the music were only half heard, and through the arching aisles of 
 palm and exotics his Circassian attendants noiselessly flitted like 
 so many bright-hued birds. 
 
 She smiled, while a new lustre came into the thoughtful splen- 
 dour of her eyes. Her heart was moved— or her pride. 
 
 ** I must rather thank you that you do not rebuke me for being 
 too rash. I assui-e you that I feared my own temerity." 
 
 ** What fear could you have, save out of pity for others? My 
 fairest fancies of Lucrece are embodied now — perhaps only too well. 
 What made you divine so entirely the woman I dreamt of ? She 
 only floated dimly even through my thoughts, until I saw her 
 to-night." 
 
 "Hush! That is the language of compliment. I have heard 
 how delicately and how dangerously you will flatter." 
 
 "Indeed, no: you have heard wrongly. I never flatter. But 
 there are some — you are one of them — to whom the simplest 
 
^ Chandos. 
 
 words of truth must needs sound the words of an exaggerated 
 homage." 
 
 All love in Chandos had been quickly roused, rather from the 
 senses and the fancy than the heart, and roused for those to whom 
 there was a royal road, pursued at no heavier penalty than some 
 slight entanglement. That this royal road could not avail with 
 the Queen of Lilies chilled her charm, yet heightened it, as it lay 
 like a light but unyielding rein, checking the admiration she 
 roused in him, yet not checking it so much but that she enchained 
 his attention while she remained in his rooms, while the bright 
 eyes of his neglected Fille de3 Feux^ kept dangerous account of the 
 lese-majeste. 
 
 La Yivarol fluttered her golden wings, and waltzed as though 
 they really bore her, bird-like, through the air, and flirted with her 
 most glittering coquetries ; but she noted every glance that was 
 given to another, and treasured the trifles of each slight infidelity. 
 
 If a Viardort, a court- coquette, a woman of the world, an 
 aristocrat, could be guilty of so much weakness, she had loved 
 Chandos — loved the brilliance of the eyes that looked into hers 
 under the purple vine -shadows — loved the melody of the voice 
 that had lingered on her ear in the orange- alleys of Fontainebleau 
 —loved him if only because so many loved him in vain. And far 
 more than her heart was involved in his allegiance ; a thing far 
 dearer to her, far closer and more precious to all women — her 
 vanity. 
 
 If any one had talked to the pretty, worldly, pampered, and 
 little- scrupulous Countess of fidelity, she would have satirised him 
 mercilessly for such provinciality, and would have asked him 
 where he had lived that he thought the vows of the soft religion 
 eternal. She was infidelity itself, and held to the right divine of 
 caprice; talk of "for ever," and she would yawn with ennui; 
 appeal to her reason, and she would cordially assent to the truth 
 that " nous sommes bien aises que Ton devienne infidele pour 
 nous degager de notre fidelite." But, alas for the consistency of 
 fair philosophers ! Madame applied her theories to all lovers except 
 her own, and, while she was eloquent on the ridicule and the 
 weariness of constancy, held inconstancy to herself as the darkest 
 of treason. 
 
 La Yivarol, whose breviary was Eochefoucauld, and whose pre- 
 cursor was Montespan, philosophised inimitably on the rights of 
 inconstancy, but was none the less prepared to avenge and to 
 resent with all the force of a Corsican vendetta any homage that 
 should dare wander from her. 
 
 And to-night she was openly, visibly, unmistakably neglected. 
 The gleam of those antique Byzantine jewels was the light that he 
 followed. In this new loveliness, so rich in its colouring, so proud 
 in its cast, yet delicate as the fairest thought of a sculptor when 
 rendered into the purity of the marble, he saw the portraiture of 
 an ideal, half idly, half passionately cast into words in the work 
 he called Lucrece, that had been chiefly wi'itten in hot, dreamy 
 dajs in the syringa and tasilica-scented air of his summer palace 
 
Tlie Queen of Lilies. 47 
 
 on the Bosphorus, and had caught in it all the voluptuous colour, 
 
 all the mystical_ enchantment, all the splendida vitia of glow and 
 of fancy, that still belong to the mere name of the East. She was 
 no longer the beauty of the season to him ; she was the incarnation 
 of his own most golden and most treasured fancies. Side by side 
 in his temperament with the nature of the voluptuary was the 
 heart of the poet. She appealed to, and tempted, both. Since the 
 days of his first loves, felt and whispered under Oriental stars to 
 antelope-eyed Georgians, none had had so vivid a charm as this 
 soft yet imperial beauty, who came to him in the guise of his 
 heroine. And he let the world see it. 
 
 **If Madame live twenty years, Chandos, she wiU never forgive 
 you to-night," whispered Trevenna, in passing, as his host ascended 
 the^ staircase, having escorted the Lady Valencia to her carriage, 
 while a crowd of glittering costumes and maskers followed her 
 footsteps, — a ceremonial he never showed except to those of blood 
 royal. 
 
 '' Forgive me ! "What have I done ? " 
 
 "What! O most innocent Lovelace, what serene sublimity of 
 ignorance! You have piqued a jealous woman, trh-cJier ; and 
 he who does that mi^ht as well have sat down upon a barrel of 
 gunpowder : it is much the less fatal combustible of the two." 
 
 '* Nonsense ! We are none of us jealous now : everybody is too 
 languid and too well bred." 
 
 Chandos laughed, and passed on into the throng of his courtly 
 maskers to seek the golden wings and falcon eyes of his Uege lady, 
 and make his peace with her, as far as it could be made without 
 offending her more deeply by showing her a suspicion that the 
 peace had ever been broken. 
 
 _ Trevenna looked after him, watching the flash of the jewels on 
 his di-ess, and the careless grace of Ms movements as he passed 
 through the groups of his drawing-rooms ; and Trevenna's eyes 
 wandered downward through the blaze of light, and the wilderness 
 of clustered flowers, along the whole line of the marble stairs with 
 their broad scarlet carpeting into the depths of the hall, where 
 at the farthest end, with the lustre from two giant candelabra 
 full upon it, was the statue of the great minister, Philip Chandos. 
 
 His glance wandered from the living man, with the living flash 
 of the rose-diamonds about him like so many points of sunlight, to 
 rest upon the cold, haughty serenity of power that was spoken in 
 the attitude of the marble limbs and the traits of the marble 
 features in that likeness of the dead. 
 
 And he smiled a little. 
 
 ''Beaux seigneurs,'" hQ said, softly and low to himself, "there 
 may be games at which you will not win. Ah, my great Chandos, 
 how you stand there in your marble pride as if you could lord it over 
 us all still ! and a stone-mason's hammer could knock you to pieces 
 now ! Sic transit gloria mundi. Your darHng Ernest is a brilliant 
 man; you have your wish; but we may sing the old <f!'.;--aw 
 over him too, before very long. And what will the wond care ioi 
 him then ? " 
 
48 Chandos, 
 
 With wHcli inquiry, mutely addressed in self-communion to the 
 Btatuo where it stood in the flood of light and maze of exotics m 
 the great hall below, Trevenna went down-stairs and out to hia 
 night-cab as the spring morning broke in its earliest hours. 
 
 Ho looked back as he waited a second in the portico for the cab 
 to make its way up to him. The music came on his ear from the 
 distant ball-room, and as he glanced backward at the hall and 
 staircase, with its bronzes, marbles, malachites, jasper, gold and 
 silver candelabra, and clusters of blossom and of broad-leaved 
 Southern shrubs, while the scarlet of the laced liveries gleamed 
 through the boughs and made it like one of the palace-antechamber 
 scenes of Paul Veronese's canvas, the statue rose white, calm, regal 
 in its attitude of command, haughty as had been the life of which 
 it was the mute and breathless symbol. 
 
 <* Curse you ! " he muttered in his teeth, while the laugh passed 
 off his face and the mirth out of his eyes. *' Curse you living, 
 and curse you dead ! I will be paid, like Shylock, with a pound of 
 flesh cut from the heart, — ^from the heart of your brilliant darling. 
 And your power cannot play the part of Portia and stop me ; for 
 you are dead, mon ministre /" 
 
 And with that valediction to the dwelling across whoso threshold 
 he was ever welcomed and to whose board he was ever bidden, 
 Trevenna passed down the steps and di'ove away in the grey of tho 
 morning. 
 
 ( '- - .: 
 
 CHAPTEE V. 
 
 When his guests had left, and all the costumes that had glit- 
 tered through his salons had dispersed, some half-dozen men, hia 
 most especial friends, remained, and in a cabinet de peinture,^ hung 
 chiefly with French pictures of the eighteenth century, while the 
 Circassians brought them wines and liqueui'S, sat down to Trente 
 et Quarante, half of them taking the bank and half the table. It 
 was a customary termination of Chandos' parties, and was at least 
 an admirable stimulant for sweeping away too lingering memories 
 of beauty that might have appeared there. 
 
 The Chandos of Clarencieux had always been famed for their 
 love of play, from the days that they shook the dice with 
 Charles the Second, or threw a main before supper at Choisy with 
 Louis and Eichelieu and Soubise. But his love of cards, however 
 great it might be, had not cost their present representative «o much 
 as another trait in his nature, i.e. that he loved men and trusted 
 them with an absolute and undoubting faith. 
 
 The Tr&nteet Quaranteio. the little picture-cabinet was too beguil- 
 ing to be quickly left ; the gold changed hands like lightning, not 
 gomg less quickly for the iced hock and the claret and seltzer that 
 washed it down, and the gay passages with the pretty Easterns 
 that interrupted it. It was past six in the morning when the Duo 
 
* T7ie Many Years of Fain." 49 
 
 Orvale broke up the bank and gave the signal for departure, he 
 with Chandos having been the chiof losers. The latter cared only 
 for the gay excitement of hazard ; when the game was over, 
 whether it had been favourable to him or not, he cared not ono 
 8ti aw. Generous to great excess, he never heeded the loss of money, 
 as, it is true, he had never learned the value of it. 
 
 As he went through the corridors to his own chamber, after hie 
 guests had at last loft him, tojtake a few hours' sleep in the opening 
 day, the deep, rich, melaucholy roll of organ-notes, hushed by closed 
 doors, but pealing the Tantum Ergo, caught his ear in the silence. 
 Music had been a passion with him from his infancy ; wealth had 
 enabled him to indulge the passion to the fuU, and its strains drew 
 him towards it now. 
 
 "Lulli is beginning a new day while we are going to bed," 
 he thought, as he turned down a short passage and opened the door 
 that shut in the melody. The daylight in the chamber looked 
 strangely white and pure and subdued after the glare of the myriad 
 gas and wax lights ; and his form, with the rich silks, laces, and 
 velvets of the Edward-the-Fourth dress, and the sparkle of the 
 Clarencieux diamonds, looked as strange upon the threshold of this 
 quiet and antique room, — a room almost like an oratory in the 
 midst of the luxurious palatial Park Lane house, with its splendour, 
 its crowds, its dissipations, and its unending gaieties. The apart- 
 ment was long, lighted by two windows, through which the 
 just-arisen sun poured in, and the antique shape of the walnut- 
 wood furniture, the ebony music and reading-desks, and the carved 
 ivory Christ above a table in a recess, gave it the look of a religious 
 retreat, especially as at the farther end stood an organ, with its 
 gilded tubes glistening against the dark walnut of its case, while 
 trom its chords there swelled the harmony of the great Sacramental 
 Hymn. 
 
 The musician was a man ot five or six-and-twenty, whose head 
 had the spiritual beauty of Shelley's ; the features fair and delicate 
 to attenuation ; the eyes large, dark, and lustrous ; the mouth 
 very perfect, both in form and expression ; the whole face of 
 singular patience and singular exaltation. His lower limbs were 
 aU-but useless, they were slightly paralysed and much crippled, 
 and his shoulders were bowed with a marked but in no way repul- 
 sive deformity. Music grand as Beethoven ever dreamed or Pasta 
 ever sang woke from his genius into life. But in the ways of 
 the world Guide Lulli was unlearned as a child ; for the labours of 
 earth he was as helpless as any bird whose wings are broken. 
 Men would have called him a half-witted fool; in the days of 
 Alcuin or of Hildebrand he would have been held a saint ; simply, 
 he was but a cripple and an enthusiast, whom nature had cruelly 
 maltreated, but whom genius had divinely recompensed. 
 
 At the opening of the door he tuined, and a radiation of pleasure 
 broke like sunlight over his face, while into his eyes came the 
 glorious look of love and of fidelity that beams for us in the clea? 
 brown noble eyes of a dog. 
 
 H© strove to rise, — to him a matter of so slow an^l painful Ofj 
 
 E 
 
^o Chandos, 
 
 effort. Before he could do so, Chandos crossed the room lightly 
 and swiftly, and laid his hands on the musician's shoulders with a 
 kind and almost caressing gesture. 
 
 ** Ah, Lulli ! you are awake and employed before I have yetheen 
 in bed. You shame me here with your flood of sunlight. No ! do 
 not rise; do not leave off ; go on with the Tantum Ergo while 1 
 listen. It is a grand hymn to the day." 
 
 Lulli looked at him stilL with that loving, reverent, grateful look 
 of a dog's deathless fidelity. 
 
 * ' Monseigneur, the sound of your voice to me is like the sound 
 of water to the thirsty in a desert place," he said, simply, in sweet, 
 soft, Southern French, giving, in earnest veneration to his host and 
 master, the title that Trevenna often gave in jest. 
 
 Chandos smiled on him, — a sunlit, generous smile, gentle as a 
 woman's. 
 
 "And so is your music to me ' so there is no debt on either side. 
 Goon." 
 
 "My life is one long debt to you God will pay it to you : I 
 atiJQT can." 
 
 The words were heartfelt, and his eyes, looking upward, still 
 uttered them with still more eloquence. Contrast more forcible 
 than these, as they were now together, could scarcely have been 
 found in the width of the world. The attenuated and enfeebled 
 cripple, with his useless limbs, his bowed shoulders, and his Hfe 
 worn with physical suffering that bound him like a captive and 
 robbed him of all the power and the joy of existence, beside 
 the splendid grace of the man who stood above him, in a strength 
 too perfect for dissipation to leave the slightest trace of weariness 
 upon it, and with a beauty dazzling as a woman's, fresh from every 
 pleasure of the sight or sense, and full of all the proudest ambitions, 
 the richest enjoyments, and the most careless insGuciance of a 
 superb manhood and a cloudless fortune. A contrast more start- 
 ling or, for one, more bitter could not have been placed side by 
 side. But there was no envy here. The loyal gratitude of Lulli 
 had no jealous taint upon it that could have made him, even for 
 one moment, see anything save gladness and gentleness in the 
 gracious presence of the man to whom he owed more than 
 existence. He could no more have felt envy to his benefactor than 
 he could have taken up a knife and stabbed him. 
 
 Six years before, travelling through southern Spain, an accident 
 to his carriage had detained Chandos at a waysido inn in the very 
 heart of the Yega. WhiHng away the tedium of such detention 
 by sketching an old Moorish bridge that spanned a torrent, high in 
 ^ir, he heard some music that fixed his attention, — the music of a 
 nolin played with an exquisite pathos. He inquired for the musi- 
 cian. A handsome gitana, with a basket of melons on her head, 
 gladly answered his inquiries. The violinist was a youth dying, 
 8s she thought, in a chalet near. He was alone, very poor, and a 
 stranger. The words were sufficient to aiTest Chandos : he sought 
 out the chdlet and found the musician, lying on a straw pallet, and 
 dying, as the girl had said- rathar ikcm hunger than any other 
 
''The Many Years of Pain,'* ^l 
 
 illness, but with his large burning eyes fixed on the sun that was 
 
 setting beyond the screen of tangled vine-leaves that hung over 
 the hut door, and his hands still di-awin^ from the chords, in wild 
 and mournful strains, the music for which life alone lingered in 
 him. He was a mere lad of twenty years, and was a cripple. 
 Chandos only saw to rescue him. Eood, hope, and the sound of a 
 voice that spoke gently and pityingly to him, fused fresh existence 
 into the dying boy : he lived, and his life from that moment was 
 sheltered by the man who had found hJTn perishing on the Spanish 
 hills. 
 
 Guide Lulli had lived in Chandos' household, never treated as a 
 dependant, but suiTounded by all that could alleviate or make him 
 forget his calamity, out of the world by his own choice as utterly 
 as though he were in a monastery, spending his days and nights 
 over his organ and his music- score, and never having harder tai 
 than to organise the music of those concerts and operas in the pri- 
 vate theatre at Clarencieux for which his patron's entertainments 
 were noted. 
 
 Guide Lulli's was far from the only life that the pleasure-seeker 
 and the voluptuary had redeemed, defended, and saved. 
 
 Obedient to his wish, the melody of the Catholic chant rolled 
 through the stillness of the early morning, succeeding strangely to 
 the wit, the laughter, the revohy, and the hazard of a few moments 
 previous. It was precisely such a succession of contrasts of which 
 his life v/as made up, and which gave it its vivid and unfading 
 colour : closely interwoven, and ever trenching one upon another, 
 the meditative charm of art and of thought succeeded with him to 
 the pleasures of the world. He would pass from all the intoxica- 
 tion and indulgence of an Alcibiades to all the thoughtful solitude 
 of an Augustine ; and it was this change, so complete and so per- 
 petually variable, which, while it was produced by the mutability 
 of his temperament, made in a large degree the utter absence 
 in his life of all knowledge of satiety, all touch of weariness. 
 
 He listened now, leaning his arm on the sill of the open window 
 that looked out upon the gardens below, fresh, even in town, with 
 the breath of the spring on their limes and acacias, and the waking 
 eong of the nest-birds greeting the day. The rolling notes of the 
 organ pealed out in all their solemnity, the cathedral rhythm awell- 
 ing out upon the silence of the dawn, that had been heard by him 
 80 often in the splendour of St. Peter's at Easter-time, in the hush 
 of Notre Dame at midnight mass, and in the stillness of Bene- 
 dictine and Cistercian chapels in the chestnut- woods of Tuscany 
 and the lonely mountain- sides of hill-locked Austrian lakes. A 
 thousand memories of foreign air were in the deep-drawn and 
 melodious chords ; a thousand echoes of the dead glories of medicDva 
 Home rose with the 
 
 ** Tantum ergo Sacramentum 
 Veneremur cerauL* 
 
 A helpless and fragile cripple in the world, no stronger than i 
 
 feed, and ignorant of all things eave his art, once before his orgraj*. 
 
5» 
 
 Chandos. 
 
 once in the moment of his inspiration, Guido Lulli had the 
 gi-andeur of a master, the force and the omnipotence of a king. Id 
 his realm he reigned supreme, and Chandos not seldom left his 
 titled associates and his careless pleasures to come and listen to 
 these melodies in his protege's still, monastical chamber, as he heard 
 them now. 
 
 He leaned against the embrasure, looking out on to the mass of 
 leayes beneath, and letting his thoughts float dreamily down the 
 stream of sound, blent with the lustre of the smiling eyes and the 
 gleam of the imperial beauty that had newly caught his memory 
 and his fancy. Entangled with the imaginations of his own 
 Byzantine poem, she haunted him with that early careless whisper, 
 soft, idle, and painless, of love in its fii'st moments,— love that is 
 but a mere momentary, passionate impulse, and may never ripen to 
 more. 
 
 The lull of early morning, the measui'e of the music passmg 
 onward without pause into the masses of Mozart and Mendelssohn, 
 fell gently and mellowly on him after the crowded hours of the 
 past night and day. As the chords thrilled through the silence of 
 the breaking day, joining the clear notes of the awakening birds 
 beneath amidst the leaves, his thoughts wandered away, dreamy 
 and disconnected, ranging over the cloudless years of a successful 
 life, in which all the memories were painted as with an Elizabethan 
 pencil, without shadow. In them he had never known one gi'ey 
 touch of disappointment, far less stiU one dark taint of calamity ; 
 in them woman's Ups had never betrayed him, nor man's hand 
 been raised against him. Fortune had favoured and the world had 
 loved him. No regret lay on him, and no imfulfiUed desire left its 
 trail. There was nothing in his career he wished undone ; there 
 were no memories in it that it would have been pain to open ; there 
 were no pages of it that were not bright with soft, rich, living 
 coloui'. He had passed through life having escaped singularly all 
 the shadows that lie on it for most men ; and he had, far more thar 
 most, what may be termed the faculty for happiness, a gift, in any 
 temperament, whose wisdom and whose beauty the world too little 
 recognises. 
 
 His thoughts, floating on with the melodious chords that swelled 
 in wave on wave of sound through the quiet of the morning, drifted 
 back by some unfoUowed chain of association to the remembrance 
 of the hot autumn sunset at Clarencieux, when, as a child, he had 
 dreamt his chivalric fancies over the story of Arthur, and had told 
 his father what his future should be. 
 
 " Have I kept my word?" he mused, as he leaned his arms on 
 the embrasure of the window, while the early light fell on the gold 
 and the jewels of his Plantagenet masquerade-dress. 
 
 The lofty, idcalic, impossible dreams, so glorious in their imprac- 
 ticability, so fail' in their sublime folly, in which boyhood had 
 aspired to a soilless fame and an heroic sovereignty such as this 
 earth has never seen and never can see, recurred to him with some- 
 thing that was almost, for the moment, a passing sadness, — the 
 8&SD» sadness which, in the wordi of Joaa PauL lies in mua«. 
 
" The Many Years of Pain.** 53 
 
 " because it speaks to us of things that in all our life we find not, 
 and never shall find." 
 
 * * Have I kept my word ? " he thought. * * I rule the world of plea- 
 sure ; but I meant then a wider world than that. They follow me 
 because I lead the fashion ; because I amuse them better than any 
 other ; because they gain some distinction by cutting their coats 
 and wearing their wi'ist-bands Hke mine ; but that is not the fame 
 either he or I meant in those years. They talk of me ; they imitate 
 me ; they obey me ; they quote me ; they adore my works, and 
 they court my approbation. But am I very much more, after all, 
 than a mere idler ?" 
 
 The genius latent in him, which in his present life only found 
 careless expression in glittering bagatelles and poems, half Lucre- 
 tian, half Catullan, stuTcd in him now with that restlessness for 
 higher goals, than refusal to be satisfied with actual and present 
 achievement, which characterise genius in all its forms, — that uu' 
 ceasing and irrepressible " striving towards the light " which pur- 
 sued Goethe throughout life, and was upon his lips in death. 
 Dissatisfation in no shape ever touched Chandos ; his years wero 
 too cloudless, and too full of fairest flavour, for discontent ever tc 
 be known in them. It was but rarely, now and then, when, in the 
 pauses of his pleasures and his fame, the remembrance of his child~ 
 hood's grand, visionary, impalpable ambitions came back to hini, 
 that the thought swept across him of having insufficiently rcalisoci 
 thcni, of having been in some sort untrue to them, of losing in a 
 dazzling celebrity the loftier purity of those early and impossible 
 di' earns. 
 
 It was not wholly true, nor wholly just towards himself. Egotism 
 had little place in his life : full though it was of a Greek-like soft- 
 ness and Greek-like idolatry of beauty and of pleasure, of aif 
 Epicureanism that shunned all pain and abhorred all roughness 
 and all harshness, the calamities of others were widely succoured by 
 him, and the bead-roll was long of those who owed him the most 
 generous gifts that man can owe to man. 
 
 He enjoyed, but he never forgot that others suffered. He loved 
 the ease, the beauty, and the serenity of existence ; but he also 
 did his uttermost that others should know them too. 
 
 " T enjoy" he thought now, as he leaned out into the morning 
 sunshine. *' It is the supreme wisdom of life, and the best gift of 
 the gods is to know it ! The Greeks were right, and in this _ age 
 men remember it too little. Old Guy Patin was a million times 
 wiser than all the Frondeurs, sitting under the summer-shade of 
 his Cormeille cherry-tree with Lucretius and LuciUus and An- 
 toninus, while his friends killed each other with fret and fume. 
 Bonaparte said, ' I have conquered Cairo, Milan, and Paris in less 
 than two years, and yet if I died to-morrow I should only get half a 
 page in any biographical dictionary ; ' but to get a line, or even only 
 to get an obituary notice and oblivion, men toil a life away and 
 consume their years in thankless, grinding, ceaseless laboiu-._ The 
 benighted opticism of vanity ! ' The succession of the nations is 
 but as a torch-race.' What is it to feed the flame of on© of the 
 
54 Chandos. 
 
 torcliGS for a passing second, — a spark that flares and dies P Th» 
 Greek ideal of Dionysus, with the ivy on his brow and the thyrsus 
 in his hand, bringing joy wherever he moved, while the wine 
 flowed and nature bloomed wherever the god's foot fell, is the 
 ideal of the real happy life, the life that knows how to enjoy." 
 
 The thoughts di^ifted through his mind lightly, dreamily, as the 
 sweU of the organ-notes poured on. It was true he enjoyed, 
 and bis temper, like the temper of the Greeks, asked only this oi 
 Ufe. 
 
 Chandos was not only famous, not only gifted, not only steeped 
 tx) the lips in deKcate and sensuous delight ; he was much more 
 than all these : he was happy. 
 
 How many lives can say that ? 
 
 The music paused suddenly, dropping down in its gorgeous 
 festival of sound as a lark suddenly drops to the grass in the midst 
 of its flood of song. Chandos turned as it ceased, and broke his 
 idle thi-ead of musing reverie, while he laid his hand gently on the 
 musician's shoulder. 
 
 ' ' Dear Lulli, while one hears your music, one is xU Avillion. 
 You make me dream of the old serene and sacred Ilt/para yair)q. 
 Tell \AQ, have you everything you wish ? Is there nothing that 
 can bring you more pleasure ? " 
 
 Guide Lulli shook his head. 
 
 *' I should be little worthy all 1 owe to you, if I could find one 
 want unsatisfied." 
 
 *' Owe ! You owe me nothing. Who would give me such musio 
 as you can give ? It is not everyone who is fortunate enough to 
 have a Mozart in his house. I wish I could serve you better in 
 the search that is nearest your heart. "We have done all we could, 
 Guide." 
 
 His voice was very gentle, and had a certain hesitation. He 
 approached a subject that had a bitterness both of grief and of 
 shame to his listener; and Chandos, carelessly disdainful of a 
 prince's wishes, was careful of the slightest jar that could wound 
 the sensitiveness of the man who was dependent on him. 
 
 Lulli's head sank, and a dark shadow passed over his face, — a 
 flush of shame and of anger, as heavy and as passionate as could 
 arise in a temperament so visionary and tender to feminine soft- 
 ness, mingled, too. with a sorrow far deeper than wrath can 
 reach. 
 
 "It is enough," he said, simply, his words hushed, low, and 
 bitter in his throat. " We are certain of her shame." 
 
 "Not certain," said Chandos, compassionately, while his hand 
 etiU lay lightly on the musician's shoulder. "Where there is 
 doubt mere is always hope ; and judgment should never be passed 
 till everything is known. Do not be harsh to her, eyen in 
 thougLtc ' 
 
 "Harsh? Am I harsh P" 
 
 " Not in your heart ever, I know." 
 
 " Not to ner, not to her, — no ! " murmured the Proven9al, while 
 his face was etUl sunk on his hands; "but to Mm, Not ©y©u to 
 
" The Many Years of Pain." 55 
 
 know "his name ; not even to know where lie harbours ,• not to tell 
 where she is, that when she is deserted and wretched she might be 
 saved from lower depths still !" 
 
 A terrible pain shook and stifled his voice, and Chandos waa 
 silent. The musician's sorrow was one to which no consolation 
 could be offered and no hope suggested. 
 
 "I have had all done to trace her that is possible," he said, at 
 last; "but two years have passed, and there seems no chance of 
 ever succeeding; all clue appears lost. Do you think that she 
 may have gone by another name at the time that her lover, who- 
 wer he may be, first saw her ? " 
 
 •*It is possible, monseigneur ; I cannot teU," said LuUi, slowly, 
 Adth a pathos of weariness more touching than all complaint and 
 lament. **Be it as it will, she is dead to me; but—but— if we 
 could know Am, helpless cripple as I am, I would find strength 
 enough to avenge my wrong and hers." 
 
 He raised himself as he said it, his slight, bent form quivering 
 and instinct with sudden force, his pale and hollow cheek flushed, 
 his eyes kindling. It was like electric vitality flashing for one 
 brief moment into a dead man's limbs. 
 
 Chandos looked at him with a profoimd pity. To him, a man 
 of the world, a courtier, a lover of pleasure, the untutored, 
 chivalrous simplicity of this idealist roused infinite compassion. 
 He saw brought home to Guide Lulli, as a terrible and heart- 
 burning anguish, those amours which in his own world and hia 
 own life were but the caprice and amusement of idle hours, the 
 subject of a gay, indifferent jest. He had never before reflected 
 how much these careless toys may chance to cost in their recoil to 
 others. 
 
 He leaned his hand with a warmer pressure on the musician's 
 shoulder. 
 
 *'I wish I could aid you more, Guide; but there is nothing 
 that I know of that has been left untried. Strive to forget both ; 
 neither is worth enough to give you pain. You believe at least 
 that I have had every effort used for you, although it has been in 
 vain?" 
 
 Lulli looked at him with a slight smile, — a snulethat passed over 
 the suffering and the momentary passion on his face like an irra- 
 diation of light. It was so fuU of sublime and entire faith. 
 
 *' Believe you, monseigneur ? Yes, as I believe in God." 
 
 It was the simple truth, and paid back to Chandos his own love 
 for men, and faith in them, in his own coin. 
 
 " I thank you. I am your debtor, then, Lulli," he said, gently. 
 ** I must leave you now, or I shall have no sleep before the day 
 is fairly up ; but I will see you again some time during the morn- 
 ing. If you think of anything that has not been done, or might 
 be done again, with any hope to find Valeria, tell me, and I wiU 
 give directions for it. Adieu ! " 
 
 He left the chamber, the flash of his diamonds and the imperial 
 blue of his dress glancing bright in the beams of the young day. 
 Lulli turned his head, and followed him with the wistful gaze tha* 
 
£0 Chandot. 
 
 eeemed to come from so far a distance, — followed him as the eyei 
 
 of a dog follow the shadow of its master. 
 
 " So generous, so pitiful, so gentle, so noble ! If I could only 
 live to repay liim ! " he murmured, half aloud, as the door closed 
 upon the kingly grace and splendid manhood of his saviour and hia 
 solitary friend. Vast as was the contrast, hopelessly wide as was 
 tJie disparity between them, there was not one pang of jealousy iu 
 the loyal heart of the crippled musician. 
 
 Then, with the last echo of his patron's step, his head drooped 
 again, and the listless, lifeless passiveness, the weary and suffering 
 indifference, which always lay so heavily upon him, save at such 
 times when his affections or his art struck new vitality through 
 him, retui'ned once more, while his fingers lay motionless upon tJie 
 ivory kej^s. Although happy (as far as happiness could be iu 
 common with his shattered and stricken life), in the artistic seclu- 
 sion in which he was allowed to dwell, and in the unbroken puis ail 
 of his art which Chandos enabled him to enjoy, there was one 
 sorrow on him weightier than any of his personal afllictionB. 
 
 The only thing that had ever loved him was a child, several years 
 younger than himself, his cousin, orphaned and penniless like him- 
 self, to keep whom in some poor shape of comfort, in their old home 
 of Aries, Lulli had beggared his own poverty till — sending to her 
 every coin that he possessed — he had been near his grave from 
 sheer famine when Chandos had found him among the hills of Die 
 Vega. For some time he had never mentioned the name of Valeria 
 to his patron, from the shiinking and sensitive delicacy of hia 
 nature, which di^eadod to press another supplicant and dependunt 
 on his patron's charity. All he could give he sent to Arlob for 
 Valeria Lulli, who was lodged with an old canoness of the city, and 
 began to be noted, as she grew older, as the most perfect contralto 
 in the girls' choir in all Southern Prance. See her he could not ; 
 a sense of duty to the man by whom he had been redeemed from 
 death, and the infirmities of his own health, which that i-i^h 
 approach of death had more utterly enfeebled, prevented him from 
 returning to Provence. But he heard of her ; he heard from her ; 
 he knew that she was drawing near womanhood in safe sheUcr, 
 and a happy, if obscure, home, thi-ough him; and it sufficed l'.,r 
 him. His affection for her was the tender solicitude of a bioilicr, 
 shut out from any tinge of a warmer emotion, both through his own 
 sense of how utterly banned from him by his calamity was all 
 thought of woman's love, and thi-ough his own memory of Vaienu, 
 which was but of a fair and loving child. 
 
 Two years before this morning in which Chandos listenea tc the 
 Tantum Enjo, a heavy blow fell on the musician, smiting down [ill 
 the fond, vague thoughts with which he had associated Valena'a 
 da\^^ling womanhood with the dawning success of his own ambi- 
 tion in liis art. A long silence had passed by, bringing no tidinga 
 of her, when his anxiety grew uncontrollable and knew itself 
 powerless; he had passionately repented of the silence he had pro- 
 served on her name to his only friend. He inquired tiding o! liie 
 caiioueesj but received nwi9. Chandos was away, yaiitinj' in the 
 
" The Many Years oj Pain,^ 57 
 
 Mediterranean, and spending the late summer and the autumn in 
 the East; the winter also he spent in Paris. When, with the 
 spring, Lulli saw him once more, he told him at length of Valeria, 
 and entreated his aid to learn the cause of the silence that had 
 fallen between him and Alios. Chandos gave it willingly; he 
 cent his own courier abroad to inquire for the young choral singer. 
 All answer with v/hich he returned was that the canoness had died 
 in the course of that summer, that Valeria Lulli had disappeared 
 from the city, and that neither priest nor layman could tell more, 
 save that it was the general supposition that she had fled with a 
 handsome milord, who had visited the cathedi-al, heard her singing, 
 learned her residence, and visited her often dui'ing the summer 
 months. He too had left Aiies without any one remembering his 
 name or knowing where he had gone. The gossips ^ of the still 
 Bolemn old Eoman city had noted him often with Valeria at vesper- 
 time, and underneath the vine-hung, grey stone coping of her 
 casement in the canoness's little tourelle. 
 
 So the history ran,— brief, but telling a world. To Guido Lulli 
 there was room neither for doubt nor hope ; it was plain as the 
 daylight to him, and needed not another line added to it. It cut 
 him to the heart. Shame for the honour of his name, which, 
 though sunk into poverty, claimed descent from him whose divine 
 strains once floated down the rose-aisles of Versailles ; passionate 
 bitterness against the unknown stranger who had robbed him ; 
 grief for the loss and dishonour of the one whom he had cherished 
 from her childhood,— all these were terrible to him ; but they were 
 scarcely so cruel as the sting of ingratitude from a life that he 
 alone had supported, and fcr which he had endured, through many 
 years, deprivation! uncounted and solicitude unwearjdng. He 
 said but little, but the iron went down deep into his gentle suffer- 
 im> nature, and left a wound there that was never closed. 
 
 No more had been learned of the fate of Valeria ; it sank into 
 silence, and all the eff'orts exerted by his patron's wealth and by 
 the ingenuity of his hirelings failed to bring one light on the sur- 
 face of the darkness that covered her lost life. As Lulli has said, 
 she was dead to him. But the pain she had dealt was living, and 
 would live long. Natures like Lulli's suffer silently, but suffer 
 greatly; and now, when the monastical sUence closed in again 
 around him as the sound of Chandos' steps died off the morning 
 stillness, and the early rays only strayed on the ivory whiteness of 
 the carved Passion above the little shrine of his antique chamber, 
 he sat there, listless and iost in thought, his head sunk, his hands 
 resting immovable upon 'the keys with which he could give out fit 
 music for the gods, the sadness on him which ever oppressed him 
 when he came back from his own best-beloved world of melodious 
 Bound into the coarse, harsh, weary world of fact and of existence. 
 He thought of the bright child whose desolate life he had suc- 
 oour^a, as he had used to see her, with the sunlight on her hair, 
 while she gathered bowing crowns of summer lilies, and feathery 
 wealth of seeding grasses, among the giant ruins of the Roman 
 Amphitheatre, where the Gaui and the Fmnk. the Latin and the 
 
5^ Chand^i, 
 
 Greek, lay^ mouldering in the community of death, while the 
 arrowy Rhone flashed its azure in the light, and^ the pui'ple grapes 
 grew mellow in the golden languor of a Southern noon. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 LATET ANQXnS IN HERBA, 
 
 ** Lots of news ! " said Trevenna, crushing up a pile of journals aa 
 he sat at breakfast in Park Lane — his second breakfast, of course, 
 for which he commonly dropped in as Chandos was taking hia 
 first. '* Queer thing, a paper is; sort of prosaic phoenix, eh? 
 Kings die, ministers die, editors go to pot, its staff drops under 
 the sod, governments smash, nations swamp, actors change ; but 
 on goes the paper, coming out imperturbably every morning. 
 Nothing disturbs it ; deaths enrich it ; wars enlarge it ; if a royal 
 head goes into the grave, it politely prints itself with a black 
 border by way of gratifying his soul, and sells itself to extreme 
 advantage with a neat and dovetailing of * Le roi est mort,' and 
 ' Yive le roi.' Queer thing, a paper ! " 
 
 " A melancholy thing in that light. To think of the swarm of 
 striving life pressed into a single copy of the Times is as mournful 
 as Xerxes' crowds under Mount Ida, though certainly not so 
 poetic." 
 
 '* Moui-nful ? Don't see it," responded Trevenna, who never did 
 see anything moui'nful in life, except the miserable mistake by 
 which he had not been born a millionnaire. " It's rather amusing 
 to see all the pother and bother, and know that they'll all be dead, 
 every man of 'em, fifty years hence ; because one always has an 
 unuttered conviction that some miracle will happen by which one 
 won't die oneself. How thoroughly right Lucretius is ! it is so 
 pleasant to see other men in a storm while one's high and dry 
 beyond reach of a drop ; and to watch them all rushing and scuttling 
 through life in the Timti columns is uncommonly like watching 
 them rush through a tempest. You know they'll all of them got 
 splashed to the skin, and not one in ten thousand reach their goal.'' 
 
 Chandos laughed. 
 
 " But when you are in the tempest, my friend, I fancy you 
 would be very glad of a little more sympathy than you give, and 
 would be very grateful for an umbrella ? " 
 
 *' Oh, the devil take sympathy ! Give me success." 
 
 " The selection is not new. But in defeat " 
 
 '* In defeat ? let it go ten leagues farther to the deuce ! Sym- 
 pathy in success might be genuine ; people would scramble for the 
 bonbons 1 dropped; but sympathy in defeat was never anything 
 better yet than a sneer delicately veiled." 
 
 * ' Poor humanity ! You will allow nothing good to come out of 
 Nazaretli ; a sweeping verdict, when by Nazareth you mean man- 
 kind. Well, I would rather give twenty rogues credit for being 
 
Latet Anguis in Herba. 59 
 
 honest men, than wrong one honest man by thinking him a rogue. 
 To think evil unjustly is to create evil ; to think too well of a man 
 may end in making him what you have called him." 
 
 Trevenna smiled — his arch, humorous smile, that danced in the 
 mirth of his eyes, and twinkled so joyously and mischievously 
 about the corners of his mouth. 
 
 "If it be your preference to think too well of men, Ms-cher^ 
 you can hardly miss gratifying it. Rogues grow thick as black- 
 berries. Only VvOien Turcaret, whom you think the mirror of 
 honour, makes you bankrupt, and Gingillino, whom you believe 
 the soul of probity, makes otf witli your plate, and Tartufe, whom 
 you have deemed a saint of the first water, forges a little bill on 
 your name, blame nobody but your own delightful and expensive 
 optimism ; that's all ! Don't you know you think too well of 
 
 There was a shade of earnestness and, for the instant, of regret 
 in his bold, bright eyes, as they iastened themselves on Chandos' ; 
 there was, for the moment, one laint impulse of compunction and 
 of conscience in his heart. He knew that the man before him 
 trusted him so utterly, so loyally ; he knew that the witness of 
 the world to sink and shame him would only have made the hand 
 of Ernest Chandos close firmer on his own. That hand was 
 stretched out now in a gesture of generous frank grace, of true 
 and gallant friendship. 
 
 "You know I have no fear of that. Our friendship is of too old 
 a date." 
 
 Trevenna hesitated a moment, one slight, impalpable second of 
 time, not to be counted, not to be noted ; then his hand closed on 
 that held out him. 
 
 The momentary better thought had gone from him. "When he 
 took the hand of Chandos thus, few criminals had ever fallen lower 
 than he. Were Catholic fancies true, and " guardian angels with 
 us as we walk," his guardian spirit would have left Trevenna then 
 for ever. 
 
 "Well,'* he said, with his mirthful and ringing laugh, like his 
 voice, clear and resonant as a clarion, *' you found me in no irre- 
 proachable place, mon prince, at any rate ; so you can't complain 
 if I turn out a scamp. A debtor's prison wasn't precisely the place 
 for the lord of Clarencieux to choose an ally." 
 
 " Many a * lord of Clarencieux ' has gamed away hia wit and his 
 wealth — which was your only sin then, my dear fellow. I am not 
 afraid of the consequences. So many people who speak well of 
 themselves are worth nothing, that by inverse ratio, Trevenna, 
 you, who speak so iU of yourself, must be worth a great deal. 
 You look at some things from too low a standing-point, to my 
 fancy, to be sure ; but you see as high as your stature will let 
 you, I suppose." 
 
 " Of course, literally and metaphorically, you're a very taU man, 
 and I'm a very short ; and, literally and _ metaphorically, if you 
 see stars I don't, I see puddles you don't ; if you watch for planets 
 I forget, I watch for quicksands you forget. My stature wiU Iw 
 
the more useful of tne two in the end. Apropos of quicksands, 
 the first architect of them in the country was magnificent on the 
 Cat Tax last night." 
 
 '^Who? Milverton?" 
 
 "Yes, Milverton. As if you'd forgotten who was Exchequer \ 
 If ho were a handsome coryphee, now you'd be eager to hear every 
 syllable about the d^hut. The speech was superb. To hear him ! 
 he drew the line so admirably between the necessary and humble 
 mouser, helpmate of the housewife, and the pampered, idle Angora , 
 fed on panada, and kept from caprice ; he touched so inimitably 
 on the cat in Egj^t and Cyprus, tracing the steps by which a deity 
 had become a di-udge, and the once-sacred life been set to preserve 
 the pantries from mice ; he threw so choice a sop to the Exeter Hall 
 party by alluding to its fall as a meet judgment on a heathen 
 deity, and richly merited by a creature that was mentioned in 
 Herodotus, and not in the Bible ; he sprinkled the whole so classi- 
 cally with Greek quotations that greatly imposed the House, and 
 greatly posed it, its members having derived hazy Attic notions from 
 the Greek cribs at the Universities, and Grote on rainy after- 
 noons in the country. By Jove, the whole thing was masterly ! 
 The Budget will pass both Chambers." 
 
 Chandos laughed as he ate the mellowest of peaches. 
 
 " And that you call public life ? a slavery to send straws down 
 the wind, and twist cables of sand ! The other evening I drove 
 Milverton to Claire Eahel's. Just at her door a hansom tore after 
 us, his Whip dashed up ; the House was about to divide ; Milver- 
 ton must go down directly. And he went. There is an existence 
 to spend ! Fancy the empty platitudes of the benches, instead of 
 the bright mots at Eahel's ; the empty froth of placemen patriots, 
 instead of the tasteful foam of sparkling Moselle ! " 
 
 "Fie, fie, Chandos I You shouldn't satirise St. Stephen's, out 
 of filial respect." 
 
 *'The St. Stephen's of my father's days was a very difi'erent 
 affair. They are not politicians now, they are only placemen; 
 they don't dictate to the press, the press dictates to them ; they 
 don't care how the country is lowered, they only care to keep in 
 ofiice. When there is an European simoom blowing through th^ 
 House, I may come and look on : so long as they brow storms in 
 the saucer, I have no inclination for the tea-party. Would ^op 
 Uke public life, Trevenna ? " 
 
 *'I? What's the good of my liking anything? I'm a Pariah 
 of the pave, a Chicot to the clubs ; I can only float myself iv 
 dinner-stories and gossip." 
 
 " Gossip ! You inherit the souls of Pepys and Grimm. Tha> 
 *iich a clever fellow as you can " 
 
 ' ' Precisely because I am a clever fellow do I collect what every- 
 body loves, except rajfineiirs like yourself. I am never so welcome 
 as when I take about a charmingly chosen bundle of characters to 
 be crushed and reputations to be cracked. To slander his neigh- 
 bour is indirectly to flatter your listener; of course, slander 
 u) welcome. Every one likes to hear something bad of m^mfY 
 
Latet Angula m Herba.^ 51 
 
 body else; it enhances his comfort when he is comfortable, and 
 makes him think * somebody's worse off than I am ' when he 
 isn't." 
 
 " I wonder if there were ever such a combination of Theophras^ 
 tus' bitterness and Plautus' ^ood humour in any living bomg 
 before you, Trevenna ? You judge humanity like Eochefoucauld, 
 and laugh with it like Falstaff ; and you tell men that they are 
 all rascals as merrily as if you said they were all angels." 
 
 *'A great deal more merrily, I suspect. One can get a good 
 deal of merriment out of rogues ; there is no better company under 
 the sun ; but angels would be uncommonly heavy work. Sin's the 
 best salt." 
 
 '* Mr. Paul Leslie is waiting, sir," said the groom of the cham- 
 bers, approaching his master. 
 
 *' Quite right; I will see him in the library." 
 
 "Paul LesKe? That's a new name; I don't know it," said 
 Trevenna, who made a point of knowing every one who came to 
 his host, no matter how insignificant. 
 
 " Very likely. He never gives dinners, and could not lend you 
 a sou." 
 
 There was a certain careless, disdainful irony in the words, half 
 unconscious to Chandos himself. He had all the manner of the 
 vieille cour^ all its stately grace, and all its delicate disdain ; and 
 cordial as his regard was for Trevenna, and sincere as was his 
 belief that the bluntness and professed egotism of the man covered 
 a thousand good qualities and proclaimed a candour bright and 
 open as the day, he was not, he could not be, blind to the fact 
 that Trevenna never sought or heeded any living soul except those 
 who could benefit him. 
 
 " 1 understand," laughed Trevenna; with a riding- whip about 
 his shoulders he would still have laughed good-naturedly. *' One 
 of jovLT protegSs, of course; some Giotto who was drawing sheep 
 when the Clarencieux Cimabue saw him; some starving Chat- 
 terton who has plucked up heart of grace to write and ask the 
 author of * Lucrece ' to give him the magna nominis umbra. Tell 
 him to turn navvy or corn-chandler, Chandos, before he worships 
 the Muses without having five thousand a year to support those 
 dissipated ladies upon; and twenty years hence he'll thank you 
 while he eats his fat bacon with a rehsh in the pot-house, or 
 weighs out his pottles of barley in sensible contentment." 
 
 " You are a thorough Enghshman, Trevenna; you would make 
 a poet an exciseman, and expect him to be serenely grateful for 
 the patronage ! Pray, how many of those who honour ' the 
 Muses,' as you call them, have had five thousand a year, or had 
 even their daily bread when they started, for that matter ? I must 
 give this boy his audience, so I may not see you till we meet in 
 the park or the clubs. You dine with me to-night ? There are a 
 triad of Serene Highnesses coming, and German royalty is terribly 
 oppressive society." 
 
 "Oh, I will be here, monseigneur; I obey orders. You want 
 me at «oui' dinners a^ Valoi? wanted Triboulet^ eh ? The jest«r Li 
 
^ Chandos, 
 
 02 
 
 welcomed for the nonsense he talks, and may be more familiar 
 than guests of higher degree." 
 
 "Trihoulet? What are you thinking of ? Men of your talent 
 bring their own welcome, and are far more creditor than debtor to 
 society. Surely Trevenna, you never misdoubt the sincerity of my 
 friendship?" 
 
 The other looked up with his bright lonhomie. 
 
 ** You are a Sir Caladore of courtesy. No ; I am as sure of the 
 quaUty of your friendship as I am of the quality of your clarets. 
 I can't say more ; and, as the world bows down before you, the dis- 
 tinction of it is very gratifying. Besides, you have the best chej 
 in town ; and I dearly love a friend that gives good dinners." 
 
 Chandos laughed. Trevenna always amused him; the uttel 
 absence of flattery refreshed him, and he knew the world too well 
 not to know that sincerity and warmth of feeling were full as 
 likely to lie under the frankly confessed egotism as under the 
 suaver protestations of other men. Yet the answer chilled him 
 ever so slightly, jarred on him ever so faintly. A temperament 
 that is never earnest is at times well-nigh as wearisome as a tem- 
 perament that is never gay , there comes a time when, if you can 
 never touch to any depth, tho ceaseless froth and brightness of the 
 surface will create a certain seise of impatience, a certain sense o' 
 want. He felt this for the moment with Trevenna. 
 
 •' No wonder the women are so fond of the caresses of those 
 mainia blanches, they are as white, and as soft, and as delicate as a 
 girl's — curse him ! " thought Trevenna, while his eyes glanced 
 from Chandos' hand, as it fell from his shoulder, and on to hi^ 
 own, which was broad, strong, and coarse, both in shape and in 
 tibre, though tenacious in hold, and characteristic in form. The 
 hand of Chandos was the hand of tho aristocrat and of the artist 
 moulded in one ; Trevenna' s that of tho working-man, of the agile 
 gymnast, of the hardy mountain-climber. 
 
 The thought was petty and passionate as any woman's — the 
 envy puerile and angered to a feminine and childish littleness. 
 But this was Trevenna's one weakness, this jealousy of all these 
 differences of caste and of breeding, as his sonnets were Eichelieu's 
 as his paintings were Goethe's, as his deformed limb was Byron's. 
 
 The warm friendship offered him and proved to him was for 
 gotten in the smart of a small, wounded vanity. A straw mis 
 placed will make us enemies ; a millstone of benefits hung abov 
 his uock may fail to anchor down by us a single friend. We may 
 iavish what we will — kindly thought, loyal service, untiring aid 
 and euerous deed — and they are all but as oil to the burning, a 
 fuel to the flame, when spent upon those who are jealous of us. 
 
 D espite, however, his hearty curse upon his host, Trevenna wen^ 
 oil with his breakfast complacently, while Chandos left him to give 
 audience (and something more) to the young artist, a clever boy 
 without a sou, with the talent of a Scheffer and the poverty of a 
 Chattertou; whom he was about to enable to study in peace in 
 Rome. Trevenna was a sagacious man, a practical man, and did 
 not allow hi* own persoual enmities, or the slight cu'cumstance 
 
Latei Unguis m Herha. 
 
 ti his having mentally damned the man whose hospitality hd 
 enjoy od to interfere with his appreciation of his lobster cutlets, 
 Hqueurs, pates, and amontillado. 
 
 Then, when he had fairly finished a breakfast that would have 
 done honour to the inventions of a Ude, he went out to the clubs, 
 — it was two o'clock in the day, — to keep up his reputation as a 
 public talker, with a variety of charming, damaging stories, and 
 inimitable specimens of inventive ingenuity, such as made him 
 welcome at all the best tables, and well received even in the smok- 
 ing sanctum of the Guards' Club. Trevenna had not dined at 
 his own expense for ten years ; he knew so well how to amuse 
 society. His manufactures were matchless ; they were the most 
 adroit and lasting slanders of all, — slanders that had a foundation 
 of truth. 
 
 ** What's up, Charlie ? You look rather blue," said that easiest 
 and most familiar of " diners-out," whom no presence could awe 
 and no coolness could ice, as he sauntered now down Pall Mall 
 with a young dandy of the Foreign Ofiice, who had played so much 
 chicken-hazard, and planned so many Crown and Sceptre and Star 
 and Garter fetes in the mornings which he devoted to the State, 
 that he had come to considerable grief over "floating paper." 
 
 Charlie nodded silently, pulling his amber moustaches. 
 
 ** Tight, eh ? Dal won't bleed ?" asked Trevenna, with a good- 
 natured, almost affectionate interest. "Dal "was Lord Daller- 
 stone, Charlie's elder brother. 
 
 " Bleed ? No. He's up a tree himself," murmm-ed the victim. 
 "It's those confounded Tindall & Co. people; they've got bills of 
 mine, — bought them in, — and they put the screw on no end." 
 
 " Tindall & Co. ! Ah ! Hard people, ain't they ?" 
 
 "Devils!" murmured Charlio, stiU in the sleepiest of tones. 
 " It's that vile old Jew Mathias, you know ; he's the firm, no 
 
 doubt of it, though he keeps it so dark. 'Payor ' That's 
 
 all they say; and I've no more idea where to get any money 
 than that pug." 
 
 " Bought your paper up ? that is awkward work," said Trevenna, 
 musingly. " I hardly see what you can do. I know the Tindall 
 people are very sharp, — old Hebrew beggar is, as you say, at least. 
 How much breathing- time do they give you ?" 
 
 "Only tiUThui-sday." _ 
 
 " Humph ! only forty-eight hours ; close shave ! '* said Trevenna. 
 " Of course you can't do anything if you're not able to get the 
 money. They've the law on their side." 
 
 ^* CanH you think of anything? You're such a clever feUow, 
 Trevenna ! " asked the embryo diplomatist, whose personal diplo- 
 macy was at its wits' end. 
 
 "Thanks for the compliment, han gargan, but I'm not clever 
 enough to make money oul of nothing. How people would rush 
 to^ my laboratory, if I were ! I should cut out all the pet preachers 
 with the women. I really haven't an idea what advice to give you. 
 I'd see these Tindall rascals with pleasui'e for you ; but I don't 
 Buppose that would do any good." 
 
04 Chandog 
 
 **Try? Ihere's a good fellow!" said the boy, witli more eagt^ 
 ness than he had ever thrown into his sleepy, silky voice in all the 
 days of his dandjdsm. 
 
 ** I'U ask them to let you have longer time, at any rate. Perhaps 
 they'll be persuaded to renew the bills. Anyway, I'm more up to 
 City tricks than you are. Let's see, what's their place of business ? 
 I remember — that wretched, dirty place in Piiiler's Court, isn't it ? 
 I'll go down there to-morrow morning." 
 
 Charlie's languid eyes brightened with delighted hope, and he 
 thanked his friend over and over again with all that cordial but 
 embarrassed eagerness which characterises Young England when it 
 is warmly touched and does not like to make a fool of itseK. 
 Charlie's heart was a very kind, a very honest one, under the shell 
 of dandy apathy, and it held Trevenna from that moment in the 
 closest gratitude. 
 
 ** Such a brick of a fellow, to go bothering himself into that 
 beastly City after my affairs ! " he thought, as he turned into Pratt's 
 for a game at billiards, while Trevenna sauntered on down the 
 shady side of the street. 
 
 *' It's as well to oblige him, we should get nothing by putting 
 the screw on him ; he is only worth the tobacco-pots and art-trash 
 he's heaped together in his rooms, and that chestnut hack that he's 
 never paid for. It's as well to oblige him. Dal will kill himself 
 sooner or later at the rate he goes, and the next brother's an in- 
 valid ; Charlie's sure to have the title, I fancy, some day or other,* 
 thought Trevenna, as he went along, encountering acquaintances 
 at every yard, and receiving a dozen invitations to luncheon in as 
 many feet of the trottoir. This was Trevenna's special statesman- 
 ship, — to cast his nets so far forward that they took in not only the 
 present but the future. He sought the society and the friendship 
 of young men : who knew what use they might not be some day ? 
 
 Men thought him ** a pushing fellow, but then so deucedly 
 amusing," and liked him. He was almost everywhere welcome to 
 them ; for he was not only a popular wit and a gossiper, but he was 
 a surpassing whist- and a capital billiard-player, an excellent shot, 
 a splendid salmon-fisher, and as unerring a judge of all matters 
 " horsy " as ever pronounced on a set of EawclifFe yearlings and 
 picked out the winner from the cracks at Danebury. They thought 
 him ** nobody," and looked on him as only Chandos' homme 
 d' affaires, but they liked him. Women alone never favoured him. 
 and held him invariably at an icy distance, partly, of course, froa* 
 the fact that women never smile upon a man who has nothing. 
 Ladies are your only thorough Optimates. You like a man if he 
 be a good shot, a good rider, a good talker — they must first know 
 " all about him ;" you laugh if the wit be hen trovato — they must 
 learn, before they smile, if the speaker be worth applauding ; you 
 will listen if the brain be well filled — they must know that the 
 pui-se is so also. Women, therefore, gave no sort of attention to 
 Trevenna, but only spoke of him as " a little man, — odious little 
 man, so brusque ; he keeps a cab, and lives no one knows how ; 
 hangs on to great men, and rich men, ]ike Chandos." 
 
Latet Anguis i n fieri- a, 65 
 
 Besides, Trevenna offended ladies in other ways. If not a great 
 disciple of truth in 'propria, 'persona, he scattered a good many truths 
 about in the world, though he lied with an enchanting readiness 
 and tact when occasion needed. lie nevertheless satiiised hypo- 
 crisy and humbug with a genuine relish in the work ; his natural 
 candour relieved itself in the flagellations he gave humanity. He 
 had a rich Hudibrastic vein in him, and he was not the less sincere 
 in his ironies on the world's many masks because his sagacity led 
 him to borrow them to serve his own ends. 
 
 Truth is a rough, honest, helter-skelter terrier, that none like to 
 Bee brought into their drawing-rooms, throwing over all their 
 dainty httle ornaments, upsetting their choicest Dresden, that 
 nobody guessed was cracked till it fell with the mended side upper- 
 most, and keeping every one in incessant tremor lest the next snap 
 should be at their braids or their boots, of which neither the var- 
 nish nor the luxuriance will stand rough usage.^ Trevenna took 
 this luimuzzled brute about ^vith him into precincts where there 
 were delicacies a touch would soil, frailties a brush would crack, 
 and smooth carpets of brilliant bloom and velvet gloss_ that, 
 scratched up, showed the bare boards underneath, and let in the 
 stench of rats rotting below. Of course, he and the terrier too 
 were detested by ladies. Such a gaudier ie would have been 
 almost unbearable in a duke ! They would have had difficulty to 
 control the grimace into a smile had the coarse and cruel pastime 
 been a prince's : for a penniless man-about-town it was scarcely 
 likely they would open their boudoir-doors to such a master and 
 to such an animal. Women abominated him, and Trevenna was 
 too shrewd to undeiTate the danger of his enemies. lie knew 
 that women make nine-tenths of all the mischief of this world, 
 and that theif delicate hands demolish the character and the 
 success of any one whom they dislike ; but to have given himself 
 to conciliate them would have been a task of such infinite weari- 
 ness to him that he let things go as they would, and set himself 
 to achieve what he purposed without reference to them. He was 
 quite sui'e that if success shone on him the fair sex would smile 
 too, and would soon find out that he was the most "delightful 
 original in the world ! " 
 
 *'Chandos," said Trevenna, an hour or two later, "I want to 
 tell you something. That young brother of Dallerstone's has come 
 to grief,— fallen in Jews' hands,— got up a tree altogether. Dal 
 can't help him; he's as bad himself; and they'll be down upoft 
 Charlie on Thursday." 
 
 " Poor boy ! Cannot we stop that ?" 
 
 "Well, you could, of com-se; but it is asking a great deal of 
 you. I have promised him to see Tindall's people." 
 
 " Who ai-e they?" 
 
 " Jew firm in the City ; hold a good many of your aristocratio 
 friends in their teeth, too. But I ^as going to say I can't do any-^ 
 thing for him unless I take them some security that they will have 
 their money. Now, if I could use your name, though there is nc 
 reciijon in life why you should give it—" 
 
66 Chandos. 
 
 ** My name P Oh, I will serve him, certainly, if he be in dif- 
 ficulties." 
 
 ** Merely your name to get the bills renewed. They'll trust 
 that." 
 
 " But I suppose his debts are not very great ? — he is such a lad. 
 Would it not be better to buy his paper out of these Hebrews* 
 hands ?" 
 
 " Mercy on us, monseigneur ! " cried Trevenna. *' If you don't 
 talk as coolly of buying up any unknown quantity of bills as of 
 buying a cigar-case ! No : there is no necessity for doing any- 
 thing of the kind. If you will just give your name to renew the 
 acceptances, it will serve him admirably. Mind, this is entii-ely 
 my idea ; he doesn't dream of it ; but I know you are always so 
 willing to aid any one." 
 
 * ' I shall be most happy to do him any good, — poor young 
 fellow ! You can have my signature when you like, though I 
 think I might as well buy the bills at once ; for most likely it will 
 end in my paying the money," laughed Chandos. Trevenna's 
 eyes smiled with self- contented amusement as he stood a moment 
 watching the roll of the carriages down St. James's Street. 
 
 "That was a very good thought," he mused to himself. "I 
 shall oblige Charlie, — ^what an angel he will think me ! — and we 
 ehall get another of the Prince of Clarencieux's signatures into 
 Tiiidall & Co.'s hands. Ah I there is nothing like combination 
 and management." 
 
 ''How does that man live, Ernest?" asked Cos Grenvil, as 
 Trevenna drove from the doors of White's in his very dashing little 
 tilbury. 
 
 " Live, my dear fellow ? I don't know. What do you mean ?" 
 
 " How does he get the money to keep that trap? The mare's 
 worth five hundred guineas. He alway-s vows he hasn't a sou." 
 
 "A man must drive something," said Chandos, who knew that 
 the mare had come out of his own stables. ''Trevenna always 
 dines out, you know ; and rooms in a quiet street cost nothing." 
 
 " Where was it you first met him P" 
 
 *' I ? At Baden, years and years ago." 
 
 "Ah!" yawned Grenvil; "plenty of scoundrels to be picked 
 Tip there." 
 
 Chandos laughed. 
 
 " Thanks for the infoiTaation, Cos. You are prejudiced againdt 
 Trevenna. Don't believe aU the nonsense he talks against him 
 self: there is not a better fellow living. Ah, there is the Lennox ! 
 How splendidly that woman wears ! she must be thii'ty, but she is 
 lovely as she was ten years ago. I always liked Mrs. Lennox ; 
 she is really perfect style, and, besides " 
 
 Chandos did not conclude his sentence as to his regard for the 
 subject of it, but looked after her a moment. A lovely woman, as 
 he had said, with hazel eyes and hair, and a half-disdainful, half- 
 melancholy glance from imder her di'ooping lids, who was driving 
 a team of cream Circassian ponies. '' L'Enqnre, c'est irwi,'' was 
 ^yritten ia every line of her classic featiues, Queen of the Free 
 
Latet Anguis in Herla, 6y 
 
 Lances as she was, daring and unscrupulous Bohemian as tha 
 world notoriously declared her. 
 
 ** This note came for you, sir, during the morning," said Alexis^ 
 his head valet, as Chandos went into his chamber to dress for dinner 
 at the French Embassy. 
 
 "Who brought it?" 
 
 '♦I really don't knowwho, sir; a commissionnmre. He could 
 not tell who the servant was that gave it him, but said ho was to 
 beg me to see it personally shown you," said Alexis, to whom tho 
 commissionnaire had brought a considerable douceur to induce hin> 
 to perform this office, all the letters that were sent to Chandos ir 
 unknown hands passing to his secretary. 
 
 He took it as he went into his dressing-rooja, and glanced at it 
 indifferently. Like all well-known men, he received so many 
 communications from strangers that he never looked at any lettera 
 save those he especially cared to open. We are all more or less 
 martp-s to letters, and get a salutary dread of them as years roll 
 onward. But this little note was so delicate, so perfumy, so pretty, 
 and looked so like a love-missive, that Chandos for once broke 
 both his rule and its seal. Little of love repaid him : the note 
 was of most unfeminine brevity, though of thoroughly feminine 
 mysteiy. 
 
 •* Chakdos, — 
 
 " Believe in evil for once in your life if you can. The man you 
 
 took out of a debtors' prison hates you, if ever there were hate in 
 this world. Under his bright good humour there lies a purpose 
 very fatal to you. What pui-pose ? I cannot t»ll you. Watch, 
 and you may unmask it. All I entreat of you is, be on your 
 guard; and do not let your own heedless generosity, your own 
 loyal and gallant faith, betray you into the hands of a traitor. 
 Give no trust, give no friendship, to Trevenna : * latet anguis in 
 herba,' 
 
 ** Your most sincere Well-wisher." 
 
 Chandos f«ad the note, then crushed it up and flung it from him. 
 
 A certain chilliness had passed over him at the words that 
 attacked in the dark the man whom he had so long trusted and 
 befriended. Belief in it, even for a second, had not power to touch 
 him. An anonymous note of course brought its own condemna- 
 tion with it ; bufc suspicion in any shape was so utterly alien and 
 abhorrent to him that its mere suggestion repellfid him. Suspicion, 
 to frank and generous tempers, is a cowardice, a treacheiy, a vile 
 and creeping thing that dares not brave the daylight. The attack, 
 the innuendo, the unauthenticated charge, only rallied him nearer 
 him whom they impugned, not from obstinacy or from wayward- 
 ness,— his nature was too gentle to have a touch of either,— but 
 simply from the chivalry m his temperament that drew him to 
 ihose :who were slandered, and the loyalty in his friendship that 
 clung closer to his friend when in need. 
 
 *'Poor Treyenna! Some lady's vengeance, I suppose. If sliA 
 
6B Chandos, 
 
 wore not too clever for any such folly, and too generous for any 
 
 siicli slander, I should say tho writing was Beatrix Lennox's : it ia 
 very like, though disguised," he thought, as ho glanced at the noto 
 where it lay among the azure silk and laces of his bed, where it 
 had fallen. 
 
 It left a transient pain, impatience, and depression on him fo? 
 ten minutes after its reception. To have read the mere suggestioi 
 of perfidy in tho man he trusted made Chandos feel himself r 
 traitor ; and to his careless, insouciant, serenity-loving temper, an\ 
 jar of a harsher world, any breath of doubt or of treachery, was Ca 
 repellent to hia mind as the east wind was to his senses. 
 
 CHAPTER Vn. 
 
 A JESTER WnO HATED BOTH PIIINCE AND PALACB. " 
 
 '* Lady Chesterton is vowing Cherubino is divine. What queer 
 divinity I What would Michaol Angelo have said to an archangel 
 in a tail-coat, a lace cravat, and a pair of white kid gloves, holding 
 a roll of music, and looking a cross between a brigand, a waiter, 
 and a parson?" said Trevenna to the Countess de la Vivarol. 
 Madame de la Vivarol was the only woman who in any way coun- 
 tenanced and liked Trevenna, the only one of the exclusive loaders 
 of toji who ever deigned to notice his existence; and she waa 
 amused by his impudence, his sang-froid, and his oddity, and jiaid 
 him only just as much attention as Montespan and other great 
 ladies of Versailles paid tlieir Barbary monkey or their little negro 
 dwarf, according the pet liberties because of its strangeness and ita 
 insignificance. 
 
 " Droll life, a public singer's," went on Trevenna, who could not 
 keep his tongue quiet even through a morning concert, and who, 
 moreover, hated music heartily, and could not have told " Mose in 
 Egitto'" from " Yankee Doodle." " Subsists on his clavicle, and 
 keeps his bank-balance in his thorax ; knows his funds will go 
 down if he hatches up a sore throat, and loses all his capital if he 
 catches a cough ; lunches off cutlets and claret to come and sing 
 * The moon rides high,' in broad daylight ; and cries * lo son ricco 
 e tu sei htUa,' while he's wondering how he shall pay his debts, and 
 thinking what an ugly woman the singer with him in the duo is. 
 Ah, by-the-by, madame,— apropos of plain women, — the Marchesa 
 di Santiago has given some superb malachite candelabra as a votiva 
 offering to Moor fields, for the same reason, they do say, as the 
 Princess de Soubise gave gold lamps to Bossuet, * pour le pouvoir 
 depecher a Vdme tranquiUe.' " 
 
 " Chut ! I detest scandal," smiled Madame de la Vivarol , ** and 
 license has its limits, M. Trevenna. Madame di Santiago is my 
 aiost particular friend." 
 
 ** Ei^actly ; of your enemy^ madame^ I know a detrimental stoi* 
 
A Jester who hated loth Prime and Palace. 6g 
 
 would not be half so piquant ! To hear ill of our foes is the salt of 
 life, but to hear ill of our friends is the sauce hlanche itself," re- 
 sponded Trevenna the Imperturbable. 
 
 The countess laughed, and gave him a dainty blow with her satin 
 programme. 
 
 ' ' Most impudent of men I When will you learn the first lesson 
 of society, and decently and discreetly apj^rendre a vom effacer 9 " 
 
 ** A tyC effacer ? The advice Lady Harriet Vandeleur gave Cecil. 
 Very good for mediocre people, I dare say ; but it would'nt suit me. 
 There are some people, you know, that won't iron down for the 
 hardest rollers. M\ffacer ? No ! I'd rather any day be an ill-breil 
 originality than a well-bred nonentity." 
 
 " Then you succeed perfectly in being what you wish! Don't 
 ymi know, monsieur, that to set yourself against conventionalities 
 IS like talking too loud ? — an impertinence and an under-breeding 
 that society resents by exclusion ?" 
 
 ** Yes, I know it. But a duke may bawl, and nobody shuts out 
 him ; a prince might hop on one leg, and everybody would begin to 
 hop too. Now, what the ducal lungs and the princely legs might 
 do with impunity, I declare I've a right to do, if I like." 
 
 ^^ Becasse ! no one can declare his rights till he can do mucli 
 more, and — purchase them. Have a million, and we may perhaps 
 give you a little license to be unlike other persons ; without the 
 million it is an ill-bred gaucherie." 
 
 '* Ah, I know ! Only a nobleman may be original ; a poor 
 penniless wretch upon town must be humbly and insignificantly 
 commonplace. "Wliat a pity for the success of the aristocratic 
 monopolists that nature puts clever fellows and fools just in the 
 reverse order ! But then nature's a shocking socialist." 
 
 " And so are you." 
 
 Trevenna laughed. 
 
 " Hush, madame. Pray don't destroy me with such a whisper." 
 
 '* And be silent yourself," said Madame la Comtesse. ** You are 
 the most incorrigible chatterer out of a monkey-house ; and one 
 cannot silence you with a few nuts to crack, for the only thing you 
 relish is mischief. Chut ! I want to hear the concerto.'' 
 
 ** Jpprendre a m' e facer, ^* meditated Trevenna. " Life has wanted 
 to teach me that lesson ever since I opened my eyes to it. ' Fall 
 in with the ruck ; never think of winning the race ; never dare to 
 start for the gold cups or enter yourself for the aristocratic stakes ; 
 plod on between the cart-shafts ; toil over the beaten tracks ; let 
 them beat you, and gall you, and tear your mouth with the curb, 
 and never turn against them ; but, though you hate your existence 
 wJth all j^our might and main, bless the Lord for your creation, 
 preservation, and salvation.' That was the lesson they tried to 
 teach me. I said I'd be shot if I'd learn it ; all the teachers and 
 lawgivers couldn't force it down my throat. I am a rank outsider ; 
 nobody knows my stable or my trainer, my sire or my dam ; nobody 
 would bet a tenner on my chances. JsTimporte ! a rank outsidex 
 has carried the Derby away from the favouiite before now." 
 
 With which consolatory metaphor of the turf, Trevenna leaned 
 
7© Chandos, 
 
 back to Lady Chesterton with as familiar a earn fagon as thougli 
 he were the Duke of Crowndiamonds. 
 
 '* Pretty landscape, thatHobbema ? Nothing but a hovel among 
 birch-trees. Why on earth is a tumble-down cottage so much 
 prettier on canvas than a marble mansion ? One likes crooked 
 lines better than straight ones, I suppose, in art and out of ii. 
 Humanity has a natural weaknese for the zigzag," 
 
 Lady Chesterton made him a distant bow, and a stare of such 
 unutterable insolence as only a great lady can command. 
 
 '• That insufferable person ! Such an odious ton de garnison ! I 
 cannot think how Chandos can countenance him," said her lady- 
 ship, without deigning to murmur any lower than usual, to the 
 Marchioness of Sangroyal beside her. 
 
 The concert at which Trevenna was solacing himself for the 
 martyrdom of melody by watching with his bright eyes for waifs 
 and strays, for hints and grounds of future scandalous and enter- 
 taining historiettes, was one of the musical mornings for which the 
 house in Park Lane was famous ; concerts of the choicest, under 
 the organisation of Guide Lulli, most delicate, most masterly of 
 musical geniuses, with the repertoire as full of artistic light and 
 shade as any Titian, and the performance, by the first singers of 
 Europe, just sufficiently, and only sufficiently, long to charm 
 without ever detaining the ear. These concerts were invariably in 
 the picture-galleries, so that while the glories of Gluck and Handel 
 and Rossini and Meyerbeer floated on the air, the companion-art 
 was always before the eyes of the audience, while beyond, aisle 
 upon aisle of colour and blossom opened from the conservatories. 
 The softest of south winds blew gently in now from the paradise of 
 flowers glowing there; the sunlight fell into some deep-hued 
 Giorgione, some historical gathering of Veronese, or some fair 
 martyr-head of Delaroche ; the dilettanti murmured praise of a fugue 
 in D or a violin ohligato ; the gold-corniced, purple-hung shadowy 
 gallery was filled with a maze of bright hues and perfumy laces and 
 the fair faces of womon ; and Chandos, lying back in his fauteuil 
 near an open window, listened dreamily to the harmonies of 
 Beethoven, and let his eyes dwell on the Queen of Lilies. 
 
 In the high-pressure whirl and incessant amusement of his life, 
 it was difficult for any one impression to be made so indelibly upon 
 him that it could not be chased away and surpassed by fifty others 
 as fascinating; but, as far as he coidd be haunted by one exclusive 
 thought, that thought, since the night of his ball, had been tha 
 young Lily Queen. 
 
 " In many mortal forms I rashly sought 
 The shadow of that idol of my thought !" 
 
 he mused to himself, with a smile. '* Have I found it at last, I 
 wonder? Sui'ely." 
 
 He did not think that to seek it here might be to the ftdl as rash, 
 and to the fudl as vain, as any other phantom -search that had before 
 beguiled him. Who eyer does think so in th© first sweetness of t^ 
 aerial yisionf 
 
A Jester who hated both Prifice and Palace. 71 
 
 "Ihe moment when lie had seen her as Liicrece had been fatal to 
 him ; he had from that moment lost the power of judging or of 
 reading her with truth and calmness ; for from that moment she 
 had become the mortal form of his ideal among women. The shell 
 was so perfect, he never doubted that the pearl within was as fair. 
 
 His glance met hers now as he sat beside her just within the 
 shade of one of the purple curtains, where she was framed in a 
 setting of South American flowers, with one faint tint of the sun- 
 light straying, rose-hued and mellow, across them and her. 
 
 The softness of a beautiful warmth passed over her face as sha 
 met his glance, waveiing, delicate, the flush of unconscious love 
 and half- startled pleasure ; he did not ask if it were but from the 
 rays of the sun, or if it were fi'om the rays of a sun brighter and 
 more precious to us than the sun of the heavens, — that God of Light 
 we call Gratified Yanity. 
 
 He bent to her with an almost caressing homage, though he only 
 epoke commonplace words. 
 
 ' ' I had the whole selection classical music to-day. Lady Valencia. 
 I remembered you had said Mendelssohn was your favourite master." 
 
 She smiled, — a sweet glad smile, full of pleased surpriee. 
 
 *' You remembered my idle words P" 
 
 " No words can be idle to me thdt you have spoken." 
 
 No one heard the answer as the serene, sublime harmonies of the 
 gi-eat Israelite floated through the air, and Chandos leaned forward 
 towards her chair, thinking how like to one another were the pui-e 
 music that thrilled his ear and the proud yet soft loveliness that 
 charmed his heart. It was his way to say gentle things to all women, 
 and to mean them indeed while he uttered them ; but here he meant 
 them more deeply than in the mere gallantries of a courtli? society. 
 
 She looked at him under the shadow of her long eyelashes. 
 
 •* You will make rne bold enough," she said, with a smile, " to 
 venture to ask you a favour that I have been hopelessly meditating 
 for the last half-hour." 
 
 ** It is granted unasked. And now ?" 
 
 " And now — how strange you will think it !" 
 
 ** Have no fear of that. If I can please you in anything, I shall 
 be honoured enough. Your wish is ?" 
 
 " Well," she answered, with a low laugh that scarcely distui-bed, 
 or was told from, the music, ".I want you to show me the room 
 where Lucrece was written. You do not let the world in there, the^r 
 tell me ; but I fancy you will not refuse me my entreaty to enter 
 the sacred precincts." 
 
 "Who could refuse you anything?" he asked her in turn. 
 " Where I wrote Lucrece was chiefly in the East ; but I will gladly 
 let you honour my sanctum, though the thoughts that have been 
 sufficient for me there will scarcely be so any longer when once you 
 have left the memory of your presence to haunt it." 
 
 They spoke no more, as the richest melody of the selection rolled 
 in all its grandeur down the air, bearing with it all the life and soul 
 of the Proven9al musician. To those who were gathered here — 
 if^ye to Chandos, indeed, who neyer heard a perfect rhythm of 
 
7^ Chandos. 
 
 harmony, but that lie glided on its Chords through dreamy Shelley 
 fancies — the music was but a pastime of the hour, a fashionable 
 distraction to amuse a languid moment, a cover to flirtation ; but 
 to Lulli it was the very breath of existence. Shrinking from every 
 strange glance and voice, and shunning all publicity as he did at 
 all other times, he was now — now that he was absorbed in his art — 
 as sublimely unconscious of the gaze or presence of that aristocratic 
 and indiflferent crowd as though they were peasant-children listen- 
 ing to his notes. He was as insensible to them as though they had 
 no existence. What wore they to him, — those cold dilettanti^ those 
 airy coquettes, those critical dandies, those beautiful idiots, who 
 talked art-jargon without a throb of art within their souls ? They 
 had no part nor share with him. He lived in the world he created, 
 lie lived in the heaven of melody that was around him ; and any 
 other world was forgotten. And in that oblivion the man grew 
 grand, the timid, suffering, helpless cripple becaino a king in hia 
 own right, a sovereign in his own domain, — an empire that lay far 
 away from the fret and fume of men, far away from the unworthi- 
 ness of life. His head was proudly borne ; his haggard cheek waa 
 bright with the youth that, save in dreams, he had never known ; 
 his eyes were alit with the light of the conqueror; and those among 
 the guests who thought to notice this lame creature with the heart 
 of a Beethoven would put up their glasses and give him a curious 
 look as though he were a medium or a piece of china, and say to 
 each other, to forget it the next moment— 
 
 * ' That poor mad cripple ! — quite a genius ! Odd fancy of Chandos 
 to keep him, but certainly he conducts wonderfully well !" 
 
 *' What a beautiful place !" cried the Queen of Lilies, as she 
 entered, at the close of the concert, that room which simply a desire 
 to be able to command perfect solitude, if he desired it, had made 
 him deny to all guests, and even to all servants, un summoned. 
 
 "Too beautiful to dedicate to solitude," she said, as he led her 
 in with words of complimentary welcome. ** How connoisseurs 
 Would envy aU the Coustous and Canovas, all the pictui-es and 
 bronzes buried in this single room ! Why your very choicest art- 
 treasuies are hidden here !" 
 
 * ' I believe they are. But the envy of the virtuosi would not 
 enhance their beauty or my pleasure in it." 
 
 ** No ?" she did not understand him. To her a diamond was no 
 more worth than a stone, unless it were seen and coveted of others. 
 *' This room is like a vision of Vathek. No wonder they call you 
 n Bybarite." 
 
 He laughed. 
 
 *' Do they call me so P And yet I would haye rather lived on a 
 date in Pericles' Athens than have been king in Sybaris. Ah ! I 
 told you it was cruel kindness to come here. Lady Valencia ; my 
 Daphne will have no smile, and my Danae no bloom, any longer. 
 My art-idols will have no charm beside one memory." 
 
 He looked down on her with a glance that made his words no 
 empty flattery, as they stood beside a wi'iting-cabinet that had 
 bf)louged to TuUia d'Arragona. She laid her hands on the manu- 
 
A Jester who hated both Prince ana' Palace, 73 
 
 Bcrlpts and papers that strewed it, and laughed, half-gai]y, half- 
 mournfully, as she touched them. 
 
 "But those papers contain what no woman will rival. Ad 
 author always has one sovereign that no one can dethrone, — in hifi 
 own dreams." 
 
 She must have known that it would have been hard for even a 
 poet's imagining to conjure any fancy more fair than her own 
 reality, where she stood leaning slightly down over the old ebony- 
 and-gold cabinet of Strozzi's mistress, alone with the art which 
 had no other story to tell than the love it embodied, no other 
 thought to create than the eternal history of human passion, — 
 alone with the golden lingering light of the sunset playing about 
 her feet and shining in the deep-brown lustre of her glance. 
 
 He stooped towards her, made captive without retiection, with- 
 out heed. 
 
 "But doubly happy the author who finds his fairest drcara 
 made real ! " 
 
 At that moment through the open doorway floated Madame 
 de la Vivarol, followed by Cos Grenvil and the Duke of Crown- 
 diamonds. 
 
 "Ah, monsieur! so you have thrown this sacred and mystical 
 chamber at last open to profane feet ? How charming it is ! — like 
 apiece of description out of Monte Christo !" she cried, with a 
 charming carelessness, as she fluttered, butterfly-like, about tho 
 room, criticising a tazza, glancing at a manuscript, admiring a 
 miniature, trjing an ivory pistol, commenting on a statuette. 
 " So this is your solitude !" she went on, remorselessly ; " really, 
 mo7i ami, it is more agreeable than most men's entertainments. 
 We shall know now how pleasant your retreat is when you are 
 occupied — in solitude — with your paperasses and your palette ! " 
 
 " Ah, madame," said Chandos, laughingly, though he knew 
 very well what was concealed under that airy challenge, "fair 
 memories will be left to my room, but its spell and its peace will 
 be broken for ever. As I was saying to Lady Valencia, I can never 
 summon shapes to paper or canvas now that its loneliness will be 
 haunted with such recollections." _ 
 
 " Man ami,'' said La Yivarol, with the prettiest mocking grace iu 
 the world, " are you so very constant to the absent ?" 
 
 And while she floated hither and thither, fluttering over a Vita 
 Nuova, rich in Attavante miniatures, lifting her eyeglass at a little 
 Wouverman, murmuring, " Que c'est joli ! que c'est joli .^" before a 
 grand scene of David, and slightly shrugging her shoulders at a 
 bewitching Greuze, because it was a different style of beauty from 
 her own, none could have dreamed that madame had a trace of 
 pique on her. Yet, as they left for their carriages a few moments 
 later, it would have been hard to say which had the niost bitter 
 pang against her rival treasured in silence, — the fair Lily Queen, 
 who had lost the one moment when warm words had so nearly been 
 won on his lips, or the French countess, who had found another 
 given the entrance to that writing- room, to which admittance had 
 been so often, and so steadily, though gaily, denied her. 
 
Chandbs, 
 
 As for Chaiidos, he consoled himself easily with the happy in. 
 sonciance of his nature, and went down to dine at his honhonniere 
 at Ptichmond. Among his party was Beatrix Lennox, a clevei 
 woman and a brilliant, — a woman with the talent of Chevreuse and 
 the fascination of a L'Enclos ; a woman whose wit was never weary, 
 and whose voice charmed like the sound of a flute through a still, 
 aromatic, tropical night ; a woman in whose splendid eyes there 
 came now and then, when she ceased to speak, a look of unutter- 
 able pain, a look that passed very quickly, too quickly to be ever 
 BGon by those around her. 
 
 Chandos — amused by those nearest to him, who laid themselves 
 ont to so amuse him with all the brightness of their ready esjmt, 
 all tlie gravity of their airy laughter, all the infectious mirth oif 
 vivacious chansons — was too well distracted to notice or perceive that 
 Trevenna studiously, though with all his customary tact, prevented 
 any opportunity occurring for Mrs. Lennox to approach her host, 
 or bo able to address him in any way apart. He did not notice, 
 either, though she was a favourite with him, that the haughty, 
 resistless, victorious lionne, usually so disdainful and so despotic iq 
 her imperious grace, allowed Trevenna to use an almost insolent 
 on-hand hrusquerie to her unreproved, and once or twice took the 
 cue of her words fi'om him, and obeyed his glance as a proud forest- 
 born deer tamed by captivity might obey the hand of its keeper, 
 compulsorily but rebeUiously, 
 
 Chandos had the too ready trustfulness of a woman ; but he had 
 nothing of that subtle power at the perception of trifles, and the 
 clairvoyant divination of their meaning, which atone to women for 
 the risks of their over-faith. 
 
 The world amused him so well, what need had he to probe 
 beneath its surface or ask its complex springs ? That work was 
 Trevenna'a business, and to Trevenna's taste. 
 
 As a boy, that alert humorist had never seen a conjurer's leger- 
 demain but to buy the trick of it, a piece of machinery but to 
 investigate its principle, a stage but to go behind the scenes, a 
 watch but to break it in trying to find out its manufacture ; ho 
 did the same now with human life. All its weaknesses, all its 
 crimes, all its secrets, all its intricacies and conspiracies and veiled 
 motives and plausible pretexts, it was his delight to pierce and 
 learn and uncover and hold in abject subjection. To walk as it 
 were in the underground sewers of the moral nature, and to watch 
 all the wheels within wheels of the world's rotation, was an exqui- 
 Bite amusement to Trevenna. Nor did he ever get cjmical with it. 
 He thought very badly of humanity, to be sui-e ; but it tickled hia 
 fancy that men should be such rascals as he thought them ; it 
 never for an instant made him sour at it. He was, as Chandos 
 had said, an odd mixture of Theophrastic bitterness and Plautus- 
 Uke good humour. He never condemned anything; he onlyfouuj 
 everything out. He had not the slightest objection that men 
 ehould be scoundrels ; on the whole, it was more convenient that 
 they should be so^ all he cared was that he should be up to theif 
 moyes. 
 
A Jester who hated both Prince and Palace, 
 
 75 
 
 Nor was it a brief or a light labour by which he became so. A 
 marvellously unerring memory, an acumen of tho finest intelli- 
 gence, a universality that could adapt itself pliably to all forms, a 
 penetration that never erred, a logic that could never be betrayed 
 into the ignoratio ehnchi, and, above all, a light, off-hand, perlect 
 tact that could successfully cover all these from view, were the 
 severe acquirements that were necessities for his success ; and by a 
 perseverance as intense as ever scholar brought to his science, or 
 warrior to his struggle, he had gained them in such proportion 
 at least as any man can ever hope to attain them all. There 
 was strong stuJQF, there was great stuff, in the man who could 
 put himself voluntarily through such a course of training as 
 Trevenna had now pursued through long years, — to the world's 
 view of him an adventurer, an idler, a diner-out, a hanger-on to 
 men of rank and riches, in real truth a man whom not one trifle of 
 the passing hour escaped, by whom the slightest thread that might 
 be useful in the future was never neglected, and who, after pleasures 
 and affronts in turn that would have alternately enervated and 
 heart-sickened any other less sturdily in earnest than himself, could 
 come back to his cheap lodgings to plunge into intellectual labour, 
 and to grind political knowledge as arduously and as steadily aa 
 though he were a lad studying for his Greats at a university. 
 
 The qualities he brought to his career were admirable beyond all 
 average of ordinary power; the purpose of his career was more 
 questionable. He would have said, and so far with fair justice, 
 that it was, at any rate, the same which sent Alexander into the 
 heart of the East, which placed Mahomet at the head of the won- 
 drous legions of El-Islam, which sent William of Orange to the 
 throne of Great Britain, and the young Corsican to the dais and 
 diadem of Louis Quatorze, — the motive of seK- aggrandisement. 
 
 And, in truth, there was in this good-humoured, impudent, 
 imperturbable, brusque, amusing man-about-town, who jested to 
 get a dinner and put up with slights to purchase a day's shooting, 
 the same element of indomitability as there was in Caesar, the same 
 power of concentration as there was in Columbus, and the same 
 strength of self-training as there was in Julian. Only his Rome 
 was the House of Commons, his Terra Nuova was the table-land 
 where adventurers were denied to mount, and his deities were 
 Money, Success, and Vengeance, — gods, it must be confessed, in 
 all ages fair to men as Yenus Pandemos, and more potent with 
 them than all the creeds from Cybele's to Chrysostom's. 
 
liOOK: THE SECOND. 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 VTTDER THE WATERS OF NILE. 
 
 It was night in tlio low, crooked, dirty, unsavoury conrt in whicii 
 
 stood the little rickety door, with its yellow panes of opaque glass, 
 that was lettered Tindall & Co. An unpretentious place, uu- 
 tempting, dusty, and boasting in no way of itself, — its shop or 
 counting-house suggestive of no particular trade, but chiefly filled 
 with a few old pictures, a few old blackened bronzes, a piece or 
 two of quaint armour, a little china, and much lumber. These 
 things, however, remained there week after week. The brown 
 
 Eictures, the cracked china, the old pair of Modenese carvings, the 
 elmet, or the fiddle, were only trifles on the sui'face, immaterial 
 garnishings to answer the curious eyes of the multitude when 
 those eyes, in passing, peered in and wondered what was traded in 
 behind the opaque panes of glass. Underneath them, as the 
 crocodile sits hidden with the sullen, reddish waters and the broad, 
 fan-like leaves of the Nile above his scaly head and opened jaws, 
 80 might be said to sit Tindall & Co., eating all manner of strange 
 things that dropped between their fangs, — youth and age, broad 
 estates and ancient halls, wooded acres and gallant names, boyhood 
 with the gold on its hair, and manhood with the shot of the suicide 
 through its heart, eating them all, and mashing them together 
 impartially, and chui-ning them all down without distinction into 
 one vast, even, impotent, shapeless mass of ruin. 
 
 This was what Tindall & Co. did under the flowing mud-huod 
 Nile-tide of London life, and then lay basking, alligator- like, 
 waiting for more. This is what Tindall & Co., and such-like 
 spawn of Nile, can do under the beneficent laws which, by restrict- 
 ing usury with a penalty, compel despair to pay double for the 
 straw it grasps at, — laws which forget that, despite them all, the 
 supply will always continue to meet the demand, and that their 
 only issue is to make the one who supplies ineiet on treble payment 
 as indemnity for the risk he runs through them. Ah ! wise, calm 
 voice of Political Economy, will it ever be hoard? will its true 
 justice ever outweigh the gushing impulses of cruel sentiment? 
 will it ever be known that its immutable partiality is as truly 
 gentle as the world at present calls it hard ? When it shall bo, 
 the crocodiles will be crushed in turn, and crocodilo- tears flow no 
 mora : but the millennium is very far away. 
 
Under the Waters of Nile, 77 
 
 The premises of Tindall & Co. were cut up into various email 
 eooms ; privacy was an essential of their pursuits. It would warn 
 away the antelope that steals down to the treacherous edge to 
 elake its thirst within fatal distance of the alligator's jaws, if it 
 were to see signs of the bones and skin of a lately- devouied brothei 
 lying near. They were all dingy, dull, smoke-dried little chambers, 
 with a musty, repellent odour that involuntarily brought remem* 
 brance of the Morgue. In one of them to-night, the poorest of 
 the lot, which bore traces of constant occupation in its poor furni- 
 ture, was the old Castilian Jew, standing in the tawny light of a 
 hand-lamp burning near him. Before him, in the shadow, was a 
 young boy, of seventeen or eighteen years, beautiful as a Murillo 
 head, the appealing softness of an extreme youth blent in him with 
 the fixed misery of a shameful grief. There were heavy tears on 
 his dropped lashes, and his lips were slightly apart like those of 
 one who is worn out and faint with pain. Between the two stood 
 Trevenna, with his bright, open, pleasant face and its shrewd blue 
 English eyes, dressed for the evening, as he leaned in comfortable 
 indiflference, like one who is master of the house and master of the 
 situation, against the wooden ledge of the painted mantelpiece. 
 
 " Much more sensible to come back, little Benjamin," he said, 
 with a shrug of his shoulders. " Never try dodging with me; it 
 isn't the least bit of use. Only riles me, as the Yankees say, and 
 can't serve you in the slightest. Bless your heart, my little felon, 
 do you suppose if you were to hide yourself in the African sands, 
 or bury yourself in the Arctic ice, / shouldn't ferret you out when 
 I wanted you ?" 
 
 His laughing, merry eyes flashed a single glance into the lad's 
 drooped face ; and the boy shuddered and trembled, and turned 
 pale as though he were an accused between the irons, wrenched 
 with another turn of the rack. 
 
 " Not the smallest use m dodging," pursued Trevenna, as good- 
 naturedly and agreeably a^ though he offered him a glass of sherry. 
 " Shows great inexperienv^ U) try it. World's made up of fliea 
 and spiders ; you're a fly, atjct all the world's a net for you ; glide 
 through one web, another'Ii 4?atch you. Listen; you'd better 
 understand it once for all. lie what you like with yourself, go 
 where you like, burn yourself up in the tropics, bury yourself 
 down in the mines, grow old, marry, grow grey, get children, 
 make money ; but don't think to escape me. AVhen I want you, 
 or when you forfeit leniency, I shall have you. Just think ! 
 twenty years hence perhaps you may be fancying the thing blown 
 over, you may be living in luxury, even, — who knows ? — yonder 
 there among your precious Spanish vines ; you may be in love and 
 have some soft Andalusian for your wife ; you may have friends 
 who think you a min-or of probity, brats who will own your name, 
 all sorts of stakes in life, all sorts of ties to it ; and just then, if I 
 want you— Presto ! I shall be down upon you. So never feel sure, 
 that's all ; and never try dodging." 
 
 He watched the boy as he spoke, winding up all these fancies, 
 80 foreign to his natural speech, that ha mi^iit turn with each one 
 
Chandos, 
 
 of them nnofcher grind of the rack to the soft and helpless nature 
 before him. It aciused him to see the agony they caused. The 
 boy shrank farther and farther, like a hunted, stricken creature, 
 trembling and paralyzed, his eyes fascinated on his tormentor as 
 though by a spell. The old man stood mute and motionless, but 
 an anguish greater even than the youth's was on him in hia 
 silence ; and, as his eyes turned with piteous entreaty, his dry lipa 
 mui-mured, unconsciously — 
 
 " Sir, sir! as you are merciful ! — he is so young." 
 
 " Precisely because he ia so young, my good Ignatius, must we 
 have him know that, live as long as he may, he'll never be free," 
 retorted Trevenna, pleasantly. " He has a long life before him, 
 and he might get fancying that all this would wear out ; but it 
 won't. Paper isn't sand, and that little document of his will 
 always stand." 
 
 The boy, Agostino, as he was called, the only living thing of the 
 old man's blood and name, looked up with a low, gasping cry. 
 This merciless seizure of all his future, this damning denial of all 
 earthly hope, this chain that wound about all years to come ere yet 
 they had dawned on him, this desparing eternity of bondage, were 
 greater than he could bear. He threw up his arms with a pas- 
 sionate moan, and flung himself at Trevenna's feet, his bright 
 brow bent down on the dust, his hands clasping the hem of his 
 tyrant's coftt. 
 
 " Kill me I O God of Israel ! kill me at one blow. I cannot live 
 like this." 
 
 Trevenna moved his foot a little, as chough he pushed away a 
 whining spaniel, and laughed as he looked down on him. 
 
 '* Cher Agostino, you would make a capital actor. I think I'll 
 put you on the stage ; you'd be a first-rate Romeo, or /o?2." 
 
 The kick, the laugh, the words, in the moment of his intense 
 tortm-e, stung and lashed the eubroissivL spirit of the Israelite race, 
 and the terror-stricken bondage of th*^ boy, into a passionate life 
 that broke aU bonds. He sprang t*? Ms feet, standing there where 
 the tawny circle of the oil-light fell^ iJke a young David, his rich 
 lips quivering, his curls flung bacfa. his cheek with its glowing 
 MuriUo tint deepened to a scarlet tii-e. 
 
 "What have I done?" he cnod aloud, while his voice rang 
 piteously through the chamber. " What have I done, to be tor- 
 tured like this F Not a tithe of what is done here every day, every 
 hour ! If I fee a thief, where is the wonder ? Is there not robbery 
 round me from noon to night ? Is not every breath of air in this 
 accursed den charged with some lie, some theft, some black iniquity ? 
 Hundreds come here in their ruin ; is one ever spared ? Is not ft 
 trade in men's necessities driven herefrom year's end to year's end ? 
 Is not poverty betrayed, and ignorance tempted, and hoL our bought 
 and sold here every week ? How could I learn honesty where all 
 is fraud and sin ? how could I keep stainless where everything is 
 corruption ? If I am a thief and a felon, what are you ? " 
 
 The bold words poured out in anguish, their English speech 
 tinged and mellowed with the Oastilian accent. Sufiering had 
 
Under the Waters of Nile, 79 
 
 made him desperate ; he writhed and turned and struck his bond- 
 master. The old man heard him, trembling and aghast; his brown 
 face blanched, his teeth shook ; he looked up at Trevenna with a 
 piteous supplication. 
 
 ** Oh, sir ! oh, my master, forgive him I He is but a child, and 
 he knows not what he says " 
 
 '* Ho will know what he has to pay for it. Out of my way, you 
 young hound." 
 
 The answer was not even angered, not even jarred from his 
 customary bantering honhomie ; but at the glance of the keen blue 
 eye that accompanied it, all the sudden fire, all the momentary 
 rebellion, of the boy died out ; he felt his own utter powerlessness 
 against the master he contended with ; he cowered like a beaten 
 dog, dropped his head on his breast, and burst into a passion of 
 tears. 
 
 " Shut up that," said Trevenna, carelessly, while, as much 
 unmoved as though the young Jew's fiery words had never scathed 
 his ear, he took out some papers from his inner coat-pocket and 
 tossed them to Ignatius Mathias. " Here, look aUve. Take these ; 
 and don't do anything [to little Dallerstone yet awhile. If he 
 come here, mind he doesn't know anything about those signatures ; 
 let him understand that, quite as a matter of kindness, I looked in 
 to see if you couli) i^e induced to take the screw off him ; let him 
 think that I'd infunte trouble to get you to do anything of the 
 kind ; and leave him to feel that you'U very likely be down on him, 
 and that his only safety's in me. Look sharp ; you understand ?" 
 
 The Hebrew bent his head, holding the papers ^in his withered 
 hands ; they were the bills of young Ch:irlie Dallerstone, freshly 
 renewed on Chandos' acceptation. 
 
 *' One thing more,",went on Trevenna, looking at his watch; for 
 he was going to dine in Park Lane, and it was nearly nine. *' I 
 find Sir Philip looks booked to make a very 'sure thing at the 
 Ducal. His French horse is sure to win, and he may strike a vein 
 of luck again. Catch him while he's down ; call in his * stiff' to- 
 morrow. He must sell up ; he can't help himself. As for Lady 
 Yantyre, — one doesn't deal with women usually ; but she's been 
 going it very fast in Venezuelan bonds and California scrip. She 
 wants some ready, and she's quite safe ; she'll come into no end of 
 money by-and-by. I buy and sell for her in the City, so I know 
 to a T what she's worth. That's all, I think. You may come to 
 me the day after to-morrow, if you've anything to say. Good- 
 bye, young one ; and just remember, if you don't want to see the 
 hulks,— don't dodge ! " 
 
 With which valediction, Trevenna Bauntered out of the room, 
 drawing on his gloves, to get into his night-cab and drive to 
 one of those charming dinners of princes, peers, wits, authors, and 
 artists, all chosen for some social gift of brilliance, for which the 
 house of Chandos was celebrated. 
 
 "What an angel Charlie will think me!" thought Trevenna, 
 with a laugh, as his dashing cab clattered his way from Tindall & 
 (Do.'s. where he had stopped openly an<^ left his thorough-bred 
 
So Chandos, 
 
 high stopper to danco impatiently before the door in full view of 
 any passer-by. He only went on Charlie's business. 
 
 Those whom ho had left in the little, close, and ill-illumined 
 chamber were silent many moments. That laughing, frank, clover 
 face of their tyrant had left a shadow there dark as night. The 
 two forms were in strange contrast with the meagre commonplace 
 of their surroundings, — two figures of Giorgiono and of Eubens 
 painted in upon the di'ab-hued dusty panels of the miserable City 
 oflice-room. The youth Agostino sat motionless, his head bowed 
 down upon his arms. The old man watched him, his eyes, with 
 all the yearning tenderness of a woman in them, filling with the 
 slow, salt tears of age. He was a hard man, a cunning man 
 may-be, a man chilled by a long life of opprobrium, of struggle, of 
 persecution, of pain ; but he was soft in his heart as a mother to 
 that beautiful lad, the last flower of a doomed and died-out house. 
 He loved him with a great love, this only living son of his young, 
 dead wife, — this Bononi, who had come to him, as it seemed, with 
 all the perfume and the poetiy of his lost Spain shed on his vivid 
 beauty and scorning to revive in his happy grace. 
 
 Therefore in his sin he had clung to him, in his shame he had 
 no reproach to deal him ; and through him, for him, by him, the 
 grand old Israelite became weak as water, facile as a reed, in the 
 hands of an inexorable taskmaster, who was as exacting as an 
 Egyptian of old. 
 
 He laid his hand on the boy's bowed head, and moved the thick 
 curls tenderly. 
 
 •* You were too rash, my Agostino ; it is not for the helpless to 
 incense the strong. I trembled as I heard. My child, \\iy child, 
 your sole hope is in his sparing you." 
 
 Agostino lifted his head, the tears heavy on his lids, his lipa 
 swollen and parted. 
 
 " Forgive mo, ffither, I was mad ! And I only said the truth to 
 him, though the God of Truth is my witness that I had no thought 
 to wound you, or to mean yoiiy by my words. If what I see here be 
 evil, what I learn from you is good : so lofty that it should out- 
 weigh it a thousand-fold. My guilt is my own; I meant nq 
 reproach to you." 
 
 "I know, I know," said the old man, wearily. *'But you 
 angered him, my child ; I saw it by his eye, and — and — we are in 
 his power. He has been good to us,— good to us. We are bound 
 to bear the stripes that he may deal." 
 
 It was said patiently, firmly, and in sincerity. Trevenna had 
 bought his invaluable tool by a few arts which were on the suiface 
 benevolent and lenient, and were in literal fact far-sighted plana 
 to purchase a fine instrument at a small price. But the perception 
 of this, even where it dawned on him, did not avail to shake the 
 old Israelite's sense of grateful bondage ; nor would it have done e^ 
 oven had it not been accompanied with the auxiliaiies of necessity 
 Biid foar which through Agostino he was moved by as well. 
 
 " Good I " the youth's eyes flashed, and his mouth quivered, 
 *' I wotiid tc Heaven, but for the sham© on you, that he would 
 
Undfir the t^aters of Nile, .. 
 
 give me up to justice, and send me out to any fate, rather than 
 force me to live in this yoke an hour longer. It idlls me ! it kill? 
 me ! Under his eye I have no will ; under his law my very breath 
 seems his. What is it to be spared, to be dogged by such a doom 
 as he told out to me ? — a never-ending dread ! " 
 
 The old man shuddered, and on his face there deepened that 
 terrible, haunted look of fear for one dearer than himself, which 
 had gleamed out from the light of his sunken eyes throughout 
 Trevenna's presence. 
 
 " Agostino, the life of a convict for you! The irons on your 
 youug limbs, the brutal work for your delicate strength, the 
 captivity, the travail, the shame, the misery " 
 
 His voice failed him, ho could not think of the near approach of 
 Buch a doom for the only thing loft to him on earth without his 
 anguish mastering him. Agostino trembled and shrank back, 
 ciouching, bowed, and prostrate, in the same paralysis of horror 
 which had subdued him when Trovenna had spoken. He could 
 not have faced his fate. There was on the Spanish splendour of 
 his boyish loveliness a wavering, womanish weakness, a cowardice, 
 the result, not of selfishness, but of changing and painful sensitive- 
 ness ; it was this instability, this cowardice, which had drawn him 
 into a crime wholly at variance with the candid tenderness of hia 
 regard, and which made him, through his fear, ductile as wax to 
 mould even into the very thing he loathed, lie might say that he 
 longed for justice in the stead of being spared by one who played 
 with him in his suffering as a cat with a bird ; but he would have 
 clung to exemption at aU cost had ho been put really to the test, 
 and accepted l&e on any terms to escape the horror and the igno- 
 miny of public retribution. 
 
 The old Israelite looked down on him, and, as he saw that pitiful, 
 tremulous abasement before tho mere conjured vision of a felon's 
 life, lifted his withered hands upward in a grand, unconscious 
 gesture of imprecation and of prayer. 
 
 *• May the God of Israel forsake me in my last extremity, if I 
 ever forsake him by whom you have been spared your doom I" 
 
 The vow was uttered in all the dignity and in all the simplicity 
 of truth. No matter what his taskmaster might be to others, no 
 matter how cruel the tasks he set, no matter how hard the lashes 
 he gave, no matter how weary the labour he imposed, to Ignatius 
 Mathias he was sacred ; he had spared Agostino. 
 
 In that moment of his oath of fidelity, the Castilian Jew, the 
 white-haired usurer, the world-worn toiler in many cities, tho 
 despised and reviled Hebrew, reached a moral height of which 
 John Trevenna never had a glimpse. 
 
 He paused a while, gazing down upon the boy. For many weeks 
 they had been parted, for the first time in their lives, and severed 
 in the tortures of suspense ; and the sight of him, even in their 
 present anguish, even in the bitterness of the guilt which had 
 stained this opening life with its blot, was sweet as water in a dry 
 land to the sear and aching heart of the old man. "With his own 
 liands he brought him wine and bread, and bade him eat, breakiug 
 
 o 
 
82 Ckundus. 
 
 througli all the custom and ceremonies of his people, and tending 
 him with woman -like gentleness. It was thus that he had made Agoe- 
 tino dependent and fragile as a girl, and powerless to guide iimi- 
 seK through the rough winds and subtle temptations of the worid. 
 Amidst the deprivation and misery that had fallen to the lot of 
 the Israelite, the child who had the eyes of his lost darling had 
 never needed warmth and light, and the sight of flowers, and the 
 song of birds, and the bloom of summer fruits. Starving on a 
 snorsel of dried fish himself, he had bought the purple grapes of 
 their own sierras for Agostino. And there was something caressing, 
 vivid, engaging, appealing in the boy, which had repaid this fully 
 in affection, even whilst he had gone farthest from straight paths. 
 
 He drank the Montepulciano wine that was brought him now, 
 R,nd with it youth and hope recovered their unstrung powers, and 
 the dread despair that had pressed on him in Trevenna's presence 
 relaxed. Eat he could not ; but as he leaned there, resting his 
 Murillo head upon his arm, and absently gazing at the red flicker 
 of the lamp-flame in the wine, something of light flashed over his 
 face ; he raised his head with an eager gesture. 
 
 '* Father, I have a thought ! Listen. Last year, when I was ir 
 the Yega, I met an Englishman ; it was in the autumn morning, 
 and I was lying, doing nothing, among the grass as he rode by. 
 He rode slowly, and I saw him well. I never saw a face like his ; 
 to look at it was Kke hearing music. He caught my eyes, and 
 stopped his horse and asked the way towards Granada ; he had 
 fallen on a by-path thi'ough the vines. I could scarcely answer 
 him for looking at his face ; it was so beautiful. He noticed it, 
 perhaps, for he asked me what I thought of, that I was so absent ; 
 dnd I told him truly, ' I was thinking you look like David, — a 
 poet-king.' He laughed, and said none ever paid him a more 
 graceful flattery ; but it was not flattery : I was thinking so. Then 
 he smiled, and looked more closely at me. ' You are of the pure 
 Sephardim race, are you not?' he asked me, and I wondered how 
 he knew ; for he was not one of us, but an azure-eyed, golden- 
 haired Gentile. I never saw him again in Spain ; but this year I 
 saw a gentleman coming down the steps of one of the great man- 
 sions to go to his carriage in the gaslight, and I knew him again ; 
 he was in coui't dress, and I asked who he was of the people. They 
 said he was very famous, veiy generous, very high in all distinc- 
 tions, and that none ever asked him a kindness in vain. He ie 
 great — you can tell that by his glance ; he is gentle — you can tell 
 Ihat by his smile. I know his worst foe might trust to his honour 
 and trust to his pity. I will go to him and tell him all, and 
 see. if he can free me. He knows 1dm, for he \Ya8 with him thai 
 night." 
 
 *' And his name, the crowds told you ?" 
 
 "isChandos." 
 
 The old Hebrew, who had listened, half beguiled as by a poetic 
 tale, started, his hands clenched on the papers that had been left 
 with him : a change of alarm and of eagerness flashed over the 
 dark oliye of his inscrutable face ; his yoice rose harsh and imperativfl 
 
Under the fFaters of Nile. 8.3 
 
 in his aaxiety, wMle a pang of shame and of disquietude t^ook 
 it? tone. 
 
 " You dream like a child, Agostino ! Chandos ! yes,^ knows 
 him, and by that very reason you must never approach him. ^ You 
 have no choice but obedience ; you are in his power, and his first 
 law is silence on aU that connects him with us. Break it by a 
 whisper, and he will spare you not one moment more. Besides, 
 this Chandos, this fine gentleman, this delicate aristocrat, — h^ 
 would shut his doors to a beggared Jew ! " 
 
 "He would not," murmured the boy in a soft whisper. 
 
 •* No matter whether he would or no ! Go near him, and the 
 worst fate you dread will teach you the cost of disobedience. Ah, 
 Agostino, Usten. Be patient, be docile ; bear the yoke yet a while, 
 and I will buy your safety with my labour ; I will earn your 
 liberation with my service. Only be patient, and you shall not 
 8ufi"er." 
 
 The first words had been spoken with the stern authority of the 
 Mosaic code ; the latter closed in the yearning tenderness of hia 
 infinite devotion to his only son. 
 
 Agostino bowed his head in silence ; it was not in him to resist ; 
 it was greatly in him to fear. His head sank down upon his arms 
 once more in the abandonment of a dejection the more bitter and 
 more prostrated because the gleam of a youth's romantic hope had 
 flickered over it and had died out ; he thought still that the -stranger, 
 who had seemed to him like the poet- king of his own Israel when 
 the crown was first set on his proud, sunlit, unworn brow, could 
 raise him from his despair and loose his fetters. The yellow lamp 
 burned sullenly on, its thin smoke curled up in the leaden, noisome 
 air of the pent city alley ; the night passed on, and the boy still 
 sat listless and heart-broken there, while Ignatius Mathias, bent 
 above his desk, passed back to the world of hard acumen, of mer- 
 ciless exaction, of unerring requisition, of grinding tribute : with 
 those exact figures, with those names so fair in the world's account, 
 60 fouled in his, with those passages which wrote out the ruin of 
 those in whom the world saw no flaw, the evil entered into his soul, 
 and the higher natui'e perished. He laboured to free his darling . 
 what cared he how many living hearts might have the life-blood 
 pressed out of them under the weights he was employed to pile, 
 so that with that crimson wine his taskmaster was pleased and 
 satiated ? 
 
 And the church-clocks of the empty city tolled dully through the 
 misty night the quarters and hours one by one; and as the lad 
 Agostino sat dreaming of that autumn morning in the Yega, with 
 the hot light on the bronze leaves and purple clusters of the vines, 
 and the joyous song of a muleteer echoing from the distance, whiU» 
 the Moorish ruins of mosque and castle rose clear against the 
 cloudless skies, the grand, bent form of the old Israelite, onc'i 
 majestic as any prophet's of Palestine, etooped over the csruiiipied 
 papers that bore the signeture — 
 
 •* Erne-st Chandos."' 
 
Chandoi. 
 CHAPTEE n. 
 
 THE DAllK DIADEM. 
 
 Ascot week came, and at the cottage which Chandos tiSTially t*>ot 
 for the races, Trevenna, with five or six others, spent the pleasantes< 
 days in the calendar. The gayest and most fashionable racing - 
 time in the world, with its crowds of dainty beauties and its aris- 
 tocratic throngs, was nowhere more fully enjoyed than at that pretty 
 Ascot lodge, with its merry breakfasts before the drags came round, 
 and its witty dinners after the day was over. Dubosc, the great 
 clief of Park Lane, went thither daily in his little brown brougham 
 to superintend the meals of his master and his guests, and throw in 
 that finishing artistic touch which made them unsurpassable. The 
 party was perfectly chosen, and perfectly attuned to each other : it 
 amused Chandos admirably, as he was used to bo amused by life. 
 From the time he was three years old, when princesses had played 
 ball with him and ambassadresses bribed him with lonhons to give 
 them a kiss, he had been accustomed to live among those who 
 beguiled his time for him without efi'ort ; and the world seemed 
 naturally to group itself round him in changing tableaux that 
 never left him a dull moment. He had no need to exert himself 
 to seek pleasure ; pleasure cam© unbidden in every varying form 
 to him, seductive and protean as a coquette. 
 
 Chandos loved horses, rode them superbly, and had all the lore of 
 the desert ; but the slang and the society of the turf he abhorred, 
 lie hated the roar of a ring, the uproar of a betting-room, the 
 jargon of a trainer, the intrigues of the flat. But the Clarencieux 
 establishment had long before his time been famous for good 
 things ; his horses had carried off all the best stakes in various 
 years at Newmarket, Doncaster, Epsom, and Goodwood. And now 
 at Ascot, far and away at the head of the field stood, almost un- 
 touched by any rival for tho Cup, his famous four-year-old Sir 
 (Jalahad. 
 
 It caused him no uneasiness that in certain quarters there waa 
 a disposition to ofier against the favoiu-ite, and that this was dono 
 vvdth a regularity and a caution which might have suggested tho 
 fact of a commission being out to lay against him. He noticed it, 
 indeed, but with that carelessness which made him too facilely 
 porsuaded ; and was content to believe the explanation Trevenna 
 offered him, that a rumour had got abroad of Sir Galahad having a 
 touch of cough. 
 
 " Yery good thing for us, too," said Trevenna, shrugging his 
 shoulders. " Galahad's right as a trivet ; and if we can heighten 
 the whisper to influenza, and take all the odds against him, there'll 
 bo a pot of money to show " 
 
 He stopped: he perceived that for once his acumen had been 
 feulty, and had overreached itself; ho saw that ho had tried a 
 ciangerous path with a man who, in all other ways, was so pliant 
 
The Dark Diadem, 85 
 
 to his hand thi'ough tho weaknesses of insouciance and of indolence. 
 Chandos turned to him with a look on his face that he had never 
 eeou there. "Eoguery makes a poor jest," he said, coldly. " If 
 any one win a shilling by the rumour, knowing its falsity, he may 
 take his name oft* my visiting-list. I will see that the horse is 
 given his next morning gallop over the Ileath as publicly as pos- 
 sible, so that it may bo known he is in pcricct condition." 
 
 And he did so. Trevenna the Astute had made a false step for 
 the sole time in their intercourse, and thought to himself: *' Chi- 
 valry on the flat ! If it ever come into fashion, we may sow wheat 
 on the Beacon Course and grow tares by Tattenham Corner. Mercy! 
 what a fool ho is, with all his talents ! " 
 
 He did scorn a very great fool to Trevenna ; but then, as Tre- 
 venna reflected, there was not much wonder in that, after all, for 
 the man was a poet— in his view synonymous with saying a man 
 was a lunatic. 
 
 "Looks well, Ernest," said the Duke of Castlemaine, where he 
 stood, among other members of the Jockey Club, eyeing Sir Galahad 
 as he came on the Heath on the morning of the Cup day. 
 
 ** He can't be more fit," answered Chandos, with his race-glass 
 up ; *' and I don't see what there is to beat him." 
 
 "Nothing," said John Trevenna, who was always pleasantly 
 positive to men about their own successes : there is not a more 
 agreeable social quality. ** I think the field's hardly strong enough 
 to do him full credit ; there is scarce a good thing in it. Lotus- 
 Lily's pretty, no doubt — very taking-looking, and her arms and 
 knees are good ; but she won't stay." 
 
 With which Trevenna, after his general trenchant fashion, 
 clenched the matter, his authoritativeness being usually forgiven 
 for its exceeding accuracy: he was never found wrong. But it 
 highly displeased the grand old duke, the longest-lived and highest- 
 bom of all the dons of the Jockey Club, to have this audacious 
 dictator dealing out his opinions unbidden at his elbow. He hated 
 the fellow, and hated to see him there — so much, indeed, that ho 
 would have found means to turn him out of the stand, had he not 
 been brought thither by and through his grandson. He pointed 
 with his glass to a long, low, rakish-looking chestnut that, with 
 hood and quarter-piece on, was being walked quietly and unnoticed 
 about, forgotten among the ruck, while Sir Galahad, Lotus-Lily, 
 and the rest of the cracks, drew the eyes and awoke tho admiration 
 of the Heath. 
 
 ** You are false to your order, sir," he said, grimly. '* There's 
 the horse you should back, if you were true to your form — a * rank 
 outsider,' entered under an alias, came from nobody-knows- where, 
 and foisted into running for a cup whUe he should be standing in 
 a cab. You should have sympathy, sir I " ^ 
 
 Trevenna could have hurled a curse at his white hairs, with the 
 Bnarl of a fuiious dog, so bitterly the arrow rankled, so keenly he 
 felt that this man alone read him as he was. But he had trained 
 himself better ; he laughed without a sign of temper. 
 
 '* An awkward brute ! I don't fancy mm. Who likes their own 
 
86 Chandos, 
 
 order, duke ? You find yours so dull sometimea tliat you come to 
 the brains of Nobodies to amuse you ! " 
 
 *' Fellow can always bit you back again," thought hia Grace, 
 "and never shows when he's struck. But that overdone good 
 humour means mischief: if a man smile imder an affront, he may 
 be above, but he's much more likely to bo beneath, resenting it. 
 Now, I'd have respected the fellow if he had showed fight in hard 
 earnest ; but he laughs at too much not to mean to take his measure 
 out for it some day." 
 
 The saddling-bell rang, the telegram-board was hoisted up, the 
 start was given; the field swept out like a fan, disentangling one 
 from another, a confused mass, for a moment, of bright and various 
 hues. Then from the press there launched forward, with the well- 
 known, light, stretching stride that covered distance so marvel- 
 lously, the Clarencieux favourite, shaking himself clear of all the 
 runnmg, and leading at a canter, which, unextended and easy as 
 it was, left even Lotus-Lily and Queen of the Fairies behind by two 
 lengths. All eyes on the course and the stands were fastened on 
 the match between the cracks. Scarce any one noted among the 
 ruck one chestnut outsider, ugly, awkward, but with great girth 
 of barrel and power of action, which, ridden with singularly fine 
 judgment by a Yorkshire jock of a little known and merely local 
 reputation, was quietly singling out from the rest, and warily 
 waiting on, the two favourites— so warily, that imperceptibly, yet 
 surely, he quickened his pace, passed the Queen of the Fairies, and 
 gained upon Lotus-Lily till he struggled with her neck by neck, 
 tjo little known was he, so dark had he been kept, that as he ran 
 even with the mare, two lengths behind the Clarencieux crack, half 
 the multitude apon the Heath knew neither his name nor owner, 
 and the fashionable gatherings on the stands looked at their cards 
 bewildered as to whom this outsider belonged to, with his feather- 
 weight in the unrecognised grey-and-yellow, that was almost even 
 with the famous blue-and-gold of Chandos's popular colours. 
 
 Fleet as the lightning the three swept on, no other near them 
 even by a bad third, their jocks becoming but mere specks of 
 colour, whose course was watched with breathless, strained anxiety. 
 Extended now to the uttermost of his splendid pace. Sir Galahad, 
 conscious for the first time of a rival not to be disdained, and per- 
 haps scarcely to be beaten, ran like the wind, the Diadem chestnut 
 gaining on bitYi at every yard, the mare behind by hopeless lengths. 
 Chandos leaned forward, and his breath came and went quickly. 
 !nie Duke muttered in the depths of his snow-white beard— 
 •* The dark one wins, by God ! " 
 
 The dark one did win. Nearer and nearer, faster and faster, the 
 ungainly and massive limbs of the Yorkshii-e horse brought him 
 alongside the graceful and perfect shape of the Ascot favourite ; 
 and from the vast crowds upon the purple heather of the Heath 
 the shouts echoed the old Duke's words, "The outsider wins!" 
 '* The outsider has it ! " A moment, and they ran neck to neck ; 
 the gallant crack of the Clarencieux stable, with all the metal in 
 him loused to fire, stroye for a second manfully with this unknown 
 
The Dark Diadem, 87 
 
 and unexpected foe; then, with a single forward spring, like magic, 
 the outsider outstripped him by a head, and ran in at the distance, 
 winner of the Ascot cup. 
 
 ** A very clever horse,"^ eaid Ohandos, calmly, as he dropped his 
 race-glass. 
 
 «« p— n you I " thought one who stood next him. " There is no 
 fun in beating you ; you never will show when you're down." 
 
 ** Owned by some very clever rascals," said the Duke, as he shut 
 up his lorgnon with a clash, while his eyes filled with the hot fiery 
 wrath that in his youth had b^.en swift and terrible as a tempest. 
 "The chestnut has been kept dark as night. Mr. Trevenna, why 
 did you not take my advice and back your own order ? The out- 
 eider wins you see ! " 
 
 ** But I did not believe in him, sir ; nor do I now. I shall hope 
 you will have inquiries made, for there must be something very 
 dark here. Galahad looked well ridden ; and if well ridden, there 
 was nothing, I should have thought, on the turf could have beaten 
 him." 
 
 ** This is no case for the Jockey Club — you know that, sir, as 
 well as I do," said his Grace, sharply, with peremptory hauteur. 
 '* The chestnut's won fairly, so far as the running goes ; the roguery 
 has been beforehand." 
 
 Trevenna shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 " It must have taken a deuced deal of roguery to have kept 
 such a flier as that ugly brute dark all the three years of his life. 
 Chandos, how cool you are ! If I owned Sir Galahad, I should 
 tear that Diadem's jock out of saddle." 
 
 Chandos lifted his eyebrows. 
 
 "My bay is beaten ; there is no more to be said. The best thing 
 to do is to forget it as soon as possible. I will go and talk to the 
 ladies : they always gild the bitter pills of one's adversities." 
 
 " Ernest, do you know I have a strong behef that your friend is 
 a most co7zsummate scoundrel?" said the Duke of Castlemaine, 
 with emphasis, as he took him aside a moment before dinner in 
 the drawing-room of the Ascot cottage. 
 
 Chandos looked at him in excessive surprise. ** My dear Duke, 
 that is not the way I can hear any friend spoken of, even by 
 you." 
 
 "Pshaw ! " said his Grace, with his fiery wrath lighting again 
 those leonine eyes that had flashed over the ranks of Soult's and 
 Junot's armies as he led his dragoons down on to the serried 
 square. " I suppose, if I see your friends forging your name, then 
 I am to be delicate to warn you ? You are as blind as a woman, 
 Ern-est. I will stake you ten thousand to nothing that that 
 felloe Trevenna is at the bottom of this afi'air with the dark 
 horse." 
 
 "Trevennul" echoed Chandos, in amazement, yet amusedly. 
 " What should be gain by doing or knowing of such a thing ? He 
 has all the confidence of my trainer. If he wants to make money 
 on the turf, he would have made it scores of times ere this ©u my 
 cracks. Besides, think what a horrible imputation I * ' 
 
'88 Chandos, 
 
 ** His shoulders are broad enough to bear it," said the DuKe, 
 grimly : ' ' thoy have boruo worse before now, I dare say. Whore 
 (iid you pick tho follow up ? " 
 
 * I met him abroad." Chandos would no more have told 
 how they met at rouge et 7wir, and how he rescued the youiif 
 Eiglish traveller from a debtors' prison, than he would havs 
 . ounted the glasses of wine Trevenna drank at his table. 
 
 * ' Humph ! — without introduction ? " 
 
 " Well, one makes many acquaintances so on the Continent.*' 
 He smiled as he thought that their only introduction had been 
 through tho Baden bank and Baden prison. 
 
 " Certainly ; but we don't often bring them home with us," 
 rejoined his Grace, with a still grim significance. " What account 
 Old you have from him of himself?" 
 
 ** Eeally, I have forgotten , I was only a boy, — eighteen or nine- 
 teen, I think." 
 
 The Duke tapped his Louis Quatorze snuff-box with an ominoua 
 dissatisfaction. 
 
 ' * You are a very clever man, Ernest ; but you are too easily 
 fooled, if you will pardon my saying so. You can believe it or 
 disbelieve it, as you please ; but I am as certain as that I stand 
 on this hearth-rug that the fellow you defend knows more than he 
 ought about the history and the running of that d — d Yorkshire 
 chestnut." 
 
 *' It is your over-kindness for me, my dear Duke, that makes you 
 so unusually suspicious. I wish I were as satisfied of every one's 
 good will to me as I am of poor Trevenna's. Good heavens ! I 
 would as soon believe that my butler plans to poison me in my 
 champagne, and that my valet means to assassinate me as I dresa 
 for dinner ! " 
 
 He laughed lightly as he spoke, and turned to his other guests, 
 who just then entered the drawing-room, — among them Trevenna 
 himself. 
 
 The dinner was of the choicest. Dubosc, with a touch of kindly 
 feeling that this great master was never without, having heard of 
 the turf disappointments of an employer who seldom failed to 
 appreciate his genius, tendered consolation in delicate thoughtful- 
 ness, hy a sudden and marvellous inspiration of artistic invention, 
 producmg results with a turbot such as Europe had never heard or 
 conceived, and to which he positively attended with his own hands 
 throughout the critical moments of preparation, watched breath- 
 lessly by his satellites and subordinates. Chandos and his guests 
 were connoisseurs, on whom such an Sprouvette positive, to use 
 Brillat-Savarin's term, could not be tried but with fullest success. 
 Chandos sent a message of appreciation to the great chef himself ; 
 and Dubosc was conscious that the employer who could have 
 remembered a horse's running ill, while he was consoled with such 
 a triumph as the new turbot au Clarencieux, would have been a 
 man whose soul was dead indeed. 
 
 " He felt it? " asked the master of the kitchen of the stately 
 follow-functionaiy in black with the silver chain of office round 
 
The Dark Diadem. 89 
 
 his neck, who brouglit him the message of recognition. " You 
 think he felt it I There is so much in soul ! " 
 
 ♦* I am sure he felt it," replied the other solemnly. "He has 
 always proper feeling on th./ty- matters." 
 
 "Yes," sighed Dubosc, ^\'t he has not the doyotion that one 
 could wish; a fine taste, but careless. He thinks too much of 
 pictures and statues, and all those trifles, to bring his mind rightly 
 to the groat science." 
 
 "There is something in that," assented Silver-Chain, regret- 
 fully. " To see it really felt, you should have seen that little 
 vulgar creature, that Trevenna, taste it. There was an eprouvette!" 
 
 *' Ah," sighed Dubosc, still, " but it is sad when the good taste 
 goes out of the great orders ! He felt it, did he ? That man will 
 have a career ! " 
 
 Dubosc's eprouveUe did not fail to restore the life and wit to the 
 pai-ty which it had in some degree lost by the losing of Galahad ; 
 for all had laid more or less heavy sums on the favourite. Gaietf 
 and bo7i mots resumed their customary reign. Chandos always 
 lent himself quickly with the easiest will to be consoled ; and the 
 hours sparkled along on swift feet and to pleasant cadence, despite 
 the disaster of the Cup-day. Trevenna was in the highest spirits, 
 which he checked slightly when he caught the azure flash of the 
 Duke's eyes, but not enough to prevent his being the salt and 
 savour of the dinner-party, as was his custom everywhere. They 
 lingered long over their pine-apples and peaches, their Lafitte and 
 Johannisbergor ; and after cofi'ee they played whist in the pretty 
 little Ascot drawing-room till the sun looked in through the grape- 
 tendrils and vine-leaves about the casements ; and by the dawn 
 Chandos had forgot his first contretemps, his first annoyance, as 
 tiiough it had never been. 
 
 In the sunny summer morning, as Trevenna sauntered into his 
 bed-room, he tossed thii-ty sovereigns he had won from his host at 
 whist down on his dressing-table, and, throwing himself into his 
 arm-chair, indidged in a hearty peal of laughter, that rang out 
 through the open window towards the quiet solitary heather- 
 purpled expanse of the Heath. 
 
 •'Sold the whole turf, by Jove!" he murmured; ^*and forty 
 thousand netted by commission, as I live, if there's a farthing ! 
 What a day's work 1 Trevenna, ban enfant, really you are a clever 
 feUow." , . ^ . ^. 
 
 He admired himself with a cordial, almost wondering, adnuration 
 that was very different from vanity, and more like the self-content 
 and self-applause with which a man who has been up every col 
 and peak in the Alpine range regards the names of his hazardous' 
 and successful feats burnt in on the shaft of his Alpenstock. He 
 laughed again, at himself, when he lay back in the cosy depths of 
 his chair, with his hands plunged into his trousers-pockets, and 
 genuine self-satisfaction brightly set on every line of his face. 
 
 There is an exhilaration to the heart of the successful engineer 
 who sees every morass drained, every ravine bridged, every girder 
 jnade strong, every obstacle overcome, by his own indomitable 
 
Chandos. 
 
 anerig'^', and watchea tho viaduct of his cwn rearing and planning 
 span the mighty distance that seemed at first to laugh his puny 
 etiorts to conquer it to scorn. This was the exhilaration Trevenna 
 felt now. That he was reaching his success by dark, by crooked, 
 by unscrupulous ways, took nothing from his enjoyment. They 
 were to him what the morass, the ravine, and the quicksands are 
 to the engineer. Ilad his road been straight and smooth, where 
 would have been this joyous excitement in his own victories, 
 this triumphant zest in his own engineering science? 
 
 As he took off his dress-coat, undid his neck- tie, and lighted a 
 cigar, he pulled the curtains aside and leaned out of the window 
 into the soft summer-dawn air. Not that he cared a whit for the 
 heliotrope and mignonette odours rising from the garden beneath, 
 for the dews on the blossoming lindens, for the sunrise on the 
 bloom of the heather ; those things were to Chandos's taste, not to 
 his ; but he liked to look at that quiet deserted Heath, where the 
 dark Diadem had borne off the cup from the favourite. It had 
 put forty thousand in his pocket, or, rather, in those far-away 
 American and Indian markets where the penniless man-about-town 
 put every penny even that he won at whist or loo, in sure and 
 secret speculations ; but it had a still sweeter pleasure than lay in 
 the money for him. 
 
 " So the outsider beat the Clarencieux crack ! " he thought, with 
 a smile. *'A prophecy! Duke, I won't quarrel with you: I'll 
 back my order to win." 
 
 CHAPTER in, 
 
 EUrrEBFLIES ON THE PIN. 
 
 " Ernest, are you going to marry ?" asked his Grace, dryly, in 
 the bay-window of White's. 
 
 '* Marry ? Heaven forbid ! " 
 
 "Then don't go after that beautiful daughter of Ivors. She 
 will marry you in a month or two more, if you do, whether yoq 
 wish it or not." 
 
 Chandos moved restlessly ; he did not Hke the introduction of 
 painful topics, and marriage was a very painful one in his view. 
 
 "If you do marry," pursued the Duke, remorselessly, "take 
 the Princess Louise ; she is lovelier than anything else the sun 
 shines on, and has the only rank from which a woman can love yon, 
 without a suspicion of interested motives." 
 
 " My dear Duke, I am totally innocent of the faintest intentions 
 to marry anybody ! " 
 
 Nevertheless, the subject was not acceptable to him, and ha 
 looked a little absently out into St. James's Street with a certnin 
 Bhade of uncertainty and of restlessness on him ; whereas the mo- 
 ment previous he had been watching the women in their cur* iages 
 through his eye-glass, with the idlest and eaaieat languor of a 
 warm day towards the close of the season. 
 
Butterflies on the Pin, 
 
 "Marry! No; not for a universe," mused Chaudos. A few 
 hours afterwards lie entered his house in Park Lane, to make hia 
 toilette for a dinner at Buckingham Palace, and tui-ned with a 
 sudden thought to his maitre d'hotely as he passed liim in the hall. 
 " Telegraph to Ryde, Wentwood, for them to have the yacht ready ; 
 and tell Alexis to prepare to start with me to-morrow morning. I 
 shall go to the East." 
 
 His yacht was always kept in sailing-order, and his servants were 
 accustomed to travel into Asia Minor or to Mexico at a moment' h 
 notice. Chandos was used to say, very justly, that the chief 
 privilege of money was that it made you quit of the obligation to 
 meditate a thing five minutes before you did it. Looking long at 
 anything, whether travel or what not, always brushes the bloom 
 off it. He liked to wake in the morning and, if the fancy took 
 him, be away without a second's consideration to the glow of the 
 new Western world or the patriarchal poetry of the East ; and so 
 well were his wishes always provided for that he went to sleep in 
 one place and unclosed his eyes in another, almost as though he 
 possessed the magic floating carpet of Prince Hassan. 
 
 The next morning the Ai:ihrodite steamed out of Ryde harbour 
 on the way to Italy, the Levant, and Constantinople, while its 
 owner lay under an awning, with great lumps of ice in his golden 
 cool Rhine wine, and the handsome eyes of Flora de I'Orme flash- 
 ing laughter down on him while she leaned above, fanning his hair 
 with an Lidian feather-screen. The Duke's words had acted like 
 a spell ; but in his abrupt departure there was one person he had 
 not forgotten. On his dressing-table lay a note to Trevenna, 
 bidding him make use of his moors in Inverness- shire with the 
 Twelfth as he pleased, or, if he preferred it, give the Scottish 
 shootings to any fiiend he preferred, and take any guests he liked 
 down to Clarencieux for the magnificent preserves of that ancient 
 place. 
 
 These reversions and donations of windfalls and of pleasant 
 places to lend or to invite to were fast making Trevenna very- 
 popular among that large class of men-on-the-town — dandies, do- 
 nothings, authors, artists, and club -loungers — who have a certain 
 reputation that floats them in the world, but no certainty of entree 
 to the good houses, and no means to purchase for themselves the 
 pleasures of the moors and coverts. It began to get him courted 
 among them ; and he was a very genial host, royally lavish with 
 Chandos's wines, most good-naturedly ready with offers of hospi- 
 tality to Chandos's empty houses, so much so that men almost 
 forgot, while they stayed with him, that wines and houses wero 
 not both his own. 
 
 *' Gone to the East ! By Jove, I'll go and find the Chesterton," 
 thought Trevenna, with aU the relish of a schoolboy for sowing 
 mischief, as he read the note and heard of his patron's departure. 
 He was a little sorry Chandos had gone ; he never liked losing him 
 from under his eyes ; but he was fully consoled by the prospect of 
 reigning as viceroy at Clarencieux, and of seeing the mortification 
 of the ^o daughters of Ivors. They were aa poor as rata ; they 
 
92 Chandos. 
 
 could neyer do him any good. Treveiina folt at liberty to toao'e 
 them just as ho liked. A restriction was too often put on his 
 merry malicious mousing by a prudential recollection of the social 
 status of his mice, and of the use they might be to him in nibbling 
 a way for him into patrician pantries. Ilere the mice were very 
 poor : so ho tracked Lady Chesterton and her sister to a garden- 
 party, and ate his pine-apple in most admirably feigned carelessness 
 and unconsciousness close to the two ladies under a Lebanon cedar, 
 lie knew the consternation ho should scatter through society by 
 his news. 
 
 "I don't see Mr. Chandos hero this morning," said Lady Ches- 
 terton, turning to him with a bland smile, condescending to bo 
 civil because she was curious. She was also a little uneasy ; other- 
 wise, be sure, she would never have had recourse to that "vulgar 
 little toady,'* as her ladyship designated the acute outsider. 
 
 "No, he isn't here," assented Trevenna, indifferently. He had 
 now put this handsome empress butterfly on the point of his pin, 
 and went leisurely about it. 
 
 " He is well, 1 hope ? " she pursued 
 
 Trevenna shrugged his shoulders. "Never was ill in his life, 
 that I know of ; perfect constitution." 
 
 " What a rude insufferable boar 1 " thought the unhappy butter- 
 fly ; but she was still more uneasy than ever, and had no recourse 
 su good as the bear: so she resumed her inquiries. "Do you 
 know where he is to-day ? I have something to tell him about 
 Eose Berri china." 
 
 "Your ladyship must send it by post, then." And Trevenna 
 laughed to himself as he saw the first irrepressible writhe of hia 
 victim on the i>m. 
 
 " By post ! Has he left town ? " 
 
 Trevenna looked at his watch. 
 
 "By this time he is midway across to L'Orient. He has taken 
 his yacht to go down south and eastward." 
 
 " So early ! " Trained and icy woman of the world though she 
 was, she could not repress the pallor that blanched her lip, the 
 anxiety that loomed in her handsome eyes. The Queen of LiUea 
 stood near. Hearing also, she was silent and very pale. 
 
 " Well, Ascot was late," answered Trevenna, cheerfully. "He 
 generally does stay for Goodwood, to be sure ; but, you see, he 
 has had so many London seasons, and there's such hard running 
 made on him, I think he gets sick of it." 
 
 This thrust the pins in cruelly, indeed, through the delicate 
 wings of the brilliant butterflies. "That coarse horror ! " thought 
 Lady Chesterton, with a shiver of disgusted wrath ; but her heart 
 was very heavy, and she had to conceal her chagrin as best she 
 might with all the gay garden-groups fluttering around her and 
 viewing her impaled. " Will he be away long ? " she asked of her 
 tormenter. 
 
 "Oh, dear, yes," said Trevenna, carelessly. "Gone to his 
 summer palace on the Bosphorus ; takes the Morea and the Levant 
 on the way. Poetic man, you know ! likes that sort of thing ; 
 
Butterjiies m the Pin. 93 
 
 loves Greece ; enjoys Corfu. I hate 'em both. Hnakes and old 
 stones in the one ; rocks, rags, and bad ragouts in the other. 
 « Euins and scenery,' they tell you. I like stucco and pantomime 
 scones. Besides, they always fry so yillanously in those hot places; 
 glad to get away from the lire, perhaps. When anybody talks of 
 the Acropolis and the Alhambra, I always smell oil and garlic, and 
 feel myself starving in memory on a melon." 
 
 Ho glanced at his butterflies as he chattered, and saw that the 
 pin was entering their souls like iron. lie thi'ust it down a lit tin 
 deeper as Lady Chesterto.>i asked, with a voice that, despite herself, 
 could not be careless — 
 
 "Mr. Chandos will be long before he returns, then, I suppose ?" 
 
 "Won't come back till next spring," assented Trevenna. "Hell 
 
 winter in Paris ; always does, as you know. Delicious hotel that 
 
 is of his, by the way, in the Champs Elysees. Clarencieux isn't 
 
 likely to see anything of him." 
 
 Which was the unkindest cut of all, seeing that Trevenna knew 
 very well that the baroness had persuaded her husband to take 
 a little estate near Clarencieux for two years' shooting, on purpose 
 that the Queen of the Lilies might conquer in the country if slie 
 failed in the town. The husband had grumbled because he could 
 ill afford it. He was terribly poor ; but ho had been persuaded 
 into it by the assurance from his wife of Chandos' s admiration of his 
 fair sister-in-law ; and now Chandos was not going to Clarencieux I 
 "I've paid you off, my lady," thought Trevenna, finishing his 
 ice. " You've found what it is to call me * a vulgar little wretch 
 who lives nobody knows where.' " 
 
 Not that Trevenna had any particular dislike to these two 
 women, beyond his general dislike to all and any members of the 
 aristocratic order ; but as the boy feels no dislike to the cockchafer 
 he spins on a string, but finds amusement in its pain, and there- 
 fore sticks a crooked pin through its poor humming body and puts 
 it to pain accordingly, so Trevenna felt and did with all humanity. 
 Gilles de Eetz enjoyed the physical convulsions of his victims ; 
 Trevenna, as became a more humoristic temper and a more refined 
 age, enjoyed seeing the mental contortions of his. 
 
 And yet the fellow had his good points, — some very good points 
 indeed. He had indomitable energy, perseverance, industry, 
 patience, self-denial,— the greatest virtues in the Carlylese school, 
 which deifies Work. Perhaps it would havo been well if both 
 Trevenna and that School had alike considered more the worth and 
 meaning of the purpose, before they gave an apotheosis to the fact, 
 Af labour. 
 
 If ^e Lily Queen hoped for remembrance from her lost lover, 
 she hoped for a well-nigh hopeless thing. 
 
 The kaleidoscope of Chandos' s life changed so incessantly that it 
 was rarely indeed any pictui'o that had been whirled past him 
 retained the slightest claim on his memory. He was always see- 
 ing one that seemed bettor than the last. Partly this was traceable 
 
94 Ckandost 
 
 to his own temperament, but chiefly it was due to the avidity with 
 which all his world catered for him. 
 
 Now, as the yacht swept on her gay way, there could be nothing 
 more charming than that voyage through ' ' isles of eternal 
 summer " and through seas laughing in an endless sunlight. 
 Pausing when he would, Italian cities on the fair sea-coast gave 
 him amusement under their aisles of orange-bouglis, blending 
 fruit and blossom till golden globes and snowy flowers swayed 
 together against the warm, bright brows of their rich Titian 
 women. Becalmed on a sunny, silent noon, he could lie stretched 
 at ease under the deck-tent, with all the perfumes of chestnut- 
 woods, and myrtle-slopes, and citron-gardens wafted to him across 
 the water, while ice-cold wines sparkled ready to his hand, and 
 light laughter or melodious music whiled the hours away. Land- 
 ing at his fancy, he would indolently watch the little grey aziola 
 fly among the ivy-covered stones of the great Pan's broken altars, 
 or the fire-flies gleam and glisten above a contadina's haii* v/hile 
 she gathered in her harvest of the yellow gold of gourds. Sailing 
 at night through silent, star-lit leagues of sea, he would think a 
 poet's thoughts in a charmed soHtude, while the phosphor-light 
 glistened under silvery vintage-moons, and the ceaseless swell of 
 waves murmured through the night. Or, when lighter fancies 
 took him, under the shade of leaning walnut-trees and red rocks 
 crowned with Greek or Eoman ruins, where, the vessel moored in 
 some nestling bay, he wound the starry cyclamen in women's 
 silken hair, and listened to their liquid voices laughing out 
 soft Anacreonic sougs over grape-clusters that might have 
 brought back upon the soil the gay, elastic feet of banished Dio- 
 nysiiis. 
 
 He was not sated, he was not wearied ; he was what thousands 
 pass from their cradles to their graves without truly being for aii 
 hour : he was happy. Oh, golden science ! too little thought of, 
 too quickly abjured by men. That glorious power of enjoyment ! — 
 we trample it under foot as we press through the world, as the 
 herds seeking herbage trample the violets unheeded. 
 
 The summer mouths passed swift with Chandos ; by lolsureiy 
 loitering, the yacht at length wound her pleasant way down to the 
 Bosphorus, and dropped anchor there opposite his summer-palaco 
 above Stamboul, — a fairy-place, with its minarets rising above a 
 wilderness of cactus and pomegranate, of roses and myrtle with 
 ^be boughs of lemon, and orange, and fig-trees topping the marble 
 garden- walls, and the showers of lofty fountains flung cool and 
 fresh under the deep shadows of cedar and cypress. Here, with a 
 French troop of actors for the hijou theatre he had som^ 3 ear., 
 br-fove annexed to the palace, — with a score or so of friends rroru 
 Florence, Eome, and Naples, brilliant, indolent Italians, the very, 
 people for the place, — with sport, when he cared for it, in t-r?- 
 wild deer and other large game of the interior, — with as complete 
 a soUtude when he wished, and as utter an absence of every 
 memory of the world beyond, as though he were a Hafiz ot 
 Hirdousi amidst thw Extern roses of a virgin earth,— here tht 
 
Butterflies on t/ie i'ln. 0^ 
 
 autumn months passed by, and all the indolent repose and viTid 
 colour he loved blended in his life were mingled to a marvel. 
 
 The very inconsistencies of his character made the charm of hia 
 existence ; through them, turn by turn, ho enjoyed the pleasures 
 of all men, of all minds, and of all temperaments. He who walks 
 straight along the beaten road, tui'ning neither \o the right nor 
 left, nor loitering by the way, will reach soonest his destination • 
 but he enjoys the beauty of the earth the best who, having no 
 fixed goal, no pressing end, leaves the highway for every fair nook 
 and leafy resting-place that allures him, and lingers musing here 
 and hastens laughing there. Consistency is excellent, and may 
 be very noble ; but the Greeks did not err when they called the 
 wisest man the man who was "versatile." There in no such 
 charm as "many-sidedness." 
 
 Chandos loved the East ; he had lived much there, either at his 
 summer-palace, or deeper in the heart of it tov/ards Damascus ; 
 be liked, of a summer morning, to float down the soft grey Bos- 
 phorus water among the fragrant water-weods, with the silver 
 scales and prismatic hues of the gliding fish shining through green 
 swathes of sea-grass or drooped bough of hanging gardens. Ho 
 liked in the stilkiess of starry nights, when the first call to prayer 
 echoed up from the vailey below as the faint gleam of dawn 
 pierced the distance, to sit alone upon the flat palace-roof and let 
 his lonely thoughts "wander through eternity," as thus upon the 
 house-top under the Asian stars, yonder afar in Palestine, tho 
 great poet-kings had thought, gazing on theii' Syrian skies, and 
 on the hushed, dark, sleeping Syrian world, and musing on that 
 vanitas vanitatum which has pui-sued all lives from theirs to ours. 
 He loved the East, and he stayed there till the first hiss of tho 
 winter storms was curling the Marmoran waves and the first 
 white blinding mists were rushing over the sea. Then he left that 
 summer paradise, where more yet than anywhere he felt "how 
 good is man's life — the mere living," and travelled quickly across 
 the continent to Paris, and wintered there in all the utmost 
 brilliance of its ceaseless gaieties. 
 
 He was one of the idols of Paris; its fashionable world wel- 
 comed him as one of its highest leaders, its artistic world as one 
 of its truest friends, its literary world as one of its choicest chiefs, 
 its feminine world as one of its proudest conquests. He was never 
 more at home than in Paris, and Paris, from the Tuileries to the 
 atelier, always delighted to honour him, always flocked to his 
 fetes as the movst magnificent since those of Soubise and Lauraguais, 
 quoted his bon mots, followed his fashions, painted him, sculp- 
 tured him, courted him, made him its sovereign, and found the wit 
 of Eivarol, the beauty of Eichelieu, and the grace of Avaux, re- 
 vived in this " bel Anglais aux cheveux dores. 
 
 In this sparkling whirlpool of his Paris winter thougiit had 
 little entrance, remembrance little chance ; every hour had its own 
 amusement, every moment its own seduction; ennui could not 
 approach, " sad satiety " could .not be known. Yet, despite it aC, 
 now and then upon ham, in the glittering follies of » <^tirt mas- 
 
p6 Chandos, 
 
 querade or the soft shadows of some patricia-i* coquette's bMidoir, 
 as in the star-lit silence of Tm-kish nights and under the Asiatic 
 gloom of Lebanon cedars, a certain impatient depression, a certain 
 vague passionate restlessness, came on him, new to his life, and 
 bitter there. 
 
 It came thus, because for the first timo he could not forget at 
 his will, bocauso for the fi-rst time a passion ho repulsed pursued 
 hiizu 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 CLARENCIEUX. 
 
 The rare red doer horded in the great forests, and the heronis 
 plumed their silver wings in the waters, down at Claroncieux, 
 Kestrels wheeled in the sunny shies, and the proud gerfalcon 
 came there. Tlie soft owls flitted among the broken arches of the 
 ruined I^ady's Chapel ; and teal and mallard crowded in the deep 
 brown pools tliat lay so still and cool beneath the roofing of the 
 leaves. It was a paradise for all living things of river, earth, and 
 air ; and it was beautiful enough for an Eden where it sloped 
 down to the seas on the south-west coast, in a climate so tempered 
 that the tail fuchsia-hedges grew vnld as honeysuckle and tho 
 myrtles blossomed as though it were Sorrento. Covering leagues 
 of country, stretching over miles of tawny beach, of red-ribbed 
 rocli, of glorious deer-forest, and of heath aU golden with tho 
 gorse, Clarencieux was tho great po-ssession of a great House ; and 
 its castle bore the marks of Cromwell's petronels, gained when 
 the Cavalier-lord of the Stuart times, Evelyn Chandos, Marquis of 
 Clarencieux, had held it after Marston Moor till the Ironsides 
 B^'ore in their teeth that Satan fought there in the guise of that 
 " Chandos with the golden hair," — the ** beautiful Belial," as they 
 called him, when, with his long light locks floating, and his velvet 
 and lace as gay as for a court -ball, he charged out on them in 
 Bueh fiery fashion that he with his troop of eighty (all that fire and 
 sword had left him), drove six liundred steel-clad besiegers pell- 
 mell, like sheep to the slaughter down through his mighty woods 
 and headlong to the sea. Raised in the days when the mediseyal 
 
 nobles were 
 
 " Building royallie 
 Their mansions cnriouslie 
 With turrets and with towers, 
 With halls and with bowrw, 
 Han_i;ing about their walles 
 Clothes of gold and palles, 
 Arras of rich arraye. 
 Fresh as flowers of Maye," 
 
 Oiftrencieux, with its tall antique louver, its massive battlemented 
 towers, its fretted pinnacles, its superb range of Gothic windows, 
 ita foliaged tracery, so marvellously delicate on such miasi^c 
 
Qarendeux, 97 
 
 stonework, stood in all magnificence still, the master-work of 
 centuries. 
 
 Between it and tlie great marble pile adjoining, of the newly- 
 made Earl of Clydesmore, stretched a wide impassable gulf of 
 difference, never to be bridged. Lilliesford had cost more than a 
 million in erection, and Europe had been ransacked to adorn it; 
 but the difference betwixt the two was as intense as that betwixt 
 the bronze Perseus of Benvenuto and the ormolu statuette of q 
 Pall Mall goldsmith, between rich old Rhenish glowing in an 
 antique Venetian goblet and new Cliquot hissing in a mousseline 
 glass, between paint and pearls and silken skirts gathered with 
 gracious grace about a nobly-born court-beauty and tinsel flung 
 with heavy hand and tawdry taste around a stage- queen uneasy \r 
 her robes and in her crown. 
 
 Lilliesford was very gorgeous; but Clarencieux alone was grand. 
 
 The setting sun was reddening all the antique painted panes o! 
 its innumerable lancet- windows ; the deer were leaving their 
 couches in the ferns to begin their nightly wanderings ; the last 
 light was shed on the bold curvo of the coast-rocks and the sea 
 that stretched beyond ; beneath the trees in the dense forest night 
 was already come, as a carriage swept through the miles of avenue, 
 and Chandos came back fi-om the East to his home. 
 
 Though, in the wayward love of change which would make us 
 weary to wander from eternal bliss itself if we enjoyed it with oui- 
 present natures, he lived much abroad, now here and now there, 
 he loved Clarencieux with a great and enduring love, — a love that 
 might have almost been termed passionate, so constant was it, and 
 so bound up with every grey stone and hoary tree. With him. 
 though hatred of pain made him sometimes seem heartless, and 
 love of pleasure and carelessness of temper made him habitually 
 nonchalant, the feelings were still strong, and were not sacrificed 
 either to the intellect or the senses. He could feel, as he could 
 enjoy, vividly; and the most vivid sentiment in his heart was the 
 attachment to his birthplace, to his great hereditary possessions, 
 not for their worth, their splendour, or their envied superiority, 
 but from a fond and almost filial tenderness for all the venerable 
 beauty of the noble place,— for the sound of its sea, for the width 
 of its woodland, for the smile of its sunlight, for the memories of 
 its past. 
 
 He leaned forward as the carriage drove swiftly through the 
 great vales of oak and beech and elm, and looked at it in the glow 
 of the cloudless spring-time sunset. Before him, in the distance, 
 iose the front of the royal pile, all golden where the sun-rays 
 glistened and lit its glass to flame, aU dark where the ivy climbed 
 to the height of the battlemented towers, and the rolling woods of 
 the inland forests stretched upward on the hiU-sides beyond, an 
 endless stretch of dewy April leaf. " It is almost ungrateful ever 
 to leave it," he thought. •* There is nothing nobler abroad* J 
 wiU live here more for the future." 
 
 And a vague, irrepressible melancholy, wholly unlike his tem- 
 perament, stole on him, despite himself, as bij looked at the home 
 
pS Chandos, 
 
 of his race, — fair as it <7as in the sunset warmth, sure as it was in 
 his possession. The thought crossed him how, ere long, at most, 
 he must look upon its loveUness no more, but lie among the dead 
 leaders of his name, there yonder to the westward, where the 
 silent graves told the vain story of their lifeless glories. 
 
 It was wellnigh the first time that the ^^ memento mori" had 
 ever crossed his gay unruffled years ; nor did it linger with him 
 
 Ten minutes more, and he was within the immense circular and 
 vaulted hall of Clarencieux, in its dim splendour of purple and 
 gold, of Kenaissance hues and Eenaissance carvings, with the 
 gleam of armour and the flash of Damascus blades from the waU&^ 
 and with the flood of light pouring down the double flight of 
 stairs that swept upward on either side of the far end. There was 
 not such another haU as that of Clarencieux in the kingdom of 
 England. At the time of the siege, Evelyn Chandos had mar- 
 shalled and marched six hundred royalists at ease in it under the 
 great banner that still hung there, the azure of the Chandos' 
 colouis, with their arms and their lost coronet, and their motto 
 •* Tout est perdu, fora Vlwnneur " broidered on its folds. 
 
 His descendant now, as he entered it and came into the scarlet 
 glow of the vast oak-wood fire which burned there almost all the 
 year, looked round it with the affectionate remembrance of the 
 man who comes back to the place of his brightest childish memories. 
 '* I will not leave it so long a^ain," he thought, once more, as he 
 passed through the line of bowing servants. 
 
 Out of a doorway on the left, in the warmth and the light, and 
 down the staircase, as he heard his host and patron's arrival, came 
 Trevenna, mirthful and full of honhomie as the brightness of the 
 leaping fire whose ruddy gleams shone on his handsome white 
 teeth and his pleasant snule of welcome. 
 
 " As your factor, steward, head butler, head secretary, head 
 trainer, minister of the finance, and master of the horse, let me 
 welcome you home, monseigneur," he cried, as he took the hand 
 Chandos held out to him. "London's in desperation at your 
 absence. What a delicious winter you've had in Paris I Never 
 got a bit tanned in the East, either. How do you keep your skin 
 so fair ? " 
 
 '* By no cosmetic but cold water," laughed Chandos. ** Charmed 
 to see you, my dear Trevenna. No one makes me laugh so well 
 even in Paris, except perhaps my exquisite Eahel. Why didn't 
 you join ine there ? " 
 
 •* Too busy," rejoined the other, shaking his head. He had had 
 delightful quarters at Clarencieux through the winter, running up 
 to town most weeks at his inclination, and asking men down for 
 the pheasants, the coursing, and the deer-drives, till he was quite 
 a popular and courted personage. 
 
 " ■^Vhat a Burleigh shake of the head ! I should like to be told 
 what your business is. Choosing cigars and gathering gossip ? " 
 Jaughed Chandos. ** Well, you know you would have been wel- 
 come, had you come. I didu't want you in the East;, because yop 
 
Clarenaeux. 
 
 99 
 
 see, my dear fellow, you are not precisely poetic, and I like things 
 to harmonize; but Paris was scarcely itself without you. I thought 
 of you every time I had your fayourite ortolans a la Frincesae 
 Mathilde at the Maison Doree." 
 
 "Ah, the little angels!" said Trevenna, lusciously recalling 
 their spiced and succulent beauties. "Dubosc, even, never gets 
 them quite right. I'd a long talk with him about it. I told him I 
 thought they wanted a shade more lemon, and just to be stewed 
 in the Chambertii : ,=ng enough to get the aroma ; but, like every 
 artist, he's as obstinate as a pig, and won't take a hint." 
 
 "You might be a club-cook, Trevenna," laughed Chandos. 
 ** You would soon make a fortune. Any one here yet ? " 
 
 "Only a few men; just a few to amuse you. I have taken 
 infinite care in sending the invitations. There are good talkers 
 and good Hsteners ; there are two or three who hate one another, 
 —that always makes 'em sparkle out of spite ; and there is not a 
 single one who talks politics. You won't be bored for five minutes. 
 They are all your favourite set. Prince Paul Corona, the Due de 
 Nemlly, and most of the ladies, come, I believe, to-morrow." 
 
 "Ah! Madame de la Vivarol comes also. She invited herself 
 and hevfourgons are already crossing the Channel." 
 
 He said it with a little sigh. Ho would rather she had not been 
 coming: chains, however silken and sweet, were unendurable to 
 Chandos. 
 
 "And you could not say No, of course, to la helle. Did you 
 ever say No, Chandos ? " 
 
 "I think not: why should I? Yea is so much easier, and so 
 much more gracious. No floats you into endless trouble, but Yes 
 pleases everybody." 
 
 " Yes is a deuced compromising little word, though," said Tre- 
 venna. 
 
 " It is better to be compromised than to be ungracious," said 
 Chandos, with a lift of his eyebrows "I will go and have a bath, 
 and then tell them to bring me some coffee up, will you, please ? 
 I shall not show to-night ; they will serve my dinner in the little 
 Greuze room. I have a charming novel of Eugene de Meisedore's 
 I promised him to read ; and if you can leave the other men and 
 come and tell me the news of the town, I shall be pleased to see 
 you." 
 
 "All right," said Trevenna, as hib host passed up one of the 
 great staircases to his private rooms, a suite looking over the rose- 
 gardens, and consisting of his bed-room, dressing-room, study, 
 atelier, and a beautiful little oval cabinet chamber, called the 
 Greuize room from its being chiefly hung with female portraits, 
 and such bewitching pictures as "La Cruche Cassee" by that artist, 
 where Chandos dined by himself or with two or three of his choicest 
 guests, when he was not in the mood for the society of the fifty or 
 fiixty people who generally filled Clarencieux in the recesses and 
 the shooting seasons. All these rooms opened one within another ; 
 and a dainty dinner from Dubosc's genius in the soft, deep hues oS 
 the Greuze chamber, with the yiolet curtains drawn, and the wnite 
 
lOO Chandos, 
 
 feax-light shining on the fair female heads, was as pleasant a& 
 evening as could be needed. 
 
 ** I must see poor LuUi ; there is no welcome, after all, so trua 
 as his and as Beau Sire's," thought Chandos, after his coffee and 
 his bath. ' ' I suppose he is here ; of course he is. I wish I could 
 take him news of that lost Valeria." And, acting on the thought, 
 \q went to the jnusician's apartment. 
 
 He never sent for LuUi. The crippled infirmity of the artist 
 made the traversing of the long corridors and galleries of Claren- 
 cieux very painful and tedious to him ; and Chandos, who never 
 put himself out of the way for a prince, invariably remembered the 
 calamity of the Proven9al. The chamber given to Luili was much 
 like that provided for him in Park Lane, containing everything 
 liiat could assist or entertain him in his art ; and, at the farther 
 end, a single statue in Carrara marble, — a Cecilia, by Canova, — 
 which gleamed white out of the unlighted gloom as Chandos entered 
 noiselessly, impreceded by any servant. 
 
 " Lulli, where are you ? " 
 
 At the first sound of the only voice he loved, or had ever cause to 
 iove, the musician, whore he sat bent in the twilight, lifted his head 
 with a low, joyous cry, and came forward as quickly as his weak, 
 bent limbs would let him,— a man who looked as though he had 
 wandered, by some strange transplanting, out of the dim cells of a 
 Paraclete, or the hushed antiquity of some mediaeval city of Italy, 
 from all his brethren who found their pale sad lives only solaced 
 by some great art- gift, and dreamt of things that they had never 
 known in the monastic silence of a living grave. 
 
 Hifl brown, wistful eyes, so deep, so wise, so dreamy, so spaniel - 
 like in their faithful loyalty, grew brilliant; the transformation 
 changed the weary listlessness of his face, that never failed to come 
 there at sight of the man who had rescued him and to whom ho 
 owed all. 
 
 " Ah, Lulli," said Chandos, with caressing gentleness, ** I wish 
 you had been with me in the East. I have heard no music fiom 
 all the singers of Eui'ope that has power to charm me like yours. 
 Do you think the voyage would have harmed you ? " 
 
 ' ' I must have seen strangers, monseigneur. ' 
 
 ' ' Well, no strangers should have treated you otherwise than with 
 courtesy and reverence in my presence," said Chandos, kindly. *' I 
 wish you could shake off this timidity, this great sensitiveness; 
 they do your marvellous talent injustice with the world." 
 
 LuUi shook his head : he knew that even the shield of his friend's 
 power could not ward off him the shafts that stmck him home, the 
 barbed arrows of contemptuous wonder, contemptuous loathing, or, 
 worst of all, contemptuous pity. 
 
 "I would do all in the world to please 2/ow, monseigneur," he 
 answered, sadly , ' ' but I cannot change my nature. The Uttle 
 aziola loves the shade, and shrinks from noise and glare and all 
 the ways of men ; I am like it. You cannot make the aziola a bird 
 for sunlight ; you cannot make me as others are." '" 
 
 Q}Mi^dos looked down on him with an almost tender compassion. 
 
ChrcTtcitux. 101 
 
 To him, whose years were bo rich in every pleasure and every de- 
 light that men can enjoy, the loneliness atul pain of LuUi's life 
 divorced from all the living world, made it a mnvvel profoundi.y 
 melancholy, profoundly formed to claim tlio utmost gentleness and 
 sympathy. 
 
 "I would not have you as others are, LuUi," he said, softly. 
 ** If in all the selfishness and pleasures of our world there were not 
 some here and there to give their lives to high thoughts and to uu- 
 eelfish things, as you give yours, we should soon, I fear, forget that 
 such existed. But for such recluse devotion to an art as yours, the 
 classics would have perished ; without the cloister-penmen, the laws 
 of science would never have broken the bondage of tradition." 
 
 Lulli looked up eagerly ; then his head drooped again with the 
 inexpressible weariness of that vain longing which ** toils to reach 
 the stars." 
 
 "Ah, what is the best that I reach? — the breath of the wind 
 which passes, and sighs, and is heard no more." 
 
 The words were so utterly mournful that the shadow of their own 
 sadness fell on Chandos as he listened. He sighed half restlessly. 
 
 " Is there any fame that becomes more than that with a few brief 
 years ? I do not know it." 
 
 LuUi's eyes turned unconsciously to the music-scroll that lay on 
 the desk beside him, the score of passages grand and tempestuous 
 as Beethoven's. ** I do not want fame, if theij might Uve," ho 
 murmured low to himself — too low to reach the ear of Chandos as 
 he stood above him, who stooped nearer and laid his hand kindly 
 on the musician's shoulder. 
 
 ** Dear Lulli," he said, hesitatingly, '* I tried to gain news for 
 you of your Yaleria whilst I was in Paris. I had inquiries made 
 m Aries ; but aU was ineffectual.'* 
 
 Lulli lifted his eyes with that deep, dog-like gratitude which 
 always touched Chandos wellnigh with pain. 
 
 "You never forget me, monseigneur. Take no more heed of 
 her ; she is dead to me." 
 
 "Hush! that is too harsh for your gentle creed, Lulli," said 
 Chandos, whilst his hand still lay caressingly on the Proven9ara 
 shoulder. *' I abhor those bitter, brutal Hebrew codes. Wait till 
 at least you know her story." 
 
 " There is no need to wait ; it is dishonour." 
 
 Out of the dreaming softness of his eyes new fire flashed, and on 
 the frail delicacy of his face a sternness set. Never yet was there 
 a recluse who had tolerance ; and the honour of his genius-dowered 
 name was as dear to the beggared artist as to the haughtiest royal 
 line, 
 
 ** As the world's prejudices hold," said Chandos. " There is more 
 real dishonour in the woman who gives herself to a base marriage 
 for its gold, than in the one who gives herself to calumniation for a 
 generous love. And it may be that Valeria " 
 
 '* Monseigneur, I pray you, speak of her no more. I have said 
 Bhe is dead to me." 
 
 There was so intense a suffering in the words that Chandos for- 
 
io« 
 
 Chandos. 
 
 boro to press tlie wound still so keenly nerved, etiU so fresh to every 
 
 touch, although two years had passed by since the loss of the young 
 Proven9al girl from Aries. 
 
 " Then think of her no more, Guide," he said, kindly. ** I can- 
 not bear that you should have anything to grieve you. Life is too 
 short to spend its hours in sorrow. And now, how is it with the 
 Ariadne in Naxos ? It must have progressed far, while I have been 
 away." 
 
 He had recalled Lulli to a theme even dearer than Valeria had 
 ever been. The Ariadne was an opera on whose composition he 
 was lavishing all his love, his time, his luxuriant fancy, and hia 
 singular talents. Ohandos himseK had wiitton for it the Italian 
 libretto, and had lent all his knowledge of music towards its per- 
 fecting; it was yet scarcely finished, but it was to be produced 
 under his own auspices and at his own expense. It would be the 
 touchstone of LuUi's powers and success, the fiat lux which would 
 either consign him amidst that circle of the lost, those dwellers in 
 the Antenora of dead hopes, who had it in them to be gi'eat and 
 failed, or would place him amidst the names of his idolatry, Gluck, 
 Handel, Mendelssohn, Eossini, Mozart. 
 
 They lingered over it. Ohandos heard some portions new to him, 
 iind read the score of others, giving it thought and care and interest 
 for a twofold reason, — for its own beauty as an opera, and for the 
 hopes which Lulli centred in it ; then, leaving the musician to the 
 solitude he prized, he went back to his Greuze cabinet for dinner. 
 
 After that little chef-d'oeuvre of the genius of Dubosc, Ohandos 
 stood leaning against the mantelpiece, glancing through his Paris 
 friend's novel. The warmth of the logs on the silver andirons was 
 behind him, the violet velvet and the glow of the painted chamber 
 around, and the light fell full on the amused smile on his lips, the 
 beauty of his face, and the easy, indolent grace of his resting atti- 
 tude, as Trevenna drew back the 'portiere and entered. He lookod 
 at his host with that acrid envy which never was stilled in him, the 
 petty, evil envy of a woman, for every elegance of form, for every 
 magnificence of manhood, unpossessed by himself and inherited by 
 the man he watched. Yet he consoled himself, looking on that 
 pleasant repose in the pictui'e-cabinet, that unconscious half-smile 
 over the witticisms of the French pages. 
 
 " Very well ! very well, my grand seigueul f" thought Trevenna. 
 ** Smile away in Olarencieux ; you won't smile long." 
 
 And Trevenna, after playing the part of host in the banqueting- 
 hall at dinner to the eight or ten men abeady staying in tho house 
 for the Easter recess, went forward into the ruddy wood-firo L'ght 
 to eat another oUve or two with his host, and amuse him with all 
 the mirth and mischief of the town gathered in his absence, told 
 lis John Trevenna could only tell it, till its wit was as bright aa 
 Meisedore's novel, and its reush as piquant as the golden liqueurs. 
 
 ** What a good foUow he is ! " thought Ohandos. " I am half 
 afraid he would be too clever for the Oonunons ; a decorous dulness 
 is what passes best there, and a fellow is almost sooner pardoned 
 for beinpr ft bor© than for being brilliant. They think there is some- 
 
Clarencieux. 103 
 
 thing so intensely respectable about mediocrity. Eut still ho ha\ 
 BO many qualities that might get his cleverness forgiven him, even 
 there. He is a marvellously good man of business, a financier, I 
 will warrant, such as has not sat on the Treasury Board, and he 
 has an acumen that cannot be overrated. I will certainly get him 
 into St. Stephen's ; once in, he will make his own name." 
 
 ** Chandos," said the Duke of Crowndiamonds, in the stable-yard, 
 two mornings later, when his Grace, with the rest of Chandos' 
 London set, had come down to Clarencieux, "did you hear what 
 that fellow of youi^s— your factor, your jproUge, what is it ? — has 
 been doing while you were away ? " 
 
 " I have no 'proteges^ my dear Crown," said Chandos, wilfully 
 failing to apprehend him. " I abhor the word." 
 
 "Well, you have the thing, at any rate. You know whom I 
 mean, — that witty rascal Trevenna. Do you know what he's been 
 about?" 
 
 ' ' No. Spending his time to some purpose, I dare say, which 
 may be more than can be said of us." 
 
 "Doing an abominably impudent thing, to my mind. Been 
 down somewhere by Darshampton (democratic place, you know), 
 talking something or other out-and-out radical. Why, it was all 
 in the papers ! " 
 
 " Never read the papers," said Chandos, with a little shrug of his 
 shoulders. 
 
 " Addi-essing the masses, you know, as they call it ; coming out 
 no end at an institute, or a what d'ye call 'em. Tell him, Jimmy," 
 said Crowndiamonds, wearily, appealing to a certain fashionable 
 ianger-on of his, who played the part in society of the duke's 
 mmemonique. 
 
 "Working men's place at Darshampton, — all working men 
 there," supplemented Jimmy, obediently. " Fellows that look 
 awfully smutty, you know, and throw things they call clogs at 
 you, if they cut up rough ; though why they use women's clogs, 1 
 don't know. Trevenna been down there ; asked to lecture ; did 
 lecture! Talked out-and-out liberalism,— all but Socialism, by 
 Jove ! Town wondered ; thought it deuced odd ; knew you 
 couldn't like it ; couldn't think what was his game." 
 
 Chandos listened surprised. 
 
 * ' Trevenna at Darshampton ! " 
 
 " Ah, I knew you couldn't be aware of it," resumed Crown- 
 diamonds. "Told them all so; knew you'd have interfered, if 
 you had." 
 
 "Interfered! How so?" 
 
 " Why, forbidden it, you know, and all that, of course." 
 
 "Why? I have no more right to forbid Trevenna's actions 
 than I have to forbid yours." 
 
 " Oh, hang it, Ernest, you don't mean that. The fellow be- 
 longs to you, — one of your people, quite ; can't have any title to 
 go dead against your political opinions." 
 
Chandos. 
 
 *' Sr«ver hdA a political opinion," said Clianclos, with a shade of 
 
 weariness at tho mere idea; "wouldn't keep such a thing for 
 worlds. There is nothing more annoying to your acquaintance, oi 
 more destructive to your own nervous system." 
 
 " Then, the douce, Chandos ! you don't mean that you'd let that 
 fellow go on talking radicalism all over the country without check- 
 ing him, or calling him to order ? " chorused the Duke, M. de 
 Neuilly, Piince Paul, and the others in the stables, all of them 
 strict monarchists, conservatives, and aristocrats. 
 
 Chandos laughed, but with a touch of impatience. " You^ talk 
 as if Trevenna were my slave, instead of my friend I Call him to 
 order! What do you mean? I may think what I like of his 
 actions ; but I have no shadow of right to interefere with them." 
 
 " What ! not if you saw him joining a party that threatened tho 
 f ery preservation of your own property, the very existence of your 
 own class ? " 
 
 "Still less then. Self-interest is the last motive that could 
 excuse an aggression on personal liberty." 
 
 " Good gracious ! " ejaculated the Duke, as though foreseeing the 
 Deluge. " Then, if you put him into the Gcmmons, as ycu intend, 
 you will let him choose his own party, go his^ own ways, run 
 as dead against all your interests and all your opinions, just as he 
 pleases ? " 
 
 ' ' Certainly. Do you suppose 1 only sell my friendship to secure 
 partisanship ? " 
 
 '•God knows what you do do ed Crowndiamonds, hope- 
 
 lessly. " All I do know is, that 1 should^ as soon have thought 
 of seeing Clarencieux turned into a hospital as of hearing you 
 defend radicalism! " 
 
 "My dear Crown," laughed Chandos, **I am not defending 
 radicalism ; I am defending the right of personal liberty. I may 
 deeply regret the wajr Trevenna takes in the House ; but I shall 
 certainly have no business to control him there because superiori- 
 ties of property might enable me to do so. You say, ' You have 
 bought him, therefore you have a right to coerce him ; ' I say, * I 
 have aided him, therefore I am bound never to make that accident 
 a shackle to him.' The man who puts chains on another's limbs 
 is only one shade worse than he who puts fetters on another's fi-ee 
 Ihoughts and on another's free conscience. But, for mercy's sake, 
 ilrop the subject : we are talking like moral essayists, and growing 
 polemical and dull accordingly I " 
 
 Clarencieux was filled with guests on the carefully-chosen invi- 
 tations of which Trevenna had spoken. He had the very social 
 tactics that enabled him unerringly to mark out harmonizing tints 
 and effective contrasts so as to make a charming whole. His plan 
 was bold and daring, but it never failed : he always asked special 
 enemies together, that they might sparkle the more for being 
 ground against each other's faces, like two diamonds on a lapidary's 
 revolving wheel ; and under his du'ections the visitors that met at 
 Chandos' house never were wearied, or wearied their host, for 
 single feour. Few bouses can boast so much. 
 
t03 
 
 According to the seasons, they rode, drove, smoked, played 
 baccarat or billiards, had drives of deer in the forest, aud cure 09 
 by torchlight, French vaudevilles and Italian operettas in the 
 private theatre, spent the day each after his own fashion, free as 
 air, met at dinner to havo some novel amusement every evening, 
 and were the envy and marvel of the county, the county being 
 little wanted in, and generally shut out fi'om, the exclusive gatho» 
 ings of Clarencioux. 
 
 Yet, well amused as hia guests kept him in the Easter recess, 
 which fell very late in spring that year, Chandos had a certain 
 restlessness he could not conquer, a certain dissatisfaction utterly 
 unlike his nature : he could not forget the Queen of Lilies. Neve'i 
 before had a love touched him that was unwelcome to him, never 
 one that he had attempted to resist ; love had been the most facile 
 of all his pleasures, the most poetic but also the most changeful 
 amusement of his life. For the first time he had to resist its 
 passion, and the very effort riveted its influence. He had always 
 forgotten easily and at will; now he could not so well command 
 forgetfulness. 
 
 Now and then all the variety of entertainments that chased one 
 on another failed to interest him, all the brilliance of his com- 
 panions to suffice for him ; the wit and beauty of the great ladies 
 who adorned the drawing-rooms of Choveley almost tired him ; he 
 was conscious of wanting what was absent. It was a phase oi 
 feeling veiy new to him, nor with the nonchalance and contentment 
 of his temperament and the gaiety of his life could it have the 
 rule over him always. But it was there, a dissatisfied passion, 
 from which there was no chance of wholly escaping. 
 
 Moreover, recalling the soft glance of the Lily Queen, he won- 
 dered, with a touch of self-reproach, if she had really loved him. 
 lie knew many who had . nor was his conscience wholly free from 
 self-accusation on their score or on hers. 
 
 The Countess de la Vivarol, radiant at Clarencieux, playing in 
 Figaro to his Ahnavivay riding a little Spanish mare that would 
 have thrown any other woman, always enchanting, whether she 
 talked of Faicnce-ware or European imbroglio, lapdogs or pro- 
 tocols, fashions or mesmerisms, flattered herself that her rival the 
 English Lily was wholly forgotten and deserted; but the keen 
 little politician flattered herself in vain. 
 
 Trevenna, with his habitual sagacity, made no such mistake, 
 but pronounced unerringly, in his own reflections, on the cause of 
 his host's needing so much more care to rivet his attention and f,o 
 much more novelty to amuse him than usual. " If he meet her 
 again, shall I let it go on?" thought that astute comptroller. 
 * ' Yes ; may as well. It will be another complication, as the 
 diplomatists say. Nothing like fine 6(!^nic arrangements for a 
 tragedy ! " 
 
 ** Heading some unintelligible score of your ancestors, LuUi ?" 
 asked Chandos, as, having wandered out alone one morning, taking 
 the freedom himself that he left his guests, he came upon the 
 PiUftician lying in the sun bet^ide the livpi' that woimd through the 
 
io6 Chandos, 
 
 deer-park. The woodlands were in their first fresh leaf; the 
 primroses, violets, anemones, and hyacinths made the moss a 
 world of blossom ; nothing was stirring except when a hare darted 
 thi-ongh the grasses, or a wild pigeon stooped down from a bough 
 to drink or to bathe its pretty rosy feet among the dew. It was 
 peaceful and lovely here in the heart of the vast deer-forest, with 
 a gleam of the sea in the dim distance at the end of a long avenue 
 of chestnut-trees. "How crabbed a scroll ! " he went on, throwing 
 himself down a moment on the thjine and grass. " The characters 
 must baffle even you ; the years that have yellowed the vellum 
 have altered the fashion. Whose is it ? " 
 
 **An old Elizabethan musician's," answered Lulli, as he looked 
 np. "Yes; the years take all, — our youth, our work, our life, 
 even our graves." 
 
 Something in his Provencal cadence gave a rhythm to his simplest 
 speech ; the words fell sadly on his listener's ear, though on the 
 sensuous luxuriance of his own existence no shadow ever rested, 
 no skeleton ever crouched. 
 
 " Yes; the years take all," he said, with a certain sadness on 
 him. " How many unperfccted resolves, unachieved careers, un- 
 accomplished ambitions, mimatui'ed discoveries, perish under the 
 rapidity of time, as unripe fruits fall before their season ! Bichat 
 died at thirty-oiie : — if he had lived, his name would now have 
 outshone Aristotle's." 
 
 ' ' ^Ve live too little time to do anything even for the art we give 
 our life to," muimui-ed Lulli. "When we die, our work dies with 
 us : our better self must perish with our bodies ; the first change 
 of fashion will sweep it into oblivion." 
 
 "Yet something may last of it," suggested Chandos, while his 
 hand wandered among the blue bells of the curling hyacinths. 
 * ' Because few save scholars read the * Defensio PopuU ' now, the 
 work it did for free thought cannot die. None the less does the 
 cathedral enrich Cologne because the name of the man who begot 
 its beauty has passed unrecorded. None the less is the world aided 
 by the effort of every true and daring mind because the thinker 
 himself has been crushed down in the rush of unthinking crowds." 
 
 "No, if it could live ! " murmured Lulli, softly, with a musing 
 pain in the broken words. "But look ! the scroll was as dear to 
 its writer as his score to Beethoven, — the child of his love, cradled 
 in his thoughts night and day, cherished as never motlior cherished 
 her first-born, beloved as wife or mistress, son or dau^^htor, never 
 were. Perhaps he denied himself much to give his time more to 
 his labour ; and when he died, lonely and in want, because he had 
 pursued that for which men called him a di^eamer, his latest 
 thought was of the work which never could speak to others as ii 
 Bpoke to him, which he must die and leave, in anguish that none 
 ever felt to sever from a human thing. Yet what remains of his 
 love and his toil ? It is gone, as a laugh or a sob dies off the ear, 
 leaving no echo behind. His name signed here tells nothing to 
 the men for whom he laboured, adds nothing to the art for which 
 he lived. As it is with him, so will it be with me." 
 
Clarencteux. 107 
 
 His Yoice, that had risen in sudden and untutored eloquence, 
 sank suddenly into tlie sadness and the weariness of the man 
 whose highest joy is but relief from pain ; and in it was a keener 
 pang still, — the grief of one who strives for what incessantly 
 escapes him. 
 
 *'Wait," said Chandos, gently. "Are we sure that nothing 
 lives of the music you mourn? It may live on the lips of the 
 people, in those Old-World songs whose cause we cannot trace, yet 
 which come sweet and fresh transmitted to every generation. How 
 often we hear some nameless melody echo down a countiy-side ! 
 the singers cannot tell you whence it came ; they only know their 
 mothers sang it by their cradles, and they will sing it by their 
 children's. But in the past the song had its bii-th in genius." 
 
 G'^ido Lulli bent his head. 
 
 *'-]Crue: such an immortality were all-sufficient : we could well 
 afford to have our names forgotten " 
 
 " Oui' names will be infallibly forgotten unless we attach them 
 to a great sauce or to a great battle ; nothing the world deifies so 
 much as the men who feed it and the men who kill it. Paradox 
 in appearance, but fact in reality ! " cried a sharp, clear, metallic 
 voice, — the voice to ring over a noisy assembly, but in no way the 
 voice to suit a forest solitude, — as Trevenna dashed through the 
 brushwood with a couple of terriers barking right and left at hares 
 and pigeons. The musician shrank back instantly and irrepressibly, 
 as a sensitive plant or a dianthus shrinks at a touch. ''Halloo, 
 ?no^ Prince!" pursued Trevenna, cheerily. "You are a disciple 
 of the dolce, and no mistake ! Easiest lounging- chair in-doora 
 and wild thyme out ; luxurious idleness really is a science in youi' 
 hands. If ever you do die, — which I think highly doubtful, you 
 are such a pet of Fortune ! — the order of your decease v/ill sui*ely 
 be to * die of a rose in aromatic pain.' Nothing harsher could 
 possibly suit you." 
 
 * ' You antithesis of repose ! " cried Chandos. ^' You will scare 
 all my breeding game, frighten all my song-bii'ds, and drive me to 
 a new retreat." 
 
 Trevenna laughed as he dashed himself down on a bed of hya- 
 cinths fit for Titania's wedding-couch, that sent out their delicious 
 fragrance, bowing their delicate bells under his weight : Trevenna 
 weighed a good deal, though a small man. Chandos glanced at 
 them. 
 
 • ' Wanton waste, Trevenna ! You are the genius of destruction.'* 
 
 " Well, destruction's very pleasant, — of anybody else's property. 
 Everybody thinks so, though nobody says so." 
 
 The man had a natural candour in him, with all his artifice of 
 action. He hated hj'pocrisy with an oddly genuine hatred, seeing 
 that he was as cool a liar as ever was born. It seemed as if, like 
 Madame du Deffand, he wished to render virtue by his words the 
 honour he robbed her of by his actions; for ho talked truths 
 sharply, and as often hit himself with them as other people. 
 
 '^But why can you want to kiU all those poor fiowers for 
 iwi^pidng?" asked Chandos, tossing him his cigar-cas^ 
 
ro8 Chandos. 
 
 *' For nothing I Sac d papier ! — is it for nothing when I lie a1 
 my ease ? To be comfortable is your first requisite of life. 0a?8ai 
 killed men by millions to lie at his ease on purples ; why majTi't I 
 kill ilowers by millions to lie at mine on hyacinths ? Flowers, tool 
 A. lot of weeds." 
 
 "Oh, Peter Bell the Second!" cried Chandos, shrugging his 
 shoulders. 
 
 "A primrose on the river's brim 
 A yellow primrose was to him. 
 And it was nothing more," 
 
 quoted Trevenna. "Now, what the deuce more should it be? 
 
 How that unhappy fellow has been abused for not being able to 
 see a thing as it wasn't, — always the thing for which poets howl 
 at sane men ! "Why are he and I required to rhapsodize our 
 hyacinths and primroses? — nice little flowers, one blue, t'other 
 yellow, with a pleasant smell, but certainly nothing remarkable. 
 What is this miraculous tongue that talks to your artists in a 
 scrubby little bit of moss or a beggarly bunch of violets ?" 
 
 *• Grimm asked Diderot the same question. You would have 
 wondered, like Grimm, what there could be to listen to from an 
 ear of wheat and a little corn-flower." 
 
 ** Certainly : Grim was veiy like me, — a regular gossip," 
 responded Trevenna, pulling a handful of hyacinths and tossing 
 them up in the air. " My dear weeds, you must die if I choose. 
 Ah ! — it's fun to have power over any thing great or small. Fou- 
 quier-Tinville enjoyed cutting off necks by a nod of his own ; I 
 understand that ; yoiL don't understand it, monseigneur. If we'd 
 been in the TeiTor, you'd have gone to the guillotine with the 
 point ruffles over your hands, and a mot on your lips, and a superb 
 smile of disdainful pity for the mob : and I should have tossed up 
 my red cap and spun round in the * Qa ira,' and cheered the 
 Samsons, and gone safe through it all. "But good-bye ; I'm going 
 to your outlying farms. Did you know I was a first-rate agri- 
 culturist ? Of course you don't ; what do you know about any 
 Bucolics, except the VirgiHan ?" 
 
 With which Trevenna, much too mercurial to sit still five 
 minutes, went on his way, switching the grasses right and left, 
 End with his two little terriers barking in fiu-ious chorus. 
 
 Lulli looked after him. 
 
 " You trust that person ?" 
 
 "Entirely," answered Chandos, surprised* 
 
 "I would not." 
 
 ••Indeed! And why?" 
 
 Over LulH's face came the troubled, bewildered look which made 
 those who noticed him cursorily think his brain was unsettled. 
 He felt, but he could not define. To a mind only used to desultory 
 dreamy thoughts, it was impossible to trace out its workings bj 
 logic. 
 
 ** I cannot teU," he said, wearily : *' but I would not trust him* 
 The eyes are bright and clear, the face looks honest ; yet there i? 
 Graft somewhere. The dogs all slink from him ; and the bir^^ 
 
Clarencteux, 
 
 109 
 
 that come to us, fly from him. He is your friend ; but I do not 
 
 think he bears you any love " 
 
 He ceased, looking down, still with that bewildered pain, upon 
 the clear brown river rushing, swollen and melodious, at his feet. 
 Like a woman, he had intuition, bat no power of arp:ument 
 Chandos looked at him, astonished more at the words thail he had 
 been at the secluded dreamer's distaste towards the busy and 
 trenchant man of the world. 
 
 ♦'I hope you are wi'ong, Lulli," he said, gently. ♦'/ do not 
 doubt you are. You and that gentleman can have little in 
 
 common ; but you are both valued fiiends to me What is the 
 
 matter?" 
 
 Lulli, as he gazed down into the water, had started, turned, and 
 looked behind him into the great depths of shadow, where the trees 
 grew so densely that even at noon it was twilight beneath their 
 branches, which cuiied, and twined, and grew in ponderous growth, 
 almost rather like a Mexican than an English forest. 
 
 "I heard Valeria's voice?" he said, hushed and breathlessly, 
 while his glance wandered in restless longing hither and thither, 
 like a listening deer's. 
 
 '♦Valeria's 1" echoed Chandos, in amazement, as he rose to his 
 feet. •* You must be dreaming, Lulli." 
 
 The Provencal shook his head, and pointed eagerly towards the 
 recesses of the woods. 
 
 *• I heard it ! Look ; pray look." 
 
 Willing to humoui' him, yet satisfied that it could be but a delu- 
 sion of the ear, common enough with such minds as Lulli's when 
 one dearly loved has been lost, he went some little way into the 
 deer-coverts, glanced right and left, heard nothing except the 
 cooing of wood-pigeons, the note of a missel-thi^ush, and the cry 
 of a land-rail, and retui-ned. 
 
 ♦'It must have been imagination. Guide," he said, soothingly. 
 " Some bird's song, perhaps, sounded like a human voice. There 
 is no creatui'e near." 
 
 ♦♦I heard it," said Lulli, very low to himself, while his head 
 drooped, and his gaze fell again with the old weariness upon the 
 ebb and flow of the river. He would never have contradicted a 
 thing that Chandos had said, if he had died through it ; but the 
 superstitious and ignorant beliefs which the early training of a 
 childhood spent in ultramontanist countries, joined to the deeply 
 imaginative mind of a visionary whom no intercourse with a 
 broader world than his own thoughts enlightened or controlled, 
 had imbued him with, made him in his own heart turn rather to 
 the wild and baseless fancy that the voice he believed he haJ 
 heard was the supernatural sign of Valeria's death,— the farewell 
 of her spirit released from earth. Lulli had been born amidst all 
 the legendary mysticism and mediaeval traditions of an almost 
 Spanish Catholicism. The hues of it had coloured his mind too 
 deeply ever to be wholly altered. It made his grandeur as a musi- 
 cian ; but equally it made his utter weakness as a man. 
 That night, when Chandos went to his own chambers from the 
 
no Caandos, 
 
 Bmoking-room, the laughter of some of the men echoing pleasantly 
 ii'om the distant corridors as they bade each other good- night, ha 
 opened first the door of his atelier and went up to a Spanish 
 picture hanging near his easel. It was a joictiu^e, without any 
 master's name, that he had picked up in one of the dark, winding 
 streets of Granada, pleased with its Murillo colouring, and yet 
 more with its subject, — a young Granadine leaning from a moon- 
 lit balcony in the coquettish duty *^ pelar la pava." There was 
 more of ])roud, melancholy gi^ace than of coquetry in the noble, 
 moonlit face; and it was strangely like the Queen of Lilies,— so 
 like, that one of her first charms for him had been her resemblance 
 to his fayoui-ite Spanish portrait. He stood and looked at it some 
 moments. 
 
 "I must see her t^-morrow again, come what will of it," he 
 thought. 
 
 As he moved away, with all the unrest of an eager and repressed 
 passion come tenfold on him with the knowledge of her presence 
 near, his lamp shed its light full on a scarcely-finished painting 
 of his own upon a rest ; it was a soft and deep-hued oil-picture of 
 the Amphitheatre of Aiies, with a cloudless sky above, and the 
 lustre of a Provence sunset pouring from the west It had been 
 sketched in Aisles itself, two years before. As he glanced at it, a 
 sudden recollection crossed him, a sudden thought sent a flush 
 over his forehead, a pang of anxiety to his heart; he paused 
 before the painting. '^ She cannot be Lulli's Valeria ?" he said, 
 half aloud. *' She never spoke of him ; she never seemed to have 
 had a living thing to care for except her own vain beauty. And 
 yet she was an Ariesienne ; she was of the age Valeria would be ; 
 she was very poor." 
 
 His memory travelled back to the past, far away, as it seemed, 
 even by two years' space, and covered with a thousand other 
 memories in lus swift and brightLy-colom^ed Life, — travelled back 
 to a time when he had loitered, in the vintage-month, in the 
 old Eoman city, passing on his way with the swallows to spend 
 an Italian winter. 
 
 •' I hope to Heaven not I " he thought, with a keener pang than 
 ho had ever before known. *'Even a thing as worthless as sho 
 should have been sacred to me if that great heart of Lulli's had 
 centred in her. They have never met ; but it would be cruel work, 
 for him and for me, to ask him. She was shameless before I saw 
 her. It would be but worse anguish for him to find his lost Valeria 
 in such as Flora do I'Orme." 
 
 And he went slowly out, leaving the darkness to fall oyer the 
 Spanish porti-ait and the glow of the Provence euii. 
 
The Poem among the Violets, itl 
 
 CHAPTEE V. 
 
 THE POEM AMONG THE VIOLETS. 
 
 The portrait-gallery at Clarencieux was one of the noblest 
 features of the whole castle. With its ceiling of cedar, its gold 
 panels, its lofty arched windows, twenty in number, and its land- 
 scape beyond them of the home-park and hanging woods that 
 stretched away to the sea, it would have been remarkable without 
 its Vandykes, Holbeins, Lelys, Mignards, and Lawrences ; with 
 them, it was the idolatiy of the virtuosi. Up and down it Tre- 
 venna, who certainly was no virtuoso, and could barely have 
 told a Gainsborough from a Spagnaletto, sauntered the next 
 morning, with his hands in his pockets, humming a Chaumiera 
 dance-tune, and reading his letters. He was very prudent, and 
 did not ti-ust the post with much of his business; what was 
 important he generally did viva voce, and the man would have 
 been astute indeed who could ever have trapped him into any- 
 thing that compromised him by the amount of a fourpenny bit. 
 He had a very wholesome reluctance for signing his name, and any 
 letters he ever wrote were of Spartan brevity. Yet this morning 
 he had had a good many, and they all pleased him. Some were 
 from the firm of Tindall & Co., wi'itten by Ignatius Mathias in 
 Hebrew. Trevenna was a clever linguist, and had some half- 
 dozen languages at his tongue's end, though he never confessed to 
 knowing more than a very Anglicized, Palais-Eoyal, cafe -learnt 
 French, which he would jabber villanously. 
 
 ** Makes you look un-English to speak Parisian well," reflected 
 this aspirant to be a representative of the British nation ; and he 
 would only let men find out by degrees even that he had a most 
 ficholarly culture in classics, making the concession for the sake 
 of college-men's prejudices, though at Darshampton ho would not 
 have had the truth whispered for worlds that he could pen quite 
 perfect Ciceronian Latin. 
 
 Erom Darshampton, too, a mighty manufactuiing town, where 
 faces might be giimy but heads were very clear, letters came that 
 gratified him. He was beginning to be known there in their 
 Unions and their Institutes, — talked of there as a rising man and 
 as a rarely quick-witted one. He had felt his way there very 
 cautiously ; for ho could not serve two masters, and be the Chicot 
 of fashion and the Demosthenes of labour, very weU, in a breath. 
 Botli his masters would have given him his conge. But he was 
 equal to greater difficulties, even, than those of playing the part o£ 
 amuse to his aristocratic patrons and that of pupil to his democratic 
 inviters at the same time. He could make a club-lounger smile, 
 and he could make a north- country operative grin : and he had not 
 much fear of ultimately turning both to his purpose. For Nape- 
 leon himself had never more intense volition, Eobert Bruce himself 
 never more patient perseverance, than this mercurial flaneur of 
 PaU MaU. 
 
 He had oomt: bere to read his letters, because no one eyei 
 
wandered in to the portrait- gallery save at such times as it was 
 
 turned into a second bMll-room, and, having finished them, he 
 sauntered up and down, revolving their contents in his mind, — a 
 mind into which nothiiig ever entered but to bo fertilized to itH 
 widest extent. Just above him, as he reached the end, was an 
 alcove in which hung alone one Kneller picture, answering at the 
 other end a Vandyke Charles the First, as grand a picture as the 
 Petworth, given to Evelyn Chandos by his king himself. The 
 Kneller was the portrait of the last Marquis, who had joined the 
 standard at Preston, and fought with Perth in the fatal wing at 
 Culloden, breaking his sword at the prince's feet when the staff 
 dissuaded him from a final charge for victory or death. The Mar- 
 quis had been ofi'ered life and honours if he would have divulged 
 certain Stuart secrets known to be in his hands, and, rejecting the 
 offer with a calm disdain, had died on Tower Hill with his grand, 
 moiu'nful, moqiieur smile on his lips to the last, and bowed hia 
 graceful head upon the block with the motto of his race, " Tout 
 est perduy fors Vhonneiir" 
 
 Trait by trait, look for look, the Kiieller portrait was reproduced 
 in the features of his last descendant. The picture of the last 
 Marquis might have been the likeness of the present Chandos. 
 Trevenna looked up at it. 
 
 "Well, my lord," he murmured, a little aloud, in that innate 
 loquacity which talked to inanimate things rather than not talk at 
 all, *' there you are, with your d — d proud smile, that he has got 
 just like you to-day. So you began life the most magnificent man 
 of your time, and ended on Tower Hill ? That sort of differenco 
 between the opening and the finale is rather characteristic of your 
 race. Perhaps you'll see something like it again." 
 
 The calm eyes of the portrait seemed to glance downward with a 
 serene disdain. Trevenna turned on his heel, singing a chanson of 
 the Closerie, and only wheeling round when he came opposite a 
 portrait of a man in the gold robes of Exchequer : it was that ol 
 the famous minister, Philip Chandos, who had died like Chatham. 
 "Ah, mon ministre!" apostrophized Trevenna, "your eon is a very 
 brilliant personage ; and yet 
 
 Lord Timon shall be left a naked gall. 
 Who flashes now a phoenix. 
 
 You were a great man ; but you and I shall be quits for all that." 
 
 At that moment the door opened. Chandos entered the gallery. 
 
 *• What on earth are you doing here, Trevenna ? I have looked 
 for you everywhere. Are you tiu-ned connoisseur P " 
 
 \Vhere he stood — under the Vandyke Stuart picture — in a velvet 
 riding-dress, he looked so like the Kneller portrait of the last 
 Marquis that even Trevenna almost started, though he was ready 
 with his answer. 
 
 *' I was reading my letters. This house is so full of people that 
 the library is as bad as a club-room. The betting's quite steady in 
 town on the colt -" 
 
 ** Certain to be. I camd to speak to j<m of a note I have had 
 
The Poem among tne Violets. tit 
 
 this morning, among others, from Sir Jasper Lyle. He tells me 
 the state of his health will compel his retirement from the borough. 
 He acquaints me with it first. Out he will resign immediately ; his 
 disease is confirmed,— poor fellow ! Now, as you know, the borough 
 is almost wholly at my disposal ; to my nominee there will be no 
 sort of opposition,— not because the people are not free to act, but 
 because they are a quiet, thin population, who for generations have 
 been used to receive their representative from my family " 
 
 ♦' Free and enlightened electors," put in Trevenna, with a cer- 
 tain grmi humour in the parenthesis ; and yet his heart was beating 
 quicker than it had ever beat. He divined what was coming. 
 
 "They have at least been better represented than metropolitan 
 boroughs," said Chandos, with a touch of annoyance. " We have 
 never supported a mere puppet or a mere partisan. We have 
 given the little town to the cleverest man we could find ; and my 
 father represented it himself, if I remember, for ten years or 
 more. What I came to ask you was, will you like to be returned 
 tor it ? " 
 
 Looking at him, he saw the eager and exultant light flash into 
 Trevenna' s eyes, the sudden lightning-like upleaping of a long- 
 smouldering ambition. The daring, aspiring, indomitable nature 
 of the man seemed instantaneously revealed before him, ftom 
 under the surface of social gaieties and jaunty honhomie, 
 
 '* Like it! " 
 
 In that moment Trevenna felt too genuinely to have TTorda 
 ready to his facQe lips. Political life had been the goal for which 
 through years, when men would have called him a madman for 
 such audacious foUies, he had "scorned delight, and loved labo- 
 rious days," with its set purpose before him, none the less 
 steadily stormed because the golden gates seemed hopeless ada- 
 mant to force. Of late he had said to himself that come it would, 
 come it should. But now that it did come,— the thin edge 
 of the wedge which, once inserted, would open for him aU the 
 gates of position and power,— the jester had no banter, the liar 
 no lie. 
 
 "I thought yon would," said Chandos, where they stood undei 
 the Stuart picture, with the proud eyes of the last Marquis gazing 
 down on them from the far distance. " You are the very man for 
 the Commons, and I should not be surprised if some day I come 
 down to hear you unfold a Budget ! Very well, then ; we wHl 
 put you into nomination immediately Sir Jasper's resignation is 
 made known, and there is not a doubt of the result." 
 
 " But— would not you " For once in his life, Trevenna 
 
 was almost silent, almost agitated. The great prize of his life 
 seemed to have fallen into his hands hke a ripe fr-uit. 
 
 "/.'" said Chandos, horrified. "Have you known me aU this 
 time only to ask such a question ? They have begged me over 
 and over again to stand for the town or the county, but I have 
 always told them that if I must sufifer for my sins I would prefer 
 purgatory itself at once : I would rather be burnt than be bored ! 
 As for you, I really do believe you will enjoy serying on comxnitteeB, 
 
 X 
 
1 14 Chandos* 
 
 going in for snpply, darting in to save a oomit-otit, and all th© rest 
 
 of it. So — it is a settled matter ? " 
 
 "Eeally — on my life, Chandos, I cannot thank you enough " 
 Even on Trevenna's face ttere came sometliing of a flush of shame, 
 and into his voice something of the husky hesitation of conscience- 
 moved restlessness: for one moment the contrast of this man's 
 actions and his own, struck him with a force that left him without 
 his usual weapons. Chandos saw in this nothing beyond the re- 
 action of a sudden and pleasurable surprise; he laid his hand 
 kindly on the other's shoulder. 
 
 * ' Thank me by showing them in the House what my friend can 
 prove himself ! And, Trevenna, look here : do not think that be- 
 cause you are returned through my influence you are for a moment 
 expected to represent my opinions. The borough is a quiet, 
 colourless, little place, that will ask you no questions provided you 
 adequately attend to its sea-coast interests ; you may do anything 
 else that you like. I hear that you have lately been lecturing, or 
 something, in the North, — that you have been expressing views 
 totally different from those you hear in my set. Now understand, 
 once for all, I wish you to enter public life entirely imshackled. 
 Choose your party, or remain an independent member : act 
 precisely as you deem most true and most wise. After living 
 among us, I am not afraid you will join the Ultras in pulling our 
 houses down over our heads and in parcelling^ our estates into 
 building allotments; but, whatever you genuinely believe, let 
 that be what you advocate in the House, as though neither I nor 
 Clarencieux existed." 
 
 "With these words he went out, to spare his presence to the 
 man whom he had just assisted to the fruitage of his once hopeless 
 ambition. 
 
 Trevenna stood still and silent, struck mute for the instant with 
 the blaze of his rising fortunes, and moved for one fleeting second 
 with a heavy sense of treacherous shame. " Damnation !_" he said, 
 in his teeth : ** for five minutes I almost forgot to hate him I " 
 
 Half in shadow, half in sunlight, in the noontide of the day, eat 
 the Queen of Lilies. 
 
 A cluster of tall copper beeches stood out before a deep dart 
 screen of crag, and waved and tossed together in grand confusion, 
 and wild as they had been in the days of the Druids, only broken 
 here and there by the rush of some tumbling torrent. Under the 
 beeches was a broken wishing-well, its stones covered with ivy, its 
 brink overgrown with heaths and maiden-hair and countless violets. 
 Here, some ten miles beyond Clarencieux, in this lonely forest-land 
 of her brother-in-law's newly-taken shooting-place, Lady Valencia 
 Mt in solitude, with the falling of the waters only mingled with 
 ; w.. thrill of a nightingale's evening note poured out on the hush 
 of the noon. In her most sovereign moments she had never looked 
 eo lo7*»ly as now, in the complete negligence, abandonment, almost 
 Auction) of h^ attitude. She leaned againat the stone cop»ng ol 
 
The Poem among tfu f^olets, 1 1 ^ 
 
 the well, one arm resting on it, so that her hand, half unconsciously^ 
 played now and then with the green coils of leaves and grasses fall- 
 mg in the water ; her head drooped slightly ; there was sadness, 
 almost melancholy, in the musing shadow of her liquid eyes. A 
 volume of ** Lucrece " lay at her feet ; a water-spaniel waited near, 
 wistfully watching for her notice. The melody of bird or river had 
 no music on her ear : she was thinking very wearily. 
 
 Thus — she all insensible of his gaze — Chandos saw her. 
 
 He paused, checked his horse as he rode through a bridle-path 
 hidden in foliage, wavered an instant, then flung the rein to his 
 servant, bade him ride on, and went backward, through the en- 
 tangled meshes of the leaves, towards the ruined wishing- well. 
 
 His step made no echo on the moss ; unseen he noted the weari- 
 ness of languor in the dreaming repose, the musing pain, that 
 darkened the eyes that gazed down absently on the purple wealth 
 of the violet buds. "Does she regret me ?" he thought ; and at 
 sight of that living beauty which had haunted him through Eastern 
 cities and Italian air, the old soft, wayward, unresisted passion 
 which had so often ruled him, yet never reigned more utterly than 
 it was near reigning now, woke in all its force. He thought neither 
 of penalty nor of consequence, of wisdom nor of future ; he thought 
 alone of her. 
 
 The movement of his hand as he put aside the red gold of the 
 copper-beech leaves and the light spring buds of the young ivy- 
 coils caught her ear ; she lifted her eyes, and met the eloquence of 
 his. She rose, with something almost hurried and tremulous in 
 the dignity of her serene grace ; her face flushed, her glance had a 
 light m it he had never seen there ; sudden surprise changed tho 
 calm of her grand and delicate beauty to a new warmth and hesi- 
 tation that lent a still fairer life. In that instant, as he saw her 
 under the burnished gold of the lurching sunlit leaves, he could not 
 doubt but that she loved him. 
 
 •' You have returned ? " The words were low and unstudied, as 
 though in the surprise of his presence there her proud tranquillity 
 broke down. 
 
 '*Ah! forgive me that I ever wandered away, Forgetfulness 
 did not go with me." 
 
 He scarcely thought, he never measured, what he said; h^ 
 thought only of her loveliness, there in the shadows of the spring- 
 time leafage ; and the loveliness of women had always done with 
 him what it would. He bent nearer to her, looking down into her 
 eyes with a gaze that made them droop, and made her heart beat 
 with a swift, uncertain throb, a vague gleam of hope. '* My love/ 
 my love ! " he murmured, thinking no more of the cost and issue 
 cf his words than he had thought when he had murmured such 
 against the warm cheek of some young Eastern odalisque, or gazing 
 into the lustre of Southern eyes under the Spanish stars, or by thf 
 shores of Procida, " we must not part again ! " 
 
 The music of his voice stole upon her ear, charming and hilling 
 her into its own trance of passion ,* the deep warmtii of a hot flush 
 stole over all her beauty, intensifying evwy delicate hue, like the 
 
» i6 Chandoi, 
 
 warmth from the noon through the crimson leaves ; and as he drew 
 her into his embrace, with his kiss he bartered his peace, his honoui, 
 and his future ; for it, in that hour of her power, he would have 
 thought the world well lost. The violets blossoming, dew-laden» 
 at their feet — flower of the poets, and crown of child- Protus' golden 
 hair — were not more sweet than that first birth and utterance 
 of loyo. 
 
 OF AFTER VI. 
 
 THE POEM AS WOMEN READ IT. 
 
 Before a fire (for she fancied or liked to say she was chilly, in 
 those late April days that were well-nigh as warm as summer) 
 Lady Chesterton lay sulkily reclining in her little boudoir. She 
 was very sullen, veiy grave, very moody. She was bitter as gall 
 in her own soul. The distant cousin she hated, because he had 
 inherited her father's title, had been left a fortune that would enable 
 him to raise the Ivors peerage to its old glories, whilst her husband 
 was so heavily in debt that the narrowest continental economy would 
 not better him. This house with its shootings that had entailed so 
 much expense, had served them no purpose. Lord Clydesmore 
 was hopeless to attract again after his first repulse ; other men were 
 coy of her beautiful sister, — a Marquis's daughter, and portionless. 
 She herself L:>ved show, wealth, magnificence, all the exclusivism 
 of greatness in its greatest ; and she was literally poorer than one 
 of the gamekeepers' wives out in the park yonder, — poorer, for the 
 keeper's wife could accept her poverty, and the peeress had to go to 
 coui't as a lady-in-waiting, and to rack her brains afterwards to 
 stave off the milliner who sent her court-dresses. 
 
 " I wish I were one of those wretched women in the cottages in 
 the woods ! " she thought. " T\ej have to bake, and to scrub, and 
 to slap their dirty children, and to pinch and screw, and Uve on 
 pork and potatoes ; but they are better off than I ; they have 
 nothing to keep up I " 
 
 It was a bitter truth, and she felt its bitterness to the utmost, 
 where she sat, curled in the velvets and silks and luxuiy, that those 
 she envied would have so envied *• my lady," could they have looked 
 ' h her in her solitude. She turned her head slowly as the door 
 .opened, glanced up with half-closed eyes, then returned to the 
 moody contemplation of the fire. She had been a very miserable 
 companion, a very gloomy tyrant, to her sister during this winter, 
 V lei they had been mewed in leafless woods for nothing, with no 
 (f^n:- ,er-party nearer than fifteen miles, hearing of that *' odious 
 man Trever;na's " men-parties at Clarencieux, and hopeless of ever 
 seeing its lost lord return. Nor had the month or so of the town- 
 season much improved her temper, now that she was back again 
 for the recess. 
 
 Lady Valencia came up in silence tiU she stood before the fire i 
 her bUuck ht^ie^ swept round her oyer a white morning dress, ai^4 
 
hi the Rose-Garaens. I17 
 
 there Had caught across it, in unnoticed ornament, one of the long 
 ivy-coils with leaves of darkest, buds of lightest green. 
 
 "What a draught you bring in with you!" shivered Lady 
 Chesterton, peevishly. *' Good gracious! you are di-essed as if it 
 were summer. Take care, pray; you brush Dragee' s hair the 
 wrong way 1 " 
 
 Moving her skirts from the little lion-dog, Lady Valencia stood 
 silent still. Her sister looked up at her and wondered. The bril- 
 liance of tiie spring-tide seemed to have lingered on the Queen of 
 Lilies ; there was a new look upon her face. 
 
 *• What has happened ? " asked the peeress, sharply. 
 
 She looked down on the baroness with a certain haughty con- 
 tempt. She owed her sister many a goading irritation, many a 
 sneering taunt. 
 
 ** Your sacrifice at this shooting-box has not been in vain," she 
 eaid, calmly detaching the green ivy-spray from her dress. 
 
 Lady Chesterton started up in her chair, her black eyes all vivid 
 Animation. 
 
 " Valencia I you do not mean " 
 
 " Yes," said the Lily Queen, serenely still ; but she turned her 
 head with the lofty supremacy of a victorious queen ; a proud 
 triumph flashed in the velvet depths of her eyes ; every line of her 
 form, every cui-ve of her lips, expressed conquest; "yes, we have 
 won. I shall be mistress of Clarencieux ! " 
 
 Had Chandos been there in that moment, he would have seen it 
 were better for him that he should lie in his grave than that she 
 should be so. 
 
 CHAPTER Vn. 
 
 IW TIIE ROSE-GAKDENS. 
 
 Chandos, as it was, could scarcely have said that tlie same triumph 
 remained with him. 
 
 For marriage he had an utter distaste, — of his liberty a sui-pass- 
 ing love ; the slightest bondage was unendurable to him ; and the 
 thought of what he had done on the spur of an irresistible beauty 
 and a vainly-resisted love weighed on him curiously as he rode 
 through the aisles of pines and over the vast undulating sward ot 
 the outlying lands, with the sound of the sea from the distance, and 
 in the sunny air the winged dwellers of the beach, the delicate tern, 
 the rare hen-harrier, the riug-plover, and the mallard, flying above 
 the wild thyme and the still moor-pools. His life had not a shadow: 
 why had he not left it as it was ? He loved her,— he loved her with 
 a great passion that, through her beauty, swayed him like a reed ; 
 and yet a strange weariness, a strange depression, came upon him 
 as he swept over the wild wolds. He felt as though he had sur- 
 rendered up his future into bondage. 
 
 As he turned his horse into the home-woods, leaving the purple 
 
ii8 Chandos. 
 
 moorlands that were the sea-shore appanage of Olarencieux at a 
 cross-road, one of his own hunters was spurred after him. Tre- 
 yenna came up with him. 
 
 " How you do ride ! " cried Trevenna, himself a good but cautious 
 Horseman, not caring very much for the saddle. " You will break 
 your neck, surely, some day. How you took that gate ! By the 
 way, if you were to do such a thing,' who is your heir ? There ia 
 no other Chandos." 
 
 "The estates would go to the Castlemaine family: I have no 
 nearer relatives," answered Chandos, a little wearily. Now, of all 
 other times, he could have wished the incessant chatter of his Chicot 
 far away. 
 
 ** Ah, but you'U marry some time or other, of course.*' 
 
 Chandos gave a gesture of impatience ; the word grated terribly 
 on his ear. Trevenna glanced at him, and knew what he wanted. 
 Through his reconnoitrer-glass he had seen the wishing-well, and 
 the two who had stood beneath the copper beeches, and he wished 
 to learn how far the affair had gone= The impatient gesture told 
 him. He had studied every impulse and minutest trait of Chandos' 
 character, till he could gauge his feeling and his meaning to the 
 slightest shade. 
 
 •' The ladies were upbraiding you loudly for your desertion when 
 I left the house. They had sauntered down out of their rooms to 
 ride and diive, and were indignant not to have their host enproie,'' 
 he went on, carelessly ; he knew his companion too well to press 
 the other subject. ** As for me, I have been meditating on my 
 coming greatness. Really, have you thought well of it, Chandos F 
 four friends will say you have put an adventurer in the House." 
 
 ** They will not say so to me, and if they do to you, you can 
 give them more than they send. Besides, you will have good 
 company ; did not they say so of Canning ? " 
 
 " Then you are really resolved on lifting me to St. Stephen's ?" 
 
 "Assuredly." 
 
 *' Upon my word, monseigneur, you make one think of Timon n 
 
 I could deal kingdoms to my friends^ 
 And ne'er be weary ! " 
 
 " Timon ! you choose me an ominous parallel. Would you all 
 
 be * feast-won, fast-lost' ?" 
 
 " The deuce ! I dare say we should." 
 
 The answer was rough, but it was true as far as it went. There 
 were times when Trevenna could not quite help being truthful. 
 Lying invariably will become as weary work, sometimes, as telliiig 
 trath becomes to most people ; and there was a cynical candour in 
 the fellow not always to be broken into training. 
 
 *' I would trust you sooner not to be, Trevenna, for the frank- 
 ness of that admission," said Chandos, right in his deduction, 
 even if he should be wrong in this present instance. "Look at 
 that glimpse of sea through the pines ; how wonderful in colour ! " 
 
 The deep blue of the sea-line glistened to violet beyond the 
 dark-green boughs and the russet shafts of the pine-stems. The 
 
In the Rose-Gardens. 119 
 
 woods of the deer-forest stretched in rolling masses upward and 
 inland; and beyond, tinged with the brightest light, stood the 
 magnificent pile of the castle. Trevenna looked. 
 
 "Yes, very pretty." 
 
 " Good Heavens I you speak as if it were the transformation- 
 scene of a ballet ! " 
 
 "I like a ballet a good deal better. Clouds of transparent 
 skirts are better than clouds of transparent mists. You are very 
 fond of this place, Ernest ! " 
 
 "It were odd if I were not. I can fancy how it was deadlier 
 to the last Marquis than to sever from friend or mistress, when he 
 had to look his last on Clarencieux." 
 
 Trevenna smiled, and flicked his horse thoughtfully between the 
 ears, as they rode on in silence. 
 
 " Thou givest so long, Timon, I fear me 
 Thou wilt give thyself away in paper, shortly,* 
 
 ran the thread of his musings. 
 
 Trevenna's momentary pang of conscience in the morning had 
 been particularly short-lived. It had died with the next look 
 upward to the face of the last Marquis. 
 
 At that moment, entering on the clearer spaces of the Home 
 Park, where four avenues of gigantic limes crossed and met each 
 other, one of the most singular beauties of Clarencieux, they 
 encountered another riding-party escorting a little pony-carriage 
 drawn by four perfect piebalds, and containing Madame de la 
 Vivarol and a Eussian princess. Among the escort were the 
 Eoyal Due de NeuiUy, and another Due, not royal, but an European 
 notoriety all the same,— Philippe Fran9ois, Due d'Orvale. PhiUppe 
 d'Orvale was a character, — Europe was given to saying, too, a 
 very bad character. 
 
 Chief of one of the great feudal races of France, now growing 
 fewer and fewer with every generation, he was, so to speak, born 
 in the purples, and had lived in them up to the time when he was 
 now some fifty years of age. Exceedingly handsome, he still 
 preserved his dihonnaire graces. Excessively talented, he could 
 on occasion outwit a Metternich, a Talleyrand, or a Palmerston. 
 Extremely popular, he was the prince of bon-vivants. With all 
 this, Philippe d'Orvale had achieved a reputation too closely allied 
 to that of his namesake of D'Orleans not to be considered a 
 thorough-going reprobate, and to care infinitely less for succeeding 
 in the field of state-affairs and political triumphs than for succeed- 
 ing in dancing a new Spanish cachucha, in brewing a new liqueur- 
 punch at his soupera a huia clos, in dazzling Paris with some mad 
 freak of exuberant nonsense, and in leading the Demi-Monde in 
 aU its wildest extravagances. He had a good deal in him 0^ 
 the madcap mixture that was in the character of the Emperor 
 Maximilian, and, like him, scouted courts, titles, states, and 
 dignities for some reckless piece of devil-may-care. He might 
 have been anything he chose ; but he, duke and peer of France, 
 decorated mth half the orders of Europe, descendant of nobles who 
 
ISO Cfiandos. 
 
 had been cousins of Valois and nephews of Bourbon and MedicL 
 
 did not choose to be anjrthing except the chief of the Free Lancea 
 and the sovereign patron of singers and ballet-dancers. 
 
 Certes, he enjoyed himself, and looked on at his gay world 
 unsated out of his careless eyes ; but his family thought him mad, 
 and had, indeed, tried to restrain him from the control of his vast 
 properties, till Due Philippe, suddenly taking it into his head to 
 show them he was sane, went to Vienna, and conducted a delicate 
 imhroglio so matchlessly for France that it was impossible to 
 support the charge any longer, though, having so vindicated his 
 sanity, he returned directly to his own courses, and was found at 
 breakfast next day with three actresses from the Varietes, an 
 inimitable buffo-singer from the Cafe Alcazar, a posture-dancer off 
 the pavement of the Palais Royal, in whom he declared he had 
 discovered a relative, and a Pifferaro's monkey seated solemnly in 
 state in one of the velvet chairs, munching truffles and praslins, 
 amidst the chorus of Eossini's Papatacci, sung by the whole party 
 and led by D'Orvale himself. 
 
 A man who will set down a Barbary ape at his table, Europe, of 
 course, will pronounce out of his senses : yet a more finished 
 gentleman than Due Philippe never bowed before a throne ; and 
 while Europe in a mass pronounced him the most hideous amalga- 
 mation of vices, two or three who knew him well, among whom 
 was Chandos, steadily upheld that there was not an ounce of real 
 evil in this bearded hon eiifant, 
 
 John Trevenna, as far as dissipation went, was a perfectly 
 irreproachable character, and had not really a vice that could be 
 put down at his score ; Philippe d'OiTale was a very reproachable 
 one, and had, beyond doubt, a good many; yet perhaps both 
 Guide Lulli and Beau Sire were in the right when they shrank 
 from the keen blue eyes of the one, and came up without fear, 
 sure of a kindly word, imder the sunny gaze of the other, 
 
 The next night there were, as commonly when the house was 
 filled, theatricals at Clarencieux. The same Paris troupe which 
 had gone to Constantinople were down here for the recess, re- 
 inforced by a new actress of the most enchanting talents, and by 
 John Trevenna, who had the most inimitable powers of mimicry 
 ever seen on a stage, and who now played in the first vaudeville, 
 as an Englishman on his initiatory trip to Paris, till even the 
 fastidious and sated audience he played for were in uncontrollable 
 laughter, and even the ladies, his very worst foes, were of opinion 
 that a person who could amuse them so well, certainly deserved to 
 
 fo into Pai'liament, though he did come nobody knew whence, and 
 ad lodgings in town nobody knew where. 
 
 Trevenna showed his vsdsdom in playing the part of a Charles 
 Mathews to this little bijou theatre, smce by it he won over the 
 toleration of his most inveterate and most inexorable foes. 
 
 The only guests, besides the people staying in the castle, were 
 the Chestertons and Lady Valencia. A prouder moment even the 
 Lily Queen had never wished for or dreamt of than when she first 
 passed the threshold of Clarencieux into the mighty hall where 
 
In the Rose- Gal lie Hi. 121 
 
 Evelyn Chaudos had marshalled his cavaliers, and knew that she 
 was the future mistress of that royal place ; than when she was 
 mot upon the great staircase as the Chaudos only met their 
 sovereigns, and knew that she was the betrothed wife of this 
 brilliant darling of courts, this magnificent leader of fashion, 
 whom the world had said no woman would ever so woo and so 
 win. 
 
 Perhaps, indeed, as they passed from the reception-rooms to the 
 dining-hall, and from the drawing-rooms again to the theatre, 
 through the lofty corridors ceiled with cedar and hung with 
 Renaissance decorations on which the first artists of Italy had of 
 late years been employed, her glance too often wandered to the 
 mere art-skill and costliness with which every yard of Clarencieux 
 was filled, — to the priceless pictures, to the delicate statues, to the 
 gold and the ivory, the malachite and the jasper, the porphyry 
 and the marble, the collections of a princely wealth and of a race 
 eight centui'ies old. Perhaps she looked too much at these, the 
 mere possessions of accident, the mere symbols of power ; perhaps 
 the higher, deeper, softer, treasures of the future she had won 
 escaped her, and were less dear to her than these insignia of her 
 lover's rank, her lover's splendour : perhaps. She had been in the 
 bitter school of titled poverty ; from her birth upwards she had 
 been so proud, and yet so penniless. 
 
 As they sat at dinner in the banqueting-hall, hung with scarlet 
 and gold, with its ceiling arched above the sixteen Corinthian 
 pillars of porphyry given by La Grande Catherine to a Chandos 
 who had been ambassador at her court, the Uueon of Lilies, 
 haughty as an empress, delicate as a young deer, pure and 
 stately as the flower of her emblem though she was, appraised the 
 grandeur of Clarencieux well-nigh with as critical a survey as 
 Ignatius Mathias could have done, and looked less upward to 
 where her lover sat, than opposite to where, above the sculptured 
 marble of the mighty hearth, above the crossed standards of 
 Evelyn Chandos and the last Marquis, of Edgehill and of Preston, 
 there rested in a niche, all wi'ought in ivory and silver in a curious 
 Florentine carving, the last coronet that had ever been worn by a 
 Chandos, — the attaindered coronet of Clarencieux. 
 
 ** Amazingly like the last Marquis he looks to-night, by Jove ! ** 
 thought Trevenna, standing behind the curtain of the pretty stage 
 before it drew up for the vaudeville, and surveying through a 
 chink the slope of the theatre filled with arm-chairs, without any 
 partition into boxes, and all glittering with arabesques and gilding 
 and chandeliers, where in the centre Chandos stood leaning over 
 Lady Valencia's chair. *' Well, there is a Tower Hill waiting for 
 him too ! Only my lord, with his d — d proud smile, said, ' All's 
 lost, — except honour ! ' I guess his descendant will say, * All's lost, 
 —eyen honour ! " We must not strike till this election matter's 
 over. That put me out of my calculations ; and it's too good to 
 lose. Onlv a little while longer, though, shall I play the fooi 
 to please nis patricians, and monseigneur stand there owner o| 
 Clarencieux. .^jpres— -" n^t 
 
i a a Chandos, 
 
 The bell rang a little chime ; the curtain, exquisitely painted 
 with a view of Pa3stum, drew up. Trevenna sauntered forward 
 to greet the Parisienne actress, with a flow of inimitable nonsense, 
 and an effervescence of animal spirits so mirthful and contagious 
 that the most Uas6 of his audience were laughed into an irre- 
 sistible good humour ; and had his election depended on their votes, 
 he would have been safe into his borough that instant. There 
 were only two who, while they laughed, would have withheld 
 their suffrage ; they were the Duke of Castlemaine and Philippe 
 Due d'Orvale, — the two who, despite the presence of women 
 whose fair eyes had vowed him such soft fidelity, were the two 
 in Clarencieux that night who loved Chandos the best. 
 
 Some faint perception that the tenderness borne him by the one 
 he last wooed was not that with which he, with the fervour of an 
 impassioned nature beneath his carelessness, had loved and been 
 loved under Southern and Asiatic suns, stiiTed in him even that 
 night. He had been hurried by her beauty into the utterance of 
 a long-resisted passion ; but of her heart, of her nature, of her 
 thoughts, he knew nothing. He loved her as poets love, seeing 
 her through the glories of his own imaginings ; but he knew no 
 more whether in truth she answered them than he knew what he 
 had done for his own future when he had di'awn her into its life 
 with that caress which left him bound to her. 
 
 He had been spoiled by a world that had so long adored him ; he 
 had been used to the utmost gratification of eveiy fancy, of every 
 wish ; he had been intensely loved by women, used to burning 
 words, to lavish tenderness. In her there was some want that he 
 vaguely missed, some coldness scarcely felt, yet ever there, which 
 now in the first moment of his surrender to her passed over him 
 with a chill. He knew that he had done a fatal thing ; and the 
 thought haunted him even in the gaieties of Clarencieux, — even 
 when for an instant he was alone with her, as he drew her from 
 the ball-room into the conservatories, aisles of tropical blossom 
 and vegetation glowing with the deep bronze of South American 
 leaves and the scarlet of Oriental fruits and flowers, the foliage oi 
 Mexico and the flora of Persia. 
 
 "Ah, my Queen of Lilies!" he murmured, passionately, "you 
 are fair as the flower they call you after ; but are you as cold ? 
 You have not yet learnt what love really is : look into my eyes 
 and read it there !" 
 
 She drew herself softly from his embrace, startled and flushed 
 by the warmth of his words, by the ardour of a temperament beside 
 which her own was as ice to the sirocco, as the moon to the sun. 
 
 " Where is it that I fail ?" eke whispered ; *' how would you have 
 me love you?" 
 
 "How! My fairest, words are but cold interpreters; if you 
 knew, you would not ask the question. How ? Speech cannot 
 teach that lore. I would be loved as I love, — so only ! " 
 
 "Ernest, pardon me," said the Duke of Castlemaine, as late in 
 that dawn he met his grandson, both on their way to the smoking- 
 room : " but your attentions were extraordinarily marked to Jiady 
 
/// the Rose-Gardens. ra^ 
 
 Valencia St. Albans to-night, — almost too much so, since there arc 
 princesses of the French and Russian blood in your house. If I 
 were not sure " 
 
 "Dear Duke, be sure of nothing." 
 
 His Grace paused, wheeled round, and stared at him. 
 
 ** Chandos ! you cannot mean " 
 
 *' Yes ; I mean what you are thinking of. I have said more than 
 I can unsay. Let us drop the subject." 
 
 An oath of the hot Eegency days of his early manhood broke 
 from under the white cavalry moustaches of the old nobleman, as 
 be stood and gazed at his favourite descendant in the silvery light 
 from the candelabra above their heads in the corridor. He had no 
 need to ask more questions ; he imderstood well enough, and the 
 comprehension cut him to the heart. 
 
 ** Good God, Ernest ! " and there was an accent of genuine grief, 
 as well as of amaze. ** And you might have wedded royal women, 
 — ^Louise d'Albe, Marie of August, the Princess d'Orvieto ! yon 
 might have claimed the hand of any one of them ! but you declared 
 that you hated marriage." 
 
 "I declared only the truth. Marriage I abhor; but her — I 
 love." 
 
 The Duke ground his still strong handsome teeth with a fierce 
 impatience ; he knew that the Chandos of Clarencieux — libertines 
 perhaps, epicureans always— had never let any earthly wisdom 
 or law or plea stand between them and the follies of their hearts or 
 passions. 
 
 '* 1 knew she would do it, if she had the chance," he muttered. 
 " To run after you here, to come into the country the instant you 
 returned from Paris, — indelicate, indecent ! " 
 
 Chandos stretched out his hand. 
 
 "Hush, sir: /cannot hear such accusations. It was not her 
 doing that she came ; she has told me that she was strongly averse 
 to it, the more averse because, as I may now confess for her, she 
 loved me." 
 
 The Duke swept his hand over his snowy moustaches with a 
 scornful, wrathful gesture. 
 
 " Need she have come, then ? The daughter of Ivors can scarce 
 be so utterly destitute of friends. She intrigues for you as markedly 
 as any Flora de I'Orme, though in a different fashion." 
 
 Chandos turned to him, grave almost to weariness for the mo- 
 ment, but gentle as of old. 
 
 " My dear Duke, you know that I would not have a diflferenco 
 with you for the worth of Clarencieux ; but you must not use such 
 words in my presence of one whom you will hereafter receive as 
 —my wife." 
 
 He paused before the last two syllables ; he could not utter them 
 without some pain, withorat some distrust. His Grace suppressed 
 a deadlier oath ; he loved Chandos with more fondness than he 
 would have cared to confess, and he had, besides, the most superb 
 instincts of thorough-bred courtesy. 
 
 ♦* I beg your pardon," he said, with a bend of his stately head. 
 
1^4 Chandos. 
 
 *• I have, of course, no right to commeiit on your choice or ou youc 
 actions ; but all I would ask you is, what will she recompenca you 
 for all you must forfeit for her ?" 
 
 Chandos gave a half-impatient sigh, not so low but that it caught 
 his grandfather's ear. 
 
 *' It is useless speaking. It is not that I doubt your wisdom, oi 
 dispute your right of counsel; but what is done is done: let u£ 
 leave a fruitless subject." 
 
 He moved on, and threw open the door of the smoking-room. 
 The Duke loved him too well to say more, but he turned back 
 abruptly, bade him good-night, and went to his own apartment. 
 Well as the gallant old man enjoyed the society of a younger 
 generation, and welcome as he was to it by right of his grand 
 intellect, his unquenched spirits, and his high renown, he had not 
 the heart for it now ; ho felt, vaguely and bitterly, that the cloud- 
 less sunshine of fortune would soon or late desert the last Chandos 
 left to Clarencieux. 
 
 Chandos himself that night smoked his favourite rose-water 
 narghile in the smoking-room, then sat down with Philippe 
 d'Orvale to S carte, closely contested, costly, and washed, now and 
 then, with iced sherbet. They played while everybody else slept ; 
 then, as d'Orvale went to bed, Chandos instead let himself out by 
 a side door that opened into the rose-gardens, and walked alone 
 into the sunny, silent morning, with no other companion than 
 Beau Sire. 
 
 With the temper of a voluptuary and the habits of a man of the 
 world, there was blent in him as strong a love of nature and of all 
 the beauty of forest and moorland, of the change of the seasons, 
 and of the floating glories of the clouds, as the purest of the 
 Lakists ever felt. In truth, he was many men in one, and to the 
 apparent inconsistency it produced in his character were due both 
 the versatility of his talents and the scope of his sympathies. His 
 penetration was often at fault; he thought too well of men, and 
 judged them too carelessly; but his sympathies were invariably 
 catholic and true ; he understood what others felt with an unerring 
 em-ety of perception, — a quality that invariably begets attachment, 
 a quality that, in its highest development, produces genius. 
 
 He walked far, spending two hours in the forest and on the 
 shore. The flight of a flock of sea-swallows, the toss of the surf on 
 the yellow sands, the roUing-in of the great curled waves, the 
 morning life of the woodlands, the nest-song of the thrushes, the 
 poise of a blue- warbler above a river-plant, the circling sweep of 
 an osprey in the air, all hai their charm to him ; not one of the 
 eights and sounds of the spring- day was indififcrent to him or 
 unnoted by him. He loved to lay high prices on the cards in 
 the excitement of a gaming-room, and he loved to lead the wit 
 and wildness of a sparkling, reckless Paris night; but nouo the 
 less did he love to stand and look over the gray, calm expanse of 
 a limitless sea, none the less did he love to listen to the laugh of a 
 west wind thiough the endless aisles of a forest. 
 
 He stroUed till past noon through his lands with the retrieyei 
 
In the Rost'Garden, 315 
 
 ftlone beside him, then he re-entered the gai*dens by the same gate 
 by which he had left them. In them he met, alone also, La Vivai'oL 
 He would very willingly have avoided the meeting. He knew 
 how inexorable a tyrant the fair countess had been : it was with 
 difficulty that he had loosened her fetters at all, and the escape he 
 had made had, as he was well aware, never been pardoned him. 
 Of a scene, of anything approaching reproaches, recrimination, or 
 a quarrel, Chandos had more than the common horror ; it was one 
 of the frailties of his nature to do any thing on the face of the earth 
 to avoid a ^^mauvais quart (Theure;^' and now his conscience told 
 him that he could scarcely complain if he had to endure one, even 
 if madame were unaware of the lengths to which her rival's 
 triumph extended. He advanced, therefore, with a misgiving. 
 
 ** Ah, madame ! good-moming. It is very rarely you honour the 
 outer world so early." 
 
 The Countess laughed as silvery a peal as that rung by her toy- 
 dog's little bells. 
 
 •' No, indeed. The dawn, and the dew, and all the rest of it are 
 charming in eclogues and pastorals, but in real life they are — a 
 little damp ! but to-day I did not sleep very well ; my novel wa8 
 dull, and the gardens looked tempting." 
 
 " Those who are so much the gainers by it will not quarrel with 
 any caprice that brings them to you earlier." 
 
 La Vivarol laughed again, — a little contemptuously, letting an 
 echo of sadness steal into it. This brightest Yenus Victrix was 
 very chary of her sighs, but on very rare occasions she could be 
 mournful with an effect no other ever approached. 
 
 ** My favourite rose-gai'dens," she said, glancing round them. 
 ** Their summer beauty is not yet come, though it is very near. / 
 shall never see it." 
 
 •* Madame ! what can make you utter so cruel a prediction for 
 Clarencaeux ?" 
 
 She let her long eyes, dazzling as a falcon's, rest on him, humid 
 with a mist that he could almost have sworn was of tears. 
 
 ** Chutf mon ami ! A new queen will soon reign at Clarencieux, 
 they say ; can you pretend that I should be welcome then ?" 
 
 iher© was a repressed melancholy in the tone more touching 
 than epoken reproach. Like Trevenna, she had long studied and 
 traced his most facile and most accessiblo weakness. She knew ho 
 could never be moved by recrimination ; she knew he could be 
 wounded in an instant by tenderness. Ue was silent a moment, 
 startled and pained ; he scarce could teU how to soothe away this 
 bitterness to her. 
 
 "Believe me," he said, a Kttle huiTiedly, *' whatever changes 
 Clarencieux sees, you will ever be welcomed to it by me." 
 
 *' And do you think that with these ' changes' I would come to 
 it?" She spoke with a proud rebuke, a melancholy challenge, 
 turning her eyes full on his. Not a woman living knew so well 
 how to place a man in a wiong position, and closo all gates of 
 escape upon him, as Heloise de la Vivarol. Chandos felt in- 
 cwnfitant r*^ cry«i — felt as she chos« that he should feeL 
 
126 Chandos. 
 
 "However that bo," she murmured, dreamily, placing him yei 
 further and further at his disadvantage, as only a woman's tact 
 can do, "/wish you every joy, Ernest, that earth can bring. 
 Ernest ! I may call you that still once more ; the name will be for 
 new lips in the future." 
 
 The tears shone, dimming her brilliant eyes ; a touching and 
 resigned reproach was in her tone ; sadness was tenfold more in- 
 tense, coming for once in its rarity upon the dazzling, victorious 
 face of the sovereign conqueror. Chandos felt guilty, felt re- 
 pentant, felt everything that she meant he should feel. His 
 wiser judgment might have known that this was but the perfection 
 of acting ; but she did not let his judgment come a second into 
 play ; she moved him at once by his heart and by his sympathies. 
 He took her hand, and stooped towards her. 
 
 "Heloise, forgive me. I deeply regret — 1 did not know — at 
 least, if ever " 
 
 He was about, despite aU his consummate tact and his know- 
 ledge of the world and of its women, to do so rash a thing as to 
 apologise to her for having deserted his allegiance ! She stopped 
 him softly. 
 
 ** Say no more; the past is past. No one you have ever known 
 will wish you happiness as I shall wish it. We are friends now, 
 and ever will be. Another love usurps you : so be it. To me, at 
 least, is left your friendship still. It is not too much to ask, 
 Ernest P" 
 
 ** Too much ! It is yours for ever." 
 
 He spoke warmly, contrite, and surprised that she had loved him 
 60 well. She had never looked more lovely than in this sudden 
 descent from her haughty and contemptuous gaiety of sovereign 
 triumph to this moumful and wistful resignation. ** I never 
 thought that she had loved me fio," he mused, surprised and 
 moved, when he had left her. She had led him by his feelings, 
 and he had neither the keenness nor the suspicion in him to doubt 
 that she betrayed him. To Chandos it was far easier to think thai 
 he had done a woman of the world wrong by thinking her toa 
 heartless, than to credit that she wronged hun by masking a bitter 
 passion that she felt and assuming a gentle passion -she didrnot feel. 
 It was true, she loved him,— «in heirreading of IJie word ; btrfe it waa 
 in such a reajding^that the- night before, seeing her EngHsh rival's 
 power, €he had set her delicate teeth together, and Bwom, in hei 
 heart, — 
 
 **I will have my vengeance! if it be twenty yearshenoe,! 
 will have my vengeance ! " 
 
 And before twenty years she had it. 
 
The Watcher /or the Fall of liim^ 9!»| 
 
 CHAPTER VTEL 
 
 THE WATCHER FOR THE FALL OP ILTOIT. 
 
 " They tell me the Premier has pressed on you again the restora- 
 tion of your title ?" 
 
 The Queen of Lilies spoke, standing under those, very palms, in 
 her sister's town residence, under which she had 'stood when she 
 had first spoken the name of Chandos. 
 
 ** Yes, my dearest, he has done so.** 
 
 "And you accept ?" 
 
 "No; I decline." 
 
 "Decline! And why P" 
 
 " ^Vhy ? For many matters. One, that what was robl)ed from 
 us by the crown I will not take from the crown as a re-creation. 
 The last Marquis laid his life down to preserve his honour. Athens 
 would have given him a statue in her Altis ; England, charac- 
 teristically, gave him a block on Tower Hill. We have never 
 condoned his judicial murder." 
 
 '* Refuse the marquisate to gratify the manes of a beheaded 
 ancestor ! What quixotism ! " 
 
 Chandos looked as he felt, — annoyed ; he was used to be deferred 
 to, and the women he had loved had been playfully gentle even 
 in their most imperious tyrannies. Besides, a deeper vexation 
 smote him ; this anxiety for his rank showed that his rank 
 usurped her thoughts. 
 
 '* Quixotism it may be ; such as it is, it will always govern inc ; 
 and I should have hoped one who loved me would strive to under- 
 stand my feelings, as I would strive to understand hers." 
 
 ** But why ? tell me why. Attaindered titles have been restored 
 before now. Others have thought it very right." 
 
 ** What others may do has never been my guide." 
 
 " I know ! But— forgive me — I cannot see your motive." 
 
 ** * Forgive ' is no word between us, my worshipped one. But 
 to teU ^ou my motives I should have to tell you a long story. 
 Suffice it, nothing — not even your prayer — would ever induce me 
 to be made Lord Clarencieux." 
 
 '* A story ? Oh, you must tell it me ! " 
 
 " Why, my dearest ? We have a story of our own far sweeter 
 than any chronicle." 
 
 "No, no. You have excited me now; you must gratify my 
 curiosity." 
 
 She spoke caressingly, but in her heart were a keen irritation 
 and mortification. She had set all the longing of her ambitious 
 life upon his marquisate. The word of a woman is command to 
 the man who loves her ; he smiled, looking down upon her, and 
 drawing her nearer in his embrace. 
 
 "You know the life and the death of the last lord? — it is a 
 matter of history. When he joined Charles Edward at Preston, he 
 was the most brilliant man of his time, a wit, a soldier, a poet, i\ 
 hel espr^, the friend of Philippe d' Orleans and EicheHeu. tiw 
 
courtliest noble of his age. He had loved many ; but he loved 
 
 latest, and above all, a Duke's daughter, his betrothed wife. When 
 he was flun^ into the Tower they offered him not only Hfe, but 
 highest distinctions, if he would betray a state secret known to be 
 in his possession. You are aware that he refused, in words which 
 sent the Whig nobles who came to tempt him out of his presence 
 like lashed hounds. Yet existence was unutterably dear to him. 
 What think you the woman who loved him did ? — she, a couit- 
 beauty, whom hundreds urged to forgetfulness and infidelity. 
 All she craved from the throne was permission to go to him in his 
 captivity, being * prouder,' as her letters phrase it, ' to share his 
 doom tlian to be one with the pomp and pride of emperors.' It 
 was granted, and she was wedded to him one evening in the 
 Beauchamp Tower. She lived with him there four months, while 
 his trial languished on. They feared to murder him, for the 
 Chandos were very powerful then ; yet they thirsted like wolves 
 for the great chief's blood. His name was like a clarion to all the 
 gentlemen of the South. Thi'ough all those months she never left 
 him for one hour, nor did one word ever escape her lips to urge 
 him to purchase life at loss of honour. They took him from her 
 side to the scaffold, one fair spring morning, to die, with a smile 
 upon his lips, and those brief words, ' Tout est perdu, fors I'hon- 
 neur ! ' They say that from the radiance of scarcely twenty years 
 she changed to the blanched and decrepitude of extreme age in 
 that houi' of agony when the axe fell upon the neck her arms had 
 wreathed in his last sleep. The son, to whom she gave birth 
 afterwards, grew up to manhood, the estates saved for hinr^ by 
 others' intercession, — never by her own. She made him swea'/ 
 never to accept the restoration of his father's title, sinco it would 
 have been to_ give condonation to his father's mui'derers. He 
 kept his oath inviolate ; and it has been passed on from genera- 
 tion to generation. Now you understand why X will not accept 
 the gift of my attaindered peei-age." 
 
 The etory had always had a strong and touching charm foi 
 women. Even Helo'ise de la Vivarci, most careless, most heart- 
 less of young coquettes, had listened to it, looking at the Knellei 
 portrait, with tears that started genuine and true into her falcon 
 eyes ; and even her mother, the Princess Lucille, that weary, 
 hardened, war-worn, continental Bohemian of the Blood, had 
 heard it in a grave, awed silence, and had turned slowly away : 
 •* C'est bien beau ! — cet amour qui est plus fort que la mort. Je 
 ne le comprends pas ; mais c'est beau ! " 
 
 Now the chastely-trained English beauty, in the purity and 
 freshness of her youth, was less moved by it, understood it less, 
 than the calumny-proof and evilly- accused Frenchwoman. 
 
 She listened, she smiled, she thanked him ; but the history did 
 not reach her heart. She felt, moreover, that after what he had 
 now said it would be as useless to urge him to the acceptance of 
 the Clarencieux peerage as to urge on him some actual dishonour ; 
 and all the longing of her soul had been set upon that oroud mar- 
 quisate. 
 
Watcher for the Fall of I lion. 139 
 
 Meanwliile there was not a single person of Chandos' acquaint- 
 ance to whom the prospect of his marriage -^as not bitterly 
 ■unwelcome, — except, indeed, Trevenna, who seemed thoroughly 
 content with it; at which other men wondered, knowing how 
 much benefit accrued to him from the careless and gay extrava- 
 gance of his friend's un wedded life. ** But then," they remaiked, 
 ** Trevenna's always such a good-natured fellow ! " 
 
 He had thoroughly earned this character. Did any man want 
 anything, from a cigar to a hunting-mount, from a seat down to 
 Epsom to an invitation for the moors, Treveuua would get it for 
 him with the most obliging good nature, — so obliging, that men 
 never knew or noticed that the cigars were Chandos', that the 
 mounts were out of his stud, that the drag came out of his stable - 
 yard, and that the Highland shootings were over his heather and 
 forest. Good nature Trevenna held a very safe and excellent 
 reputation. His talents and his shrewdness secured him from ever 
 incurring that contempt, bom of familiarity, which good nature is 
 apt to beget ; and it was a reputation, as he considered, that kepf 
 a clever man ** dark," and secured him from every imputation ov 
 being "dangerous" or ambitious, better than any thing. No 
 one ever suspects an embryo Drusus or Catiline, a lurking Glad- 
 stone or Bismarck, in the man of whom everybody says, *' Most 
 obliging fellow in the world ; always do you a turn ; uncommonly 
 good-natured ! " 
 
 When the blue-eyed, golden-haired Proconsul cracked his jests 
 with Eoscius, and lent his thousands of sesterces in reckJesa 
 Uberality, and offered his Cuman viUa to his boon-comrades, and 
 played the witty fool, with roses on his bright locks, through the 
 not nights of roystering, devil-may-care, dead-drunk Eome, who 
 feared or foresaw in the boon-companion the dread conqueror of 
 Aphrodite's Temple, the great dictator of the Optimates, tiie iron- 
 handed Eetribution of the Marians ? 
 
 "What ever possessed you to put that fellow into Parliament, 
 Ernest ? " asked the Duke of Castlemaine, in the window of White's, 
 a fortnight after the recess, flinging down the paper, in which a 
 quiet paragraph announced the retirement of Sir Jasper Lyle and 
 the unopposed nomination and election in his stead of the nominee 
 of Clarencieux, John Trevenna, now M.P r 
 
 Chandos raised his eyebrows a little. 
 
 "I put him in because he was fittod for it not a common 
 reason for elections, I admit." 
 
 The Duke gave a low growl in his white beard. "You think 
 life is t© be dealt with by bon mots and epigrams. I can't say the 
 Lower House has much to thank you for in furnishing it with an 
 adventurer ! " 
 
 " It has much to thank me for in giving it a talker who can be 
 logical without being long-winded, and sparkling without being 
 shallow, — though possibly it won't see the obligation It reve'^s 
 the prosy, and venerates the ponderous." 
 
 " 4nd if vou had s little of its tastos you would gain In safety 
 
I JO Chandoi. 
 
 what you would lose in brilliance. You set too much store on 
 
 mere talent, Chandos.'* 
 
 <' I err in an opposite extreme to most of my countrymen, then, 
 Duke." 
 
 ** Can you answer one without a repartee ?" muttered his Grace, 
 grandly wrathful at an election from which he had done his best 
 to dissuade his favourite. Prevent it he could not ; he had no 
 local influence in his grandson's county, and the little sea-coast 
 borough within twenty miles of Clarencieux had almost as feudal 
 an attachment to the mere name of Chandos as his peasantry and 
 tenantry on the estates. The days of the last Marquis were not so 
 far back but that living men could remember their grandsires 
 relating the southern rallying round his standard ; and the great 
 lame of the late minister was a thing beloved and honoured thi'ough 
 the whole of that sea-board as s tbdng of personal and imperisJi-^ 
 able renown. 
 
 *' To put an adventurer like that fellow in the House ! " muttered 
 the Duke, fiercely recurring to a pinch of his fragrant etreune. " I 
 confess, I am astonished at you, Ernest." 
 
 *' I would never have believed it," chomsed his son, the Marquis 
 of Deloraine. 
 
 *' I did not believe it," echoed the Earl of Pontifex. '* When I 
 t^iiwthe paragraph in the paper, I set it down at once as a canard.'* 
 
 " Preposterous ! " murmured a noble lord, who held the Foreign 
 i oitlolio, from behind his morning j)aper. 
 
 " The ruin of the Constitution," sighed a colleague. 
 
 Chandos listened a little impatiently for his usual temper, and 
 hrugged his shoulders ever so slightly. 
 
 " I am very sorry if the matter disturb you, but reaUy I fail to 
 fcee the occasion. I confess, it seems to me less damaging to put a 
 man into the Lower House who has every promise for the vocation,, 
 except mocey, than to admit so many, as is now the custom, be- 
 cause money is the only recommendation they possess ! " 
 
 With which concise retort on his and Trevenna's censors, Chandos 
 absorbed himself in a new novel. The Duke, who might blame one 
 whom he loved more dearly than any other of his kith and kin 
 himself, but would never endure to hear him blamed elsewhere, 
 laughed, and turned to the Poreign Secretary. 
 
 ' ' Tell your rising men to look to their laui-els, Pendragon : thi» 
 fellow, now he is in, will cut some work out for them. ' Eh, sirrah, 
 and ye're na quiet, I'll send ye to the five hundi'ed kings in the 
 Lower House : I'se warrant they'll tame ye,' said James the First 
 to his restive charger. I don't think there will ever have been one 
 of the ' five hundred kings' more likely to reign paramount, some 
 way or other, than this very outsider, John Trevenna." 
 
 His Grace was a world-wise Nestor of aU councils and battle- 
 groimds, and, despite his aristocratic prejudices, judged the auda- 
 cious outsider correctly. 
 
 The election had been conducted very quietly ; there had not 
 been the slightest attempt at even a threatened opposition ; as 
 Trevenna said himself, he '* took a walk over." 
 
The Watcher fwr the Fall of ilion, 13I 
 
 Chandos waa the idol of the whole country-side, and, for thft 
 sake of his great father's memory, no wish of his would have been 
 opposed in his county. He proposed the new member in a few 
 words, which sent a thrill through all his elder auditors ; for the 
 voice was the same clear, rich, irresistible voice — essentially the 
 voice of the orator — which they had used to hear as Philip Chandos'. 
 They had often wished and besought him to rejjresent them in per- 
 son ; but he knew his own character better than they knew it, and 
 had invariably declined. "Without any murmur they took the can- 
 didate he proposed to them. The only persons who could have 
 opposed the Clarencieux nominee, on the score of the ConserYative 
 creed so long held by the Clarencieux house, namely, the few 
 people in the borough who loved change or studied politics enough 
 to be Whig (and they were very few), Travenna himself had con- 
 ciliated. That part of his canvassing he had done alone, unknown 
 indeed to Chandos; and it was a study in itself, the masterly 
 manner in which, abstaining fi-om any avowal of Darehampton 
 
 Eolitics, such as would have startled out of their wits the old Tory 
 urghers, whose only creed was the creed professed at Clarencieux, 
 he still managed to dine his few Whig alKes, to chat with them in 
 inn-bars, to smoke with them cheerily in their back parlours or 
 their sombre "best rooms," to win them all over to a man, and to 
 leave them with the profound conviction that he only coalesced 
 with their opponents in order that he might ultimately advance 
 and support their own opinions. Travenna was a capital postuie- 
 dancer in social life, and here achieved the proverbially dangerous 
 feat of sitting on two stools, with triumphant address and security. 
 
 Still, not here by his own tact, but by Chandos' assistance and 
 friendship alone, did he accomplish the commencing ambition of 
 his Hfe, to pass unchallenged the door-keeper of St. Stephen's, and 
 take his place upon the benches with the "five hundred kings." 
 
 Trevenna was in no sense an impressible man, and assuredly not 
 an imaginative one; he would have strolled throuoh the Bira 
 Nimrud or the broken columns of Jupiter Ammon, with the sun 
 full on the glories of the ruined temples, and would have cracked 
 a ginger-beer bottle and wished for a Punch ; he would have stood 
 in St. Peter's in the gloom of the Crucifixion-day, while the "Mise- 
 rere" wailed through the hush and the twilight, and would have 
 amused himself like a schoolboy with letting off a bunch of crackers 
 undetected, to ban» and sputter on the solemn silence ; ho was 
 essentially a "realist," to use the jargon of the schools, and a 
 very jovial realist too. Yet even he, little given to bemg touched 
 or impressed as he was, felt a certain proud thrill run through him, 
 a certain hushed earnestness faU for a moment on him, as he first 
 walked down to the House and took his place in the assembly that 
 John Eliot suffered for, and every tyi*anny since has feared. 
 
 Ae he seated himself in the Commons, men noted that he was 
 unusually quiet ; some thought that this town-gossip, this dinner- 
 wit, this idler of the Park and clubs, was conscious of being out of 
 his element, and felt his own superficial cleverness useless and 
 friyoloua in their great congress ; one or two thought, noting the 
 
t^ Chandos 
 
 clear keenness of the eye, the meaning of the well-built brow, and 
 the bright indomptable firmness of the lips, that he might be 
 rather, on the contrary, measuring and maturing his strength 
 against ttie future ; and these were the deeper, surer-sighted of his 
 observers. 
 
 So, quietly and unostentatiously, with good taste, as oven those 
 who begrudged bim the elevation were constrained to admit, not 
 altering his manner nor his mood because he had gained this social 
 status, giving men no touch, as yet, of his quality and his power, 
 training himself wisely, sedulously, and well, and caring little to 
 be noted at present for any thing beyond his punctual and steady 
 attendance at the House, Trevenna entered on his parliamentary 
 career. 
 
 At the same time with his own, a very dijQTerent ambition and 
 aspiration were forwarded and fructified by Chandos. 
 
 The opera Ariadne in Naxos was completed, and after Easter, 
 through his influence, and chiefly, indeed, at his expense, was to 
 be produced with every magnificence in the presentation, and every 
 assistance in the artists, that could be procuied at any cost. On 
 it hung the very life and soul of the musician Lulli. The idealic 
 ambition of the French cripple was as intense in its absorption of 
 him as Trevenna's realistic ambitions were of him ; each was lite- 
 rally and equally governed by ambition . the difi'erence was tha'» 
 one worshipped Art, the other only coveted Success. Lulli would 
 have expired in rapture if, perishing in want and misery, he could 
 have known that the world would treasure his works ; Trevenna 
 would not have given a rush for a fame that should have excelled 
 Caesar's, Aristides', or St> Paul's, if he had not dined well and 
 driink well while he lived. 
 
 Dreaming in his solitary room, the visionary, whose infii-mities 
 shut him out from every joy and hope that filled the lives of his 
 fellow-men, had created thiugs as glorious as ever issued from the 
 thoughts of Mozart or of Meyerbeer. In self-reliance most helpless, 
 among men weak as an ailing child, so ignorant of all worldly 
 ways and wisdom that an infant of six years might have laughed 
 him to scorn, Lulli in his own domain was a king, and from the 
 twilight of the aching brain, which looked with so touching a 
 pathos, with so bewildered a pain, out of the dieamy depths of his 
 ead eyes, music had risen in its grandest incarnations, poems ol 
 eternal meaning had been garnered, beauty that would haunt a 
 listening world and stir it from its Qloth into a pang of some 
 Bublimer thought than daily toil for greed and gain, had been born 
 in supreme perfection. 
 
 When will men learn to know that the power of genius, and the 
 human shell in which it chances to be harboured, are as distinct as 
 is the diamond from the quartz-bed in which they find it ? 
 
 The Ariadne was the crown of Lulli's life ; it was the first-born 
 of his brain, the darling of his thoughts, the fruit of many a long 
 summer day and winter night, given in untiring love to the work 
 of its creation. By it the world was to decide whether this cripple's 
 dr«a2u of fame was vain as " the desire of the moth for the star,'* 
 
The fFaicket'for the Fall of Ilion. 13^ 
 
 or whether, when his existence had passed away from the patience 
 and the pain of its daily being, the legacy he left would bo upon 
 khe lips and in the hearts of thousands, with the legacies of the 
 great masters. 
 
 The day approached at last for the trial, — scarcely three weeks 
 since Chandos had bartered all the liberty of his futui-e in one 
 caress among the spring- wealth of the violets. Was it well lost ? 
 He thrust the question from him unanswered, and gave himself up 
 to the sway of his new passion unresisting. He had never known 
 son'ow ; how could he weU know fear ? Now and then a passionate 
 regret seized him for the fatal opportunity which had led him 
 away to resign his fate and future to her ; but— he loved ; he had 
 never been overtaken by calamity ; he was of a natui'e on which 
 presentiment could assume no hold ; he flung the fear off him, and 
 forgot it, stooping to take the soft touch of her lips. 
 
 *• I suppose before long, Trevenna, you will renounce my ex- 
 chequer-chancellorship and begin to prepare youi'self for the 
 nation's?" laughed Chandos, the evening before that on which the 
 Ariadne in Naicos was to be presented. '* I cannot hope to keep 
 you as my financier now that you have parliamentary affairs in 
 earnest to work at : still, you must give me notice when you mean 
 to resign. The vacancy will be hard to fill." 
 
 Trevenna laughed also. 
 
 ** I confess, I pity my successor, as far as finances go : though 
 it is a very good office for pei'quisites, it is something tremendoua 
 for expenditure. By the way, have you any idea what you do spend, 
 Chandos?" 
 
 Chandos carelessly shook together the diamonds on a fancy-dresa 
 as he made his toilette for a fancy-ball at the Princess Anna Mira- 
 flora's. 
 
 " An idea of what I spend ? No. I always tell you, knowing 
 the price of things spoils them." 
 
 ** But not knowing the price of them may chance to spoil you." 
 
 ** I am spoilt. I don't deny it ; but then it's very pleasant." 
 
 " Very, no doubt. I never tried it. But in sober seriousness, 
 Ernest, do you guess what your expenses are ? " 
 
 '* * Sober seriousness ! ' What an invocation ! Decidedly the House 
 is disagreeing with you, Trevenna, and you are imbibing its pro- 
 fessional duluess. Give the benches your estimates, please ; don't 
 try my patience with them. By the way, though, you are my 
 finance-minister still : wiU you tell my lawyer to draw up Lady 
 Valencia's settlements immediately, and see to the matter altogether 
 yourself for mo P ** 
 
 '* With pleasure. What instructions P '* 
 
 *• That is just the point ! Save my having to give any. I only 
 ^ve you one injunction," added Chandos, dropping his voice so 
 that his attendants could not hear ; * * arrange them so that Lady 
 Valencia can never feel she has not brought me a fortune as large 
 as my own, and draw them up as you might have drawn them fol 
 a princess in her own right." 
 
 '* As I should have done if you had followed the Duke's counsels. 
 
134 Chandos. 
 
 But, fts for tliese settlements, I should be glad of a little grayei 
 
 talk with you. Can you not stop half an hour P " 
 
 " I ! I am fearfully late as it is ; and I have promised Princess 
 Anna to be in time for the Louis Quinze quadiille. Besides, I 
 know what your graver talk means. My dear fellow, go in foi 
 supply, and attend committees, if such be your taste ; but, for 
 pity's sake, spare me legalities and finance. Settle what they wish 
 upon her ; I cannot give you a wider margin." 
 
 ^"Wide enough!" said Trcvenna, grimly. "I wonder what 
 would be left you if my Lady Chess filled it up 1 But that is not 
 all, Chandos. Indeed " 
 
 ** Indeed, the 'all,' then, must wait for a better season," laughed 
 Chandos, shaking the jewelled hilt of his rapier into its place ; he 
 Was dressed as the Due de Eichelieu ; while the Queen of Lilies 
 Would represent the Duchcsse de Berry. *' The princess would 
 never speak to me again if I were to ruin her quadrille by my 
 absence. Good-bye, my dear fellow ; and don't learn gravity from 
 St. Stephen's : I am sure you see a perpetual comedy there.'' 
 
 Trevenna looked at him as he swept out of the dressing- chamber, 
 with the Clarencieux diamonds glittering at every point on the 
 lace and embroidery, the black velvet and azure silk, the gold and 
 the silver, of his dress of the Bourbon court. 
 
 " Go to your last night, monseigneur," he thought. ** A week, 
 and those diamonds will be for sale. You want settlements : well, 
 you shall have them. The pear is ripe ; it shaU fall. Take a re- 
 prieve for to-night ; nothing loses by anticipation. Ten years ! — a 
 long time. On my life, I feel rather like the watcher who looked 
 out from his watch-tower through a whole decade to catch the first 
 red light of the leaping flames. Ten years ! — a long time ; but 
 Troy feU at last." 
 
 With which memory of the days of his school- desk hexameters, 
 Trevenna drove on to the House, where he had already been in 
 attendance from four to eight, and where there was a protracted 
 though not important after-dinner debate. 
 
 Before he went to the body of the House, however, he tiu-ned a 
 moment into the library, and wrote a little note, which he sent out 
 to his groom to post. 
 
 It was addressed to Ignatius Mattiias, and was condensed in one 
 word : — 
 
BOOK THE THIflD, 
 C^FRPTER I. 
 
 **8PE8 ET FORTTJNA YALETB.'* 
 
 •*GoME early to-morrow," mnrmured the Queen of lilies, a« liGi 
 lover led her to her carriage, lifting her fair eyes, lustrous as those 
 of the daughter of D' Orleans she personated. 
 
 Chandos stooped his head, so that his voice in its soft answer 
 only reached her ear. 
 
 '' Would that to-morrow wore here, or, rather, that how we did 
 not part !" 
 
 If he had ever donbted that he was loved, he could not have 
 doubted it now, as he watched the warmth that flushed her face, 
 the light over which her lashes drooped, the half smile, half sigh, 
 which with that divine blush replied to him. 
 
 The costume-ball had been magnificent as though it had been 
 given in the Eegency age it celebrated, and the Louis Quinze 
 quadrille had been the most splendid of all the square dances. 
 The Richelieu dress excelled all others in the costly glitter of its 
 grace ; the Clarencieux diamonds outshone all othOTS there. Boyal 
 women flattered him on ** Lucr^ce;" the greatest stateemen of the 
 day pressed on him the restoration of his Marquisate ; the world 
 adored him as it had ever done, and feminine lipe breathed him 
 his most delicate and most dulcet incense. The night lived long in 
 his memory. It was the last of his reign, — ^the last in which he 
 loved the world and the world loved him. 
 
 It was late when the guests of the ItaKan princess left her imi- 
 tation of the fetes of Sceaux and of Versailles; the long line of 
 carriage-lamps glittered far down to the right and left in the 
 uncertain Ught of an early summer morning. Among the crowd a 
 boy, of such beauty as belongs to the canvas of Spanish painters, 
 stole noiselessly near, and, looking on, crouched, almost kneeling, 
 in the shadow of the portico. One carriage rolled away ; another, 
 with the well-known white-and- silver liveries of Clarencieux, took 
 its place ; the name ran along the line of servants ; the lad Agostino 
 leaned eagerly forward. Down the steps of the entrance, under 
 the awning, Chandos came,— the gaslight shed fall on the rich 
 oolovm and the gleaming jewels of his dress, as EicheUeu himself 
 might have come leaving the gatherings of the Palais Royal. So 
 near leaned the boy that the gold and silk of the sword-knot 
 tevehed his lifted £»rehe*d. The attendants ordered him sharply 
 
1 36 Chatidos, 
 
 off the pavement. Ohandos, struck by the look upon his face, so 
 eager, bo longing, bo full of youth and misery, stopped them, and 
 paused a moment. 
 
 ** My poor boy," he said gently, ** do you want anything with 
 me ? Surely I have seen your face before P" 
 
 Agostino gazed up at him, pale to the lips, and with an utter 
 abject wretdiedness in the darkness of his eyes. He trembled 
 violently. He would have given twenty years of his dawning life 
 to have found courage for speech : yet, now that the opportunity so 
 yearned and sought for came to him, the cowardice of his feminine 
 nature held him paralysed. 
 
 *• Speak. Do not be afraid,*' said Chandos, kindly, *' If you 
 want anjrthin^ from me, say it without fear." 
 
 The boy's lips parted, but only inarticulate Spanish words halted 
 uV^on them ; the dread of his father's forbiddance, the horror of his 
 E^^lish taskmaster's vengeance, held him powerless and speechless. 
 
 *' That lad suffers; have him looked to," said Chandos, turning 
 to the footmen nearest him. *• "What is your name ?" 
 
 " Agostino Mathias." 
 
 The voice was husky and scarcely intelligible; a great terror — 
 the terror of his tyrant — lay upon him; yet the strange sudden 
 loyalty and love he had conceived for the English stranger, with 
 the face like Guide Eeni's golden-haired St. Michael, whom he 
 had seen among the vine-fields of the Vega, looked upward longingly 
 and piteously from his eyes. 
 
 *' I shall remember," said Chandos, as he stooped nearer and 
 put the sovereign or two that he had with biTn against the boy's 
 closed hand. *' Come to my house in the morning." 
 
 But Agostino shuddered from the touch of the gold, and shrank 
 back against the stone of the portico. 
 
 ** Not your money ! — not your money !" 
 
 Chandos saw the gesture ; he did not hear the murmured answer. 
 He turned and dropped the pieces in the hand of the servant closest 
 to him. 
 
 " That poor boy can be scarcely, I fear, in his right mind. See 
 to him, will you ?" he said, as he went down the few remaining 
 steps and entered his carriage, which stopped the way of others. 
 Agostino looked after him with passionate wistfulness, while the 
 great tears gathered and brimmed over in his eyes. The footman 
 touched him on the shoulder and addressed him. Like one roused 
 out of fever and lethargy, the lad started and looked round, then 
 wrenched himself out of the hold the man had laid on him, and 
 fled like a frightened deer down into the darkness of the street. 
 The servant let him go, and slipped the sovereigns in his waistcoat- 
 pocket. 
 
 ** If a boy who calls himself Agostino Mathias come here to- 
 morrow, receive him, and let me know," said Chandos to hia 
 maitre d'hotel, as he passed up the staircase of his own house. 
 
 The man bowed as he heard Chandos' command. 
 
 ** I wiU be very careful he is admitted, sir. I beg your pardon, 
 but Mr. Trevenna bade m© tell you he is waiting." 
 
" Sp€2 ee !7ortuna Valete,'^ 13 • 
 
 * Mr. Treveuna P Why, it is past four o'clock. Is Clarencieux 
 burnt down, that he comes here at such a time ?" 
 
 '* I believe he said, sir, his business was urgent: he entreated tc 
 Bee you." 
 
 ** A very good fellow, a very clever fellow, but a man with ono 
 failing ; he never knows when he is de trop'' he mu^ed, as he went 
 '/n into his own chamber, that was library, atelier, smoking-room, 
 and art- gallery, all in one. It was always ready lighted, and, 
 without waiting to take off his Eichelieu dress, he stood against 
 'he mantel-piece, striking a match for a cigarette, and thinking, as 
 nis hand caressed the eagerly-lifted head of the dog, Beau Sire, 
 less of what Trevenna could need him for, than of how lovely the 
 Daphne looked in the mellow gleam of the light. 
 
 '♦Who would care for life without Art and Pleasure?" he 
 thought. 
 
 The handles of the double doors turned sharply \ the massive 
 fall of the blue velvet cow f re- vmi was thrust hastily aside; Tre- 
 venna entered. Chandos looked up, and laughed. 
 
 •'Adieu to peace ! You can't open a door, Trevenna, without 
 jarring a room. Is Clarencieux burnt, a racer dead, my Titians 
 stolen ? or, what is it ? " 
 
 "I beg your pardon for disturbing you, my dear Chandos," 
 returned the other, vdth more gravity than had ever been seen in 
 him before ; " but it is very imperative that I should talk to you." 
 
 " Talk away, then ! " rejoined Chandos, with a sigh of ennui 
 and resignation: "but, for Heaven's sake, shake off that most 
 unusual and unbecoming solemnity. Who ever would have 
 thought a single week of St. Stephen's would have been enough 
 to make a man so prosy ? Or perhaps its only training for future 
 'office,' is it?" 
 
 Trevenna was silent ; he came and stood on the hearthrug, with 
 50 rare and grave a seriousness upon him that he gave no hght or 
 humorous answer. 
 
 *J Come," said Chandos, in some surprise and a little impatience ; 
 " silence is never your forte. Say what you have to say." 
 
 "Well, Fni a blunt man," answered his friend, as with some 
 effort. " Plainly and briefly, I'm come on a disagreeable errand." 
 
 Chandos shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 "I'd a presentiment of that. People don't stay up for one on 
 pleasant ones. A-pres .2" 
 
 " Aprh 9 " said Trevenna, with something of his old malicious 
 humour gleaming out in the comers of his mouth, " It w just 
 the ' a/pres ' that I'm come to talk about. You've had a comet-like 
 course, mon prince; did you ever speculate how comets end ?" 
 
 Chandos looked at him in supreme astonishment: he almost 
 thought, for the moment, that Trevenna's habitual sobriety had 
 given way, and that some hot wines heated his fancies. 
 
 "My dear feUow," he said, with a touch of stronger impatience 
 " You must really pardon me, but if you only keep out of bed to 
 propose me astronomical riddles, I must, with ail courtesy, Ind 
 you good-night," -^tjijitivt*!! .T>*.^t4**jjui*i ,<***> -.oiot^ -^i ,- 
 
138 Chandos, 
 
 ' ' Monseigneur, have a little patience, I come on grave matters, 
 and you must hear them," said Treventia, quietly. "You lock 
 annoyances out with double doors in this chamber ; but I fear, do 
 what you will, they will ferret through and foUow you at last. I 
 asked you before you went to your fancy-ball, if you knew at what 
 rate you have lived and are living ; I ask you, now you have 
 come back from it, the same thing." 
 
 '* And I give you the same answer ; I do not know.** 
 
 •♦ShaUIteUyouP" 
 
 •* If you please." 
 
 ** I will, then ; but wait one moment You are perfectly happy, 
 Chandos ? " 
 
 Chandos looked at him again, in an astonishment not unmixed 
 with amusement. 
 
 " I ? Perfectly ; I don't think I would live a day longer, if I 
 were not." 
 
 Trevenna watched him as he spoke, leaning against the marble, 
 with the deep glow of colour, the strewn treasures of art and 
 wealth, the white grace of the statues, and the intense hues of the 
 painted ceiling around and above. In the court costume, with 
 the diamonds flashing through the lace and gold embroideries, the 
 strong resemblance he bore to the last Marquis was as great as 
 though the dead man lived again. Trevenna watched him, recom- 
 pensed at last for a long decade of patient tact, for a lifetime of 
 bitter envy, of gnawing mortification, of impotent hate, of fester- 
 ing jealousy, — watched him as the jungle-cheetah watches his 
 prey before the final spring. He went leisurely about his work ; 
 the treasured preparation of such long and thirsty toil was not to 
 be devoured in an instant, but tasted slowly in its wicked sweet- 
 ness, drop by drop. 
 
 "You would not live a day, if your fortunes altered? I am 
 sorry to hear that ; for the world, then, may lose you soon. We 
 must take those pretty ivory-handled pistols out of sight: for, 
 though you are so happy now, I fear you will not be so happy in 
 the future." 
 
 Chandos rose from the easy indolence of his resting attitude, 
 and looked at him, with a new light rising in his eyes, — a light 
 of anger and of impatience very seldom there. 
 
 "Jesters are privileged proverbially," he said, coldly; "but 
 there are limits to theii* allowance when their jests have no wit 
 and mudh. insolence. If you have anything to say, say it plainly, 
 and make an end." 
 
 " Tres-cheVy' replied Trevenna, with an irresistible lapse into 
 his habitual manner, " that confounded hauteur of you thorough- 
 breds is deuced provoking ; it is, indeed ; and people won't put up 
 with it, perhaps, quite so patiently in future. As for saying plainly 
 what I have to say, I suppose you will not believe me if I tell you 
 that your expenditure is, and has been for many years, about 
 quadruple what your income is ? " 
 " My expenditure ? Impossible I ** 
 •* Only too possible, unhappily, Eoyalties come expennyo, 
 
*' Spes et For tuna Falete,^ 139 
 
 prince; and who wears the purples must pay for them. You 
 have no notion, you say, of all that you have spent. "What 
 comes of a man's not knowing the rate at which he Uves ? Why, 
 that, sooner or later, the last rope-strand gives way, and he is — 
 ruined." 
 
 The word fell strau#«ly on the silence of that tranquil cham- 
 ber, bringing, like the stroke of death, desolation where all was 
 peace. 
 
 Yet still the word passed by him whom it should have warned ; 
 his confidence was too secure, his carelessness too entire, his pos- 
 session of all that was highest and richest and brightest of too long 
 custom, for the first presage of the storm to have power to force its 
 meaning on him. 
 
 "Have you drunk too much, or are you mad? This sort of 
 fooling passes aU license. If you indeed know what you are say- 
 ing, I must heg you to leave my presence." 
 
 Trevenna, in answer, stood in a firmer, sturdier attitude, 
 with his feet apart, and his arms folded like the Napoleonic 
 statuettes. 
 
 '* I am neither mad nor drunk, and I am not fooling. Briefly, 
 Chandos, I must tell you what I have staved off perhaps too long ; 
 but I shrank from the task. I let time pass. I thought you 
 might marry some rich or even royal bride, whose alliance would 
 change the whole aspect ; but your bidding me arrange the settle- 
 ments for Lady Valencia compels me to withhold the truth no 
 longer from you. There is nothing to settle on her ! " 
 
 " Nothing to settle on her ? What can you mean ?" 
 
 *' I mean what I say. There is not a sou's worth — not even those 
 diamonds that glitter so bravely on your dainty dress — that is free 
 to go to her dower. Can you not understand me when I tell you 
 that you have lived at the rate of four times the amount of your 
 annual income? What history does that simple fact suggest? 
 You must be financier enough to know that ? Hang it, Chandos ! 
 I am not a deep-feeling man, — I don't go in for all that, as you 
 know ; but I wish fi-om my soul that I could spare you, or that 
 some other could better break to you the news you must hear to- 
 night." 
 
 Chandos listened ; a deadly pallor came on his face, his lips grew 
 white, his heart almost ceased to beat ; the first shadow of this dim 
 horror stole on him. A glimpse of its meaning was forced at 
 length upon him ; he had heard of such fates for other men. 
 
 ** If you speak truth, speak out," he said, in that strange and 
 deadly calmness which falls upon the mind and senses before the 
 visitation of some great calamity. A faint, vague sense of this evil 
 approaching him was aU he felt ; it was not possible that it could 
 come to him yet more fixedly or fully. 
 
 ** I speak the sad and sober truth," returned Trevenna, far more 
 quietly than he had ever spoken, his eyes still resting on the 
 Daphne opposite, as though to guard against a tell-tale flash from 
 them of that lustful exultation that he knew was in their glance. 
 •* I can't speak to you as coyly and as delicately «i3 your patrician 
 
14© Chandos. 
 
 friends and relativeB would do. I'm a plain, frank man, Ohandoa, 
 and I've the very devil's own mischief-making to teU you of now : 
 but, believe me once for all, it costs me almost as much to tell as 
 it can do you to hear. There is no good in beating about the bush, 
 — no good in being discursive over a thing so horrible as this ; you 
 must know the worst at once, and it is better, perhaps, told without 
 varnish or veil ; a short shrift and a quick death. That is truer 
 mercy, after all, than all the endless preparation, your fellow- 
 aristocrats might give you. Listen ! " 
 
 He paused a moment, as though that which he had to bring bore 
 even him down in its bitter burden ; but his eyes glanced swiftly 
 and longingly at the man he tortured : he loved this protracted 
 torment. Like a cat, he plaj^ed with his victim's misery before ho 
 killed him ; and if without suspicion he could have prolonged it 
 through hours of ignorance and di'ead, he would have done so with 
 all the endless patience of hate. 
 
 "Listen," he said, more softly; **aa I have said, you have long 
 lived — indeed, I think since your majority— at the rate of four 
 times your income. You have kept two households in England 
 nearly such as princes keep ; you have had youf Paris hotel, 
 your Turkish palace ; you have lavished money on art, like an- 
 other Beck ford ; you have spent God knows what on women ; you 
 have given entertainments that cost you a couple of thousand a 
 night : you have played the patron to every starring genius you 
 met : in a word, you have lived like a king, my dear Ernest, and 
 not being a king, your royalty has broken down, and will, I fear; 
 end in a very unavoidable abdication. In a word, you are in debt 
 to an extent I hardly dare compute to you. To sell everything 
 you possess will hardly satisfy your claimants; bill-discountors 
 and money-lenders have your signature in their hands, and will 
 call for payment without mercy. Briefly, you have sold your 
 birthright for ten years' enjoyment, and you now are, beyond all 
 hope of ransom, irrevocably and most utterly — ruined.'^ 
 
 The word cut down again upon the stillness with a shrill, sharp, 
 pitiless echo, as a sword cuts down through the air before it faUa 
 on the bowed neck of the doomed. 
 
 Its utterance repaid its speaker for all he had foregone, for all 
 he had foreborne, for every slight endured in silence from the world 
 he hated, for every benefit taken with an inward curse from the 
 man he hunted down. He loved that word so well, he could have 
 diuLcd it on the silence in incessant repetition, hurling down with 
 it the brilliant and gracious life he had so long envied from the 
 thrones of pleasure and of power into the nethermost darkness of 
 a hopeless desolation. 
 
 "Euined? /.<?" 
 
 Chandos echoed the word as a man suddenly wakened from a 
 deep, sweet sleep to learn some unutterable shame or misery that 
 has befallen him, repeats the phrase that tells it, mechanically and 
 without sense. The agony of horror that gathered, white and be- 
 wildered, on the gallant beauty of his face, was in as ghastly a 
 contrast with the glittering splendour of his dress as though the 
 
** Spes et Foriuna Falete,** i^i 
 
 ftuse of a corpse gazed out from the laces and jewels of a gay 
 masquerade. 
 
 " Yes ; even you, my brilliant Lord of Clarencieux I " answered 
 the friend who stood upon his hearth ; and with the words went an 
 irrepressible snarl and sneer of triumph and of mockery that passed 
 him unnoted in that moment of breathless, burning, inconceivable 
 anguish. " Even you ! Details you wiU learn for yourseK here- 
 after, for to-night the broad, brief fact's enough. I would have 
 warned you long ago, if you would only have listened ; but you 
 know as well as I do you would never hear of business, never think 
 of money. Besides, m truth, I scarcely thought it was so very, so 
 hopelessly bad as it seems now to be. I suppose your marriage 
 with a bride who has no dower has set the fellows on : they are 
 hounding for their moneys now like mad. I have had hard work 
 to keep them even from arresting you ; I have, upon my honour ! 
 To-night, when you went out to your princess's ball with all those 
 thousands of poiinds' worth of rose-diamonds about you, it was a 
 wonder, on my life, that some one of your hungry creditors didn't 
 stop those dainty jewels. You shall see to-morrow that I tell you 
 but the plain, unvarnished truth. You are so deeply involved now, 
 Chandos, that I doubt if there is a single little cabinet picture on 
 these walls, or a single rood of land at your beloved Clarencieux, 
 that in a month's time you will call your own " 
 
 " Stop ! — oh, my God ! have some mercy ! " 
 
 The words broke out like the last cry wrung from one driven to 
 the extremity of physical endurance, — wrung from him in the 
 abandonment of human misery against all strength of manhood 
 and all power of will. He could bear no more , he was stunned 
 and blinded like a man struck from behind him a murderous blow 
 upon the brain which blasts his sight to darkness. 
 
 Ruin ! — it had no meaning for him ; it came to him like some 
 dun, shapeless, devil-begotten thing that had no form or substance. 
 a hideous lemur of a night's delirious dream. 
 
 Trevenna stood by and watched him ; his hour had come at last, 
 the hour which paid him back the cankerous evil, the relentless 
 toil, the unremitting chase, of such long, wakeful, hungry years. 
 This moment had been hoarded up by him as a miser hoards his 
 gold, and now, in its full seizure, he was repaid for all his studied 
 craft, for all his fondly-nursed revenge, for all his unrelinquished 
 hatred, — repaid to the uttermost coin by every gasped breath that 
 he counted, by every shiver of the voiceless anguish that he 
 watched. 
 
 He did not heed the prayer for silence, but took up the broken 
 thread of his discourse, and played with it as tiiough loving it in 
 every shape and on every side. 
 
 '* Your property, you see, was fine, no doubt ; but fine properties 
 are not Monte-Clmsto caverns of exhaustless wealth. Dipped into, 
 they will waste. You have eclipsed princes, and starred through 
 %11 Eui'ope ; you pay now for the pre-eminence. You have had 
 Yemen's love, — no toy so costly ! you have had the great world'6 
 worship,— no cliwitel!: ^ ©xpenaive I you haye b«att ^ dilettante. 
 
I4» Chandos, 
 
 a lion, a leader of faskion, a man of endless pleasures, — no ptirgmta 
 
 take so much gold ! You have lived in such a style that you would 
 have run through millions, had you had them ; and you had not 
 one million, though you had a noble inheritance. Of course you 
 possess such quantities of pictures and statues, and all that kind of 
 thing, and your estate itself is such an untouched mine, that there 
 can be no fear of your personal liberty ever being endangered ; but 
 I am grievously afraid, I am indeed, that you will be obliged to 
 give up almost everything, — give up even Clarencieux ! " 
 
 The words, so deftly strung together to goad and taunt and add 
 misery to misery, wound their pitiless speech, unchecked, with all 
 the fiendish ingenuity of hatred that could not sate itself enough in 
 the vastness of this wreck it wrought. 
 
 Chandos heard them, yet only dimly as men hear in whose 
 ears the noise of great sea-waves is surging. He raised himself 
 erect, rigid in an unnatural calm. Years of age and wretched- 
 ness could not have changed his face as this brief moment had 
 changed it. 
 
 «' You swear that this is truth ? " 
 
 His voice was broken and strained, like the voice of a man just 
 arisen from a bed of lengthened sickness. 
 
 *' To the uttermost letter." 
 
 Chandos' head drooped as though he had been suddenly stabbed ; 
 all the vigour and grace and perfection of his frame seemed to 
 wither and grow old ; a shudder, such as the limbs shiver with 
 involuntarily under some unendurable bodily torment of the flames 
 or of the knife, shook him from head to foot. 
 
 As the flare of a torch suddenly shows the abyss that yawns 
 beneath the traveller's feet, so the glare and the shame of the 
 sentence he heard showed him the bottomless desolation over which 
 he stood. He was wakened from his di^eamful ease to be flung face to 
 face with an absolute despair. For the moment strength gave way, 
 manhood was shattered down, consciousness itself could keep no 
 hold on life ; the lights of the chamber reeled in giddy gyrations 
 round him, a sound like rushing waters beat in on his brain, a 
 darkness like the darkness of death fell upon him. He swayed 
 tbrward, like a drunken man, against the broad marble ledge above 
 the hearth ; his hands instinctively clenched on the stone as the 
 hands of those sinking to their grave down the glassy slope of an 
 Alpine mountain clench on the ice-ridge that they meet ; his head 
 sunk on his arms, the sufi'ocated labour of each breath panted out 
 <?n the silence like a death-spasm : — at one stroke he was bereaved 
 of all ! 
 
 His torturer looked on. Never in the cells of the Inquisition 
 could Franciscan or Dominican have watched the gradual wrench- 
 ing of the rack, the windiag-out of the strained limbs till they 
 broke, the wringing and bruising and slaying of the quivering 
 nerves till they could bear no more, as Trevenna watched this 
 moral torment, this assassination of joy and honour, peace and love 
 and fame, and every fair thing of a gracious world, laid desert and 
 desoktd at his word. He looked on, as in the legendis of the early 
 
'* Spes et For tuna f^alete. 143 
 
 Church devils looked on at the impotent despair of those whoso 
 souls they had lured and tempted and meshed in their net, and 
 made their own. He looked on, and was repaid. 
 
 " Chandos," he said, gravely, almost softly, pouring the last drop 
 of buining oil into the fresh wound his stab had dealt, ** Chandos, 
 believe me, — from my soul I pity you ! " 
 
 He had studied long the nature of the man now in his power, 
 and he knew the keenest sting to give. 
 
 This man pitied him ! Chandos raised himself with sudden force ; 
 the pride of his race was not dead in him ; and the same courage 
 in the teeth of calamity, which had sent the last Marquis with a 
 smile to the Tower scaflFold, was in him now under the lash of his 
 dependant's mockery of compassion. His face was strangely and 
 terribly calm, but a premature age seemed to have withered all life 
 from it ; his lips were colourless, and on his forehead alone the dark 
 congested blood flushed heavily, red and bui-ning as in the heat of 
 fever. 
 
 " If this he the truth, you have had little mercy m the telling I 
 Go ; take the town your story ; it will startle them. Spare more 
 of it to we/" 
 
 The words were spoken with a tranquillity more horrible than 
 the fiercest outbreaks of deliiium or the most hopeless abandonment 
 of woe. 
 
 Trevenna moved slightly ; he could not meet the gaze of those 
 calm tearless eyes, from whose depths there looked so wide a world 
 of unuttered reproach, of unuttered agony. 
 
 ** Chandos, Chandos, there will be no need for me to tell the 
 town ; it will be whispered soon enough ! Would you give the 
 task to your debtor, your guest, your friend ? No ! There are 
 too many who will take it fast enough. Leave it to the men you 
 have outrivalled and the women you have forsaken ; those are the 
 glib tongues for such a theme ! As for mercy in the telling, what 
 mercy can the man show who has to bring his death-warrant to 
 another ? I would have warned you long ago, and you would not 
 be warned. Is it my fault that you have wasted your princely sub- 
 stance and are a beggar now ? Oh, my friend, there is no error in 
 this thing save your own." 
 
 Chandos gave a forward gesture, like a maddened animal rising 
 to its spring ; he did not reel, or stagger, or let escape one sign of 
 the anguish within him, but he stood there upon his desolated 
 hearth, erect, brought to bay as the deer by the sleuth-hounds, livid 
 to the lips, with only the blood burning like fire across his brow, 
 his golden hair dashed back disordered, his eyes proud and fearless 
 even in their misery. It was no longer Alcibiades amidst the gay 
 levity, the dreamy languor, the fragrant rose-crowns, and the 
 laurel- wreathed amphorse of the revels of his youth ; it was Alci- 
 biades, grander in his fall than in his reign, facing alone the dead 
 cold of the winter's night and the unsheathed circle of his assassins' 
 steel, until they cowed and fell asunder and pierced him with das- 
 tard surety fi-om afar off with the arrows of the Bactrian bows. He 
 raised his right hand wad pointed to the door. 
 
144 Chandos. 
 
 ** If you are man, not devil, let me be I Go 1 I command you . 
 
 Go!" 
 
 Bold though they were, his torturer's eyes could not meet his ; 
 victorious though he was, Trevenna dared not dispute that bidding; 
 insatiate though his greed for this exhaustless triumph would still 
 have been for hour upon hour, he was forced to obey that gesture 
 of command. Mastiff-like both in courage and ferocity, he was 
 still driven out as a murderous animal is driven out by the will it 
 reads in a human gaze. He longed to linger there the whole night 
 through, and ring every change upon that note of ruin, and watch 
 every spasm of the overburdened Hfe, and turn every screw and 
 wheel in that rack on which he stretched his friend. 
 
 But he dared not ; he felt that he must leave his work to bear its 
 fruit and harvest of misery unwatched ; he knew it as the murderers 
 of Alcibiades knew that none could come near, with life, to the 
 menaced danger and the mighty woe that looked unquailing on 
 them from the flaming eyes of the roused Sybarite, the discrowned 
 idol, the awakened Epicurean, called out in the dead of night to 
 stand face to face with his destruction. The hirelings of Pharna- 
 bazus slew the Greek ; Trevenna, less merciful, left the living man 
 to suffer. 
 
 The velvet swept down behind him, the door closed, and he drew 
 it softly after him ; then he paused in the stillness of the breaking 
 dawn that was rising on all the sleeping world without, and listened 
 with an expectancy upon his face. 
 
 On the silence he heard a heavy crashing fall, like the fall of a 
 stricken tree ; then all was still with the stillness of the grave. 
 
 He smiled, and passed onward through the second door, and 
 down the corridor and staircase of the house that had been opened 
 to him, night and day, with a hospitality that no claims could 
 weary and no exactions chill, and went out through the lighted 
 hall, with its bloom of exotic colour and its richness of jasper and 
 porphyry. As he passed the statue of the great minister standing 
 there, white and majestic, amidst the foliage of American plants and 
 the glow of Eastern flowers, he looked upward to the sculptured 
 face with a glance of triumph, of achievement, of satisfied revenge, 
 that in the intensity of its evil and its cruelty was ahaiost grand by 
 the sheer force of strength and purpose. 
 
 *' Monsoigneur, monseigneur," he murmured, in that thusty ex- 
 ultation, flinging his victory and his mockery in the face of the 
 lifeless marble, "how is it with your beloved one now i " 
 
 CHAPTER IL 
 
 '•tout est perdu, fors l'honneub.** 
 
 The morning sun straying fitfully in through the thick leafy 
 shades and trellised creepers of the winter garden beyond, as the 
 day rose high and bright over a busy waking world, found the 
 
" Tout est Perdu, fors CHonneur. 145 
 
 ruined man lying where he had fallen, struck down by the blo^ 
 fchat had beggared him of all, as a cedar is stmck by the lightning. 
 He lay there insensible to all except his agony, his hands clenched 
 upon the leopard-skins that strewed his hearth, his brain heavy 
 with the pent blood that seemed on fire. 
 
 The shock had fallen on his life as suddenly as, in tropic lati- 
 tudes, the black tempestuous night falls down upon the shadowless 
 day. Yesterday he had been rich in every earthly treasure ; to-day 
 he was beggared, shamed, dishonoured. Euin ! — it was upon hin^ 
 like the vague, confused horror of a nightmare whose bonds he 
 could not break ; he could not realise its despair nor measure its 
 desolation ; he felt like one drugged with opiate poi^ions that 
 briug a thousand loathsome shapes thronging between their 
 dreamer and the light of day and the world of men. He had been 
 a stranger to the mere pain of transient human sorrow ; ho was 
 stunned to unconsciousness by the world-wide misery that f "ed 
 him down at a stroke, as the iron mace fells an ox. lb aii 
 passed ; he knew nothing of their flight ; the gas burned iv the 
 chaudoliers above him, still shedding its flood of light that looked 
 garish and yellow beside the brightness of morning that streamed 
 in from the garden beyond. There was profound silence round 
 him, broken by nothing save the monotonous murmur of the 
 fountains falling yonder ; the faint noise of the streets could not 
 penetrate hei-e, and the sounds of the moving household were shut 
 out in a deathly stillness. He was left to the solitude which was 
 all the mercy that life now could give him. The dog alone was 
 with him, and crouched, patient and watchful, moaning now and 
 then with sympathetic pain for the misery it could not comprehend, 
 and gathered close against him where he lay. 
 
 As the sun grew brighter in the palm and flower isles beyond, 
 the retriever tried to rouse him, as on a battle-field dogs will essay 
 to waken their slaughtered masters ; it thrust its muzzle against 
 his hands, and laid its broad head against the disordered rich- 
 ness of his hair, moaning with piteous entreaty and fond, dumb 
 caress. At last the patient efforts moved him ; he looked up in the 
 dog's eyes with a blind, bewildered gaze, and rose slowly and 
 staggeringly to his feet, like a man feeble from protracted 
 illness. He had no clear memory of what had passed ; he could 
 have recalled nothing, save that one word in which all was told, — 
 ''ruin!" 
 
 He looked mechanically round the familiar beauty of the cham- 
 ber ; the hues of the pictures, the grace of the scuptv:"^, the lavish 
 luxury of every detail, the peace and fairness of the charmed 
 tranquillity, seemed so many mockeries of his woe. In the midst 
 of wealth he stood a beggared man ; with the world at his feet 
 yesterday, he stood now dispossessed of every earthly thing. 
 
 He had sold his birthright for ten years' delight ! And not of 
 the world, not of his wealth, not of the fame of his name and 
 the worship of men, not even of the woman whom he loved, 
 did he think in that first moment of awaking to this mighty 
 desolation that had fallen on him: it was of th© trust of hij 
 
 h 
 
1 46 Chandos* 
 
 fathers that he had forfeited, of the home of his race that he had 
 lost. 
 
 Esau-like, he had bartered his kingly heritance for the sensuoiis 
 pleasuies of an hour ; and the sole memory that lived thi'ough the 
 stupor of his brain were those brief, brutal words that devils 
 seemed to hiss for ever in his ear — *' You have lost all ! " 
 
 A convulsion shook his limbs ; a great voiceless sob rose in 
 his throat ; his head drooped upon his arms, veiling his face as 
 the Eomans veiled theirs before outrage and calamity. '* Oh ! my 
 God! my God!" he prayed, in his agony, "give me death, — 
 
 QOt </«>/" 
 
 • • o • » • 
 
 The only mercy life had left him — the privilege to suffer in eoli- 
 tudo — could be his but a brief space. After the bitterness of the 
 night followed the worse bitterness of the risen day, when its wit- 
 nesses must come about him ; when its wretched tale must be 
 rung on his ear in aU its changes ; when the world must flood in 
 to wonder, to smile, to sigh, to censure, and yet worse, to pity ; 
 when the condemned must go out to the cross, to be stretched 
 and nailed and lifted up in crucifixion within sight of the gathered 
 crowds. When he remembered all these things, it seemed to him 
 more than life could bear to go through them ; when he slowly 
 roused to the real meaning of this beggary that had suddenly 
 Eseized him in the midst of his joyous and magnificent existence, he 
 recoiled from its endurance with a sickening shudder, as the 
 bravest man will recoil from the approach of a drawn-out and 
 excruciating death. 
 
 Once the thought passed him, — Why meet it ? Why await this 
 Uving grave which yawned for him, when the rest of the dead 
 might be taken, — the blank, blest silence of the tomb be his, 
 instead of the world's pillory and the exile's wretchedness ? 
 
 Close at his hand*lay the pistols to which his tortui-er had referred 
 with a jest that might be his tempting ; they were loaded to the 
 muzzle, as they had been carelessly laid down the morning pre- 
 vious, after an hour's pistol-shooting in his gardens below with a 
 gay party. His grasp mechanically closed on one of them. Over 
 and over again, in his serene eecurity of happiness, he had smiled 
 and said he would not live to brook a single hour of pain ; the jest 
 had become a terrible reality. One touch, one moment's bhnd- 
 ness, — then oblivion; the world and his own ruin would be as 
 naught, powerless to sting or harm. Were it not better than to 
 live on to face all that must come to him with the rising day r 
 The old weary wonder of Hamlet, that pursues every mind through 
 every age, rose in him now ; the old, eternal, never-answered 
 question came to him as it comes to so many : — Why live, when 
 every breath of life is pain ? 
 
 For a moment his worst foe was nigh the fulfilment of his 
 worst wish ; for a moment, in the devastation of every hope 
 and every possession, death and its escape allured him with a hor- 
 rible force. AH that made life worth the living was dead in him , 
 ♦he body oiily was left to perish : why leave breath in it, when to 
 
" Tout est FeidUfJbrs r Honneur.** 147 
 
 breathe was only to prolong and to intensify an anguish without 
 hope ? For a moment he lifted the weapon up ; its chill touch was 
 the only kiss left to him now, the only caress of pity he could 
 know. His head sunk down against it, leaning on its mouth as it 
 had used to lean on the softly-beating hearts of women who loved 
 him. A moment, and his dead limbs would have been stretched 
 there on his hearth in such a close to the history of his life as would 
 have sated even the lust of his unrelenting foe. 
 
 A ray of the sun, straying in across the yellow heat of the 
 chandelier-lights, fell across the white features of a bust that stood 
 at the far end of the chamber, — the same features and the same 
 sculpture as the statue to which Trevenna had murmured his vale- 
 diction. The Hght illumined the marble, giving to the mouth 
 almost breath, to the eyes almost life, with its sweet spring-day 
 varmth. Chandos saw it as his own eyes stared vacantly and with- 
 out sense into the empty space. 
 
 His arm dropped ; his hand unloosed its hold ; he laid the weapon 
 down unused. 
 
 He had treasured his father's memory, he had venerated his 
 father's fame, with a great love that no time weakened. He 
 remembered how his father once had bidden him make '* the 
 people honour him for his own sake ; " and he was about to die a 
 dog's death by his own act, lacking the courage to rise and meet 
 the fate that his own madness brought him ! 
 
 With that memory the temptation passed. Philip Chandos had 
 died, like Chatham, in his nation's cause ; the last Marquis had died 
 upon the scaffold to save his honour from forfeit, and those who had 
 trusted him from betrayal ; he would not put beside those deatbe the 
 history of a suicide's fall. 
 
 Such as his doom was, he accepted it. 
 
 He rose and walked towards the window, with the uncertain, 
 tremulous gait of a man dead- drunk. He drew the heavy cur- 
 tains aside, and looked out with aching, scorching eyes. The hum 
 of the streets in the distance rolled in on the morning air ; the faint 
 busy noises of hfe came across the stillness of the gardens ; a clock 
 was striking twelve. Each sound, each murmur, every echo of 
 the existence stirring round him, every shiver of the linden-leaves 
 near him, throbbed through his brain as though they were the 
 clanging, jangling iron strokes of deafening bells ; every sense and 
 pulse of living things came to him with an excruciating pain, like 
 the touch of a knife on a bared nerve. The day was at its height; 
 solitude could be no longer possible. Even now the woman wXiom 
 he loved watched for his coming; in a few hours his world 
 awaited him; even that very night, all that was highest and 
 fairest in the land was bidden to his house ; even that very night, 
 the fame and the fashion of his name were to give success to the 
 crippled artist's best-beloved creation. The world looked for him ; 
 to be alone was too rich a luxury, too merciful a sentence.^ He 
 must go out and endure this thing which had come to him, in the 
 broadness of daylight, — in the sight of all men. 
 
 As memory rushed on him of all that must be borne, of all thai 
 
 t 
 
1^8 Chandcs. 
 
 had been lost, he bent his head as though under the weight of 
 some insupportable bodily burden ; a sickness of horror was upon 
 iiim ; he strove to realise all that was ended for him, and he could 
 not. Only yesterday his hands had been filled with every fairest 
 gift of life ; he could not bring himself to know that they were 
 now stricken as empty as the outstretched hands of any beggg? 
 sitting at his gate. 
 
 The paralysis of an absolute despair fell on him, mute, tearless, 
 unmoved, — the rigidity that falls on mind and brain and heart 
 under the pressure of some immeasurable adversity. 
 
 He had to hear the worst ; with the rising day came all the day's 
 course must unfold. He could not have the partial peace of 
 loneliness ; he could not have such comparative mercy as those have 
 who, bereaved of what they love, know their doom at once, and can 
 seek solitude to bear it. Step by step, letter by letter, he must 
 pass through every detail of his desolation; and, soon or late, 
 publicity must proclaim it to all who should choose to listen. He 
 could have no rest, no pause, no reprieve ; his misery had hunted 
 him down, and must be met and faced. 
 
 The sun shining in through the gas-light, that burned dull and 
 lustreless in the noonday, shone on the diamonds glittering on his 
 dress 5 his eyes fell on them as, in the extremity of wretchedness, 
 the mind will strangely play with some trifle of whicli it has no 
 consciousness. He looked at them dreamily, and wondered why 
 ho wore them : a blank had fallen between him and every memory ; 
 it seemed a life-time since the night just passed; it seemed as 
 (hough the life that was parted from him by a few hours only, had 
 been destroyed for an eternity. Yet with the sight of them came 
 one remembrance ; he heard, as if it stole on his ear now, the low 
 whisper of the lips he loved, as they had murmured, " Come to mo 
 to-morrow," — murmured it with the softness of a good-night blush. 
 with the lingering light of sweet eyes of farewell ! 
 
 The morrow was now to-day. How had it dawned for each 1 
 #♦*•♦* 
 
 He had to hear the worst. In this thing there could be no 
 delay; under this sentence there could be no waiting-point of 
 '•reparation or of hope. He must meet the gaze of other men, and 
 listen while their voices coldly told the story of his iiiin. 
 
 He bade them come and tell him all,— to the furthest letter of his 
 doom. Despair is often bitterly calm ; it was so now with him. 
 In solitude, nature had given way, and sunk prostrated; before 
 iaiother's eyes, pride supplied the place of strength, and lent him 
 its fictitious force. 
 
 With the noon, Trevenna returned, as a hound returns to the 
 p\oi of his quarry, when once loosed from the coursing-sHp that 
 has held it back perforce. He re-entered the chamber as soon as 
 pel-mission came to him. He was the holder of all papers, the 
 tjomptroUer of all finance, the director of all affairs, connected with 
 the Clarencieux properties ; with him, even more than with the 
 lawyers, lay the knowledge of all their minutiae ; through him, 
 more than through any, must come the unfolding of the million 
 
Tout est Perdu, fors I'Honneur,'* 145 
 
 things that went to make up the one vast sum of destruction, llo 
 could not be driven out from the scene of his work ; for by him 
 alone could the thousand meshes of the net which, unseen and un- 
 suspected, he had woven, be traced and moved. He had secured 
 more than his victory and his vengeance ; he had secured the im- 
 perative necessity that he should behold the fruits of both. 
 
 Yet even he, evil as was the brute greed in him, started at sight 
 of the wreck that he had wrought. Last night he had looked upon 
 Chandos in the full brilliance of his youth, of his splendour, of his 
 fashion, of his shadowless content; he saw him now broken, ex- 
 hausted, aged, altered as the flight of twenty peaceful years coul'] 
 never have changed him. He was still in the court-dress of the 
 ball he had quitted when his fate fell on him : its richness was dis- 
 ordered, its lace crushed and soiled, its ribbon-knots and broideries 
 tangled; but its jewelled elegance set in deadlier contrast the 
 haggard whiteness of his face, the shattered look of his whole 
 form ; it marked in ghastlier contrast what he had been and what 
 he was. 
 
 The gas was still burning in all the crystal globes and silver 
 branches as Trevenna entered. Chandos had no sense of the 
 things that were about him, of the dress he wore, of the passage of 
 the noonday hours ; and his household, who felt that some great 
 adversity had suddenly befallen him, dared not venture nigh un- 
 summoned. He stood against the hearth as his guest advanced ; 
 his eyes were bloodshot, his hair disordered and damp with the de^v 
 of his forehead; his face was bloodless: beyond these, he " ^awtj 
 no sign." 
 
 He looked at Ti'evenna with a tranquil, lingering gaze; if 
 there were reproach in it, the reproach remained otherwise un- 
 spoken. 
 
 "Tell me all," he said, briefly; and his voice, faint though it 
 was, did not falter. 
 
 For one instant his traitor was silent, baffled, and wonder- 
 struck. 
 
 Fine as were his intuition and insight into character, he had 
 made an error commwi. nth. men of his mould ; he had under- 
 valued a nature it was impossible he could comprehend. Studying 
 the weaknesses of his patron's temper, he had not perceived tha-t 
 they were rather on the surface than ingrained ; he had disdained 
 the facihty that had lent Chandos so willing a tool into his hands, 
 the gentleness, the frankness, the generosity, the unsuspecting 
 pHabOity of temper ; he had looked with contempt on the imagina- 
 tive, idealic mind, and the effeminate softness of the man he hated. 
 He had never perceived that there were qualities beneath these 
 that might leap to life in an instant, if once roused; he had never 
 dreamed that Alcibiades the voluptuary could ever become Alci- 
 biades the warrior. Had he found Chandos shot by his own hand, 
 in the light of the young day, he would have felt no surprise ; he 
 would have thought the close in fitting keeping with the tenor of 
 his career ; to find him braced to look his desolation calmly in the 
 fag^, staggered, and almost unnerved him, 
 
i^o Chandos. 
 
 But; m an instant he recovered himself. The ruin was complete ; 
 and it should go hard, he thought, if to it he did not drive his victim 
 to add — dishonour ! 
 
 With the concise rapidity of a mind trained to ^rms-writing and 
 to logical analysis and compression, he had every detail clear as 
 the daylight, proved to the letter ; and he showed with mathe- 
 matical exactitude that everything was gone. His papers were of 
 the plainest, his accounts the most perfectly audited, his represen- 
 tation of others' statements lucid to a maiTel. If he had been open- 
 ing a budget to a crowded House, he could not have more finely 
 mingled conciseness with comprehensiveness, geometrical exacti- 
 tude with unerring quotation, than now when he came to prove the 
 hopelessness of his best friend's beggary. 
 
 Hopeless it was. The inheritance which Chandos and his world 
 had thought so secure and so exhaustless, had melted away as a 
 summer evening's golden pomp and colour fade, till not a line of light 
 is left to show where once it glowed. It was the old, worn-out, ever- 
 recurring story of endless imprudence, of absolute destruction. If 
 other hands had woven half the meshes of the net spread round 
 him, if other hands had spread their snares and temptings to make 
 the fatal descent the surer, if any villany were in this thing, there 
 was no trace that could even hint it. It might even have been said 
 that the best had been done, with patient labour, to arrest the 
 downward and iiTesistible course of a blind and unthinking extra- 
 vagance, and done wisely and toilsomely, though in vain. 
 
 The whole mass of the fortune was expended ; the debt-pressure 
 had accumulated to an enormous extent. Who could say where 
 what was scattered was gone ? Who could check now the piled-up 
 bills of hirelings and kitchen-chiefs ? Who could tell now whether 
 aU the great sums paid had been paid rightly ? Who could know 
 now whether the items of that magnificent prodigality were justly 
 scored down or not? It would have been as hopeless a task tx) 
 thread the buried intricacies of all these things, as to take the 
 Danaids' labours and seek to fill with the waters of a too-late 
 prudence the bottomless vessels through which this lost wealth had 
 been poured. 
 
 Trevenna, indeed, showed how, when he had first come to share 
 any management of these matters, the locust- swarm had already 
 eaten far into the fair birthright that Philip Chandos had be- 
 queathed. He failed to show why he had not forced the bitter 
 knowledge on his friend's careless ease in time to save much, 
 though not all: yet even this discrepancy in his narrative he 
 glossed over with an orator's skill, a tactician's sophistry, until he 
 seemed throughout it to have been the one steadfast, wise, and 
 unheeded Artabanus who had vainly stood by the side of the 
 crowned Xerxes and pleaded with him not to fling riches and 
 honour and life into the grave of the devouring ^gean. 
 
 Chandos heard in unbroken silence. 
 
 Gigantic sums were numbered and added before him in gigantic 
 oonfusion. Tables of figures and of estimates were placed before 
 his eyes, and told him nothing, save that their sum-total 
 
' Tout est Perdu, fori VHonneur, 151 
 
 banki'uptcy 1 He had never known or asked the cost of the plea- 
 sures he enjoyed ; he had never speculated on the worth of all the 
 luxuries by which he had been surrounded fi'om his infancy. His 
 mind had never been trained to balance the comparisons of receipt 
 and expenditure. He could have told, to a marvel of accuracy, 
 whether a picture, a statue, a cameo, was worth its price, through 
 the fineness of a connoisseur's judgment; but beyond these he 
 knew no more than any child-Dauphin in the Bourbon age what 
 was the value of all the things which made up the amusement and 
 the adornment of his life. A man well skilled in finanoe finds it a 
 hopeless task to glean the truth of squandered moneys. To hira 
 only one thing could stand out clear and immutable, — the fact that 
 all was gone. It was impossible for him to dispute the mass of 
 evidence heaped before him, as impossible also to dispute the mass 
 of debt that was brought before hira. He had believed tliat no 
 creditor had ever had claim on him for a day ; but, now that the 
 demands were made, ho could not prove they were undue. Of 
 receipts, of accounts, he had never given a thought : his agents and 
 his stewards had been allowed carte blanche to do as they would ; 
 they could not be blamed for having used the power, and there 
 was no evidence that they had abused it. The demands of the 
 debts were vast ; there was not a witness that could be brought to 
 their injustice or their illegality. There was nothing with which 
 to face or to deny them ; they must devour as they would. He 
 heard in unbroken silence. Once alone he spoke ; it was as the name 
 of Tindall and Co., the bill- discounting firm, among his creditors, 
 came into sight, pressing for heavy sums. 
 
 " How are they among the swarm P" he said, with that unnatural 
 serenity which he had preserved throughout the interview un- 
 moved still. " I never in my life borrowed gold, either of Jew or 
 Christian." 
 
 For an instant the face of his tormentor flushed slightly with 
 the same transient emotion of shame which had moved him in the 
 portrait-gallery of Clarencieux. 
 
 " For yourself? Perhaps not to your own knowledge," he an- 
 swered, promptly ; "but for your friends you have many a time. 
 How many bills you have accepted for men in momentary embar- 
 rassment ! In nine cases out of ten these bills have never been 
 met by those in whose favour they were drawn. They have always 
 been popular with the trade. Your signature was thought the sig- 
 nature of so rich a man ! This firm has bought in most of that 
 floating paper, and has taken its own time to press for payment : 
 that time has come at last. There lies your writing ; the bills can- 
 not be dishonoured without dishonouring you. No loan was evel 
 so costly to its lender as that loan which looks so slight at first,— 
 the loan of your mere name ! " 
 
 Chandos heard him calmly still. The extremity of misery had 
 reached him, and the peace of absolute hopelessness was on him. 
 
 "You say, 'perhaps not to my own knowledge;' unknown to me, 
 then, have I borrowed moneys of these usurers ?" 
 
 "Once ot twice lately, — yes. Forgive me, Chandos, if in my 
 
1^2 Chandos. 
 
 c.eal to screen or save you I plunged you deeper into this chaoa 
 You sent over for great sums to be lodged in Tiu^kisli and Athenian 
 banks, whilst you were abroad this winter : you wrote to me to 
 lodge them thoj-o. I know that if I sent, on yoiu' bidding, to your 
 own bankers, the amounts you required fi'om time to time would 
 OTcrth-aw by thousands the little left of your original capital, and 
 that the bank would inform you of your improvidence without 
 delay or prcpaiution. I could not tell how to spare you ; and I 
 always persuaded myself that in some way or other — mainly, I 
 thought, by some very high marriage — you would rebuild your 
 (shattered fortunes. I went to these Tindall people; I effected 
 arrangements wdth them to supply you with the moneys. They 
 held my acknowledgments for the amounts till you returned, 
 they knew me and they knew you. When you came back, you 
 may remember, I brought you papers to sign at Clarencieux, and 
 pressed you to give me a business interview. You would not wait 
 and hear me, — you never would ; you signed ; and I had not heart 
 or cornea ge, I confess, to tell you then at how terrible a pass things 
 Were with you. I did wrong ; I admit it frankly. I was guilty of 
 what I should call the most villanous procrastination in another 
 man ; but I knew it was too late to save you, I was willing to let 
 you have as long a reprieve in your soft pleasures as I could ; and 
 until your engagement with the Lady Valencia, I always thought 
 9uit some distinguished and rich alliance would restore the balance 
 of your affairs. And there is this much to be said for it : the en-or I 
 committed in essaying to save you, added but very, very little to 
 the mountain abeady raised of inextricable debts and difficulties. 
 It only gave you six months more of peace : you, seK-indulgent 
 tis you have been, would have deemed even those worth the pur- 
 chasing." 
 
 The sophistries were deftly spoken. To a man more aware of 
 business customs and of monetary negotiations, Trevenna would 
 have been too astute to offer such an untenable and unlikely expla- 
 nation ; with Chandos the discrepancies passed unnoted, because 
 he knew nothing of the method of pecuniary transactions. All he 
 had known had been to draw money and to have it But, though 
 the financial errors passed him, his instinct led him to feel the 
 falsity and the hollowness of the arguments to himself. Suspicion 
 was utterly foreign to him; his attachment to Trevenna was 
 genuine and of long date ; doubt forced itself slowly in on a nature 
 to which it was alien . yet a vague loathing of this man, who had 
 let him go on im warned to his destruction, began to steal on him ; 
 a disbelief in his friend wound its way into his thoughts with an 
 abhorrent strength. 
 
 " I understand," he said, simply ; ** you have betrayed me I" 
 For the instant his traitor's eyes drooped, his cheek flushed, his 
 conscience smote him. Under the accusation of the man to whom 
 he owed all, and whom he had pursued with a bloodhound's lust, the 
 baseness of his own treachery rose up for a single moment before hia 
 own sight. But it passed ; he even frankly met the eyes whose 
 eilent reproach condemned him more utterly than any words. 
 
** Tout est Perdu, Jors I Honneut.^' 1^3 
 
 '* Betrayed ? Do you take me for a second Iscariot P Betrayed ! 
 how so ? Because I tried to save you pain with means that proved 
 at best fallacious ? Because I was guilty of an error of judgment 
 that I frankly rogi'et and as frankly condemn ? No ! blame me as 
 j-ou will, I may have deserved it ; but accuse me of (lisloyalty you 
 shall not. If every one had been as faithful to you, Ernest, as I 
 have been, you would not now hear the history of your own 
 ruin." 
 
 There was a grim, ironic truth in the inverted meaning of the 
 last sentence, that the temper of the speaker relished with cynical 
 humour. If others had been as faithful in friendship as he had 
 been in hatred, the positions of both would have indeed been 
 changed. 
 
 Chandos answered nothing ; his eyes still rested with the same 
 L>ok on the man whom he had defended through all evil report and 
 enriched with such untiring gifts. The truth of his own natui'o 
 instinctively felt the falsity of the loj^alty avowed him; j'et that 
 such black ingratitude could live in men as would be present hero 
 were his doubt real, took longer than these few hours— more evi- 
 dence even than these testimonies— to be believed W him. lie had 
 loved humanit}^, and thought well of it, and serveti it with unex- 
 hausted charity. 
 
 Trevenna moved slightly ; hardened and tempered as was the 
 steel of his bright, bold audacity, even he could not bear the voice- 
 less rebuke that asked still, " Et tu. Brute V 
 
 " Let us speak of the future," he said, rapidly; " we have seen 
 that the past is hopeless and irremediable. You know the worst 
 now ; how do you purpose to meet it ? " 
 
 " You have said already, all must go." 
 
 The same perfect tranquillity was in the reply ; it was the ossifi- 
 cation of despair. 
 
 "True, — even Clarencieux." 
 
 An irrepressible shudder shook his listener's limbs, but he bent 
 his head in unchanged silence. 
 
 •' And win the woman you love not go with the rest ? " 
 
 ** She will be given her freedom." 
 
 Trevenna looked at him with the same impatient amaze with 
 which he had started as he had entered the chamber. He could 
 not reaUzo that the voluptuary whose weakness he had so long 
 studied, that the pleasure-seeker whose pococurantism had so long 
 been the subject of his scorn, could be the man who answered him 
 now, thus calm in his endui'ance. 
 
 "But, if she love you, she will not take it. If all that you 
 poets say of the sex be true, she wiU cling but the closer to you in 
 your_ fallen fortunes. "What think you ? I, I confess, doubt it. 
 She is so poor ; she is so ambitious ; she has so sought the restora- 
 lion of your Marquisate ! " 
 
 Chandos stretched out his hand ; his breath caught as with the 
 pang of one who can endure no more. 
 
 ^ "It matters nothing to speak of this. I haye heard your worrit 
 tidings ; now leaye me for a space." 
 
*5+ 
 
 Chandot, 
 
 ** No ; hear me yet a little longer. 1 fancy I see a way to spai'tt 
 you some portion, at least, of your heritance, and to spare you at 
 least this loveliness you covet. Will you listen ? " ^ 
 
 He made a gesture of assent. Hope was dead in him ; but he 
 was passive through the very exhaustion of extreme suffering. 
 
 ♦' See here ! " pui'sued his tempter. ** If you go to her and say, 
 ' I am a beggared man,' will her tenderness remain with you ? 
 You know her best. I trust it may ; but, frankly, my friend, I 
 fear ! She loves you; yes, all women do. She loves you as well 
 as she can love ; but she loves power more. Tell her of this thing 
 which has overtaken you, and I believe she will be lost to you for 
 ever." 
 
 Chandos shrank from the words. 
 
 ** Leave me ! let me be ! It avails nothing—" 
 
 ** Yes, it does. Why need she know itV^ 
 
 The question stole out, tempting and alluring as the sophistries 
 that beguiled Faust. 
 
 *• Why ? " He re-echoed the word almost in stupor. 
 
 ** Ay, why ? Who need tell her ? Listen here. I can temporise 
 with your creditors for a little while. Each does not know how 
 heavy the claims of the rest are, and none whoUy suspect— heU- 
 hoimds though they be— how complete is your beggary. Your 
 marriage is fixed for an early date from this ; let the settlements 
 be drawn up as they ivould have been, and the ceremony concluded. 
 A marriage, even though to a penniless bride, will throw youi 
 creditors off their cast. They will believe you are secure, or would 
 you wed with one so portionless ? You can leave for abroad on 
 your marriage-day ; I fancy I could quiet them enough to let you 
 go. Take the Clarencieux diamonds with you. Meanwhile I will 
 send off, under divers names and in secret, many treasures of yours, 
 that will pass out of England unknown to those who have these 
 claims, and wiU be sufficient by their sale to enable you to live in 
 moderate ease, though, it is true, without affluence. The rest you 
 must let go ; but you will have secured much, — ^your liberty, your 
 love, and a remnant of your possessions." 
 
 ♦' What ! you would tempt me to dishonour ! " 
 
 ** Dishonour ? Whew ! " answered Trevenna, lightly. " Call it 
 so, if you like. I caU. it common sense. How many men, pray, 
 quit England for their debts, and see nothing but a sensible care- 
 taking for themselves in it ? Doubtless there are in those bills and 
 estimates very heavy overcharges — we can't check them now ; but 
 I don't doubt there are; mattres d' hotel will cheat, butlers will 
 charge per-centage, tradesmen wiU add compound interest, biU- 
 discounters will demand usurer's toll; if you take a little from 
 them, you only take your own. As regards your fair Queen of 
 Lilies, if she love you, what wrong can you do her ? Wed her, and 
 she will be your own ; and, granted, she is very lovely. Go to her 
 now and say, ' I am a beggared, self-outlawed, ruined man,' and 
 you must know as well as I, Chandos, that in a few months' time 
 you will see her given to one of your rivals' arms." 
 Chandos swept round to face him, the fire of passion flashing into 
 
*' Tout est Pel du, fors rHoimeur." 155 
 
 the weary pain of his eyes, the contraction of a great torture in tho 
 quivering lines of his lips. 
 
 "Are you a fiend? You would tempt me to disgrace, after 
 having lured me into ruin " 
 
 ''Patience, caro mio," said his allurer, softly. "You are hard 
 on your best friend. Tempt you ? what is there of ' dishonour ' in 
 what I suggest ? On my life, I see nothing. Last night you knew 
 no more of youi* ruin than the world knows now ; certainly, you 
 are justified in withholding the world from your confidence as long 
 as you choose. Is a man ' dishonoured ' because when he holds a 
 bad hand at whist he does not show the cards and tell his ill luck, 
 but keeps his own counsel, and plays the game out in the best way 
 he can ? Your cards are bad now ; but you are no more bound to 
 expose them than he. Men are not your keepers, that you are 
 called on to proclaim to them that, while you thought yourself a 
 millionaire, you were in truth a beggar. You are proud : why 
 give yourself this degradation ? why pillory yourself for public 
 mockery ? You have dazzled them and outshone them : will you 
 bear their laugh and their sneer when the tables are turned ? You 
 have had homage fi-om the highest : will you brook it when the 
 lowest, unpunished, may jeer at yom- fall ? You have lived with 
 royal brilliance : will you feel no sting when society chatters of 
 how rotten at core was the royalty ? You love with all the blind- 
 ness of passion : will you feel no sting when the beauty you covet 
 IB possessed and enjoyed by another ? " 
 
 Blunt, sometimes coarse, in ordinary speech, when he saw occa- 
 sion, Trevenna could summon both eloquence of language and per- 
 suasiveness of phrase ; could wind with subtle tact into the hearts of 
 his listeners, and strike surely and softly what bolt he would home. 
 
 Chandos heard him ; his head had sunk upon his breast, and 
 from his white, parched lips his breath came in painful, gaspmg 
 spasms. His agony was mortal ; his temptation, for the moment, 
 was very great. , , , . . j- 
 
 ■ Subtlely and insidiously the words stole on his ear, goading 
 pride, torturing passion, waking all the longing of desire, lulling 
 and confasing every dictate of honour, like the dreamy potence of 
 a nicotine, till cowardice looked strength, fraud looked wisdom,— 
 till a Kin seemed just, a lie seemed holy. 
 
 "Because you have forfeited your birthright/' pursued hia 
 Iscariot, " you are not called on to beggar yourself utterly, and to 
 summon the world in to pity and to jibe you. That which you did 
 not know yourself last night, it can be a small sin not to proclaim 
 to men to-day ! If she love you, she wiU thank you that you do 
 not mar her sweetest hours with your own calamity. If she love 
 you, the 'blow will fall softened on her if she only learn it when 
 she is your wife, whom no evil can part from you. Conceal your 
 ruin but a few weeks,— a few days,— and the woman you covet if 
 yours ; proclaim it now, and you will forfeit her, with all the rest 
 that you have gambled away in ten mad years. Do as I say, and 
 ner beauty is your own." 
 
 A sigh, wrenched as in a death-pang, alone answered him. 
 
1^6 Chando^, 
 
 ** Can you hesitate ? " said Trevenna ; and his eyes gleamed with 
 an eager light as he lured his prey on. *' Only withhold tor a few 
 days the knowledge you yourself had not last night, and she is 
 given to you ; tell it, and some other will taste the sweetness of her 
 lips, and rifle as his own the loveliness you covet. Choose ! " 
 
 A low moan broke from the man he tortured ; he wavered ; he 
 almost yielded ; he was sorely tempted. 
 
 All his nobler, better instincts were forgotten under the spell of 
 that insidious tempting : all he knew was the yearning of his love ; 
 all he heard was the subtle voice that bade him take evil as his 
 good, and hung out to him, as the sole price of all he longed for, 
 one single sin, — a lie ! A sin so venial, as men hold it, — a sin so 
 familiar in the world, that every trader's ordinaiy commerce and 
 every social difiiculty's small entanglement is filled with it and 
 solved by it, — a sin so slight, as a baneful license has decreed it, 
 vet a sin in his ey^s accursed as the vilest of dishonour, — a sin, as 
 he deemed it, that would mark him out for ever an alien to his 
 blood and a disgrace to his name. 
 
 For the instant only it tempted him, — tempted him with all the 
 mad longing of passion that dulled and dwarfed all other thoughts 
 in its own intensity. He lifted his head, and for the moment hia 
 voice rang with the old clear melody of other days : — 
 
 '* Out of my presence ! Cease to tempt me I — cease to torture 
 me ! By God, I will not yield ! " 
 
 Trevenna bowed, and backed towards the door ; he was too 
 careful a tactician to press what was useless, to pursue what was 
 unasked. 
 
 " So be it ; I have done ! I spoke but in the roughness of my 
 common sense, in the ignorance of my coarser natuie of the fine 
 porcelain you haughty gentlemen are made of. I would have 
 served you, had you let me ; but since you have such a fancy for 
 flinging yourself to the crying pack, why, it must bo so ; and they 
 are ready ! You have the last marquis's superb consolation, — 
 ' Tout est perdu, fors VhonneurJ I hope it may content you !" 
 
 Chandos, from where he stood, crossed the room with a sudden 
 impulse, as a stag, driven from bay, springs ar the hounds sur- 
 rounding him. 
 
 ** If it were not to make you viler than the beasts, I should 
 think it failed to content you, and that, after the beggary you have 
 let me drift to without a word of warning, you want to drive me 
 farther yet down into shame and shamelessness ! " 
 
 Trevenna looked at him w,iJ^ a steady, unflinching gaze : he was 
 on his guard now. 
 
 "You speak on the spur of pain, mon prince, and wrong me. 
 I sought to serve you. If my blunter, ruder senses failed to feel 
 the ' dishonour' your aristocratic blood recoils from, put it down to 
 my failure in delicacy, not to my lack of loyalty. One word more, 
 and I leave you, at your wish. Have you forgotten that this is the 
 day of the new opera, and that all yoiu' world will be about you 
 before many hours ? Without you, the opera must fail. Shall J 
 give out that you are ill, and that thp matter is postponed P" 
 
The Love of IVoman. 157 
 
 Chandos shuddered involuntarily, and the nerves of his mouth 
 quivered. All that had hefallen him, all that the future held, had 
 never stood out before him in its desolation as now, when he 
 remembered — the world. 
 
 " Alter nothing," he said, with an effort. " Let them come. " 
 
 '* Come ! What ! Can you meet them ? " 
 
 He smiled — a smile more utterly haggard and heart-broken than 
 any sign of grief. There was a meaning in it, too, from which the 
 daring and hardy nature ot his foe recoiled. 
 
 **I have neither killed myself nor you in these past hom's. 
 There is little that will be hard to endure since I have withheld 
 from that!" 
 
 Trevenna looked upward at him for one glance; then, silenced 
 and with an unfamiliar awe and fear upon him, let fall the heavy 
 velvet and left him once more to his solitude. 
 
 CHAPTER m. 
 
 THE LOVE OF WOMAN. 
 
 The Queen of Lilies stood beside one of the windows of her own 
 boudoir, restless, disquieted, half swayed by anger and half by 
 anxiety. So many hours of the day had passed, and her lover had 
 not approached her. Where she stood there was nothing near her 
 but the foliage and clusters of innumerable flowers ; the brightness 
 of the declining day was shed full on hers. She looked a woman 
 to satisfy a sculptor's dream, to haunt an artist's thoughts, to be 
 hymned in a poet's cancion ; yet there was about her that nameless 
 and fugitive coldness which, in the fairest statue, chills the senses 
 and the heart. 
 
 Her hand was listlessly wandering among the clusters of 
 blossoms ; and every now and then, as the impatience and disquiet 
 of her thoughts increased, she broke them off and cast them down, 
 beating her foot in haughty irritation on them till their fragrance 
 and their colour perished. 
 
 The door unclosed ; she turned, a smile lighting her eyes, and 
 lending a lovely warmth to her cheek. She swept forward with 
 the grace of her step, with half-playful, half-proud words of 
 reproach for such unexplained desertion. Quickly they paused 
 upon her lips ; she looked in his face alarmed and amazed, 
 
 " Ernest ! what has happened ? You are ill ?" 
 
 For all answer, he pressed her to his heart and kissed her many 
 times with a passion almost terrible in its force, the fever of his 
 lips scorching her own like fire. He held her as men hold the 
 dead form of their mistress, which they must lay down and leave 
 for ever, never again to meet their sight, never again to cling to 
 their embrace. 
 
 Then in silence he released her, with his last caress upon her lips, 
 and moved from her, while his limbs, weak with long fasting, 
 
i^^8 Chanao%. 
 
 ehook like a woman's, and his head sank down upon his breast 
 He would sooner have gone out to his death upon a scaffold than 
 have told her what he came to tell. 
 
 She watched him in fear and terror. She saw that he suffered 
 as no physical pain could make him suffer ; she saw that he was 
 altered as no illness could have changed him. She swept softly to 
 his side again ; she laid her fair arms round him ; she lilted to him 
 her beautiful face, which in that moment tempted him to dishonour 
 as his betrayer's words had never done. 
 
 " My love, my love," she murmured, anxiously, ** what is it?— 
 what has grieved you ?" 
 
 He tui-ned his eyes on hers, and in them she read a look that 
 paralyzed her, that haunted her throughout her lifetime, — a look 
 of such unutterable anguish that she cowered down and shrank 
 back as she met it, struck by it as by a blow. 
 
 '• Calamity has come to me," he said briefly, whilst his voice 
 Bounded hollow as a reed, and wrung from him as confessions were 
 wrung from men upon the rack. " I have been a living lie to you 
 and to the world. Listen." 
 
 Then, as he spoke the last word, his calm forsook and his 
 strength failed him ; he fell before her, his hands clenched in her 
 dress, his head bowed down upon her feet. In a few broken, 
 passionate, disconnected words, wild in their misery, yet burned 
 into her mind for ever as aqua-fortis burns its record into steel, he 
 told her all. 
 
 There was a profound silence in the chamber, — a silence in 
 which he only heard the dull, oppressed beating of his heart, — a 
 silence in which his head was still bowed down as he knelt. He 
 dared not look upward to her face. He loved her, and it passed 
 tiie bitterness of death to bring this misery on her young life ; he 
 loved her, and he had to utter words that might divorce them for 
 eternity. 
 
 For many moments the silence lasted, — a silence so agonized to 
 him that in it he seemed to live through years, as men in the 
 moments of a violent death. He longed, as one perishing in the 
 desert longs for water, for one word of tenderness, one promise of 
 fidelity ; he longed for them with an intensity great as the fall he 
 bade her look upon. 
 
 None came. 
 
 She drew herself slowly from him where he knelt, and stood in 
 the dignity of her matchless grace, mutely gazing at him with 
 those eyes which had all the chilliness, as they had all the lustre of 
 the stars. Her face was white and drawn like his own ; but in tho 
 amazed fixity into which it had set, there was no trace of pity for 
 him, there was no grief that sprang from tenderness. 
 
 *'This is a strange tale," she said, at last, and her voice was 
 bitterly, bitterly cold, though it was tremulous with the tremor of 
 incredulous rage. *'A strange tale. You must pardon me if I 
 fail to believe it.'* 
 
 He looked for the first time upward at her. All hope he might 
 imcozisoioucly have cherished that her loye might be stronger than 
 
The Love of Woman* 1 1;9 
 
 its trial, and vows that had been vowed him in his prosjierity not 
 prove false in his adversity, forsook him now. He rose slowly to 
 his feet, and stood beside her ; and in his eyes came the same wist- 
 ful reproachful pain that had been in them when he had looked at 
 his betrayer. 
 
 ** Believe!" he said, wearily; "believe I Can you look me in 
 the face and doubt ?" 
 
 She stood aloof from him, lifted in her full height, her foot 
 beating the bruised colourless petals of the flowers she had 
 destroyed, her fair face haggard and rigid, her gaze fixed on him, 
 pitiless yet passionate in the coldness of its unrelenting scorn. 
 
 " Beheve !" she repeated, while her lips shook and her bosom 
 heaved. " Believe that you are the ruined bankrupt that you tell 
 me, — yes ; but believe that you have been in the ignorance of your 
 own beggary that you plead,— no ! ten thousand times no!'' 
 
 He looked at her in a mute amazed stupor. He had never 
 known but the tenderness and the softness of women. This 
 vileness of imputed fraud flung at him by the one who, but a 
 moment before, had lifted her sweet lips for his kiss, paralyzed 
 him with its wantonness of merciless indignity. 
 
 '] Ruin does not fall in a day," she pursued, while the haughty 
 acrid words came from her lips in a quiver of rage that her graceful 
 breeding alone reined in from the violence of passion. ** Such ruin 
 as yours is, you confess, the work of years. How perfectly you 
 have duped the world and me ! " 
 
 He who had loved her with a great and most disinterested love, 
 yet who had refused to win her through a falsehood, could have 
 killed her in his agony as he heard her now, — coidd have crushed 
 her in his embrace, and trampled out this life that looked so fair 
 and was so merciless, that had smiled on him with so divine a 
 forgery of love, and that flung at him in his darkest hour a dis- 
 honour that his worst foe would never have dared to hint. 
 
 Yet he stood before her with a calm dignity, a proud reproach. 
 
 " Look in my eyes, and see if I could Ue ! Had I chosen, I 
 could have wedded you by a fraud, and made you mine, in ignor- 
 ance of my fall. As it is, I set you free : it is your right." 
 
 "My right P Indeed! My right! The pity is you did not 
 earlier remember what my rights and the world's both were, ero 
 you chicaned us and misled us with the paste brilliance of your 
 tinsel glitter. You could have wedded me by a fraud. I wonder 
 you could hesitate at one fraud more, when you were so long prac- 
 tised in so many." 
 
 " Oh, God ! — And yesterday you loved me ! " 
 
 The cry broke out involuntarily from him. Yesterday her soft 
 caresses had been his ; a few days or weeks later, and she had been 
 his wife ; now — from her lips poui-ed the cruellest invectives his 
 ruin could ever hear, from her thoughts came the foulest taunt that 
 could be thi'own at him to goad his wretchedness. 
 
 '* Yesterday, — yes ! Yesterday the world and I alike beUeved in 
 vour honoui' and your rank. Yesterday we did not know you as 
 you are,— a gamester, a trickster, a liyiag falsehood to us botk" 
 
Chandos, 
 
 Men under lees torture than he bore then have killed with a 
 madman's blow the fair, false thing that taunted and that jibed 
 them. A convulsive effort of self-restraint shuddered through him; 
 then he stood tranquil still, and almost yielding to her still the 
 forbearance her sex claimed for her. She had no pity for him : he 
 would claim none. 
 
 " Your insult is undeserved," he said, briefly. " Believe or not, 
 as you will ; I have spoken truth, and all the truth. I sought you 
 when my fate was such as all men envied me ; it has changed, and 
 I set you free. All I ask is, for the sake of others, — keep these 
 tidings back until to-morrow ; and, for yourself, forgive me that I 
 ever " 
 
 His voice broke down ; his control forsook him ; he loved her» 
 and he thought only of all they would have been, of all they never 
 now could be, to one another ; and his heart went out to her in a 
 great resistless longing that shattered pride and forgot injury, and 
 only craved one touch of tenderness, one echo of the fond fail h bu'* 
 yesterday so lovingly vowed to him. lie was not changed : wero 
 these accidents of fortune, this visitation of calamity, to make him 
 loathsome where he had been adored ? 
 
 He stretched out his arms involuntarily. 
 
 *' For the mercy of God, my love, my luife ! — for the sake of 
 all we should have been ! — speak gentler to me in our wretched- 
 ness." 
 
 It was the only prayer he ever prayed for pity. In the moment 
 of its entreaty, something softer, some grief more piteous and less 
 absorbed in selfish violence, passed over her face. In the moment 
 of that gesture of beseeching tenderness she could have tkrown 
 herself upon his breast and given up the world for him. Trevenna 
 had rightly said she loved as well as she could love, and in this 
 instant life asunder seemed a doom too terrible to bear. But the 
 impulse passed swiftly : the weight of the world was heavier and 
 stronger on her than her love for him ; he had destroyed her am- 
 bitions and had shattered her victory ; she knew no thought save 
 for what she deemed her wrong, no grief save for what she deemed 
 her degradation ; for her loveliness enshrined a heart of bronze, 
 and her solitary idol was— herself. She stood unmoved, her head 
 turned towards the light with a gesture of scorn, her foot still 
 treading out the bruised fragments of the wasted flowers. 
 
 "Claim gentler words when you can prove justor deeds," she 
 said, with a bitterness that seemed to leave her fair lips with the 
 lash of a leaden-weighted scourge. ' ' You have lived one long 
 falsehood in the sight of men; they may believe your pleaded 
 ignorance of your bankrupt shame ; they have long been your 
 dupes, and they may be so still • / shall not. The premier ofl'ercd 
 you your marquis's coronet ; go take it ! You refused it to my 
 wish ; you will accept it to screen you from the claimants of your 
 dolts!" 
 
 His gaze fastened on her, riveted there by a horrible fascination. 
 Were those eyes, that froze him with so unpitying a hate, the eyes 
 til fit yesterday had smiled up in his own P were those lips, that 
 
T%€ Last flight among tne Purples. ifSi 
 
 lashed him with such brutal taunts, the lips that yesterday had 
 met his own in their last lingering caress ? 
 
 His breath came slowly, and drawn with effort, as though life 
 were ebbing out of him. 
 
 "Silence! you shame your sex I I thank God that I have 
 known you as you are before my life was cursed with you." 
 
 Without another word, he turned and left her, — left her with the 
 crushed blossoms lying beneath her foot, and the summer light 
 upon her loveliness. 
 
 CHAPTEE IV, 
 
 THE LAST NIGHT AMONG THE FX7BPLES. 
 
 The new opera began. 
 
 Fashion was prepared to patronise Genius ; happily for Genius 
 it does not do it very often. 
 
 The Ariadne in JSfaxos was commenced, and the most brilliant 
 audience of the season glanced in surprise to the empty box of its 
 patron. The grand swell of the overture rolled out, and thrilled 
 through the silent house with a new emotion. Such marvellous 
 poems of sound, such pathetic echoes of sadness, such intens^i 
 vibrations of passion, such spiritual cadences of thought ! — in the 
 creation that had issued from the lonely chamber of suffering, from 
 the di'eamy mind of a feeble cripple, there was that which caught 
 the ear of the hearers with a new voice, and spoke to them with q 
 new eloquence. They came to patronise ; they stayed to feel ! 
 
 As the overture closed in the throbbing of the waves of melody 
 that swelled with a mighty thunder through the stillness, into the 
 dazzling light and glitter of the thronged theatre Chandos entered. 
 
 The fairness of his face was unusually pale and unusually cold ; 
 his eyes had dark shadows under them, and had a singular hectic 
 brilliance ; otherwise there was no change. 
 
 *' Late he is ; been drinking," said a person in the stalls, who did 
 not know him. 
 
 *' Never drinks," said one who did. " Been gambling." 
 
 Trevenna, sitting by, set his teeth while he smiled. 
 
 *' Curse him! he dies game," he thought, while he looked up» 
 ward to the box as Chandos advanced to the front and stood there 
 for a second, as though blinded with the light ; then seated himsel 
 in his accustomed chair and leaned slightly foTward in full view 
 of the thronged building, where there was scarce a seat in the 
 grand tier but held some titled friend or foreign beauty who 
 knew him familiarly or loved him well. No other noticed that 
 slight pause as he stood with a paralysed, dizzy stupefaction 
 noming into that blaze of radiance and crash of sound, — nc 
 one except his foe, who knew all that was suffered in it and Ml 
 it meant. 
 
 There had ueyer been a night in which he had been more ^ 
 
 u 
 
i^ Chandos. 
 
 people's lips, and more in their praise and babble, than he was to- 
 night. Foreigners looked at mm eagerly as the man with whose 
 fetes all Paris had rung ; strangers had him pointed out to them as 
 the leader of the aristocracy, the former of fashion, the author of 
 ** Lucrece," the owner of Clarencieux. Peeresses wondered at the 
 absence of his betrothed, and spoke of his appearance as the Due 
 de Eichelieu at the princess's fancy-ball, — of his "Watteau water- 
 party at his Eichmond bijou villa,— -of the magnificence of the 
 bridal gifts he had ordered for the Queen of Lilies. Poor men 
 envied him bitterly, — bitterly ; and rich men wondered why, with 
 all their wealth, they could not buy his grace, his fame, his popu- 
 larity. Women who had been loved by him, or had loved him 
 vainly, looked at him, and alone were struck by some vague sense 
 of pain and disquiet at the serenity of his face, at the glitter in the 
 blue depths of the eyes that had ever till now smiled at life with so 
 careless a brilliance. 
 
 He sat unmoved. He spoke, listened, acted precisely as he had 
 done on any other of the many nights when he had led the verdict 
 of that house on some new talent ; there was not even a tremor in 
 his hand, not even a quiver in his voice. The intense strength of 
 intense agony was lent him for a time ; the world-wide desert of 
 desolation that spread around him gave him the desert's arid and 
 passionless calm ; he had all the fictitious force, all the mechanical 
 action, of fever. The recklessness of his nature was roused till he 
 could have laughed aloud to think how he sat there, the observed 
 of aU eyes, the envied of all men, accredited by the world about 
 him with every gift the gods could give, and knew himself that 
 not a beggar in the streets was poorer, not a homeless dog starving 
 to death more wretched, than he was. 
 
 He had not come to play out his terrible comedy from mockery 
 or desperation ; he had come because even in his darkest hour he 
 would not forsake the man who was dependent on him, and whose 
 whole future hung on the success which his own presence here 
 ftlone could be certain to secui-e. But passing through it for this 
 man's sake, the gigantic gulf that yawned between what he seemed 
 and what he was, the knowledge of what his world thought of 
 him and said of him in this his last night's reign over it, and of 
 the mighty lie that, all unwitting to him, his whole life had been 
 and was, struck on him with the horrible jest which despair often- 
 times will seem to itself, and woke in him the desperate laughter 
 with which men of his race had ridden in the old days of warfare 
 down to tlio ring of spear-heads, down on to a certain death, to 
 laugh still whde the life-blood burst forth from a hundred wounds, 
 and the hoofs of ti'ampHng chargers broke their bone and tore 
 their nerve. 
 
 The music swelled out on the air, rising in aerial cadence an( 
 throbbing in eloquent passion, now clear and^fresh as a spring bii'd 
 song, ncw supreme in its melancholy as the moan of autumn 
 winds through Western forests of pine. Every joy denied him, 
 every hope forbidden him, every smile he sought in vain, every 
 sigh he breathed in suffering, Guido Lulli seemea to haye recorded 
 
The Last Night among the Purples. l6j 
 
 here. The music was sublime as a song of David, pure as a young 
 child's eyes. It might not throughout be coldly perfect for the ear, 
 but it was far more ; it was passionately human for the heart, it was 
 eternally true for every time. 
 
 Chandos sat unmoved to the end. To him, though his hand had 
 moulded many of its parts, though his sympathy had cherished it 
 from its earliest biith, though his thoughts had many a time 
 vibrated to its every chord, it was without sense or melody or 
 meaning now ; it was like the sound of rushing waters in his ear, 
 — no more. Yet he sat unwavering to the end, and led with an 
 imerring precision the bursts of applause that ever and again rang 
 through the Opera-House. 
 
 It closed ; the last magnificent chords re-echoed through a dead 
 silence ; then, through the thunder of public admiration, the name 
 of Guido Lulli was given for ever to the fame he sought. 
 
 Chandos rose and left his box. He went to one, small, obscure, 
 ehut wholly away from the sight of the audience ; here, alone, 
 Lulli had been placed, shunning the view of the glittering throng, 
 and dreading the notice or the speech of any with the nervous 
 terror of a recluse. He unclosed the door softly. Stretched sense- 
 less on the ground he saw the Proven9ars form, his hands above 
 his head as he had fallen, in the moment of ecstasy, when for the 
 first time the voices of the world had given him that promise of 
 immortality of which he had so long and vainly dreamed. 
 
 Chandos stooped and raised him gently ; the movement and 
 the sweep of air from the open doorway roused him from his 
 trance ; his eyes unclosed, he looked upward, scarcely conscious 
 still. 
 
 " It has triumphed ! Ah ! I can die so happy ! " 
 
 The words left the cripple's lips with the sigh so rare in human 
 life, — the sigh of perfect joy. 
 
 His gaze, dreamy and distant, like one who sees the visions of 
 the future, wandered back, and knew the features that bent above 
 him. The smile that was like sunlight beamed upon his face; he 
 took his benefactor's hands and kissed them, the great tears 
 coursing down his cheeks. 
 
 ' ' Monseigneur, this is your gift ! I cannot thank you. What 
 are words ? You have given me life, and more than life; you have 
 given me immortality I / cannot reward you, but night and day I 
 pray that God may pay my debt." 
 
 A smile came on Chandos' lips, — a smile so sad that it might 
 have been either curse or prayer. He stooped over Lulli, and 
 Bpoke with an infinite gentleness. 
 
 "You will be very famous in the years to come. Once or 
 twice remember that I aided something to it. I shall be repaid 
 enough." 
 
 And with those words of farewell— a last farewell, though the 
 other knew it not — he left him before the musician could reply. 
 
 *' You eclipse yourself to-night," said a French princess to him, 
 when, an how latei:. his groat world, haying ordained the triumph 
 
£04 Chandos. 
 
 of the opera, came, as they had long been bidden, to an entertain- 
 ment in celebration of the success of the Ariadne in Naxos, ** You 
 revive the fetes of our Grand Si^cle." 
 
 The gardens were lighted with innumerable lamps gleaming 
 among the trees ; the winter-garden glanced a very paradise of 
 oriental colour ; the wax radiance fell on fairest brows, and the 
 diamonds and sapphires glistened among silkiest hair; the low 
 pleasant murmur of voices filled the chambers ; the echoes of 
 music came from the ball-rooms beyond ; all the old life that he 
 Iiad known so well, and led so dazzlingly, was about him now for 
 the last time. 
 
 As the "thousand great lords" who ''drank and praised tho 
 gods of gold and silver " at Belshazzar's banquet, while laughter 
 and song echoed through the high halls of Babylon, saw not the 
 f<jreshad:wed doom written on the brow of the lord of the feast, 
 and read nou among the jewelled arabesques of the palace -wall the 
 '* Mene, Tekel, Upharsin" that rose out to his own sight, so those 
 who came to Chandos to-night saw no sign upon his face, and had 
 no thought that this was a farewell,— a farewell to joy, and peace, 
 and women's love, and the honour of men, and all the gracious 
 gifts and treasures of his life. They did not know. They saw no 
 change in him. He had said in his heart that none should be able 
 on the morrow to recall having noted in him one shadow of pain. 
 The men of his race had always been proud as they were reckless, 
 capable of intense endurance as they were resigned to limitless in- 
 dulgence ; the spii'it of his race rose in him now. Thi-oughout this 
 night — a night when such agony was on him as men of stronger 
 will and harder training might have sunk under without shame — 
 he let the world about see no trace that all was not with him as it 
 had ever been. His face was quite colouiless, and now and then 
 he lost all sight or sense of where he was ; yet he never let a word, 
 a glance, a sigh, escape him which could have told his deadly 
 secret. 
 
 One only, mingled among the crowds of princes, peers, and 
 statesmen by right of long-established footing and familiarity, 
 noted the dark gleam in his eyes as of one who defied fate with 
 all the delirious daring of desperation, and knew all that was 
 «!ufiered, all that was suppressed,— and was content. 
 
 Once their eyes met, with a swaying cloud of perfumed laces, 
 and delicate hues, and fair faces, and glittering orders, and spark- 
 ling jewels, parting them for the breadth of a chamb'^r. It was a 
 strange fellowship between the betrayer and the betrayed, this 
 solitary knowledge of the doom that hung over the house that was 
 now filled with light and melody, and the music of women's voices, 
 and the names of those who controlled nations, — this mutual con- 
 sciousness alone that as they met now they met for the last time 
 for ever, that when this night should end, with it would end for ever 
 the shadowless life that had been here so long. 
 
 To-night was the supreme martyi'dom of the one, the supreme 
 triumph of the other. 
 
 ** Finished at last I" thought the man who had never let go hi« 
 
The Ldsi Night among tne PurpLs. iWJ 
 
 vow of vengeance since the summer night lonj* before in his child- 
 hood, when he had sworn it at his mother's instance. "All tho 
 toil, all the lie, all the envy, all the bitternoss and the humiliation, 
 finished for me ; all the glory, all the peace, all the fame, all the 
 luxurious ease and the royal pride and the world-wide love, 
 finished for you. After to-night wo shall change parts, my proud, 
 beautiful, caressed darling of women,— my careless Chandos of 
 Clarencieux I Ah I what a thing is patience ! it sits and weaves 
 so long in the gloom futilely, but it traps at the last. There js 
 only one thing wanting,— if you would siurrender. But you die 
 like the last Marquis, curse you ! you die game through it all!" 
 
 Imperceptibly, one by one, the crowd thinned, and left the rooms 
 that had so often and so long seen the most exclusive and the most 
 superb entertainments of the time; they passed away, seeing 
 nothing, dreaming nothing, of the fate that had fallen on the man 
 who thus took his farewell of them, but speaking only, as their 
 carriages rolled away, of the new genius that he had introduced 
 among them, and of the lavish and fantastic royalty of splendour 
 with which his fetes were alway given. The murmur of the voices 
 died away, the strains of the music ceased, the low subdued 
 laughter sank to silence, the glittering thi'ongs dispersed ; they 
 left him— his long-familiar friends, companions, and associates— 
 never again to rally round their roi gail/ard, never again to be 
 summoned at his bidding. 
 
 He stood alone, — alone as he must ever be henceforth. 
 
 The perfect stillness followed strangely on the movement and 
 melody and radiance of life that had all died out ; a clock struck a 
 mournful silvery chime upon the silence, the fall of the water 
 splashed in the fountains ; other sound there was none. The light 
 from a million points fell on the clustering colours of the tropic 
 flowers, the drooping fronds of the pale-green palms, the fair 
 limbs of the statues, the deep glow of the paintings : he looked 
 at these things, and knew that from this hour they would be his no 
 more. . , ^- 
 
 To-night for the last time they were his own ; when the sun 
 should rise, the fiat would go forth that would scatter them abroad 
 to strangers' hands and enemies' spoil. Henceforth they and he 
 would be divided,— the things that he had gathered and cherished 
 would be scattered broadcast to whoever should choose to buy, 
 -and under the roof that had known him so long his voice would 
 je unheard, his face unseen, his name forgotten, his place behold 
 him no more. 
 
 Far behind him, parted from him by an eternal gulf, lay the lite 
 of his past, which had been one glad and gorgeous revel, one cloud- 
 less and unthinking joy, and which he must now lay down, as the 
 Discrowned whom the Praetorians summoned laid aside golden 
 pomp, and Tyrian purples, and brimming amphorae, and dew-ladon 
 rose-crowns, and went out, unpitied, and alone, to die. 
 
 That sweet and cloudless life of his rich past !— to-night he was 
 dethroned and driven out from it for ever ; to-night, a living man, 
 fee knew all the desolation of death, and in the full glory of hii 
 
1 66 Chandas* 
 
 youth was condemned to the anguish and the beggary of im- 
 poverished and stricken age. 
 
 To-night he was driven out to exile ; and behind him closed 
 for eyer were the barred gates of his lost Eden. 
 
 CHAPTEE V. 
 
 THE DEATH OF THE TITAN. 
 
 The Duke of Castlemaine sat in his library in his mighty Abbey oi 
 Warburne, whither he had come by his physician's counsels. He was 
 alone ; for secretaries and chaplains and stewards were no com- 
 panions for the superb old Titan of the Eegency. His brip:ht blue 
 eyes, so fiery and so eloquent still, were looking outward at the tum- 
 bled mass of rock and moorland and giant forest-breadths that made 
 the grandeur of Warburne ; his head so stately, though white 
 with eighty winters, was slightly bent ; his thoughts were with 
 dead days, — days when his voice rang through the House of Peers 
 Dr wound its silky way to the hearts of women,— days when he 
 could riot in the wildest orgies through the niglit, and dictate de- 
 spatches on which the fate of Europe hung, with a clear brain and 
 a calm pulse, when the morning rose, — days when he had loitered 
 laughing over ladies' supper-tables with half a dozen duels on his 
 hands, and looked in the soft eyes of cloistered Spaniards ere lead- 
 ing his cavalry to the charge, — days when his frame had been iron 
 and his voice magic, when nations were guided by his will, and 
 soft lips had been warm on his own, — days, in one word, of his 
 Youth. 
 
 Though in extreme age, the Duke was a greater man yet than 
 those of this generation, — more powerful, more fearless, more fuU 
 of fine wit, of stately courtesy, of haughty honour. He was of 
 another breed, another creed, another age, than ours, — the age 
 when men drank their brandy where we sip our claret, when men 
 punished a lie with their sword where we pass it over in prudence, 
 when disgrace was washed out with life where we bring it in court 
 and make money of it, when if their morals were more openly lax 
 their honour was more inexorably stringent, when if their revels 
 were wilder their dealing was fairer, and when the same strength 
 which made their orgies fiercer and their blow harder, made their 
 eloquence loftier, their mettle higher, their wit keener, their 
 courage brighter, than our own. And in his extreme grace the 
 Titan was a Titan yet, dwarfing and paling those of weaklier 
 stature and of more timorous breed. He sat there looking out at 
 the brown moors, warm with the golden gorse ; and he moved in 
 surprise as the door opened, with a smile of pleasure lighting hia 
 eyes. 
 
 *' You ! Has an earthquake swallowed the town ? " 
 Even as the first word was spoken, even as his first glance feUon 
 Ohandos, he knew vaguely but terribly that some calamity, vastef 
 
The Death of the Titan. US'] 
 
 than his thoughts could compass, had fallen here, on the man 
 whom he cared for as he cared for no other of his race. This was 
 the only one of his blood who had his own code, his own creed,— 
 the only one in whose companionship he heard the echoes of a long 
 passed age ; and he was proud of him, and built mighty hopes on 
 him, — proud of his eminence, of his brilliance, of his successes, 
 proud even of his personal grace and beauty. 
 
 Those who loved him as the old Duke loved saw a change on him 
 more ghastly than though they had seen his face set in the colour- 
 less calm of sudden death. 
 
 Chandos sank down into a seat, and his head fell forward on his 
 arms. The recklessness of desperation, the fever of utter hope- 
 lessness, had given him strength to pass through the ordeal of the 
 night before : but here his strength broke down. He knew ho^ 
 the pride of the gallant old man had been centred in him ; he suf- 
 fered for the pain that he must deal, not less than for the misery 
 he bore. 
 The Duke's mellow voice shook huskily : — 
 '* Tell me in a word ! I have never loved suspense." 
 Chandos did not lift his head ; his answer came slowly dragged 
 out, hoarse and faint from exhaustion, excitation, and long want 
 of food and sleep ; for he had tasted nothing from the hour that he 
 
 had learned his fate, and his eyes had never closed. 
 
 '* I can tell you in one word : — ruin ! " 
 
 The Duke's hand trembled, making the diamonds flash and glitter 
 on the enamel lid ; it had never so trembled when it had shaken 
 the dice, though a fortune hung on a throw, when it had lifted a 
 pistol, though a life hung on the shot, when it had pointed to a 
 serried square of Soult's picked troops, though an army hung on 
 the charge. 
 
 * * Ruin ! A wide word. And for whom ? " 
 
 ''Forme." 
 
 '*Your 
 
 " Yes ! It will amuse the world, — for a weel. at least. A long 
 time for the absent to be remembered." 
 
 A deep oath sprang from the clcHf^-siiut lips of the old Duke ; 
 his face grew white as the hoary ailky Lair that shaded it. and the 
 diamonds shook and glittered in the tremor of his hand. But ho 
 loved the temper that made a jest even of a death-blow ; he had 
 seen much of it in his early day ; he followed the lead with gallant 
 ooodunuiott. 
 
 ' ' Ruin for ym f It is very sudden, is it not P Tell me more : 
 tell me more." ,,,.•■ a 
 
 His voice was very faint, but it was steady ; he loved the manot 
 whom he heard this thing with the generous love of an age that 
 kept all the warmth and all the fire of his youth ; yet they were 
 both of the same school,— they both suppressed all sign of pam as 
 shame. He heard; his head— the head of an Agamemnon- 
 bowed ; his hand closed con\Tilsively on the Louis Quatorzo toy ; 
 his breathing was quick and loud. Once alone he interrupted the 
 recital ; it was at Trevenna's name. 
 
1 68 Cfiandos, 
 
 " That vile fellow I — I bade you beware of him. He hates you, 
 
 Ernest." 
 
 "It may be. I have almost thought so since — since this. And 
 yet he owes me much, — more than you know." 
 
 " Who hate us so remorselessly as those who owe us anything .?" 
 
 ** Then are men devils ! " 
 
 "Most of ^eiB. "Who doubts itP Did he ever owe you any 
 grudge?" 
 
 " None,— only benefits." 
 
 "They are the less easily forgiven of the two. Had you any 
 mistress whom this man loved ? 
 
 "Never, to my knowledge." 
 
 " But you may have had, unknown to you. Whatever for, he 
 hates you, haunts you, envies you ruthlessly ; hates you if only 
 because his hands are large and coarse and yours are long and 
 slender 1 " 
 
 " You make him knave and fool in one." 
 
 " The combination is not rare. But, pardon me, go on. I wiU 
 hoar more patiently." 
 
 He heard very patiently — heard to the end. 
 
 His head sank, his breathing grew fast and laboured, the veins 
 swelled on his still fair broad brow, his giant limbs trembled. It 
 was the heaviest blow life had it in its power to deal him. 
 
 " Great God ! if Philip Chandos had foreseen " 
 
 His voice faltered; his listener stretched out his hand in an 
 involuntary supplication. " In mercy spare me that! Do you 
 think / have not remembered him P " 
 
 * * I meant no reproach. You would have heard none from your 
 father's Kps. He loved you well ; and though you have been im- 
 provident, you have not lost all. You have been true to your 
 house : you have saved your honour. Pardon me, Ernest ; your 
 news has left me scarcely myself. But— but— must Clarencieux 
 go?" 
 
 Where Chandos sat, in the gloom of the mullioned window, the 
 shiver passed over him that had always come there at the name of 
 his idolized inheritance. He could bettor have borne to part from 
 wealth, and repute, and the love of the world, and the love of woman, 
 than he could bear to part from Clarencieux. 
 
 "They say so." , 
 
 " My God I and we cannot help you. Warbume is mortgaged 
 to its pettiest farm. We— of the Plantagenet blood — are beggars I 
 I would give my life to aid you, and I have nothing." 
 
 The confession broke from him so low that it barely was above 
 his breath. It was very terrible to the great noble to know that in 
 the dire extremity of the man he loved he could aid him no more 
 than though he were the poorest peasant on his lands. 
 
 Chandos looked up ; the unnatural coldness and fixity that had 
 set upon the fairness of his face from the moment this calamity had 
 fallen on him softened and changed ; his lips trembled ; he rose 
 with a sudden impulse, and stooped over the chair, laying; hie feancj 
 teaderly on the old man's. 
 
The Death of the Titan. i6g 
 
 ** Forgive me that I bring this sliame and wretcliedneas upon 
 you. I came here that you might learn it from no other lirst ; not 
 the least bitter of my memories has been tho grief that I must 
 entail on you." 
 
 The Duie's fingers grasped his hand close, and wrung it hard 
 ho reproach, no rebuke, came from hivi ; he could not have raised 
 his voice more than he could have lifted his arm against Chandos 
 in his suffering. 
 
 ** Do not think of me ; I shall live but little time to suffer any- 
 thing. One question more. She who is to be your wife ?" 
 
 Ohandos moved from him into the shadow that was thrown 
 darkly across the casement by the great cedar-boughs without. 
 
 " She is dead to ?ne." 
 
 Another oath, loud and deep, rattled in his hearer's throat. The 
 haughty patrician could have borne anything sooner than this— 
 that one of his blood should be forsaken. Still, no recrimination 
 escaped him; he never said, "/ warned you I" The grand old 
 pagan of a colossal age, hardened by long combat, and used to the 
 proud supreme dominion of a great chieftainship through such long 
 years of war and of state power, was more merciful to adversity 
 than the young and delicate Lily Queen. 
 
 Silence fell between them. 
 
 The Duke sat with his white crest bowed and an unusual dimness 
 over the brightness of his Plantagenet eyes ; and every now and 
 then the diamonds in the box he held shook with a quick tremor 
 in the sunlight. 
 
 "What will you doP" he asked, suddenly, shading his glance 
 with the enamelled box. 
 
 " Do I" echoed Ohandos, wearily ; it seemed to him that his life 
 was ended. "What is there to do ? Nothing: except — to end 
 like the last Marquis. An axe on Tower Hill was more dignified, 
 but a dose of laudanum will be as rapid. It would make the best 
 ending for the story for the clubs, and the sales will realize better 
 if their interest be heightened by a suicide !" 
 
 The Duke looked hastily up, with that Jin sourire with which, 
 throughout his career, his Grace of Castlemaine had veiled every 
 deep agitation. 
 
 " Well, you would have precedent. You would but do xhat 
 Evelyn Ohandos did after his master's death, you remember ? 
 Doubtless it would finish the melodi-ame well for the world. Still, 
 were I yon, I would not. I am an old soldier, and I confess I do 
 not like surrender — to fortune or anything else. Your father died 
 in the Commons like a gladiator ; I should not like you to die in 
 a ditch like a dog. They would not be meet companion-pictures. 
 Besides, I do not wish to see your grave : I have seen so many ! " 
 
 Oalmly, dispassionately, the old soldier spoke, toying with his 
 Bourbon box. None could have guessed the intense anxiety 
 hidden under that courtly manner, the yearning emotion concealed 
 under that serene smile. Once only his voice shook ; he had seen 
 the graves of so many — of the friends of his youth, of his brothers 
 in council, of the oomrades who had fought %a^ fallen beside luin« 
 
170 
 
 Chanaos. 
 
 of the women who had lain in his bosom and smiled in his eyes- 
 he had seen so manv ! 
 
 Chando3 knew his meaning, — knew all that was veiled undei 
 the graciOL;5 courtesy, the gentle smile ; those brief and tranquil 
 words to him bore an unspeakable eloquence — an eloquence which 
 moved him as no insult, no indignity, no adversity, had power to 
 move him. 
 
 Whore ho stood, ho bowed low, very low, till his head waa 
 stooped and his lips touched the aged noble's hand. 
 
 "You are rifht, and I thank you. Have no fear ; your words 
 shall be remL;:; &ered. Whatever my fate is, I will accept it and 
 endure it." 
 
 The Duke looked upward at him. 
 
 ** I am glad," he said, almost faintly. " Contre fortune Ion cceur» 
 Pardon me if I intrude my counsels : it is the privilege of Nestors 
 to prose. You go now. I shall see you again. 
 
 ** Surely. Before I go, forgive me." 
 
 The Duke's eyes, so blue, so fiery still, dwelt on him with a 
 great unuttered tenderness ; and the tones that had used to ring 
 like a clarion down the battle-fields were gentle as a woman's. 
 
 ** I have nothing to forgive. Had you loved and served yourself 
 as you have loved and served others, it would not be thus with you 
 now." 
 
 Then they parted, never to meet again. 
 
 The old man sat listening to the last echo of his footsteps ; then^ 
 with a slight sigh, he leaned back in his arm-chair, his hand 
 relaxed its clasp upon the jewelled box, a weariness came over him 
 new to his nerve of steel, rt mist stole before his eyes, shutting 
 from his sight the flickering leaves and the purple moorlands and 
 all the light and movement of the forest- world. 
 
 The summer light quivered through innumerable boughs, young 
 fawns played in the warmth, white clouds drifted over simny skies, 
 and a nest- bird above in the cedar's branches sang low and softly, 
 as though not to break the rest of the sleeper within. And the 
 Duke still leaned back in his ebony chair, with a slight smile about 
 his lips, and the diamonds flashing in the box that was lying at 
 his feet. 
 
 The golden day stole onward, the shadows lengthened, the birds 
 sought their roost, and the yoimg fawns their couches ; the peace 
 of evening brooded on the earth, all things were at rest, and so waa 
 he ; for he still sat there, motionless and with the jewels gleaming 
 at his feet. 
 
 The sunset faded, and the twilight came, the purple haze upon 
 the moorlands deepening to night. Still he sat there, while the 
 shadows stole the brilliance from the diamonds and softly veiled 
 his face, as though in reverence. And when some of his wide 
 household, who were so nigh, yet whom he could not lift his hand 
 to summon, dared to venture at length unbidden to his presence, 
 they found him thus ; and a great awe fell on them, and the hush 
 
**And the Spoilers came down^ 1 7 1 
 
 of fi breathless dread ; for they knew that they were standing in 
 the presence of Death. 
 
 ^ The last of a race of Titans had died, as \7ell became him, in 
 silence and alone, without a sign, and with a smile upon Lis lips. 
 
 CHAPTEE VL 
 
 *'AND THE SPOILERS CAME DOWN.*' 
 
 It was night at Clarencieux. 
 
 In the Grenze cabinet, Chandos leaned against the high carved 
 marble of the mantel-piece ; his chest was bowed as with the 
 weight of ago ; he breathed heavily, and with each breath pain ; 
 his face was white as the sculpture he rested on, and set into 
 that deadly calm which had never left him when in others' sight. 
 The tidings of the Duke's death had reached him some days, and 
 had filled up the measure of his anguish, adding to it the torture 
 of a passionate regret, of an eternal remorse. He had loved the 
 grand old man from whose fearless, fiery eyes no glance but one 
 of kindness and of gentleness had looked on him from his earliest 
 childhood ; and he knew that the shock of his own ruin had slain 
 the mighty strength of the old noble, if ever grief killed age. 
 
 He stood alone ; his heart seemed numb and dead with misery ; 
 he gave no sign of emotion ; no tears had over come into his eyes 
 since the hour in which his fate fell on him. The nights had passed 
 pacing sleepless to and fro his chamber, or heavily di-ugged to rest 
 with opium ; the days had passed almost fasting, and in an apathy 
 that awed those about him with a vague terror lest his end should 
 be in the vacant gloom of madness. He was self-possessed, self- 
 controlled \ he answered tranquilly, he heard patiently ; but there 
 was that in this mechanical action, this unnatural serenity, that 
 had a more horrible dread for those who saw him than all the 
 ravings of deliiium, all the passion of grief, could ever have had. 
 
 The door unclosed. John Trevenna entered. 
 
 ♦* They are all here." 
 
 Chaados bent his head, and followed him out of the chamber. 
 They who waited were his creditors. 
 
 In a day, with the rush of hell-hounds let out of leash, and as 
 though at a given unanimous signal, his claimants had poured and 
 pressed in on him, baying with one tongue for their one quarry, — 
 money. He had bidden them all meet here, and they had como 
 without one missing, — a strange gathering for the halls of Claren- 
 cieux, where kings had used to find their surest shelter, and courts 
 had been entertained through Plantagenet and Elizabethan and 
 Stuart days. 
 
 They were collected in the great banqueting-hall ; a mob of mora 
 than a hundred men, — men who had come down on the same 
 eTrand, in the same temper, sullen yet eager, defiant yet suspicious, 
 
eavage yet audacious, — men who had no mercy on a dethroned 
 roj-alty, and who had no sight save for the deficit they pushed to 
 claim. Still even on them the solemn and venerable beauty of 
 Clarencieux had a quieting spell. As they had entered, their voices 
 nnconsciously had sunk lower, their gait involuntarily had grown 
 less swaggering; and as they stood now, counting with greedy 
 eyes the worth and magnificence of the bauqueting-room, a silence 
 had fallen on them. 
 
 *' Feels a'most like a church," whispered one, a picture-dealer, 
 as he looked down the vista of the double porphyry columns. 
 
 As he spoke, Chandos entered. 
 
 lie bowed to them with a grave and courteous grace ; all had 
 their hats on, even those better bred, from the sense of scorn in 
 which they held a debtor, and for the sake of vaunting and of 
 claiming their own superiority. Involuntarily, as they saw him, 
 they uncovered in respectful silence, the Jew Ignatius, who repre- 
 sented the bill-discoimting firm, alone remaining the exception. 
 Trevenna's eye had glanced at him as his hand went to his velvet 
 cap, and his arm had dropped as though paralysed. 
 
 In the stillness Chandos advanced up the hall, his eyes resting 
 unmoved on the strange and motley group that filled with their 
 uncomely fonns, and with almost every type of European nation- 
 ality, the porphyry chamber where king and prince and peer had 
 used to sit, his guests and his boon friends. There was not a 
 muimur, not a whisper, raised ; there was that in his look which 
 hold the coarsest, the greediest, the most pitiless, silent. 
 
 He stood beside the statue of his father, and turned towards 
 them. He was at the upper end of the poi jthyry hall, and the 
 multitude faced him in the glow of the lights that were illumined 
 there. 
 
 ** Gentlemen," he said, calmly, with a tremor in his voice, though 
 it was faint as after long illness, '* I have but a few words to say 
 to you. You are here to enforce your claims. Of any one of those 
 claims I was in ignorance a few days since, but I dispute none of 
 them ; the improvidence of my life has left me no title to do so. 
 You will doubt me, perhaps, when I say I never knew I owed a 
 single debt ; yet such is the truth." 
 
 There was a stir among the crowd, restless, pained, yet curious; 
 they could not tell the meaning of this, yet they were stirred with 
 a singular awe and wonder. One voice, the picture-dealer's, rough 
 yet cordial, broke the silence : — 
 
 " We believe you I damned if we don't I You ha'n't got a face 
 what lies ! " 
 
 Chandos bent his head in silent acknowledgment. 
 
 " For the rest," he continued, still with that unchanged tran- 
 quillity, " I have but little to add. The amount of your claims on 
 me is, in the aggregate, sufficient to wreck fortunes ten times larger 
 than mine has been ; yet, as I understand, you can be paid in full 
 by my entire surrender of all that I possess. This surrender I 
 make ; my lawyers will explain its value better than I can do. I 
 resign eyeiytliiiig unconditionally to you ; it has become no longer 
 
'* And the Spoilers came down.** 173 
 
 mine, but yours. I believe there will be enough to satisfy you to 
 the uttermost farthing." 
 
 The murmur rose deeper and louder in the hall : the mass of 
 men swayed together as though stirred by a universal impulse. 
 They had come prepared to bully, to bluster, to demand, to enforce, 
 and they were disarmed. Moreover, as he stood against the statue, 
 they remembered the fame of Philip Chandos ; the coarsest among 
 thorn felt a pang of shame that his only son should be standing thus 
 before them now. 
 
 They looked at one another; they could not comprehend this 
 man who voluntarily came and laid down all his possessions at their 
 feet, and yet in their own rough way they understood him ; they 
 would fain now have sympathised with him had they known how. 
 The picture-dealer — a rude, broad boar, who was worth near a 
 million, and whose claims were the largest of any there, save the 
 Jew's — pressed himself forward again, and spoke what all there 
 felt, spoke with a genuine emotion in his harsh voice, with a mist 
 before his sharp and eager eyes : — 
 
 ** Sir, you're a gentleman, and have behaved like one. We thank 
 you, all on us. If we'd a' known, we'd a' waited, — ay, bless you, 
 we would ; but that a'n't here nor there. Your father was a great 
 man, but damned if I don't think you're a greater ; and if there's 
 any little matter— any picter', or that like— that you set particular 
 store on, say the word, and it shall be kept for you, or I'll know 
 the reason why." 
 
 ** Spoke up right well, Caleb ! hear, hear ! " muttered another ; 
 and the applause was echoed and murmured down the whole body 
 of the hall, till even the fashionable tradesmen, who had heard and 
 had looked on supercilious and impassive, were moved by it, and 
 joined it. 
 
 Chandos bowed his head again. 
 
 •' I thank you for your good will, and for the belief you give 
 me. I will leave you now. My men of business will conclude aU 
 arrangements with you, and my servants will bring you refresh- 
 ments here. For your offer, there is nothing I would claim. 1 
 have said I give up all ; but if there be any surplus left, I wiU ask 
 you to do me the favour to sink it in an annuity for one who has 
 been long dependent upon me, and whose health can never let him 
 be as other men are : I mean the musician, Guido Lulli." 
 
 A profound silence followed on his words,— the silence of supreme 
 astonishment. He might have taken advantage of their offer to ask 
 anything, and he thought only of providing for a foreign cripple ! 
 
 Caleb, the dealer, broke the stillness as before, dashing his hat 
 down on the mosaic with a stormy oath. 
 
 ** I wore that hat afore you ; — I'd sooner uncover to you than ia 
 all the kings. Lulli shall be took care of; /'ll go bail for that." 
 
 Chandos tiu-ned with that royal grace which had made him the 
 darling of courts, and could never leave him while he had life, and 
 silently stretched out his hand— the delicate patrician hand which 
 his foe had hated— to the rough, uncleanly, hairy palm of the 
 dealer. Then, with a bow to the standing multitude, he passed 
 
tjj^ Chandos. 
 
 out of the porphyry chamber ; and they made way for their dehtoi 
 as men make way for monarchs. 
 
 The Israelite Ignatius smothered a sigh in his patriarchal heard. 
 
 " Agostino was right. It is worse than murder ! " he thought. 
 
 Trevenna ground his teeth, baffled even in the sweetness of his 
 utter victory. 
 
 "Curse him! Do what you will, you can't lower him I he 
 mused. 
 
 Caleb, the dealer, stood curiously looking at and touching with 
 a sort of wonder his own tough broad right hand. 
 
 " He shook it, he did," ho muimured ; '* and they call him as 
 proud as the devil. He waru't above taking it. Damn me if it 
 shall ever do so much dirty work agen ! " 
 
 A few hours later, Trevenna re-entered the Greuze cabinet. 
 Chandos sat alone before the still-opened window; there was 
 even now no light, except the pale radiance of the moon, in which 
 the fair women of the French painter lost life and colour, and 
 smiled a deathly smile. His head was di'ooped forward ; his eyes 
 fixed on the moonlit forest and river scenes beyond. In his hand 
 was the tube of a great Eastern narghile, and the smoke that curled 
 fiom it was suffocating in its perfume ; it was the smoke of opium. 
 Thus, hour after hour of night or day, in solitude, he would sit and 
 o-aze out at the lands he had lost, and strive to steep his senses and 
 his agony in the insensibility of the nicotine. 
 
 Trevenna called him by his name ; he did not raise his head nor 
 give a sign of knowledge ; he sat, bent forward, looking dreamily 
 out at the night-world of dew-laden grasses, and mighty forests 
 bathed in starlight, and dark skies with wreathing mists of whit© 
 summer vapour, and beyond all, the silver line of the calm sea. 
 
 Trevenna touched him on the shoulder ; then he raised his eyes ; 
 there was in them so senseless, so sightless a look of intolerable 
 pain, yet almost utter unconsciousness, while, dilated by the opiate, 
 the pupils were twice their natural size, that the man who had 
 ^ui'sued him might well have thought his pursuit would end in the 
 chambers of a madhouse. 
 
 •< Chandos, can't you hear me ? " 
 
 ♦• Hear ! " he echoed wearily. " Shall I never have heard allP 
 What more can there be ? 
 
 "What more ? Then have you no heed as to what becomes of 
 Clai-encieux ? " 
 
 Travenna saw the shudder, which always passed over him at the 
 name, shake him from head to foot. 
 
 "No heed? i ./ " 
 
 In the stilled words there was a piteous anguish that might have 
 moved his torturer to mercy, were not the man who hates a blood- 
 hoimd whom no death-struggles will sate till the last drop of life- 
 blood has ebbed out. 
 
 "Well, it must go. The men are in a good mood; you have 
 pleased them mightily ; and it's a great pity when you had th« 
 
**Aiid the Spoilers came down."' 17? 
 
 ofiFer that you didn't clinch it, and ask 'em straight off for the 
 Clarencieux diamonds. I do believe you might have had them. 
 Englishmen are such almightj^ fools when they once get soft and 
 ecntimental ! Still, though they've taken such a fancy to you, 
 they won't do \sdthout their money. Park Lane must go, and 
 Clarencieux must go ! " 
 
 "Why come to tell mo this? You heard me. I gave them 
 all." 
 
 Treveima shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 ** Tres-cher, you did. It was just as weU to give it them with a 
 good grace, seeing that they would assiu-edly have taken it. But 
 the point that concerns Clarencieux is, how will it go ? It may go 
 by private contract, if they're all of one mind, — which no set of 
 Britons ever was yet ; if not, it goes by public auction." 
 
 Chandos drew his breath with a sharp contraction. Despite the 
 dull, heavy, half-di^unk stupor of the opium, each one of these 
 phrases quivered through him with a fearful force. 
 
 " And if it go by public auction, they will divide it." 
 
 *♦ Divide it ! " 
 
 The echoed words were hollow and inarticulate ; a fresh misery 
 faced him. He knew that ho and his home must part, that 
 strangers must rule in his father's heritage, and that the place he 
 loved must see his face no more ; but he had never thought that 
 his heiitage could be parcelled out and severed among the spoilers, 
 and scattered north and south, east and west. 
 
 " Yes, — divided." 
 
 The certain vulgarity which had always underlaid the tone of 
 Trevenna's manner, though his scholarly culture had counter- 
 balanced it, and his familiarity with good society almost effaced it, 
 came out now almost unconsciously to himself, as he stood on the 
 hearth, with the careless insolence of a coarse temper to adversity, 
 and addressed, with a roughness he had never dared to use, the 
 man who now had no power and no title in the home that had so 
 long called him master. 
 
 '*' You won't be consulted, you know; it's theirs now, and of course 
 they'll go the best way to work to make money by it. We can't 
 Uelp that : wish we could ! It will bring most so, sold in lots. 
 The Castle will go with the Home Park, of coui'se ; some million- 
 aire will buy it, very likely, just as it stands, fui-niture, pictures, 
 and all ;_ or else, they say, it may bo bought by Government for a 
 new militaiy hospital. I don't know about that myseK; but somo 
 say so. The rest will go in lots ; the forests will fetch no end i'oi 
 timber; those oaks and elms are worth any money for shiio-buihl- 
 ing and railway carriages. The deer-park they'll turn into ^ 
 eheep-walk, kill the herds, and drain the land ; and all that w-a:4e 
 part by the sea, so pretty to look at, you know, and worth just 
 nothing at all for agriculture, they'll sell for building purjioses. 
 All that rock, and gorse, and moor, and pine-wood, will tell un- 
 commonly well in an auctioneer's periods. The air's beautiful > the 
 eea runs right up under the trees. It will take the public mightily 
 H8 a bathing-plaoo. I'll be bound in ten years' time villas mU 
 
Chandos, 
 
 eovor the whole sea-line, and hotels will be cropping up among the 
 firs like mad. A company's sure to dart at it." 
 
 For his life he could not restrain the merciless jocularity ; it wa« 
 so delicious to him to stand there and parcel out by his words the 
 jjiagnificent demesne he had longed so savagely to see sold to the 
 l*]yyptians and divided among the thieves, as the sons of Jacob 
 longed to tear the many-coloured coat in rags, and sell the favourite 
 of Israel into bondage. 
 
 Chandos standing where he had risen, heard in silence. 
 
 " Best thing that can be done with it for you,*' went on Tre- 
 \ enna, standing at ease there, with his hands behind his back, and 
 i ti his whole attitude the insolence of a coarse triumph more legibly 
 spoken than he knew. ** There may be a surplus if it sell well, 
 und of course that will come to you. I don't think there can be 
 much ; but still something, ever so little, if it's only just as much 
 as you used to give for an acti'ess's bracelet, of course we shall be 
 glad if we can save for you now. I suspect the building idea will 
 bo very profitable ; there are always such a lot of builders ready 
 to rush at a new place ; and when the villas spring up Uke mush- 
 rooms, and the lodging-houses grow thick, I shouldn't be sur- 
 prised if Clarencieux beats Ventaor. By Jove I what would the 
 last Marquis have said if he'd foreseen bricks and mortar invading 
 his mighty Druidic woods ? " 
 
 Still Chandos said nothing; his eyes never left their gaze at 
 Trevenna, but there was rising in them darker and darker that 
 look which the Hanoverian nobles had seen in the eyes of the last 
 Marquis when he had sent them from his Tower cell, with a single 
 syllable, like lashed curs. 
 
 " But what I came to ask you, my dear Chandos," pursued his 
 tormentor, "was, "What will you do ? What is your future to be ?" 
 
 Still no word of answer. 
 
 "You must do something," continued Trevenna, with a kick to 
 the silver andirons. * ' You have not the worth of one of those 
 fiiedogs now. You chose ' honour.' Now, honoiu* don't give us 
 bread and cheese. It's quite a patrician luxury, and I can assuj-e 
 you you'll never get your salt out of it. There a'n't anything the 
 world pays so badly ; you see, there a'n't any demand for it ! 
 What's to be done ? To be sure, you wi'ite ; but now you're down 
 in the world, I'm sadly afraid your books will go down in the 
 world too, and I shouldn't be at all surprised if the critics find 
 you immoral. They always do, unless a writer gives 'em good 
 dinners ; they always shy that stone, unless their hands are filled 
 with a claret-jug. Besides, as Scott says, 'literature's a good 
 crutch, but a sorry staff,' unless you cant in it; and I don'f 
 suppose you'd ever cant, not if you were living on a loaf in a 
 garret ? " 
 
 Still there was no answer to him ; only the gleam in his dilate<J 
 eyes grew blacker as Chandos heard. 
 
 " Literatiu-e, of course, you can turn back to," resumed Tre- 
 venna, too appreciative of the satisfaction he enjoyed, and too 
 absorbed in his ingenuity at stretching every pulley, and turning 
 
"And the SpoiUrs came down.* i]f 
 
 ©very screw of the rack he had his prey stretched on, to note how 
 dangerous a pastime he had chosen. '* But I fear you won't be 
 much able to write at present. Forgive me if I speak bluntly. I 
 mean well. Wbat remains ? You can say with truth, if ever any- 
 body could, ♦ I cannot work, to be^ I am ashamed.' To be sure, 
 the country— the Cabinet— would give you some post, perhaps, out 
 of respect to the great minister's name; but, on my life, unless 
 it's to choose pictures for the nation, or to preside over a competi- 
 tive examination of pretty women for the palm of beauty, I don't 
 know any public office for which you've trained ! You're an Epi- 
 curean, and there's no room for Epicureans in these busy, practical 
 days. Your pride, your pococurantism, your art-fancies, your 
 fashionable caprices, wero thought charmm^ by the world, my 
 dear Ernest, while you were rich and were its idol ; but I am sadly 
 afraid, now that you're a sold-up bankrupt, the world won't care to 
 give you back your very good dinners, and will tell you, like Job's 
 friends, that the best thing you can do to please them is to ' curse 
 God and die.' " 
 
 He had gone one step too far. As the lion-tamer amusea him- 
 self with goading and insulting the fallen monarch that lies 
 chained before him, till ho forgets that the desert-blood is still there, 
 and in incautious insolence tampers and stings one moment too 
 long, imtil the captive king, with a single leap, clears hia barrier 
 and breaks his bonds, and avenges his injui'ies with the old desert- 
 might, so Trevenna had played for one moment too protracted with 
 the man he tortured. With a spring light and long as a deer's, 
 unerring and irresistible as a leopard's, Chandos thi'ew himself on 
 him, one hand grasping his shoulder, the other twisted tight in the 
 linen at his throat, and silently, with a resistless force, strong as 
 steel to clasp, thi'ust him downward across the painted cabinet 
 towards the door, his height above the low square form of Trevenna 
 like a Greek god's above a faun.'s. 
 
 " To-night at least this house is mine. If it were not that 1 
 have bonetited you, you should not leave it with your life, — you 
 traitor, who sold youi' friend I '* 
 
 The door closed, barring him out. He rose livid with rage, and 
 passionately bitt«r that in one moment of thoughtless self-indul- 
 gence he should have undone the caution and the acumen of so 
 many years, and betrayed the carefully veiled secret of his hate. 
 Yet,''as he shook himself, jan-ed but unbruised by the fall on the 
 yielding velvet carpets, he smiled in a contemptuous triumph, a 
 compensative satisfaction : he had what life could never take from 
 him, — his vengeance. 
 
 "The last exercise of your dAFoits de seigneur, my beggared Lord 
 of Clarencieux," he thought, content, though angered at himself. 
 *' You won't find any one put up with your pride now. You are 
 bitter ; yes, I dare say you are bitter ; but all your misery won't 
 prevent this haughty castle going to the hammer, and one day or 
 other you shall see me in it ! When I do como, I'll light my 
 first fire with my Lord Marquis's Ejieller pictuTB, and I'll build 
 lay kennela with the pounded dust of Philip Chandos' statue ! " 
 
1^8 Chandoi. 
 
 CHAPTEE yn. 
 
 THE FEW WHO WEUE FAITHFUL* 
 
 The morning came, — a beautiful summer morning, with its light 
 on the sea, and its west wind blowing over the limitless blossoms 
 of acres on acres of lilies-of-the-valley and of wild dog-roses that 
 filled the forest-glades with fragrance and made their dewj couches 
 for the deer and their perfumed shelter for the earth-nesting birds. 
 The earliest rays glancing in to the painted cabinet found Chandos 
 sitting there as he had sat all the night through ; he had never 
 stirred : now and then his head had sunk forward on his breast, 
 and the sleep of the opiate had fallen on him for an hour, heavy, 
 dreamless, merciful, insomuch as it annihilated thought ; at all 
 other times he sat motionless, save once or twice when he diank 
 off great floods of iced water or brimming draughts of brandy, 
 looking outward at all he loved so passionately, — at aU he had lost 
 for ever. 
 
 With that single roused action towards his traitor, aU revival of 
 sense or movement seemed to have ebbed out again in him. He 
 sat dulling his senses to insensibility with the nicotine, but never 
 dulling with it the pangs that ate at his heart, as the vulture at 
 Prometheus'. 
 
 He never noticed the rising of the day, he never saw the sun 
 grow brighter and higher in the east ; he knew nothing ; his eyes 
 only fastened with a look that never left them on the sea and the 
 woodland, and all the forest beauty that had been his so long, that 
 never now would be his own again. Couched at his feet the dog 
 Beau Sire lay, stirless through the day and night, lifting his head 
 now and then with a low moan ; the brute was faithful where the 
 hand he had filled with gifts and benefits numberless as the sands of 
 the sea had turned against him. 
 
 All was very still. Trevenna, with the creditors and lawyers, 
 had left in the past night ; the men whom they placed in charge 
 had been enjoined to show the strictest respect for his privacy. 
 The household were dumb and paralyzed with amazement and with 
 grief ; none of them dared venture near him. Nothing roused him 
 &om his stupor. 
 
 As the noon was high, and the sunlight without shadow across 
 the breadths of grass-land in the hush in which the song-birds 
 ceased, and even the busy wild pigeons rested on the wing, the slow 
 sullen tramp of the steps of many men came on the stillness, 
 echoing dully on the road of the western avenue that swept round 
 by the western wing in which the Greuze room was. The solid, 
 measured beating of the many feet did not awake him from his 
 apathy of drugged unconsciousness; the noise of the irregular 
 marching of varied steps as they crashed the ground beneath the 
 woven boughs of the arched aisles of beech and che.>tnnt did not 
 reach bis eai% The men came on t-o pass round tl^e castle to iJbe 
 
The Few who were Faithful, 1 7v^ 
 
 front ; they were men of all ages and of different rants, but well- 
 nigh all of the same type, the type of the two classes of Old 
 England whom she never hears the name of now : — the yeomen 
 and the peasantry ; the fair, florid, blue-eyed, broad- shouldered^ 
 bull-dog type of what were once her franklins and her eorlmen, that 
 now— here and there fast fading out—are still her tenant-farmers 
 and her coimtry cotters, stiU reap her yellow harvests, and still live 
 in the green shadow of her woods. 
 
 They came on very slowly, their heads bent, their heavy steps 
 dragging with a weary, melancholy effort. They came as they had 
 followed the bier of Philip Chandos, as they would have foUowed 
 the funeral of his son. 
 
 They had learned that a worse thing than death had fallen on 
 Olarencieux. They moved with a certain solemnity and dignity, 
 rough and various as the men were in person and degree ; for one 
 emotion was upon them all, and a profound grief lent its sanctity, 
 almost its majesty, to the weather-beaten faces on which the 
 warmth of the early summer shone down through the leaves, and 
 to the stalwart stature and the bent frames which were side by side 
 as age and youth, as the tenant of thousands of acres and the pea- 
 sant who lived in a shieling, advanced together in a long line up 
 the double avenue. 
 
 _ At their head, walking alone, was a very old man of more than 
 eighty-five years ; his form gnarled and tough as one of the oaks 
 of the deer-forest ; his white hair on his shoulders like one of the 
 patriarchs of Israel ; his face tanned to a i-uddy brown, that nc 
 near approach of death could pale. He leaned heavily on an elm 
 staff, and the lines in his still-comely face were deep-set as though 
 his own plough had riven them. 
 
 As they paced near, the loud ST;7eIling noise of their marching 
 smote dully on the hushed noontide. At last it reached the 
 ear of Chandos ; he raised his head, heavy with the opium-fumes, 
 and saw them. He knew them, every man of them ; he had known 
 them fi'om the earliest moment when evei7 creature on the broad 
 lands of Olarencieux had striven with all the loving loyalty of 
 feudal affection to do their best to please and to amuse the golden- 
 haired young child of the gi-eat house of Olarencieux. 
 
 "Oh, my God!" he moaned aloud: ''and thev must suffer 
 *oo ! " 
 
 Not alone could he bear his burden ; not alone could his fata 
 strike him ; it would crush others in his fall, remove the land- 
 mark of the fatherless, driveout the old man from his life-long hearth, 
 send the worn-out peasant from the cottage hearthstone that had 
 been his so long, and feU the green, glad welcome of the forests 
 that the fathers' fathers of the most aged there had known and 
 loved as familiar and venerable things. 
 
 He had thought of them before, thought often of all who must 
 suffer through him ; of the retainers made homeless in their old 
 age ; of the tenants given over to hard bands ; of the men who had 
 lived on those lands from their birth, like tiieir fathers before 
 them, condemned to see their roof-trees sold belore their si^ht, 
 
i8o Chandos, 
 
 and to be driven across the western seas to seek new homes, when 
 they had had no other wish save to be laid in peace beside their 
 people in the familiar graves beneath their village spire. He had 
 thought of them ; no pain could make him selfish ; but he had 
 never thought of them as he thought now, when the three hundred 
 Bouth- countrymen who held his fiefs, large or small, came up in 
 the noontide through the western avenue. 
 
 Involuntarily ho rose; they saw him, and paused before the 
 opened casement on the broad stretch of turf, all checkered with 
 the shadows of the crossed branches. The oriels reached nearly to 
 the ground ; he was as much in their presence as though they had 
 entered the building, and that which they came to say seemed best 
 spoken under the summer freedom of the sky. With the same 
 unanimous movement as his creditors, they uncovered to a man, 
 standing with as much reverence before the ruined bankrupt as 
 they had stood before the Lord of Clarencieux. The sun shone 
 clear upon his face, and at what they read there — the change so 
 unutterable that a few days had sufficed to work— they were 
 silenced with as unspeakable a horror. They knew then that this 
 thing of which they had heard was true. 
 
 The old man who stood at their head advanced slightly. He 
 was their spokesman, who had rented and farmed the greenest 
 lands of Clarencieux, and had lived imder the same broad thatch- 
 roof as his ancestors had dwelt under since days beyond their 
 memory, when the Ohandos had been peers, and had marched with 
 their brother bai'ons to win at the sword's point the chartered 
 liberties of England. He was a brave and staunch old patriarch, 
 holding himseK proudly as any Saxon thane, yet loyal to the house 
 he loved, as the Ohandos had been loyal to their Plantagenet kins- 
 men and to their Stuart kings. 
 
 He — by name Harold Gelart — stood forward, his white hair 
 floating in the soft west wind. 
 
 '' My lord" (the owner of Clarencieux had been their lord to all 
 the yeomen on the lands since that imforgotten, unforgiven day 
 when the Hanover boor had slaughtered in cold blood their last 
 Marquis), *' my lord, is this thing true ?" 
 
 Harold Gelart could not have put into clear words the shame and 
 misery which he had heard had come to Clarencieux. 
 
 Ohandos bowed his head. 
 
 The dense throng gathered under the leafy shadow of the elms 
 moved with a shuddering, swaying motion. Against all witness 
 they had disbelieved it till they should hear its utterance fi'om his 
 own lips Its blow to him was scarcely less than was its blow to 
 them. 
 
 The old farmer bent over his elm staff as though the shock that 
 had been so deadly to him in the past night, smote him afresh. 
 
 *♦ Will the lands be sold ?" 
 
 His voice was hoarse, and panted slowly out, and he covered hia 
 face as he asked it. To him it was such unutterable shame, such 
 insupportable disgrace, to speak such words to their beloved and 
 Jk^juoured fav-^urite. 
 
The Tew who were Faithful, 181 
 
 Ohandos bowed his assent once more. 
 
 Speech would not come to him, and none was needed as thej 
 looked upon his face. 
 
 They were strangely, terribly still, — that mass of toil-worn, air- 
 freshened, stalwart men, whose strength could have wrecked 
 Clarencieux from terrace to turret, had they hated its beauty with 
 Trevenna's hate. What they heard might drive any or all of them 
 out to new homes, might consign them to new and pitiless dealers, 
 might level the homesteads they cherished, and might ruin them 
 in many fatal and unlooked-for ways. But in this moment it was 
 not of themselves they thought ; it was for the great house that 
 had fallen, — ^for the dispossessed lord who stood before them. 
 
 Harold Gelart, the oldest among them, and elected their am- 
 bassador, a man of few words, tough in his mould as any oak that 
 stood the shock of the sea-storms, yet tender at heart as any sapling 
 fresh in its first green leaf, lifted his head, while great drops welled 
 slowly out of his aged eyes and down the sunburnt furrows of his 
 face. 
 
 "If it had pleased the Almighty God to have laid me in my 
 grave before this day ! " 
 
 It was the only moan that escaped the brave old yeoman. The 
 honour of his '* lords " had been his honour, their fame his fame ; 
 loyalty to them had been one, in his simple creed, with loyaltjr to 
 his God ; and though he knew not but that the old moated ivy- 
 hidden grange, where he and his had dwelt so long in peace, might 
 be sold above his head and new landlords eject him to find a 
 ft'esh resting-place in his last years, no syllable would ever haAc 
 escaped him to add a blow to the misery that had fallen upon Cla- 
 rencieux. 
 
 Chandos looked at him, and at the crowd that gathered so mutely 
 under the ehns ; and the icy, stony rigidity, the almost senseless 
 stupor, which had been upon his features, changed and softened 
 as it had done at the dead Duke's words. He had known those 
 furrowed, bronzed faces ever since his youngest years; he had 
 seen them gather round him in loyal attachment on every anni- 
 versary of his birth, at every return to his home, at everj^ Chi'istmas- 
 tide that he had been among them. They were familiar to him 
 as the venerable trees beneath which they stood ; and he knew that 
 they and he met for the last time. 
 
 **My friends," he said gently, " the worst that you can hear is 
 true. You and I must part,— for ever. I hope that my fate ma\' 
 not recoil on you ; but it is too likely you may sufi'er tliough me. 
 I have been blind and mad. Forgive me that I thought too little 
 of aU I owed my heritage." 
 
 The words reached the farthest that stood on the outskirts of the 
 throng, hollow and feeble though the once rich music of his tones 
 was now. A single sound, like one deep, vast sob, &hook the crowd 
 cs they heard. They loved him well for his own sake, for his 
 father's sake, for the sake of his great name and race, that had 
 been part and share of their own honoui- for so long. 
 
 Harold Gelart lifted his white head, like the head of a Saxon 
 
rb* Chandos 
 
 franklin, ana spoke with the broad, marked dialect of the southern 
 gea-board steeping his words in its accent. 
 
 '*My lord, we aren't here to reproach of you; you have done 
 what you will with your own. We are come to tender you our 
 loyalty, to say a few words to you, an' you will." 
 
 The old patriarch, whose life was spent amidst the woods and 
 fields, whose rising and going to rest were with the larks of hia 
 corn-lands, found words with difficulty. His speech was ever 
 laconic, and little above a peasant's ; and the most silver-tongued 
 orator would have found utterance hard under such grief as that 
 he choked down now. 
 
 *' Speak on," said Chandos, gently still- E3 knew that, bitterly 
 as they tortured him, they came tnere out of love for him. 
 
 **My lord, it is just this,— no more," said the old man; while 
 the broad provincialism of his county-tone gave a rough, imploring 
 earnestness, beyond all oratory, to his words. ''You tell us the 
 lands must go ; we have heard yesternight that a sore and wicked 
 thing have befell you : it don't need to speak on it, it's too bitter 
 in all GUT teeth ; and them as has wrought it on you, may the 
 vengeance of God overtake ! " 
 
 Chandos stayed him with a gesture. 
 
 " No ! to pray that were to call a curse on me. I but reap the 
 harvest of my own utter madness." 
 
 Harold Gelart's eyes flashed with a fire that age could not whoUy 
 dim, and he struck his ehn staff down into the turf with mighty 
 force. 
 
 *' Where be them that never warned you ? Where be them that 
 feasted at your cost ? Where be them that knew all was rotting 
 under you, and never spoke the word that might have saved you 
 in good time ? Where be them ? Let their giiilt find them out ! " 
 
 There was a rude grandeur in the passionate imprecation, as the 
 old man raised his head and looked upward at Clarencieux, where 
 the colossal waUs towered above him, as though marking the 
 vengeance of the great dead who had reigned there. Then he 
 tiuTied his eyes on Chandos. 
 
 "I ask pardon, my lord; I feel dazed-like with the misery! 
 What we come to say to you is only this. We hear a power of 
 money is wanted : if the money was forthcoming any other way, 
 the lands would be safe ? We fancy so ; we don't know much ; 
 but we guess that. Now, we aren't rich men, none of us ; but 
 put together, we're worth summat. We've saved a good bit, most 
 of us ; and, clubbed together, it will make a bigger sum than 
 may-be anybody'd think. Now, my lord, we don't mean no offence; 
 we've lived under you and yours all our lives, and we love you 
 like as if you was our king. Now, will you let us pay the money ? 
 We'U clear the lands, anyhow ; we'll clear summat, at least as far 
 as it'll go. We'll give every penny we can scrape together ; and 
 we'll bless you for using of it, as we used to bless your father's 
 name when, let state and grandeur load him ever so, he never 
 forgot MS. Take it as we give it, right down with all our hearts ; 
 theire a'n't a man among us but what would go cwitent. and feed 
 
The Few who were faithful, 183 
 
 \^iih his dogs, and fodder with his cattle, to know that he'd beeu 
 of ever such a littlest bit of help in saving you and saving Claren- 
 cieux ! " 
 
 Harold Gelart paused,— his voice shaken and stifled ; the drops 
 streaming unbidden, like a woman's, down his withered cheeks, in 
 the passionate earnestness his errand lent him. Never, in all the 
 years of his tough, sun-tanned, wind-beaten, healthy, vigorous life, 
 nad such a weakness been wrung from him. 
 
 From the yeomen and peasant- throng a murmiu? came such as 
 that which the speech of the dealer had roused in the porphyry 
 chamber, but louder, bolder, rough, and honest, with the simple 
 warmth of those who gave it. It was the ratification by every man 
 present of the words and of the offer of their spokesman. Every 
 man there bent his head, as they bent it entering their woodland 
 chiu-ch ; so, silently, they registered their adhesion to his promise. 
 
 Chandos stood and heard. A strange alteration passed over his 
 face ; all its fi'ozen calm changed ; for tho first time since the night 
 that he had learned his doom, the blood rushed back in a hot flush 
 over his features ; he quivered through all his frame, as if they 
 had struck him some heavy-weighted physical blow. He waa 
 silent. 
 
 At his silence, the throng stretching far away under the elm- 
 glades before him, serged nearer by one impulse ; every unit of 
 that swaying mass pressed forward to pledge his sincerity and the 
 willingness of his gift, and from their thioats, to a man, one shout 
 broke : 
 
 " My lord ! take it, — take it, and buy back the lands 1 What is 
 ours is your'n!" 
 
 "Ay, ay ! " swore the staunch old Gelart, while with his brown, 
 homy hand he dashed back the salt fi'om his lids. "And only just 
 reckoning, too. What was yom-'n have been ever free to us iii 
 your days and in your forefathers' ; no soul was ever pressed, no 
 soul ever hungered, no soul ever pined, on these lands. What is 
 ours is your'n." 
 
 Chandos was silent still. The change on his face grew softer, 
 wanner, better, with each moment; the vacant lethargy of the 
 opiate cleared more and more away from his senses ; but his head 
 was sunk upon his chest, and for the first time since his ruin had 
 been known to him tears gathered in his eyes and fell slowly one 
 by one. The loyalty showed to him, moved him as insult and as 
 anguish had had no power to do; the rain of those bitter tears 
 saved him from madness. 
 
 He stood back in the shadow, so that his face was concealed from 
 them; the weakness he could not for the instant control wrung hir 
 pride, and wrung his heart ; with the warmer gratitude and emotioii 
 that their generous fealty brought him was blent the shameful 
 misery that he— the last Chandos of Clarencieux — should ever stand 
 thus before the tenants of his lands. Their love touched him with 
 an intense pain that he should ever have tried and proved it thus. 
 
 They mistook his silence, and the movement witii which he in- 
 Yolmitanly drew back into the gloom of the Greuze chamber, fox 
 
184 ChandOT, 
 
 offence ; and their spokesman, Gelart, pressed nearer, laying hold 
 of the oak framework of the oriel. 
 
 " My lord, it sounds bold and coarse, may-be, as I puts it, for 
 we to come bringing our money to you, but it a'n't meant so ; we 
 come out o' love and loyalty to you,— just out o' that. Your house 
 have been our glory and our friend ; we can't a-bear to see it fall 
 and not to heave a shoulder to its prop. Leastways, my lord, if 
 you'll just let us save the lands : we sha'n't be a-doing it for you ; 
 we shall only be let to save ourselves from new masters, — nothing 
 more. The charity'll be to us." 
 
 The pld yeoman was rude in speech and tough in fibre, but a 
 true inlierent delicacy lived in him for all that ; he strove, as far 
 as his powers could, to put the service they came to render in the 
 guise of a service permitted them to aid themselves. 
 
 Chandos came foi-ward, and took the old man's brown hands in 
 nis, and pressed them silently : words were very hard to him to 
 utter then. 
 
 **My friends," he said, unsteadily, while his voice vibrated on 
 the quiet of the sunny summer day, ** thank you, I cannot ; such 
 service as you would render me is not to be recompensed by any 
 gratitude. If I could take a debt from any man, I would take 
 one from you. But were I to stoop so low as to rob you of your 
 earnings to arrest my ruin, you would be right to deny that I could 
 erer be the son of Philip Chandos.'* 
 
 A perplexed, piteous pain cast its shadow over the honest, ruddy 
 faces upon which he looked : some perception of his meaning, some 
 sense that could he take their offer he would be no longer what the 
 men of his race had ever been, stole on them. They would have 
 given their lives for him in that hour ; and they had some faint 
 knowledge that he was right, — that his acceptance of what they 
 tendered, in all the cordial singleness of their hearts, would stain 
 the man they came to save, more deeply than his calamity. 
 Old Gelart lifted his eyes. 
 
 ** Master, master," he whispered, hoarsely, '* it would be to save 
 his name, Ms lands. I think he'd 'a' let us do it." 
 
 The yeoman had been of the same years with the great mini- 
 stei', and had loved and honoured him with all a vassal's feudal 
 Btrengtb. 
 
 Chandos shivered at his words. 
 
 "No," he saidj gently, — though in his voice there was an accent 
 that pierced the hearts of the listening crowd. * ' I have dis- 
 honoiu-ed him enough : as I have sown so I reap : it must be so. 
 Yet, because I refuse you, do not think me dead to all your love, 
 --senseless to all your fidelity. We shaU never meet again ; but 
 to my dying day I shall never forget you, — never cease to honour 
 and to thank you." 
 
 A mighty sob, like the wrung-out moan of a giant, shtJok the 
 whole throng like one man. They had heard from his own voice 
 the fiat of farewell ; they had learned from his own lips that the 
 doom of Clarencieux was sealed, that they and the race they 
 honoured would be severed for evermore. 
 
The Few who were Faithful. 18^ 
 
 They looked upon his face in as eternal a parting as the strong, 
 bold men who had dwelt upon his lands and fought under his 
 standard, had looked upon the face of the last Marquis when 
 he had ridden forth to join the rallying,— ridden forth never to 
 return. 
 
 And they wept sorely, like women. 
 
 The length of the summer hours passed, the shadows of the 
 clouds sweeping oyer the breezy uplands, the swathes of scythed 
 grass, the golden gorse of the moors sloping to the sea, and tlie 
 swelling woods of the deer-forests. A fairer day had never dawned 
 and closed on Clarencieux. Far in the distance a white sail glided 
 in the offing ; the stags couched slumbering under the umbrageous 
 shelter of the greenwood aisles; the brooks muiTaui-ed theil 
 incessant song of joy, bubbling through the maiden-hair and be- 
 neath the wild-rose boughs: its beauty had never been more 
 beautiful. 
 
 Like the youth whom the ancient Mexican world decked with 
 roses, and led out in his loveliness in the light of the sun, ere the 
 knife of the priestly slaughterer laid his dead limbs to be severed 
 on the altar of sacrifice, the lands stretched smiling in the 
 warmth, unshadowed by the doom that would dismember and 
 destroy them. 
 
 To part fi-om them for ever ! — easier to lower the life best loved 
 within the darkness of the grave, easier to lie down in the fulness 
 of youth and die, easier to suflPer all that the world can hold of 
 sufi'ering, than to leave the birthright every memory has hallowed, 
 every thought cherished, every childhood's love endeared, every 
 pride and honour of manhood centred in, and the one mad ruin of 
 an Esau's barter lost. 
 
 The night was down, — with the shine of the stars on the sea, 
 and the call of the deer on the silence, with the grand woods bathed 
 in dew, and the moorlands steeped in a hushing quiet ; and with 
 the night he must pass out from Clarencieux a self-exiled and 
 self-beggared man. All through the day he had wandered in 
 monotonous, almost unconscious action among the places that he 
 loved ; by the waves where they stretched under endless crests of 
 rock, and below beetling walls of pine-topped granite ; over the 
 heather, blossoming on leagues on leagues of brown wet sand, 
 where the grouse nested and the sea-swallow skimmed ; thi-ougli 
 the dark, interminable aisles of oaks without a memory that 
 could gauge their hoary age ; through the rich, wild splendour of 
 forest-growth, all melodious with birds and with the noise of bab- 
 bling waters ; by the side of lonely lakes belted in with leafy 
 screens, under the shelter of towering headlands, all clothed with 
 fern and pine, and with the fragrant wealth of linden-flowers and 
 the clinging luxuriance of summer creepers ; through them he 
 wandered, almost insensibly, walking mile on mile without a sense 
 of bodily fatigue, wearing out physical strength without a know- 
 ledge of its loss, beaten, sti'ung, haggard, well-nigh lifeless, yet 
 conscious of nothing save that he looked his last for ever on th« 
 place of his birth and his heritage. 
 
J 86 Chandos. 
 
 It was near midnight when he reached his home in ehodr ex- 
 haustion. 
 
 Of the flight of time, of the bodily suffering that racked his limbs, 
 of the weakness upon him £i*om want of food, he knew nothing : ha 
 only knew that before the next day dawned he must leave Cla- 
 rencieuxj — his own no more, but given over to the spoilers. All 
 the familiar things must pass from him, and be his no more. 
 The trees that had shed their shade over his childish play would 
 fall under the axe ; the roof under which kings had sought covert 
 from the men of his blood would know him no longer ; strangers 
 would sit by the hearth to which hunted princes had fled, knowing 
 they were safer trusting in the honoui* of a Chandos than amidst 
 the Guards of their lost throne-room. In the banqueting-hall, 
 where his ancestors had gathered the chiefs of the nation, curious 
 throngs would rush to stare and barter ; the very marble that wor^ 
 his father's semblance would be sold to whoever would buy ; the 
 very canvas from which his mother's eyes smiled on him, woul(^ 
 pass away to hang on dealers' walls. In the place that had been 
 sacred to his race none would pause to recall his name ; in the 
 heritage where his sovereignty had been absolute, his lightest word 
 treasured, his idlest wish fulfilled, he would have no power to bid a 
 dog be cared for, no right to arrest a hand that should be raised to 
 tear down with laugh and jibe the records and the symbols of the 
 honour of his house. 
 
 Thi'ough the years, however many, that his life should stretch to, 
 never again could he lay his head under the roof that had sheltered 
 his childhood's sleep ; never again could his eyes look upon the 
 things beloved so long ; never again could his steps come here, 
 where every rood was hallowed, and where no race but his race 
 had ever yet reigned, 
 
 In that hour, nothing but his oath to the man who had bade him 
 live on and meet his fate, whatever that fate should be, stood 
 between him and a self-sought grave. 
 
 Death took the young, the fair, the well-beloved — O God ! he 
 thought, why would it pass him by ? why would it leave him 
 breath on his lips, strength in his limbs, consciousness in his brain, 
 when all that was worth living for was dead, when every pulse of 
 existence through his veins was but a fresh pang P 
 
 It was long past midnight ; all was very stiU. Through the 
 opened casements came the lulling of the sea, and the faint, deli- 
 cate murmur of leaves stirring in a windless air, moved only by 
 the weight of their clinging dews or by a night-bird's wing. All 
 in the vast building slept ; all who loved him in the household had 
 looked their last upon his face, — the face that most of them had 
 known since the laugh of its childhood had been on it. The moon- 
 light streamed in, clear and white and cold, through the unclosed 
 wmdows ; chamber opening on chamber stretched on and on in the 
 spectral silver light ; the hush of the grave rested on the mighty 
 halls where white-crossed Crusaders had defiled, and houseless 
 monarchs been sheltered, and revellers feasted in the king's name 
 through many a night of wassail, and his own life of careless, 
 
The Few who were Faithful. 187 
 
 cloudless pleasure, spent with so lavish a hand its golden moments. 
 iTho quivering ashy gleam of the star-rays poured down the por- 
 phyiy chamber, leaving deep breadths of gloom between the aislea 
 of its columns, touching with a moiu'nfnl light the di'ooping stand- 
 ards and the lost coronet of the last Marquis, shed full across Philip 
 Chandos' statue, and leaving in its darkest shadow the motionless 
 form of the exiled and beggared man by whose madness the honour 
 had departed from their house. 
 
 Standing there before them, — those memorials of the dead, — ho 
 felt as though they drove him out, dishonoured, alien, accursed aa 
 any parricide. Through him had gone what had been dearer to 
 thern than life ; through him had perished what they had trusted 
 to him ; through him their name must be tarnished by sneer, by 
 scorn, worse yet, by pity ; through him their might, their fame, 
 theii' stainless heritage, were dragged in the dust and parted amidst 
 thieves. The crime of Orestes seemed scarce more of parricide 
 than his crime. 
 
 Had not his oath held him, had not his word, pledged to one who 
 now lay in his fresh grave, bound his arm powerless, in that hour 
 he would have fallen, killed by his own hand, beneath his father's 
 statue, where the moon touched with its brightest lustre the proud 
 brow of the marble that stood there as though to bear wit news 
 against the wreck and shame of his ruined race, the desolation of 
 his forsaken hearth. 
 
 The stillness of the after -midnight was unbroken ; once the dis- 
 tant belling of a deer echoed over the park without : other sound 
 there was none. He seemed alone with the dead he had dishonou t eil, 
 — with the great dead whose memories he had shamed and w)io,ie 
 treasures he had sold into bondage. 
 
 He looked at those lifeless symbols as though they were lus 
 judges and accusers : and a shuddering cry broke from liim aad 
 moaned down the silence of the porphyry hall. 
 
 ** Oh, God ! I saved our honour ! 
 
 He felt as tho\\gh he pleaded before their judgment-seat,- -aa 
 though he called on them to bear with him in Ms agony, to be 
 merciful to him in his misery. 
 
 He looked once more at all that he must leave for ever, then 
 tiirned to pass out from the porphyry chamber. But the tension of 
 his strength gave way ; weakened by little food, and worn out by 
 exhaustion, his limbs shook, his frame reeled ; he swayed aside 
 like a tree under the blows of an axe, and fell prone across the 
 threshold, — the moonlight bathing him where he lay. 
 
 For houi's he was stretched senseless there, the dog — ^the one 
 fiiend faithful — crouched down by him in a sleepless guard. The 
 night passed lingeringly ; the flicker of the gentle leaves, or the 
 soft rush of an owl's wing, the only noise that stirred in it without. 
 Now and then there was the sweeping beat of a flight of deer troop- 
 ing across the sward that echoed from afar ; once a nightingale 
 eang her love-song with a music of passionate pain. There was no 
 noise of life in the ^eat forests without ; there was none her© in 
 the moonlit banqueting-hall. 
 
) 88 Chandos. 
 
 The -wind freshened as the day drew near> blowing through the 
 
 vastness of the forsaken chambers down the aisles of the porphyry 
 columns : its cooler breath breathed on him and revived him ; he 
 atirred with a shuddering sigh. His limbs were stiff and paralysed ; 
 his blood seemed frozen ; the warm air around felt chill as a tomb. 
 He rose with difficulty, and di-agged himself, like a man crippled 
 with age, across the threshold that his steps should never repass. 
 The faint light of the young day was breaking, and shed a colder, 
 grayer hue on all its splendour, from which the white majesty of 
 the sculptui'e rose, like a spectre keeping silent witness over the 
 abandoned solitude. 
 
 Thus, with his head bowed, and in his step the slow, laborious, 
 feeble effort of bodily prostration, he passed onwai'd,— onward 
 through all that never again could his eyes look upon, save in such 
 remembrance as di'eams lend to sleep, to mock the waking of despair, 
 — onward through the mighty entrance-hall, in which the silence 
 as of death reigned, where the steel tramp of the soldiers of the king 
 had once re-echoed to its vaulted roof. 
 
 He looked back, in longing as agonised, in thirst as terrible, in 
 yearning as speechless in its love as that with which eyes look back- 
 ward to the bier in which all that made life worth its living to them 
 lies sightless, senseless, and for ever lost. He looked back once, — 
 in such a gaze as men upon the scaffold give to the fairness of earth 
 and the brilliance of sunlight that they shall never gaze upon again. 
 Then the doors closed on him with a hollow, sullen sound ; he was 
 diiven out to exile, and his place would know him no more. 
 
 CHAPTER Vni 
 
 THE CEOWD IN THE COUR DES PHINCES. 
 
 With the day after his last entertainment, the ruin, so sudden and 
 
 so vast, had been rumoui^ed on the town. 
 
 Convulsed with amaze, aghast with indignation, indignant in in- 
 credulity, the world at first refused to believe it ; persuaded of its 
 truth, it went as nearly mad with excitement as so languid and 
 poUto a world could. 
 
 Well as he had entertained the world, he had never, on the whole. 
 so richly banqueted it as now, when it could surfeit itself upon a 
 calamity so astounding. It was grateful to all, which no good 
 news could ever claim to be, — the story was so utterly undreamt of, 
 so perfectly complete, without a flaw to make it less terrible, a 
 lo<^hole to make it less dark. 
 
 It burst upon the town like the bursting of a sheU. In its first 
 rumour it was utterly discr(<dited. ** Absurd 1 Had they Tiot been 
 at his ball last idght ? Hail not every one seen him at the new 
 opera? Euined? — preposterous! He could never be iiiined. They 
 knew better." 
 
The Crowd in the Cour des Princes. 
 
 Then, when the truth became indisputable, gossip-mongera quar- 
 relled for it as a flock of street- sparrows quarrel for a crumb of 
 bread ; and the town felt virtuous and outraged. To have been led 
 into offering such clouds of incense, year after year, to a man who 
 aU the while was on the eve of bankruptcy. Gourmets were in 
 despair, — there would be no such dinners elsewhere ; and club-wits 
 were in paradise, — there could be no dearth of a topic. Ladies 
 fainted with grief, and revived to wonder if his Limoges-ware would 
 be sold, and wept their bright eyes dim, to clear them again with 
 eager speculation as to the fate of the Clarencieux diamonds ; divi- 
 ded interests reigned together in their hearts : it was agonising, it 
 was terrible ; no one would ever give them such fetes, but it was 
 possible — all clouds have their silver lining — that the Chandoa 
 jewels perhaps might come into the market ! 
 
 The Countess de la Vivarol set her deUcate teeth as she heard 
 of it, 
 
 *'I hate him; I have my vengeance. I ought to rejoice," she 
 thought . ** and yet " And yet in solitude her tears fell. 
 
 "He is ruined? Well, I have helped to do it," said Flora de 
 rOrme, with ^ay seK-accusation. 
 
 ** What a pity ! " lamented Claire Eahel. ** The art of opera- 
 euppers will perish with him." 
 
 ''There is an overruling Providence," sighed the worldly- 
 holies ; *' his books are not fit to be read. Genius ?— yes, no doubt ; 
 but what is genius without principle ? " 
 
 * * Died game," said a Guardsman. * ' By George, one saw nothing 
 last night." 
 
 ''Always eccentric," hinted a club-lounger. "A little mad, 
 I think; and, on my word, it's the most charitable thing to 
 suppose." 
 
 "Deceived as shamefully; acted most dishonourably," wept 
 Lady Chesterton, to her allies. "My sister's peace is ruined for 
 ever ; indeed, I fear for her very life. But we may bo thaukfiJ 
 perhaps for even this terrible dIow : it may have saved more. 
 What happiness could she have looked for with a gambler, a liber- 
 tine, a free-thinker, however brilliant his career ?" 
 
 Two or three women — notably one beautiful Eoman princess, 
 with the splendour of Eome in her eyes — suffered passionately in 
 their solitude, and thought, wearily pushing off their weighty hair 
 from their brows, " / would have gone with him to his beggary." 
 
 For the rest, the world talked itself out of breath over its lost 
 leader's fall, and picked the story of his calamity as a carrion picks 
 the bones of the dead camel. It flavoured their white soups, was 
 the choicest olives to their wines, spared them silent moments, let 
 the dull seem witty if he brought a piquant addition to it, and 
 gave a lulling morphine to the pangs of jealous vanity. The world 
 was perfectly certain, of course, that the assertion of ignorance 
 was merely a blind, and that they had been wittingly duped many 
 years. A man run through a fine fortune without knowing it ? — 
 ridiculons ! And tiie world began also, as Trevenna prophesied, to 
 find out that " Luci ece " was very immoral 
 
lOo Chandos. 
 
 Thus the babble busied itself over the wreck of a life, denying 
 it even that sanctity of solitude which even barbarians have con- 
 ceded to calamity, and exposing it far and wide in those pillories 
 where no adversity can veil, no misery can hallow, no dignity 
 beneath misfortune can avail to shield those once given over to the 
 mercy of insatiate tongues. 
 
 They were shocked, grieved, horrified, _ most compassionately 
 sympathetic, of course ; but tiiey were quite of opinion that the 
 idol they had followed had been utterly worthless, and began to 
 discuss with unanimous vivacity the chances of who would be most 
 likely to secure the prize of that inimitable genius Dubosc. It was 
 perhaps regarded as almost the cruellest stroke of the whole fearful 
 affair when the fact oozed out that the celebrated chef alleged his 
 spirit to be broken, and announced his intention of retiring for the 
 rest of his days to a villa at Auteuil, there to devote his mind pri- 
 marily in uninterrupted study, to indite a work which should 
 annihilate Brillat-Savarin, and become the eternal Libro d'Oro of 
 gastronomists. 
 
 The world, altogether, was harshly treated. ^ There was no scandal 
 or crime in the story of ruin, — which omission rendered it curry 
 without its cayenne ; and the great coveted master — Dubosc — was 
 lost to it. It could have lived without its late idol well enough, but 
 it could not be reconciled to living without his cook. So it said 
 one De Profimdis over the virtually dead man, and turned to his 
 sales, much as it would have turned from his tomb to his cata- 
 logues. 
 
 He was ruined, and they had been deceived ; it was frightfully 
 shocking, of course ; but meanwhile the virtuosi felt curious about 
 the Quercia terra-cottas and the Fragonard medallions , turf-men 
 could not but congratulate each other that the famous Clarencieux 
 strains would become public property; dilettanti thought of the 
 superb Titians and exquisite Petits Maitres they had envied so 
 long ; Pall Mall loungers rumoured of his cabinets of cigars, and 
 epicui-es 1» .nged to read the catalogue of his Comet, his Eegency, 
 and his Imperial growth wines ; whilst ladies comforted themselves 
 for their darling's loss by projects for secui"in^ his Delia Eobbia 
 ware, his Evangeliarium in conical letters, enriched with crystals 
 en cahoclwn, his Cellini vases, or his Pompadour cabinets. He had 
 amused them, no doubt, far more brilliantly than any other ever 
 would do ; but, since he was gone, it was as well to console them- 
 selves with his collections. Chandos before had entertained but 
 his order ; now he furnished entertainment for all the world. 
 
 "VvTien the palace-gates were opened in the raw grey of the 
 morning, and the Poissardes rushed in, eager, envious, insatiate, 
 devouring, filling the Gour des Princes, what matter to them that 
 the privacy of Versailles had never before been broken save by 
 laughter and music, and the soft fall of women's steps and the 
 glitter of a throng of nobles ? — what matter that Calamity held the 
 thi'one-room, that a mighty adversity had set its seal of sanctity 
 upon the threshold ? Like the Poissardes in the Cour des Princes, 
 the crowds rivshed to enjoy the ruin of the leader of fashion, and 
 
The Crowd in the Cour des Princes. igi 
 
 gave not one thouglit to the fate of the discrowned. His palacea 
 were theirs to wreck and to burn as they would ; they pillaged 
 with both hands. 
 
 Moreover, as Philippe Egalite, if history bewray him not (which, 
 sooth to say, it often does), took a latent pleasure in that rifling of 
 his house, in that destruction of his order, and went up to see the 
 crowd thron^g through the dismantled j)alace-chambers with a 
 smile on his lips, and his little cane swinging lightly between his 
 fingers, to see the annihilation of the Eldest-born, to see the root- 
 ing up and trampling down of the White Lilies, even like Mon- 
 scigneur d'Orleans, some there were of his own relatives, of his 
 own rank, who came up to watch the spoliation, and to view the 
 wreckers among the household treasures of the fallen man, with i 
 certain sense of gratification, with a certain self-congratulatory 
 remembrance that he had most inconveniently outshone them. 
 
 The comet was quenched in the blackness of darkness. Well,, on 
 the whole, the stars felt they showed better. 
 
 Then the papers, too, took up the theme, and embellished it in 
 leaderb and notes of the week, and the Ilypercritic recanted, and 
 found the tone of " Lucrece " most unhealthy. 
 
 '*Dteu! how droll an end to his royalty! It is horrible, and 
 yet it's amusing," said Flora do I'Ornie, casting herself down, on 
 the day of the first view, on one of the couches in his own room, 
 while strangers stared up at the painted ceiling, tossed [over his 
 portfolios, appraised the hric-h-hrac, wondered at the Daphne, and 
 talked that the French sovereign had bought all the Old Masters. 
 What Demi-Monde said openly, a higher and more delicate Monde 
 thought secretly, — a point of coincidence common betwixt the two. 
 
 The world found it amusing, this discrowning and disrobing of 
 its idol. His treasui-es were scattered far and wide ; his favourite 
 gems were numbered in lots ; his pictuies were borne from barren 
 walls to hang under other roofs and in other lands ; the Daphne 
 was torn from her rose-hued shiine to pass to a Rusbian palace ; 
 the Danaid was bought by an American fiu'-dealer to go to his 
 mansion in the Fifth Avenue ; the^ plate was bought by the greac 
 jewellers to be remelted; the Circassian girls wore hiied by a 
 French due ; the Park Lane house was let to strangers, — now 
 millionaires of Melbourne -made fortunes, — who had the painted 
 ceiling gilded over, the winter garden changed into a covered glass 
 building for skittles, and the studio turned into a lumber-closet. 
 
 The world had followed him, worshipped him, caressed, quoted, 
 courted, adored him ; but when his catalogues closed, his interest 
 for it had passed away. His closest friends wore not altogether 
 sorry to have his Titians in their galleries, his clarets in the^ 
 cellars, the Clarencieux breed in their racing establishments, an§ 
 to feel that one who had eclipsed them had passed out of sight, 
 Hjs ruin was a nine-days' wonder ; then a peeress ran away with 
 a famous Tenor, and usurped the attention of society. Women 
 taught themselves a pretty blush when that shocking word ' ' Lucrece ' 
 was spoken of^ Mid men laid bets at evens tlmt he had kiUe<^ 
 himself. 
 
tp2 Chandos. 
 
 Tho world indeed felt that such an end for the tragedy was due 
 to it, especially as it had been acutely disappointed in the fate of 
 Qaroucieux. 
 
 The summer days found Trevenna at the place that was lost for 
 ever to the great race which had reigned there since the thrones of 
 Eufus and Beauclerc. Ostensibly he was there in a self-imposed 
 devotion to his ruined friend's interests, keeping watch and ward 
 over the spoilers. Indeed, the world altogether gave Trevenna 
 credit for behaving very admirably in the matter, — -for showing an 
 excellent spiiit throughout. Society naturally could not doubt his 
 regret for a man with whom he had dined almost every day of his 
 life, and began to discover that he was a very sensible and very 
 entertaining person : he spoke with so much good feeling, and yet 
 with so much just discrimination, of his friend's self-destruction. 
 
 It was thought, too, very delicate in him that, after the first 
 shock of the town, he withdrew himself as much as possible to 
 Clarencieux, to avoid hearing the misfortune discussed, and to 
 guard, as far as he could, the conduct of the sales from dishonesty. 
 Of course he had no power, as he said; still, if there were any 
 residue, he should too gladly save it for his lost friend, though no 
 one knew whither that friend had gone ; and, at all events, it was 
 as well to keep some note of tho creditors' proceedings. In truth, 
 in all his life Trevenna had never enjoyed himself so thoroughly. 
 
 To lounge through the porphyry chamber, with a baiJifi' eating 
 Ilia luncheon under the coronet of the last Marquis, to saunter 
 thi'ough the portrait-gallery and hear dealers appraise the Lelys 
 and the Lawrences, the Vandykes and the Jamesones, to ride 
 through the forests and know they would soon be felled as bare as 
 a plateau, to feel his horse's hoofs sink into the rose and lilac 
 heather-blooms and think how building lots would soon crush all 
 that flower-fi^agrance out of sight, to look across from the deer park 
 over the sea and muse how the mighty herds would be diiveu out 
 and dispersed, while scaffoldings of bathing-hotels would riso to 
 front the waters where now no step stirred the ospreys and no 
 sound scared the silver-gulls, — this was Trevenna's paradise, — the 
 paradise he had set himself to gain ever since the oath ho had 
 sworn in his childish vengeance, standing in the streets of West- 
 minster. Hannibal-like, he had sworn in his boyhood to sack the 
 citadel of his foes ; more fortunate than Hannibal, he had seen his 
 Rome fall. 
 
 All the cruellest traces of ruin were those which brought him 
 most closely home the unction of his success the writing-table 
 strewn just as the pen had last been thrown down ; the studio, with 
 the unfinished picture on the easel ; the statues with their snow- 
 white limbs smutched by the dirty fingers of appraisers; the 
 treasures which had been the gift of monarchs noted down at their 
 net value ; the volumes that were the collections of centuries num- 
 bered and ticketed in lots ; the rose-terraces, with all their luxuriance 
 (4 bloppom. their perfect scidpture» their summer sunlight, filled 
 
The Croud in the Cour des Princes. 193 
 
 with the gathering of traders, Jews, and brokers: — these wer« 
 the things that brought to him the full realisation of his uttermost 
 desires. 
 
 " We should put the escutcheon up, and paint * Ichabod ' under 
 it : the glory has gone from your house, my superb aristocrats ! " 
 thought he, as he lounged down the facade of the building ; and, 
 but that it would have looked a strange lament for his ruined friend, 
 he could have enjoyed doing that bit of buffoonery himself. Like 
 many men of strong will and indomitable endurance, — like Crom- 
 well, and Napoleon, and Frederick, — he had a dash of the broad 
 jester in him, a love of comic, farcical bathos ; it enters largely 
 into many of the most powerful characters. For sheer school-boy, 
 devil-may-care love and zest in the devastation, he could have 
 taken a brush himself and painted *'Sic transit" on the white 
 pedestal of the minister's statue ; for he was very human in his 
 Mephistophelism, and jovial, almost, in the old rich Hellenic sense 
 in his animal spirits. Besides, he had worn a curb so long ; it was 
 a delicious sensation to be utterly free and utterly victorious. 
 
 A good many of those into whose hands Clarencieux had fallen 
 had made their camp there for a day or so, whilst the valuation 
 was being made. It was given over to many masters ; it had none 
 in especial. Trevenna took his quarters there unmolested. Ha 
 was, of course, closely allied with the lawyers, familiar for years 
 with the agents ; and he had a pleasant way with him that made 
 him welcome even to those whom ostensibly he came to inspect 
 and control. He occupied the rooms Chandos had himself 
 always used — that suite of the Greuze chambers looking out on the 
 deer-park ; and as he stretched his limbs on the bed, under the 
 costly canopy of silk and lace and golden broideries, he could say 
 to himself, what few ever can say, * ' I have accomplished the dreams 
 of my youth." He did not say so, so poetically ; but he thought^ 
 with a laugh of self-congratulation, — 
 
 " Which of us is the victor now ? " 
 
 And deeper than that jesting triumph, more intense in exultation, 
 more exhaustless in sovereign supremacy, was the sense in him of 
 having struck down for ever the aristocrat he had hated, and of 
 having alone, unaided, sheerly by force of his own masterly intel- 
 ligence and his own matchless wit, pioneered himself into a roa^ 
 on which he would distance the patrician he had so long and sa 
 futilely envied, and mount higher and higher, till he fiUed th<^ 
 void and ascended the throne from which he had flung down hi» 
 rival. 
 
 Thought of remorse, touch of self-condemnation, there were none 
 in him ; he had hugged what he deemed his own wrong till he had 
 learned to look on treachery as a legitimate shield, and on chicanery 
 as a legitimate weapon. Moreover, he was of a bright, world-wise, 
 unerring, unscrupulous strength of nature, that never succumbed 
 to weakness and was never tainted by after-doubt. 
 
 That this nature was also one that no benefit could soften, no 
 gratitude warm, was the most damning thing in the close- wrought 
 Kteel of its formation. o 
 
f9v Chandos, 
 
 The thii'd day of his stay in the Greuze suite, he sat at dinner 
 with the land- steward and one of the late lawyers of the ruinee: 
 house. He was popular with business men of every class, though 
 they sometimes shirked his pungent knowledge of them. 
 
 The confusion that reigned in the building pleased him; he 
 would have liked to have seen the whole stripped and gutted by 
 fire, if he could ; he would have watched the leaping flames devour 
 Clarencieux as the Eomans watched them devour the fair palace-walls 
 of the city of the Barca brood. The old servants who came to him, 
 homeless, with tears running down their cheeks, thinking little of 
 their own fortunes, but begging him to tell them if he knew aught 
 of their beloved lord; the weary, dejected faces of the keepers and 
 the tenants when he met them in the shadowy woods, the emotion 
 with which strong men shook like women as they spoke of the 
 master they had lost, — all these touched him not a whit. They 
 jingered him, because there was one throne from which he could not 
 oust Chandos — the hearts of his people ; but they touched him not 
 a second. And in like manner the desolation and confusion of the 
 household pleased him ; and he would rather have seen a broker 
 cracking a bottle of rum at the ebony tables of the banqueting- 
 room, than he would have sat there to be entertained with all the 
 sovereigns of Christendom. He had never enjoyed himself more 
 than as he leaned back in the Louis Quinze arm-chaii* that Chandos 
 had used to occupy, pufi'ed his smoke into the fair eyes of the 
 French painter's women, and ate his cutlet off the gold plate with 
 the arms of Clarencieux raised in bas-relief upon it, which would 
 soon pass to a miUionaire's ormolu buffet or be melted down in the 
 silversmith's smelting-room. 
 
 As he sat there, the crash of wheels driven at a gallop ground the 
 avenue-road beneath the windows ; a carriage swept round and 
 paused. Silence followed. " Is it Esau come back to look at his 
 lost land ? " thought Trevenna. 
 
 As the thought crossed him, the door of the Greuze cabinet was 
 flung open, the Due d'Orv'Vle strode in, his frank face flushed, his 
 chestnut hair— just dashed with a white thread here and there- 
 tossed back disordered, his hazel eyes aflame. 
 
 "Where is Chandos?" 
 
 His mellow voice rang out almost in the fierceness of a challenge. 
 He entered without any of the ceremony customarily shown his 
 rank, and without any of the formalities of greeting : '* Ze fou 
 d'Orvdle,'' as his world called him, disdained both ceremonies and 
 formalities. 
 
 Trevenna rose and received him with that informal indifference 
 with which (it was his best and highest point) he received a prince 
 as unembarrassedly as he would have done a sweep. Indeed, there 
 was something grand and true in his intense democratic scorn foi 
 titular differences, if he had not stifled his democracy when it 
 was expedient, as he courted his hated aristocrats when it w^ 
 lucrative. 
 
 ' Wherft is Ohandos ?" repeated D'Orvale, imperiously. 
 
The Crowd in the Cour de.s Princes. 3^ 
 
 *' Nobody knows, M. le Due," returned Trevenna. •*! suppose 
 you will have heard " 
 
 Philippe d'Orvale stopped him with a passionate Parisian oath, 
 and struck his right hand on the console by which he stood, till the 
 room rang with the echo. 
 
 ** Heard ? Yes, I have heard. The news reached me in Eussia. 
 I have travelled night and day since, without stopping,— though 
 till I reached England I believed the tale the blackest falsehood ever 
 spawned. You do not know where he is gone ?" 
 
 "Nobody does, I have said, M. le Due," rejoined Trevenna, u 
 little impatiently. He held the French prince in profound derision, 
 as a man who, having the chance to rule half the continent had he 
 chosen, spent all his substance on cafe-singers and posture- dancers. 
 '' He is gone, I am sorry to say ; and the world expects him to send 
 it a sensational suicide." 
 
 The brown eyes of Due Philippe, so kindly and so full of gaiety 
 and mirth at other times, grew full of ominous wrath ; his colossal 
 strength, that stood unimpaired all the wild excesses of his life, 
 towered in the light against the violet hangings of the cabinet ; he 
 faced Trevenna with a superb disdain, mingled with the impatient 
 
 frief that his face, mobile as a woman's and transparent as a child's, 
 etrayed without disguise. 
 
 " What ! what ! Did every one forsake him in a single day P" 
 
 Trevenna shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 "Men are rats, monseigneur, — scurry towards a full granary, 
 and scamper away from a rotting house. As for the forsaking, I don't 
 know about that. He gave a ball one night, and let the town hear 
 next day he was ail-but bankrupt ; he made a present of every- 
 thing to his creditors, and disappeared another night, God knows 
 where. Now, a man who does that don't please society." 
 
 If Philippe d'Orvale had doubted the fate that had befallen his 
 friend, he could have doubted no longer when those words were 
 spoken, under the roof of Clarencieux, by the man Chandos had 
 protected, befriended, and benefited. 
 
 He shook with rage as he heard; the reckless and dissolute 
 prince-Bohemian might have many vices, but he had not the most 
 dastardly vice on earth : he had no desertion for the fallen. 
 
 " You were his debtor, sir ; of course you are but a time-server ! " 
 he said, with the haughty contempt of the VieiUe Cour on his fine 
 lips, the noblesse spirit waking in him, utterly as it was accused of 
 slumbering whilst he drank with buffo-singers, laughed with poli- 
 chineUe-showmen, danced the mad Eigolboche and Cancan at the 
 Chateau Eouge, and learned their argot de la Halle oyster-feastin^ 
 with blooming Poissardes, in all his headlong Paris orgies. " It ia 
 time, then, all this accursed history that I hear in every mouth ? " 
 
 " Only too true," said Trevenna, more gravely. He would have 
 rather had any eyes upon him than those of this devil-may-care 
 and dauntless noble, this eccentric and hare-brained originai, this 
 l&n efnfant of the Coulisses and the Chaumidre, whom Europe bad 
 orouou&oed insane tot iuTitiag Barbary apes to brwlrftirt; lor h» 
 
•)n6 Chandos. 
 
 knew how Philippe d'Orvale loved his friend. " Only too true, 
 M. le Due. Chandos has lost everything, and gone, no one knows 
 whither ; out of England, no doubt. I* was very suddenly that 
 the crash came at last,— though, of course, the extravagance ol 
 years had long led up to it." , ^ ii ii. 
 
 Philippe d'Orvale swung from him, and turned to the other men 
 with the grand disdain with which he would have turned on to the 
 Marseillaise swarming on the Terrasse des Feuillans, had he lived 
 in the days of the Lilies. 
 
 '* You were all the creatures of his bounty. Can you serve him 
 no better way than by sitting drinking his wines in his chambers ? 
 Could he not be gone one hour before you carrion-crows came to 
 pick your feast ? Answer me in a word— What has been done to 
 save him?" . , , , , 
 
 "To save him!" echoed Trevenna, whose imperturbable non- 
 chalance and good humour alone left him able to answer the sudden 
 attack of the fiery Southern noble, which had paralyzed his com- 
 panions. '• Everything, M. le Due, that tact and good sense could 
 suggest. But you cannot dam up an avalanche once on its down- 
 ward road : no mortal skill could arrest his ruin. It was far too 
 vast, too complete." 
 
 Philippe d'Orvale seemed as though he heard nothmg ; he stood 
 there in his Herculean stature, -svith his fiery glance flashing on the 
 men before him, his lips drawn into a close tight line under the 
 chestnut shower of his beard. So only had they set once before, 
 when he had seen a young giil struck and kicked by her owners on 
 a winter's night outside the guingdte, where he had been as a 
 Pierrot to a barriere ball of ouvriers and grisettes ; and the man 
 who had beaten her till she moaned where she lay like a shot fawn, 
 had been felled down in the snow by a single crashing stroke fi-om 
 the arm in whoso veins ran the blood of French nobles who had 
 charged with Godefroi de Bouillon, and died with Bayard, and 
 fought at Ivry under the White Plume. 
 
 " What is left him?" he asked curtly. His breath came short 
 and sharply drawn. 
 
 "Nothing, monseigneur." 
 
 Trevenna felt his hate rising against this haughty roysterer, this 
 sobered reveller, who came to challenge the hopelessness and the 
 completeness of the devastation he had wi'ought. He could not 
 resist the malicious pleasure of standing there face to face with the 
 aristocrat-ally, the titled boon- companion of the ruined man, and 
 dinning in his ear the total beggary that had fallen on his favourite 
 and his friend. 
 
 '* Nothing ! Not a shilling ! " he repeated, with the same relish 
 with which a hound tuins his tongue over his lips after a savoury, 
 chirsty plunge of his fangs inU> the blood he is allowed to taste. 
 * * ' Nothing ! ' Is this place gone ? " 
 " It is going by auction, M. le Due." 
 
 The curt, caustic complacency of the answer was not to ha 
 .•estrained for aU. that prudence could suggest. 
 ' <<Ck>odGodI what he has suffered I" 
 
The Crowd in the Cour des Princes, ipjf 
 
 The words broke unconsciously from D'Orv^le's lips : he kne\v 
 how he bad suflPered. In the moment he almost suflPered as much. 
 Due Philippe was reckless, wayward, wasteful of the goods of the 
 earth and the gifts of his brain, was eccentric to the verge of 
 insanity, and fooled away his mature years in the follies of a 
 Eochester, in the orgiea of a Sheridan ; but he had a generosity as 
 wide and a heart as warm as the stretch of his Southern lauds, as 
 the light of his Southern suns. For a moment the grief on him 
 had the mastery ; then, shaking his hair as a lion shakes its tawny 
 mane, he dashed his hand down again on the marble breadth of the 
 console. 
 
 '* Sold ? By the heaven above us, never ! " 
 
 Trevenna bowed with a tinge of ironic insolence of which he was 
 scarcely aware himself. 
 
 •' It would be happy if monseigneur could make his words good ; 
 but, unfortunately, creditors are stubborn things. Clarencieux ia 
 no longer our poor friend's, but belongs to his claimants. It will 
 be parcelled out by the auctioneer's hammer." 
 
 '' Never!'' 
 
 •♦ With every respect, M. le Due, for your very strong negative, I 
 fear it is quite impossible that it can take effect. Clarencieux is 
 doomed I" 
 
 D'Orvale flashed his glance over him with that mute scorn which 
 his grandfather had given to Sanson when he sauntered up the 
 steps of the guillotine as calmly as he had gone through a minuet 
 with Marie iGitoinette or Lamballe. 
 
 ** You triumph in your patron's advoi'jity, sir. That is but 
 inevitable : eveiy jackal is content when the lion falls I By the 
 God above us, I tell you Clarencieux shall not be bartered !" 
 
 Trevenna shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 •* With every deference, M. le Due, your language, though you 
 are a prince, is not polite. With regard to Clarencieux * 
 
 " It shall be mine." 
 
 The words were said as Philippe d'Orvale could say such when 
 he chose, with a dignity that none could have surpassed, with a 
 sovereigntv that sat finely on him in its negligent ease, with a force 
 of will which now and then flashed out of his mad caprices and his 
 fantastic vagaries, and showed what this man might have been had 
 he so willed to lead the world instead of to be the hero of a night's 
 wild masking, the king of a score of wine-cup rioters. 
 
 * ' Yours ? Impossible ! " 
 
 Trevenna was startled almost into self-betrayal of the thirst that 
 was upon him for the dispersion and destruction of the lands of 
 Clarencieux, — of the terror that seized him lest, by some mischance, 
 any portion of the bitterness of his fate should be spared to Chandos, 
 any fragment of the home he had been exiled from be saved frora 
 ignominy and outrage. 
 
 "Impossible?" echoed Philippe d'Orvale. **No one ever says 
 the word to me ! " 
 
 There was all the superb defiance of the old nobles of Versailles, 
 fdl the disdainful omnipotence of the ancien regime, in the reply. 
 
i^ Cnandos. 
 
 When he would, he coulr! exert his command as imperioualy, as 
 intolerantly, as any marshal of Louis Quinze. 
 
 ** Indeed ! I fear his creditors will say it." 
 
 Trevenna could pause neither for the courtesies of custom noi 
 the ceremonies to rank ; he could have killed, if a glance would 
 have slain, this loathed French noble, who, with his seigneui-'s 
 sympathies and his aristocrat's loyalty to his order and his friend, 
 came to arrest the consummation of that unsurpassed edifice oi 
 vengeance which he had erected, at such labour and with such 
 genius, to crush the might of Clarencieux and lie heavy above a 
 Buicide's grave. 
 
 A fierce oath, passionate as a tornado, broke from under the 
 sweeping beard of Due Philippe where he stood. But that hia 
 Honour forbade him to strike a man whom his patrician pride 
 could not have met and satisfied as his equal, he could have dashed 
 Trevenna down on the hearth he insulted, with a single blow of 
 his stalwart right hand. 
 
 " Say it f"' he repeated. ** By God, then, they shall not. What ! 
 Parcel his lands out among thieves ? Let a broker be master here 
 in his stead ? Sell his home to some trader's new gold ? Never. 
 while there is life left in me ! never, if my o-^ti castles are mort- 
 gaged over my head to get the money they ask ! Where is your 
 country's gratitude, that they let his father's memory go pawn ? 
 Where are all those he benefited, that there ia not a voice lifted 
 against such shame ?" 
 
 Trevenna shrugged his shoulders. That this man was a prince 
 and a millionaire whom he bearded he cared not two straws : he 
 only remembered Philippe d'Orvale as a madman with whose out- 
 rageous follies all Eui'ope had rung ; he only remembered him as 
 one who clung to the idol the world had dethroned, and who 
 threatened to tear down the topmost laurel-vrreath with which his 
 own hand had crowned his labour of vengeance. 
 
 " Monseigneur d'Orvale," he said, with that malicious banter 
 which Trevenna could no more hold back in his wrath than the 
 leopard in his will hold back his claws, " if the country spent its 
 money on every great man's extravagant scions, it would have 
 Bome uncommonly uncomfortable legacies. It don't even pay its 
 own debt ; deuce take me if I can see why it should pay Chandos' 
 because his father once was First Lord of its Treasury, and he has 
 seen fit to squander as pretty a property as ever was made ducks 
 and di-akes of for pictures and dinners and women. As for those 
 he benefited, — granted they're a good many ; but if a lot of artists, 
 and singers, and dancers, and shabby boys who think themselves 
 Shakspeares, and bearded Bohemians who swig beer while they 
 boast themselves Raphaels, were all to club together to help him 
 with a shilling subscription, I don't suppose they'd manage to buy 
 back much more than a shelf of his yellow French novels. I'm 
 as sorry for him as you can be (you can't doubt my sincerity ; I 
 shall never get such good dinners) ; but I candidly confess I don't 
 see, and can't see, why, just because he has been a fool and a 
 ppendthrift, a whole nation of sane people are bound to rush to Ivis 
 
The Crowd in the Cour dfs Princes. I9<r 
 
 lescne with their purses wide open. As he sowed, so he reaps , 
 nobody can complain of that." 
 
 Due Philippe shook in all his mighty limbs ; and as he looker! 
 at the speaker planted there lightly, firmly, with his feet apart and 
 thd Insolence of triumph irrepressibly spoken in his face and hU 
 attitude, he could have leaped forward like a staghound, and shaken 
 all the life out of him with a single gripe. It was with a mighty 
 effort that he kept the longing in. 
 
 ** If you reap as you sow, M. Trevenna, you will have a fine 
 harvest of woven hemp ! " he said, curtly, in the depths of his brown 
 beard, as he swung with an undisguised loathing from him, and 
 turned towards the other men, who, mute with astonishment, and 
 out of deference for the rank of the mad noble who had broken in 
 on them thus, stood passive. *' You are his men of business, are 
 you not ? — wreckers enriched by the flotsam and jetsam you save 
 out of his shipwi-eck ? Listen to me, then. Whoever they be, or 
 however his creditors hold this place, it shall be mine. Whatever 
 price they ask, whatever liabilities be on it, I will give them and 
 I wiU discharge. Let them name the most extravagant their 
 extortion can grasp at, it shall not be checked ; I will meet it. I 
 will buy Clarencieux as it is, from its turrets to its moorlands ; 
 do you hear ? Not a tree shall be touched, not a picture be moved, 
 not a stone be displaced. It shall be mine. And, hark you here . 
 I offer them their own terms, — all their greed can crave or fancy ; 
 but tell them this, on the word of Philippe d'Orvale, that if they do 
 not part with it peaceably, if they do not send their hell-dogs out 
 of its places and take the bidding I give them, I will so blast their 
 names through Europe that their trade and their credit shall be 
 gone for ever, and they shall perish in worse beggary than this that 
 they have caused. Tell them that,— Europe can let them know in 
 what fashion I keep my oaths,--and with to-morrow make Claren- 
 cieux mine." 
 
 The passionate words quivered out on the silence of the painted 
 chamber, furious as a hound's bay, firm and ringing as an army's 
 sound to assault. Then, without another syllable, Philippe 
 d'Orvale swung round and strode out of the cabinet, his lion eyes 
 alight with a terrible menace, his lion's mane of hair tossed back. 
 He had said enough. When once he roused from his wild masque- 
 rades and his headlong Bohemianisr.i to use his leonine might 
 and to vindicate his princely blood, tk.re was not a man in all 
 the breadth of the nations that ever dared say nay to the " Mad 
 Duke." 
 
 He saved Clarencieux,— saved it from being sundered m a thou- 
 sand pieces and given over to the spoilers, though he could not 
 save iJie honour of its house, the ruin of its race. The world was 
 bitterly aggrieved, — it was deprived of so absorbing a theme, of so 
 precious a prize ; and Trevenna could have killed mm. 
 
 The pyramid of his vengeance had risen so perfectly, step by 
 step, without a flaw ; it was unbearable to him that the one stono 
 for its apex should be wanting, the one last Hne of the record .of 
 the trramphs engraved on it should be missing. He had swept all 
 
Chandot. 
 
 the herds away, leaving not one ; it was unendurable to him that 
 the last coveted ewe-lamb should alone have escaped him. He 
 had destroyed Chandos utterly, hopelessly, body and soul, as he 
 believed, — slain honour and genius and life in him, without a pause 
 in his success. It was intolerable to him that the last drop should 
 not crown the cup, that the green diadem of the Clarencieux woods 
 should wreathe its castle untouched, that the royalties of the exiled 
 race should be left in sanctified solitude, in lieu of being flung out 
 to the crowds and parcelled among the Marseillaise in the desolated 
 Courts of the Princes. 
 
 He had longed to see, had it been possible, the plough pass over 
 the lands and the harrow rake out every trace of the banished race ; 
 he had longed to see, if he could, the flame of the culturer licking 
 up all the beautiful, wild, useless wealth of heather and fern and 
 forest lilies ; he had longed to hear the hammers clang among the 
 woodland stillness, to watch the oaks crash down under the axe, to 
 behold the beauty crushed out under the iron roll and the timber 
 ecafi'olding of the new speculators, to know that the very place and 
 name and relics of the exiled lord were eff'aced and forgotten. 
 Through Philippe d'Orvale this last crowning luxury was denied. 
 
 Clarencieux, though he had driven from it the last of its race, 
 escaped him, — escaped the indignity, the oblivion, the desecration 
 he had planned to heap on it ; he had made its hearths desolate, 
 but his arm was held back from the final blow with which he had 
 planned to make them also dishonoured, and to raze their stones 
 as though no fires had ever burned there, — till sheep should have 
 grazed where kings had feasted, and wheat have waved where its 
 dead rulers had their graves. 
 
 Through Philippe d'Orv&le it was denied him. 
 
 Thus, some were faithful to the fallen idol : the sun-browned 
 men who toiled from dawn to evening among the seas of seeding 
 grass and the yellow oceans of the swelling com ; the crippled 
 dreamer whom his fellows thought an idiot that a child might lead ; 
 the reckless voluptuary, the prince-Bohemian, whom the world 
 called a madman and vested with every vice that libertines can 
 frame ; the dog whom human reason disdains as a brute without 
 speech : — those were faithful,— those only. But they were many, 
 as the world stands. 
 
 The two who were deadliest against him, and chiefest with- 
 out pity or mercy in his fall, were the man he had succoured with 
 his friendship and his gold, and the woman he had lo^nd and 
 
BOOK THE FOURTH. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 "FA0ILI8 DESCENSUS AVERNI." 
 
 It was far past midnight in Paris ; a chill 3% bitter winter's night, 
 in the turn of the going year ; a night without stars, in which the 
 enow drifted slowly down, and the homeless couched down shiver- 
 ing into a traitorous sleep, — a merciful sleep, from which they 
 would wake no more, — an endless sleep, to be yearned for passion- 
 ately when there can be no bread for the parching lips, if breath 
 linger in them, no peace for the aching eyes, if they wake again 
 to a world of want. 
 
 It was long past midnight in one of the gambling-dens which 
 mock the law in the hidden darkness of their secret haunts, — the 
 dens which no code will ever suppress, which no legislature will 
 ever prevent. Where any vice is demanded, there will be the 
 supply ; let every shape of forbiddance be exercised as it may, in 
 vain. Wherever men be hungered for their own ruin, there will 
 be also those who bring their ruin to them. 
 
 This was one of the worst hells in Paris, — the worst in Europe. 
 Men who dared venture nowhere else came here ; men on whom 
 the grasp of the law would be laid, were they seen, came here ; 
 men who, having exhausted every form of riot and debauchery, 
 had nothing left except the gamester's excitation, came here ; it- 
 embraced them all, and finished the wreck that other ruin had 
 begun. Other places allured with colour, with glitter, with enticing 
 temptations : this had none of these ; it allured with its own deadly 
 charm alone, it made its trade terribly naked and avowed ; it let 
 men come and stake their lives, and raked the stake in, and went 
 on without a pause ; it was a pandemoniac paradise only for those 
 already cursed. 
 
 It was hidden away in one of the foulest and most secret nests 
 in Paris ; its haunt was known to none save its frequenters, and 
 none so frequented it save those whom some criminal brand or 
 some desperate doom already had marked or claimed. Close at 
 hand to it, in an outer chamber, were the hot di'inks, the acrid 
 wines, the absinthe, and the opiates that were drunk down by ashen 
 lips and burning throats as though they were water ; these alone 
 broke the ceaseless tenor of the gambling ; these alone shared with 
 it the days and nights of those who plunged into the abysa it 
 
102 Chitndos, 
 
 opened 10/ them. Often all on through the dawn, and the noon, 
 and the day, the flaring gas-jets of its burners would be kept 
 alight : the crowd that filled its room would know nothing oi 
 time, — not know even that the sun had risen. The gay tumult of 
 the summer life of Paris would be waking and shining on all 
 around it in the clear light of the fresh hours ; and still here where 
 the sullen doors barred out all comers the gamesters would play on, 
 play on, till they dropped down dead- drunk, or reeled insensible 
 with want of food and drugs or nicotines. The Morgue had never 
 owed so many visitants to any place as it had owed to this ; tho 
 Bagne had never received so many desperadoes as it had received 
 from here ; the walls of Bicetre had never been so filled with 
 raving brainless lives, as it had been filled with by the haunters 
 of this den, hidden in the midst of curling crooked streets an<J 
 crowding roofs, like a viper's nest under the swathes of grass. 
 
 Those who owned it were never known ; the longest frequentei 
 of its room never knew who the bank was ; it was a secret pro- 
 found, impenetrable, — guarded as closely as its own existence was 
 guarded from the million eyes of the clairvoyant law. No one knew 
 that in two or three superb hotels, with fine carriages, fine dinners, 
 fine linen, with fashionable wives and blameless reputations, with 
 a high name on the Bourse and a reception at the Tuileries, dwelt, 
 in peace and plenty — the proprietors. 
 
 Does the world ever guess how a millionth part of the money 
 that fills it is made ? The world at large, never ! 
 
 It was far past midnight in the heU ; the gas- glare fell on tho 
 painted faces of unsexed women, and on the haggard brows of 
 men who had played on here all through the day and played on 
 through the night. The croupiers were relieved at intervals : the 
 gamblers never moved ; they hung there till the sheer physical 
 powers of life gave way, and famine forced them from the tables ; 
 stirless and breathless, only at long intervals rending themselves 
 from it to take the drugs and the stimulants that soddened their 
 senses, they were riveted there by one universal, irresistible fasci- 
 nation. Featui'es of every varied kind were seen in the gaudy 
 flare of the gas ; but they all wore the same look, — the thirsty, 
 sleepless, intense look of ravenous excitement. It was not the 
 polished serenity of fapliionable kursaals, the impassive languor of 
 aristocratic gaming-tables, the self-destruction, taken with a light 
 word, of the salles of Baden, of Homburg, of Monaco ; it was 
 gambling in all its unreined fever, in all its naked excitation, 
 in all its headlong delirium, in all "its aiid quest for wealth 
 midst ruin." 
 
 There is a vast error in which the world believes,— that game- 
 sters are moved by the lust of gain only, by the desire of greed, by 
 the longings of avarice. It is not so ; the money won, they toss it 
 back without an instant's pause, to risk its loss at venture. 
 Avarice is no part of the delirium which allures them with so 
 Bxhaustless a fascination ; the speU that binds them is the hazard. 
 Give a gamester thousands, he cares for the gold only to purchase 
 with it that delicious, feverish, intoxicating charm of chance. 
 
'* Facilis Descensus Averm. 3o> 
 
 There is a delight in its agony, a sweetness in its insanity, a 
 drunken, glorious intensity of sensation in its limitless swing 
 between a prince's treasures and a beggar's death, which lends 
 life a sense never known before, — rarely, indeed, once tasted, eyer 
 abandoned. 
 
 There was scarcely even a sound in the fatal place. Once now 
 and then an oath, a blasphemy, or a shuddering gasping breath 
 broke the charmied stillness, in which the click of the roulette -ball, 
 the rattle of the dice, or the rapid monotone of the croupiers 
 reigned otherwise alone. The room was crowded. Men who had 
 grown old and gray and palsied waiting on the caprices of the 
 colour, — men who had wasted on the framing of cabals intellects 
 that might have rivalled Newton's or Descartes', — men who had 
 consumed their youth in this madness, and, young yet, looked for 
 cjothing save a death in a hospital and a pauper's unowned grave, 
 —men who had flung away high birth, high gifts, high chances, 
 and came here to wear out the few last hours of dishonoured lives, 
 — men with eyes in which the wasted genius of a mighty mind 
 looked wistfully out through the bloodshot mists of a drunkard's 
 sight, — men who had the trackers of turf-law or of social law in 
 their trail, and, hiding for very life, knew no nest surer than this 
 foul one, — all these were here in the tawdry glitter of the flaring 
 gas-jets. And there were women, too, — some young, some 
 fearfully young, — loveless and rouged, and hacking bitter coughs, 
 or laughing ghastly laughs, playing, playing, playing insatiate, 
 with the thirsty, eager, devilish glare aching in their painted eyes 
 
 Among them stood Chandos. 
 
 The look which had set on his face the night that he had left 
 Clarencieux had never left it; its glorious beauty survived the 
 ravages of misery, the gaunt sleeplessness of a gamester's days, 
 the wreck of all greater, better, higher things in him. Nothing 
 could stamp it out utterly; but it had something more fearful 
 than any one of the other faces crowded round them. It survived 
 to show all that he had been, — to mark more utterly all he had 
 become. 
 
 For he had fallen very low. 
 
 He had met calamity greatly ; he had been tempted to sell his 
 honour for passion's sake, and he had repulsed the temptation ; he 
 had been allured to evade justice, and secure comparative peace, 
 by acting a lie to the world ; he had refused, and had given up all, 
 to remain with a stainless honesty and a conscience uncondemned. 
 He had done these things with a sudden power of will, a sudden 
 steel-knit strength of resolve, that had sprung in the instant of 
 their need, giants full-armed, from the voluptuous unheeding 
 indolence and indulgence of his life. But characters cannot change 
 in a day ; endurance may be forged hard in the flame of adversity, 
 but it will give way many a time first, and melt and writhe and 
 bend and break at last. When all had been done, all ended, all 
 eacrificed, all lost, the force which had sustained hi m had broken 
 ^own, the utter reaction followed. 
 The habits of his life had left him with no shield ; the temper ol 
 
ao4 
 
 Chandos. 
 
 his creeds had left him with no shelter, against the storm that had 
 burst over him. His only knowledge had been how to enjoy ; none 
 had ever taught him how to suffer. A limitless indulgence had 
 been the master of his existence; he had no comprehension oi 
 calamity. With latent greatness, he had dominant weakness ; aa 
 the limbs that lie ever on couches of down are enervated and sinew- 
 less, so his nature that had basked ever in the warmth and the 
 light of enjoyment, had no stamina to bear the crushing desolation 
 that struck all from his hands at one blow. 
 
 In the moment of emergence, of temptation, he had risen equal 
 to it, risen above it, and been great ; in the darkness that followed, 
 in the darkness in which he was driven out into exile, stripped, 
 mocked, abandoned, left in beggared solitude, to drift to his grave 
 as he would, he sank under the burden that he bore. A strong 
 man might have gone down powerless under the accumulated 
 anguish, the blasted devastation, of such a fate. He who had 
 known nothing but the caress of fortune from his birth, he who 
 had all the loaSiing of pain and of deformity of the Achaean nature, 
 he who had never felt a desire unfulfilled, a command unaccom- 
 plished, he who had been pliant to frailty, yielding to effeminacy, 
 could have no sustaining force to enable him to face and to con- 
 tend with the destruction that smote him to the earth. All who 
 had kissed his feet forsook him as though he were plague-stricken ; 
 there was little marvel that he forsook himself. 
 
 He seemed to walk like a blind man through a starless night ; 
 he had neither sight nor knowledge : all that was left to him was 
 the consciousness of misery, the power to suffer ; the power to en- 
 dure was dead. He drifted senselessly on, far on evil roads, far 
 towards the murder in him of all that he had once been. He lived 
 in infinite wretchedness, and the very memory of all better things 
 died out in him. There is no arrest in a downward road. In the 
 way of honour and honesty, and every holier thought and loftier 
 effort, life piles obstacles breast high ; but in descent there is no 
 barrier, down the ice-slope there is no pause, till the broken limba 
 are dashed to pieces in the black crevasse below. 
 
 In the sheer instinct for covert in which the hunted animal un- 
 consciously finds his lair, he had made his way to the safe solitude 
 and secrecy of a great city. He shunned every sign, every sight, 
 that could recall the world he had left to him, or him to it. The 
 place of his refuge was known to none ; it was hidden among the 
 innumerable roofs of a close quarter ; it was quitted only at night 
 or in the earliest gray of the morning, and quitted then only for 
 the gambling-dens. There was not a creatui-e with him or near him 
 that he had known or loved, save his dog. A burning fever con- 
 sumed hi in at times ; at all others he was sunk in a lethargy more 
 dangerous for his reason than even the oblivion of opium -ch-eams. 
 The loss of lands, of wealth, of power, he would have met with the 
 courage of race and of manhood ; it was the desertion of every 
 creatme he had aided, of eveiy life he had loved, it was the Judaa- 
 betrayal of all he had trusted, that had killed all strength and all 
 life in him. 
 
** Facilis Destensus Avernt,** %o^ 
 
 He lived in intense wretchednoss ; the little gold he had on hia 
 person was not so much as he had spent on a woman's bracelet, on 
 an hour's entertainment. The absolute fangs of want might be 
 upon him lq a single day. He who had feasted emperors more 
 brilliantly than they reigned in their own courts, and who had only 
 spoken a wish to have it fulfilled as by enchantment, might any 
 day want actually bread. Every thing around him, every thing 
 touched or seen or heard, was such as would have been loathsome 
 and unendurable to his voluptuous and fastidious habits a few 
 short weeks before : yet these he was barely conscious of ; he was 
 lost in the stupefaction of a misery too great to have any other 
 sense awake in it. Now and then he would glance with a shudder 
 round the places to which he wandered ; now and then he would 
 turn sickening from the food oflfered him ; more often all things 
 
 Eassed him unnoted, and in his eyes there came gi'aduaUy the lustre- 
 3SS dreamy vacancy which presages the rupture of the reason, the 
 dulling of the brain. For hours he would lie prostrated. When 
 he rose, it would only be to drag his limbs wearily out into the 
 night, and go to the gaming-hells, where intoxication as sure, and 
 even yet more deadly, was to be found, where alone he gained such 
 gold as sufficed to keep life in him, and to ^q him a stake to cast 
 again. 
 
 Strangely enough, the temptress favoured him. Hazard often 
 allures her prey with that merciless mercy, and fills his hands only 
 to hold him closer in hei joils. He won enough to keep life in him, 
 — such as life was now. 
 
 This was the issue to which his career had come ; this was the 
 fate to which he, who iu his bright visionary childhood had vowed 
 to rival in his nation's story the chivalrous honour of an Arthur's 
 fame, had come ; his pride trampled out, his genius diowned in 
 drugs, his waking hours consumed in the gambler's delirium, 
 almost all manhood slain in him. The Hebrew's thought was 
 right : his enemy's work on him was worse than murder. It was 
 a teiTible abasement, a terrible suiTender; it was frailty, cowardice, 
 suicide ; but the storm had beaten down on his once proud head 
 till it hung in a slave's shame. Existence had grown so hideous to 
 him that he sunk beneath its ceaseless torture, longing alone for 
 death. 
 
 Those who have from early years been tried in the fires of afilic- 
 tion may grow the sterner, firmer, more highly tempered for it, like 
 the wrought steel ; but those to whom it has been wholly unknown 
 in the soft sensuousness of a joyous life, stagger and fall swooning 
 at the first intolerable breath of its blasting furnace. 
 
 Chandos stood now amidst the crowd about the play-tables, in 
 companionship with much of all that was worst and most desperate 
 in Paris. He did not know them ; he scarcely knew how vile the 
 character of many round biTin was. His license had been the license 
 of a graceful Catullus ; his sins had been the soft sins of an elegant 
 Sardanapalus ; he knew nothing of the ignominy of great cities; 
 he knew nothing of the coarse criminality of such as those who 
 harboured &Dd gambled here. He had strayed to its haunt 
 
so6 Chandat 
 
 by chance; lie returned again and again for the sake of its 
 
 secrecy, its opium- drugged wines, its reckless play. He had nc 
 knowledge of the companions with whom he was thrown ; he was 
 too utterly lost in his own misery to note or to loathe them, whilst 
 they looked on, half awed, half curious, at one whom all Paris 
 knew by name and sight, whose history all knev/ also, as he came 
 among them day after day, night after night, vnth. that deathlesa 
 beauty, that inextinguishable grace left in nim, as they were left 
 in the slaughtered body of Alcibiades, to show how royal a blood 
 had run in his veins, how mighty, how majestic, how hopeless a 
 wreck was there. 
 
 Once one of them touched his arm,— a young girl, not twenty. 
 
 ** "Why are you here ? You are as beautiful as a god I You are 
 not like us — yet." 
 
 He looked at her with a dull vacancy, and answered nothing, as 
 he fiUed a glass with brandy. She thrust the opiate he had mixed 
 with it back to his hand. 
 
 ' ' Drink enough to kill yourself at once. Don't live to be what 
 you will be. Such as you go to a madhouse." 
 
 Her words di-eamily pierced thi^ough the semi-insensibility of his 
 brain : he set the opiate down imdrunk, — for that once. He thought 
 of the dead man who had bade him meet his fate, whatever his fate 
 became ; but the next moment he was again at the gaming-table, 
 the next moment only its mad tempting was remembered. 
 
 He never heeded what he won, what he lost, though he knew 
 that the very food of the next day hung in the hazard; he would 
 have blessed the famine that should have killed him. But he had 
 the gamester's instinct in him ; the gamester's peril alone gave him 
 an oblivious intoxication; he never left it, except when he wandered 
 out to some sleeping-place and flung himself down to sleep, well- 
 nigh as lifelessly as the dead sleep, houi's, perhaps days through. 
 
 So months had gone with him. The splendid strength and stamina 
 of his fi^ame resisted the ravages that were consuming them ; but 
 what was worse than the body perished : the mind decayed, swiftly, 
 surely. 
 
 The golden summer, the ruddy autumn, the bitterness of early 
 winter, had passed ; he noted no change of seasons ; night and day 
 were alike to him ; he only dully wondered how lon^ life would 
 curse him by leaving its throb in his heart, the breath in his Ups. 
 
 He had played thirty-six hours now at a stretch, among the 
 painted women and the haggard men who filled this pandemonium. 
 He had played on tiU he had lost all, — the only time that he had 
 ever done so ; the last franc was staked and swept awaj^. He stood 
 blankly gazing down at the tables ; he felt that the means of gain- 
 ing the one intoxication that was precious to him was gone, he had 
 no remembrance that it turned him on the streets a beggar. The 
 eager throngs, seeing the card pass without his stake being laid on 
 it, pushed fiercely, ravenously, to get his nearer place. He let 
 them take it, moving as a somnambulist, and made his way out 
 down the staircase and through Hiq low, masked side door that 
 aloBo lent adznittaaee to t^e gambUug-iooms : tiie feuje of Hie houfit^ 
 
" Facilis Descensus AvernV* 207 
 
 was merely a fruiterer's and a tobacconist's shops. He went out 
 meclianically ; he knew he must get more gold or go without this, 
 which had become the single craving necessitjr of life. _ Where ? 
 He who had owned the aristocracies of whole nations as his friends, 
 and had given to all who asked, as though the world were his, had 
 not a shilling now to get him bread. 
 
 He walked on aimlessly, unheeding the snow which poured down 
 on his bare head, the cutting north wind that blew like an ice-blast. 
 It was between three and four in the morning ; there was scarce 
 a soul abroad. In the quarter where he was few carriages ever 
 rolled, and the thieves and revellers who filled it were mostly 
 housed in some den or another in the inclement weather. The dog 
 followed him closely ; otherwise he was almost alone in the tortuous, 
 endless streets, whose windings ho took without knowing whither 
 they led him. The bitter rush of the wind lifted the masses of 
 his hair, the sleet drove in his eyes, the ^cold^ chilled him to the 
 bone ; he was adrift in the streets of Paris, without a sou to get 
 hiTTi food or bed, — he who a few months before had reigned there 
 in a splendour passing the splendour of princes ! 
 
 He longed for death,— longed as never man yet longed for life. 
 The unspeakable physical misery alone passed his strength ; to the 
 nerves that had shrimk fi'om pain, to the senses that had been 
 steeped in every pleasui-e, to the tastes that had loathed unsightli- 
 ness as a torture, to the habits that had been enervated m all the 
 richness of enjoyment, the wi'etchedness that was now his portion 
 was horrible beyond the utterance. He who had never known what 
 an hour's suffering, what a moment's denial, were, now endm-ed 
 cold, and exposure, and need of food, and all the racking pangs 
 of want and fever, like any houseless beggar starving in the night. 
 
 He wandered on and on, — still always in the same quarter, still 
 always keeping, by sheer instinct, far from all that he had once 
 known, — far fi'om all that had so lately seen him in the magnifi- 
 cence of his reign. He wandered on, ujider the lowering walls of 
 pent-up dwellings, through the driving of the slowly-faUing snow, 
 against the cutting breath of the ice-chill air. A strange faintnesa 
 stole on him, a strange numbness seized his limbs; he began to 
 lose all sense of the keen blasts that blew against him ; the in- 
 tensity of cold began to yield place to a dreamy exhaustion and 
 prostration, haK weary, haK soothing : he felt sleep stealing on 
 him, — deep as death. He had no wish to resist, no power to over- 
 come it ; the languor stole over all his frame, his Hmbs failed him ; 
 he sank down and stretched himseK <mt as on some welcome bed, 
 with a heavy sigh, lying there on the snow-covered ground, with 
 the snow falling on his closed eyes and the wind winding among 
 his hair. The dog couched down and pressed its silky warmth 
 against his breast; profound rest stole on him : ho knew no moret 
 
ao8 Chandos, 
 
 CHAPTER IL 
 
 **-w:hebe all life dles, death lites.'* 
 
 There was intense solitude in the dark, cheerless night ; the Bnow 
 drifted noiseless down ; now and then the wild winds broke and 
 howled with a hollow moan : all else was very still, — still as the 
 starless, ink-black skies that bent above. One shadow alone 
 moved through the gloom that a yellow lamp -light here and there 
 only served to make more impenetrable, — a shadow frail, bent, 
 delicate as a woman's, feeble as that of age, — the shadow of a 
 cripple. 
 
 He dragged himself along with slow and painful effort ; when 
 he passed under one of the lamps, its glare shone on a face fair and 
 spiritual, with great dark dreaming eyes, that looked out at the 
 snow-flakes wearily, — the face of Guide LuUi. The fragile, help- 
 less, pain-worn Proven9al, who shuddered from cold as a young 
 fawn will shudder in it, and who had barely till now quitted the 
 chamber where he wove his melodious fancies and forgot a world 
 with which he could have no share, was out in the bitterness of the 
 winter's night, on a quest that his fidelity had never slackened in 
 through many months of vain toil and fruitless search. The search 
 was ended now. 
 
 His foot touched the outflung arm of the form that lay prostrate, 
 half on the stone of the steps on which it had sunk, half on the 
 road to which the limbs had been stretched in the strange peace 
 and languor which had come with the slumber of cold and fasting. 
 
 The snow had fallen faster and heavily in the last few moments ; 
 it covered the hands, and was shed white and thick upon the im- 
 covered hair and uptuined brow. A lamp bui'ned just above; its 
 flicker, glowing dully through the raw gray mist, shone on the 
 death-like calm of the features in the breathless rest of sleep from 
 which few ever awaken. Lulli stooped and looked ; then, with a 
 gxcat cry, sank down on his knees beside the senseless form. He 
 knew it in a glance, aU changed though it was " his search was 
 over. 
 
 The dog lifted his head and gave a moaning of recognition, half 
 of joy, half of entreaty; but he would not stir fi'om where he 
 crouched on his master's breast, lending with his warm breath and 
 his curly hair and his massive strength, such aid and protection as 
 he could against the blasts of the storm and the chills of the night. 
 If any life lingered, he had saved it. 
 
 Lulli raised his voice in a shout for aid ; nelpless and weak as 
 he was in aU actions for himself, loyalty and gratitude gave him 
 :he strength of giants to save the man who in his own extremity 
 had saved him. 
 
 There was no answer to his call. He was alone in the bleakness 
 and the darkness of the wintry dawn, with one whom he firmly 
 believed to be dying ^djdng of cold, of exposure, and of want, 
 
" tf^kere all Lije dies, Deain Lives'* 309 
 
 the man whom but a year before he had known in q-^qty luxury 
 
 and every pleasure that the world could give, — the man who had 
 come to him in the summer-heats of Spain as the saviour of 
 his life and art, who had seemed to him the very incarnation of 
 beauty, of joy. of splendid manhood, of proud, rejoicing, perfect 
 strength. 
 
 The roll of a carriage coming slowly, and muffled on the whitened 
 roads, smoto on his ear at last ; he raised a louder cry, with all the 
 power he could gather. He heard a woman's voice from the 
 interior bid the coachman stop and wait. In the duU gleam of 
 the lamp he could see the glitter of jewels flash as she leaned out ; 
 her words came strangely clear to him through the frosty darkness, 
 as she asked, in French, — 
 
 '♦What is it?" 
 
 " One dying, — and from cold 1 " 
 
 "Dying! Wait while I see," said the voice he had heard, as 
 the form he could dimly perceive through the gloom swayed from 
 the carriage- steps and came towards him ; a woman who had been, 
 who indeed was still, very lovely ; a woman whose youth was 
 waning, but who still was young ; a woman in rich costly draperies 
 that the yellow light glittered on, and with the blue gleam of 
 sapphires above her brow. She was Beatrix Lennox. 
 
 A moment, and she stood beside Lulli, disregarding the snow- 
 3akes that di'ove against her, and the icy wind that blew thi'ough 
 her scarlet cashmeres. She was a woman of swift impulse, of warm 
 pity. 
 
 '•Is he dying, you say ? " she asked, with an infinite gentleness 
 in her voice, while she stooped to look at the prostrate form. She 
 started with a loud cry. 
 
 ** Chandos ! — merciful Heaven 1 " 
 
 Her lips turned very pale. Her voice trembled. 
 
 ** Oh, Heaven, what a wreck I I have fleen so many, yot never 
 one like this ! " 
 
 She was silent a moment, gazing down at the senseless features, 
 and softly touching, with a caressing hand, the dead gold of the 
 hair, all wet and whitened by the driving of the snow. Then she 
 turned with a nervous energj^ ; she was impetuous and rapid, and 
 finn in act. 
 
 ♦* He is not dead," she said, impatiently ; *• but he will die if ho 
 stay there. Lift him into my carriage, quick ! "We must get liim 
 warmth and stimulants ; my house is so far off, and there is no (it 
 place here " 
 
 •* My lodging is not distant. Let him come there," pleaded 
 Lulli, pitoously, while he drew the inanimate hands closer into his 
 own, as tbong^h afraid he should be robbed again of the one so long 
 lost, so terribly found. 
 
 *♦ Yes, yes; anywhere that is nearl" she answered, rapid'/, 
 while she flung the scarlet down-lined draperies she wore about 
 the half-dead hmbs, and stood, regardless of the blasts that howled, 
 «nd of the heavy icy mists that descended on the earth like sheets 
 of solid water, as her servants, at her bidding, raised him and laid 
 
 P 
 
3fO Chandos, 
 
 him gently down upon the cushions of her carriage. She felt 
 nothing of the searching wind, nothing of the drenching storm, 
 nothing of the flakes that were driven against her delicate skin and 
 her masked-ball dress. Her eyes were dim with tears; her lips 
 shook ; her heart ached. 
 
 " How many fallen I haye seen I" her thoughts ran; ** yet neysr 
 such a fall as his." 
 
 When life and sense returned to Chandos, he was stretched 
 before a wood fire, that shed its ruddy, uncertain light over a 
 darkened room ; the dog was licking his hands and murmuring ite 
 love over him where he lay; and beside him, watching him, were 
 the musician and tiie richly-hued and delicate form of Beatrix 
 Lennox. 
 
 "Clarencieux?" lie muttered, dreamily. It was the one loss 
 ever at his heart, the one name ever in his thoughts. 
 
 It struck those who heard it with a pang ; they knew how end- 
 less must be this longing, how endless this loss. 
 
 Lulli stooped over him, his voice very broken. 
 
 " Monseigneur, do you not know me ?" 
 
 Chandos looked at him dreamily, blindly. His head fell back 
 ^th a sigh of weariness. 
 
 " No, no ; if you had been merciful, you would have let me die." 
 
 The words told his listeners more mournfully, more utterly, than 
 any others could have done, how bitter to him had become the 
 burden of the Hfe once so rich and gracious. 
 
 Beatrix Lennox, albeit a woman who had known the world in 
 phases that harden and chill and fiJl with an ironic mockery for 
 most emotions, those who do so know it, looked on at him, where 
 he lay, with eyes of pathetic pain, dim and aching with unshed 
 tears. She had seen him but so late in all the glory of his kingly 
 manhood, of his unshadowed youth ! 
 
 Lulli, his voice broken with the weeping that shook him like a 
 young child, stooped over him, passionately praying for his recog- 
 nition. 
 
 *' Monseigneur! my master, my friend, my saviour! look at 
 me ; you know me ?" 
 
 The long-familiar tones reached the bram, dulled Dy cold ai 
 want of food. 
 
 Chandos lifted his eyelids, laden still with the sleep that ha 
 been so nearly the sleep of death, and saw Beatrix Lennox. H 
 remembered them both then, and, in the old instincts of his cour- 
 tesy to women, strove to rise. "With an effort he staggered to his feet, 
 and leaned heavily against the high slate shelf above the warm 
 wood-piled blazing hearth. He could not speak ; the sight of these 
 two faces so well known in his past — that past which seemed 
 severed from him as by the gulf of a lifetime — brought back with 
 a flood of memories on his slowly waking thoughts what he had 
 been, what he was. They, looking on him and seeing the ruin a 
 few months had wrought, did not know how vast, how terrible tho 
 change was in him more utterly than he himself. 
 
*• Whera all Life dies. Death lives,'' SI I 
 
 His eyes closed involuntarily with a shudder. He had buried his 
 life in the dens of the populous city to escape sight of all those once 
 familiar to and with him. That any of those should meet him 
 now was torture almost imhearable to the pride which survived in 
 him above all that had sought to shame and stay it. 
 
 " How do I come here ?" he said, feebly, while his gaze wan- 
 dered towards them with the pathetic glance of a man paralyzed, 
 whose eyes alone can speak. 
 
 '* The cold had struck you, and you had fallen," answered 
 Beatrix Lennox, in her voice that fell on him like soothing music. 
 ** My carriage was near ; we brought you to M. Lulli's room. You 
 are weak still; the night was so bitter. Wait and rest before 
 you speak." 
 
 She restrained the tears that choked her utterance ; for, with the 
 tf.ct that nature gave her, she divined how fearful must be to him 
 the knowledge that they had found him in his destitution and his 
 suffering, — they, who had been the companions of his glittering 
 prosperity, the one the recipient of his widest charity, the other 
 the guest of his gayest hours. She sought to hide her own know- 
 ledge of it as she could. 
 
 Lulli could exercise no such self-restraint ; he knelt at Chandos' 
 feet, his head bowed in his hands, his heart half broken. 
 
 *' Oh, monseigneur," he murmured, passionately, piteously, 
 ** how have I searched for you ! how have 1 grieved for you ! I 
 sought you night and day, — sought you living or dead. Could you 
 not have trusted me .* Could you not have let me go out with you 
 to your exile?" 
 
 Chandos looked down on him. 
 
 " Forgive me, Lulli, I forgot you would be faithful." 
 
 " You never forgot ! " cried the musician, Uffcing his head eagerly, 
 while he flung back the silky masses of his dark hair off his eyes. 
 ** You never forgot me; you only forgot yourself ! You remem- 
 bered my needs, you remembered my helplessness, you remem- 
 bered to save me and serve me to the last ; all you forgot was how 
 I loved you ! " 
 
 Chandos stretched out his hand to him with his old gesture ; he 
 could not answer, the Proven9al's fidelity moved him too deeply, 
 stirred him too bitterly, in its contrast with the abandonment of 
 well-nigh every other. 
 
 Beatrix Lennox drew nearer, and laid her hand softly on his 
 arm. 
 
 *• You were very near death an hour ago. Eest now, and take 
 what I bring you." 
 
 With the skill and the speed of her sex, she brought him with 
 her own hands some ^y)d and some warm and fragrant coffee, 
 standing there in her masquerade-dress all glittering with Vene- 
 tian gems and Venetian grace, with the ruddy wood-fire Hght 
 upon her, as she had stood in the driving down-pour of the snow- 
 storm. The hand that held him the food so tenderly had but just 
 laid aside the black coquette Venetian mask of her opera-ball ; but 
 of a surety the ministratJon war n<>t less gentle, tlie heai-t that 
 
aia Chandos, 
 
 prompted it not less full of divine charity, than if it had jiist cast 
 aside the gray serge of a religious recluse. 
 
 It was the first food for months from which he had not turned iu 
 loathing ; he took it with a gratitude that, though his eyes alone 
 spoke, sank into her memory for ever. She saw, what LuUi did 
 not see, that it was the first he had taken for many hours, and 
 that long fasting had done its work on him not less surely than the 
 winter night. 
 
 ** Can he want bread P " she thought, with a quiver of horror. 
 Heartless though the world called her, this reine gaillarde of a 
 lawless court, she would have gone and sold her jewels and 
 her cashmeres to bring him gold, had she not known by instinct 
 that, though he might die of hunger, he would never take an 
 alms. 
 
 ** I owe you a great debt, Mrs. Lennox," he said, simply, as his 
 oyes rested on her, all the light dead in them, a heavy languor 
 weighing down their lids, and a haggard darkness circling them, 
 but with their weariness, a look of infinite thankfulness to her 
 and to the one man who alone had never forsaken and reviled 
 his memory. 
 
 ** You owe me none." The words were very low, as she stood 
 swaying to and fro the gold strings of her Venetian mask. "I 
 owed you some time ago a far greater one." 
 
 "Owed me?" 
 
 His senses and his memory were still dim ; warmth and, with 
 warmth, life were fast flowing back into his veins, but he felt 
 as one in a dream; the faces he looked on were so familiar, 
 the place was so strange, he could not disentangle fact from 
 fantasy. 
 
 "Yes!" 
 
 She came closer towards him, standing there in the reflection of 
 the blazing wood, with the scarlet and black folds of her masquerade- 
 dress sweeping downward in the glow, and her haughty, handsome 
 face turned to him with an inexpressible sweetness and tenderness 
 tremulous upon it. The thought woke in him vaguely, even in 
 that moment. Had this woman loved him? She, swift to read 
 unspoken thoughts, guessed it. 
 
 " Do not think that," she said, with a smile of infinite sadness. 
 
 i never loved you ; it is very long since my heart beat. But I 
 \yould serve you anyhow, — anywhere, — if I could. Do you re- 
 member being with me at an opera-supper at the Maison Doree, 
 years and years ago ? No ! how should you ? It was only 
 memorable to me. Some German prince gave the supper, — who T 
 forget now; but there were women present with whom even I 
 abhorred association. The jests were very free, the license very 
 mchecked, and I — I had forfeited the right to resent. You alone 
 noticed it, — you alone pitied me ; you went and spoke in a 
 whisper to the prince. He laughed aloud. * The Lennox, who is 
 
 she to ' You silenced him. ' She was at least the daughter of 
 
 a gallant gentleman ; that should not be forgotten.' Then you 
 2am/!s to me with your gentle courtesy, and offered to take me to my 
 
all Life dies, Death lives.*' a ; 3 
 
 earriago. M ! I was wrong to say I never loved you. I wved you 
 then ! I never forgot it, — I never shall." 
 
 Ohandos looked at her with a great gratitude, and yet a pair i 
 wellnigh as great; tenderness shown him subdued and touched 
 him as it subdues and touches a woman. 
 "God knows it was trifle enough. If others remembered as 
 
 you do *' 
 
 He paused ; no words ever escaped him that could sound likc^ 
 a lament for the ingratitude that had forsaken him on every side. 
 *' Ah," she said, passionately, " it was no trifle to me. If ever J 
 can repay it— if it be twenty years hence — I will, let the paymen^ 
 cost what it may." 
 
 The promise was very hurried and broken in its utterance i(h 
 the most fluent and most eloquent woman of her time. She took 
 his hands and bent over them. 
 
 •' If you could let me serve you ! " she murmured, as softly as 
 his mother could have breathed him her farewell; then, with a 
 long, loving gaze, she left him, the black and scarlet hues of her 
 draperies lost in the gloom of the fire-shadows. She could have 
 stayed with him, stayed with him willingly, to aid, to tend on, to 
 assist him with every ministry that love, with which no touch of 
 passion blent, could give ; but she knew him to be very proud ; 
 she saw that pride was not dead, but lived in passionate pain 
 beneath calamity ; she felt that the fewer eyes there were upon him 
 now, the better could he bear the knowledge that they had found 
 him, a homeless wanderer, dying in the streets of Pans. So, true 
 to her unselfish instinct, and guided by a tenderness higher than 
 compassion, she left him, — she whom the world called an adven- 
 turess, without pi'ty and without conscience. 
 
 As she passed from the chamber, he sank down wearily and 
 faintly, his head bowed on his breast, his limbs stretched out in 
 racking misery from cold and stiflEnoss in the heat of the leaping 
 flames. He, who in his superb completeness of strength and oi 
 health had never known what the illness of a day was, sufi'ered 
 now every ill of mind and body, — suffered almost more in this 
 moment, when the^ reviving warmth and the stimulant of tho 
 choicer food gave him the power of vivid consciousness, than ho 
 had done in the stupor of his o^ium-drugged senses. Yet no 
 word, scarcely any sign, escaped him of what ho suffered ; there 
 was too proud an instinct in him still. Lulli watched him silently ; 
 the dog nestled close in the light of the hearth. For many moments 
 there was not a sound in the chamber ; sheer physical aching pain 
 wore Chandos down, seeming to load him with the weight of iron 
 chains, to bum him with the scorch of fire. He wished — he 
 wished to God — that they had left him in that dreamless slumber 
 upon the snow to die, with no more knowledge of the life he 
 quitted than the frozen stag that stretches out its stiffened limbs 
 upon some desolate moor- side. 
 
 Gradually, slowly, bodily exhaustion conquered ; the pangs that 
 racked his frame were soothed to comparative peace by the after- 
 action of the opiates he had so long taken ; the warmth of the 
 
f 14 Ckandos. 
 
 hearth lulled him to rest; his eyes closed, his breathing gre-vr 
 gentler and more even ; he stretched himself out with a weary sigh, 
 IS he had done in the darkness of the streets, and he slept at last 
 la he had never slept since the night he learned the story of his 
 ruin, — slept for hour on hour, with scarce a breath that stirred the 
 ?tillnes8 of his repose or could be heard upon the silence. That 
 Aleep saved him from the fate which the girl in the gaming-den 
 had foreseen for him if he Hved. 
 
 "When he awoke the sun was high in the western skies ; it was 
 far after noon. Lulli sat beside him, watching with a patience no 
 length of vigil could exhaust ; the dog lay asleep ; the ruddy glow 
 of the great fire on the hearth was dying down, though its intense 
 heat still filled the chamber. His eyes, as they unclosed, met 
 Lulli's resting on him with that unwearied spaniel look which had 
 scarce ever relaxed its watch over that repose which so resembled 
 death. 
 
 "Is it you, Guide ? " he asked, faintly. ** Ah, yes, I remem- 
 ber. And you have been waiting by me there so many hours ! "^ 
 
 Kie Proven9al strove to smile, though the tears stood thick in 
 his eyes. 
 
 " Monseigneur, I would never weary of tJiat" 
 
 *' I know. There are few like you.' 
 
 " Monseigneur, if all those whom you once served were like me, 
 there would be many throngs." 
 
 Chandos answered nothing ; he raised himself on his left arm, 
 and lay on the hearth, gazing at the flicker of the crimson flame, 
 at the fall of the gray noiseless ash. 
 
 The deadliest pang to Eichard Plantagenet, in all the bitterness 
 of his discrowned fortunes, was when his hound, who loved him, 
 who caressed him, who had been fed from his hand, and had slept 
 by his pillow, went from him to fawn on Bolingbroke. " 11 vous 
 suivra, il m'ehignera," said the forsaken king, — a whole history of 
 infidelity in the brief pathetic words. The deadliest pang of his lost 
 royalties to Chandos lay in the abandonment of all, save this poor 
 cripple, whom he had loved and saved, and who had caressed him 
 in the days of his purple and his power. 
 
 "You can tell me," he said suddenly, — his voice was very 
 hushed, and came with efi'ort through his lips, — " what is the fate 
 
 of— of " 
 
 "OlarencieuxP" 
 
 He bent his head. 
 
 The musician looked at him eagerly. 
 
 "Did you not know? Monseigneur d*Orv&le has bought the 
 whole." 
 
 Chandos looked up, a flush of breathless gratitude, of incredulous 
 relief, banishing for the moment aU the broken, aged, colourless 
 pain from his face. 
 
 " Is it true ? PhiUppe d'Orvale ? " 
 
 " Would I cheat you? True as that we live. He forced them 
 to surrender it to him, — ^bought it untouched, undespoiled." 
 
 *^ThNikGodI» 
 
" Whert all Lift dies, Death lives** %i^ 
 
 He covered his face with his hands, and for the only time in all 
 his adversity, save the moment when old Harold Gelart had spoken 
 under the elms of the western terrace, great storm- drops forced 
 themselves thi-ough his closed lids and his clenched fingers, and fell 
 one by one, like the rain before a tempest. 
 
 Ear more to him than any mercy to himself was the mercy which 
 had saved Clarencieux from sacrilege, and barter, and destruc- 
 tion. 
 
 " MonseignoTir d'Orvale has it," pursued the swift sweet voice of 
 the Proven9al. "Not a tree will be touched, not a thing be dis- 
 placed. He sent for me, and bade me live there ; but I could not : 
 it would have broken my heart. He has sought for you every- 
 where ; he has longed to find you ; he would have you return to it 
 as though it were your own still." 
 
 Chandos shivered where he sat. 
 
 *' I! I am dead to it for ever." 
 
 He could not have borne to look upon the purple distance of its 
 woods, he could not have borne to stand beside the far-off course 
 of the mere river that flowed towards it, — he who had forfeited hia 
 birthright. 
 
 Lulli was silent; his eyes watched ever, with a dog-like love, 
 the form of Chandos, where he lay at length in the dying glow of 
 the flames, his face hidden, his frame shaken now and then with an 
 irrepressible shudder. An unutterable thanksgiving was in hia 
 heart for the fate which had spared his home and his lands from 
 the shame and ruin of dissolution ; yet the knowledge that another 
 dwelt there, that another had bought his heritage for ever, brought 
 in him, as it had never come before, the full realisation of his own 
 eternal exile. 
 
 He raised his head after many moments, and strove to steady his 
 voice. 
 
 '* Thank him from me ; he will know how I thank him. I used 
 to feel how true, how generous, his heart was, how noble a 
 friend he would ever be. Tell him he is merciful beyond men's 
 mercy '' 
 
 " You will tell him?" asked Lulli, softly : *< you will see himP 
 He loves you so well." 
 
 Chandos gave an irrepressible gesture of pain. 
 
 *' Not yet ; not yet," he said, hurriedly. " I doubt if ever " 
 
 The words were unfinished ; in his own soul he felt as though 
 never could he force himself to look on the friends and companiona 
 of that lost life which seemed to lie so far behind him in a limitless 
 distance, dead and past for ever. Nor in himself did he think that 
 he would long live, — long bear this burden of hopeless wretched- 
 ness, — long endure this existence which was unceasingly upon 
 the verge of madness or of death. 
 
 What had he now ? The food that he ate here might be the last 
 ever to pass his lips. He had not a farthing wherewith to buy 
 bread even for his dog. 
 
 Lulli looked at him wistfully, and stooged forward nearer, a 
 kindling light on his £aoe. 
 
Si6 Chandoi. 
 
 •'Monseigneur, hear me! When I was dying, you saved mo; 
 when I was in beggary, you gave me food and shelter; when 
 I was poor, and friendless, and alone, you were the world to mo. 
 You found me in misery, and pitied me ; and for the art that 
 is my life and my soul you gained me hearing and you gave me 
 fame. Through you I am no more poor ; they talk of me ; my 
 Ariadne has been heard through all tho width of Europe, and they 
 have paid her beauty with their gold, though that was never my 
 thought with her. Listen ! Pay my debt to you 1 never can ; 1 
 love to owe it and to cherish it. But in some little sense I may 
 serve you ; in some degree you can make me happy by letting me 
 ask you to remember it. Stay with me ; let me toil for you, labour 
 for you. wait on you, gather the gold they offer me for you. It 
 will be such joy to me ! Without the sound of your voice, 1 am 
 like a blind man lost in this wide world ; if you will only wait 
 with me, you can give me back strength, power, ambition, every- 
 thing, and I shall love the coins that I hato now, if you will let me 
 glean them all for you, lot me do for you in some little kind all 
 that you did for me when I was a homeless cripple, dying, with all 
 the music that was in me killed and silenced by my hunger and 
 my poverty." 
 
 His voice rose in his impassioned entreaty, till it thrilled through 
 the still chamber like one of his own melodies ; he would have slaved, 
 have starved, have killed himself, to have saved or served the man 
 who had had pity on his youth. 
 
 Chandos heard, and the words moved him deeply as the words of 
 the old yeoman had done. He never lifted his head, but he stretched 
 out his right hand silently, and grasped the frail, nervous, trans- 
 parent hand of the musician in a close clasp. 
 
 •* What you wish cannot be," he said, huskily. ** I should be 
 lost to shame indeed ! But from my heart I bless you for your 
 fidelity — for your love." 
 
 " Cannot bo ? Why not? In my need you aided me," pleaded 
 LuUi, his wistful eyes pleading more fervently than his words. 
 Ho knew too little of the world to know why, in his own sight, 
 Ohatulos would have felt himself shamed beyond all humiliatiuu 
 had he listened to his prayer. 
 
 The blood flushed his listener's forehead with a pang of the old 
 pride of his proud race ; he could not tell this guileless, generous, 
 devoted creature t^at he would sooner die like a dog, die of famine 
 in the streets, than live on upon the alms of his debtor. 
 
 " It cannot be," he said, gently. " Do not ask it, Lulli. If you 
 have fame and comfort, I am more than rewarded by you." 
 
 The Proven9ars face darkened mournfully ; the whole of many 
 months had been passed in a vain quest for his lost master, in an 
 unwearied, though, as it had seemed, hopeless search, throng' 
 which his sole sustaining thought had been to find his solitary 
 friend and to repay in some faint measure all the gifts he owed. 
 
 Chandos rose slowly from where he leaned upon the hearth ; his 
 limbs were still stiff and weak, though the profound repose ol 
 long-imbroken sleojj had restored him something of stienpth. 
 
" Where all Life dies, Death lives." 917 
 
 BdI the life-g:iving warmth in which he had rested had lessened 
 the pain in ms brow and eyes and the oppressive weight on his 
 lungs. 
 
 "Stay with me I oh, for pity's sake, stay with me!" pleaded 
 Lulli, passionately. So willingly would he have given up every- 
 thing on earth to be allowed to starve for the only living creatuie 
 who had ever pitied him. 
 
 Chandos gave a faint sign of dissent, he knew not what he 
 should do, he knew not whether in the next day and night h« 
 might not perish of the same exposure and want he had been now 
 rescued from , but his highest instincts were not dead in him ; ho 
 would not linger hero, though for one moment physical weaknes* 
 and all the long habit of physical indulgence came upon him with 
 a fearful longing to lie down and rest without effort in tho 
 eoothing beat of the hearth, to stay in the lulling peace »nd sheltei 
 of the quiet chamber. 
 
 Serious illness was on him, as well as the inertia of fever and of 
 languor. For the rnoment he felt it beyond his strength to pass 
 out into the bleak biting wind, to face the homeless night, to accept 
 the fate that drove him out into the wilderness of the great city, 
 with none to give him rest, with nothing to buy him food. He 
 longed to turn back, and lie down and die in the dreamy comfort of 
 that calming fire- glow. 
 
 But he moved away, only pausing one moment to droop his head 
 to LuUi's ear. 
 
 •' Tell me, what of 7i6r. 2" 
 
 The musician turned shuddering away. 
 
 ** Do not ask me ! do not ask me ! " 
 
 Chandos staggered slightly. 
 
 "Is she dead?" 
 
 " Would to Heaven she were ! " said Lulli, with a force that 
 thrilled for the moment with the fierce vengeance of the South. 
 The gentle di'eamer, who would have pardoned the cruellest wronjj^^ 
 done to himself, could hate and could avenge where those he loved 
 were wronged. 
 
 " Hush ! I have loved her. What of her ? I can bear all novj." 
 
 " She is Lord Clydesmore's wife." 
 
 Chandos swayed forward as though about to fall. 
 
 " O God ! his wife ! " 
 
 The words broke from him like a wrung- out cry; in that 
 moment he remembered nothing save the passion wherewith he 
 had loved her, save the beauty which was given to another. He 
 made his way with a blind swaying movement towards the door ; 
 he had no sense now except that he must be alone, — alone to bear 
 this crowning bitterness which had befallen him. 
 
 " Wait !— wait ! " cried Lulli, imploringly. *' Oh, Heaven, 
 why would you have me tell you ? Wait ! You will come back to 
 me?" 
 
 Chandos put him aside gently, though he had no consciousnesa 
 of what he did. 
 
 " Yes, I will come back," he answered mechanically, withoul 
 
the sense of wliat he promised, as he made his way out once more 
 into the bitter winter aii-. 
 
 He had forgotten all, except that the one who should now have 
 lain in his arms— his wife — had gone, so soon, to the love and the 
 i^onbrace of another I 
 
 CHAPTER m. 
 
 IN THE NET OF THE EETIAKIUS. 
 
 LxJLLi looked for him in vain. He never returned. It was not 
 that he broke wittingly his promise ; he never knew that he had 
 made it. 
 
 He dragged his limbs, how he could not have remembered, to 
 the only home he owned now, — a pent, dark, dreary chamber in 
 one of the million houses of the crowded streets. There he lay pros- 
 trate many days, many nights, with no watcher beside him save 
 the dog, except once in several hours, when the woman of the house 
 came and filled afresh the flagon of water that he drank from 
 eagerly, and looked at him with a pitying wonder, rather for his 
 beauty than for his danger, and went away and left him ; for she 
 only knew bim as a beggared gamester, and would have turned 
 him, half lifeless, wholly senseless, into the streets, had it not 
 been that, woman like, she was moved to compassion by the physi- 
 cal graces that no ruin could kill in him, and that touched her to 
 pity as he lay unconscious there. 
 
 " As handsome as a fallen angel ! " she would mutter to herself, 
 while, though but an old, bent, savage, avaricious crone, she would 
 just touch softly with her yellow horny hand the gold locks that 
 women had used to crown with roses. "An aristocrat ! an aristo- 
 crat ! Mort de Dim ! how many of them I have seen die off like 
 murrained cattle from their gaming-hells ! " 
 
 So, just for the sake of his fair hair and hiB beautiful mouth, 
 like the mouth of a Greek god, she tended him enough to keep life 
 in him like a flickering flame ; for the rest, he lay alone in ths 
 midst of the peopled city, where he had once reigned supreme, 
 dying in his solitude for aught that any knew or cared. The winter 
 stars shone clear through frosty nights, and looked in on him 
 prostrate there, with his head fallen back, and his eyes without 
 light or sense, and his chest rising heavily and wearily with anguish 
 in every breath the inflamed lungs drew ; while the dog watched 
 beside him, moaning now and again its piteous wail, or covering 
 with its caresses the clenched hands and the contracted brow. 
 Winter dawns broke chill and gray ; winter days roUed darkly on ; 
 winter nights passed with riotous storm or frost so ciystal clear, 
 through which the cold moon shone like a shield of steel ; he lay 
 there in his loneliness as though in his grave, forgotten, and with- 
 out % friend in the midst of thousands who had feasted at his tables, 
 in the heart of palaces where his word had been as law. Yet th« 
 life in his^ would not die. 
 
In the Net of the Retiarius, 119 
 
 It survived through i^ll ; it recovered without aid, without suc- 
 cour, without other comfort than was given him by the warmth of 
 the animal's nestling body and the cooling draught of the icy 
 water. Whilst he lay there, one only, beside the old brown 
 withered crone who tended his wants in the few intervals of hei 
 daily toil, came and watched hira. One only of all those who had 
 known him and been succoured by him discovered the wretched- 
 ness of that last retreat, and stood beside the bed where he was 
 stretched. Hate is swifter of foot and surer of chase than love, and 
 will remember and search, untiring, when love has r^own weary 
 and laggard. 
 
 One only came andf liaounted the nasrow, dark, rickety stairs, and 
 entered the room where there was no single thing of solace or of 
 mercy except when the clear pale L'.ght of the stars shone down 
 from above the endless roofs; one only stood beside the pallet 
 where the man whom all Europe had caressed and honoured had 
 no watcher but a starving dog. Trevenna stood there looking on 
 his work, and was content with it. Philippe d'Orvale had baffled 
 hirn of his vengeance on the senseless stones of Clarencieux, but 
 none could take from him his vengeance on the living man whom 
 his patient hate had slain more mercilessly than by a swift and 
 single death-stab. 
 
 All the years of subtle dissimulation, of carking envy, of long- 
 ing thirst to destroy the peace and the brilliance of the life he 
 pursued, of gifts accepted with greed because they were the means 
 of conquest, but loathed and cursed and adding by each one a stone 
 to the load of his hatred — all these were over and over recompensed 
 now, here, in this darkened, poverty-bared garret in the city of 
 Paris, where his prey, in torture and in famine, lay insensible be- 
 neath his gaze. 
 
 Of all the women who had listened to Chandos' love-words and 
 toyed with the brightness of his hair, there was not one who now 
 held a stoup of water to his lips. Of all the hands that he had 
 filled with gold, there was not one now to touch with pitying caress 
 the brow all bent and dark with pain. Of all the mouths to which 
 he had given food, there was not one now to murmur a gentle 
 word over his misery. Of all the throngs whom he had bidden 
 b neath his roof, of all the lives he had made prosperous and 
 jo^ ous, of all the friends who had laughed with him through the 
 lo€« g luxuriant summer day of his existence, there was not one now 
 wIto asked whether he were living or dead. There was but his 
 eniemy, who looked on him and rejoiced. 
 
 Every unconscious sigh that broke from him, every movement 
 of. his fevered aching limbs, every breath drawn through hia 
 agonized lungs, every contraction that knit his burning forehead 
 in his suffering, every look of dull sightless suffering from the 
 blind and sleepless eyes, his foe watched, and was content. 
 
 Quand j'^miettais mon pain a Toiseau du rivage, 
 L'onde semblait me dire, " Espere ! aux mauvais joan, 
 Diea te rendra ton pain." Dieu me le doit toujoun I 
 
%ZO Chanaos. 
 
 wrote the poet Moreau, dying in his youth of lack of the food dogs 
 rejected. Chandos had thrown his bread on many waters, giving 
 to all who asked, to all who were heavy-laden, to all who lived in 
 darkness and in want. It was unrecompensed and owing to him 
 etill. He needed it now, but none repaid it. There only remained 
 with him his foe, who brought him the hyssop and the aloe 
 when he died for a drop of the clear living rivers of the land he 
 had left. 
 
 "Water! — water!" he murmured, unceasingly, where he was 
 stretched in his delirious stupor. Trevenna poured some absinthe, 
 and touched his lips with it. He shuddered, all unconscious as he 
 was, and turned with a heavy gasping sigh from the loathsome 
 drink, so bitter, so abhorrent to the fever-burnt, dry lips that longed 
 to steep themselves for ever in the cool flow of sweet, fresh waters. 
 Trevenna smiled. 
 
 ••Beau seigneur!" he said, softly, to himself, *'/ have drunk 
 bitterness long ; it is your turn now." 
 
 He lay insensible, defenceless ; the width of his chest was bare, 
 and the loud, panting, inflamed beatings of his heart could be 
 seen where it throbbed like the passionate, aching heart of a 
 mured eagle. Trevenna laid his hand on it, and his eye glanced 
 to a knife that lay on the deal board on which his pitcher of diink 
 was set. 
 
 •' How easy ! " he thought. •' But I have done better. I have 
 killed him ; but I have never broken a law. A stab there would be 
 mercy to him ; he shall never got it from me." 
 
 Chandos' arm moved where it hung over the bed, seeking 
 instinctively, all dead to what passed or what looked on him though 
 he was, the place whence he was used to take the cup of water which 
 the woman of the house set by him. For the sake of his beauty, 
 she had been pitiful in the last hour, and had sliced in it a few 
 cuts of orange. His hand wandered in a pathetic uncertainty, 
 seeking, as a blind man's seeks, the only thing he had life left in 
 bim to long for. Trevenna moved the table from his reach, and 
 emptied out upon the floor the orange-water. 
 
 The thirst, parched and delirious as the thirst of men in the 
 desert, consumed his victim with an intolerable torment ; his mouth 
 was white and dry as dust, his forehead red with the heated blood, 
 his eyes wide open with a terrible senseless star© : thrown back 
 there, with his bare chest grand as the chest of a Torso, and the 
 luxuriance of his hair tangled and tossed and lustreless, yet 
 retaining the beauty with which nature had created him deathless 
 to the last, he lay like a young gladiator flung down in the sand 
 of the arena by the clinging serpentine coils of the Eetiarius. 
 Indistinct, disconnected words broke now and then from his lips, 
 in the wanderings of thoughts that in the misery of that thirst 
 stretched far away into dim memories of his past,— to the forest 
 freshness of English brooks, to the deep still blue of Austrian 
 lakes, to the sweet music of waters falling through innumerable 
 leaves down the steep height of many-coloured stone, of the grand 
 teeadth of Euphrates rolling beneath its palms, of the silver- 
 
In ths Net of ttie Retianus. 2a I 
 
 sheeted Danube lying in the deep shadows of its woods, of the 
 stilly murmur of winding waters in the Italian spring-tide leaf, 
 flowing lazily and softly beneath the green wild arums, and the 
 tawny beds of osiers, and the wreathing boughs of Banksia roses, 
 and the gentle fragrance of the young vine's flower-buds. They 
 were on his lips ever, in longing, fugitive, broken memories, — 
 those scenes and hours of his past, those thoughts of the earth's 
 fair freshness that was dead and lost to him. 
 
 Trevenna stood still and listened to the unconscious, unbidden 
 suffering that longed for all that it was exiled from, that spoke in 
 those broken words of all the glories of remembered hours, all 
 the freedom of the forests and the seas, while life was wrung 
 and death embittered by that one poor piteous want, — one draught 
 of the water that beggars might drink from every brook that bub- 
 bled. He listened ; he could have listened for ever. 
 
 He thought of the night when he had ground the Paris sweet- 
 meats into the mud of the gutter, and registered his childish vow ; 
 he had kept it to the letter. Happier than Shy lock, he had cut the 
 piece of his vengeance from the living heart of his victim, with 
 none to stay his hand. 
 
 The gray chilly twilight of a winter's day filled the attic ; the 
 light of the first faint moon-ray glistened on the bare walls and 
 the naked floor ; the noise, the stench, the noxious reeking air of 
 the alley below could reach but little here; only an oath, or a 
 laugh more ghastly than the oath, pierced the stillness of this 
 chamber in the roof, while through its broken casement the tide of 
 the icy night-wind poured bitterly in on the uncovered chest, on 
 the fevered limbs, on the darkened aching brow. 
 
 There was no pang of conscience in the watcher there, — no 
 memoi-y of the friendship that had trusted, of the loyalty that had 
 saved him, — no thought of his own fr-aud, of his own baseness. 
 He only remembered what this man had been in the spelndour of 
 his promise, in the gladness of his youth, in the brilliance of his 
 renown, and looked at him lying thus, and was content. When 
 the net had wound its coils, and the strangled limbs were power- 
 less, and the strength reeled and fell under its twisting, writhing 
 meshes down into the sand, the Eetiariushad no pity, but he looked 
 upward to where the shouts of "Euge!" and the turned-down 
 hands decreed with him no mercy to the vanquished, and ho 
 plunged in again and again the fangs of his trident, seeking the 
 last Ufe-blood. So it was now with Trevenna. His net had been 
 deftly flung, and had brought his adversary down, blinded and 
 paralyzed ; but he would never have wearied of stabbing again and 
 again, while there was life to feel. 
 
 He turned reluctantly away : he could have lingered there whilst 
 there was a pang to watch, a sigh to count. He heard the footfall 
 of the old Auvergnat woman heavily treading over the bare boards. 
 She touched his arm, — a hideous, brown, wrinkled, shrivelled being 
 of nigh eighty years, with avarice in her black glance, and a hor- 
 rible old age upon her. 
 
 ** You know him P " she askedt 
 
22» CnanJiu3, 
 
 "I know a little of him," he answered, indifferently. " You had 
 better not keep him here longer than you can help : he may get you 
 into trouble." n. • -. i 
 
 He roused her fears and her selfishness, that even t^'ns miserable 
 hand might bo withheld from easing the suffering they looked on. 
 The Auvergnat looked at him in terror. 
 "With the police?" 
 
 Trevenna nodded and shrugged his shoulders. The old creature, 
 steeped in Paris vice and devoured with Paris avarice, set her teeth 
 hard. 
 
 *« By the Mother of God ! I would have turned him in the streets 
 days ago if he were not as beautiful as a marble Christ." 
 Trevenna laughed, — a loud, coarse, jeering laugh. 
 " His beauty ! You old crone, what can that be to you ? If you 
 
 were twenty, now " 
 
 She turned on him her darkling and evil glance. 
 ** Women are fools to their tombs. I cannot hurt him ; I should 
 see his face for ever." 
 Trevenna shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 ** If you wish to serve him, get him let into some pauper mad- 
 house. It is the only thing you can do for him." 
 She shuddered a dissent. 
 
 *• They would shear all that in a madhouse ! " she said, drawing 
 through her hard withered hands the silken fairness of his hair. 
 " When I was young, I would have given my life to kiss that gold, 
 —when I was young ! " 
 
 The words muttered half sullenly, half longingly, on her lips ; 
 the memory made her touch gently, almost tenderly, the locks that 
 lay in her horny palm. She felt for him, — almost, in a way, 
 she loved him,— this battered, evil, savage old creature of Paris ; 
 but she would strip the linen from his limbs to thieve and sell, for 
 all that. . 
 
 *«Send him there all the same," said Trevenna. "It is the 
 only place that will shelter him now ; except one, to be sure,— the 
 Morgue ! '* 
 
 And with these last words to rankle and fester, and ripen if they 
 should, in the soul of the old beldam who had all to lose, nothing 
 to gain, by the life of one whom she had robbed of eveiy thing, 
 Trevenna went lightly down the high crazy staircase that passed 
 through so many stories to the basement; there was a more 
 intensely victorious glance in his eyes, a smile of tenfold success on 
 his mouth. 
 
 And he went out into the night, leaving the man who had rescued 
 him from his prison to perish of thirst, or of famine, or of fever,— 
 to die iu the streets, or to live like a chained beast in a mad- 
 house, — ^whichever should chance to be the fruit and the end of his 
 history. 
 
 Trevenna never laughed more merrily at the vaudeville of the 
 Bouffes, never ate his salad with keener relish at the Cafe Eiche, 
 iiever looked on at Mabille with more good-tempered indulgence 
 fat the foUier which had no attraction for himself, than he did tiv'*t 
 
In the Net oj the Retiarm^ aaj 
 
 night. Once he laughed aloud, so gaily, so long, that a friend 
 near asked what the jest was. He laughed again. 
 
 ** I am thinking of Belisarius begging an obole; and of Henry IVt 
 hunted and naked, and dead of starvation, at Spires ! " 
 
 His friend stared, and thought the wine was in his head. But 
 it was not ; he was only drunk with success. 
 
 The doom of his prey, however, then at least, was not the mad- 
 house or the grave. He rose from his bed at length, the superb 
 frame with which nature had dowered him resisting all the stress 
 and peril that had sought to undermine it. He wondered wearily 
 why he could not die. 
 
 The woman who had brought him drink and tended him now and 
 then, for the sake of those Sps like the Sun-God's, of those limbs 
 like the Antique, had robbed him of the little he had left while he 
 lay insensible. She said, when he could hear, that she had been at 
 
 freat cost for his illness : he believed her ; he could not tell that 
 er pitcher of water had been the sole thing set by his side. 
 
 Having lost what he had lost, moreover, what could the few 
 things stolen now be to him ? 
 
 Thus, when he rose at last and staggered out from the wretched 
 dwelling where he had not a coin left to keep even its roof above 
 his head, he was literally beggared, — beggared almost as utterly as 
 any unknown corpse that lay waiting burial in the dead-house by 
 the Seine. 
 
 Since the far-gone German days, when an emperor vainly begged 
 bread at the Chui'ch he had endowed, and dragged himself to a 
 vault to die unsepulchred, there had hardly been a fall more vast, 
 more sudden, h'om the height of power to the depths of poverty. 
 
 He went feebly out into the early night, that by a chance waa 
 clear, starlit, and mild. Beau Sire looked up at him and moaned ; 
 a piteous hunger gazed out from the dog's eyes : he was famished ; 
 he had well-nigh starved through all the daj^s and nights that he 
 had kept guard by his master. He had not a sou left him to buy 
 the animal food. 
 
 He shuddered as he met the wistful, uncomplaining, hungry eyes, 
 — he who had never beheld pain save to relieve or to release it ! 
 
 He almost reeled through the first street that his steps turned 
 into ; illness had mortally weakened him, and his head swam with 
 the booming noise of the traffic, and with the stench of the crowds. 
 The retriever followed him feebly: famine was telling on its 
 strength ; and, like its master, used to all luxury and to all deli- 
 cacies for so long, it was untrained to want : its eyes were growmg 
 dim and ravenous. 
 
 Chandos sank down almost unconsciously on some stone steps of 
 the narrow thoroughfare he had wandered into, and drew the dog 
 to him with its fond head nestled in his breast ; he could not bear 
 the mute appeal of those longing, piteous eyes. The crowds swept 
 past him, — rich and poor, chiefly the latter, for it was ii; a densely • 
 peopled and ancient quarter, but all bent fast on their own errands, 
 Xwo or three turned their heads back over their shoulders to look 
 at him, with his arm resting on the shoulders of the animal that 
 
134 Chandos. 
 
 pressed so closely to him ; none did more. They \vere the hurrieil 
 pleasure-seekers and the toiling labourers of a great city; they 
 could have no heed of one misery amidst so vast a canker of ur ' - 
 versal want and greed. 
 
 The throngs passed him like a throng of phantoms ; he thought, 
 as he sat there, of the thousand nights when he had driven through 
 PariB with all the rank, with all the brilliance, of the Court of St. 
 Cloud around him, with no name more famous, with no presence 
 more courted, at Tuileries or Faubourg, than his own. 
 
 Now he must let his dog hunger for a broken loaf ! 
 
 Where he sat, the lamp-light flashed on the collar the retriever 
 wore, — a handsome toy of silver, with his arms embossed upon it, — 
 a relic of his long-lost hie. His hand wandered to tho padlock 
 fastening it : how man^ hours it recalled to him, that burnished 
 glittering ornament where it gleamed under the dog's black curls ! 
 — hours of fresh autumn mornings among tho woods of Clarencieux, 
 of breezy Scottish days, with the splash of the cool brown water, 
 and the flush of a snow-white swan, and the balmy honey-smell oif 
 the heather; of glowing deep-hued Eastern sunsets, where the 
 reeds of the Nile trembled in the after-glow, or the curling flight 
 of the desert-hawk soared upward above the ruins of the temples 
 of Jupiter Ammon ; — hours when the days and the nights were 
 all too brief for the glad luxuriance of the ' ' life he was gifted and 
 filled with." 
 
 Then he unfastened the collar, and rose and crossed the street 
 to a small dark house where he saw that things were pawned, — 
 a minor, obscure Mont de Piet^. He entered and laid the toy 
 down. 
 
 " Take it,'' he said, faintly, yet with a new, strange fierceness in 
 the words, — the fierceness that comes with the gnawing of want ; 
 *' take it, and give me food for the dog." 
 
 The owner of the wretched place stared at him, and balanced the 
 collar thoughtfully in his hands, amazed at the richness and the 
 workmanship of the thing offered him. 
 
 " It is of value, — of great value," he muttered. 
 
 ** Give me food for him, and take it." 
 
 The words were very low, but there was something of menace 
 m them. The man, old and, though avaricious, not dishonest, for 
 his trade, glanced half frightened at their speaker, and, keopiug 
 the collar in his hand, stooped under his dirty counter, and drew 
 out a plate of his own supper, — good food enough, though coarse, 
 and heaped up in abundance. The retriever devoured it as only 
 starvation can devour. 
 
 The pawnbroker watched him with a half-stupid wonder, then 
 took three napoleons from his desk and pushed them towards 
 Chandos. 
 
 " Your silver thing is worth more than your dog's meat. Take 
 
 The collar was worth thirty, as he knew well ; he voluntarily 
 gave thi'ee. He thought himself stupendously honest; so he was, 
 rt» tho world go©^ 
 
In the Net oj the Retianus. a»5 
 
 Ohandos drew back with an involuntary gesture of repulsion. 
 
 Want had not killed in him yet the impulses of his blood ; then, 
 as the colour faded, leaving him deadly pale, he stretched out his 
 hand and took it. It would keep life in him for another week. 
 
 ** I thank you," he said, simply, as he bowed with his old courtly 
 grace to the man who with wide-open eyes watched him with a 
 fascinated amaze. 
 
 ** Mon Dieu !" murmured the pawnbroker, as he turned to leave 
 •^he place, — *' mon Dieu ! how strange a man ! He wants food for 
 a dog, and he bows like a king. Well, I gave him three, I gave 
 him three; I almost wish I had given him more." 
 
 Still, even as it was, he felt by that voluntary gift of three he 
 had been virtuous enough. There are many in higher trades than 
 he who consider that to abstain for a little part from all the cheat- 
 ing they have it in their power to do, is to attain a high degree of 
 social and commercial honesty, 
 
 Chandos turned to pass fi'om the place. In the entrance stood 
 Trevenna. 
 
 Well clothed in dark warm seal-skins that hung lightly on him, 
 with his ruddy coloiu' brighter, his white teeth whiter, and his keen, 
 frank eyes bluer in the winter air and glancing gaslight, he stood 
 in an easy comfort, in a traveller's carelessness ; and on his mouth 
 was a lurking smile, — a smile of irrepressible amusement, of ironic 
 triumph. He had watched Chandos many a time in the gambling- 
 hell, in the midnight streets, in the opium-drunkenness, before ho 
 had stood and looked at him where he lay insensible on what 
 seemed his death-bed. He had seldom lost sight of him ; he had 
 been the only one who remembered him ; for hate is more enduring 
 than any love. But now only for the first time Chandos knew that 
 his gaze was on him, — now when the hazard of accident had made his 
 bitterest enemy pause at the door of the pawnshop and look on at 
 the barter of the silver toy. 
 
 And not in the first instant when Chandos turned and saw him 
 could he wholly hide the caustic mockery, the victorious success, 
 with which he had watched this last depth of hopeless misery into 
 which the man he had pursued had fallen ; not in that moment of 
 supreme domination over his fallen friend could he resist the 
 impulse that beset the single weakness lurking in his bright, bold 
 nature, — the weakness of an insatiable and woman-like avidity of 
 hate. 
 
 He stretched out his hand with his old ready, pleasant smile ; 
 the palm was filled with some ten or dozen sovereigns and a few 
 crisp bank-notes just won at the whist-tables of the Jockey Club. 
 
 '' Trea-cher ! when we last met, you used me rather roughlj 
 because I offended you with a bit of common sense ; the direst 
 msult to you men of genius. But let bygones be bygones. Take 
 what you want, Chandos ; you did the same for me once. Take 
 'em aJI : do, now. You won't believe how, from my soul, I pity you 
 Pawned the dog's collar ? — oh, the deuce ! Is it so bad as that ? 
 You look as if you wanted food yourself; why didn't you write ta 
 me ? I'm a poor man, as you know ; but still a five-pound 
 
 Q 
 
226 Chandos. 
 
 He knew so T;7ell how to pierce with the cruellest strokes the most 
 sensitive nerves of the nature he had studied so long and so minutely. 
 The words might have passed on a stranger's ear as kindly meant, 
 though coarsely phrased ; he knew how more bitter than all taunts, 
 more unbearable than all outrage, would they be to the man who 
 stood before him. 
 
 He was not prepared for their effect. 
 
 Chandos looked at him a moment in silence, then dashed hie 
 hand down with his own clenched fist in a sudden blow that scat- 
 tered in the mud the coins and notes. 
 
 " Take care ! or you shall have the same on your jibing lips." 
 
 The menace was low-breathed, but it thrilled with a fierce in- 
 tensity of suppressed passion. Trevenna had not calculated or 
 remembered the change that wretchedness and desperation 
 work in the gentlest natures; he had never thought how the 
 softest and most pliant temper, goaded by indignity and altered 
 by circumstance, will turn at last ferocious, like a wild boar at 
 bay. 
 
 He stooped, amazed and for the instant speechless, and picked up 
 the scattered money from the doorstep and the street (Trevenna 
 never wasted anything ; it was one of the secrets of his success) ; 
 then he looked up with the insolence of superiority, the coarseness 
 of triumph, that he could no more have spared to the man before 
 him than the hound will spare the stag he has pulled down the 
 gripe of his fangs, the wrench of his jaws. 
 
 "On my honour, monseigneur, we can't stand that style now, 
 you know. You've lost your head, that's what it is, with gaming, 
 and drinking, and going to the bad. I'm deuced sorry for you, on 
 my word I am " 
 
 Chandos' s hand fell with a swaying weight upon his shoulder and 
 torced him back off the step, off the stones. Under the goad of his 
 loe's insults, under the taunting pity of the man he had saved and 
 enriched, all the weakness of illness, all the dizziness of exhaustion , 
 seemed to leave him ; he felt as though the fowje of lions flowed 
 back into his veins. 
 
 "Come out— into some lonely place," he muttered in Trevenna'a 
 ear. " Como quietly, or I shall find strength to kill you still." 
 
 Trevenna turned passively down a solitary, gloomy, unlighted 
 court of a dreary uninhabited fifteenth- century hotel, not far from 
 the Tourelle do la Reino Isabeau, in the ancient Eue du Temple, 
 where the darling of Paris was struck down by the assassins of his 
 foe of Burgundy, 
 
 Chandos had never released his grasp upon his shoulder; he 
 forced him slowly on and backward into the darkness of the stone- 
 paved court. Once alone there, in that gaunt black silence, he 
 released him. 
 
 *' Now tell me why you hate me." 
 
 The words were distinctly uttered, and were not loud ; yet for 
 the moment of their utterance, as he had done once before, Trevenna 
 felt very near his death. But he was a bold man ; he did not 
 quail ; he laughed audaciously. 
 
in the Net uj llic Rcliarius. 
 
 " Why do I hate you P What a question 1 In tne first place, 
 you can t know I do." 
 
 Chandos took a step nearer to him. 
 
 "No lies I Why do you triumph in my ruin ? Howhavelevei 
 wronged you ? " 
 
 Trevenna laughed again ; his temper was up for once, his savage 
 hatred had got the better of him, his caution was forgotten in iKo 
 irresistible delight of flinging off the disguise he had worn so long, 
 and taunting and cursing his fallen antagonist openly while he was 
 powerless ; even as yonder, under the House of the Image of Our 
 Lady, the boar of Burgundy had commanded the *' coiq) de massue " 
 to the fair lifeless body that his brute envy had slaughtered in its 
 youth. 
 
 " I have no title to aspire ; 
 Yet if you sink, I seem the higher ,• 
 
 he chanted, with a malicious humour. **That couplet is true to 
 the core. Triumph ? I don't triumph. I only offer to lend you a 
 five-pound note ; and you look deucedly as if you wanted it. Of 
 course there's something di'oll in such a fall as yours. I can't help 
 that. To think of all you^used to be and all you are ! The see- saw 
 of Fortune was never half so strikingly illustrated since the days ol 
 Croesuso" 
 
 There was very little light where they stood, none save such a s 
 the winter moon shed, but there was enough for him to see tbe 
 face above him, and the words stopped abruptly even on his fear- 
 less lips. 
 
 He knew that for far less provocation than this blood had been 
 shed a million times since the days of Cain. 
 
 " Answer me," said Chandos, — and there was a menace in tLo 
 patient words more deadly than lies in passion ; *' answer me. Why 
 do you hate me as devils hate ? " 
 
 " Can't say how devils hate ! Don't believe in 'em,'* said Tre- 
 venna, flippantly. His audacious and insolent temper was dared 
 and roused ; though he had died for it, he would not have aban- 
 doned his victory. "No more do you. They all say now 'Lucrece' 
 is a deistical work; a season later, it will be atheistical. Trust 
 public opinion to run all down-hill when once it takes the turn. What 
 if I do hate you ? I'm not singular. No end of men hate you, mon 
 jeau Chandos!" 
 
 Something of the fierce concentrated passion faded from the face 
 on which the white moon shone ; a great weariness of pain came 
 there. 
 
 " Hate me ?'* he re-echoed, dreamily. ** I never wronged any 
 man, to my own knowledge. "Why should men hate me ? Why 
 should you?" 
 
 Trevenna shrugged his shoulders, and shook his sealskins with a 
 careless laugh. 
 
 ** Why? Why, hate's sown broadcast, like so much thistle- 
 down. Why ? Perhaps you robbed me of my mistress, or I envied 
 yours. Perhaps you beat me once at ecarti. Perhaps you only 
 
3a8 Chandos. 
 
 provoked me with your d — d languor of aristocratic hauteur ; that 
 did a deal of mischief for you with a good many. Perhaps you in- 
 censed me with the very cursed grace of your generosities, with the 
 very royal nonchalance of your liberalities; that annoyed more 
 than you wot of, too. Hate ? "Why, what is there to wonder at in 
 that ? K I loved you, now, you might think it out of the com- 
 mon 1 " 
 
 And yet, were love won by friendship, loyalty, and gifts, how 
 Lad he bought this man's ! The memory rose in him where he 
 stood, with the goading banter of Trevenna's bonies on his ear ; yet 
 there was too grand a fibre in his nature, too proud a chivalry in 
 his blood, for him to smite his torturer with the past of forgotten 
 benefits, — for him to appeal against ingratitude with the rebuke, 
 *' I served you /" 
 
 *• You hate me ! " he said, slowly. ** You / " 
 
 It was the only utterance of reproach that passed his lips ; in it 
 a world was spoken. Though every other living thing had forsaken 
 him, he would have sworn that this man would have been faithful 
 as the dog beside him. The rebuke, slight as it was, struck such 
 lingering conscience as Trevenna retained, and, with that sense of 
 momentary shame, stung afresh all his greedy triumph, hia 
 jeering exultation, his untiling mockery, into their pitiless ex- 
 ercise. 
 
 *• WeU, if I do P What if I do ? You'll call me a hound that 
 bites the hand that fed him. Basta ! monseigneur ; there are some 
 gifts and caresses we can't forgive so soon as we could forgive a 
 kick and a curse. Human nature 1 You loved human natui-e ; 
 don't you love it now ? You were an aristocrat, ana I hated aris- 
 tocrats. A la lanterne with every one of *em. Not but what I'm 
 eorry for you, — deuced sorry for you. I'll trv to get you a place, 
 if you'll tell me what you'll fill. There are lots of things they'll 
 give you ; the world heartily pities you, you know, though you 
 ivere so imprudent. Besides, if anybody ever hated you, my poor 
 Chandos, they can afibrd to forget it now. You can't sink lower, — 
 a cleaned-out gamester, a sotted opium-drinker, a beggar in the 
 streets !" 
 
 The last words had scarce left his tongue in their insolence oi 
 assumed compassion, in their vindictiveness of victorious jibe, 
 when Chandos dashed his hand back on his lips, smiting them to 
 silence, the sole answer that he gave his traitor. His face had 
 changed terribly as he stood and heard ; the instinot of vengeance, 
 the instinct to kill, had wakened in him ; for the moment a very 
 hell of crime was in him. 
 
 Trevenna's laughing, sanguine, sun-tanned features turned livid, 
 8nd set fixed as m a vice ; the blow stirred black blood in him. 
 Lightly as a leopard, and as savagely, he sprang forward on the 
 man he hated. For one instant, in the grey gloom of the old 
 lonely court, there was a close-locked struggle ; wrong and hate 
 found their last issue in the sheer animal blood-thirst, the wild- 
 brute, untamed instincts that live latent in all men ; the next, the 
 unequal contest ended. Just risen from his sick-bed, weak with 
 
In the JNet of the Retiarius, S99 
 
 long festing and past illness, feyer-wom, and already blind and 
 dizzy with the single exertion of the crashing blow that ho bad 
 dealt, Ohandos reeled over under the fresh strength and supple 
 science of his adversary, and swayed back heavily on the grass- 
 grown stones of the desolate court. The dog, who had wandered 
 away for a moment, sprang back with a lion s bound and a lion'3 
 bay as his master fell, rushed at Trevenna, buried deep fangs in 
 his clothes and flesh, tore him with mad fury off Chandos, and 
 stood guard over the senseless and prostrate form ; — none could 
 have put a hand on it now, and lived. 
 
 Chandos lay there as he had done in the frozen night when 
 Ouido Lulli had found hira, utterly still, utterly senseless. His 
 face was turned upward, and the moon shone on it with a white, 
 cold, clear light. 
 
 His foe looked at him, standing much as in the dim centuries of 
 the Moyon Age, a little farther under the shadow of the tower of 
 fair Queen Isabeau, John of Burgundy had once looked on in the 
 evil night at the stone-dead body of the man. his jealous, covetous 
 lust of ambitious envy had pursued and him ted down to the death. 
 
 He had his victory, so sweet to him that he never felt the blood 
 pour from his shoulder, where the retriever had seized him and 
 dragged him off. , 
 
 " llow easy to kill him now I" he thought. ** Bah ! only fools 
 brfv,k laws. He will be dead soon enough ; he is worse than dead 
 nc-vr; he can stiffer. I wish priests' tales were true, and souls 
 ccubl live. I wish his father's could have power to see him as he 
 lieB^'Hsee the wreck of him and tho ruin." 
 
 There was a hard, ravenous, gloating longing in the thought 
 that stretched out beyond the grave. Not content with its work 
 on oarth, he looked lingeringly, enjojdngly, reluctant to pass away ; 
 but it was rare that caution with him could be conquered by 
 passion or desire, and he knew that if he waited a moment more 
 the dog would be at his throat. He looked once more with a smile 
 —a smile of full success — then went out from the still quadrangle, 
 leaving the chill moonlight to settle in a broad unbroken space 
 where Chandos lay. 
 
 That black shade of the old Rue du Temple had seen many 
 mtirders since the night when Louis d'Orleans was felled down 
 there as he rode from his tryst with Isabeau ; but it had never seen 
 fouler murder than that which John Trevenna had done, though 
 ho had held back his hand £:om the shedding of blood) from the 
 breaking of lav. 
 
'iZQ Chandos, 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 "em SHALL NOT HAVE DOMINION OVER YOU." 
 
 The square couit, sm-rounded with its four blank granite moss- 
 grown walls, with the round pointed towers looming darkly up 
 towards the sky, was wholly forsaken ; it was three parts in ruin ; 
 no one wandered there save once or twice in the length of the 
 night, when the beat of the patrol's step sounded through it, 
 waking its hollow echoes. It was as still as when, in the mediceval 
 ages, which saw its stones raised, the monks of its brotherhood had 
 flitted ghostlike through its shadows ; the pale moon only looked 
 down on it, her spectral swathes of light falling across the leaden 
 gloom of the damp, lichen-coyered pavement. 
 
 How long he lay there he never knew ; hurled back, but swaying 
 over from faintness rather than from injury, he had fallen in a 
 dead swoon, his head striking the stones with a dull sound that 
 echoed through the silence. The fresh night-air revived him, 
 blowing over his forehead and his eyes. He had been struck down 
 heavily, flung in wrestling by a merciless hand ; but there was 
 little sense of pain on him as he woke to the knowledge of where 
 ho was and of what had chanced ; his bodily weakness had prevented 
 the struggle and the resistance that might have been fatal to him. 
 He looked up at the moon shining so far above, so clear, so bright, 
 so tranqml ; life seemed to have faded far away fi-om him, and to 
 have left him in the calmness of the grave. 
 
 He rose with difficulty — his limbs felt powerless and broken — 
 and he staggered to an old stone bench hard by, where a shattered 
 fountain-spout slowly let fall a stream of water that ebbed away, 
 gHstening and shallow, in the starlight over the squares of the 
 pavement. He stooped and drank eagerly from it — it was cold and 
 pure — then sank down on the bench. The dog gathered itself 
 close against him. ; there was no sound of the world without, save 
 the dull roar of the distant night-traffic and the striking of church- 
 clocks upon the stillness: they seemed alone in the heart of Paris 
 —God-forgotten, man-forsaken, in the midst of the peopled world. 
 
 In the solemn night, the opium -mists, the brandy- di'ugged 
 stupor, the delirium of exhaustion, so long on him, passed away ; 
 the thoughts of his mind grew clearer, for the first hour since the 
 day of his ruin. An intense agony was on him, — the deep, still, 
 tearless agony of absolute despair. Yet he seemed to look on the 
 ruin of his life as from a burial-place from which he would never 
 rise; to look on and see the world that knew him no more, the 
 love that had abandoned, the friendship that had betrayed him, as 
 one dead, whose sense and soul retui-ned to behold all that he had 
 cherished revile his memory and forget his loss. He had no feeling 
 of present existence ; all he knew was that in the world of men he 
 bad no place, that in the hearts of the vast multitude of earth he 
 (lad no remembrance, that he had perished for ever inio oblivion 
 
" St>t shall not have dominion over you." 23 ! 
 
 N/hen the stroke had eimtten him down. There, in the sliUiies'i 
 and solemnity of night, all things seemed manifest to him ; apart 
 from all that he had once known, he seemed to gaze on it and hear 
 its pitiless course pass on, as a man lying paralyzed watches and 
 listens, having no more part or share with the humanity around 
 him than though his shroud had covered him, having no hand to 
 raise if *»is cheek be smitten, having no arm to lift if a fool mock 
 his misery, having no lips to speak if a lie make foul mirth of his 
 name ; lifeless, and yet among the living ; slain, and yet alive to 
 suffer. 
 
 This is how it seemed to him that he was now. Breath was i\ 
 him,— that was aU he claimed of life ; in every other tiling he was 
 a corpse; felled into a grave, whence he heard the jibing laughter 
 of those who jested at his fall, the restless feet of those who passed 
 on and bade him be forgot, the stones flung down on him by the 
 hands he had filled with gifts, the kisses that were welcomed by 
 the cheek his kiss had warmed ! He was dead ; and as the dead h? 
 was abandoned and forgotten. 
 
 The beauty that had been his was given to the embrace of another ; 
 the caress that had been on his lips now burned as softly on the 
 mouth of his spoiler ; the roof that had sheltered him from his 
 birth up covered the sleep and the revel of strangers ; the treasures 
 that had owned him master, and been gathered by him from north 
 to south, east to west, were scattered broadcast over the earth ; the 
 world that he had led knew him no more, and never named hia 
 name ; the women who had smiled in his eyes, and wound their 
 wreathing arms about his neck, let their bright hair brush the 
 bosoms and their pulses thrill to the whispers of newly-wooed 
 lovers ; the men whom he had served followed the light of rising 
 suns, and gave no heed to the eternal night that had faUen for 
 him : all that he had loved, all that he had owned, all that he had 
 lost, was gone to make the joy of other hearts : hie fate was the 
 fate of the dead. 
 
 He was forgotten in his misery, as slaughtered kings are for- 
 gotten in their sealed sepulchres ; and his sceptre was not even 
 broken, in pity and honour for his name, above his grave, but 
 passed to the hands of those who dethroned him, bringing them his 
 wealth, his crown, his treasuries, his lieges. 
 
 Of all that he had possessed, of all he had reigned over, he 
 could claim, nothing, — not even a heart that had loved him. 
 
 He knew the width and the depth of his desolation as jie had 
 never known it. The man whom he had fed as utterly as he had 
 fed the dog at his feet, when he had been starving and homeless 
 and friendless, the man whom he had lifted from a foreign prisor. 
 and served as few serve their own flesh and blood, the man who 
 had been his guest, his debtor, his suppliant for the very bread and 
 wine of his table, had turned against him, had deserted him, had 
 cursed him with a foe's hate; no other thing could have told 
 him how utterly he had sunk, how utterly had the world forsaken 
 him. 
 
 This man had flung his scorn at him, an*' had reviled him with -t 
 
Chandos, 
 
 traitor's pitiless mockery ; he knew it was the last depth of his 
 fall, the last and the most infamous witness of his degradation, — 
 as the Plantageiiet had known it, when the hound that had been 
 reared by his hand went from him to fawn on the conqueror. 
 
 In the state to which his mind had sunk, in the world-wide 
 wreck that he saw around him, the strangeness of Trevenna's 
 hatred struck him little ; he did not muse, as earlier he would have 
 [lone, on what could be the secret and the spring of this coarse, 
 merciless passion of enmity in one to whom his gifts had been as 
 many as the sands of the sea, and whom he had served more truly 
 than he had served himself. He [accepted it with the hopeleea 
 apathy that comes with despair : all left nim, all changed with his 
 changed fate, all condemned him where all had caressed him : it 
 seemed but of a piece with the rest that the greatest of debtors 
 should bring him as payment the blackest of ingratitude. 
 
 In one sense only did the full bitterness and shame of Trevenna's 
 taunts strike home to him : they showed him how low he must have 
 sunk that this man could dare revile him. It was less loathing of 
 his foe that rose in him than it was loathing of himseK ; it was less 
 hatred of his betrayer's infamy than it was hatred of his own abase- 
 ment. He shuddered as he thought what adversity already had 
 made him ; he dared not think what a brief while more might 
 make him. 
 
 A few nights more of the life he had led, and he would have been 
 dead at the Morgue, or raving in a madhouse. The lengthened 
 sleep that had preceded the congestion of the lungs which cold and 
 lack of food produced, had saved him ; had stiUed the fever in his 
 blood, and freed his reason from the half-drunk phantoms in which 
 it had lost itself, and been broken and blinded for so long. He 
 rose from his wretched bed but the shadow of what he had once 
 been ; bnt ^Jie look was gone from his eyes which had made the filU 
 de Joie in the gaming-den thrust the opium to him, and bid him 
 not Uve to be what he must be. 
 
 Her words came back to him now where he sat, the serene, cool 
 night, through which the stars alone looked, stilling the riot of his 
 mind with l£e sense of their own eternal calm. " What he must 
 b© ! " He knew well enough what that was. 
 
 A little while more of such a life as he had led since the day of 
 his ruin, of those hideous orgies, of that drunken stupor, of that 
 horrible and ghastly union of poverty and intoxication, of despair 
 and vice, and the lowest creature that crawled through the mid« 
 night snows to devour the stray relics of offal that the curs had left 
 would be as high as he ; a little more, and every better thing would 
 be crushed out in him, and the vilest den would spurn hmi from 
 it to die in the river-slime like a choked dog. 
 
 Had he embraced dishonour, and accepted the rescue that a lie 
 would have lent him, this misery in its greatest share had never 
 been upon him. He would have come hither with riches about 
 him, and the loveliness he had worshipped would have been hia 
 own beyond the touch of any rival's hand. Choosing to cleave to 
 the old creeds of his race, andj?assiixg, without a backward glance. 
 
** Sin shall net have dominion over you* %$$ 
 
 into the paths of honour and of justice, it was thus with him now. 
 Verily, virtue must be her own reward, as in the Socratic creed ; 
 for she will bring no other dower than peace of conscience in hei 
 gift to whosoever weds her. " I have loved justi«.-e, and fled from 
 iniquity ; wherefore here I die in exile," said Hildebrand upon his 
 death-bed. They will be the closing words of most lives that have 
 followed truth. 
 
 What could he be ? What could the future, if he lived for one, 
 hold for him ? Misery, privation, abandonment, solitude, the 
 ceaseless thirst of vain desires, the unending void of eternal losses, 
 the haunting knowledge of all he might have been. These were 
 what faced him ; these were what alone awaited him. K he lived 
 on, he could but look for these, and for worse yet, — he to whose 
 beauty-steeped senses every passing pain had been unknown, every 
 eight of deformity been veiled ! He thought of the old sacred legend 
 of Herodotus, — how, when the Argive mother prayed at the temple 
 of Juno in Argos for the highest blessing that mortals can attain to 
 be bestowed on Cleobis and Bifo, her prayer was granted : her sons 
 fell asleep to wake no more. He knew now its terrible truth, its 
 eternal meaning, — he who had thought ten thousand times the 
 span of his rich and shadowless life would be too brief a space to 
 spend on earth ! Death ; — it would not come to him ; and he 
 longed for it as a man in a desert land, shipwrecked amidst the 
 buining wealth of colour and the cruel wantonness of beauty roimd 
 him, longs for water as he perishes of thirst. 
 
 Still yet, even yet, a pulse of life stirred that he could not with 
 his own hand slay ; it was the power of the genius in him. Dulled, 
 drugged, stifled, paralyzed, beneath the weight of infinite wretched- 
 ness, the frozen apathy of despair, the fever of vice, the pangs of 
 famine, it was not dead, and the taunts of his foe had stung the 
 piide sleeping with it into fi'esh existence. The insult of his debtor 
 and his traitor had been the crowning agony of his passion ; but it 
 brought back life in him, as the plunge of the surgeon's steel will 
 bring it back and cut the cords of death by the very force and 
 suddenness of its stab. 
 
 A gentler hand could not have saved him or arrested him ; tho 
 unpitying and binital thrusts of his adversary roused him ere it 
 was yet too late. 
 
 There, in the silence, in the solitude, with the dark walls brood- 
 ing above him, and the cold winter's moon looking down, some- 
 thing of the grandeur of resistance, something of the calm of 
 andurance, came on him. Should this man see him die in a 
 bagnio ? point to him as one so womanish weak that the first stroke 
 of calamity had slain him ? mock him as a madman, who, having 
 squandered his birthright, flung his manhood and his mind and his 
 soul away with it ? 
 
 He had been gifted with such a genius as was in Alcibiades when 
 he listened in love to the golden words of his master, or heard the 
 shouts of the people give him to triumph as his chariot- wheels 
 crushed the wild thyme they threw. Should he perish, like Alci- 
 biades. in the arms of a courtesan, lost to all that earlier and holies 
 
^j^ Chanlos. 
 
 time ? A greater inhciitance than that which he had squandered 
 had been given him in his intellect ; a greater suicide than that of 
 the body would be the suicide that now was destroying the mind 
 with which nature had dowered him. 
 
 Freedom was left him, and intellect, — the two first treasures of 
 life ; whilst the powers of his brain were still his, and his liberty, 
 the poet would have said, — 
 
 "Then firjt o! thtj mighty, thank God that thoa fti." 
 
 There are liberties sweeter than love ; thef e are goals higher than 
 happiness. 
 
 Some memory of them stirred in him there, with the noiseless 
 flow of the lingering water at his feet, and above the quiet of the 
 stars ; the thoughts of his youth came back to him, and his heart 
 ached with their longing. , , , 
 
 Out of the salt depths of their calamity men had gathered the 
 heroisms of their future ; out of the desert of their exile they had 
 learned the power to return as conquerors. The greater things 
 within him awakened from their lethargy ; the innate strength so 
 long untried, so long lulled to dreamy indolence and rest, uncoiled 
 irom its prostration ; the force that would resist and, it might be. 
 survive, slowly came upon him, with the taunts of his foe. It was 
 possible that there was that still in him which might be grander 
 and truer to the ambitions of his imaginative childhood under 
 adversity, than in the voluptuous sweetness of his rich and careless 
 life. It was possible, if— if he could once meet the fate he shud- 
 dered from, once look at the bitterness of the life that waited for 
 him, and enter on its desolate and arid waste without going back 
 to the closed gates of his forfeited paradise to stretch his limbs 
 within their shadow once more ere he died. 
 
 There is more courage needed oftentimes to accept the onward 
 flow of existence, bitter as the waters of Marah, black and narrow 
 as the channel of Jordan, than there is ever needed to bow down 
 the neck to the sweep of the death-angel's sword. 
 
 He rose slowly and looked upward ; the hours had fled, the city 
 was sleeping, the busy feet of the crowds were silent, and the hush 
 of an intense rest was on the world around him. Beneath it vice 
 might yet riot and misery still moan ; but it was towards dawn, 
 and the noiseless peace was unbroken ; the trembling rays of moon- 
 light shivered on the water's surface, and far above, shining from 
 the deep, blue-black, fathomless vault, the lustre of the stars 
 burned through the brilliancy of winter air,— a myriad worlds 
 uncounted and unknown. Men had abandoned and hope forsaken 
 him ; on the eaxth he had no place, and in human love no memory ; 
 but there, under theii- solemn light, their own tranquillity encom- 
 passed hiTn ; solitude lost its desolation in the eternity and the 
 immensity of that limitless space, of that unknown deity. 
 
 A lifetime suffered here,— what was it ? the span of a single day 
 in those bright worlds beyond the sun. In face of that changeless 
 and endless calm, the burder of so brief a labour might well be 
 
In Exile ^ ~ 335 
 
 borne ; sufficient if through travail the faintest shadow of likeness 
 unto trath were gained. To many in their suffering that unalter- 
 able and eternal serenity of nature is pitiless, is unendurable ; they 
 find no mercy in it, no shelter, and no aid ; to him it was divine 
 as consolation, divine with the majesty of God. Above the fret 
 and vice and wretchedness of earth it brooded so still, so cold ; it 
 stretched so boundless and so deathless out into the infinite realms 
 Df space !— from it there seemed to breathe the promise of a future 
 when men should live '* sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed ; " from 
 it there seemed to steal the bidding, " Let the world abandon you, 
 but to yourself bo true." 
 
 Though he had lost all, there were with him still the dreams of 
 his youth; the world forsook him, and the width of the earth 
 stretched before him,— a desert laid waste, barren and pitiless as 
 stone, through which he must pass, wearily and in solitude, to live 
 and to die alone ; yet he arose with his dead strength revived, with 
 Iho calm of a passionless endurance fallen on him. 
 
 He accepted the desolation of his life, for the sake of all beyond 
 life, greater than life, which looked down on him from the silence 
 of the night. 
 
 BOOK THE FIFTH. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 LN EXILE. 
 
 It was sunset in Venice,— that supremo moment when the magi- 
 cal flush of light transfigui-es all, and wanderers whose eyes havo 
 long ached with the greyness and the glare of northward cities 
 eaze and think themselves in heaven. The still waters of tho 
 Fagunes, the marbles and the porphyry and the jasper of the mighty 
 palaces, the soft grey of the ruins all covered with clinging green and 
 the glowing blossoms of creepers, the hidden antique nooks where 
 some woman's head leaned out of an arched casement, like a dream 
 of the Dandolo time when the Adriatic swarmed with the returning 
 gaUeys laden with Byzantine spoil, the dim, mystic, majestic walls 
 that towered above the gHding surface of the eternal water, once 
 aUve with flowers, and music, and the gleam of golden tresses, and 
 the laughter of careless revellers in the Venice of Goldoni, in the 
 Venice of the Past ;— everywhere the sunset glowed with the marvel 
 of its colour, with the wonder of its warmth. 
 
j^36 Chandos, 
 
 Then a moment, and it was gone. Night fell with the hashed 
 shadowy stillness that belongs to Venice alone ; and in the place 
 of the not and luxuriance of colour there was the tremulous dark- 
 ness of the young night, with the beat of an oar on the water, the 
 scent of unclosing carnation-buds, the white gleam of moonlight, 
 and the odour of lilies-of-the-valley blossoming in f>he dark arch- 
 way of some mosaic-lined window. 
 
 One massive and ancient house towered up amidyt many another 
 palace, — a majestic, melancholy place, with shafts of black marble 
 and columns of porphyry, and deep sea-piles that the canal bathed 
 into a hundred umber tmts. Long ago some of the greatest of the 
 oligarchy had held there their highest state ; now it was scarcely 
 habited, left to decay, and lost m gloom,— a sepulchi-e of dead 
 j^lories, while the insolence of foreign mirth and the shame of 
 foreign arms outraged the captive and widowed beauty of the Adri- 
 atic spouse. It was lonely and unspeakably desolate; with the 
 gliding sheet of the still water beneath its walls, and the long 
 sombre lines of forsaken palaces stretching beyond it on either side, 
 and facing it in the splendour of the early moon. Yet it was inti- 
 uitely impressive, infinitely grand, standing there with its mediaeval 
 sculptures touched with rays of starlight, and its costly marbles 
 washed by the ebbing of the tide. 
 
 At one of its lofty, narrow casements a man leaned out into the 
 fragrant spring-tide air ; he had risen fi'om close studies in the 
 chamber within— vast in space as a king's throne-room, barren in 
 f^arniture as a contadina's hut— to watch the fading of the sun, tho 
 sudden loss of all the wealth of colour in the grey hues of evening ; 
 and he lingered still, now that the night had wholly fallen. In 
 tJiat stillness, in that soft lapping of the water, in that glisten in 
 the distance of the silveiy lagune, in that scarcely-stirring wind 
 filled with the breath of opening blossoms, there was a lulling 
 charm,— there was the echo of a long-lost youth. 
 
 His face was of a great beautv ; though many years had j)assed 
 over it, time could touch and could dim it but httle ; but in the 
 eyes there was the exile's weariness and the deep thought of the 
 scholar ; on the mouth there was that look which comes of bitter 
 pain borne, of strong victories wrung from calumny and poverty 
 and hard defiance,— such a look as Dante might have worn, yet less 
 harsh, though not less mournful, than the Florentine's. He looked 
 down on the deep and sleeping shadows, on the gliding darkness of 
 the canal below ; the sweetness of the you»g night, the Adriatic 
 fragrance of the sea-wafted air, brought him a thousand memonea 
 across the desert of long years. 
 Through his mind floated such thoughts as wearied Oleon :— 
 
 ** Indeed, to know is something, and to prove 
 How all this beauty might be enjoy'd is more ; 
 But, knowing naught, to enjoy is something too. 
 Yon rower with the moulded muscles there, 
 Lowering the sail, i» nearer it than I." 
 
 There had been a time when every breath of life had been for hist 
 
In Exile, 237 
 
 ebjoytaent, rich as the god's life of Dionysus. In moments eucl 
 ds these he longed for tiiat dead time, as the poet Ovid, in the itt 
 and winter storms and snow-bound forests of his Danubian exil. 
 longed for the golden sunlight, for the purple pomp, for the gh.J 
 idolatry of the vine-crowned land that knew his place no more. 
 
 '• Am I any neaier the ambitions of my youth than I was twenty 
 years ago ?— am I as near ? " he thought. In the voluptuous husL 
 and fragrance of the Venetian night his years seemed cold and 
 fruitless and heavy-laden. 
 
 Where he stood, in the dark arch of the window, the measured 
 music of oars beat the water ; beneath the walls several gondolas 
 gilded ; on the silence rose, chaunted by the mellow voices of young 
 Venetians, a hymn of libei-ty. They might pay to their tyranty 
 well-nigh with life for its singing ; yet that knowledge gave no 
 tremor to the cadence that rang so bold and so clear in the still- 
 ness. Passionate, yet unspeakably sad, rich as the world of colour 
 that had just passea fr-om the world, but melancholy as the breath- 
 less stillness of the calm lagunes, the ode of freedom was sung by 
 the lips of those who knew themselves slaves, — young, fresh voices, 
 the voices of youth and of vivid ambition, yet touched to a deeper 
 meaning and vibrating with a hopeless desire ; for they were the 
 voices also of forbidden hope, and of thoughts held in bond and 
 enchained. It was the *' lo triumphe " of liberty, — 
 
 '• Thou huntress swifter than the Moon f thou terror 
 Of the world's wolves ! thou bearer of the quiver, 
 Whose sun-like shafts pierce tempest-tossed error 
 As light may pierce the clouds ; " 
 
 but also it was the lament of Leopardi, — the lament most weary, 
 most utterly desolate, of all upon earth, — the lament of men whose 
 hearts ache for lofty aims and noble fields, and whose lives are 
 denied all purpose and all effort, — of men whose country is in 
 thraldom. 
 
 The chaunt ceased ; all the many and melodious tones which had 
 tisen on the night and swelled louder and sweeter down the canal, 
 dll the boatmen far off heard the echo and gave it back, were sud- 
 denly silenced, as a choir of song-birds will cease at noontide. In 
 the prow of the foremost vessel a young Venetian rose, the gleam of 
 his auburn hair and the kindling light on his face like some old 
 painter's Gabriel or Michael yonder in the gloom of the ancient 
 churches. He lifted his eyes to the arch of the casement where he 
 stood up in the white, tremulous lustre of the moon. 
 
 ** You have striven for the freedom of thought and for the liberty 
 of judgment," he said, simply. " Venice, who has lost them both, 
 loves you for that which you have loved, and gives you thus the 
 only homage she now dares." 
 
 Without pause, without a word more, the rowers bent above 
 their oars, the gondolas floated down the dark surface, the young 
 Impassioned faces of the singers turned backward with a fond and 
 cdYoreut farewell as their vessels swept into th/9 shadows, so deep 
 
Chandoa. 
 
 so rayleas, underneath the walla of the abandoned palaces : it wafc 
 
 all they had to give, that song of freedom in a fettered land. 
 
 llo to whom they gave it thought it more than the gift of crowns 
 Laid at his feet. It touched lum strangely with its suddenness, 
 with its meaning, — this gratitude rendered to him by the young, 
 pure, patriot- voices of those who might pay the cost of that night's 
 utterance with the pain of captive's bondage or of exile's banish- 
 ment. It was more worth to him than any diadem with which the 
 world could have anointed him, — this recognition of what he sought, 
 this knowledge of why he laboured. 
 
 It came to him as answer and rebuke to the thoughts which had 
 been with him as that unbidden music rose upon the night. _ To 
 enjoy was much; but to seek truth and labour for fi-eedom might 
 be more. 
 
 '* One fetter of tradition loosened, one web of superstition broken, 
 one ray of light let in on darkness, one principle of liberty secured, 
 are worth the living for," he mused. " Fame ! — it is the flower oi 
 a day, that dies when the next sun rises. But to do something, 
 however little, to free men from their chains, to aid something, 
 however faintly, the rights of reason and of truth, to be unvan- 
 quished through all and against all, these may bring one nearer the 
 pure ambitions of youth. Happiness dies as age comes to us ; it 
 sets for ever, with the suns of early years : yet perhaps we may 
 keep a higher thing beside which it holds but a brief loyalty, if to 
 ourselves we can rest true, if for the liberty of the world we can do 
 anything." 
 
 For he was one of those who to the cause of freedom and of truth 
 bring the wealth of their intellect and the years of their life, and 
 receive but little requital save a sullen reverence wi-ung from an 
 imwilling world, and the railing bitterness of the crowds who abhor 
 light and hug error and tradition close. His words stirred with 
 shame the hearts of nations steeped in lust and lethargy and the 
 greed of gold ; and they awoke to hoot and hiss the one who dared 
 rouse them from their torpor or arrest them in their money-chang- 
 ing. His thoughts sank down into the unworn hearts of youth, 
 and they shook themselves free from the ashes of superstition and 
 the chains of creeds ; and the priests of superstition cui-sed him. 
 His utterance probed the surface of the world, and, piercing its 
 panoply of wordy falsehood, brought to it the clear, keen light oi 
 scepticism and truth ; and the world was weary of him, it slept so 
 much mo.?>o soundly beneath the veil and in the darkness. He loved 
 men with a pity and a tolerance no trial could exhaust ; he would 
 have led them, if he could, to the search and to the knowledge of 
 other things than their gold-thirst an^ Cieir paradise of lies ; and 
 they tui-ned back to their treasuries of money, to their granaries of 
 hypocrisies, and would have none of him. Their cars were wilftilly 
 deaf, their eyes were wilfully blind, their feet loved the trodden 
 paths, their hands were busy grasping their neighbours' goods ; 
 they wondered at and they reviled him ; they would not follow to 
 the mountain air he bade them breathe; they stayed in the mud, 
 seekizig a coin He was alone. The world gaye him fame grudg- 
 
In lyiumph, a^Q 
 
 ingly, reluctantly, because it could not withhold it longer ; but it 
 left him alone and condemned because he saw no holiness in the 
 shrine of gold, and no right divine in the tyi-anny of tradition. 
 
 He was alone ; eagles that love the high light-penetrated aii\ 
 that has no mist and clog of earth-born dust, must ever dwell in 
 solitude. Yet now and then there came to him, as there had come 
 from the voices of fettered men to-night, an echo of his own 
 thoughts, a recognition of his own labours, and these sufficed to 
 him. 
 
 They who laboui* jujtly for the sheer sake of truth find no pre- 
 sent reward : will they hereafter find it ? A weary question ; — one 
 to which men never yet have gained an answer. 
 
 CHAPTER n. 
 
 IN TRIUMPH. 
 
 The stars, as they shone on Venice, shone likewise farther north- 
 ward on one of the mighty, labyrinthine, ink-black cities of labour. 
 The heavy pall of smoke loomed over the forests of roof, of chim- 
 neys, of factories, of churches ; the bells of the latter were chiming 
 with incessant, joyous, pealing clangour, bells that rung a chime 
 called of God every seventh day in the midst of the worship of 
 Mammon, bells put up in many a steeple, iron ofi'erings to Deity 
 by iron hands that wrung the last bitter di'op out of poverty, and 
 clammed the last starveling of laboui', and bought redemption 
 cheaply by a sop to a parish priest. 
 
 The bells were rhyming wildly, with no pretence, happily, that 
 it was in the honour of Godhead now, — tossing upward through the 
 weight of murky air wave on wave of changing sound, of riotous 
 triumph, of passionate, mirthful, random, uncouth music like the 
 harmony of Thor's great hammers. Under the sea of iroai-echoing 
 noise vast crowds pressed tumultuous, in a grim triumph like that 
 of the metal melodies. Their hard, keen, indomitable faces were 
 sharp-set as the knives they made, were massive as the iron they 
 worked ; and on them was the flush and the pride of victory. It 
 u-as on the night of a great election, an election that had followed 
 in Lenten time on a sudden and unlooked-for dissolution, — an 
 appeal to the country as agitating as it had been unforeseen ; and 
 they had brought to the fore their champion, their idol, the most 
 famous of all his party. In this vast city of Darshampton there 
 was but one name and but one sovereignty, — his. The people had 
 crowned him ; and who should dare to discrown ? 
 
 In one of the chambers of a magnificent hotel, he stood in the 
 dusky red glow of the sunset that burned through the smoke-laden 
 atmosphere and fell about his feet as though it too were eager to 
 seek him out and smile on him, — this man, omnipotent in all he 
 undertook. A crown of friends were about him, breathless in con- 
 ,?ratuIation on what was but a repeated triumph, waiting in 
 
«40 Chandos. 
 
 delighted warmth of welcome on ono in whom they saw a deity 
 more potent than all the gods of Semitic or Achaean creeds, — the 
 deity of a supreme Success. Throngs had been about him from 
 earliest days, — throngs of friends, of flatterers, of men who believed 
 in him honestly and would have fought for him to the death had 
 need been, — of men who believed in nothing except the divinity of 
 fluccess, and followed that idolatrously in him because they saw his 
 acumen never faU, his fortune never change. The city would give 
 him its banquet to-night ; his party brought him devoted gratitudt 
 and ecstatic pride, the country bestowed on him scarce less admira- 
 tion ; young men looked to him as their leader, elder looked to him to 
 reap the harvest of the seed they had sown in the future ; the aris- 
 tocracy dreaded, the plutocracy bribed, the multitude adored him. 
 He was a great man already ; later on he would be a greater,-— 
 popular beyond all conception, triumphant in whatever he essayed. 
 
 The shouts and the cheers of the populace swelled louder and 
 louder ; the clamoui* was hoarse, Titanic, almost terrible in its im- 
 perative power, as the voice of the People always is when once it 
 thunders through the land, — imperative for murder as imperative 
 for bread, mighty and resistless alike in both. Here it rose with 
 one accord, with one word, — his own name. They had brought 
 him in, — those men with their horny, supple hands, and their black- 
 ened, resolute brows, and their limbs like the limbs of the old Ber- 
 eaerkers, those men of the Black Country, who grasped so doggedly 
 at truths sharp as steel, yet gi-asped but at half-truths, and, so 
 blinded, reached but hatred of an Order when they thought] they 
 grasped at liberty for Mankind. The shouts swelled louder and 
 louder, more and more full of peremptory demand ; they had 
 brought him through, or thought they had, and clamoured for 
 their idol. 
 
 He humoured them ever, as a lion-tamor humours his cubs, that 
 he may cut the claws and grind smooth the teeth and make the 
 brave oeast lie down passive as a spaniel at his beck, and turn to 
 profit the world's terror when he shows how docilely he guides the 
 wild, tawny, desert-king, that at his bidding would leap forth and 
 tear and slay. 
 
 He went out on the balcony, and the din of the acclamations 
 rolled up to the red evening skies like thunder. In the large square 
 before the building, and in the transverse streets that crossed and 
 mot, the dense multitudes were gathered, wave on wave of human 
 life, sui'ging in in swift succession, and stretching far and wide 
 away beyond the sight, like a stormy and restless sea. Their dark 
 faces, swarthy and begrimed, shrewd and stem, were turned up- 
 ward to the balcony with an eager pride and pleasure, while from 
 the brawuy chests of the iron-workers that tremendous welcome 
 rang. The sun shone more burnished red in the crimson, heavy 
 west, and, slanting in broad, glowing, dusky streams of light 
 athwart the misty gloom, fell on that ocean of upraised faces, and 
 across the eyes of the man they honoured, — eyes so keen, so mirth- 
 ful, so unerring, so full of sagacious life, of triumphant victory. 
 
 <' He is the man for the Future," said one stalwart workeri with 
 
In Triumph, 141 
 
 the breath of the furnace-blasts and the blackness of the iron- 
 foundry upon him, ^et who read Bentham, and Foui-ier, and Mill. 
 
 One, less book-wise and more world-wise, pierced nearer to the 
 secret of success, to the root of popularity, as he answered, 
 
 *' He's more : he's the man for the Present." 
 
 " And the man for the People ! " shouted a third, behind them. 
 The words were caught up and echoed on all sides, till they ran 
 through the packed thousands like electric fluid, till from the whole 
 of tho swaying gigantic mass the words broke unanimously, rising 
 high above the pealing of the bells and the sti'ife of the streets, 
 hurling his name out in that grim, passionate, fiu'ious loye of a 
 multitude which has oyer in it something, and welhiigh as much, 
 of menace as of caress. 
 
 He nodded to them with a pleasant, familiar smile, — such a smile 
 as a boy gives to his favourite and unruly dogs ; then he stood more 
 forward against the iron scrollwork of the balcony, looking down 
 on that movement beneath him, and spoke. 
 
 Not for the first time here, in Darshampton, by many, the ring- 
 ing, metallic, clarion-roll of the voice they knew so well stilled 
 them like magic, thrilled them as hounds thrill at the notes of a 
 horn, and held them in check as the horn holds the pack. He 
 spoke as only those can speak who have been long trained to tho 
 public arena, who have studied every technicality of their science 
 and every weakness of their audience, who have brought to it not 
 orJy the talent of native skill, but ihQ polish of long usage, the 
 power of assured practice. He spoke well, — keen, trenchant, 
 vigorous, humorous oratory, English to the backbone, coarse in 
 its pungency, withal, here, as it could be scholarly elsewhere, 
 striking to the heart of its subject as surely and as straightly aa 
 the arrow of Tell to the core of the apple. There was a breath- 
 less silence while he spoke, the trumpet-like tones of his ring- 
 ing voice penetrating without effort to the farthermost of the 
 listening thi'ongs, the Swift-like humour- and wit shaking sar- 
 donic laughter from the brawny chests of his hearers, the biting 
 and incisive reasoning drawn in by them as eagerly as town- 
 dusted lungs draw in .the salt, fresh breezes of the sea. He was 
 their master, though they thought themselves his electors and 
 creators ; and he played at will on them, as a strong, skilled baud 
 plays on a stringed instrument, moving it to what cadence ha 
 chooses. They listened in devoted silence, only broken by tumul- 
 tuous cheering, or by the hoarse, gaunt laughter that was ominous 
 as any curses raised against what they hated. He spoke long, 
 though so succinctly, so pungently, that the minutes of his speecn 
 seemed moments ; then ceased, while the red sun-glow still strayed 
 to his feet, and the chimes of the bells swung wild delight, and the 
 ehouts of the populace teeming below deafened the air with his 
 name. 
 
 He laughed to himself as he bowed many times his thanks and 
 his farewell, then sauntered from the balcony into the lighted and 
 crowded room, glancing back at that shifting sea of upraised, 
 Ernest, hard-lined faces in the dusky heat of the fading siin. 
 
34^ Chandos. 
 
 ** D— d rasoals, every one of you, my friends," he thought, ** oi 
 out-and-out-fools ; God knows which. Eave about oppression and 
 the wrongs of Capital to Labour, while you send your children to 
 Bweat, at five years old, in furnaces, and threaten to Icill your 
 brother if he don't join your trade-union and strike when he's told ; 
 clamour for the rights of man, and worry your brains after political 
 economics, while you think all the ' rights ' centre in scribbling 
 your name in a poll-book and talking mild sedition in a tap-room ! 
 Oh, you precious fools ! how we use you, and how we lausrh 
 at you ! » ^ 
 
 For he was not even wholly true to those who were so true to 
 him ; and he had no belief even in their thorough, heartfelt earnest- 
 ness, en-ing from imperfect vision, and distorted from imperfect 
 education, but sincere and true in its widest errors. 
 
 They thought they had made him what he was ; he knew that 
 they were his tools, his wax, his weapons. 
 
 He glanced back once on to the vast, oscillating crowd in the 
 reddening angry sunset mist, and the laugh of a consummated 
 victory, tne insolence of a secure triumph, were in the backward 
 flash of his eyes, mingled, too, with a certain proud power, a cer- 
 tain exultation of self-achieved distinction. His name was still 
 echoing to the skies from the lungs of the close-packed throngs. 
 
 ""Who dare sneer at that name now?" he thought; and there 
 was in that thought the glow which Themistocles felt when they 
 who had exiled him as a nameless thing of the people, to wrestle 
 with the base-born in the Bing of Oynosarges, welcomed him in 
 the city of the Yiolet Crown as the victor of Salamis, the slayer 
 of Persia. 
 
 Then he went within from the stormy clangour and the scarlet 
 flush of evening, and was feasted through that night by the men 
 of the mighty town, nobles who hated him bearing their part iii 
 his honour, rivers of wine flowing to his toast, the crowds of tho 
 streets knowing no theme but his present and his future, the nation 
 on the morrow saying, as the city said to-night, '*He is a greftt 
 moa ; he Trill be still greater." 
 
BOOK THE SIXTH. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 ** PRIMA VERA ! GIOYENTU DELL* ANNO I " 
 
 Down at the foot of tlie mountain- slopes reaching to Vallombrosj^ 
 hidden away in the deep belt of the chestnut-forests, was a little 
 Tuscan village. Sheltered high above by the pines of the hills, 
 and veiled from every glance by the thick masses of the chestnut- 
 leaves, no strange foot ever scarcely wandered to it. It was out 
 of the route of travellers ; it had slumbered here for ages : it had 
 been here when Milton looked on the Val d'Arno ; it had been 
 here when Totila thundered at the gates of Kome ; it had been here 
 when Plautus caught in the colour of his words the laughter, the 
 mirth, the tavern- wit, the girls a Ubre allure, the wine-brawls, and 
 the Bacchan feasts of the Latin life ; it had been here thi^ough all 
 changes, but it had never changed. Belike, it had been sacked 
 by Csesar, razed by Theodoric, visited by Stilicho, plundered by the 
 Franks of Carl ; but it was still the same, surviving all ruin, and 
 covered in the spring-time with so dense a leafy shade that the 
 grey tint of its stone, the red brown of its few roofs, showed no 
 more than the oriole's nest through the boughs. The pui-ple pluma 
 of the olives ripened and were gathered, the red osiers changed to 
 tender green, the grapes were garnered with the vintage-tide, the 
 cattle came down the hill- sides when the sun sank low, the chest- 
 nuts turned to ruddy brown and broke their husks and fell upon 
 the moss ; a few lives were born, a few lives were buried. These 
 were all the changes known there, the changes of the night and 
 day, of the seasons of the year, and of the coming of life and of 
 death. The light of the after-glow shone on it, the scorch of the 
 later summer parched its fields and woods, the snows of winter lay 
 upon its hill-top and gleamed between the darkness of its pines^ 
 the breath of the spring breathed the flower-glory over its land, 
 and uncurled the white spiral blossom of its arums in the water- 
 bed ; but through wars and rumours of wars, through the Cam- 
 paign of Italy as through the wars of the Great Captain, througli 
 the ravages of the Cinque Cento as through the raids of the Goths 
 and the Gauls, the httle woodland nook of Fontane Ajuorose 
 remained unaltered, as though the foot of Dionysus when it had 
 pressed its sward had bidden its blossoms keep an eternal bloom, 
 smd the Dryads and the Satyrs, driven from every other ancient 
 
344 
 
 Chandos. 
 
 haunt, still lived beneath the green fronds of its trailing plants, 
 and laughed amidst the bronzed gold of its autumn vines. 
 
 It was in the "mezza notted' Aprile," beloved of painters, 
 hymned of poets, which makes of all the Southern land one fresh 
 and laughing garden. Upward yonder, higher still on the hills, 
 there was some little chillness lingering still, and the air blew keener 
 thi'ough the aisles of pines ; but here, midway in the sloping of rich 
 mossy greensward, deeply sheltered by its beeches and chestnuts 
 and by the slopes of its fir- woods, the delicious spring of Italy was 
 in its fairest, with the purple orchid glowing in the noon, and the 
 deHcate wind-flower fanned by the breeze, and the young buds of 
 the vine opening in the clear and perfect light. A few miles from 
 the clustering dwellings of Fontane was a grove of beech-trees, 
 always, save at the height of noon, dark as twilight ; for the branches 
 were dense, and the trees towered massive and many. Yet in the 
 heart of them was a nook fit for the couch of a Naiad, — fit to have 
 had laid down in it the fair lifeless limbs of Adonis. In the shade of 
 the leaves the moss and grass were ever fresh; the sun-tan of midsum- 
 mer never brought drought there; anemones and violets, and all wild 
 flowers that bloom in Tuscan woods, filled it with odour and colour, 
 and through it welled the bright clear water of a broken fountain, 
 so old that underneath its moss might still be traced the half-effaoed 
 Latin inscription. By it perhaps Vii'gil once had learned, or 
 Claudian rhymed his epic ; at its spring the beautiful evil lips o) 
 Antonina might have drunk, or, lying beside them, Lucretius might 
 have thought of the Etrurian shades, looking far down into those 
 deep, rayless aisles of beech, sublime and sad as his own genius. 
 Where the water rippled, losing itself among the mosses and the 
 orchids, a glory of sunlight came, touching to silver the wing of a 
 wood-pigeon poised to drink, lending a warmer blush to the white 
 wUd rose as the rifling bee hummed far down in its violated chalice, 
 and shedding its ripe gold on the hair of a -young girl leaning 
 motionless there. 
 
 The birds, fearless of her presence, paused in their flight to glance 
 at her ; the nightingales, thinking it night in the beech-shadows 
 yonder, sung her their softest songs ; the butterflies alighted on 
 the flowers her hands held ; they knew her well, they loved her ; 
 they were her only playmates in the long Italian day. Arum lilies, 
 and the pale-green blossoms of the ivy, and anemones glowing 
 crimson, and the emerald coils of moss, were in a loose sheaf on her 
 lap ; she sat in a day-dream, watching the mystical flow of the 
 water as though its patient music could sing her the hymn of her 
 future. 
 
 She was very young, but on her beauty was the Tuscan glow ; 
 and she had already the taU, slender, jdelding, voluptuous form of 
 thr South. In the hair, like a chestnut that has the fleck of the 
 sunhght upon it, iu the deep eyes with theii' blue-black lustre and 
 their dreamy passionate Hds, in the lips so soft, so proud, so mom-n- 
 ful, in t'ie brow, broad and thoughtful like an antique, in the bril- 
 liance and the light upon the face, were all the Soutiiern types : 
 it wag onlv in the fairness of t^^ skin that something more Northern 
 
Castatio. %j^i 
 
 might have been fancied ; in all else it was the rich and sunlit loye- 
 liness of Italy. 
 
 Her hand rested on the stone that bore the Latin words, all 
 covered now with the wild growth of ivy ; her gaze rested on the 
 water sparkling so bright in sunshine here, flowing so dark 
 beneath the grasses there ; the sheaf of woodland wealth rested 
 listlessly on her lap. She leaned there, in her childhood's care- 
 lessness, in the classic solitude, against the black shades of the 
 beech-woods that closed her in as in a temple, and only let the 
 flood of sun pour down across the mined Eoman fountain and the 
 countless flowers at her feet. 
 
 She was fair as Sappho while yet love was unknown and a child's 
 laughter amidst the roses of Ionia was only hushed now and then 
 by vague and prescient dreams ; she was fair as Heloise while je\ 
 only tiie grand serenity of the Greek scroU lay opened before her 
 eyes and no voice beside her had taught a lore more fatal and a 
 mystery more mournful than the wise words of Hellas. 
 
 She was very lovely, motionless here where no sound came ex- 
 cept the lulling of the water and the gliding noise of a bird's wing, 
 where the tender green blossoming vines hung coiled above her 
 head, and where the deep bronze of the beech- belt drew round her 
 the gloom of the night. 
 
 Where she leaned thus, one passing through the denseness of 
 that gloom saw her, unseen himself, and paused ; he thought of 
 Proserpine among the flowers ere the cruelty of fate fell on her. 
 The young life and the grass-grown ruin, the aisle of colour and 
 sunlight, and the mass of enclosing shade, were a picture and a 
 poem in one, — the gladness of a Greek idyl, with the mystic dark- 
 ness of a Northern Saga. 
 
 Once he would have lingered there, drawn the ivy-wreaths from 
 the hands, wooed the eyes from their musing ^aze, paused beside 
 her in the leafy peace, — once, in the days of his youth. Now he 
 looked an instant, thought how fair she was, and passed onward 
 down his lonely path far into the beechen shadows. 
 
 CHAPTER n. 
 
 0A8TJ 
 
 Suddenly, without a warning, the radiance of the late day 
 clouded. Before the mules could patter along the stony roads, 
 before the contadine could reach homeward as they came from 
 antique Pelago, before the workers could leave the ohve-fields and 
 vineyards, before the mild-eyed oxen of the Apennine could be 
 driven through the rank hill-grass, without warning, the mighty 
 clouds gathered, the night fell, the fires ran down the heavens, the 
 storm broke. 
 Through it, as best he might, he who had an hour or two before 
 
14^ Chandos. 
 
 passed throxigli tlie moss-grown path of the beech-woods, made hu 
 backward way. It was now peril to life and limb to be out in its 
 fury ; the melon -plants were torn up by their roots, the twisted 
 olives wiithed into tenfold contortion, the peaceful bubbling waters 
 turned into angry torrents, the young trees were uprooted and 
 hurled down the steep descents ; the darkness was impenetrable, 
 except when the lightning lit the whole land in its glare, and the 
 rushing of stones and of boughs and of saplings, as the winds tore 
 them up and whirled them on its blaat, roared with a thunder only 
 drowned in the peals that shook fi-om hill to hill and echoed 
 through the solitudes of the forest. 
 
 He could not even tell his road ; he had lost its certainty in the 
 blackness around. Unknown to himself, he had wandered back 
 once more into the beech-glades, and was lost in their impenetrable 
 shades, instead of holding on his upward road along the hill-side 
 through the pines. As he went, feeling his way slowly through 
 the dense hot gloom, he trod on some fallen thing that his foot 
 crushed ere he felt it. He stopped and stooped to it ; he thought 
 it might be some frightened hare or some large bird struck in the 
 storm and entangled in the yielding, clinging moss. The darkness 
 was dark as that of a moonless midnight ; he had no sense to guide 
 hJTTi but the sense of touch. The grasses and the flowers, all 
 bruised and beaten, met his hand ; then, as it moved farther, it 
 wandered to the loose trail of some floating haii', and passed over 
 the warmth of human Hps and the outline of a woman's cheek and 
 bosom. He thought of the Tuscan child whom he had seen in the 
 sunset light. 
 
 The heavy tresses lay in his hand ; he could not teU whether she 
 were living or dead, she was so stiU in the darkness. He passed 
 his hand gently over her brow, she did not move ; he spoke, she 
 did not hear ; he di-ew her loosened dress over her uncovered chest, 
 she did not feel his touch. There was warmth from the lips on hia 
 palm, there was a faint pulsation in the heart as he sought for its 
 throb ; that was all. Else she lay, as one dead, at his feet^ in 
 the blackness of the driving stonn, in the din of the echoing 
 thunder. 
 
 The fire flashed fi'om the cleft skies ; the blaze of an intolerable 
 light poured down. In it he saw her, and the broken stone of the 
 Latin ruins, with the water gliding into its deep, still pool. He 
 paused a moment, leaning over her with the thick wealth of the 
 hair Ijdng in his hand; he could not leave her, and succour there 
 was none. With little thought, save such an impulse of pity as 
 that in which a man might raise a fawn his shot had struck, or a 
 song-bird his foot had ti'odden on, he stooped and raised her in his 
 arms. Her head feU back, her limbs wore powerless, she lay 
 passive and unconscious in his hold; forsaken here, she must 
 peridi; death was abroad in every blast, in eveiy flash. He 
 hesitated no more, but leaned her brow against his breast, and, 
 thus weighted, went on his toilsome and perilous way through the 
 beech-glades. He knew his road now ; that was much : and he 
 waa cot very far from his own home. He forced his passage 
 
Castalia, »47 
 
 dowly and with difficulty through the denseness of the woods. It 
 was a tedious and dangerous toil. But still as he went he sheltered 
 her, and he pierced his road at length through the aisles of the 
 beech-wilderness tiU he camo into the broken arches of what had 
 once been stately Koman courts. So far near his refuge, he paused 
 a second to take rest ; the vivid Hghtnings filled the arcade^ with 
 their glow, the peal of the storm rolled above ; he leaned against a 
 marble shaft and looked down on his burden. Her head rested 
 on his breast as peacefully as though she slept upon her mother's 
 heart ; the long dark lashes swept her cheek ; her Hi)s were slightly 
 parted with a warmer breath. There was a touching sanctity in 
 the unconscious rest, a plaintive appeal in the extreme youth and 
 in its death-like calm. 
 
 " Poor child ! " he thought, " she may live to wish she had been 
 abandoned there to die in the peace of her childhood." 
 
 In other years his lips would have called back the sleeping life 
 with a caress ; now he looked on her with a passionless pity, gentle 
 because profoundly sad, sad because she had so much youth, and 
 that youth was a woman's. 
 
 Kien he went onward through the shattered arches that were 
 canopied and covered with impenetrable ivy and feathery grasses 
 tinted to every hue in the flashings of the Light, and entered by a 
 low side-door the first court of a Latin villa half in ruins, crossed 
 the court, and passed into the first chamber. It was long and 
 lofty, and had in it the decay of greatness ; fragments of a perfect 
 sculpture were upon the waUs, a fresco in hues fair as though 
 painted but yesterday covered the ceiling, the pavement was of 
 mosaic marbles ; these were all of its old classic glories that time 
 had left untouched : for the rest, it was an artist's studio, a student's 
 library, strewn with papers and with books, with here and there a 
 cast or bronze ; at the far end a lectern with a veUum manuscript 
 open upon its wings, and in the midst an Etruscan lamp swinging 
 from on high and shedding a subdued silvery light and a soft 
 perfume on the gloom. Here he brought her, and laid her gently 
 down upon the cushions of a couch. She knew nothing of what 
 was done with her. He went to a flask of Montepulciano standing 
 near, poured some of the wine out, and touched her lips with it. 
 She drank a little, by mere instinct ; the warmth revived her ; her 
 lids trembled, then unclosed, and her eyes looked out with a 
 dreamy, bewildered sightlessness. 
 
 ♦'What is it? Where am I?" 
 
 "Have no fear, my child; you are safe now. I fotind you in 
 the storm, and brought you here.'* 
 
 Her glance met his ; consciousness came to her. 
 
 *' You saved my Hfe, ecceUenza ! How can I thank yon P " 
 
 " By telling me you are unhurt." 
 
 She looked at him with that awed wistftilness, that earnest won- 
 dering gratitude, of a child. 
 
 He touched the bright masses of her hair, moving them back 
 from her brow — she was so young ; he caressed her with hie hand 
 as he would a wounded bird. 
 
14B Chandoi 
 
 ** 1 foar you are in pain ? There is a bruise on your temple 
 and you were senseless when I found you. Do you suffer now ? " 
 
 '* Oh, no ! not much. You brought me from tiie forest? Ho^ 
 good ! how merciful ! " 
 
 She stooped her head with the supple gi-ace of the South, and 
 kissed his hand with the reverent supplication and thanksgiying of 
 a young slave to her owner- He drew it from her quickly. 
 
 ' ' My child, do not pay me such homage for a mere common 
 charity. What creatui-e with the heart of a man could have left 
 vou to perish alone ? The blow must have struck you down sense* 
 less. Was it from a bough do you think ? " 
 
 She shuddered with the memory. 
 
 •* I cannot recollect. The storm came up from the back of the 
 woods before I saw or thought of it ; it burst suddenly, and as I 
 went something struck me down ; whether it was the flash or 
 a fallen branch, I can remember nothing since, till I awoke — 
 here." 
 
 She lifted herself a little, and glanced round the chamber with 
 the startled wonder still in her eyes, as of one who wakes from a 
 deep sleep in a strange scene; her glance came back to him, and 
 dwelt on him with a venerating marvel and admiration : she knew 
 his face well, though until that day he had never seen hers. Her 
 sweeping lashes were weighted and glistening with tears as she 
 looked — sweet, sudden tears of an infinite gratitude for her rescue, 
 and to him by whom she had been saved. She was veiy fair in 
 that moment. 
 
 Her hail", all loosened by the wind, fell backward and over her 
 shoulders, like a shower of molten gold; the warmth of the 
 chamber, and the suiprise of her waking thoughts, gave a glow 
 like a wild rose to her cheeks. Some of the ivy-coils that she had 
 dropped in her haste to rise and flee from the stonn had caught in 
 the gay colour and the white broideries of her simple pictui-esque 
 diess : an artist would have given a year of his life to have 
 
 f)ainted her as she was then, in the shadowy chiar'-oscuro of the 
 amplight, in the marble waste of the far-stretching, half-mined 
 chamber. 
 
 A dim fugitive memory wandered before him with the glance oi 
 her eyes, — a likeness that he could not trace, yet that pursued 
 him, rose before him with the earnest, haunting beauty of her 
 face. Far down in his past it lay ; he coidd not disinter it, — ho 
 could not give it name or substance, — but its shadow flickered 
 before him. She was like something remembered, like something 
 recovered. 
 
 ** You are tired and exhausted ; lie still," he said, as she strove 
 to rise. "They shall bring you food; I need some myself; and 
 in an hour the storm may lull, perhaps. May I ask who it is that 
 my roof has the honour to shelter ?" 
 
 She looked at him still with that wistful wondering homage; 
 she was shy with him, and the language of courtesy was unfamilifti 
 to her; it was very new to her to be addressed so. 
 •• What ii your name, poverina $ " he asked her. 
 
Castaiiu, 249 
 
 «• They call me Oastalia.'* 
 
 ♦' Castalia !— a fair and classic name ! And what else F * 
 
 ''Nothing else, eccellenza." 
 
 Her Toice was yei-y low; her head sank, the tears glittered 
 Vhickly on the length of her lashes. In the answer she had told 
 him all the history she had. 
 
 He was silent a moment, regretful that he had pained her ; his 
 voice was very tender as he spoke again. 
 
 " And your mother — is she living ?" 
 
 She shook her head. 
 
 He looked at her with a deep pity, this child with the brilliance 
 of Southern suns about her, and a fate so lonely and so blighted at 
 the outset. . 
 
 He asked her no more ; but, as a Tuscan woman answered his 
 iummons and brought into the chamber a tray of fruits, and 
 macaroni, and truffles, with some flasks of Italian and Rhine 
 wines, he served her with his own hands as assiduously, as reve- 
 rently, as any would serve a queen. And as the rest and the 
 food revived her more and moro, and more and more restored 
 the animation to her lips, the lustre to her eyes, she seemed, in the 
 antique classic Doric charm of the silent chamber, like some gem 
 of the old Venetian masters set in the white coldness of the marble 
 walls— like some lustrous, gold-leaved, Italian flower, sprung in 
 its bud from the grey solemnity, the sublime decay, of Eoman 
 ruins. 
 
 He wondered whence she came and what she was — this Tuscan 
 child with the grace of a daughter of the Antonines, who was 
 without a name ; and once moro the memory which had haunted 
 him rose again, not to be grasped, but lost in the mazy shades 
 of a far- distant past. 
 
 The storm was at its height, there seemed little chance of ita 
 abatement ; the mighty din of its thunder rolled like the roar of a 
 hundred battles, and the moaning and trembling of all the beech 
 and chestnut woods were heard on the stillness. She shuddered aa 
 she listened. 
 
 ♦' Ah ! I should have been lying dead in aU that terror now, but 
 for your pity ! " 
 
 '* Do not think of it," he answered soothingly. *' Let the storm 
 rage as it will, you are safe here with me. Tell me, where is it 
 you live ?" 
 
 She looked at him with an intense sadness, veiy strange upon 
 the glow and glory of her youth ; and, though the flush grew 
 hotter in her face, it was nroud and still in its pain. 
 
 *' Illustrissimo," she said, softly, for there was a breathless awe 
 of him upon her, mingled touchingly with a spaniel-like trust, 
 *' you ought to know whom your house shelters ; it is only just. I 
 have no name ; I have no histoiy. My mother died when I was a 
 few months old; she came a stranger, and the village kxew nothing 
 of her, only this— she was not wedded. The Padre Giulio and hii 
 mother adopted me ; they have been very good. The name they 
 found on me was Castalia. I have nothing more to teU«". 
 
250 Chandos. 
 
 The simplicity of the words lent them but the deeper sadness , 
 the restrained pain, th© half-haughty, half- appealing shame, witli 
 which she spoke them, gave them but the stronger pathos. They 
 touched her listener greatly. 
 
 ** Thank you for your confidence, my fair child," he answered 
 her, with a pitying tenderness in his voice — she was so young to 
 be already rouched with life's suffering and the world's reproach. 
 " You do not know your history; there is room, then, to hope it a 
 bright one." 
 
 She shook her head. 
 
 "niustrissimo, howP It began in shame; it will end in a 
 convent." 
 
 ' ' A convent ? Better the tomb ! " 
 
 He spoke on an impulse. To cage her to that living death of 
 the veil seemed barbarous as to shut away in darlmess, till it died, 
 one of the golden-winged orioles that fluttered through the length 
 of a spring day below the slopes of Yallambrosa. 
 
 "Yes ! better a thousand times ! In the grave one sleeps un- 
 conscious ! But, forgive me, eccellenza; I weary you. Let me go." 
 
 **Go! with the storm at that height ? You would go to your 
 destruction. No living thing could pass from here to Pontane in 
 such a night. Wait a while ; it may lull presently. And give me 
 no titles of deference ; I can claim none." 
 
 '* You must be a gi-eat lord ?" she said, softly and hesitatingly. 
 
 He smiled wearily. 
 
 " My greatness — if I ever truly had any — departed from me long 
 ago. I am no noble. I am little richer than your peasants ol 
 Fontane." 
 
 She glanced round the chamber. To her, after the bare sim- 
 plicity of the Fontane hamlet, the frescoes, the sculpture, the 
 mosaics, though they were but the reUcs of Latin ruins, made it 
 seem a palace ; then her glistening meditative eyes dwelt on him. 
 
 " You are lord of yourself, at least ? " she said, lingeringly, with 
 the naif expression of a child. 
 
 "I have but a rebellious subject, then," he answered, with a 
 tinge of sadness that did not escape her. **But, poverina, you 
 look feverish and tired. I have been thoughtless for you. Ai'e you 
 in pain?" 
 
 She smiled at him — a smile of infinite patience and sweetness, 
 that brought back in his thoughts once more a memory he could 
 not follow. 
 
 " Not much : it is nothing." 
 
 She would not confess that, in truth, an intolerable pain ached 
 thi'ough her bruised temples, and that an utter exhaustion was 
 stealing fast upon her. 
 
 *' Lie still, then," he said, bending over her ; " the tempest is at 
 its worst now. Take no heed of me, but sleep, if you can." 
 
 She thanked him, and obeyed him ; she watched him with a 
 reverent, wondering homage ; she revered him already like a king, 
 like a deity. 
 
 Sh& had passed all her young years in the chestnut-shadows 
 
Castalia. 25' 
 
 beneath Vallombrosa, and she had far too much innooence, far too 
 much faith, to think of harm that could be done her in this soli- 
 tude, to feel anything but a sublime, devoted trust in tne stranger 
 who had saved her hfe. Moreover, the weariness that was grow- 
 ing on her, the sleep that weighed down her eyelids, the reaction 
 from the shock and peril of the night, left her little sense save of 
 a lulling peace that surrounded her, of a voice that soothed her 
 like music, of a wish to be silent and still, and keep unbroken this 
 soft charm. , 
 
 He left her, and went to the lectern at the farther end of the 
 room, where the vellum scroll lay, a disputed manuscript of 
 Boethius. On the wide stone hearth some pine-logs were burn- 
 ing, for the evenings were chilly, though the days were so warm ; 
 the aromatic odour of the lamp filled the room with a sweet, famt 
 incense; the shadows were deep in all the farther parts of the 
 hall, only about the hearth was the ruddy, iiickermg glow of the 
 pines ; all else was in gloom. , i. i n j 
 
 The hours passed uncounted ; the thunder had somewhat lulled, 
 but the winds were a hurricane, and the drenching downpour of 
 rain scoured the land and howled thi'ough the pine and the beech 
 woods. It was a night which broke the mountain firs like saplings, 
 and wrenched up the grey writhing olives by the roots, and laid 
 the young birds stone dead by the score. No human thing could 
 venture out in it and be sure of life. The twelfth hour struck 
 from the campanile as the lull of a moment succeeded to the 
 roar of the storm ; he lifted his head from where he bent over the 
 lectern, and looked at the young companion chance had so strangely 
 brought there. In the glow of the embers she lay, m her delicate, 
 richly-hued beauty, a child in her innocence and her tranquil rest, 
 far more than a child in her grace and her charm,— a thiug of 
 light, and life, and colour, and youth, in the cold, classic solitude of 
 the lonely and half-ruined hall, whose cracked mosaic had been worn 
 by the passing of so many banished feet that had trodden through 
 their brief day, and had glided onward down into their tombs. He 
 watched her with an indefinable pity, with a fugitive, intangible 
 remembrance pursuing him ; her brief story was so mournful, and 
 the memory that pursued him was so strong, though he could find 
 it no clue, and would give it no substance. As a chord of music, 
 as a flower blooming in a desert place, as a sound of harvest-chant 
 or spring-bird's singing, will bear us back to long- gone hours, so 
 the sight of her bore his thoughts backward to years that were 
 sealed for ever,— thoughts that thronged on him, many, and em- 
 bittered by their own dead sweetness, as the thought of all that he 
 will never again see comes on the exile with the mere scent of 
 faded leaves brought to him from the summer woodlands that hear 
 his step no more. 
 
 In them he was lost, as he leaned against the broad hronze 
 wings of the lectern-eagle, with his eyes on the rmg of ruddy 
 colour that circled her like a halo. The storm shook above the 
 low, flat roof of the Latin villa, breaking on it as with the force of 
 a waterspout. He roused himself and went near her. 
 
25» Chandos. 
 
 ** She cannot go out in such a night ae this," he thought. 
 
 She slept still, softl}^ as a child, a proud, resigned sadness, Iiks 
 the memory of her stained birth and lonely fate, on her face. Ha 
 was loath to break her rest, yet he knew that to let her sleep on 
 here would be to let the coarse tongues of the mountain peasants 
 touch even her defenceless childhood. He stooped and passed his 
 hand lightly oyer her brow. At the touch, slight as it was, she 
 wakened instantly ; the blue-black lustre of her eyes startled into 
 consciousness, the flush on her cheek bright as the scarlet japonica 
 blossoms. She started up, ashamed. 
 
 " Oh, eccellenza, forgive me ! I have been asleep ! " 
 
 ** Naturally, after your danger and your fatigue. It was the 
 best restorative you could have. It is midnight now, and the storm 
 is scarce lessened " 
 
 "Midnight? The Padre will be so wretched 1 What will ho 
 think ? Let me go ; pray lot me go." 
 
 ** Impossible ; you would go to your certain death. I could not 
 venture myself in such a night ; you hear the hurricane ? You 
 must remain with me." 
 
 "With you?" 
 
 " Surely : I would not let a dog leave my roof in Buch weather 
 as this is. Besides, you are miles higher on the slope here than 
 Fontane ; the return to the village would be impossible for those 
 far hardier than you." 
 
 She looked at him with a wondering awe ; he seemed to her such 
 an emperor as Marcus Antoninus, who had laid down his pomp 
 and come to dwell a while like other men. The deep -blue, weary, 
 brilliant eyes that gazed on her made her think of the serene, 
 imperial eyes of Augustus. 
 
 " I am a total stranger to you, it is true," he said, gently, mis- 
 interpreting her silence ; *• but you are not afraid to remain in my 
 house ? I am only here for a villegiatura, and the place is desolate 
 enough, but it will at least give you shelter." 
 
 "Afraid? Afraid of youf What could I fear? You saved 
 my life; it is yours to command. All is — I cannot thank you 
 enough." 
 
 The words were very touching in their liquid Tuscan, in their 
 complete innocence, and in their perfect trust. 
 
 "You have nothing to thank me for; a mule-driver or a char- 
 coal-burner must have done for you what I did," he answered her, 
 his voice unconsciously softening. "And now go to rest; you 
 want it. I will send the women to you, and they shall remain in 
 your chamber ; for you are not well enough to be left alone." 
 
 "Ah, eccellenza, how good you are!" sho murmured. A few 
 years older, and she would have been grateful to him in silence, 
 better knowing the motive of his words. " But indeed I am 
 strong now ; we, below Vallombrosa, have the strength of the 
 mountain air, and— shall I not trouble you with staying hero ? " 
 
 "Far from it; you bring your own welcome, like the birds 
 that come and sing under our windows. Good-night, and sleep 
 weU." 
 
Castalia, 23 3 
 
 He held his hand out to her ; Bhe was but a child to him, and a 
 child who had been sheltered on his breast through the driving of 
 the storm. She stooped with the exquisite softness of movement 
 of Southern women, and touched the hand he gave her, lightly and 
 reverently, with her lips. 
 
 "I would thank you, ecceUenza, but I cannot." 
 
 She did thank him, however, better than by all words, with that 
 hesitating touch of her young lips, with that upward glance of her 
 eyes, languid with sleep and fatigue, yet lustrous as the Tuscan 
 skies by night, — eyes that seemed to him to have some story of his 
 past in their depths. 
 
 Then he summoned the women to her, peasants who dwelt in 
 the villa, and she left him. 
 
 He, having surrendered to her, though she knew nothing of it, 
 the only habitable chamber that the half-ruined villa afforded, 
 stretched himself in the warmth of the pine logs on the wolf-skins 
 strewn before it. She had brought back to him, why or whence he 
 could not tell, memories that ho would willingly let die, — memories 
 that, through the length of weary years, burned still into his heart 
 with unutterable longing, with intolerable pain. 
 
 In the loneliness of the old classic hall, in the leaping light of 
 the pine flames, throngs of shadowy shapes arose around mm, — 
 the shapes of his past, summoned by the light of a child's smile. 
 
 She, meanwhile, lay wakeful, yet dreamy, gazing out at the 
 unfamiliar chamber and the swaying figure of the peasant woman 
 keeping watch over her, and nodding in her sleep. Her thoughts 
 were steeped in all the wonders of legendaiy lore, and she fancied 
 some enchantment had been wrought in her since, out of that 
 awful forest darkness, she had been brought to this channed still- 
 ness, in which only one remembrance was with her, the remem- 
 brance of the musing, lustrous, weary eyes that had looked pn 
 gently on her, of the voice that had soothed her terror and her pain 
 with an accent softer than she had ever heard. She thought cf 
 him, and thought, as one other had once done before, that he was 
 like the Poet-king of Israel, but having known the bitterness o^ 
 abdication, having known the ingratitude of the people. Then her 
 musing became a dream, and, with a smile upon her lips, she slept 
 under a stranger's roof till the tempest had passed away and the 
 dawn was bright. 
 
 As she awoke, the morning had risen. The sun broke in full 
 glory over a splendid mass of purple cloud and tumbled storm - 
 mist that glowed in magnificent colour beneath the newly-risen 
 rays. The earth laughed again even amidst her ruin, — her ruin of 
 crushed olive-buds, and uprooted saplings, and trees rent asunder, 
 and nests flung down, with the young birds killed, and the mothers 
 flying with piteous cries over the wreck ; but the wheat-sprouts 
 were too low to be harmed ; the vines, though they trailed and 
 hung helplessly under the dead weight of rain-drops, were stiU 
 only in blossom ; the watercourses made the wilder, merrier music, 
 filled to overflowing, and lajong in swathes the rank grasses ol 
 ^heu' beds ; the mules began to patter over the broken p;>ths, pick- 
 
t$4 Chandos. 
 
 ing their careful way over the dislodged holders of rocks and the 
 deep channels of brimming brooks. Beneath Vallombroaa th^ 
 morning was fair and sun-lightened agaLa, deadly though the 
 tempest had been over-night, and rough work of destruction 
 though it had wrought. With the sun she rose ; her youth, liko 
 the youth of the spring and the earth, the brighter for the storm 
 and the danger gone by. There was the Hush of waking childhood 
 and of past sleep upon her cheeks, and her eyes had the gladness 
 of a wondering dream in them, as she found her way, marvelling 
 if she dreamed a fairy-tale, down some broken marble steps and 
 out into the air. 
 
 CHAPTER in. 
 
 "GIOVENTtr! PRIMAVERA BELLA. TirAl" 
 
 The ftdl light poured into the open loggia before the half-ruined 
 courts and halls of the Latin villa. Within, the one spacious 
 chamber, with its frescoes and the mosaics, its books and scrolls, 
 was bare enough. But the world of blossoming spring, of 
 morning mists, of lavish foliage that opened out before it, made 
 ample amends for any poverty and decay of the interior ; and it 
 was perfect for a villegiatura, this deserted place that Roman pomp 
 had once filled in Augustan days. 
 
 In this loggia, reading, her host sat, — a man no longer young, 
 though as yet there was no silver amidst the fair and golden length 
 of his hair ; a man of a grave gi-ace, of a serene, meditative dignity 
 of look and of movement that had in it something that was very 
 weary, yet something not less grand, not less royal : he might 
 have been a king in pui-ples rather than what he was, — an exile, 
 and poor. 
 
 The book was open upon his knee, but his eyes were not upon it 
 for the moment; they were resting on the gardens without,^ 
 gardens wild, forsaken, uncultured, but only the more beautiful 
 for that. What he watched in them was the passage of the young 
 Tuscan flitting through them with the freedom of a chamois in her 
 step, and all the languor of a dew-laden flower in her loveliness. 
 
 Sixteen years beyond the Apennines bring womanhood; they 
 had brought it to her in the loveliness nature had dowered her 
 with, but in all else she was young as a child, — she had never 
 wandered from the chestnut shadows of her village, had but dimly 
 beard of another vast world beyond the beech- woods, had known 
 no friends but the birds who sang to her, no pleasures but to watch 
 a blue-warbler shake his bright wings in the myrtles, or to look 
 deep down into the heart of a passion-flower and build a thousand 
 fancies from its mystic burning hues. She was a child with the 
 beauty of a woman ; there could be no greater peril for her. 
 
 He thought so as he saw her in this deserted garden. Art liad 
 i\o handling with her ; the puro hill-air had made her all she waa } 
 
" GioventiL ' Primavera della Vita '' 
 
 '^SS 
 
 and she had the unconsciousness of some rich-plumaged bird, now 
 floating softly through the sunlight, now pausing on the wing 
 now alighting to drop down in happy rest in a couch of feathery 
 
 He gazed at her as she wandered through them, that exquisite 
 ease in her step which many a royal woman has not, which a 
 contadina may have balancing on her dark imperial head a pannier 
 of water-melons. The lizards did not hurry from her, but watched 
 her with curious eyes ; the timid hares let her stoop and stroke 
 them ; the old owls blinking in the ivy let her lift her hand and 
 touch their crests ; the wood-doves flew about her and pecked the 
 buds from the boughs she held up to them. She bent over the 
 black swollen water, and saw her own reflection laurel- crowned as 
 the branches met above her head ; she gathered the lilies of the 
 valley, the buds of Banksia roses, and the young green ivy-blos- 
 soms, and crowned herself with them till the wreath was too heavy 
 and shook all her glistening hair downward in a shower of gold, 
 like a picture of Flora. Then, lastly, she sank to rest on a grey 
 rock of fallen sculpture, the crown of flowers still above her brow ; 
 and after the glad, thoughtless pastime of a child, the proud and 
 profound sadness that usually in repose was on her face succeeded 
 it with a charm not the less great because so sudden. 
 
 It was like the sudden fall of evening over the brilliance and the 
 glow of her own Tuscan landscape. 
 
 Ashe saw it, he left the loggia and went towards her. She did 
 not hear his step till he had approached her close ; then she sprang 
 up with the swiftness of a fawn, and with words of gratitude made 
 only softer by the awe of him which lent her its delicate coyness. 
 
 " I have been watching you for the last half-houi% Castalia," he 
 said, gently. " I am glad you could find such companions in my 
 flowers and my birds ; there is little else here fit for your bright 
 youth." 
 
 She put her hands up hurriedly to remove the dew-laden wreath 
 of bud and blossom ; she had forgotten it till his speech brought it 
 back to her thoughts. He put out his own hand and stayed her. 
 
 " Not for worlds ! I wished a Titian lived to paint you ! you 
 look like a youne priestess of Flora. But, tell me, what spell have 
 vou that tames the lizards, and stills the hares, and brings all the 
 birds to your hand ?" 
 
 She lifted to him her musing eloquent eyes, grave as a child's 
 when he pauses to think. 
 
 "I do not know, eccellenza, unless— it maybe because I leva 
 them so well." 
 
 His face ^ew a shade darker and yet softer ; her words recalled 
 the fond belief of his own youth. 
 
 " You think love begets and secures love ? I thought so once." 
 
 " And was it not so Y " 
 
 "No ; but— that knowledge should not kill loye in us ; there is 
 much that is worth it, if there be much that is not. Because a 
 viper turns and stings you, it would be wild vengeance to wrimr 
 WQ wood-pigeon's neck." 
 
t^6 Chandois 
 
 He spoke half to hie own thoughts, half to her; she regarded 
 
 him with a reverent, grateful, wondering gaze ; in her little beech- 
 forest nest of Fontane she had never seen anything like him. 8he 
 who had known but one bent old priest, and brown, brawny 
 muleteers and vintagers from whom she shrank as the white sea- 
 swallow shrinks from the hard beak and cruel pursuit of the 
 kestrel, thought almost he must be more than mortal. 
 
 "I ought to leave you, 'lustrissimo ? " she said, hesitatingly. 
 ** I have troubled you so long." 
 
 *' Do you wish to leave me ?" 
 
 *'Wish? oh, no!" 
 
 "Well, do not leave me yet, then. Come within, and let me 
 see, though no Titian, if I can paint you with your crown of 
 flowers. Your Padre Cuiato will feel no anxiety ; I sent a mes- 
 senger to him to say you were here." 
 
 The gravest contrition stole over her face ; she looked penitent as 
 a chidden child. 
 
 " Oh, 'lustrissimo ! I had forgotten him. How ungrateful, when 
 he is so good ! How selfish one grows when one is happy ! " 
 
 ** Then are you happy with me ? " 
 
 "Eccellenza," she said, under her breath, "it seems to me that 
 I have been happier than in all the years of my life." 
 
 The reply pleased him. He had always loved to see happiness 
 about him, 
 
 •' I am glad it should be so. And do not believe that happiness 
 makes us selfish; it is a treason to the sweetest gift of life. It is 
 when it has deserted us that it grows hard to keep all the better 
 things in us from dying in the blight. Men shut out happiness 
 from their schemes for the world's virtue ; they might as well seek 
 to bring flowers to bloom without the sun." 
 
 He spoke again rather to his own thoughts than to her ; but she 
 understood him. This young Tuscan, lost amidst the chestnuts 
 beneath Vallombrosa, had in her the heart of a Heloise, the mind 
 of a Hypatia, though both were in their childhood yet. 
 
 " Excellenza," she said, hesitatingly, " that is true. If we keep 
 light from a plant, it will .r^row up warped. When they condemn, 
 do they ever ask if what they condemn had a chance to behvold the 
 light ? Perhaps — perhaps if my mother had been happy she would 
 not have been evil, as they call her ? " 
 
 ITie colour bm-ned hotly in her face, but her eyes were raised ia 
 wistful entreaty to him ; it was but very vaguely that she under- 
 stood the shame that she was made to feel was on her birth, but 
 vciy dimly that she comprehended some vast indistinct enor with 
 which her dead mother was charged. 
 
 The question touched him with great pity. 
 
 " Poverina," he said, caressingly, "do not weary your young life 
 with those subtleties. You do not know that error lies at all upon 
 your mother's history ; who can, since you say that history is wholly 
 unknown,— even to her very name ? It may be that the thing tho 
 world — your little woodland world, at least— blames in her, was 
 some unrecognised martyrdom, some untold unseltishneae. At ail 
 
GiaventiL I Primavera delta f^iia ! 
 
 >57 
 
 erents, be she what she Tvill, you are stainless and blamelesa ; all 
 you need seek is to be so for ever." 
 
 She looked at him with passionate feeling. 
 
 * ' I thank you, eccellenza, more for those noble words than for 
 the life that you saved me." 
 
 The brief answer was very eloquent, — eloquent of her nature and 
 of her gratitude. He said no more, but led her within to the old 
 Hall, only fit for a summer residence for an artist, or a scholar 
 sufficiently content with its classic charm and forest wildness to 
 bear its scant accommodation. An easel stood before the open 
 colonnade facing the gardens ; he paused before it, and glanced at 
 her. A lovelier theme never lured any painter's brush, with the 
 fresh crown of lilies and rose-buds and light-green blossoms of iv^ 
 shaking their dew upon the gold- flaked shower of her hair, Ete 
 looked at her, then he threw aside the colours be had taken up. 
 
 "Twenty years ago I could have given your picture there," he 
 said, half wearily. "Now I have not the heart to paint you, my 
 fair child. I have not the great inspiration, — youth." 
 
 Twenty years ago he would have found no hour more beguiling 
 than that spring morning with the young Tuscan, bringing the 
 bloom of her beauty and of her crown of flowers out on the can- 
 vas ; now it only recalled to him all he had lost. 
 
 A shadow stole over her eyes ; he saw it, and turned back to the 
 easel. 
 
 " Are you disappointed ? " 
 
 She looked beseechingly in his feoe. 
 
 " I never saw any pamtings except those in our little chapel." 
 
 "No ? Well, then, I will try and give you your desire." 
 
 He took the brushes up again, and, standing before the easel, 
 sketched her as she leaned against one of the piUars of the colon- 
 nade, the rich glow and warmth of her young face but the brighter 
 for the whil-eness of the lilies and the deep green of the leaves that 
 circled her hair. He had both the skill and the habit of Art ; and 
 the impassioned brilliance of her beauty, with the coronal of blos- 
 soms weighting her forehead with the weight of all diadems, rose 
 gradually under his hand out df the sea of brown opaque gloom ou 
 which it was painted. The hours passed, and tiie picture grew ; it 
 beguiled him for the time of heavier cares, and won him out of 
 deeper thoughts ; yet ever and again, as he lifted his eyes and 
 glanced at her, the weariness which had made him turn from the 
 task came over him again. He thought of so many golden hours, 
 when faces as fair had bloomed to fresh life thus on his canvas, and 
 the glory of his youth had been with him to lend its sweetness to 
 the eyes, and teach the language of love to the lips, of those ho 
 painted. The soft labour only recalled to him so many days thar. 
 were dead. 
 
 The noontide was intensely still, the heat of the sun quivered 
 down through the open arches of the colonnade ; the picture grew 
 clearer and richer beneath his hand, and the blossoms faded where 
 they crowned her hair. She untwined them, and touched them 
 mournfully. 
 
 S 
 
Chandosm 
 
 * Ah, eccellenza, they are all dying ! 
 
 He smiled, not without sadness, too, though it was for deeper 
 things than the flowers. 
 
 " Never mind ; you ha-^e had their sweetness. Be content with 
 that. Nothing endures." 
 
 "But it is better never to have had them than to see them 
 withered ! " 
 
 " I doubt that. If we should have been spared much pain, we 
 should also have missed much joy." 
 
 His thoughts were with other things, though he spoke still in the 
 figure of the flowers. He had seen his own crowns wither and 
 fall and be trodden under foot, yet it was better to have worn 
 them. She looked at him in silence, reverently, wonderingly ; she 
 mused on what his history could be ; she thought him a king in 
 exile. So, in a sense, he was. 
 
 There was an infinite shyness of him in her that gave her ten- 
 fold more charm, it was so innocent and so full of religious vene~ 
 ration. He seemed to her hke the archangels of her Church, 
 so full of majesty, so full of pity. She thought with him of all 
 the grand, serene, lonely lives that she had read of in the Latin 
 legends. 
 
 He rose, and turned the easel to her. 
 
 " Castalia, do what even wise men never do ; see yourself as you 
 
 olio came forward, and looked, as the sun fell full on the work of 
 II lew hours, and her countenance changed as by magic ; a breath- 
 less surprise was on her lips, a scarlet flush upon her checks, the 
 light of an immeasurable admiration and amaze beamed in her eyes. 
 She stood entranced at the likeness of herself, as, with its diadem 
 of blossoms, it gazed out at her from the brown shadows of tho 
 background. 
 
 " Well ? " he asked her, smiling. 
 
 She turned to him bewildered and beseeching. 
 
 " Oh ! 'lustrissimo, can it be ? Am I as beautiful as thatf" 
 
 " Did the river and the fountain never tell you so before ? " 
 
 Her head drooped, the colour in her cheek deepened; her 
 innocent delight had had no thought of vanity, but at his words 
 she remembered what she looked on was — herself. 
 
 " And yet it is beautiful ! " she murmured, very low, as though 
 in apology. " And if I be reaUy like it " 
 
 "What then P" 
 
 A prouder glory flashed into her face ; she lifted her head with 
 the royalty of a daughter of emperors, mingled with a great soft- 
 ness of regard. 
 
 " Then, I think, if I could once see the great world I might reign 
 there, and I might win some love, and not be scorned as peasants 
 scorn me here." 
 
 He paused a moment ; the words touched him to compassion, 
 
 " Would it not be so, eccellenza ? " 
 
 " Yes," he answered, slowly ; " doubtless it would. But do not 
 jTidi it, if you be wise. Your diadems would xiot be so pure as the 
 
•• Gioveniik f Primavera della Vita**' A59 
 
 one that lies withered there ; your brows would soon ache under 
 
 them, and for the love " 
 
 "Ah ! " she said, softly, whilst the glow faded, and her eyes filled 
 with tears as she spoke with the pathos and the guilelessness of a 
 child, '* I long to be loved ! All tiie children of Fontane have their 
 mothers, who look brighter when they see them near ; but I am 
 all alone. I have been alone so long ! 
 
 The words had an intense and touching piteousness in them ; a 
 harder nature than her listener's was would have been moved by 
 them. How could he find the cruelty to tell her that the chances 
 were as a million to one that the only love she would ever meet in 
 tliis world beyond the pine woods to which she vaguely looked as 
 the redresser of her wi'ongs, would be one less merciful to her even 
 than the bitterness and loneliness which now visited on her inno- 
 cence and her youth the improven error of her dead mother ? 
 Twenty years before he would have heard her with little thought, 
 save to let his lips linger on the brow whence the faded ivy-buds 
 had fallen, and murmur to her the tenderness which herunawakened 
 heart longed for, as an imprisoned bird longs for the shelter of 
 summer leaves and the whispers of summer rivers ; now such a 
 thought as this was distant from him as the wide unknown world 
 was far from her. 
 
 But pity her he did, profoundly. This nameless, motherless 
 child, with her radiant grace and her proud instincts, was as deso- 
 late as any chamois-fawu lost on the hills and driven as an alien 
 from every herd with which it seeks a refuge. 
 
 '* You will have love, some day, 'poveritm^^'' he said, gently, *' and 
 as much as you will ; you will hardly lift such eyes as those to ask 
 for it in vain." 
 
 She sighed, and her head sank lower, while she looked still at 
 the painted likeness of herself. She was unaware of any tribute 
 to her beauty in his words ; she thought he meant that some, one 
 day, would pity her. 
 
 " Ah," she answered, wearily, ** where is the worth of love, if 
 with it is scorn ? " 
 
 The thoughtless taunts and the careless jests which among tho 
 peasantry had been cast at her from her birth up as a foundling— 
 rather in the mothexs' jealousy of her face and the children's re- 
 sentment of her love of solitude, than from any cruelty or any real 
 contempt — had sunk deeply into her nature, rousing rebellion and 
 disdain well-nigh as much as they caused sorrow and a vague sense 
 of shame. 
 
 He saw how great a shipwreck might be made of her opemng 
 life, even from the very purest and loftiest things in her, if 
 chis outlawry banned her long — if this passion of mingled de- 
 fiance and humiliation were fostered by neglect. He spoke on 
 that 
 
 ' ' Scorn ! Why dwell on scorn ? It is unworthy of you. It is 
 a word that may bring a pang to those who merit it by their own 
 ill deeds ; it need have no sting for any other. Keep your life 
 high and blameless, and you will afi'ord to treat scorn with ^com.'* 
 
a6o Chandos. 
 
 She did not reply to him with words, but she flashed on hits 
 with an answering glance the night- like lustre of her eyes, in an 
 eloquence, in a comprehension, in a promise, that accepted his 
 meaning far more deeply and more vividly than by speech. He 
 saw that she might be led by a cord of silk — that she would not be 
 driven by a scourge. 
 
 He stood a few moments in the shadow of the colonnade, later 
 when she had left him, looking at the painting that had grown out 
 of the deep, sombre hackwork by the work of his own hand, the 
 head alone luminous, from the veil of gloom around it, with its 
 spiritual radiance, crowned by that wealth of flowers ; he looked, 
 then turned it aside towards the wall, so that the richness of colour 
 no longer smiled out of the opaque shadows, and went within tc 
 his solitude. That face, gazing out from the darkness under the 
 diadem of woven blossoms, seemed like the nhantom of his own 
 dead youth. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 "beigneur! AYEZ PITIE, ' 
 
 Never in the rich days of the Cinque Cento, or the Dandolo age, 
 when the cities of Italy were filled with pomp and mirth and 
 music, when the mighty palaces were wreathed with flowers that 
 lent their bright blush to the white stone and glowed over the black 
 marbles, when the dark arches framed hair, Like the gold arras that 
 draped the balconies, and lips ripe as the scarlet heart of the rose 
 that glowed in their bosom, was any beauty rarer or more lustrous 
 than that of the young Tuscan who had gi'own up under the 
 forest-shadows below Vallombrosa, scarce more tended, not more 
 heeded, than one of the passion-flowers that bursts into its glorious 
 bud unseen by any eyes above the broken stone of some ruined 
 altar of Pan. Though her years were so few that the fulness oi 
 her beauty might yet be scarcely reached, she had already the 
 splendour of a Titian pictm-e on her, the superb grace, wild as a 
 deer, proud as the daughter of Csesars, that here and there still 
 lingers, as though to verify tradition, in the women of Campagna 
 or of Apennine. 
 
 The loneliness of her childhood, the consciousness of a ban placed 
 on her, the haughty instincts which had wakened in self-defence 
 against the shafts of scorn, the solitary and meditative life which 
 she had led, had lent her a certain patrician pride, a certain 
 thoughtful shadow ; a wistful pain sometimes gazed out of her eyes ; 
 a lofty rebellion sometimes broke through the dreaming gladness of 
 her smile. She was happy, because she was young, because she 
 was sinless, because she had the innocence which finds its joy in 
 the caress of a bird, in the radiance of a sunset, m the mere breath 
 and oonsciousneBs of existence ; but ghe had the pang oi wounded 
 
" Seigneur I ay e» Puis/' a6i 
 
 pnMe, the burden of a scarce-comprehended shame, and the vague, 
 bitter, impassioned longing of a mind too ardent and too daring 
 for its sphere ; and these gave their character to her face, their 
 hues to her youth ; these made her far more than a mere child, 
 however lovely, can be. She was like H^loise ere her master had 
 become her lover, and while her eyes, as they gazed on the Greek 
 scroll or the vellum Evangeliarium, were brilliant with the light ol 
 aspiration and dark with the thoughts of a poet, but had never yet 
 drooped, heavy with the languor and burning with the knowledge 
 of love. 
 
 From the aged priest she had learned all his scholarly lore that 
 plunged deep into the life of the past, and drank deep of Latin 
 and Hellenic culture; he had loved the rugged roads of wisdom, ^ 
 the urifathomcd sea-depths of knowledge, the buried treasures ot 
 cloister folios and of crabbed copm— she had loved them too. "With 
 no other in the obscure hill- side, to which fate had condemned 
 him, to give him sympathy or understanding in these things, the 
 stern old man had taken eager pleasure in steeping with them the 
 virgin soil of a young and thirsty mind. In the bare, grey, narrow 
 chamber of his dwelling, with its single lancet window through 
 which crept the mellow sunlight from the cloudless skies, the fair 
 hoiu\ of the child Castalia, with its weight of burnished tresses, 
 had bent above the huge tomes and the century-worn manuscriptum 
 for hour on hour, like Heloise in the cell of the canonry. She had 
 a passionate love of those studies : and, whilst they filled her mind 
 with great and impersonal thoughts, they did much to console her 
 for her fate, and much to enrich her intelligence far beyond her 
 yea rs and her sex. They, and the beauties of the earth and the 
 seasons, were her sole pleasures. The priest's mother, under 
 whose roof she lived, was nearly ninety years, decrepit and harsh, 
 who, well as she loved her foundling in her heart, could be no aid or 
 associate to her. With the peasantry, the people who maligned 
 her unknown parent, she would have no converse in their flower- 
 fsifcets and their vintage celebrations. She lived alone with the 
 learning of dead ages and the fragrance of a forest- world. 
 
 Som«, such an isolation would have maddened or ruined ; Cas- 
 talia, with a singular vividness of imagination, and a proud patience 
 beneath the passionate warmth of her nature, had received through 
 it a higher character than any other and happier life could have 
 developed. 
 
 She was a poem, with her slight, sad, all-eloquent stoiy, that 
 needed no detail to fill it up ; with her touching desolation of cir- 
 cumstance and of destiny, and her brilliant youth that in its 
 elasticity and its enthusiasm broke aside all barriers of doom and 
 pain and found its careless joy God-given from a song-bird's carol, 
 from a cloister- scribe's story, from the tossing of a soa of green 
 rushes in the wind, from the dreams of an outer world, unknown 
 and glorified in fancy into paradise. She was a poem in the spring- 
 time of her life and in the spring-time of the year. 
 
 The smile of women's eyes had no beckoning light for him, tho 
 whisper of women's allurement no sorcery for his ear ; he had been 
 
»u* Chandos. 
 
 a voluptuary in an earlier time, but he had passed through bitter. 
 uess and poverty, and sensuous charms had ceased to hold him. 
 Yet there was enough of the poet lingering in him to make him 
 vaguely feel some memories of youth and some tenderness of pity 
 arise as he looked on the bright head that he had painted with its 
 diadem of flowers, on the opening life that he had found in this 
 beech- wood nest. Had chance not thrown her or him, he would 
 never have sought her ; brought to his protection, to his compassion, 
 she won her way to him as some forest-fawn whom he should have 
 found wounded and beaten in the storm might have come to his 
 hand in after-days, and been caressed for the sake of its past peril 
 and its present gratitude. 
 
 He had sought the seclusion of the old Latin villa for the isola- 
 tion which he, a writer and a thinker of whom the world spoke, 
 often preferred to the life of cities, under grey Alpine shadows, in 
 still Danubian woods, by olive-crested Southern seas, or amidst the 
 Moorish ruins of a Granadine landscape. Wealth he had none ; 
 but as each young year awoke in its renaissance, he liked to have 
 around him the richness of colour and fragrance, the beauty of the 
 earth's dower, that needed no purchase, but could be made his own 
 by each who loved it well enough to understand its meaning. 
 
 In the monastic twilight and silence of the old classic hall, the 
 painting with the crown of flowers glowed brightly and vividly like 
 a living thing from out the gloom : and with the deep studies and 
 the solitary thoughts which had heretofore usurped him, the memory 
 and the presence of this fair child mingled, — not without a charm, 
 a charm which had in it something of recollection. The remem- 
 brance was fugitive, and he could never bring it clearly before his 
 knowledge ; but it was there, and strong enough to make him seek 
 more of her history. The search was futile : there was no more to 
 know ; her mother had died, mute and nameless, and whence she 
 came there was no record — there was not even a suggestion — to 
 show or to hint. One thing alone was certain ; her mother had 
 worn no marriage-ring, and the only word marked on the child's 
 linen was the single one Castalia. 
 
 The woman had been of great beauty, the peasants said, though 
 worn and haggard, with eyes that bui-ned like flame, and a terrible 
 wandering look ; but she had been utterly exhausted when she 
 had reached Fontane, and had lain almost speechless, until in the 
 middle of the hot, heavy, tempestuous night she had looked with a 
 glance that aU could read from the face of the priest to the sleeping 
 form of the child, and then had sighed wearily and restlessly, and 
 died. 
 
 The blank in the history made it but the more mournful, the 
 more suggestive. An exceeding pity moved in him, as he heard, 
 for the life ushered in in such abandoned desolation, and for which 
 there seemed no haven open save the cloister, — a fate as barbarous 
 for her radiant and impassioned loveliness, which not even the 
 melancholy of her fate could dim, as to wring the glad thi'oat of a 
 long-bird in the full rush of its forest melody. With him at least 
 the was happy,— she who had never known what happinesa wfi4B» 
 
" Seigneur 1 ayez Pitii^ 265 
 
 except snch forms of it as the sweet, irrepressible intoxication of 
 the mere sense of existence which youth gives, and the joys that a 
 yivid imagination and a passionate, poetic temperament confer. In 
 his presence she was happy, and he could not refuse it to her Few 
 days passed without his seeing her, in the beech-groYe where he 
 had first glanced at her by the broken fountain, in the pine-woods 
 eloping up toward Vallombrosa, in the deserted gardens or in the 
 ruined hall of his own Latin villa. He had no thought in it save 
 that of compassion, even whilst her lustrous eyes vaguely recallorl 
 him his past ; and in the untutored thoughts that had fed in these 
 hill-solitudes on the legacies of the Hellenic schools and the litera- 
 ture of the Renaissance, he found the wakening intellectof a Oorinna. 
 Love had long been killed in him ; it was a thing of his youth, 
 never, he believed, like that youth, to revive, and no touch of passion 
 mingled with the pity she aroused in him; but that pity was infinitely 
 gentle, and to her the most precious mercy that her life had known. 
 In her home, silence and austerity reigned with the stem sim- 
 plicity of the primitive Church. From the peasants she met with 
 at best a good-natured insolence that was to her instinctively im- 
 perial nature worse than all neglect ; from him alone she met with 
 what ennobled her in her own sight, and filled her towards him 
 with a passionate gratitude and veneration that was only not love 
 because no knowl^ge of love had dawned on her, and because an 
 absolute submission and awe were mingled with it. To her he was 
 the incarnation of all sublime lives that she had dreamed of over 
 the histories of Plutarch, and Tacitus, and Claudian, of Augustin, 
 and Hildebrand, and Basil ; to her he was as an emperor to his lieges, 
 as an archangel to his devotees ; all grand and gracious things to 
 her seemed blended in him, and aU lofty and royal lives of poet, 
 saint, or king with which her memory was stored seemed to her met 
 in his. It was not love that she bore him ; it was something in- 
 finitely more unconscious and more idealised : it was an absolute 
 adoration. 
 
 She did not know why the hours were a dead worthless space 
 unless they brought her to his presence, why the mere distant sound 
 of his voice filled her heart with a joy intense as pain, why any 
 sufi'ering he had bidden her would have been sweeter than any 
 gladness, why the forest- world about her wore a light it had never 
 had before : — she did not know ; she only knew that all the earth 
 seemed changed and transfigured. He was not blind to it; it 
 touched him, it beguiled him, it pleased him ; it was very long 
 since any thing had loved him and been the happier for his smile ; 
 it was very long since these softer, slighter things had come into his 
 life, and they had a certain charm for him. 
 
 There had been a time when all women's eyes had gained a 
 brighter light at his approach, though that time lay far away in a 
 deserted land ; yet in some faint measure it revived for him, as he 
 saw the silent welcome, more eloquent than all words, of this young 
 Tuscan's glance ; and to him she was but a beautiful child, to b6 
 caressed, without deeper thought. 
 
 ** Ecoellenisa !" she said, hesitatingly, one day that he had paused 
 
264 Chandos, 
 
 by her beside her favourite haunt by the Eoman fountain in the 
 black belt of the beech- woods, " you tell me that I have talent; 
 you say that my voice, when I sing the Latin chants that you love 
 best, is music the world would love too. Would they do nothing 
 for me in the world 1 " 
 
 That ** world " was so vague, so far off, so dim, so glorious to her ! 
 She could not have told what she thought lay beyond those chest- 
 nut-belts that she had never passed ; but her ideal of the unknown 
 land was divine as Dante's of the City of God. 
 
 He answered her slowly : he knew the fate to which her defence- 
 less and nameless beauty would there be doomed ; but he could not 
 find the heart to break her fair illusion. 
 
 " They might— they would ; but you are better and safer here in 
 your mountain shelter." 
 
 A quick sigh escaped her. 
 
 *'01i,no!" 
 
 " No '? How can you tell that ? You do not know what would 
 await you. Be happy while you may, Castalia ; the world would 
 crush you ! " 
 
 She looked at him wistfully, while a grander power and aspiration 
 than the mere longing of a child for "fresh fields and pastures 
 new" gleamed in eyes that in a little while would burn with 
 passion as they now glanced with light. 
 
 " It is only the weak who are crushed. They could not scorn me 
 for my birth and loneliness if I forced them to say, * See ! fate was 
 harsh to her ; but God gave her genius and enduranee, and she 
 conquered ! * " 
 
 The words and the tone moved him deeply : the fearless youth, 
 with its faith, its fervour, its courage, its sublime blindness of belief, 
 recalled to him his own. 
 
 " Ah, Castalia !" he answered gently, '* but the world loves best 
 to dwarf God and to deny genius. And genius in a woman ! Cyiil's 
 oiivy stones Hypatia, and casts her beauty to the howling crowds." 
 
 Her head drooped, but the look of resolve, though shadowed, did 
 not pass off her face. 
 
 * ' Perhaps ! Yet better Hypatia's glory won with her death, than 
 a lon^, obscure, ignoble, useless life ! You say, be happy here, 
 'lustrisdmo : happy ! when all my future is the convent V 
 
 It was a great terror to her, tJiat monastic doom to which the 
 priest inexorably condemned her future ; — other provision he could 
 make none for her. She was so full of vivid, luxuriant, abundant, 
 glowing life. Life was to her an unread poem of such magical en- 
 chantment, an ungathered flower of such sorceress- charm ; — ^and 
 nothing opened to her except that living tomb 1 
 
 He gave an in^Foluntary gesture of pain. 
 
 ** God forbid I Some fairer fate will come to you than that. To 
 condemn you to a convent-cell I it would be as brutal as the cap- 
 tivity of Heloise." 
 
 A broodmg weariness passed over the beauty of her face. 
 
 " But Heloise was happier than I should be. She had been loyed 
 once I" 
 
" Seigneur ! ayez Fuii.'' 26 '» 
 
 There was no thought in her as she spoke, save the longing for 
 tenderuess ever denied her, and an instinctive comprehension ol 
 the passion and the sacrifice of Paraclete. 
 
 Where he leaned against a beech-stem above her, his hand 
 touched her hair lingeringly and tenderly, as it had done when he 
 had brought her through the storm,— like a touch to a fluttering 
 bird. 
 
 ** You would love like Heloise ? " 
 
 She drew a deep, soft breath ; she was always awed with the 
 despair and the beauty, half mystic, wholly sublimated to her, of 
 that eternal tale. 
 
 " Ah, who woidd not P That alone is love ! * Quand I'empereur 
 eiit voulu m'honorer du nom de son spouse, j'aurais mieux aimer 
 6tre appolee ta maitresse I ' " 
 
 The words of Heloise on her innocent lips, which uttered them 
 with no thought save of their devotion and their fidelity, — their 
 choice of slavery to her lover rather than of imperial pomp with 
 any other, — ^had an eloquence and a temptation greater than she 
 knew. 
 
 He sighed almost tmconsciously ; it was the love of which he 
 had dreamt in his youth, — dreamt, and never found. 
 
 *• Castalia 1 you make me wish we had met earlier 1 '* 
 
 «*EarUerI Why?" 
 
 •• No matter I What is it you are reading there ? " 
 
 She lifted him the book ; an Italian translation of an English 
 romance, — ** Lucrece." 
 
 A shadow, weary and heavy, came - on his face as he glanced 
 through the pages. 
 
 ** You know it ? " she asked him. 
 
 «* Yes, 1 know it." 
 
 ** I love it so well ! It was left here by chance years ago, by some 
 travellers going through to Vallombrosa. It is beautiful 1 It 
 moves me as the winds do when they make their music through 
 the woods, and seem as though they called on men to cease from 
 evU and remember God." 
 
 The words, fantastic, yet very eloquent, while her eyes grew 
 humid, and the colour on her cheek grew warm as the scarlet heart 
 of a pomegranate, were perhaps the truest homage the work had 
 ever known. 
 
 He closed the book and gave it back. 
 
 •' Since you feel it so, you give the author his best reward." 
 
 " But you must think it great, too ? " 
 
 ** No; it is very imperfect. No one knew that better than he 
 who wrote it." 
 
 ♦• It is perfect to me. And who was he,— its writer P 
 
 ** You see his name there.* 
 
 ** Yes, his name ; but his fate " 
 
 ** Was, they say, a very common one. It was the fate of Icarus, 
 who thought himself a winged god, and fell broken to earth." 
 
 "He never fell ignobly," she said, below her breath. "He 
 ttroye to rise too high, perhaps ; and those who were earth-bound 
 
%66 Chandos. 
 
 envied him, and shot him doTni as hunters shoot an eagle ; but 
 
 whoever wrote that book would only gather strength from any 
 iall." 
 
 He answered her nothing. 
 
 The spring deepened into early summer ; he had been seven 
 weeks in the Latin villa since the day he had found her in the 
 Btorm, and he saw her often. He was beguiled with her, and the 
 thoughts of her cultmed fancy, all untinged by the world's taint 
 as they were, had a certain charm for the scholar, not less than her 
 
 Eersonal loveliness had a charm for one who had been, as the world 
 eld, a libertine. But either passion was dead in him, or her de- 
 foncelessness lent her sanctity in his sight ; for no warmer word or 
 glance than that of a pitying and pure tenderness ever came from 
 him to teach her either his power or hers. 
 
 She knew nothing of his history, not even his name; to the 
 peasantry he was simply " the stranger." He was sojourning here 
 for the viUegiatura, and into his solitude none had ventured until 
 she had been taken there by the hazards of the mountain weather. 
 Muse on what could be his history she often did, but to question 
 him on it she would no more have thought of than, in the old 
 legends of her Church, those whom angels visited thought of press- 
 ing cuiiously upon their reverenced guest. She followed other 
 words^ of Heloise, " En toi je ne cherchai que toi, rien de toi que 
 toi-meme." It was he who was the idol of her thoughts ; what 
 he was, whence he came, she never sought to know. The king- 
 ship of the earth would not have seemed to her an empire too 
 superb for him to have forsaken. She would have believed what- 
 ever he should have told her of himself— save evil. As it was, he 
 told her nothing ; and he spoke her language and the dead Latin, 
 which was equally familiar to her, so that he might have been a 
 Tuscan by birth, or, as her fancy — imaginative to extravagance — 
 sometimes could have almost conceived, have lived in those ages of 
 Augustan Eome or Gracchan Revolution of which he loved best to 
 converse. 
 
 Utterly at his mercy she was ; of peril to her from him she had 
 no conception, — what he had commanded she would have obeyed 
 implicitly ; of her own danger she was profoundly ignorant ; and 
 that he could have erred she would have no more believed than the 
 simple fanatics of her native beech- woods would have believed in 
 the error of the saints and seraphs to whom they prayed. The 
 verj'- difference in their years, wide as it was, lent an additional 
 charm to their intercourse, and even an additional danger, since it 
 lent it also an apparent and fallacious security. 
 
 Later on that same day, returning through the forest above 
 Fontane to the ruined villa, where he lived in the ascetic simplicity 
 of a man whose only riches lie in his own intellect and in the 
 books that he can gather round him, he saw her again, as the sudden 
 break in the wall of leaves and the sudden descent of the rocky 
 pathway brought him to a grey antique broken bridge that spanned 
 what was now little save a dry water-course, orchid-fiUed, with a 
 narrow, glimmering, brown brook under the flowers. She was 
 
" Seigneur ! aye% PitU.'' %6) 
 
 laaning otot the parapet, resting her arm on a basket of fruit. 
 There was the indolent, reposeful grace of her southern blood in 
 the attitude, but there was also something of depression; and 
 while a joyous light flashed into her eyes, he saw that tiiey had 
 been dim with tears. He paused beside her. 
 
 ** Castalia ! what has vexed you ? " 
 
 ** An idle thing, eccellenza." 
 
 *' Nothing is idle if it have power to wound you. Tell me." 
 
 A proud pain, that was half of it scorn for itself and half titie im- 
 patience to repay scorn, was on her face as she raised it. 
 
 "It is my folly to he wounded ! But as two contadine passed 
 me a while ago, they thrust out their lips with a smile that was 
 wicked, and looked at me. * Like mother, like child ! ' And I 
 knew that they meant disdain at me and at her ; and my heart 
 ached because I could not revenge. Eevenge is guilt, the Padre 
 Giulio says ; it may be, but when they mock at her, it would be 
 veiy sweet to me." 
 
 The strength of vengeance gleamed for a moment over the soft- 
 ness of her youth ; he saw how easily the noble nature here might 
 be driven to desperation and to guilt. If the lash of scorn fell on 
 her, it would never chasten, but it would goad and madden into 
 rebellion, perhaps into recklessness. 
 
 ** Foverina !" he said, caressingly, "evil be to those who cause 
 you one moment's pain. Does so much coarseness and cruelly 
 exist even in youi' primitive valley ? But do not heed them, Cas- 
 talia ; these women are beneath your regret ; and, remember, 
 calumny can only lower us when it has power to make us what it 
 calls U8." 
 
 Her glance gave him eloquent and grateful comprehension. 
 
 " Oh, 'lustrissimo ! it is not their scorn that I heed ; it is only — 
 I am afraid that it may bring me yours. And death would be 
 more merciful to me ! " 
 
 The words touched him deeply, — more deeply than he showed ; 
 for he sought to turn her thoughts from herself, as he took her 
 hands in his own, and looked down into the splendour of her eyes. 
 
 " Castalia, never fear that. I honour you for what you are, my 
 child. Your mother's error — if error it were — can never rest upon 
 you ; and the world is often sorely at fault in its judgments. It 
 condones its thieves, and condemns its martyrs. But you are rash 
 to attach so much value to my opinion. You do not know who 1 
 am, — whence I come, — what my history may be." 
 
 ' ' But I know you. Had I sought to know more, would you not 
 have thought me unworthy of so much ? The fable of Psyche is 
 BO true ; where doubt has once come, faith is dishonoured." 
 
 He smiled at the fable she chose, and her insight into human 
 nature. 
 
 ' ' Eight. I think Eros was justified in taking wing and in never 
 retm-ning ; but still there is such a thing as prudence. How can 
 you tell that some guilt does not rest on me ? — that I come here 
 oecause I am a marked and disgraced man ? — that I may be utterly 
 unlike all you believe me ? " 
 
s68 Chandos. 
 
 She looked at him proudly and yet sadly. 
 
 •' Eccellenza, those who bear guilt do not look as you look ; and, 
 whatever you be, you are great." 
 
 " No ! I told you I am a fallen Caesar, and dropped my purples 
 long ago." 
 
 *' But his purples are the least part of Caesar's greatness." 
 
 " Not in the world's estimate. Come, let me see you home- 
 ward." 
 
 He raised the load of yellow gourds and luscious summer fruits, 
 glowmg amidst leaves and wild flowers, as he spoke ; she tried to 
 take it from him. 
 
 * * Oh, illustrissimo ! do not do that ! You must not carry a burden . ' ' 
 
 " I have carried many," he said, half with a smile. She looked 
 at him still, with that reverent, wistful look ; she wondered what 
 he had been. 
 
 ' ' You have ? But they must have been the weight of royalties, 
 then. Give me the fruit ! Pray do not take it for me I " 
 
 "Castalia, an emperor is bound to serve a woman. We have 
 that lingering chivalry among us, at least." 
 
 The rocky road wound down under beech-boughs, and oveT 
 green tui-f, and into the twilight of dense woods, till the aerial 
 campanile of Fontane rose in its delicate height like a fi'ozen 
 fountain out of the nest of leaves. The Tuscan sunset, in all its 
 glow, was just on earth and sky as they entered the valley where 
 the white spire and the masses of chestnut-wood stood out against 
 the intense blue of the early summer heavens. 
 
 ** Coleridge cried, * God, how glorious it is to live ! ' " he said, 
 rather to himself than to her, as they came into the roseate 
 radiance. "Kenan asks, 'O God, when will it be worth while 
 to live ? * In nature we echo the poet ; in the world we echo the 
 thinker." 
 
 The light was gone, the twilight fallen, as he left her at the 
 little chalet where the charity of the Church sheltered her. He 
 drew her to him with an involuntary action of tenderness. 
 
 *' Castalia, good-night ! " 
 
 Her eyes looked up to his in the shadows heavily flung around 
 them by the bending boughs. The infinite beauty of her face had 
 never been more fair; almost unconsciously, something of the 
 softness of dead years revived in him ; he stooped his head, and his 
 lips touched the flushed warmth of her cheek in farewell. The kiss 
 startled her childhood from its rest for ever ; with it the knowledge 
 of love came to her. 
 
 A sudden consciousness, a sudden alarm, quivered through her ; 
 her heart beat like a caught bird, in a sweetness and joy that made 
 her afraid at their terrible strength and made her tremble before 
 him as though criminal with some great guilt ; she stood like an 
 antelope that in its wild, shy grace only tempts the hunter the 
 more : what she felt had a strange awe for her, and as strange a 
 rapture. Though given only in a compassionate tenderness, the 
 caress had taught the meaning of passion ; her colour burned, her 
 eyes sank under his. 
 
" Seigneur f ay €% Pitie.*' 269 
 
 At that instant the tread of a heavy step was heard on the 
 lilence : she fled instinctively, fleet as a fawn, into the deepening 
 shadow of the arched and open door ; he turned away and went 
 back up the woodland road to his own dwelling. Fronting him, in 
 a faint ray of dying light that slanted through the wall of chestnut 
 and of C5T)ress, the old priest stood, his grave, austere features 
 rugged as the riven rock. 
 
 " Give me a word with you," he said, simply. 
 
 He whom he checked iu his path looked up and paused ; he had 
 scarcely seen, and as scarcely thought of, the self-appointed guardian 
 of Castalia. 
 
 "A word with me ? Assuredly." 
 
 The priest looked at him with searching eyes, in which there was 
 still a great sadness and a great appeal. 
 
 *• Whoever you be," he said, briefly, " whether great, as I deem 
 by your bearing, or no, I speak to you not as to one owning 
 authority, nor as one holding myself God's command, but simply 
 as man speaks to man." 
 
 "Say on." 
 
 " Then I say, have you thought what it is you do now? ** 
 
 ** Do ? I fail to understand you." 
 
 " I will make my meaning plainer, then. Do you mean to ruin 
 that young life ? " 
 
 '•God forbid!" 
 
 '* Then do you know that they speak evil of her on your score ? 
 Do you know that, through you, they say the shame of her mother 
 is hers?" 
 
 "They lie, then — ^utterly! Teach your flock more charity to 
 youth and innocence, holy father. And let me pass ; I cannot wait 
 for this catechism." 
 
 "I thank you for that denial ; /did not need it; her eyes are 
 too clear beneath mine. Yet allow me a few worda more. You 
 give her no love, probably; but you are already far more her 
 religion than the creed I have taught her from infancy. How will 
 you use your power over her ? " 
 
 He was silent ; his thoughts were little with the speaker; he was 
 thinking of the lips that had trembled beneath his own. 
 
 ** You may lead her where you will ; I confess it you ! You, a 
 stranger, who saw her first but a few weeks ago, have a force to 
 mould and sway her that I never won — I who have reared her and 
 succoured her well-nigh from her birth," said the Italian, with a 
 bitterness in which was a yearning pain. ** It may be that I have 
 seemed harsh to her ; it may be that I have missed my way — that, 
 while I strove oveimuch to shield her from her mother's error, I 
 forgot to woo her trust and her heart— I forgot that a child, and a 
 woman-child above all, needs love and needs indulgence. It may 
 be that I erred. Be it so or not, you can command her ; and I can 
 no more stay her from your sorcery than I can check the winds. 
 Yet you say you would not bHght her life ; you speak as though 
 you had pity on her. You say you leave her innocence sacred; 
 but win you, then, rob her r^f ^^eaoe ? You say you will not lead 
 
•;e Chandos, 
 
 her to dishonour : will you not spare her also the bitterness of a 
 knowledge that must destroy the vii'ginity of the heart ? You say 
 the slanderers lie : will you not, then, be wholly merciful, and 
 leave her ere she learns to love you too well ? You can make hei 
 the plaything of an hour ; but it will only be at the price of hei 
 whole future." 
 
 He stood silent still while the oid priest spoke. He had not 
 thought of cost to her. 
 
 " Your lips touched hers to-night," pursued the Tuscan. " The 
 woman who has once felt shame under a caress has already lost 
 half her purity. You gave her in that a memory which will burn 
 into her heart with humiliation every time that she thinks of you. 
 STou may mean her no injury now ; but you are one who has lived 
 long, doubtless, in the pleasures of the world : how will it end if 
 you remain near her ? " 
 
 He raised his eyes, where they stood in the early evening light 
 falling so faintly through the parting in the barrier of cypress, and 
 looked full at the Italian. 
 
 " You plead with me for her; to what fate do you condemn her 
 yourself ? The cloister ? Have you ever thought what it is to 
 bury her in that tomb which cannot claim even the repose of the 
 graves of tho dead ? — to bar her out from light and laughter and 
 melody and joy ? — to chain her loveliness where no kiss shall ever 
 meet her own, no heart beat on hers, no eyes see her smile, no 
 lover seek her embrace ? Have you ever thought what you will 
 do when you seal down such luxuriant life as hers to beat, and 
 struggle, and desire, and pine, and wither, and perish alone? 
 Yours is the cruelty — not mine ! " 
 
 The Tuscan's furrowed cheek grew paler ; he was too deep a 
 scholar to be a fanatical churchman, and in his close, stern, rugged 
 soul he cherished Castaha tenderly. 
 
 "I mean no cruelty, — Christ knows. But I have no other 
 shelter for her, and there at least she would have innocence." 
 
 " Innocence forced and untempted ! what is it better than sin ? 
 Let her take her chance in the width of the world, let her even 
 know trial and poverty and temptation, let her be a wanderer an<? 
 a beggar, if she must ; but leave her the free air, and the forest 
 liberty, and the human love that is her right, and the possibility at 
 least of joy ! " 
 
 The Italian sighed wearily. 
 
 •* I strive for the best ; and my cruelty is not as yours. I would 
 save her at least from actual pain ; you — if you do her no worse 
 thing— will bind on her a passion and a regret that will consume 
 her to her grave. I know her nature; and though she has the 
 innocence, she has not the inconstancy, of a child : she will not 
 forget. There is but one way to spare her : leave her." 
 
 He was silent a while longer, as the priest's words ceased, and 
 there was no sound save the falling of a water- course rushing 
 downv>'ard thi'ough the gloom and through the leaves. 
 
 *' I will leave her," he said, at last, "if you in turn give mp 
 - ^ur word never to force her life into a convent." 
 
" Do well unto Thyself: %J t 
 
 ** I promise," 
 
 ** So be it. I will make her no farewell ; let her think me heart- 
 less of her, if she will ; so she will best forget." 
 
 Then he went upward alone through the evening shadows, along 
 the slope of the hills, to the loneliness of the Latin villa. In the 
 gloom of the deserted hall the picture of the diadem of flowers alone 
 gleamed radiant as a ray of the moonlight fell across it. He paused 
 before the painting, and a sudden pity stole on him. 
 
 The promise that he had given had a certain pain for him. It 
 was not love that he felt for her. There had been too great a dark- 
 ness on his life for the softness of that passion easily to revive ; but 
 he had found a pleasui-e in once more, after lengthened solitude, 
 being the subject of that sweet, reverent adoration ; and she had 
 inspired him with an unspeakable compassion for her fate, ^^N'liich 
 could not let him muse without anxiety upon that fate's inevitable 
 future. There had been a time when the lavishness of his gifts 
 and the influence of his word could have lifted her into happiness 
 as easily as a flower is transplanted into sunlight from the shade ; 
 but that time was far away. He felt the hardest pang of poverty 
 to those of generous nature : he had nothing to give. 
 
 He had offered the promise, and he would redeem it because she 
 was motherless and defenceless, and therefore sacred to him ; but 
 he stood and looked at the flower-crowned painting with a pang of 
 regret. 
 
 ' * It is a harsh mercy that he asks of me," he thought ; * ' and yet 
 what else should be the end? Love is no toy for me now ; and she 
 IS worthier of a happier fate than to be the passing fancy, the con- 
 solation of an hour, to a worn and wearied life." 
 
 On the morrow, ere the sun was hi-h, he was far from YaUom* 
 brosa. 
 
 BOOK THE SEVENTH. 
 
 CHAPTER L 
 
 "DO WELL TINTO THYSELF, AKD MEN WILL SPEAK GOOD OF 
 THEE." 
 
 The Member for Darshampton sat at breakfast in his house m 
 town,— a fine mansion, whose rental was two thousand a year, yet 
 in whose unostentatious and solid comfort there was the impress oi 
 eterlinfr wealth, but not a trace of parvenu arrogance or ill tast^. 
 
 He sat at breakfast in his dining-room ; a long, low room, hung 
 with crimson and with a few fine pictures ; at the farther end was 
 R white bust on a pillar of jaspar; it was the bust of a long-dead 
 statesman, Philip Chandos. The Member for DarL^hampton waa 
 taking his breakfast, surrounded with a sea of morning papers | ha 
 
jya Chandos. 
 
 had already done two hours' hard work with his secretary, dictating, 
 annotating, reading reports, computing statistics, conning ovei 
 precis. Leisure, indeed, was a thing he never knew ; untiring, 
 elastic, indefatigable, unsparing, he was an admirable man of busi- 
 ness, and evei-y moment of his day was consumed in a labour seem- 
 ingly borne as lightly as it was in reality thoroughly done, whatever 
 its nature. 
 
 Public life was his natural sphere ; to it he brought a brain ever 
 vigilant, an energy ever unconquerable, s facility that might have 
 been almost too facile had it not been corrected by a keen and 
 vigorous patience that would never slur over anything, and that 
 searched out the minutest points of every subject. Yet the enor- 
 mous variety, and the intensity of application that characterised 
 his work, told in no sort of way on his health: he felt well, 
 looked well, slept well ; he never found any tax on his strength 
 touch him, more than if he had been made of oak or granite ; he 
 never knew what pain or what weariness was. He reaped now tho 
 recompense of the training, the temperance, and the entire freedom 
 from all license in vice that he had imposed on himself so severely 
 throughout his early manhood. His eyes were as bright, his skin 
 as clear, his teeth as white, his smile as merry, as twenty yeara 
 before ; John Trevenna was unchanged,— unchanged in form and 
 feature, in manner and in mind. In the first, the man was too 
 healthily framed to alter much with time ; in the latter, he was 
 too mtegrally original, and bore too thorough and marked an idio- 
 syncrasy to alter while he had life. He cut his impress on the 
 world about him, he did not take his mould from it : men of this 
 type change little. Moreover, Trevenna had Success : it is a finer 
 tonic than any the Pharmacopoeia holds, specially for those who, 
 like him, are too wise to let it be also a stimulant that intoxicates 
 or an opiate that drugs them. 
 
 He had success of the richest and the fullest. Slowly won, but 
 surely, he had mounted his cautious and victorious way to those 
 heights that long ago had been a goal of which men would have 
 called >>^Tn a madman ever to dream, and had netted together the 
 innumerable threads of his policies and his efi'orts, till ho had 
 Nvoven them into a rope-ladder strong enough and long enough to 
 reach the power he had coveted from earliest boyhood. His rise 
 had, in appearance, been gradual, yet it had been rapid in fruits 
 and in attainment ; and there were few men living of whom so 
 much was thought in the present, from whom so much was ex- 
 pected in the future. The sedulous training he had pursued so 
 patiently had brought its own reward : none went to the political 
 arena more finely prepared for it : none had more completely 
 gained a footing and a power there. 
 
 The first words he had uttered in the House had told them hig 
 quality, had told them that no ordinary man had come among 
 them to represent that little borough of the south-western sea- 
 board ; but he had been careful, and he had been wise. He had 
 not alarmed them with a sudden burst of talent ; he had been con- 
 tent to run a waiting race for the first, and to bide his tiine. IXg 
 
" Do well unto Thyself:' t73 
 
 had let hi8 influence grow ; he had been noted earliest rather for 
 
 his admirable common sense and his practical working powers, than 
 for anything more brilliant ; and gradually as his critical audience, 
 who regarded b^m as an outeider and an adventurer, became cogni- 
 zant of his value, he allowed the true resources and the real capa- 
 bilities of his mind to be discovered. Festina lente was his motto, 
 and he had followed it with a patience the more marvellous in one 
 whose quick, energetic, prompt, caustic temper always urged him 
 to instant action and ironic retort. 
 
 Now he had his reward ; his weight was immense, his popularity 
 with the large and wealthy and liberal mass of the country, extreme. 
 Ministers dreaded him, chiefs of his own party recognised in him 
 the first of all their auxiliaries ; Government would have bought 
 his silence with any place ; the benches never were so crowded as 
 on a night when one of his watched-for and trenchant speeches 
 rang thi-ough the drowsy air of the Lower Chamber like the clear 
 stirring notes of a trumpet. He was rich ; his commercial specu- 
 lations, made with that unerring acumen which distinguished him, 
 had prospered and multiplied a thousandfold; all he undertook 
 succeeded. Those who had sceered him down had become com- 
 pelled to court and conciliate him ; great orders who had dubbed 
 nim nobody, and shut him with scorn outside their pale, now 
 learned to dread him as their direst opponent. Houses where he 
 had used to enter on sufferance now received him as an honoured 
 guest; statesmen who had once blackballed him at clubs now 
 would have given any splendid bribe he would have taken to still 
 his defiance or to secure his alliance. Against prestige, prejudice, 
 poverty, the sneer of the world, the antagonism of the nobility, the 
 uttermost disadvantages and difficulties of position, Treyonna had 
 fought his way into a foremost rank, and compelled his foes to 
 acknowledge and to dread the man whom they had laughed dow-i 
 as an insignificant /arcewr, a nameless club-lounger. 
 
 His conquest was grand ; the indomitable courage that he hnj 
 brought to it, the exhaustless endui-ance with which he had sus- 
 tained defeat and humiliation, the untiring resolve with which h 
 had kept one aim in view so long, and beaten down the barriers of 
 class and custom, are the most magnificent qualities of human life 
 The work was great, and greatly done. The man who vanquishes 
 the opprobrium of adverse orders and the opposition of adveise 
 circumstances, is a soldier as staunch as the Barca brood of Car- 
 thage ; but — the weapons with which the fight had been fought 
 here were foul as an assassin's, and the root, like the poal of tU 
 struggle, was envy. A man may rise with an admirablo perse- 
 verance and dauntlessness ; but the hatchets with which ho carves 
 his way up the steep shelving ice-slope may nevertheless be blood 
 stained steol and stolen ^oods. We are too apt, in our wonder aiii 
 our applause at the height to which he has attained against all 
 odds, to forget to note wnether his steps up the incline have booc 
 clean and justly taken. 
 
 Trevenna's frankness, his honhomie^ his logical brain, his racy 
 eloquence, his practical working powers, his taking candour, with 
 
 T 
 
i74 
 
 Ckandos. 
 
 which he avowed mmseK of the middle classeB, claiming no rights 
 of bifth, his cheerful and unerring good sense, with whicn ho 
 would alike treat a political question by examining its business 
 utility, and disarm a social sneer by disclaiming all pretensions to 
 rank or to dignity, charmed the world in general, paralyzed his 
 aristocratic foes, and pioneered his way wherever he would, giving 
 him a wide and sure hold on the classes to whose sympathies he 
 made his direct appeal. The fine intrigues by which power had 
 been secretly won to him ; the merciless knowledge with which he 
 coerced those whose histories he held in a tyranny none the less 
 irresistible because tacit; the paths in which his finesses had wan- 
 dered to gather his hold on so many ; the sinks out of which his 
 wealth had been taken, as gold is found in the sewers ; the maiii 
 fold infamies into which his bright skill had dived, to issue from them 
 with a terrible omnipotence ; the network of inimitable chicaneiies, 
 ever wisely to windward of the law, with which he had overspread 
 1 he world he had vanquished ; the commercial gambling in which 
 ho had filled his treasuries by a fluke, and doubled and quad- 
 rupled gains gotten by lies ; the hearty, ironic, good-humoured, 
 rascally contemj^t in which he held all mankind, and disbelieved in 
 all honesty, — these were unknown, unguessed. alike by the people 
 who believed in him, by the aristocracies who hated him, by the 
 party who adored him, and by the world on which he had, against 
 odds so vast, graven the impress of his daring and splendid talent. 
 
 When the white block of marble shines so solid and so costly, 
 who remembers that it was once made up of decaying shells and 
 rotting bones and millions of dying insect-lives, pressed to asheB 
 ore the rare stone was ? 
 
 Trevenna's success was, like the bricks of the ancient temples, 
 cemented with the blood of quivering hearts ; but it was all the 
 firmer for that, and none the less victorious. Now, where he sat 
 •n his dining-room, he glanced down the leaders of his own especial 
 organ, a journal that ever sounded " lo triumpho " before him, — 
 glanced amusedly over the closing words of the column devoted to 
 the praise of " the most promising statesman we possess, — the 
 assured chief of the future, — the great orator by whom Dars^hamp- 
 ton is so nobly represented." 
 
 ** Of unflagging energy," pursued his daqueiir of the Communist-, 
 " of the highest political probity, of a fixity of princijile never to 
 be turned from its goal by the gilded bait of office, of talents most 
 versatile, yet which never interfere with his devotion to the 
 smallest business detail or mercantile interest, essentially English 
 in creed, bias, and temper, preferring solid excellence to tho ilashy 
 fascination of superficial attainment, and signalized by cordial and 
 earnest sympathies with the wishes and the rights of the masses, it 
 is to Mr. Trevenna that all thoughtful and advanced minds must 
 inevitably look for progress and assistance in the future of our 
 nation. The laws, the liberties, the domestic virtues of tho hearth 
 and home, the independence abroad, and the prosperity of internal 
 interests, the maintenance of religion and morality, the security of 
 the birthright of freedom to the poorest life that breathes, — all that 
 
** Do well unto Thyself.' 275 
 
 nre so notably dear to every Englisliman are equally precious to 
 him ; and their preservation from all foreign taint and alien tyranny 
 is the object alike of his public and private career. Conquest does 
 not recommend itself to him as peace and charity do; and the 
 clash of arms is jarring on his ear when heard instead of the 
 whirr of a myriad looms, bread-winning and bread-giving. The 
 welfare of the vast industrial classes of Great Britain is at his 
 heart before all else ; and to the sway which he exerts over the 
 Senate, even when its members be most strongly adverse to him, 
 we may apply the trite Hues of the ' .ZEneid,' ' Hoc tibi erunt artes,' 
 &c. &c." 
 
 So the Communist, Trevenna laughed : the lion had too much 
 racy humour in him not to enjoy the ridicule of his jackal's fine 
 peroration. 
 
 "Very well, my good fellow," he thought, condescendingly. 
 ** Laid on a trifle too thick, perhaps ; and you will call the Com- 
 mons a ' Senate,' and nothing will cure you of trotting out your bit 
 of school Latin, whether it quite fits or not : still, it does very well. 
 * Virtues of the hearth and home ; ' ah ! nothing brings down the 
 House like that. We're as blackguard a nation as any going in 
 vice ; but we do love to amble out with a period about domestic bosh. 
 My puffs were neater when I wrote 'em myself ; no gale blows you so 
 bravely along as the breeze you prick yourself out of the wind-bag. 
 Who should know so well as yourself all your most telling hits, 
 your titbits of excellence, your charming niceties of virtue ? The 
 puff perfect is the puff personal — adroitly masked. Mercy on us ! 
 I do believe Hudibras is right, and the cheated enjoy being cheated. 
 If I told my dearly beloved masses, now, ' Yoa're a lot of unedu- 
 cated donkeys, — but you're my best stepping-stones, and so I 
 make you lie down and I get into your saddles,' they'd be disgusted 
 to-morrow. I talk liberties, moderated Socialism, philanthropy, 
 and moralities ; I wear the Bonnet Eouge discreetly weighted down 
 with a fine tassel of British prudence, and they believe in me ! 
 Can't, either, quite, surely ? And yet I don't know ; there isn't 
 anything so easily taken in as a whole country. Nine-tenths of a 
 nation are such fools, — that's where it is ; of course the other tenth 
 part do what they like with them." 
 
 With which reflection oa the aggregate of whom he was an 
 honored representative, Trevenna ate a rognon au vin de Madere. 
 His delight in the infinite jest of the world was unchanged ; he 
 enjoyed with an unction never sated the whole of the vast bur- 
 lesque to which he played the triumphant part of Arlecchino : his 
 heart was as light as a boy's, and his humour as savory as Falstaff '3. 
 Having worn the robes of respectability of a grave and reverend 
 Siguier, all day long before the people, he would come home and 
 toss them off with as mischievous a glee at the perfection with 
 which he had played his part, as lq earlier days he had tossed aside 
 his domino and mask after teasing the life out of everybody at a 
 masquerade. 
 
 He ate his kidney, glancing over some other journals that echoed 
 the Communist with a more ot less different wording, and some Op- 
 
^1^ Chandm, 
 
 position ones that flattered him equally well by damning him bo yery 
 strongly that nothing but an acute diead of him could make them 
 so bitter. Of the two, perhaps these pleased him the best. Intense 
 abuse may be, on the whole, a suier testimony to your power than 
 ! atense praise ; and, moreover, he was of that nature which is never 
 so vigorously happy as when it has something to combat. He was 
 .lade of splendidly tough stuff, this man who had been so long 
 [ joked down upon as a mere town-chatterbox and diner-out ; and 
 i.e throve on every added effort which endeavoured to displace him, 
 ..ad only grew the more firmly rooted for it. Breakfast done, and 
 a first-rate cigar or two smoked, he rose, nodded to the white bust 
 a t the end of the chamber with mischief in his eyes, as though it 
 were a living thing (he liked to see that bit of statuary there, as 
 soldiers like to see their enemy's standards droop on their mess- 
 1 oom walls, in witness of hard-fought and successful war), and went 
 out to his busy day. He toiled none the less than he had done 
 when self-educating himself for the tribuneship he now filled; he 
 was not a whit less punctual, arduous, and methodical than he had 
 been when he had ground logic and finance and laws of exchange, 
 while the world thought him an idle flaneur ; every thing he under- 
 took was done with a conscientious thoroughness, none the less 
 complete because its far-sighted motive was ultimate aggrandize- 
 ment. Let him have risen as high as he would, he would never 
 have spared himself: he loved work for its own pleasure, as a man 
 loves swimming. 
 
 TTiH party was out of office at this time, — ^had been so for some 
 I wo or three years ; whenever they should come in again, he knew 
 rhey could not help but offer him a seat in the Cabinet ; well as 
 many of them detested him, they dared not risk his enmity or his 
 opposition. To get them into office once more, therefore, and write 
 himself the Eight Hon. John Trevenna, he laboured assiduously, 
 and for the opposite faction with a terrible ability. He had so 
 weakened, undermined, countermined, impugned, ridiculed, arraign- 
 ed, and stripped bare their policies, that it was generally believed 
 they would be compelled before long to try an appeal to the country. 
 They had no one strong enough in debate, though they had several 
 brilliant speakers, to oppose the sledge-hammer force of his close 
 arguments and the weight of his keen logic, that felled their de 
 fences with its sharp pole-axe. 
 
 He accorded now two hours after breakfast to correspondence and 
 such matters ; then he gave audience to a Darshampton deputation, 
 who came in stiu'dily sullen, but were received with such chatty 
 familiarity, such pleasant good nature, that they went out again 
 docile and enchanted, and never had time to remember till they 
 v^ere half-way home that they had extracted no pledge from him 
 ind received not one single definite answer ; then he saw some score 
 Dr more of different visitors, breathless with political anxiety or 
 t)rimming with political rumours; a private interview with a foreign 
 imbassador, andaconfidential<^^e-a-te^ewithagreatlord of hi^- ;>arty, 
 followed ; then he sauntered into one or two of the Pall-Mali dubs. 
 ib full e^ news, wit, and good humour as when he had mad© bit 
 
**Do well unto Thy self V 277 
 
 repartees to get his dinners ; then he drove down to show at a 
 couple of garden-parties at a French prince's and a Scotch duchess's, 
 vivacious, full of fun, charming the ladies as " so droll, so original ! " 
 and playing lawn-billiards as if he had not another stake in the 
 world ; then he went to the House for a couple of hours and 
 launched a short speech that told Kke a rifle-shot ; then he went to 
 a dinner-party at a great chiefs of his party; and thence to an 
 Embassy -ball. 
 
 There were wars and rumours of war political pending ; there was 
 agitation in the great aristocratic ranks of opposition ; there were 
 excitement and intrigue in the whole of the world of state-craft. 
 It was a crisis, as the grandes dames murmured with emphasis, and 
 he liked to show these nobles, these hereditary statesmen, these 
 women who had once scarcely bowed to him as a " rank outsider," 
 that he could take the emergency with all the sang-froid imaginable, 
 gossip as pleasantly as though no import hung on the night, and 
 chatter with a duchess about Tuileries tittle-tattle till he was called 
 away and carried .forcibly off by a whip who was in the height of 
 haste and trepidation. 
 
 " He will cut some work out for you," had the old duke once said 
 of him ; and Trevenna made good his words. His party hated 
 alliance with him, but they no more dared alienate him than they 
 dared have called him in Darshampton what they called him in 
 secret, — a demagogue. Of a truth ho was no demagogue ; he wa.- 
 far too wise and far too cultured. He was simply a sagacious, 
 audacious, astute, and unerring politician, willing to lead the people 
 as far as it was his interest to do so, but not one step fartiier, if 
 they starved by the thousand. 
 
 Many lords had come down to hear the Debate ; the Ladies' and 
 Strangers' Galleries were full, ttie crowds outside the House packed 
 close in expectation ; it was known that the fate of parties hinged 
 chiefly on this night's issue. With a grey paletot over his evening 
 dress, he sauntered to his place, imperturbable, nonchalant, looking 
 as bright and as keen as though he were just going up to the 
 wickets at cricket. All eyes were on him ; he was used to that b^ 
 tl^s time, and liked nothing better. He loved to know that his 
 brisk, elastic step, and his good-humoured, easy bearing, were as 
 well known here as the haughty grace of Philip Chandos once had 
 been. The ambition of his life centred in the turn of the night ; 
 the hopes of his party centred in himseK. It was his to attack, and, 
 if possible, to defeat, the Government, and all the resources of his 
 intellect had been brought to meet the need ; yet, as he took his 
 seat, he was as genial, as bright, as light-hearted, as though b.e 
 were a school -boy, and was so without a shade of affectation in it. 
 He had the qualities of a very great man in him, and he loved the 
 atmosphere of conflict. 
 
 His famous rival's speech closed : it had been brilliant, persuasive, 
 subtle, launching an unpopular measure with consummate skill, 
 and fascinating, if it failed to convince, all auditors. It was no 
 facile task to reply to and refute him. Trevenna rose, one hand 
 li^tly laid on the rail, the other in the breast of his coftt ; on hi? 
 
a ^8 Chandos, 
 
 lips was his pleasant, frank smile : the Opposition had learned to 
 dread its meaning. The House was profoundly hushed as his voice, 
 perfectly moderated, but resonant, telling and clarion-like, pierced 
 the silence. He knew well how to hold its ear. 
 
 He was a master of the great art of banter. It is a marvellous 
 force : it kills sanctity, unveils sophistry, travesties wisdom, cuts 
 thi'ough the finest shield, and tui-ns the noblest impulses to hopeless 
 ridicule. He was a master of it ; with it he rent his antagonist's 
 arguments like gauze, stripped his metaphors naked, pilloried his 
 logic and his rhetoric, his finance and his economics, and left the 
 residue of his ornate eloquence a skeleton and a laughing-stock. 
 He did this matchlessly, and did not do it tooj much : he kuew the 
 temper of his audience, and never transgressed its laws of courtesy. 
 He carried it with him as by magic, and fi'om his lighter weapons 
 he passed on, and took up the terseness of reasoning, the closeness 
 of logic, the mathematical exactitude, the shrewd, practical _ com- 
 mon sense, without which no speaker will ever thoroughly gain the 
 confidence and homage of the English Commons. It might not be 
 the silver eloquence of a Demosthenes, but it was the oratory suited 
 above all to his theme and to his place, — classic, moreover, even 
 whilst it was business-hke and restrained, as befitting a gathering 
 of gentlemen, even whilst most audacious, most pungent, most 
 merciless in raiUery and attack. 
 
 The House cheered him in riotous excitement as he sat down, 
 and the supreme triumph of a triumphant life was given him. His 
 speech did a rare thing in St. Stephen's: it influenced the votes ; 
 the Government was defeated hopelessly on a great issue, and 
 could have no choice but to resign. 
 
 There was the grandeur, if there were the insolence, of supreme 
 success, seK-won, in Trevenna's eyes and in his thoughts, as he 
 went out in the lateness of the night with the cheers which had 
 ratified his victory still seeming to echo in his ear. He looked, as 
 his carriage roUed through the gaslights, down the darkling streets 
 of Westminster, and thought of the night he had stood there as a 
 boy and trodden out the luscious Paris bonbons of a young child's 
 gift. What he had done since then ! 
 
 " Beaux seigneurs ! what of the outsider now?" he mused, with 
 his victorious smile on his mouth. " In a week's time I shall be 
 called the Eight Hon. Jokn Trevenna ; and they di-ead me so 
 bitterly they wiU dare to refuse me no place in the Cabinet that I 
 choose to command." 
 
 *' The ministry wiU go out. Sit down, and don't yawn : there 
 is no end to do," he said, curtly, to his sccretaiy, as he threw off 
 his paletot and entered his library. It was nigh four in the morn- 
 ing ; but his indefatigable elasticity and energy knew no fatigue. 
 As though just fresh to the work, he plunged into correspondence 
 that no precis- writing could have made terser and no diplomatist 
 have surpassed for masterly sm-face-honesty and secret reticence. 
 A splendid campaign had been finished; a splendid campaign 
 was to be commenced. The army of attack had been led 
 triumphant' the army of occuoation was to be headed in th*» 
 
The Throne of the Exile, syp 
 
 future. There would be others higher than ho in the titular dig- 
 nities of office, but there would bo none higher in virtual power. 
 
 " Do well unto thyself, and the world will speak well of thee." 
 It was rare indeed that ever now there was found one bold enough 
 to murmur against the wealthy speculator, the popular favourite, 
 the astute poHtician, the audacious and sagacious winner of all 
 life's choicest prizes, the bitter word that had long ago been cast 
 at him, — " adventurer." 
 
 Others forgot that old time ; he did not. He loved to remember 
 every jot of it. He loved to remember the vow lie had sworn in 
 the midnight streets in his childhood. He loved to remember 
 every privation endured, every smart felt, every insolence taken in 
 silence, every long lonely night spent in hard toil and pitiless 
 study, while the merry world laughed around in its pleasures and 
 vices. He loved to count up how much he had conquered, and to 
 pay back jibes of twenty j^ears ago, treasiu'cd up and waiting their 
 vengeance ; he loved to make men who had turned their backs on 
 him then bow before him now, and to glance downward on the 
 vast decline up which he had mounted, and to think how the sure- 
 ness of his foot and the keenness of his eye had brought him 
 against all difficulty to the table-lands where he now stood secui-e. 
 All he forgot were — benefits. 
 
 With these triumphal thoughts did remorse ever mingle ? Did 
 ho ever remember the cost to other lives at which so much of his 
 victory had been gained ? Did he ever give a flush of shame when 
 he recollected how he had rewarded evil for good, and bitten 
 through vidth tiger-fangs the hand which had loaded him with 
 gifts, and betrayed and robbed and driven down to ruin the most 
 loyal friend that ever gave him fearless faith ? Never once ! 
 Amidst the paeans of success conscience has small chance to be 
 heard, and the temper of Trevenna was proof against all such 
 weakness. He would have said that ho knew neither form of il^- 
 digestion, — neither dyspepsia nor repentance. 
 
 CHAPTEE n. 
 
 THE THRONE OF THE EXILE. 
 
 It was in the boudoir of the great house of Lilliesford, where a 
 political coterie wove its silken meshes for men's souls and official 
 places. Very beautiful women were seen in it sometimes, but 
 they were rarely the gay young sovereigns ; they were rather the 
 older and more stately leaders of the world political. For of these 
 latter was the Countess of Clydesmore. 
 
 She sat there now, in the darkest depths of the shadow, her 
 head slightly bent, no light on the rich brown wealth of her haii 
 or the sculpture-like perfection of her features. She was a woman 
 whom her own great world revered : no levity ever touched her 
 name, no coquetry eyer Icwered her dignity. Ambitious she was, 
 
28o Chandos, 
 
 though she scarce knew what for, — rather for the simple sake ani 
 ewcotness of power and of prerogative than anj^thing else. If her 
 heart remained cold as ice to the man whoso name she graced and 
 whose children she had borno,— if her young sons never saw any 
 smile in her eyes, but shrank from her in their infancj', cMlled 
 and afraid, — her world did not know this, and, had it known, 
 would have thought it no breach of the social code. Wo lay 
 blame to society because it judges from the surface: — idle blame; 
 how else can it judge ? 
 
 She was a stainless wife, <rf a lofty purity of life ; if in her soul 
 elie hated with a hate intense as passion the man to whom she had 
 bound captive her beauty, — if when she looked on tho children she 
 had brought him she pressed her lips tight to hold back a curse 
 on them because he was their father, — who could teU this ? None, 
 — save the husband who had heard another name than his own 
 murmured wearily in the dreams of her bridal sleep, — save the 
 young boys who glanced at her with timid, troubled eyes, and 
 wondered why, when, for duty or for appearance, she had touched 
 their cheeks with a kiss, she thrust them away with an involuntary 
 revulsion as they saw her thi'ust a tiresome dog. 
 
 Now Lady Clydesmore leaned back, musing of the prospects of 
 her party. She reined for reigning' s sake ; she wove for weaving'a 
 sake ; she was ambitious because her nature could not choose but 
 be so ; she intrigued because she was weary of her life and forgot 
 herself a little the quickest in these cabals. It was neither for her 
 husband nor her sons that she laboured : if the raising of her 
 hand could have made the one a king, she would not for his sake 
 have raised it ; if by lifting it the others could have died out of her 
 sight and out of her memory and sunk into theii' graves, it woidd 
 have been lifted as eagerly, as pitilessly, as ever Eoman matrons 
 gave tho sign for the slaughter in the arena. But tho acquisition 
 of privilege and the vanity of her own splendid dominion were ( he 
 passions of hor character : she had sickened long ago of the reign 
 of her bcautj' ; the domain of intellectual and poUtical pro-emi- 
 nence remained to her, and she had occupied it and usurped it. 
 
 The three ladies with her were talking now of one who had also 
 won his way to that closely-fenced and closely-crowded table-rock 
 of political strife. 
 
 •'It could not have been formed without him," said one fair 
 politician. 
 
 " Oh, no," assented a yet warmer partisan. " He could make 
 his own terms." 
 
 '* He was moderate to be content with the Colonial," murmured 
 the Lady of Lilliesford. 
 
 *• The Board of Trade might have done ? " suggested the first. 
 
 "Ceit-ainly notj he would not have taken it," negatived the 
 second, La«iy "Dorenavant, with a certain contempt. " The Foreign 
 goals now '' 
 
 **0h, no," disseLted her adversary; "we should have twenty 
 wars on our hands in as many weeks with his brusque, brief 
 despatches. They would be vei-y Napoleonic ; but be would saj? 
 
The Throne of the Extte. »8i 
 
 to the Pope, * You belong to the past : off with you ! ' and would 
 \mte to France, ' We hate you, and you hate us : why mince the 
 matter ? ' He would not be conducive to European harmony." 
 
 Lady Dorenavant gave a lazy gesture of dissent. 
 
 ** Is that all you know of him ? In the Foreign Office, or any- 
 where else, he would always do just the thing that needed to be 
 done, and no more. He can keep Darshampton in good humour ; 
 it is more unmanageable, on the whole, than Europe." 
 
 **I a^ee with you," murmured a third fair Oheyreuseof politics, 
 ** I behove he would hold the Foreign portfolio and hold it well. 
 He would keep peace ; but there would be no fog in his corres- 
 pondence, and no beating about the bush. What he had to say 
 would be said briefly, firmly, and with infinite tact. The only pity 
 is— he was nobody." 
 
 "Every one has forgotten that by now," said Lady Clydesmore, 
 with a curl of disdain on her thoughtful lips, that was followed by 
 a darker and more bitter shadow where she sat in the shelter of the 
 cuiied tropic leaves. 
 
 ♦*No: it is never forgotten and never forgiven," said the last 
 epeaker, with delicate disdain ; for she was a very keen wit, a veiy 
 truthful temper, and despised her own party now and then not a 
 little. "But, you know as well as I, we can't afford to appear to 
 remember it. He is so much to us." 
 
 "I do not see there is anything to be forgotten," said Lady 
 Dorenavant, who piqued herself on being positively " Red " in 
 her political tastes in theory, but who would nevertheless never 
 have set foot again in any house in which the order of precedence 
 had been violated in going down to dinner and the heraldic dignities 
 of her house been offended in any iota of ceremonial. " That is 
 euch a miserable monopoly, such an old-world opticism, to adhere 
 60 much to lineage. For my own part, I never forget that the 
 greatest men of all nations have sprung from the people. Life 
 IS too earnest, truth too broad, for these insignificant class-dis- 
 tinctions." 
 
 " Quite so, dear," yawned her pretty, inconsequent antagonist. 
 ••We all say that nowadays. But why aren't you true to youi- 
 theory ? Why don't you let Adine marry poor Langdon ? " 
 
 "That is absurd I" said the socialist peeress— a little nettled ; for 
 no one likes to be twitted with turning theories into action. " No- 
 body is talking of marriage : we are speaking of men who attain 
 power without the hereditary right to it. I confess, I admire 
 eelf-made men ; there is such a rugged grandeur about the mere 
 idea of all they have contested with and conquered." 
 
 Which was a beautiful absence of all prejudice on her ladyship's 
 part, slightly nullified in its weight by the fact that she had a 
 month before half broken her daughter's heart, and spent all her 
 most bitter and deadly courtliness of insolence and opprobrium on 
 that daughter's lover — a great artist, who had had the presumption 
 to think that his fine celebrity and his gallant love might mate 
 him with the young azure-eyed aristocrat, and in return had been 
 etoued and pierced with a great lady's polished insults. 
 
s9f Chandos, 
 
 " Besides," she pursued, now on her favourite theme, " you can- 
 not call hmi a self-made man : he was always among us, always at 
 tho best houses, entered Parliament at a veiy good age, has always 
 known everybody and been seen everywhere. I remember his first 
 speech so well ! It was short — he had too much tact to detain tho 
 benches long — but so pithy, so trenchant, so precise to the purpose, 
 so admirably uttered ! I remember saying to poor Sir James 
 that very night, * See if I am not right ; we shall have a recruit 
 well worth studying and retaining there.' And he did see I was 
 right." 
 
 She nestled herself among her soft cushions with complacent 
 remembrance ; she had been tiie first to discern the faint beams of 
 the rising sun. 
 
 " ^Vhat that man has done since then ! " murmured the Countess 
 of Clydesmore, rather to herself unconsciously than to her com- 
 panions. 
 
 At that instant a hand thrust aside the sacred velvet curtain 
 before the open folding-doors, that rarely was drawn aside save by 
 the few privileged comers who were made fi-ee of the guild : the 
 subject of their words and thoughts entered the boudoir. He was 
 just then a guest for an autumnal week at Lilliesford. 
 
 Lady Clydesmore did not look up ; a slight gloom came over her 
 face, and the abrupt rapidity of entrance jarred her nerves. Lady 
 Dorenavant smiled a bland welcome. 
 
 " Ah, Mr. Trevenna, you come to enliven us ! " 
 
 " You have faith in my powers of enlivening ? "Well, so have I, 
 I think. I actually once contrived to make a royal dinner only 
 half aiS dull as a sermon ! " 
 
 ' ' AVhat specific have you against dulness P " 
 
 "Don't know," answered the popular politician, shrugging his 
 shoulders and hitting, as he usually did, the truth, — " except it 
 may be that I never feel a dull dog myself." 
 
 " But then that's just it : how is it you don't ? " 
 
 "Ah! that 2s just it. Can't say. Natui-al constitution, I sup- 
 pose, and a good digestion ; good conscience, if you like it better- 
 that sounds more pretty and poetic. Though really, as a practical 
 fact, I believe it's a good deal easier to carry a murder conifortably 
 on one's soul than a Lord Mayor's dinner comfortably on one's 
 chest." 
 
 " You speak as if you have tried both," said the languid, dis- 
 dainful voice of his hostess from the shadow. 
 
 " So I have. I've eaten Corporation tui'tle, and I've murdered 
 many a little Bill— hopeless little Bills that scarcely saw the light 
 before I strangled them. But I can't say their slaughter was 
 hea\y to bear, whatever the debate upon them might be. Lady 
 Dorenavant, what are you reading ? Anything good ?" 
 
 "An old acquaintance of youi's," she said, handing him the 
 book. 
 
 He had read it, but he tui*ned the leaves over as though he had 
 not. Lifting his eyebrows where he lay back luxuriously coiled i'J 
 the depthc of a couch 
 
The Thrme of the Exile, iS^ 
 
 ** Ah ! Chandos ! Frightens people di-eadfully, doesn't it ? Sort 
 of Buddhism — eh ? sublimated Cartesianism, intended for the 
 thirtieth century or thereabouts ? Makes a science of liistory, 
 and gives a sinecui-e to Deity! Believes in other worlds, but 
 smashes Providence as a used-up Deus ex machind ; utterly con- 
 temns the body, and isn't very clear about the soul. That's the 
 Btyle, isn't it?" 
 
 The grand dark eyes of Lady Clydesmore loomed on him from 
 her corner in the shadow. 
 
 '* You travesty what you have not read," she said, slowly and 
 curtly. " The book is a great book." 
 
 " Sorry to hear it ! It won't bring him a shilling, then. As for 
 writing all those heterodox before -your- time speculations and 
 philosophies, it's the sheerest madness, if you want to live by what 
 you write, as of course he does. If you're an unfrocked priest, 
 now, or a curate without a chance of promotion, it's all very well 
 to do it : you have a. piquance about you from having stoned your 
 ov/n gods ; and if you can't be a success, it's just as weU to go in 
 for the other side toto corde, and come out in full bloom a martyr- 
 dom. But just to write a ' great book,' and look to posterity to 
 reward you — mercy alive ! I'd as soon sow corn in the sea, or try 
 to get a ladder to the stars ! " 
 
 "I can beheve you," said the voice of his hostess, with that 
 veiled bitterness still in it; "no one would accuse you of doing 
 anything without the certainty of present reward." 
 
 He laughed with the charming good humour with which he 
 always won over the most sullen and angry mob, sooner or later, 
 to his side. 
 
 " No : I don't ' go in for the angels.' Too unsubstantial and too 
 solemn for me. Where's the use of working for posterity ? A 
 comet may have sent the earth fizzing into space before it's fifty 
 years older. Besides, I've an EngHsh prejudice that real, sensible, 
 practical work deserves its reward and gets it. I think in the long 
 run all things bring in their net value. It's only the mortified 
 vanity of those who carry bad goods to market that makes them 
 start the hypothesis that they're unsaleable because they are too 
 superior." 
 
 " They may be right sometimes, if they say — because they are 
 too true to be welcome," said the Countess of Clydesmore, in that 
 slow, languid, yet almost acrid tone with which she had spoken 
 throughout from her distant nook of shadow. 
 
 " Oh, yes," he laughed, carelessly toying with the book he still 
 held. "Chandos, here, tells a good deal too much truth : they'd 
 forgive him his unorthodoxy sooner than they'd forgive him his 
 accuracy. All men are candid when they're in extremis and have 
 nothing left to lose, — banki-upts, beggars, moribunds, authors in 
 the Index, and thieves in the Old Bailey ! " 
 
 " You are complimentary to authors." 
 
 *' Never liked them," retui-ned the successful politician. " They 
 are so un2)ractical. If they write fiction, it's puppets ; if history, 
 it's prejudice t ?f philosophy, it's cobwebs; it' sc' -^nce, it's majes* 
 
nests : let them take what they will, it must be more or lees n^m- 
 ghine. Now, if I ever wrote a book " 
 
 ** What should it be ? " asked his fair partisan. 
 
 **Well, it should be what everybody should like, — a true con- 
 temporary Chronique Scandaleuse, such as his secret polico Bummed 
 up to Louis Quinze, every day, of the doings of Paris. How it 
 would sell ! — specially with a tag of religion to finish, and a fine 
 blue-light of repentance burning for the British public at the end 
 of every wickedness 1 It would sell by millions where this book, 
 that my Lady Clydesmore says is a ' great book,' sells by tens." 
 
 The languid grandes dames laughed softly ; it was the fashion to 
 admire and to quote all he said as *' so infinitely humorous," '* so 
 admirably original ! " Yet beneath the art-bloom on her cheek 
 Lady Dorenavant felt herself turn pale. There was a family secret 
 of a terrible shame to her house, that had been buried, as they had 
 thought, five fathoms deep, where none could disinter it ; and John 
 Trevenna had found it out, and had let them learn that he had 
 done so. All the weight of her vast influence, of her political 
 favour, had been thrown into the scale many years gone by to pur- 
 chase silence : yet she had never felt secure that her bribe, magnifi- 
 cent and mighty in profit though it was, had availed. There is no 
 sign and seal to those bargains, and the tacit bond may any day bo 
 broken by the stronger side. 
 
 " A religious * tag ! ' What a word ! " smiled a radiant blonde. 
 " I thought you were never irreverent now ? " 
 
 " Never," he responded, promptly. ** It never does to be ^inortho- 
 dox in a country where the Church is a popular prejudice- — 1 beg 
 pardon ; I meant bulwark. I had my unregenerated days, I know, 
 when I didn't go to church ; but I hadn't heard grace said before 
 dinner by an archbishop then ; that does more than anything, I 
 think, towards correcting one's soul, if it's a little adverse tendency 
 towards cooling the soup. You don't talk Pantheism or Positivism 
 when you've once stayed with a Primate. But I didn't come to 
 chatter : I ventured into this sanctum sanctorum to show you these." 
 
 With which he unfolded some afternoon letters he had in his 
 hand, and, lounging comfortably in that velvet nest, by the side of 
 the priestess of his own especial party, went deep with her into 
 their various contents and their news political, — as deep, at least, 
 as he chose to go. He always satisfied his confidantes that they 
 knew as much as he did ; but he always spread the surface : he 
 never showed the whole. There is not an art so delicate and so full 
 of use as that art of apparent frankness : it conciliated the very 
 women who had been his deadliest foes, and, while they imagined 
 themselves his allies, they became at his fancy his dupes. They 
 were his scouts, his sharpshooters, his skirmishers, his spies, tho«!e 
 dainty, haughty, high-bred patrician chatelaines ; they fetched and 
 carried, they parried and bribed, for him ; they played into h^.s 
 hands, and they worked out his will ; and they never knew it, but 
 all the while thought themselves condescending with a supeib 
 grace and tact to secure a serviceable recruit, and guesstd no moie 
 the remorseless and vulvar uses to which he tum^ them than the 
 
The Throne of the Exile. 385 
 
 sun guesses the use that photography makes of his glory when it 
 turns his rays into detectives and brings them as witness in law- 
 courts. 
 
 He stayed there some twenty minutes ; the Doudoir was not 
 Seldom a cabinet council-room in the recesses, and all the ladies in 
 it now were for him and were with him. He never sought women, 
 — not a whit ; they must come to him, must need him, and must 
 serve him ; but he knew how to turn to account better than any 
 man living all theii' ai-momy of slender, invincible, damascened 
 weapons,— the better because no glance of lustrous eyes ever had 
 power to quicken his pulse one beat, because the softest voice that 
 ever wooed his ear never had charm to lull his wisdom for a second. 
 Love was a trumpery nonsense that never could enter the virile 
 sagacity of Trevenna's mind. And now, when he had done with 
 the ladies, he went to play rackets with the young Lord Lilliesford, 
 tho eldest son of the house. 
 
 Ho knew how to do this soi"t of thing, — how to enter with infinite 
 glee into a boy's sports, yet how never to risk losing the faith he 
 had impressed men with in his unerring acumen and practical 
 talents. Every one felt the contagion of the bright, ^ vivacious, 
 untiring good humour which could make a learing politician love 
 a lark like an Etonian , and it was not assumed with him. He was 
 essentially full of animal spirits, and '-•^^ver had to simulate them 
 by any hazard. It was one of the chiei secrets of his social success : 
 men who might have feared him or mistrusted him whilst they 
 were with him in the political field lost their awe or their distrust, 
 and could not choose but warm to him, when they saw him taking 
 a blind fence " like a good 'un," telling mischievous stories in a 
 smoking-room, or heartily snowballing public-school lads on tho 
 terraces of some famous house. 
 
 " L«)ok at him playing with that boy 1 \Vliat a capital fellow he 
 is ! Goes in for it, by George, as if he hadn't anything else to live 
 for ! " said a peer, Lord Dallerstone, as he watched the science with 
 which Treveima caught the ball on his racket. He had ceased to 
 be ** Charlie," and had left far behind him the troubles of his F. 0. 
 days of dandyism and " dead money ; " but he had never forgotten 
 Trevenna's aid, and did him in repayment many a public service 
 with most loyal gratitude. The popular favourite had always had 
 the knack 01 so throwing his crumbs upon the waters that they 
 returned to him in whole quarterns of wheaten bread. 
 
 Lady (Jlydesmore gave a careless glance at the game, then turned 
 away with an imperceptible shudder. The haughty grace of her 
 young son, so like her own, had caught her eyes, and she held him 
 m a bitter aversion for his father's sake. 
 
 She would have condemned with all the icy severity of a patrician 
 matron the errors of a too ardent passion, the devoted self-abandon- 
 in ont of an uncalculating love ; but she placed no check on the 
 silent, unseen indulgence of an intense abnorrence, that made her 
 husband feel like a whipped hound under the lash of her unuttered 
 scorn, axui her children shrink from the frozen apathy of her iaax 
 faoe. 
 
%S6 Chandos. 
 
 '* There are serious compHcations," said the Earl, musingly, aftei 
 a lengthened conversation with his guest, in a ride which had suc- 
 ceeded to the rackets. His party did not altogether relish union 
 with the Darshampton representative, but they were glad of his 
 alliance and dared not brook his opposition. 
 
 " I don't see anything that need disturb us," said Trevenna, 
 carelessly. He made no solemn mysteries of his political views : 
 he always showed his cards frankly, — as frankly as the Greek 
 shows them to the watching galerie when he knows the marks upon 
 the backs of them are only to be traced by his own eye. ' ' On the 
 contrary, when the House meets, we shall have a good working 
 majority that, well handled, should keep us in for years. If there 
 be no internal dissensions among us, there can be positively nothing 
 that can unseat us for sessions, unless very unlooked-for contin- 
 gencies arise. You know we've such a good cry : — we're all for 
 the people ! " ^ 
 
 He laughed a little as he said it. To Trevenna' s acute mind, 
 there was always a good bit of absurdity in the political dance of 
 his hurattini, and while he used his marionettes with all the gravity 
 needful, he could not help being tickled at the gaping national 
 audience which behoved in them and never spied out the strings. 
 
 *' Their interests, indeed, are always first at my heart," said the 
 Earl, who was in the ministry himself, was a strict Churchman, and 
 was considered a great philanthropist. ** The country trusts no one 
 better than yourself : in real truth, there are few, if any, to whom 
 it owes more." 
 
 ** You do me much honour by such an opinion," bowed Trevenna, 
 who managed the noble lord as he liked. "It is my highest am- 
 bition to serve the nation to the best of my insignificant powers ', 
 but meanwhile I am quite content to yield the pas to men of your 
 rank and weight," 
 
 " Sensible fellow," thought the lord ; "so moderate ! Who can 
 be so blind as to accuse him of Socialism ? " 
 
 << p^Q ^p^ ig more my cry thaji pro patrid. I'm a selfish man," 
 laughed Trevenna, with that confession of egotism which sounded 
 80 charmingly frank. " I don't pretend to be among the ' ideaHsts.' 
 Apropos, have you read that new book by Chandos ? The Countess 
 Ihinks very highly of it." 
 
 The Earl reddened : he had never ceased to be jealous of the 
 man he had supplanted, — of the man he knew his wife still loved. 
 
 ** I never read his books," he said, frigidly. *' His influence is 
 TTidely fatal. I am happy to think your acquaintance with him 
 has been long at an end." 
 
 ** Oh, we were old comrades in my wild and unconverted days. 
 I should never have dropped him, indeed, for old acquaintance' 
 Bake ; but years ago — time of his crash — he behaved ungratefully 
 to me, very badly, on my word ! — after I'd been slaving my life 
 out for him, too. I'm not a sensitive man, — never was ; but that 
 cut me up a good deal." 
 
 ** Ah ! I am not surprised to hear it. It is singular that great 
 genius is almost always companioned with so much depravity I '* 
 
The Throne of the Exile. iBj 
 
 Trevenna laughed. 
 
 "Thank God J^ he didn't give me genius,— only talent. Talent 
 •S'ears well, genius wears itself out ; talent drives a snug brougham 
 in fact, genius di'ives a sun-chariot in fancy ; talent keeps to earth 
 and fattens there, genius soars to the empyrean to get picked by 
 every kite that flies. Talent's the port and the venison, genius the 
 Boltzer and souiiles, of life. The man who has talent sails success- 
 fully on the top of the wave ; the man with genius beats himself to 
 pieces, fifty to one, on the first rock ahead. Ah ! there's our very 
 man of genius's lost Clarencieux. Just see the tops of the towers. 
 Would you mind riding over ? " 
 
 The Earl gave a hurried though bland dissent. 
 
 " Pardon me : pray ride there if you wish ; but I have promised 
 to visit a tenant who is, I sadly fear, dying. We are close to his 
 farm now. Call for me as you come back. The poor man begged 
 to see me ; and there are high and holy duties which one must not 
 neglect, even when they are irksome." 
 
 * ' High and holy fiddlesticks, my friend ! You're a very poi>^ 
 hypocrite, but you're a very good card," thought Trevenna, as they 
 parted. Lord Clydesmore, with his irreproachable moral character, 
 great wealth, and solid standing in public life, was one of his prize 
 puppets in the ballet that he made all his fantoccini dance, while 
 he turned the handle of the barrel-organ to what tune he would. 
 
 Trevenna' s hatred was class-hatred. Could he have followed the 
 bent of his mind, he would have had as little scruple and as much 
 zest in the sweeping away of the Optimates as Marius had in their 
 slaughter. He would have held back his hand from their exter- 
 mination as little as did the ruthless old plebeian, hating them as 
 Marius hated the men who had worn the golden amulet and the 
 purple robe whilst he was following the ploughshare over the 
 heavy clods of the tillage. This animosity was strong in Trevenna ; 
 nothing could cool it, nothing soften it ; success in no way changed 
 it, for in success he saw that these, his born foes as he thought 
 them, di-eaded him, but detested him. The bitterness was oddly 
 woven in with the brightness and the vigour of his nature, other- 
 wise too healthy and too well balanced to cherish passion ; but it 
 was deathless with him. 
 
 Still, he was too acute a man to let this appear in his public or 
 private life : he appreciated too ably the temper of his times and 
 his country to allow this wholesale enmity to be betrayed. Trevenna 
 would have enjoyed to be the leader of a great revolution ; but he 
 liad no ambition to remain a popular demagogue in an anti-revo- 
 lutionary nation. He considered it very unpractical and unpro- 
 fitable, and, while he cared not one whit for all the creeds and 
 principles in the world, he cared very heartily for the solid 
 advantages and the real power that he set himself to win. The 
 pure impersonal longing of a Vergniaud or a Buzot, the sublime 
 devotion of a Washington or a Hampden, were utterlv incompi d- 
 hensible to him. Trevenna was too thoroughly En^^ish to have 
 a touch of "idealism," and not to measm-e all thinga, principle* 
 included, hv the pocket. Had he flung himseK headlong into the 
 
i88 Chandos. 
 
 cause of the people, and into the service of a repul)lican code, he 
 irould have been a far better and more honest man than he was ; 
 6ut he would not have been so clever, and he would not, assuredly, 
 feve been so successful. He knew what he was about too well to 
 fte himself to a principle ; the only principle he ever consistently 
 /oUowed was his own interest. He was a man who could tell the 
 temper of the hour he lived in to a miracle, and adapt himseK to 
 it with a marvellous tact and advantage. They who do this are 
 not the highest order of pubUc men, but they are invariably the 
 most successful and most popular. If a genuine loyalty to any 
 creed could once have fairly taken hold on him, it would have gone 
 far to redeem him ; but it could not. His hate was strong against 
 an order, certainly ; but his solitary creed was a very simple one, — 
 his own self-advancement. 
 
 He rode now by himself, on a ride that he usually took whenever 
 he was staying at Lilliesford : he rode towards Clarencieux. A few 
 miles of fair speed brought him within sight of the magnificence of 
 the building, with the glow of the sun on its innumerable windows, 
 and the upward- stretching masses of the rising woods at its back. 
 It was grand, historic, inexpressibly beautiful in the decline of the 
 day, with the golden haze over its dark sweep of endless woodland, 
 and the rush of water beneath the twilight of the boughs, the only 
 sound on the air. A stranger coming thus upon it would have 
 paused involuntarily at the solemnity of its splendour of sea and 
 land, of hill and ysle : Trevenna checked his horse, and gazed at 
 it with a smile. 
 
 " 'The glory has departed, and his place shall know him no 
 more,* " he muttered. " How scriptural I grow ! Ah ! he's gone 
 for ever ! And / could buy that now ; I will buy it, too, just to 
 cut the forests down, and turn the pictures to the wall, and send 
 the last marquis's coronet to the smelting-shop. He is gone for 
 ever, and I come here as a Cabinet minister. Vengeance is a good 
 Madeira : it gets mellower by keeping. There is nothing on earth 
 so sweet, except its twin — Success ! " 
 
 Seventeen years had gone by since he had first taken his ven- 
 geance ; but whenever, in the full and rapid whirl of his busy life, 
 he had time to remember and to look back, it was sweeter than of 
 old, even to him, — deeper, richer, fuller of flavour, as it were, like 
 the wine with which he compared it. 
 
 A labourer near him was working at a sunken fence in tne deer • 
 forest. The man looked at him, knowing his face. 
 
 Trevenna, always communicative and always good-natiu'edly 
 familiar with the working- classes, — it was a part of his stock-in- 
 trade, — nodded to him. 
 
 " Fine day, my good fellow. Have you an easy time of it on 
 these lands ? " 
 
 '* Main and easy, sir," answered the man, thrusting his spade 
 into the soil with his heel, and standing at leisure for a talk, 
 '■' There's naught to complain of hereabouts." 
 
 ** Glad to hear it," said Trevenna ; though he thought to him- 
 self, " If everybody gave your answer, where th^ deuce would all 
 
The Throne of the ExiU. *89 
 
 politics and our trade be ? " "So you're all content, are you, under 
 the French Due ? " 
 
 The hedger and ditcher took his spade up with some clods of 
 earth on it, turned them thoughtfully, as though there were con- 
 solation in the act, patted them, and looked up again. ''The 
 duke's a good master, and a free giver, — I ain't a-saying a word 
 
 agen him ; but " 
 
 *' But what ? What else the dickens can you want, my man ?'\ 
 he labourer lowered his yoice, and uncovered his head. ** Sir, 
 want Am." 
 ''Him? Whom?" 
 
 " Him as we have lost this many year, sir," said the man, gravely 
 and gently, leaning his arms on his spade. "We ha'n't a-forgot 
 him, — we ha'n't. Not none on us." 
 
 ** Indeed, my good fellow," laughed Trevenna, with a petulant 
 anger in him that the exiled man should be remembered even by 
 this labourer in the deer-forest, "you are imcommonly loyal for 
 nothing. He thought deuced little about you." 
 
 ♦'That's as may be, sir. He was a gay gentleman, and had 
 many things to please him, and that like ; but he was a good master 
 to the poor, and we was proud on him, we was ; that's just it, — 
 proud on him," continued the hedger and ditcher, with a steady 
 resolve and a wistful regret commingled. " We won't see his like 
 again ; and the country-side ha'n't been the same since he was took 
 from us. Old Harold Gelart, he died ten year and more ago ; but 
 his death-word was for him as we lost. ' Bring him back ! ' he 
 cries ; ♦ bring him back I ' and he looks wild-like as he says it, and 
 dies." 
 
 The speaker stooped and thrust his spade afresh into the rich, 
 damp earth ; he felt a choking in his throat. Trevenna dug the 
 spur into his horse's flank, and urged him forward. it incensed 
 him that he could not hurl down Chandos from this last throne left 
 him, — the hearts and the memories of his people. 
 
 The labourer looked up once more, touching his hat with an eager 
 anxiety. " I beg pardon, sir, but — you was his friend, you were : 
 can't you tell me ? A'n't there no hope we'll over have him back?" 
 Trevenna laughed, and threw him down a half-crown. 
 ♦* Not the faintest, my man. When you see those towers walk 
 out and sit in the sea! — not till then. Beggared gentlemen dou . 
 get out of beggaiy quite so easily." 
 And he rode on at a hand-gallop. 
 
 * Mercy I what fools these clods are I " he thought. " How they 
 remember I Seventeen years ! "W ky, in the world, there, it's time 
 enough for us to recast Europe, ani knock down kings, and pull up 
 old religions and plant new ones, and bury whole generations and 
 forget 'em again, and cry, * Le Roi est mort ! Vive le Eoi ! ' fifty 
 times over ; and here are these dolts under their forests sleep the 
 years away in idiocy, and dream of * prodigal and a bankrupt whom 
 they liaven't seen for half a lifetiinB I" 
 
 It incensed him that there should remain to the disinherited even 
 sooh shadowy remnant of his forfeited royalty as lingered in th« 
 
290 Chandos. 
 
 remembrance of these peasantry. He could not forgive the throne 
 that the exile still held in the hearts of his lost people. 
 
 One other, as well as he, thought of Chandos in that moment. 
 The mistress of Lilliesford sat alone in her writing-cabinet, and op 
 the dullness of her face there was the mournful agitation which 
 trembles on the cold surface of waters when the dead float below 
 them. The dead were rising now beneath her icy calm, — dead 
 words, dead days, dead love. In her hand, just taken out of a 
 secret drawer, were some faded letters, — tender notes, short and 
 graceful, such as are written by those who love, in days when they 
 meet wellnigh every hour. 
 
 The wife whom the world quoted for her haughty honour, her un- 
 blemished name, the chaste purity of her proud life, looked on them 
 till her head di'ooped, and her eyes grew dim with a thirsty pain, 
 and her lips quivered as she gazed. She had forsaken him ; but 
 she knew now that she had erred to him. She would have given 
 her life now to have felt his kiss once more upon her Ups. 
 
 Though the traffic had been sanctioned by the Church, she had 
 been in no sense superior to any coui'tesan who sells her beauty 
 for men's gold, when she had sold her own in barter for the rank she 
 lield, for the things of wealth that were about her, for the posses- 
 sions of a husband she scorned and hated. And in that moment of 
 weakness she would have given them all back for on© hour of the 
 love that she had lost. 
 
 OHAPTEE in. 
 
 "HE WHO ENDTJBES CONQUEBS." 
 
 Under the deep leaves of Fontainebleau, in the heart of the forest, 
 in the golden pomp of early autumn, when only a few trees were 
 bronzed with the reddening flush of the waning summer, there 
 stood an antique wooden building, half lodge, half chalet, all 
 covered with the quaint floral and faun carvings of the Moyen 
 Ige, and buried away beneath dense oak-boughs and the dark 
 spreading fans of sea-pines. It was old, dark, fantastic, lonely; 
 yet from under its low-peaked roof music was floating out like a 
 Mass of Palestrina's from within a chamber dark and tranquil as an 
 oratory. 
 
 The musicians were seated in the glow of a western afternoon 
 T5un, that shone all amber and crimson and mellow through the 
 open, painted panes. They were strangely dissimilar, yet bound 
 together by one love, — their Art. The first was a grand old 
 Roman, like a picture of Bassano ; the second a South German, with 
 a fair, delicate head, spiritualized and attenuated as Schiller's; a 
 tliiid was a little, nut-brown, withered, silent creature, ugly and 
 uiicouth as Caliban ; the leader was a cripple, with whose name tho 
 ^ orld had come to associate the most poetic and ethereal harmonicE 
 
^* He who endures conquers,"' 291 
 
 that ever rebuked tho lusts and the greed of its passions a/id cares. 
 They were often together, these four brothers in art, and no 
 jealousies ever stirred amidst them, though they all served the 
 same mistress ; three of them implicitly loved and implicitly 
 followed the fourth, though he never asked or thought of mastery, 
 but was still humble in his great powers as a child, still thought 
 the best that he could reach so poor beside his dreams of excellence. 
 The world treasured his works, and paid lavishly with its gold for 
 the smallest fragment of his creations, the slightest and briefest of 
 his poems of sound ; but this brought him no vanity, no self- 
 adoration.^ He worshipped his art too patiently, too perfectly, 
 ever to think himself more than a poor interpreter, at his utter- 
 most, of all the beauty that he knew was in her. Success makes 
 many men drunk as with eating of the lotus -Kly ; success only made 
 Guide Lulli scorn himself that he could not tell men better all the 
 sublime things his art taught him. 
 
 Their music filled the chamber with its glory, and that glory 
 flushed his face and lit his eyes as it had always power to do, as 
 the world had now seen it in the moments of his triumphs, until it 
 had learned to know that the feeble visionary whom it called a fool 
 was higher and holier than it in all its stirring strength and wealth. 
 He roused to life the beating of its purer heart ; he led it towards 
 God better than any priest or creed. But he held himself through- 
 out but an unworthy priest of the mighty hierarchy of melody ; 
 he hold himself but a feeble exponent of all tho glory, unseen oi 
 men, that with his dreams was opened to him. They thought and 
 called him great ; he knew himself unwise and faint of utterance 
 as a young chUd. 
 
 Against the casement leaned one whom the Hebrew lad Agostino 
 had likened in his youth to David of Israel in the fulness of 
 royalty, when the sniile of women and the sun of Palestine had 
 their fairest light for the golden-haired, golden-crowned king; 
 whom the young Tuscan Castalia had likened now to David when 
 his royalty still was with him, but when tho treachery of men had 
 eaten into his soul, and the heat and burden of battle darkened his 
 eight, and the shadows of night lengthened long in his path. 
 
 Chandos came here as men in the old monastic days came, war- 
 worn and combat- wearied, into the hush, and the majesty, and the 
 subdued colour- glow of the abbey sanctuaries, to leave their arms 
 and their foes without for a while and forgotten, and to lie down 
 to rest for a brief hour on the peaceful altars where in the silence 
 they remembered God. 
 
 He was changed, — utterly changed ; not so much in his face or 
 his form ; the beauty with which nature had dowered him so 
 lavishly could not perish, except with death itself; and though the 
 brilliance, the carelessness, the gay and cloudless light which had 
 made painters paint him as the Sun -god were gone, the grave and 
 serene melancholy, the deep and weary thought, which were upon 
 his feattu'es co',7 shadowed them indeed, but gave them a yet 
 higher, a yet grander cast : it had the power of Lucretius ; it had 
 the weariness of Milton. Dead in him for eyer, lost neyer again 
 
a9» Chandos. 
 
 to be recovered, were the brightness, the splendour, the radiant 
 and fearless lustre, of his early years: they had been killed,— 
 killed by a merciless hand, — and could no more revive than the 
 slaughtered can revive in their tombs. Yet not wholly had 
 calamity conquered him ; and from the black depths into -which 
 misery had tlu-ust him to die like a drowned dog, he had risen with 
 a force of resistance that in some sense had wning a victory from 
 the fate that sought to crush him. 
 
 In the old court of the Rue du Temple he had accepted adversity, 
 and lived for the sake of the honour of his fathers, of the dignity 
 of his manhood, of the heritage of his genius. From that hour, 
 though he had longed as the tortured long for death many a time, 
 r.e had never swerved fi-om the path he had taken ; in the arid, 
 \ifeless, burning desert-waste around him he had gone on, reso- 
 lute and unbeaten, wresting from its very loneliness and barren- 
 ness the desert-gifts of strength and silence. His natui'o was one 
 to loathe the burden of existence unless existence were with every 
 breath enjoyment ; yet when every breath was pain he bore with 
 it as men whose tempers were far stronger and more braced by 
 training might never have found ability to do, — bore with it for 
 the sake of the loftier things, the prouder powers, that would not 
 die in him, and that naught except dishonour or his own will 
 could slay. 
 
 The little gold given for the silver collar had sufficed to keep 
 life in him a few days ; when those were ended, he had gone to 
 the house at which the French editions of his works had been pro- 
 duced, and asked the chiefs of it simply for work. The heads of 
 <he firm, touched to more pity than they dared express, gave what 
 he sought,— classical work, which, though but the laboui'S of 
 routine and of compilation, stiU brought his thoughts back per- 
 force to the Greek studies that had ever been his best-beloved 
 treasuries of meditation and of knowledge. He laboured for hia 
 bare subsistence, — for his day's maintenance ; but the exertion 
 brought its reward. It gave him time to breathe, to think, to 
 collect his efforts and his "energies; for his intellect seemed dead, 
 and his thoughts numb. He wondered if it were true that the 
 world had told him so brief a time ago that he had genius. 
 Genius ! — his very brain seemed dull as lead, hot as flame. Yet 
 he took the sheer laborious, mechanical work, and he bent him- 
 self to it; he bound his mind to the hard mental labour as a 
 galley-slave is chained to his oar ; and he who had never known 
 an hour's toil, spent day after day, month after month, in the 
 thankless, imremitting mental travail. It brought its recom- 
 pense : his mind through it regained its balance, his reason ita 
 tone ; the compulsory exertion did for him what nothing else 
 could. It took him by degrees back into that impersonal life 
 which is the surest consolation the world holds ; it revived the 
 lost tastes, it reopened the deep scholarship, that even in hia 
 gayest years had been one of his best-loved pui-suits ; it led him 
 to take refuge in those vast questions beside which the griefs and 
 joyc of li£» alike are dwarfed,— those resomces of the intelied 
 
'* He who endures conquers** 3^j 
 
 wbidi are the best companion and the truest friend of one who 
 has once known them and loved them. In his past career he lififl 
 never exerted all the powers that nature had gifted him with ; tlic 
 very facility of his talents had prevented it, and brilliant trifles 
 had rather been their fruit than anything wider or weightier. 
 Kow in the treasuries of study and in the solace of composition 
 he alike found a career and a hope, an ambition and a conso- 
 lation. 
 
 The ruin that had stripped him of all else taught him to fathom 
 the depths of his own attainments. He had in him the gifts of a 
 Goethe ; but it was only under adversity that those reached their 
 stature and bore their fruit. 
 
 When the world had forgotten for some years, or, if it ever 
 remembered him, thought he had killed himself, it learned this 
 suddenly and with amazement. His name once more becam«i 
 public,— never popular, but something much higher. He was 
 condemned, reviled, wondered at, called many bitter names ; but 
 his thoughts were heard, and had their harvest. Aristocratic as 
 his tastes were, and proud though he had boon termed, he had 
 always had much that was democratic in his opinions ; fox he had 
 ever measui-ed men by thoir minds, not their stations ; such 
 freedom was in his works, and they had done that for which the 
 song of the Venetian youths had thanked him. Against much 
 antagonism, and slowly in the coui*se of time, he won fame. 
 Kiches ho never made ; he was poor still ; but he was nearer the 
 fulfilment of the promise of his childhood now, when the chief 
 sum of the world was against him, than in the days of his pro- 
 sperity, when the whole world lay at his feet. Happiness he had 
 not ; it could bo with no man who had such losses ever in his 
 memory as his ; but some peace came to him ; a great and a pure 
 ambition was his companion and his consoler, and a grander 
 element was woven in his character than fair fortune would have 
 ever brought to light. England he never saw. The intercession 
 of his relations or his acquaintance might with ease have procured 
 him affluent sinecures ; but he would have held it degradation 
 deep as shame to have taken them. By his own folly his ruin had 
 been wrought ; hy his own labour alone would he repel it ana 
 endeavour to repaii- it. He accepted poverty, and lived in exile, 
 associating with many of the greatest thinkers of Europe ; but 
 into the pale of the fashionable world he had once led he never 
 wandered, and in the palaces in which he had once been the idol 
 of all eyes he was never seen. The friends of that past time knew 
 of him indeed by the intellectual renown that he had won, but i\ 
 was voiy rarely that they looked upon his face. Cynic he could 
 not grow ; ho did not curse the world because to him it had beei* 
 base: he believed in noble lives and staunch fidelities thougu 
 treachery had trepanned and love abandoned him The bitterness 
 of Timon could have no lodging with him ; but an un!:!peakable 
 weariness often came on him. 
 
 He had lost so much ; and one loss — that of Clarencieux— gna-wed 
 SYer at his heart with an unceasing pang. There were times whe* 
 
»94 Chandos. 
 
 he longed for his perished happiness with the passion with which 
 an oxilo longs for the light of his native sun. 
 
 IJo listened now to the melodies that filled the chamber. Lulli's 
 was the solo life which had been faithful to him, save that of the 
 dog, buried now under Sicilian orange-boughs, in the grave to 
 which old age had banished it, but lamented and remembered 
 with more justice than many a huni^n friend is regretted and 
 moui'ned. The music, a new opera-overture of the Provencal's, 
 closed with, its noblest haimonies, reeling through the air like a 
 young Bacchus ivy-crowned. Then it stayed suddenly, the hands 
 that di'ew out its charmed sounds pausing as moved by one 
 impulse ; three of them bowed their heads. 
 
 " It will be great," they said, reverentlj^, adding no other word, 
 and went their way silently and left the chamber. Guide Luili 
 was alone with his guest. The victorious radiance, the sovereignty 
 In his own realms, that had been on him as he called out to 
 existence the supremacy of his own creations, faded into the 
 hesitating, doubting hope of a child who seeks the praise of a voice 
 he loves. 
 
 * ' And you, Monseigneur ? " he said, appealingly. ** Can you say, 
 too, it will be great ? " 
 
 *' You ask me, Lulli ? The world has long told you, and truly, 
 that you can give it nothing that is not so. You surpass your- 
 self here ; it will be noble music, — nobler even than anything ol 
 yours." 
 
 The eyes of the cripple beamed. The world had long crowned 
 him with the Delphica laurus, yet he still came with the humility 
 of a child to receive the laurel he loved best in the words of his 
 old master. 
 
 "The world may have told me, monseigneur, but that were 
 nothing unless you spoke also. What would the world have ever 
 known or heeded of me without your aid ? Known of me, do I 
 say ? It is not that I heed ; it is my works. I shall pass away, 
 but they will endure ; my body will go to corruption, but they 
 will have immortality. I thank God and you, not the world, 
 that what is great in me wiU not perish with what is weak and 
 vile." 
 
 " I understand you ; others might not," answered Chandos, as 
 he looked at the delicate kindling face of the only man who had 
 given him back fidelity and gratitude, — a face that time had 
 changed in so little, save in the white threads that gleamed among 
 the dark masses of hair. " Men prostitute their genius now, as 
 the courtesan her beauty; they think little — think nothing— of 
 impersonal things. Hypocrisy pays ; they supply it. Were 
 blasphemy the better investment, they would trade in it. You 
 are fortunate in one thing ; you speak in a language that cannot 
 be cavilled at or misunderstood." 
 
 ** But deaf ears were turned to it till, through you, the disbe- 
 lievers listened." 
 
 " Hush ! Let the dead bury their dead. I do not look back ; ^ 
 thftt no one should." 
 
" He who endures conquers.* 295 
 
 " But I cannot forget ! Such debts as mine are not scored out " 
 
 ** In yonr nature. Yet I served many more than 1 served you 
 You are the only one who remembers it." 
 
 He spoke without bitterness ; but the words were the more pro- 
 foundly sad because there was no taint of acrid feeling in them. 
 Lulli glanced at him with an anxious reverence. 
 
 ' ' You served so many ! yes ; and they were curs who tore dowT; 
 one by whom they had been fed, — one whom they had fawned on 
 for a word of notice ! The vilest of them all, what is he now r 
 High in honour among men." 
 
 A darkness passed over his listener's face, a gloom like night, 
 yet a disdain as strong as it was silent, — such a look as might comc- 
 upon the face of a man who saw one whom he knew assassin aii<l 
 traitor courted and adored by the peoples. 
 
 "Ah! give him your scorn now. One day you shall give him 
 your vengeance ! " cried the musician, with that passionate desire 
 of revenge which he could never, under any wi'ongs, have known 
 on his own behalf, but which he had felt for Valeria, and which ho 
 felt for Chandos. 
 
 Chandos' head di'ooped slightly where he sat, and into his eyc.^ 
 came the shadows of a thousand bitter memories. 
 
 " Perhaps," he said, under his breath. 
 
 The evil tempted him ; if ever it passed into his hands, its wide^i. 
 exercise could be no more than justice. In his dark hours then.' 
 were times when no other thing looked worth the living for, or 
 worth the seeking, except this, — vengeance upon his traitor. 
 
 LuUi gazed at him regretfully and with self-reproach ; he had 
 not meant to stir these deep-closed poisonous pools of deadly recol- 
 lection ; he had not meant to recall a past that was, by a command 
 he obeyed with the docile obedience of a dog, never named between 
 them. His music was, to the man he honoured, as the music of 
 the young Israelite was to the soul of the great stricken king whom 
 men forsook and God abandoned. His conscience and his love alike 
 emote him for having jarred on these forbidden chords, and wrought 
 harm instead of bringing consolation. 
 
 He leaned forward, and his voice was infinitely sweet. 
 
 *♦ Forgive me. You have loved truth, and served men through 
 aU, despite all ; it is not to you that I should talk of such a tiger's 
 lust as vengeance, though Yengeance the're were righteous. If they 
 had not driven you from your paradise, would you ever have been 
 your greatest ? If you had not been forced from your rose-gardens 
 out into tlie waste of the desert, would you ever have known your 
 strength? Till you ceased to enjoy, you were ignorant how to 
 endure." 
 
 The words were true. The bread of bitterness is the food on 
 which men grow to their fullest stature ; the waters of bitterness arc 
 the debatable ford through which they reach the shores of wisdom ; 
 the ashes boldly grasped and eaten without faltering are the price 
 that must be paid for the golden fruit of knowledge. The swimmer 
 cannot teU his strength till he has gone through the wild force oi 
 opposing wavee ; the great man cannot tell the might of his hand 
 
apO Ctiandos. 
 
 and the power of his resistance till he has wrestled with the angej 
 
 of adversity, and held it close till it has blessed him. 
 
 Still, the thought will arise, Is the knowledge worth its purchase? 
 Is it not better to lie softly in the light of laughing suns than to 
 pass through the blackness of the salt sea- storm out of pity for 
 men who will revile the pursuit of a phantom goal, that may be 
 but a mirage when all is over ? 
 
 This thought was with him now. 
 
 "God knows! "he said. "Do not speak against my golden 
 days ; they were very dear to me. I think I was a better man in 
 them than I have ever been in my exile. A happy life — a life 
 that knows and gives happiness as the sunlight ; it cannot last on 
 earth, maybe, but it is life as no other is, wMe it does." 
 
 Lulli was silent. The yearning regret that unconsciously escaped 
 in the reply pierced him to the heart, even though he, to whom 
 existence had been one long spell of physical pain, and to whom 
 all strength and joy were unknown, could but dinily feel all that 
 the man who spoke to him looked back to with so passionate a 
 longing. 
 
 ** The revellers in Florence," he murmui'ed, softly, " had delight 
 and gladness, and made of life an unbroken festa, while Dante was 
 in exile. Who thinks of them now ? — even of their names ? But 
 on his door is written, ' Qui nacqui il divino Poeta.* " 
 
 Chandos rose with a smile— a smile in which there was a weari- 
 ness beyond words. 
 
 " A tardy and an empty recompense ! While they write on his 
 door to-day, reviling those who were blind in his generation, they 
 repeat in their own times the blindness, and the persecution to 
 iree thought, by which the poet and the thinker suffered then and 
 suffer stiU." 
 
 Throughout the years which had gone by since the fall of his 
 high estate, no lamentation, no recrimination, had ever been heard 
 t o pass his lips. When the tidings floated to him of success piled 
 on success that his enemy and his traitor achieved, he listened in 
 silence, too proud to condemn what was beneath envy and beyond 
 vengeance. Men sought oftentimes to make him speak of the past 
 and speak of Trevenna ; they never succeeded. He held his peace, 
 keeping patience with a force of control which amazed and bewil- 
 dered those who had known him as an effeminate, self-indulged 
 voluptuary, and had looked from him for a suicide's story, or, at 
 best, for a bitter upbraiding of the curse of fate. They never heard 
 a word from him either of regret at his own ruin or of anger at his 
 debtor's success. He endured in as absolute a silence as ever an 
 Indian endured when bound to the pyre. To two only, two who 
 aione remained to him out of the throngs who had once thought no 
 honour higher than to claim his friendship, did he ever speak either 
 of his fate or of his foe , and to them he spoke but reluctantly. 
 Thev were Lulli and Philippe d'Orvale. 
 
 The lustre of the descending sun was bright through all the 
 forest-glades as he left the musician's house now, and went aloini 
 through the great aisles of oak ?tnd elm. The love of the earth.'? 
 
" He who endures conquers,'* §9^ 
 
 &eehne6S and fragrance and beauty would never die in Him ; he 
 had too much of Shelley's natiu-e. The bleakness of poverty, the 
 narrow rigidity of want, the colourlessness of life without the glow 
 of passion, the warmth of pleasure, the vividness of sensuous 
 charms and sensuous delights, the richness of luxury, and the 
 power of possession, all these, which he had known in their depri- 
 vation and their misery, had not altered this in him ; and the chief 
 solace of his life had boon the consQlation that he had been able bv 
 his temperament to find in the antique tranquillity of the cities of 
 Italy, in the solemn repose of mighty Alps, in the intense splendour 
 of Oriental landscape. The artist and the poet were too closely 
 blent in him for him. ever to cease to heed these things ; and yet 
 there were times when there was in them lor him an anguish that 
 Beemed to pass his strength. Ho had onco looked on them with 
 such careless eyes of sunlit joy, with tho warmth of their suns on 
 woman's cheeks, and the laughter of idle summer-day love on their 
 air I There are many natures, stool kuit, Puritan, austere, narrow 
 in limit and in sight, which never know what it is to enjoy, and 
 never are conscious of their loss ; but to his, and to characters like 
 his, life without this divine power of enjoyment difiers in little — 
 differs in nothing of value — from death. 
 
 Now, as he went through the woodland shades, with the 
 checkered light across the moss of the paths, his heart went back 
 to the time of his youth, the time when no other doubt had rested 
 on him in such forest-luxm-iauce than to ask, — > 
 
 "Oh, which were best, to roam or rest? 
 The land's lap or the water's breast ? 
 To sleep on yellow millet-sheaves, 
 Or swim in lucid shadows just 
 Eluding water-lily leaves? 
 Which life were best on summer eves?" 
 
 It might be true, as the French cripple had said, that he was 
 greater now than he had been then — that in conflict he had gained, 
 and had become that which he would never have done or been in 
 the abundance, the indolence, the shadowless content, and tho royal 
 dominion of his epicurean years. But for himself — in many mo- 
 ments, at the least— the vanity in all things, in wisdom as in riches, 
 that Ecclesiastes laments, smote him hard ; and he would have 
 given the fame of a Plato, of an Antoninus, of a Dante, of a 
 Shakspeare, to have back one day of that glorious and golden time I 
 
 The sun had wellnigh set; here, in the darkness of the oak- 
 glades, there was little but a dusky, ruddy glow, fitful and flame- 
 like. He passed slowly onward ; his head was uncovered, for the 
 air was sultry, and such breeze as arose was welcome ; here and 
 there a stray lingering sunbeam touched the fairness of his hair ; 
 otherwise tho depth of the forest-shadow was on his face, that 
 wore ever now, though it was serene in repose and its smile was 
 infinitely sweet, the weariness and the dignity of pain silently 
 borne, which long ago had hushed with their royalty of resolve and 
 of suffering the h^pigiy crowd gathered in the porphyry chaanber. 
 
298 Chandos. 
 
 An artist, hid^len among the thickness of the leaves, pketching, 
 looked up as his stop crushed the grasses — a swift, slight, breath- 
 less look ; then, as though he saw some ghost of a dead age, the 
 painter shivered, and let fall his brushes, and cowered down into 
 the gloom of the tall ferns with the shrinking horror of a frightened 
 hare. 
 
 " Ah, Christ ! " ho murmured, in Spanish, ** how weary he looka 
 of his exile ! Miseiy has not embittered him. He must have a 
 rare nature. If I had found strength to tell him all that night 
 in the street, how would it have been now ? It could not have 
 been worse with vs; and it was an Iscariot's sin only to know, — to 
 share ! " 
 
 Chandos passed onward, not seeing him there beneath the shelter 
 of the spreading ferns ; his thoughts were sunk far in the past. 
 He had met his fate with a tranquil endurance, with the proud and 
 uncomplaining temper of his race, which had in all centuries risen 
 out of the softness of voluptuous indulgence to encounter misfor- 
 tune grandly ; but not the less was life very joyless to him, and 
 the bitterness of its vain toil oftentimes pursued and mocked him. 
 As he went, on the silence rang the clear mellow notes of a hunting- 
 horn, and the echo of a horse's feet ; into the open green plateau 
 immediately below the rising ground on which he was, a horse- 
 man dashed rapidly, and reined up, looking about him, — a court 
 guest, by the court hunting-dress he wore, with its scarlet and 
 green and gold, and its gold-handled forest-knife. 
 
 '* Hola ! has the Palace party passed ? " 
 
 As he glanced up, the words died on the speaker's lips ; for the 
 first time their eyes met since the night in the Eue du Temple, In 
 the red, faint, lowering Hght, under the dense shade of the oak- 
 boughs, with the twilight of the autunm-bronzed leaves flung 
 heavily down between them, Trevenna saw him where he stood on 
 the slope, with the black wall of foliage behind him, and a single 
 faint ray of the declining sun shed full across his eyes, that were 
 filling dark as night with the sudden upleaping of silent passions, 
 of thronging memories, of unavenged and unextinguished wrongs. 
 
 When they had last met, the murderous hand of his traitor had 
 flung him down on the blood-stained stones of the old monastic 
 coui't, and had left hiTn to perish as he might in the heart of the 
 sleeping city, in the cold of the winter's night. When they had 
 last met, John Trevenna had cursed him where he lay sense- 
 less, and had wished his father's soul could know his ruin, and 
 had believed no more that the life he had destroyed would ever 
 again be raised among living men, and gather strength to vanquish 
 and endure, than if he had struck to its heart with a knife and 
 flung the corpse out to the river. 
 
 For the first moment there was no memory on either save that 
 memory, and Trevenna's face paled and lost its healthful glow. He 
 had known that his prey had survived to bear calamity and exile 
 and follow the guidance of a pure and impersonal ambition ; the 
 world had often spoken each other's names on their ears ; but they 
 had never met until now — now when the form of CCbf^xidos rose 
 
** He who endures confuert,** 199 
 
 before him in the reddened sullen glow of the dim forest-aislea 
 like a resurrection from the grave. And, in the first moment, all 
 his intensity of hate revived in its ancient lust, bm-ning in him 
 none the less, but the more, because it had wreaked its worst to 
 satiety. He hated to think Chandos lived ; he hated to know he 
 had not sunk, body and mind, into debauchery and insanity ; he 
 hated the very beauty that he knew so well of old, because years 
 and pain would not destroy it ! 
 
 Then the insolence, the mockery, the audacious greedy exultation 
 of his triumph governed him alone; the pride of success and 
 supremacy made him feel di'unk with the joy of his victory. He 
 bowed to his saddle with a contemptuous reverence. 
 
 * * Ah, beau sire ! it is many years since we met. We said once 
 we'd see which made the best thing of life, you, the visionary, or 
 I, the materialist. I think I've won, far and away, eh P The fable 
 says iron pots and china pots can't swim down the stream together ; 
 your dainty patrician Imig's-pattern Sevres soon smashed and 
 swamped amon» the bulrushes ; my nameless, ugly, battered two- 
 penny tin pipkin got clear of all shoals, and came safe into port^ 
 you see. 1 was your palace jester once : what do you think of my 
 success now ? " 
 
 Chandos, raised above him by the rocky felope on which he stood, 
 looked down and gazed at him full in the eyes : for the instant, 
 Trevenna would have quailed less if a dagger had been at his 
 throat. Neither shame nor conscience smote him; but for the 
 instant some touch of di-ead, some throb of what was wellnigh 
 fear, came to him, as the voice that had used to be so familiar on 
 his ear, and that had been unheard through so many years of 
 silence, fell on his ear in the hush of the forest, clear, low, cold as 
 ice, with the quiver of a mighty passion in it. 
 
 '*I think it great as your infamy, great as your treachery; 
 greater it cannot be." 
 
 Trevenna laughed : his savage mirth, his taunting bu/Toonery, 
 nis unreined, exulting malice of triumph, were all let loose by 
 the scorn that cut him like a scoui-ge, and which he hated becauso 
 he knew that, however high he rose, however proud his rank, how- 
 ever unassailable his station, this one man kjiow all that he had 
 once been, knew whose hand had first raised him, knew that he 
 Was the vilest ingrate that ever sold his fiiend. 
 
 **"Whew!" he cried; *'you are as haughty as ever. How do 
 they stand that, now you're only a heterodox author with a dubious 
 reputation? You are bitter on me: well, I can forgive that. 
 'Tisn't pleasant, I dare say, to have sparkled like a firework and 
 then gone out into darkness, — a failure ! But you'd ten years of 
 it, you know; and it's my turn now. I'm a Eight Hon. and a 
 millionaire ; I'm a Cabinet minister, and I'm staying at court. I 
 mean to die in the Lords, if I don't die in the Lord ; and I'm only 
 waiting for the *mad duke's' death to go and buy Clarencieux 
 When I retire into the Peers' Paradise, I'll take my title after 
 it— John Trevenna, Baron Clarencieux ! Won't it sound well, eh r"' 
 
 With a single leap, light, resistless, unerring as in his earliest 
 
years, Chandos leaped down the slope on which he stood, his fao4 
 
 darkly flushed, his lips set straight and stern in the shado-wy fiery 
 autumn light ; with the swiftness and force of a panther's spi-ing 
 he throw himself on Trevenna, swaying him back off his saddle 
 and out of his stirrups to the ground, while the horse, let loose 
 from the weight of its rider, tossed its head impatient in the air 
 and galloped alone down the glade. 
 
 **You make me vile as youi'self ! Dare to own or to taint 
 Clarencioux, and — as we both live — I will kill you ! " 
 
 The words were low breathed in his foe's ear as he bore him 
 backwards, but the more deadly in meaning and in menace for 
 that; then he shook Trevenna from him and left him, and pluneed 
 down into the dark thick depths of the leaves. He knew if he 
 stayed to look on at his debtor the mere brute instincts, the sheer 
 Cain-like passions, which slumber in all, would conquer him and 
 force him on to some madness or some crime. The voice of his 
 tempter and betrayer had come back on him across the wide waste 
 of spent and desert years, and had brought the passions and the 
 shame and the despair of his conquered ruin fresh on him, as though 
 known but yesterday. 
 
 " Oh, God !" he thought, ** what have I vanquished, what have 
 I learned ? This man makes me a brute like himself ; one trial, 
 and my creeds and my patience and my strength break like reeds!'* 
 
 For Trevenna had been the bane, the temptation, the tyrant, the 
 poisoner, of all his life, and was so still. Through his foe even the 
 pure and lofty hopes which had alone sustained him were broken and 
 polluted. This man had fame and success in a world that applauded 
 him! What was renown worth, since it went to such as this 
 mocker ? — a crown of rotten rushes, an empty bladder blown by 
 lying lips, a meed to the one who dupes a blind world best, a prize 
 that goes to the stump-orator, to the spangled mountebank, to the 
 blatant charlatan, to the trained posture-maker of political and in- 
 tellectual life ! What avail was it to labour for mankind, when this 
 in grate was their elected leader, their accepted representative? What 
 worth to toil for liberty and tolerance, when the one whom humanity 
 crowned was the ablest trickster, the adroitest mime, the cheat who 
 could best hide the false ace in his sleeve by a face of laughing 
 candt)ur and a fraud of forged honesty ? 
 
 Trevenna had robbed him of all ; Trevenna had wellnigh robbed 
 hiiu now of the only solace that his life had left. The success of 
 his traitor made him doubt truth ifiialf. 
 
 CHAPTEE rV. 
 
 "QUI A OFFENSE NE PARDONNE JAMAIS.** 
 
 " OtmSE him ! When he lay in that garret dying, who could dream 
 he would ever rise again, unless it were to go to a madhouse ? " 
 mused Treyenoa before the fije in his dressing-room in tbr palaoet 
 
" (^ui a ql/ensi ne pardonne jamais.^ 301 
 
 He had been slightly bruised, but not hurt; and he had told the 
 coui-t party, whom he had found and rejoined as soon as he had 
 called his horse to him, that an oak-bough had struck and blinded 
 him, so that he had fallen out of his saddle. As he sat now, nmok 
 ing, with his costly velyets wrapped around him, with all the 
 elegance and luxury of a palace in the suite of chambers allotted 
 him as an English minister and a guest of the first circle of autumn 
 visitors, there were something of irritation and impatience even 
 amidst his triumphant reflections. He could not resent the force 
 used to him, for he was too wise to let the world know of that 
 forest-meeting ; and he hated to think that his intricate nets had 
 had a single loose mesh, by which his prey had escaped the ruin of 
 mind and body that he had made sure would accompany the ruin 
 of peace and pride and fair fortune ; he hated to think that while 
 Chandos lived there would live one who knew him as he was, knew 
 what he had been, knew the treacheries by which his rise had been 
 consummated, knew the stains that darkened the gloss and the 
 eymmetiy of the splendid superstructure of his success. 
 
 They had never mot until now; and he hated to feel that the 
 eting of his victim's scorn had power to pierce him ; he hated to 
 reel that a ruined exile could quote against him the time when he 
 —the millionaire, the minister, the court guest, the national favourite 
 —had been a debtor in gaming-prisons, an adventurer without a 
 8OU. 
 
 •' And yet I don't know," he mused on, while a smile came about 
 his mouth, and he gave a kick to the ruddy embers of the fire. ' * I'm 
 not 6ori7 he lives, either : if he were dead he wouldn't suffer, and if 
 he were dead he wouldn't see me rise ! No ! I like him to live. 
 He'd have missed all the bitterness of it if he'd gone in his grave 
 then. How I sting him with every step I get ! How his heart 
 burns when he reads my name in the Cabinet ! How it must wring 
 and goad and taunt and madden him when he knows I'm in his 
 palaces, and have got his prosperity, and have won my way to t^e 
 proudest position a man can hold in England. No I I'm glad he 
 tvcs. Gad ! I'll ask him to Clarencieux, one day." 
 
 And he laughed to himself. This was part and parcel of the 
 man's jovial malicious, farcical, racy temper; and the sweetest 
 morsel in all his triumphs was that each step and each crown of 
 them was— a revenge. 
 
 " Mercy ! what a fool he's been !" he thought. " Cared for no- 
 thing, while he had the power, but pleasure and revehy, and making 
 lovo to women, and playing Lorenzo the Magnificent, and now 
 solaces himself in his poverty with turning metaphysical questions 
 inside out, and hrodant sia la toile d*araignee, as they say here, and 
 caring for the future of the world, and working out the scientific 
 laws of history ! Mercy ! as if it mattered to us whether the world 
 ^oes smash when we've no more to do with it ! However, I don't 
 understand him ; never did. A man who could care so little for 
 money as he did never could be quite sane. Even now he's such a 
 fool ; he's never said to me the one thing he might seiy,— that I waa 
 his debtor." 
 
}09 Chandos. 
 
 To dream that there might be a generosity too proud to quote 
 
 past services against a present traitor utterly escaped Trevenna : he 
 was far too practical to have glimpse of such a temper ; he only 
 thought the man a fool, a wonderful fool, who forbore to taunt 
 him, with the stone that lay so ready to his hand, in the reproach, 
 ** I served you." 
 
 " No ; I'm glad he lives. It would be Hamlet with the part of 
 {lamlet left out, if he didn't exist to watch my triumph !" he mused, 
 •benching the matter in his own mind, and getting up to summon 
 Ais valet and dress for dinner. His momentary bitterness was all 
 gone. Here he was, the guest of a sovereign, with a name that had 
 fame in the Old and New Worlds, riches as much as he needed 
 them, a futui-e brilliant as his present, an ambition without limit, 
 and a station that enemies and friends alike must envy. He was 
 content, very richly content, as he sauntered down to join the 
 Palace circle, distinguished as the most eloquent, the most pene- 
 trating, the most liberal, and the most promising statesman of the 
 English Cabinet, his opinion sought by princes and diplomatists, 
 his words heard as words of gold breathed from the lips of one who 
 would probably govern in the highest rank of all in the future, hie 
 views studied with interest, as those of the favourite of a great people, 
 even his mere badinage graciously sought by grandes damea who 
 once denied him cards to their receptions. The high orders detested 
 him still, it is true ; but they feared him, and they courted him , 
 They thought they propitiated him by such concessions. Never 
 was error wider. He used them, and — despised them. 
 
 " M. Trevenna, peiinit me congratulations on your late mag- 
 nificent coup d'etat," smiled the Comtesse dela Vivarol, who, under 
 a new dynasty, reigned in the court, apowernow, as she had earlier 
 been a beauty. 
 
 He bowed his thanks. 
 
 ** You do me much honour, madame. I trust we have the aid oi 
 your favouring sympathies?" 
 
 " Personally, yes ; scarcely your party. You are all so decorout 
 and so dull in your Parliament. Whoever turns the handle, the 
 organ plays the same tunes." 
 
 "And you would like an infusion of the fa ira ? Well, I should 
 not object to it myself; but I shouldn't dare to introduce it. I'm 
 Tery pi-udent !" 
 
 " Indeed ! You go rather far, too, at Darshampton— " 
 
 Trevenna shook his head. 
 
 " Darshampton ! They will tell you there that I am devoted tc 
 the civil and religious institutions of the nation. Why, I have 
 built a church ! It cost me a deal in painted windows ; but you 
 aon't know what it has done for me in reputation. It's made two 
 spiritual lords believe in me, and given me postiche as a * safe man' 
 in perpetuity. EeaUy, for a good public effect, I think nothing is 
 better than a church. Men think you have such a thorough con- 
 viction of orthodox truths if you adore the Lord in »Vacco and oak- 
 carving!" 
 
 La Yiyaiol laughed. 
 
Qui a offensi ne pardofine jamais." 30^ 
 
 ** You were not so orthodox once ?" 
 
 ** No ; but I am now. I go to church every Sunday, — specially 
 when I'm down at Darshampton. To be unorthodox is like walk- 
 ing out on a midsummer day in your shirt-sloeves. It's refreshing 
 to take your coat off, and it's very silly to carry a lot of sheep's 
 wool that you pant under ; but all the same, no man who cares 
 what his neighbours say walks abroad in his waistcoat. Orthodoxy 
 and broadcloth are fallacies d la mode : if you air yourself in heresy 
 and a blouse, the parsons and tailors, who see their trades in danger, 
 will get a writ of lunacy out against you." 
 
 ' ' You are a clever man, M. Trevenna ! You know how to 
 manage your world. But does it never tire you, that incessant 
 promenade in such unimpeachable broadcloth ? " 
 
 Trevenna met her eyes with a gleaming mischief in his own. 
 He attempted no concealment with her ; the keen wit of the aris- 
 tocratic politician would, he knew, have pierced it in an instant ; 
 and she, who had once bidden him apprendre a s'effacer, alone 
 never let him forget that she had known him when he was on suf- 
 ferance and obscure. 
 
 "Tire?" he said now; "no, never ! Who tires on the stage, 
 so long as they clap him, and so long as it pays ? It is your dis- 
 satisfied, unappreciated men that may tiro of their soujpe maigre; 
 nobody tires of the turtle-soup of success." 
 
 ** Then you don't believe in surfeits ? " 
 
 ** Not for strong digestions." 
 
 ** Perhaps you are right ; and there is no absinthe that produces 
 incessant appetite so well as intense self-love." 
 
 Trevenna laughed good-humouredly ; he acknowledged the im- 
 plication. 
 
 " Ah, madame, you know I never denied that I was selfish. 
 Why should I ? If one don't love one's self, who will ? And, I 
 confess, I like present success. Immortality is terribly dull work , 
 a hideous statue, that gets black as soot in no time ; funeral ser- 
 mons that make you out a Vial of Revelation, and discuss the pro- 
 babilities of your being in the regions of Satan ; a bust that slants 
 you off at the shoulders, trims you round with a stone scallop, and 
 sticks you up on a bracket ; a tombstone for the canes of the curious 
 to poke at ; an occasional attention in the way of withered immor- 
 telles or biographical Billingsgate, and a partial preservation shared 
 in common with mummies, auks' eggs, snakes in bottles, and defor- 
 mities in spirits of wine — thafa posthumous fame. I must say 1 
 don't see much fun in it." 
 
 The Comtesse smiled a gracious amusement over her fan. 
 
 " You have different views from your old fiiend." 
 
 "Who? Chandos? Poor fellow! he was always eccentric, 
 lived in the empyrean, and had ideas that ^nay be practicable in 
 the millennium, but certainly won't be so before. * Great wits to 
 madness,' &c. After having squandered all that made life endur- 
 able, he consoles himself, I believe with the belief that people will 
 read him when he*s dead. What a queer consolation ^ Stendahl 
 thought the same thing : who'opens his books now ? " 
 
304 
 
 Chandoi. 
 
 *' Though you despise immortality, M. Trevenna, it Be&iaui jrou 
 can still grudge it," said La Vivarol, with that quick, penetrative 
 wit which could be barbed as an arrow. 
 
 Trevenna felt angry with himself for having been trapped into 
 the words. 
 
 "I grudge him nothing, madame," he laughed, good-humouredly, 
 ** least of all a mummy-like embalming by posterity's bibliomaniacs. 
 Indeed, now I am come in office, I shall try and induce him to 
 accept something more substantial. I believe he's as poor as Job* 
 though he's still as proud as Lucifer." 
 
 •' He had somewhat of Job's fortune in his friends," said the 
 Comtesse, with a smile, as she turned to others. 
 
 •♦ What does she still feel for him ? — love, or hate? I can under- 
 stand most things," thought Trevenna, *' but hang me if I can ever 
 understand love, — past or present. It^s a Jack-in-the-box, always 
 jumping up when you think it's screwed down. It's like dande- 
 lion-seeds for lightness, blowing away with a breath, and yet it's 
 like nettles for obstinacy ; there's no knowing when it's plucked 
 up. A confounded thing, certainly." 
 
 Like a wise man, he had taken care to have nothing to do with 
 the confounded thing, and, in consequence, digested all his dinners, 
 and never muddled any of his a£Pairs. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 •*NE CHERCHER QU'UN REGARD, QU'UNE FLEUR, QTj'UN 80LEIL." 
 
 In the deep gloom of an antique, forsaken, world-forgotten town 
 of Italy, silent, grass-grown, unspeakably desol.ate, with the brown 
 shadows of its ancient houses, and here and there the noiseless glid- 
 ing form of monk or nun flitting across the deserted spaces, a head, 
 like a Guide Aurora in its youth, like a Guide Magdalen in its sad- 
 ness, leaned out from the archway of a bridge-parapet, with the 
 fair warmth of the cheek and the chestnut light of the hair lying 
 wearily on the pillow of the rough-hewn stone. Fallon so, half 
 unconsciously, to rest, the girl's form leaned against ike buttress 
 of the old river- way that spanned tawny shallow waters only tra- 
 versed by some olive-laden canal-boat, whose striped sails flapped 
 lazily in the sun ; her brow was sunk on her hand ; her eyes, roll 
 of a passionate pain, watched the monotonous ebb and flow of the 
 stream ; her whole figure expressed an intense fatigue ; L tit on her 
 face, with all its brooding, tired sufiering, there was a look of 
 patient and unalterable resolve. 
 
 *• So endless !— so endless ! " she murmured to the silence of the 
 waters. *' Surely God will have pity soon I " 
 
 There was only, in answer, the changeless, sullen ripple of the 
 river far below, — the silence that seems so bitter to those who suffer 
 ** their youth, and who think some Divine voice will suiely 
 
*' Ne chercher quuii legard" »0 5 
 
 whisper oonBolation, — the silence eternal, in which later they find 
 man must live and must die. 
 
 A bent, browned, weather-worn jfruit- seller, with a burden of 
 melons and gourds and figs fresh from the tree, traversing the steep 
 incline of the bridge, paused and looked at her. She was verj 
 poor, and she was old ; but she had a tendw soul under a rough 
 rind. She touched the girl's fever-flushed oteek with the cool 
 fragrance of a bough of syringa, and if|MlD9 rery gently in hex 
 broad, meUow peasant-dialect : — 
 
 " Poverina, thou art tired. Take some froH.^ 
 
 She started, and looked up ; but there was almost apathy in the 
 smile with which she shook her head^-^^-it W9B flk) listless in its 
 melancholy. 
 
 *' You are very kind ; but I want Doihmg/^ 
 
 ** That is not true," said the old contadiiui. •*fliou art in want 
 of much ; thou art too weary for thy fWliiu Where are thy 
 friends ? " 
 
 ** 1 have none! " 
 
 "None? Mother of God! and so yoongl Thou artseekino- 
 some one ? " ° 
 
 A deep flush passed over her face ; she bent her head in assent. 
 
 *• Ah ! thou seekest those who love thee ? " 
 
 " No," she said, simply. " I only seek to find one ; and when I 
 have found him, and heard his voice once more — to die." 
 
 She spoke rather to her own thoughts than to the peasant. The 
 old woman's deep-set eyes grew very gentle, and her lips muttered, 
 in wi'ath, 
 
 " Che— e — e! Is it so with tbeef iiiti eo young! The 
 Madonna's vengeance fall on hini. ihea* ^frbomer he be, for having 
 caused thee such early shame I ^"* 
 
 The words acted like a ^U; ahebfted herself fi^m the drooping 
 languor of her rest, and Bashed on tbe peasant torn the superb 
 darkness of her eyes an imperioue <diaU<mge of rebuke and amaze. 
 Who the speaker was she fargeli she only remembered the sense 
 that had been spoken, 
 
 " Shame ? I have no shame I My only glory is to have seen 
 and known the noblest life on earth. The only hope I live for is 
 that I may be worthy to hear his words once more. Vengeance on 
 him $ God's love be with him always ! " 
 
 She passed onward with a sovereign's grace, moving like one in 
 a dream ; though the passion of her words had risen to so sudden 
 and vivid a defence, she seemed to have little consciousness of 
 what she did, whither she went. Then, as though a pang of self- 
 reproach moved her, she turned swiftly and came back, and stooped 
 over the aged contadina, raising the fallen fruit with a self- accusa- 
 tive gentleness, beseeching even while it still was so proud. 
 
 '* Forgive iml fou meant kindness; and you did not know= 
 I was ungrat^fdl and migentle ; but I am very tired." 
 
 Her lashes were heavy with tears, and a sigh of intense exhaus- 
 tion escaped her. Hi© peasant, touched to the quick forced the 
 h^ah^ mdts into ber hands. 
 
 X 
 
3^3 Chandos, 
 
 " 1 thought nothing of it. I only pitied thee.*' 
 ** Pity is for those who ask alms, or stoop to shame : do not give 
 if: to me." 
 " But art thou all alone P" 
 
 ''Yes; all alone." 
 
 " Christ ! and with thy beauty ! Ah ! insult will come to thee, 
 though thou art like a princess in exile ; insult will come, if thou 
 ui-t alone in the wide world with such a face and such a form as 
 ihine," 
 
 On her face arose a look of endurance and of resistance far 
 beyond her years. 
 
 " Insult never comes except to those who welcome it. Farewell 
 raid believe me from my heart grateful, if I have seemed not to be 
 so enough." 
 
 And she went on her way, with the mellow light of a setting sun 
 on her meditative brow, and the shadow of the gi'ey parapet cast 
 forward on her path. The fruit- seller looked after her wistfully, 
 perplexed and regi-etful. 
 
 " The saints keep her ! " she muttered over her tawny gourds 
 and luscious figs. " She will need their care bad enough before 
 .'he has found out what the world is for such as she. Holy 
 Mary ! whoever left her alone like that must have had a heart 
 <•£ stone." 
 
 The girl passed onward over the rise and descent of the old 
 pointed bridge; there was the flush of fever on her check, the 
 exhaustion of bodily fatigue in her step ; but her eyes looked far 
 forward with a brave light, resolute while it was so visionary, and her 
 lips had as much of resolve as of pain on them. In one hand swung 
 a pannier full of late summer flowers, woven with coils of scarlet 
 creepers, and with the broad bronzed leaves of vine, in such taste 
 as only the love and the fancy of an artist-mind could weave them; 
 in the other she held, closely clasped, the bough of blossoming 
 syringa and a book well worn, that she pressed against her bosom 
 as she went, as though it were some living and beloved thiug. 
 There was an extreme pathos, such as had touched the peasant 
 woman, in the union of her excessive youth and her perfect loneli- 
 ness ; there was something yet higher and yet more pathetic in 
 the blending in her of the faith and ignorance of childliood that 
 Tranders out into the width of the world as into some wonder-land 
 of Faery, and the unwearying, undaunted resolution of a pilgrim 
 who goes forth as the pilgrims of Christendom went eastward to 
 look on their Jerusalem once, and die content. 
 
 The bridge led down across the river into a wide sq^uare, so still, 
 so deserted, so mediaeval, with its vast, abandoned palaces, and its 
 marvellous church beauty, with only some friar's shadow or some 
 heavily-weighted mule crossing it in the light of the Italian sunset. 
 In the low loggia of one of the palaces, altered to a posting-house, 
 a group was standing, idly looking at the grass-grown waste, whilst 
 their horses were changing. They were a gay, rich, titled set of 
 indolent voyagers who were travelling to Home from Paris. They 
 saw her hs she came beneath the baloony, with the book against 
 
" Ne cherchei qu'un regard*' 307 
 
 her bosom, and tho abundance of the flowers di-ooping downward 
 in rings and wreatlis 01 colour as she bore them. Murmurs of 
 admiration at her loveliness broke irresistibly even from the world- 
 sated men and women who leaned there, tired and impatient of 
 even a few minutes' dulness. 
 
 " The old traditions of Italia, the ideal of Titian himself ! " said 
 one of them. '' Bellissima, will you not spare us one of your 
 liHes?" 
 
 She paused, and glanced at the women of the group. 
 
 *' Those ladies can have them, if they wish." 
 
 "But must not I, my exquisite young flower-priestess?'' 
 laughed her first questioner. 
 
 She let her grave luminous eyes dwell calmly on him. 
 
 *' No, signore." 
 
 One of the women leaned down, amused at her companion's 
 rebuff and mortification; the loggia was so low that she could 
 touch the flowers, and she drew out one of the clusters of late 
 lilies. 
 
 " My fair child, do you sell these P " 
 
 " I have done, signora." 
 
 *• Then you will sell them to me," said the other, as she dropped 
 into the basket a little gold piece and took up the blossoms. A 
 hand as soft as her own put back the money into her p;ilni. 
 
 " I have sold them for v/hat they are worth — a tow S(uidi ; I give 
 them to you gladly, and I do not take alms from any." 
 
 They looked at her in wonder ; the dignity of hor uiteranco, the 
 purity of her accent, the royal ease in her attitude, amazed them. 
 An Italian child, selling flowers for her bread, spoke with the 
 decision and the serenity of a princess. 
 
 " But you wiU let me offer it you as a gift, will you not ? ** 
 
 She shook her head. 
 
 " Would you take gold as a gift yourself, signora ? " 
 
 The great lady reddened ever so slightly ; the words spoken in 
 aU simplicity pricked her. It was rumoured by her world that 
 empires and governments had on occasion bought her silence or 
 her alliance by magnificent bribes. 
 
 *' Pardieu, my loveliest living Titian ! " lauged the French 
 Marquis who had first addressed her, " Madame la Comtesse does 
 not sell flowers in the street, I fancy." 
 
 Her eyes swept over him with a tranquil, meditative disdain. 
 
 *' There is but one rule for honour," she said, briefly; "and 
 rank gives no title for insolence." 
 
 " Fairly hit ! " laughed the great lady, who had recovered her 
 momentary irritation. " My beautiful child, will you tell me your 
 name, at the least ? " 
 
 "It is Castalia." 
 
 Where she stood before the loggia, with a troubled seriousness 
 in the gaze of her brilliant eyes (for the tone of the Marquis had 
 roused more anger than his mere words), her hand moved the 
 book against her heart. " If I were to ask these ? " she mused. 
 '* It is only the nobles who will eve^ tell me ; it is only thev who 
 
5o8 Chandos, 
 
 can be his friends. I havo never found courage to speak of him 
 yet ; but, until I do, I cannot know." 
 
 "Castalia!" echoed the aristocrat. "A fair name, indeed, — 
 as fair as you and your flowers. You will not let mo repay you 
 for your lilies : is there nothing you can let me do for you ? " 
 
 Castalia looked at her musingly ; the words were gentle, but 
 there was something that failed to reassure her. She stood before 
 the haK-insolent admiration of the men, the Kupercilious admira- 
 tion of the women, of this titled and aristocratic gi'oup, with as 
 complete a dignity and indifference as though she were a young 
 patrician who received them ; but she felt no instinct of regard or 
 of trust to any one of them. Still she drew nearer the loggia, and 
 held out the book reluctantly to her questioner ; her eyes filled 
 with an earnest, terrible, longing wistfdjiess ; the words were only 
 wrenched out with a great pang. 
 
 '* Signora, yes : can you tell me where he is P" 
 
 Her hand pointed to the name on the title-page, and her voice 
 shook with the intensity of anxious entreaty over the last two 
 words. 
 
 The Countess glanced at the volume, then let it fall with amaze, 
 as she gazed at the pleading, aching eyes that looked up to hers. 
 
 *' Chandos ! Mon Dieu ! what is it to you ?" 
 
 *'You know him?" There was the tremulous thirstiness of 
 long-deferred, long-despairing hope in the question, but there was 
 also something of the passionate jealousy of love. 
 
 The aristocrat looked at her with searching, surprised, insolent 
 eyes, in which some anger and more irony glittered, while she 
 turned over the leaves of the book. 
 
 **It is 'Lucrece!'" she murmured,— '* 'Lucrece !' " In the 
 moment her thoughts went backward o^'er so many years to so 
 many buried hours, to so many forgotten things, to so many by- 
 gone scenes. The book came to her like a voice of the past. 
 
 "You know him !" 
 
 •* What interest hag he for you?" 
 
 The lady had recovered her momentary amazement, and the 
 smile with which she spoke thi-illed with fire and ^ struck like ice 
 the heart of Castalia, though that heart was too guileless to know 
 all the smile meant. But the anguish of a hopeless and endless 
 search was stronger on her than the sense of insult ; her eyes filled 
 with a beseeching misery, like a wounded animal's, and her hands, 
 as she drew back the volume, were crushed on it in a gesture of 
 agonised supplication. 
 
 ' ' You know his name, at least ? Ah ; tell mo, for the love of 
 pity, where he is gone !" 
 
 The aristocrat turned away with a negligent cold contempt. 
 
 "Your friend wanders all over the world ; if you want to dis- 
 cover him, you have a very poor chance, and one I am scarcely 
 disposed to aid." 
 
 " Chandos, now he has turned philosopher, retains pretty much 
 the same tastes he had as a poet, I suppose ? " she murmured, with 
 •a smile, to one of her female friends, " The «irl ia v«ry beautiful 
 
** Ne chercher quun regara. 309 
 
 certainly ; but how shameless to ask us ! It is scarcely creditable 
 to an author who writes such eloquent periods on Humanity to 
 leave her to starve by selling lilies ! " 
 
 The slight, scornful laugh caught Castalia's ear, as the cold words 
 of the first phrases had stung all her pride and killed all hope 
 within her ; a great darkness had come over her face ; but her face 
 was white and set, and her lips were pressed together to hold in 
 the words that rose to them. She turned away without another 
 entreaty ; not even to learn of him would she supplicate there. 
 The Marquis, with a light leap, cleared the loggia and gained her 
 side. He was young, handsome ; and his voice, when he would, 
 was sweet as music. 
 
 *' You seek the writer of that book ? " 
 
 The look she turned on him might have touched the sternest to 
 pity. 
 
 **Ah, signore, — ^yesl' 
 ^ The answer broke fi*om her with a sigh that was beyond repres- 
 sion. Her eyes grew dim with tears. The world held but one 
 idea, one thought, one existence, for her, and her love was at once 
 too utter an absorption and too absolute an adoration to be con- 
 scious of anything except its one search. 
 
 ** Come with me, then, and I will tell you what you wish.** 
 
 A radiance of joy and hope flashed over the sadness of her face. 
 She did not know how dangerous an intensity that sudden light 
 of raptui-e lent her beauty ; she only thought that she should hear 
 of him. 
 
 *• I will come," she said softly, while her hand still held the book 
 to her bosom ; and she went, unresisting, beside him to the place 
 to which he turned, — a solitary, darkened terrace, heavily overhung 
 by the stones of an unused palazzo, with the river flowing sluggishly 
 below. 
 
 *' Why do you want to seek him ?" her companion asked. 
 
 In his heart he thought he knew well enough. Her lover had 
 aba,ndoned her, and she was following him to obtain redi'ess or 
 maintenance. 
 
 Her eyes dwelt on the water with the earnest, lustrous, dreamy 
 gaze that had used to recall so vague a memory to Ohandos. 
 
 ♦* Signore, only to see him once more." 
 
 " To see him ! To stir him to pity, I suppose, — to make some 
 claim on him ? " 
 
 She did not cornprehend his meaning ; but she lifted her head 
 quickly with the imperial pride that mingled in so witching a 
 contrast with her guileless and childlike simplicity. 
 
 _** Signore, I would die sooner than ask his pity ; it would be to 
 ask and to merit his scorn. Claim, too ! What claim ? Have sub- 
 jects a claim on their king, because he has once been gentle enough 
 to smile on them ? When I find him, I will not weary him ; I 
 will not let him even know that I am near ; but I will search the 
 world through till I look on his face once more, and then — the joy 
 of it will kill me, and I shall be at rest with my mother for ever." 
 
 He look^ at her* mute with STirDrise. If she had been attractive* 
 
3iO Chanaos, 
 
 in his eight before, she was tenfold more so now, as she spoke with 
 the exaltation of a love that absorbed her whole life, making her 
 unconscious of all save itself, and the mournful simpHcity of the 
 last words uttered with a resignation that was content, in the dawn 
 of her youth, to receive no other mercy than death. He was 
 amazed, he was bewildered, he was entranced ; he felt an envious 
 passion in an instant against the one for whom she could speak 
 thus ; but comprehend her he could not. He was shallow, selfish, 
 a cold libertine, and at once too young and too worldly to even 
 faintly understand the mingling in her nature of transparency and 
 depth, of tropical fervour and of utter innocence, of fearless pride 
 against all insult, and of absolute abandonment to one idolatry. 
 He spoke in the irritation of wonder and annoyance. 
 
 *' The author of ' Lucrece ' is much flattered to be the inspirer of 
 so tender a love ! I am afraid he has been but negligent of the gift." 
 The words were coarser than he would have used save on the 
 spur of such ii^ritation ; their efi'ect was like a spell. The flush 
 that was like the scarlet depth of a crimson camellia covered her 
 face in an instant, her eyes darkened with a tremulous emotion that 
 swiftly altered to the blaze of wrath, her lips trembled, her whole 
 foim changed under the sudden change of thought ; the shame of 
 love came to her for the fii^st moment, as the Hps of another man 
 spoke it ; she had been wholly unconscious of it before. She was 
 seeking him as devotees sought the Holy Grail, as a stray bird 
 seeks the only hand that has ever caressed and sheltered it. The 
 Word or the meaning of passion had never been uttered to her till 
 now. An intense horror consumed her, — horror of herself, horror 
 of her companion ; she shuddered where she stood in the hot air, 
 but the proud instinct of her nature rose to sustain herself, to 
 defend Chandos. 
 
 "You mistake, signore," she said, with a calm that for the 
 moment awed him. '* He whom I seek, I seek because he is my 
 only friend, — my only sovereign lord ; because my debt to him is 
 a debt so vast, a debt of life itself that life can never pay. He was 
 never negligent of me, — never ; he was but too good, too generous» 
 too gentle. 
 
 He looked at her, perplexed and incensed. He vaguely felt that 
 he was in error ; but he was distant as ever from the truth. All 
 he knew was that he had never, in the whole range of coui'ts, seen 
 'oveliness that could compete with the face and form of this young 
 seller of the Tuscan lilies. 
 
 "Forgive me," he murmured, eagerly; "I meant no ofi'ence. 
 Only to look on you is sufficient to " 
 
 "You said you would tell me where he is." She spoke very 
 low, but her lips were set. She began to mistrust him. 
 
 " I will ; but hear me first. He whom you talk of is very poor ; 
 he is no longer young ; he is a madman who spent all his millions 
 in a day, and who always played at his fancy with women, and left 
 them. He is not worthy a thought of yours." 
 
 The glorious darkness of her eyes grew like fir,e ; but she held 
 ^er passion in reir 
 
** Ne chercher qu*un regard,'^ 3 1 1 
 
 " Keep the promise you made me," she said, in her teeth. ** Tell 
 me of him." 
 
 ** I will. One moment more. He cannot care whether you livei 
 01 die, or would he have left you f,hus ?" 
 
 It waa a random blow, essayea at hazard, but it struck homo. 
 She grew very pale, and her l\ps shook ; yet she was resolute, — 
 resolute in her proud defence and self-restraint. 
 
 *' Signore, there was no cause why he should care. I was but 
 as a broken bird that he was gentle to ; he had a right to leave me, 
 —no right to think of me one hour." 
 
 He repressed an impatient oath. He could not understand her, 
 yet he felt he made no head against this resignation of herself to 
 neglect and to oblivion ; and the splendour of her face seemed a 
 hundred times greater because of this impotence to make any 
 impress on Jier thoughts. 
 
 ' ' At least, if he had had the heart of a man, he could never have 
 forsaken or forgotten you," he urged, tenderly. "Listen. I, who 
 have seen you but a moment ago, give you too true a homage to 
 be able to quit your side until you deal me my fiat of exHe. In 
 the world there— the world of which perhaps you know nothing — 
 I have riches and honours, and pleasures and palaces, that shall all 
 be yours if you will have them. Come with me, and no queen shall 
 equal your sway. Come with me, and for all those Ulies I will 
 give you as many pearls. Come with mo ; you shall have diamonds 
 in your hair, and slaves for youi* every wish, and I the chiefest 
 yet the humblest of them all ; you shall have kings at your feet, 
 and make the whole world mad with one glance of those divine 
 eyes. Come with me. He never offered you what I offer you now, 
 If you will only trust to my truth and my love." 
 
 He spoke with aU the hyperbole that he thought would best 
 dazzle and entrance one to whom the beauties and the wealth of 
 the world alike were unknown, — one in whom he saw blent the 
 pride of patricians with the poverty of peasants, — spoke with his 
 eyes looking eloquent tenderness, with the sun on his handsome 
 head, with the mellow, beguiUng music in his voice. For ail 
 answer where she stood, her eyes dilated with abhorrent scorn and 
 slumbering fire ; she shuddered from him as from some asp. She 
 did not comprehend all to which he wooed her, all that he meant 
 to convey ; but she comprehended er.ough to know that he sought 
 to bribe her with costly promises, and outraged her with a fami- 
 liarity offensive beyond endurance. 
 
 " No ! " she said, passionately, while the liquid melody of her 
 voice rang clear and imperious, — *' no ! he never ofi'ered me what 
 you offer me, — insult. Neither was he ever what you are, — a traitor 
 to his word ! " 
 
 She turned from him with that single answer, the blood hot as 
 flame in her cheek, her head borne with careless, haughty dig- 
 nity. She would not show him all she felt; she would not 
 show him that her heart seemed breaking, — breaking with the 
 bitterness of disappointment, with the sudden vivid sense of ineradi- 
 cable shame, with the absolute desolation that OMa# on her witb tb9 
 
ji» Chandoi. 
 
 first faint eickeuing perception of the meaning and the tempting 
 of evil. 
 
 Mortified, irritated, incensed at defeat where he had looked foi 
 easy victory and grateful welcome, the young noble caught her aa 
 -he turned, flung his arms about her ere she could stir, and stooped 
 his lips to hers. 
 
 " BelUssima I do you think I shall lose you like that ?" 
 
 Before his kiss could touch her, she had wrenched herself free, 
 Liirig him off, and struck him across the mouth with the bough 
 of synnga. The blow of the fragrant white blossoms stamped him 
 toward more utterly than a weightier stigma could have stamped it. 
 
 Then she broke the branch in two, threw it at his feet as a young 
 • mpress might break the sword of a traitor, and, leaving all her 
 lilies and wealth of leafage scattered there, she quitted him with- 
 out a word. 
 
 Bold though he was, her pursuer dared not follow her. She 
 looked down at the water, as she went along its sullen course, with 
 II smile, and leaned her lips on the book's worn page. 
 
 '' He touched them once," slie thought ; •' no other ever should 
 r/hile that river could give me death ! " 
 
 A deadly horror, a tumult of dread and of loathing, were on her. 
 She never rested, all tired though she was, till she was far out of 
 the town, and amidst the vine-nelds, whose leaves were bronzed, 
 and whose purple and amber clusters were swelling with their 
 richest bloom, near the vintage. The shadows, and the stone 
 wilderness, and the contracted air and space of cities, were terrible 
 Vi' her ; mountain-winds and forest-fragrance and the free stretch 
 of limitless vision had been as the very breath of life to her from 
 her infancy; caged in the darkness and the heat of cities, she 
 would have died as surely as a caged mocking-bird dies of longing 
 for the south. She di-opped to rest, stiU by the side of the water 
 under the shade of the vines, while the buildings and bridges of 
 the town sank down behind a cypress-crowned crest of hills, grey 
 with olives, or bare where the maize had been reaped. The browned 
 loaves and the reddened fruit hung over her ; the water-flags and 
 the purling stream, narrowed and shallow here, were at her feet ; 
 alone, the great tears rushed into her eyes, and her scarce-flown 
 childhood conquered. 
 
 " Oh, God I the width of the world ! " she murmured, while one 
 sob rose in her throat, — it seemed so vast, so endless, so naked, 
 and so pathless a desert. This was the world to which she had 
 used to look as the redresser of her wrongs, the battle-field of her 
 victories, the fairy-realm of every beauty, the giver of such golden 
 crowns, such hours of paradise ! — this world that seemed so full 
 of lives rushing to their tombs, wherein no man cared for hia 
 brother, — where all was hard, and heated, and choked, and pitiless, 
 and none paused to think of God ! — this world in which there waa 
 but one life for her, and that one lost, — perhaps lost for ever. 
 
 This boundless width of the world ! — to wander through it, ever 
 seeking, never finding, wearing the years away in fruitless search, 
 pursuing what, like the mountain-heights, receded farther witli 
 
** Ne chercher quun regard.** 313 
 
 every nearer step, looking in all the multitudes of earth for one 
 face, one regard, one smile ! The burden lay hca\7 on her young 
 heart, and the heart- sickness of toil without end was on her to 
 despair. But the nature in her was brave unto death, and the 
 veneration she bore her one idol enchained and possessed her whole 
 existence. She had a child's faith, a woman's passion, a martyr's 
 heroism. 
 
 She looked up at the sunlight through the mist of her tears ; and 
 irust was strong in her, strong as the anguish that made her fair 
 dps white and hot in its pain and her brief life seem near its ending. 
 
 " He is poor,— ho has suffered," she mused, recalling the words 
 that had been spoken against him. " He is so great ; but he has 
 lost his kingdom. When I find him, then, there may be some way 
 I may serve him, — some way as slaves serve.'* 
 
 To hear that he had want and sorrow had seemed to bring him 
 nearer to her, had bound her heart closer yet to one who was not 
 less a sovereign to her because a sovereign discrowned. She mar- 
 velled what his history could be. All of glory, of dignity, of 
 sacrifice, of desolation, that wronged greatness bears, thronged cc 
 her thoughts as the story of his life. She knew him now as the 
 unknown man of whom she had said, on the faith of his written 
 words, that he would have gathered strength from any fall ; and 
 she knew no more than this. It was enough ; it spoke more to 
 her than if she had been told of empires that he owned. She knc w 
 the kingdom of his thoughts, the treasuries of his mind ; through 
 his words he had spoken to her long ere her eyes had rested on 
 him, and she had revered him as her master ere ever she had heard 
 his voice, as Heioise had revered the genius which roused the 
 nations and shook the churches, ere ever Abelard had stood before 
 her. 
 
 It bound her to him in a submisf ion absolute and proud in its 
 own bondage as was ever that of Heloise. 
 
 It mattered nothing to her what his life had been, — a reign or 
 a martyrdom, a victory or a travail ; what he was was known to 
 her, and she asked no more. Yet, where she leaned alone, the 
 colour glowed into her face ; she shi'ank and trembled in the soli- 
 tude as though a thousand eyes were on her ; for the first time 
 the sense of shame had touched her, for the first time the vileness 
 of evil had approached her, and both left her afraid and startled. 
 
 "They spoke as though it were sin to seek him," she thought. 
 " Will he be angered if I ever find him ? I will never go near him, 
 never ask his pity, never let him know that I am by ; I will only 
 look on him from some distance, only stay where I can hear his 
 voice afar off— if I live. But whenever I see him the joy wiU kill 
 me; and better so,— better far than to risk one cold word from 
 him, one look of scorn. He said the world would crush me, and 
 stone me like Hypatia. The world shall not ; but one glance of 
 his would, if it ever rebuked me I " 
 
 A shiver ran through her as she mused. 
 
 She had cast herself on the desert of the world in darkness, as 
 tt\f^ lamps of sacrifice are cast ou the stream by Indian women pA 
 
3 14 Chandos, 
 
 night. All was strange to her, all cold, all arid, all withoat tracL 
 or knowledge or light. The beauty of her voice in choral service 
 and the flowers that she gathered from forest or river were all hei 
 riches, and hand to guide her she had none. But all fear for her- 
 self, all thought for herself, were banished in the domination ol 
 one supreme grief, one supreme hope. The world was so wide I 
 ^Vhen would she find him ? 
 
 Her tears fell heavy and fast, down into the white cups of the 
 {'aded lilies at her feet. The world was so wide, and she was so 
 lonely, — sho whose heart ached for love, whose eves ached fot 
 Dcauty, wHos© youtn longea tor Happiness, as tn© nart lor me water- 
 eprings. 
 
 CHAPTEE VI. 
 "nihil htjmani a me ALIENTJM WTO.** 
 
 ' ' If you would but come back to us ! " Philippe d'Orvale spokesoftly, 
 as a woman speaks in tenderness. He stood on the hearth of his 
 gieat banqueting-room, rich and dark in its burnished lustre of 
 gold and scarlet, like an old palace-chamber of Venice ; his hair, that 
 silky lion's mane, was white, but under it his brown eyes flashed, 
 full of untamed fire, and from the depths of the luxui-iant snowy 
 beard laughter fit for Olympus would still shake the silence with 
 the ringing, riotous mirth of yore. Now those eyes were grave 
 with a wistful shadow, and the voice of the reckless Prince Bohe- 
 mian had a silver gentleness. * ' If you would but come back to 
 us ! " he said, again, as he had said it many times through the 
 length of weary years. "The people hunger for you. They bear 
 patiently with me, but it is in bitterness ; they have never been 
 reconciled to my rule, though its yoke is light. Come back ! It 
 is unchanged ; it will be as your own ; it should he your own at one 
 word, if you would but let me ! " 
 
 Where Chandos stood, in the shadow of the jutting angle of the 
 alabaster sculpture above the hearth, a shiver shook him that he could 
 not restrain, like that which strong limbs give irrepressibly when a 
 1 tared nerve is cut and wrung. His own voice was very low, as ho 
 iinswered, — 
 
 " To thank you were impossible ; I have found no words for it 
 i hrough seventeen years. Your friendship may well avail to out- 
 weigh a whole world's faithlessness. But to accept were to sink 
 myself lower in my own sight than my worst ruin ever sank me. 
 Were I to go back on another's bounty, I would give the men who 
 Ktill remember me leave to stone me as I went, and curse me in my 
 lather's name." 
 
 Philippe d'Orvale's superb head drooped in silence : the proud 
 noble knew the temper that denied him, and honoured it, and could 
 not dare to press it to surrender, — knew that denial to him wa 
 right and just, ©yen whilst his heart longed most to wring assent 
 
'* Nihil humani a me alienum puto.** 315 
 
 That denial had been given him steadily through the long coiirse of 
 so ventecn years, — given by one who had once never known what it 
 was to forbid a desire or control a wish, — by one to whom exile 
 was the ceaseless and deadly bitterness that it was to Dante, — by 
 one who longed for the mere sight of the forest-lands, the mere 
 breath of the forest- winds, of the birthright he had lost, as the 
 weary eyes of the Syrian Chief longed for a sight of the Promised 
 Land, that he had to lie down and die without entering, banned 
 out to the last hour. 
 
 Chandos saw the pain on him, and stretched out his hand. 
 
 ** My best friend, if I could take such charity from any, it should 
 be from you. But you must feel with me that to give consent to 
 what you wish were to lose the one relic of my race I have striven 
 to keep, — its barren honour." 
 
 ** I know ! I know ! Yet all I ask is leave to give a sovereign 
 back his throne. No more than my house did to my cousin of 
 Bourbon." 
 
 " And the sovereign who bartered his kingdom for ten years* 
 mad delight had but justice done him when it was swept away for 
 ever. But speak no more of it for God's sake ! I am weak as water, 
 here ! " 
 
 ** Weak ! and yet you refuse P " 
 
 "I refuse, because to accept were disgrace ; but there are times 
 when I could wish still that — bearing me the love you did — you 
 had shot me like a dog, while I could have died in my youth ! " 
 
 The words were hushed to a scarce-heard whisper, as they 
 escaped through his sot teeth; they were a truth rarely wrung 
 from hi m , — the truth that thi'ough the patience and the peace and 
 the strength he had forced from calamity, through the silence in 
 which he had borne his doom and the high ambition which guided 
 and sustained him, the old passionate agony, the old loathing of 
 life that was pain, would break with a resistless force, and make 
 him long to have died in that golden and cloudless light of his lost 
 years,— died ere its suns had set for ever. 
 
 * * Weak ! That is rather strength, since, wishing this thus, you 
 still have borne against it, and lived on, and conquered ! " 
 
 _" I have no strength ! A foe's taunt can make a brute of mo, a 
 friend's tenderness unnerve me like a woman. Sometimes I think 
 1 have learned nothing ; sometimes I think that no reed was ever 
 £1 ailer than 1. A while ago a young girl showed me * Lucrece :' I 
 know, as I saw the book, what Swift felt when he shed those pas- 
 sion ate tears for the genius he had in his youth I " 
 
 " Yours is greater than in j^our youth." 
 
 •* Ah ! I doubt it, Youth is genius ; it makes every dawn a new 
 world, every woman's beauty a love-ode, every breath a delight. 
 We weave philosophies as life slips from us ; out when wo were 
 young our mere life was a poem." 
 
 Dark hours came on him oftentimes; the Hellenic nature in 
 him, that loved beauty and harmony and the soft lulling of the 
 senses, could not perish, and, imprisoned in the loneliness and 
 colourless ascetici;sm of need and of exile, ached in bin) and beat 
 
S'6 
 
 the bsurs of its prlson-honse in many a moMont. He had subdue4 
 
 his neck to the yoke, and he had found his redemption in snblimer 
 things and loftier freedoms, as Boethius under the chains of the 
 Goth found his in the golden pages of the "Consolations;" but 
 there were times when the Greek-like temper in him still turned 
 from life without enjoyment, as from life without value. 
 
 The heart of Philippe d' Ovale went with him. The careless, 
 royal, headlong levity of the princely Bohemian had made of life 
 one long unthinking revel. Dynasties and creeds and nations and 
 thrones might rock and faU, might rise and totter, round him ; he 
 heeded them never, but drank the purple wine of his life brimming 
 and rose-crowned, and learned his science from women's eyes, 
 and sung a Bacchic chaunt while others grew grey in the gall of 
 state harness, and shook the grand, mellow, rolling laughter from 
 his colossal chest at the vain toil of the heart-burning world 
 around him while he held on his gay, endless. Viking-like 
 wassail. Of a truth there are creeds far less frank and less wise 
 than his ; and of a truth there are souls far less honest and bold 
 and bright. He would have lost life rather than have broken his 
 word ; and no lie had ever stained his fearless, careless, laughter- 
 warmed lips. Of a truth the mad Duke had virtues the world 
 has not. 
 
 Hie eyes dwelt now with a great unspoken tenderness on 
 Ohandos. 
 
 *' Yet you are greater than you were then," he said, slowly. 
 ** I know it, — I who am but a wine-cup rioter and love nothing 
 but my summer- day fooling. You are greater ; but the harvest 
 you sow will only be reaped over your grave.'* 
 
 ** I should be content could I believe it would be reaped then." 
 
 " Be content, then. You may be so." 
 
 ** God knows ! Do you not think Marsy and Delisle de Sales 
 and Linguet believed, as they suffered in their dungeons for mere 
 truth of speech, that the remembrance of future generations would 
 solace them ? Bichat gave himself to premature death for science' 
 Bake : does the world once in a year speak his name ? Yet how 
 near those men are to us, to be forgotten I A century, and history 
 will scarce chronicle them." 
 
 •* Then why give the wealth of your intellect to men ? " 
 
 **Are there not higher things than present reward and the 
 mere talk of tongues ? The monstrari digito were scarce a lofty 
 goal. We may love Truth and strive to serve her, disregarding 
 what she brings us. Those who need a bribe from her are not her 
 true believers." 
 
 Philippe d'Orvale tossed his silvery hair from his eyes,— eyes of 
 such sunny lustre still. 
 
 "Ay I And those who held that sublime code of yours, that 
 cleaving to truth for truth's sake, where are they ? How have 
 they fared in every climate and in every age ? Stoned, crucified, 
 barned, fettered, broken on the vast black granite mass of the 
 blind multitude's brutality, of the priesthood's curse and craft I " 
 
 *• True 1 Yet if through us, ever so slightly, the bondage of 
 
" Nihil hunidni a me alienum puto,** 317 
 
 the creeds' traditions be loosened from the lives they stifle, and 
 those multitudes — so weary, so feverish, so much more to be pitied 
 than condemned — become less blind, less brute, the eacrihce is 
 not in vain," 
 
 ** In your sense, no. But the world reels back again into dark- 
 ness as soon as a hand has lifted it for a while into light. Men 
 hold themselves purified, civilised ; a year of war, — and lust and 
 bloodthirst rage untamed in all their barbarism ; a taste of slaugh- 
 ter,— and they are wolves again ! There was truth in the old 
 feudal saying, * Oignez vilain, il vous poindra ; poignez vilain, il 
 vous oindra.' Beat the multitudes you talk of with a despot's 
 Bword, and they will lick your feet ; touch them with u Christ-like 
 pity, and they will nail you to the cross." 
 
 There was terrible tiiith in the words: this man of princely 
 blood, who disdained all sceptres and wanted nothing of the 
 world, could look through and through it with his bold sunlit eyes, 
 and see its rottenness to the core. 
 
 Chandos sighed as he heard. 
 
 "You are right, — only too right. Yet even while they crouch 
 to the tyrant's sabre, how bitterly they need release ! even while 
 they crucify their teachers and their saviours, how little they know 
 what they do ! They may forsake themselves ; but they should 
 not be forsaken." 
 
 Philippe d'Orvale looked on him with a light soft as women's 
 tears in his eyes, and dashed his hand down on the alabaster. 
 
 " Chandos, you live twenty centiuies too late. You would have 
 been crowned in Athens, and throned in Asia. But here, as a 
 eaving grace, they will call you — ' mad ! ' " 
 
 " Well, if they do ? The title has its honours. It was hooted 
 against Solon and Socrates." 
 
 At that moment they were no longer alone ; a foreign minister 
 entered the reception-room. Only at Philippe d'Orvale's house in 
 Paris was Chandos ever seen by any members of the circles which 
 long ago had followed him as their leader. With the statesmen, 
 the thinkers, the scholars of Europe he had association : but with 
 the extravagant and aristocratic worlds where he had once reigned 
 he had no fellowship; and the younger generation, who cmefly 
 ruled them, had no remembrance and but little knowledge of 
 "what his career once had been in those splendid butterfly-frivolities, 
 those Tyrian purples of a glittering reign. A Turkish lily, when 
 all its pomp of colour and of blossom has been shaken down in 
 the wind and withered, is not more rapidly forgotten than the 
 royalty of a fashionable fame when once reverse has overtaken it. 
 
 But his name had power, though of a widely different sort ; and 
 its influence was great. Science saw in him its co-revolutionist 
 against tradition ; weary and isolated thinkers battling with the 
 apathy or the antagonism of men found in him their companion 
 and their chief ; young and ardent minds came in eager gratitude 
 to his leadership; the churches stoned, the scholars reverenced 
 .im ; the peoples vaguely wondered at him, and told from mouth 
 o mouth the strange vicissitudes of his life. From the deep. 
 
3i8 Chnndos. 
 
 Bilent heart of old Italian cities, where many of his years were 
 passed; his words came to the nations, and pierced ears most dead and 
 closed to him, and carried far their seed of freedom, which would 
 sink in the soil of public thought, and bear full harvest only, as 
 Philippe d'Orvale had said, above his grave. Men knew that 
 there was might in this man, who had risen from a voluptuary's 
 delight to face destruction, and had forced out of adversity the 
 gold of strength and of wisdom. They listened, — even those who 
 cursed him because he spoke too widely truth. They listened, 
 and they found that an infinite patience, an exhaustless toleration, 
 a deep and passionless calm, had become the temper of his intellect 
 and of his teaching. It was too pure, too high, too profound for 
 them, and too wide in grasp; but they listened, and vaguely caught 
 a loftier tincture, a more serene justice, from him. 
 
 The career which his youth had projected, in the splendid ideala 
 of its faith and its desire, could have been possible only in the ages 
 when the world was young, and the sceptre of a king could gather 
 the countless hosts as with a shepherd's love into one fold, under the 
 great Syrian stars, — when the life of a man could be as one long 
 magnificence of Oriental day, with death itself but the setting of 
 a cloudless sun, and the after-glow of fame a trail of light to 
 nations East and West. The dreams of his youth had been im- 
 possible : yet one thing remained to him of them, — their loyalty 
 to men and their forbearance with them. In one sense he was 
 greater than his father had been : s*^atesmou mould the actions of 
 the Present, but thinkers form the minds of the Future. It is the 
 vaster power of the two. 
 
 It was late when he left the Hotel d'Orvale. He had spent the 
 hours with some of the most eminent statesmen of the continent. 
 All men of mark heard his opinions with eagerness and with 
 deference. When he had had the opportunity, he had never 
 Bought either rank or state power ; now that his intellect was hia 
 only treasury, he never sought to purchase with it either riches or 
 the revival of his lost dignities. They did not comprehend him ; 
 but the absolute absence of all personal ambition impressed them 
 in one who, when his word was omnipotent, had never exercised it 
 to obtain the place and the power which made up their own aims, 
 and who now gave his years and his thoughts to the search of 
 truth, unheeding what it brought him. They wondered that, with 
 his fame, he endeavoured to attain no material rewards, no poli- 
 tical influence : in that wonder they missed the whole key of his 
 character. He had been too proud ever to be attracted by the 
 vulgarities of social distinctions in the years when any could have 
 been his for the asking ; now the same temper remained with him. 
 Then, as a careless voluptuary, he had smiled at and pitied those 
 who wasted the golden days in the feverish pursuit of ephemeral 
 renowns; now, as a great writer, he had the same marvel, the 
 same contempt, for the minds which could stoop their mighty 
 strength to seek a monarch's favour or a court's caprice, to gain a 
 ribbon or to form a six-months' ministry. The strife and fret of 
 party had little more dignity in his eyes than the buzzing an(^ 
 
" Nihil humani a me alienum puio^ §1^ 
 
 pushing of bees to enter a honey-clogged hive. The hero of public 
 life is a slave, and a slave who must wear the livery of conventional 
 forms and expedient fallacies. Chandos loved freedom, absolute 
 freedom : he could no more have lived without it than he could 
 have lived without air. 
 
 He knew that it was well that there should be men who 
 would harness themselves to the car of the nations, and think 
 that they led history, while they were in truth only the driven 
 pack-horses of human development or national decadence ; but 
 he would no more have gone in their shafts than an eagle will wind 
 a windlass. 
 
 As he went now, through the lateness of the night, with the 
 fragrance of the Luxembourg gardens on the air, his thoughta 
 were grave and far away. 
 
 The stillness of the night — so late that the crowds had thinned, 
 and there were but little noise and movement even in the greatest 
 thoroughfares — brought back on his memory the nights in which 
 he had lain dying for a draught of cold water in the dens of this 
 brilliant city, — of the nights when, in infamy, and shame, and 
 misery, he had sought to kill remembrance and existence in joyless 
 vice and opiate slumbers, in orgies that he loathed, in drugged 
 sleep that lulled his mind into an idiot's vacancy. That time was 
 vague and unreal to him as the phantasms of fever to the man 
 who awakes from them ; but he never looked back to it without a 
 shudder. His fall had been so vast, and the plank so frail that 
 alone had arrested his headlong reel into a suicide's grave or a 
 madman's darkness ! All men had forsaken him then, save one, — 
 his enemy, — forsaken him, though their hands were full of his 
 gifts,— forsaken him, leaving him to die like a dog. But he had 
 not in return or in revenge abandoned them : he knew the terrible 
 truth of the ** Qui vitia edit, homines edit," and he would not let 
 hatred of their ingratitude dwell with him and turn him cynic, for 
 he cleaved to them in tenderness still. Perhaps in this yet more 
 than in all other efforts of his later life he kept true to the dreams 
 of his youth, — this patience with which he loved men and believed 
 in their redeeming excellence, even through all which might have 
 bidden him, as his foe had once bidden him, " curse God and die ! " 
 
 As he passed now through the richer and finer quarters 
 towards a retired and little-frequented street where he had his 
 temporary dwelling in the centre of Paris, he passed close by the 
 gates of a ducal mansion. Before them stood, among a long line, 
 a carriage^ handsomely appointed, with powdered servants and 
 laced liveries ; the gates were open, and the court was in a blaze 
 from a hundred lamps, with lackeys in their laced liveries moving 
 to and fro. An English minister was coming out to the equipage, 
 with some light, costly furs thrown loosely over his full dress. 
 They looked at each other in the gas-light : a moment was enough 
 for recognition. 
 
 Trevenna waved his hand towards his carriage with a laughing 
 Jmile. 
 
 '• Ah, mon prince P you on foot P How times are changed I Get 
 
320 Chandos, 
 
 m ; pray do. I'm very forgiving, and I'll give you a lift for auld 
 lang syne." 
 
 Chandos passed on, — without a word, without a sign,— as though 
 he had not heard. Yet men have slain their foes, m hot blood 
 and cold, for less than this mocker's basouess and outrage. 
 
 The petty jeer of the indignity was fouler than a wrong 
 worthier of resentment. When the soldier of the guard spat in 
 Charles Stuart's face, the insult was the worse because too ignomi- 
 nious for scorn, too low for revenge. 
 
 He went onward down into the solitude of the tortuous 
 winding, — one of those streets in which brie a brae, and priceless 
 china, and old pictures, and old treasures of every sort are 
 heaped together in little, dark, unguarded windows, and are only 
 told from the shadows by the shine of a diamond or the shape of 
 a quaint vase forcing itself up from the dimness and the dust. 
 There came feebly towards him in the gloom, the tall, bowed form 
 of an old man, with white hair floating on his shoulders, and his 
 hands feebly stretched before him in the wavering, uncertain 
 movement of the blind. The figure was impressive, with its long, 
 flowing, black garments, and its stem, antique, patriarch-like 
 look so painfully in contrast with the extreme feebleness of 
 excessive age and that plaintive, flickering movement of the hands. 
 
 "Oh, my God!" he was muttering, piteously, *' where is he ? 
 where is he ? " 
 
 The grief and appeal of the accent, the helplessness of the 
 sightless action accompanying it, arrested Chandos. He paused, 
 and touched the blind wanderer on the arm. 
 
 " Whom are you seeking ? Can I help you ? " 
 
 The old man stopped his slow swinging step, and caught the 
 gentleness of the tone with the quickness to sound that com- 
 pensates for the loss of sight in so many. 
 
 "I search for my dog, sir," he answered. **He is my only 
 ^uide, and I have lost him." 
 
 * * Lost him ? How far from this P ** 
 
 " Some way. He broke from me : children lured him, I think. 
 lie was very pretty, and the life he led with me was but dull. 1 1 
 13 natural he should forsake me." 
 
 Chandos listened, struck by the accent : he had known what ii 
 was to have an animal the sole friend left. 
 
 "Dogs rarely forsake us. I should hope he will come back to 
 ^ou. You cannot find your way without him ? " 
 
 The other shook his head silently, — a grand, majestic, saturnine 
 old man, despite the decrepitude that had bowed his back, and the 
 melancholy supplication in which his trembling hands were out- 
 stretched. 
 
 Chandos looked at him silently also ; there was something in hia 
 look and in his manner which impressed him with their mtense 
 sadness. No memory revived in him, but compassion moved him. 
 
 '* Tell me where you live : I will see you home," he said, 
 presently. It was not in his nature to leave any one so aged to 
 wander wretchedly and uncertainly in the darkness of the aiter' 
 
" Nihil humani a me alienum puto. jli 
 
 midnight. Trevenna would have eujoyed stealing the dog away^ 
 and leading the harassed creature round and round in a circle by 
 a thousand mystifications ; but to Chandos there was something of 
 positive pain in the sight of any human being stranded in the 
 midst of that peopled city for sheer need of a hand stretched out 
 to him. Men had been false to him ; but he remained loyally true 
 to them. 
 
 The blind man turned with an involuntary start of wonder and 
 of gratitude. 
 
 *' You are very good, sir ! Will it not trouble you P " 
 " Far from it. Men must be very heartless if they oould all 
 leave yon to need such a trifle as that." 
 
 " Men owe me nothing," said the other, curtly, whilst he went 
 on to tell his residence. 
 
 Chandos said no more, but went thither, slackening his pace to 
 the halting step of the one he guided. It was some little time 
 before he could find the place he was directed to ; when he did so, 
 it was a tall, frowning, niined house, jammed amidst many others, 
 with the shutters up against the lower windows, and poverty told 
 by all its rambling timbers. 
 
 "Open, sir, since you are kind enough to take pity on me," 
 said the blind man, as he gave him a key, to which me crazy door 
 yielded easily. '* My room, such as it is, is the first on the fifth 
 story." 
 
 It was a miserable chamber enough, bare and desolate, with a 
 rough pallet bed, and an unspeakable nakedness and want about 
 it. A little lamp burned dully, and threw its yellow light on the 
 peculiar and striking figure of the man he had guided ; and he 
 looked at him curiously, — a man of ninety winters, with the dark 
 olive of his skin furrowed like oak-bark, and his sweeping, pointed 
 beard snow-white, — a man who had suffered much, needed much, 
 endured much, and possibly done much evil in his day, yet com- 
 manding and solemn in his excessive years as the figure of a Beli- 
 sarius sightless and poverty-stricken and forsaken by those for 
 whom he had given his life-blood. He turned to Chandos with a 
 stately and touching action. 
 
 '* Sir, who you are I cannot tell ; but from my soul I thank you, 
 from my heart I would bless you — if I dared." 
 
 Chandos lingered, leaning against the barren, unsightly wall. 
 He might be in a den of thieves, for aught he know ; but there was 
 that in the Israelite (as he justly deemed him) that moved him to 
 interest. Since the glory of his summer- day world had clo£»d on 
 him, he had gone far down into the depths of human suffering and 
 human sin ; he had known life in its darkest and in ito worst, and 
 he evaded nothing to which he could bring either aid or consolation. 
 The mingled infirmity and wisdom of his glorious manhood had 
 been to abhor and shun every sight and shape of pain ; 8ii.ce he 
 had tasted the bitterness of ruin, he had passed by no pain ti^tat he 
 coiild hope to succour. 
 
 **You should not be alone at your years," he said, gently. 
 ** Have you nothing but this lost dog to take heed of you F^' 
 
 Y 
 
Chana»i* 
 
 ** Nothing, Bir : ^ is gone now." 
 
 " I trust not. I will try and find lum for you. Pardon me, but 
 %t your age it is rare to be wholly solitary.'' 
 
 **Is it?" said the blind man, with a sententious melancholy. 
 **1 thought the reverse. We have outlived our due time. "We 
 have seen all die around us ; we ought to be dead ourselves." 
 
 Chandos was silent ; he stood, thoughtful and almost saddened 
 by the Israelite's words. He was alone himself, — he, for whom the 
 world had once been one wide palace, filled with courtiers and 
 friends ; he looked to be so alone to his grave. 
 
 At that moment there came the rush of eager feet, the panting 
 of eager breath ; the unlatched door of the room was burst open, 
 A little dog of the Maltese breed scoured across the floor, and 
 leaped on the old man vnth frantic caresses ; its desertion had been 
 but for a moment, and its conscience and its love had soon brought 
 it back. The Jew took it fondly in his arms, and murmured 
 tender names over it ; then he turned his blind eyes on Chandos. 
 
 ' ' Sir, I thank my little truant that through Ms abandonment I 
 learned that one man lived so merciful as you." 
 
 '' There are many ; do not doubt that. Forgive me if I seem to 
 force your confidence, but I would gladly know if I can aid you. 
 Eich I am not, but there might be ways in which I could assist 
 you." 
 
 He spoke very gently ; this old man, grand as any sculpture of 
 Abraham or Agamemnon, in his extreme loneliness, in his extreme 
 poverty, awoke his sympathy. 
 
 The Hebrew drew his bent form straight, with a certain uncon- 
 scious majesty. 
 
 " Sii", my confidence you cannot have ; but it is only meet that 
 you should know I am one who often has worked much evil, and 
 who has been once branded as a felon." 
 
 Chandos looked at him in silence a moment ; he could believe 
 that evil had left its trace among the dark furrows of the sombre 
 and stem face he looked on, but criminal shame seemed to have no 
 place with the Jew's patriarchal calm and dignity. 
 
 " If it be so, there may be but the more cause that you need aid. 
 i^peak frankly with me." 
 
 " There are those who say my people never speak except to lie," 
 fiaid the Hebrew briefly. "It is untrue. But frank I cannot be 
 with you, — with any. Could I have been so, I were not thus now." 
 
 " How ? Did you refuse the truth, or was it denied you ? " 
 
 '' Both. I heard a story once, — whether fact or romance I can- 
 not tell; it struck me. I will tell it you. There was an old 
 soldier of the Grande Arm^e, who was bidden by his chief to 
 execute some secret service and never speak of it. He did it; 
 his absence on its errand was discovered; he was tiied for 
 desertion or disobedience, I forget which. Napoleon was present 
 at the trial ; the accused looked in the face of his master for per- 
 mission to clear himself by revealing the truth ; the face was chill 
 as stone, mute as steel ; ti^ere was no consent in it. The^ soldier 
 bared bw head, and held ins peaoe; he underw^at his chaetasement 
 
•' Nihil humant a me alienum puto.** 323 
 
 in silence ; he muttei ed only eyer after, in insanity, * SUgiko d la 
 
 mort /' " 
 
 Chandos heard, moved to more than surprise. He saw that this 
 poverty- worn blind Hebrew was no common criminal, and had had 
 no common fate. He leaned forward and looked at him more 
 eai-nestly. 
 
 "And the soldier's doom, — was that yours ?" he asked. 
 
 Ihe Jew bent his snow-white head, pressing the little neaOing 
 dog closer to his bosom. 
 
 *' Much such an one." 
 
 ** You were of the army, then P" 
 
 " No ; but I had a ch^af as pitiless as Napoleon. No matter ! 
 he had the right to be so. It is not for me to speak." 
 
 The words were spoken with the patience of ins race ; an infinite 
 pain passed over the harsh, saturnine sternness of his face. 
 
 "But you would seem to say that by silence you were wronged^ 
 Tell me more plainly." 
 
 A sigh escaped the close-pressed lips of the aged man. 
 
 " Sir, you have been ^ood to me ; it is not for me to deny what 
 I can justly tell. That is not much. I was in the employ of an 
 Englishman; we drove an evil trade, — a trade in men's ruin, in 
 men's necessities, in men's desperation. It is a common trade 
 eaiough, and there are hundreds who drive in their carriages, and 
 live amidst the great, who have gained their wealth by that trade 
 and by no other. I was a hard man, a shrewd, a merciless ; I 
 asked my pound of flesh, and I cut it remorselessly. Life had 
 been bitter with me ; it had baffled me when 1 would have done 
 righteousness; it had denied me when I would have sought 
 justice ; it had damned me because of my wandering race : with 
 the book of my religion in their hands, Christians flouted me and 
 scourged me, — a Jew dog, a Jew cheat, a Jew liar ! If I said 
 truth, none believed me; if I did honestly, all laughed, and 
 thought that I had some deeper scheme of villany beneath. I 
 would have acted well with men, but they mocked me ; and then 
 — ^I took my revenge. I do not say it was right; but it was 
 human." 
 
 He paused ; the died-out light began to gather in his sunken 
 eyes, the memories of manhood to kindle on his brown and withered 
 face ; his voice grew stronger and deeper, as it thrilled with the 
 remembrance of other days. Chandos stood silent, looking on him 
 with a strange force of interest, while the dull feeble flickering of 
 the oil-flame shed its faint illumination on the old man's Syrian- 
 like form. 
 
 " I was sorely tossed, and beaten, and reviled ; I became bitter, 
 ana keen, and cruel. I was like iron to those Gentiles who needed 
 me and, when they needed, cringed. I said in my soul, ' You call 
 me a Jew robber; well, you shall feel my knife.' And yet I 
 declare that, till they made me so, I had served men and striveL' 
 to make them love me, — hard as it is for a poor man, and a Jew, 
 to gain a friend among Christians ! They have stolen our God ; 
 but they only blaspheme in Hub name, and call the people whoa^ 
 
524 Chandos. 
 
 creed they borrow, by the vilest obscenities of their streets \ So 1 
 grew like a flint, and I checked not at cunning. One innocent may 
 be wrongly suspected until he is made the thing that the libel has 
 called him. I was a usurer : you know what that is, — a man who 
 makes his gold out of tears of blood, and fills his caldron with 
 human flesh till its seething brings him wealth. I had only one 
 softness in me : it was my love for my wife." 
 
 His voice quivered slightly ; even the memory of the dead love 
 that lay so far away in the grave of buried days had power to shake 
 him like a reed. 
 
 " She was as beautiful as the morning, twenty years or more 
 younger than I ; but she loved me with a great love, and while 
 she was in my bosom she made me seek to be as she was. "Well, 
 she died. My life was as dark as midnight, and my heart was ice. 
 For a while I was mad ; when my senses came to me, I set myself 
 to the lust of gold, to the grinding out of my deadly pain on the 
 lives that had mocked me. Thus I became evil, and men cursed 
 ni0^ —.justly then. I made much money, and, years after, I lost 
 it, in schemes in which it had been risked. I fell in the straits of 
 extreme poverty ; in them I met, in the dens of a great city, an 
 Englishman who was good to me and succoured me. Afterwards 
 we entered into negotiations together; he joined my old firm,-— 
 it did not bear my name ; he became it : in fact, I was but his 
 manager, clerk, subordinate ; but the public still thought me the 
 principal. He was very clever, very able; he knew the world 
 widely, and he had fashionable acquaintances by the hundred. 
 Between us,— he secretly, I openly,— we spread our nets very 
 far ; we drew many lives into the meshes ; we made much money ; 
 -he did, at least : hiw was the capital, his the profit ; I did but the 
 work at a salary. We were always strictly to the letter of the 
 law ; but within the law we were very hard. Oh, God ! now that 
 I am blind and forsaken, I know it I Well, meanwhile my son had 
 come home to me from Spain, — a beautiful, gracious child, who 
 brought his mother's look in his eyes. In him I was almost happy ; 
 for him I worked unceasingly ; thinking of him, I did my master's 
 bidding with alacrity aud with little heed for those who suffered. 
 For seven years my boy grew up with me from a child to a youth; 
 and when he smiled at" me with his mother's smile, I would have 
 coined my life, if I could have done so, to purchase him an hour's 
 pleasure. And in those seven years the firm had prospered mar- 
 vellously, and my master — so I call him — made much wealth from 
 it in secret. At the time of the eighth or ninth year, when my eon 
 v/as eighteen " 
 
 He paused ; though his eyes had no sight in them, he veiled 
 them, drooping his head in shame as his words were resumed. 
 
 ' ' The lad erred, — erred terribly. I cannot speak it ! Dishonesty, 
 glossed over, had been round him so long, — it was not his crime. 
 He saw tis thieve : how could he learn to keep his young hands 
 pure ? He forged my master's name, in thoughtlessness, and 
 thinking, I believe, that such money was our common due, aince 
 I work^ for it. I knew then a Torse anguish than when my 
 
"^thil humani a me alienum pulo,** 3^5 
 
 darling had died. My master found it out, — he found everything 
 out : me boy was in his power. He could have sent the youn<> 
 life to a felon's doom : he was merciful, and he spared him. For 
 it let me ever hold his name in blessing." 
 
 He bent his head with a grave, reverential gesture, and was 
 silent many moments, his lips mutely moving, as though in prayei 
 for the benefactor of his only son. 
 
 '• He spared the youth always : let it be ever remembered by 
 me," he resumed, while his voice was broken and very faint. ** To 
 purchase his redemption, to repay his ransom, I gave my body and 
 my mind, by night and by day, to travail. I did iniquity to buy 
 my son's peace : that was my sin. My master was lenient, and 
 spared him from accusation : that was his clemency. By one and 
 by the other the child was saved. He was so gentle, so loving, so 
 bright, so full of poetic thoughts and noble longing ; it must have 
 been a mortal fear that ever drove him to that single crime I Or 
 rather, I have thought later, it was the thoughtless fault of a child 
 who did not know the error that he did. Well, my master had been 
 pitiful to the thing I loved. I owed him my life — more than my life 
 — for that. A few years, and the test came to me. I have said in - 
 violate secrecy was kept on his association with the business that I 
 conducted. No living creature guessed it. His own friends by the 
 score were among our clients, among our victims ; but none of them 
 ever dreamt that he had anything to do with the usury on which they 
 heaped their curses. One night he had visited the office (a thinjv; 
 he rarely did), and had taken away with him the title-deeds and 
 family papers of one whose extremity of need had forced him to 
 lodge them with me as security for an immediate loan. That very 
 night their owner came down in hot haste ; he had obtained money 
 by a sudden and marvellous stroke of fortune, and was breathless 
 to recover his pawned papers and pay back the loan. The deeds 
 were not there ! To say ivhere they were would have been to betray 
 my master. I could not produce them ; I could not explain their 
 absence. The gentleman was very fiery and furious ; he would 
 not wait ; he demanded his papers back. Give them I could not, 
 and I had neither time nor means to communicate with my master. 
 The gentleman, hot-blooded and young, gave me into arrest for 
 their detention and disappearance. The trial ensued. Since my 
 arrest I had watched and waited for some word, some sign, from 
 my master which should tell me what I should do. I waited in 
 vain : none came. I was placed in the dock, and tried for the theft 
 of the deeds. My counsel were bitter towards me, because I would 
 not be 'frank' with them and explain; I could only be silent 
 unless my master gave me freedom to speak. He knew he could 
 trust me. Besides, had he not the lad's fame and life in his power ? 
 He was there, — in court, — listening. I looked at him ; he looked 
 at me. I read * silence' hidden on his face, as the soldier saw it on 
 Napoleon's. It was enough. I was silent. It was his due, and 
 my right of obedience. He had spared my son in his error , I had 
 sworn to keep his secret till death. The trial took its course ; they 
 found me guilty. I was sentenced to ten years' penal servitude. 
 
326 Chandos, 
 
 It was a grave offence. The deeds were gone : they were nevoi 
 found : I suppose my master destroyed them. It was a fearful losa 
 for their owner, and they could not choose but judge that I had 
 held them back or burnt them, for theft or for the sake of extor- 
 tion. I suffered the punishment ; but I never broke my silence." 
 
 There was a sublime simplicity, an inexpressible grandeur, on 
 the old man, as he spoke, bowing his head as though borne down 
 by the weight of that enforced burden of silence, stretching out his 
 trembling hands as though in supplication to God to witness how 
 he had kept his oath. 
 
 Chandos, where he stood in the gloom of the poverty-stricken 
 chamber, uncovered his head with a reverent action, before the 
 sightless gaze of the blind man. 
 
 "Let the evil of your life be what it may, in that martyrdom 
 you washed it out with a nobility men seldom reach." 
 
 His words were low and heartfelt : the unconscious dignity of 
 the seK-devotion and of the fidelity to a promised word was too 
 lo% to his thought to be insulted with any offering of mere pity. 
 
 A warmth of surprise and of pleasure passed over the withered 
 olive face of the Israelite,— though it faded almost instantly. 
 
 «* It was duty," he said, simply,—'* the duty of a debtor." 
 
 ** Eather it was the sacrifice of a martyr. But he, this brutal 
 taskmaster, who could condemn you to such a doom, who con id 
 stand by and see you suffer for his sake,— what of him ?" 
 
 ** I say nothing of him : he is sacred to me 1 " 
 
 ** Sacred ! though he cursed you thus ?" 
 
 •* Sacred, because he spared my son." 
 
 Chandos bent his head. 
 
 ** I understand you ; I honour you. But it was a terable ordeal, 
 Few construe duty so. And your son, — what of him ?" 
 
 " I am as one dead to him." 
 
 Ignatius Mathias said the words very softly, whilst over the 
 bronzed, worn rigidity of his patient face came the softer look 
 which it only wore at the thought of Agostino. 
 
 " Dead to him ? Is he, then, so ungrateful ?" ^ 
 
 The Hebrew shook his head with a quick negative gesture of his 
 hands. 
 
 *< He is never ungrateful; he felt only too vividly, and he loved 
 me weU. But I had sent him out of the country before this 
 happened — sent him, my master permitting, to people of mine 
 in Mexico. It was bitter for me to sever from him. But the 
 lad's spirit was broken ; I knew nothing but change of scene could 
 ever restore him. Journals did not reach him there in the western 
 country. I learned that he was recovering health and courage, 
 was prosecuting a career for which he had from childhood shown 
 genius. I learned that he knew nothing of my arrest and of my 
 trial : I thanked God ; for I knew how it would have grieved him. 
 He might have done something very rash, had he heard that I 
 suffered or was accused. As it was, I bade them tell him I was 
 dead. It would cause him pain, great pain,— for he loved me, 
 9t»cnge as it may seem that he should,— but less pain than th« 
 
** Nihil humam a me alienum puto,'* 317 
 
 shame that most haye fallen on him with the other knowledge. 
 It was weak in me, perhaps, but 1 could not bear that my only son 
 should think, with the world, that I could be guilty of that crime. 
 And if he had not thought it, it would have been worse ; he would 
 have been galled to some act of desperation. He heard, as I say, 
 of my death ; he euflfered, but less than he would have suffered 
 knowing the truth, knowing the punishment I underwent. Yet 
 the deadliest thing in my chastisement was that I could never look 
 on his face, never listen to his voice, never let him hear that I 
 lived ! " 
 
 The old man's voice faltered slightly ; even his strength, that 
 had been like wrought iron to endure, and that had held his soul 
 in patience for so long, could not look back at that time of torture 
 and keep its force imbroken. 
 
 "At the end of ten years I was liberated. They had not been 
 cruel to me as a convict. They pitied my age, I think, though at 
 first they had little mercy because they held me a Jew thief. I 
 was free — a beggar, of course ; and at eighty-four years one cannot 
 begin the world again. Besides, I was as one branded : go where 
 I would, the police followed me, and warned others of me : I was a 
 leper and a pariah in the midst of men. I did not starve, for my 
 people are good to the helpless ; but all thought me guilty, and no 
 creature trusted me. I heard of my darling, of my son : he was 
 prosperous. He was achieving fame and success in the life he had 
 chosen : he was, I hoped, happy. I could not be so brutal, so 
 selfish, as to seek him out and say, • Behold, your father lives ! * 
 when he must have found in his father a convicted felon just set 
 free from his public punishment. I could not blight his youth 
 and his peace by rising up, as it were, from the grave, and forcing 
 in on him my age, my poverty, my disgrace, as the world held it. 
 He had mourned for me, and ceased to mourn long before : I could 
 not open his wounds afresh; I could not humiliate him with a 
 criminal's claim on him. Not that I wronged him ever, not that I 
 ever doubted him ; let me have been what I should, I knew hia 
 heai't would be tender to me, and his roof be offered me in shelter. 
 But because I knew, I could not bring that wretchedness on him ; 
 I could not injure him in the world's sight by standing by him 
 a liberated felon ; I could not torture mm by showing him my 
 wrists, on which the chains of the convict gang had weighed, 
 by bidding him look back with me upon my prison- cell, my 
 prison-shame. I left him to believe me dead. I never looked 
 upon his face except by stealth. I never listened to his voice 
 except standing hidden in some dark archway to hear him speak 
 as he passed by me in the streets. I have watched for hours under 
 the shelter of green leaves to catch one glance of him as he came 
 forth. I have waited for a whole night through, in storm or 
 enow, to see him leave some house of pleasure or some labour 
 of his art. It was my only thought, my only joy. I thanked 
 Qod that I still lived in the days when I had looked a moment on 
 his beauty. And now that too is gone. I am blind, and I hayo 
 nothing left except to listen for the echo of his step !" 
 
Chandot. 
 
 Silence followed his closing words; his beud sank, hiis hands 
 were pressed together like one who is tortured beyond his strength. 
 AH answer, all consolation, seemed mockery beside the supreme 
 renunciation and desolation of this living sacrifice of an immea« 
 surable love, that gave itself to martyrdom without a thought ol 
 its own devotion, without a memory of the vastness of its own 
 unasked and unrewarded sacrifice. 
 
 Veneration, strong as his pity, moved the blind man's auditor 
 
 ] as he heard; the heroism of the abnegation was noble in his 
 
 ^ si^bt, with a nobility that no words could dare taint or outrage 
 
 with either compassion or homage, — a nobility that raised the 
 
 Hebrew outcast to a loftier height than the great of the earth often 
 
 reach, than the sunlight of a fair fate ever gives. 
 
 ' ' Your Psalmist said that he had never beheld the righteous 
 forsaken, nor the seed of the vii'tuous begging their bread," he said, 
 slowly, at length. "How is it that you, then, are poor? You 
 ishould be in the smile of your God." 
 
 The Israelite sighed wearily. 
 
 ** It has ever seemed to me that David spoke in a bitter irony. 
 Yonder in Syria, as here among us, sin throve, doubtless, and 
 loyal faith passed unnoticed, unrecompensed by a crust. Yet I do 
 not say this for myself. I merited all I suffered. I was merci- 
 less ; I lived to want mercy. It was very just." 
 
 There was the inexorable meting out of the Mosaic code to 
 his own past, and to his own errors, in the still, calm, iron 
 lesimation. 
 
 "Moreover," he added, with a certain light and hope that 
 kindled the faded fire of bis sightless eyes, "if we follow duty 
 because it brings us gold and peace and man's applause, where is 
 there effort in the choice of it ? It is only when it is hard that 
 there can be any loyalty in its acceptance. Not that / should 
 speak of this. I loved evil and avarice and cruelty too long, and 
 followed them too fondly." 
 
 "At the least, vour atonement might outweigh the crime of 
 a Cain 1" 
 
 The Hebrew sighed wearily again. 
 
 " Oim evil ever be outweighed ? I doubt it. We may strive to 
 atone, but we can never efface. The past work spreads, and 
 spreads, and spreads, Uke a river broken from its banks; and 
 all the coffer-dams we raise in our atonement cannot stay the 
 rushing of the waters we have once let loose. Ah ! if when evil 
 is begun we knew where it would stretch, men's hands would be 
 kept pure from the very dread of their own awful omnipotence for 
 
 The words died faintly away. Bemorse had too wide a ^art in 
 this man's memories for any thought that he redeemed his past 
 crimes by his present sacrifice to have power to enter into him in 
 any form of consolation. 
 
 He recovered himself with an effort, raising his blind eyes as 
 though he could still read the face of the one who listened to him. 
 
 *' Sir, you have heard me with a gentie patience. I thank you* 
 
" Nihil humani a me alienum puto.*' 329 
 
 1 never spoke of these things until I spoke them now to you. 
 Your voice is sweet and compassionate ; it seems to me as though 
 I had once heard it before now. Will you tell me your name 
 among men?" 
 
 " Willingly; though I have no memory that we have ever met 
 before. My name is Chandos." 
 
 A change, as intense as though some sudden pang of disease had 
 seized him, convulsed the Israelite's whole frame ; his thin withered 
 lips closed tight, as though to hold in words that rushed to them ; 
 his hands clenched together, A revulsion passed over him, as if 
 the whole dark, poisonous, pent tide of his past years swept in, 
 killing with their return all the higher and better thoughts that 
 but now had ruled him. 
 
 ** Do you know me ?" asked Chandos, in surprise. 
 
 The Spamsh Jew answered with an effort, and hie voice was 
 harsh and jarring : — 
 
 '* I know your name, sir ; aU the world does." 
 
 Ohandos looked at him with awakened curiosity : the agitation 
 which this old man showed at his recognition was scarcely com- 
 patible with the mere scant knowledge of his public reputation. 
 Btill, no remembrance of the solitary morning in the porphyi-y 
 chamber, when he had seen the Castilian, came to him. In that 
 terrible hour he had only been conscious of a sea of imfamiliar 
 feces, — thirsty faces eager for his wealth, strange faces forcing 
 themselves in to see the ruin of his race, and hungry, insolent 
 faces gathered there to be the witnesses of his abdication an.i 
 his faU. He remembered them distinctly no more than Scipio 
 could have remembered the features of each unit of the libellous 
 crowd that thronged about him to attaint his honour and discrown 
 his dignity, until beneatii the shadow of the Temple of Jupiter ho 
 rebuked them with one word, — " Zama." 
 
 " If you know my name, then," he said, after a slight pause, 
 *' I hope you wiU let it be a guarantee to you that I will do my 
 utmost to serve you, if you will but show me the way. You 
 interest me powerfully, and I honour you from my heart. Can I 
 not help you ? " 
 
 The old man turned away, and leaned over the lamp, so shading 
 it that the light burned low : he had learned the marvellous self- 
 guidance of the blind in those matters, and knew by its warmth 
 8iat the flame was high and fell upon his face. 
 
 "No one can help me, sir. That I may be forgotten is all I 
 ask." 
 
 **Do you mistrust my willingness, then? I hope not," said 
 Chandos, gently* He noted the harsh, abrupt change in the Jew's 
 manner ; but te thought it might be but the weariness and way- 
 wardness of old age and long and bitter endurance. 
 
 ** I mistrust you in nothing," said the Hebrew, while his voice 
 was very low. ** But I need no aid : my people will not let me 
 want. I thank you for your goodness ; and I bid you remember 
 me no more." 
 
 Tkflve w»8 « mingled austerity and appeal in the tone thftt gayc 
 
5JO Chandos, 
 
 it a singular vibration of feeling ; in it there was something lik« 
 the thrill of shame. 
 
 Chandos lingered a moment still ; he was loath to leave the old 
 and sightless sufferer to his solitude, yet he saw that his presence 
 was unwelcome now, however gratitude forbade the Israelite to 
 say it. 
 
 "But your people forsake you," he persisted, gently; **you 
 have but a dog for your friend. I have known what such solitude 
 is ; I would gladly aid you in yours. Will you not trust me with 
 your name, at the least ? — or your son's name ? " 
 
 The Hebrew turned resolutely away, though his voice trembled 
 as he replied, — 
 
 ' ' My son's will never pass my lips. Mine was buried for ever in 
 my felon's cell. I have told you — I am dead! Leave me, sir; 
 and believe me an ingrate, if you will. I have been many thin^a 
 that are worse." 
 
 Chandos looked at hinn regretfully, wonderingly ; he was loath 
 to quit the chamber in which so strange and so nameless a tale 
 had been unfolded to him. 
 
 " There is nothing worse ; but I shall credit no evil of you," he 
 answered ; '* and when you need friendship or assistance, think of 
 my name, and send to me." 
 
 There was no reply : the face of the blind man was turned from 
 him. He waited a moment longer, then went out, and closed the 
 iiaiTow door of the room, leaving the Hebrew to his loneliness. 
 
 He would willingly have done more here, but he knew not how> 
 
 The little dog, sole companion of the Castilian's solitude, nest- 
 ling to him, as the door closed, with caressing fondness, felt ^eat 
 tears fall slowly one by one upon its pretty head, and lifted itself 
 eagerly to fondle closer in the old man's bosom. But I^atius 
 Mathias paid it no heed ; he had no answering word for it : his 
 hands were wi'ung together in an agony. 
 
 '• Oh, God ! " he murmured, ** and I lent my aid to rob, to ruin, 
 to destroy hii^-i ! Oh, God ! why could I not die before he heaped 
 the fire on my guilty head, with his gentle words, with his pitying 
 mercy ? " 
 
 CHAPTEE Vn. 
 
 "PALE OOMME UN BEAU SOIB D'AUTOMNE." 
 
 As Chandos descended the staircase, he paused to ask a woman, 
 who seemed mistress of the house, the Hebrew's name. She gave 
 him the alias by which the old man was known there. It told 
 him nothing : the real name would scarcely have told more. The 
 whole time of his adversity was almost a blank in his memory, 
 blotted out at the moment of his suffering by that suffering's sheer 
 intensity, and effaced yet more utterly, later on, by the gambler's 
 orgies into which for a year he had sunk without an effort at re- 
 demption. It seemed to him sometimes now that the cloudless 
 
" Pale comme un beau soir d'automne^' 331 
 
 life he had led ere then must haye been the golden and lotus- 
 teeped dream of some summer night : of the darkness which had 
 followed on its ending he had barely more recollection than a man 
 has of iJie phantasma of fever. Between the night when he had 
 first learned his irreparable losses, and that on which he had been 
 struck down by his foe in the court of the Temple, all was a blank 
 to him, from which a few broken points of terrible remembrance 
 alone stood out, — the sole measure- marks in that wide waste of 
 desolation. 
 
 The stairs were narrow and crooked, ill lit by a dusky oil-lamp 
 flickering low in its socket. Something in the house had seemed 
 familiar to him, and as he passed downward he knew it again. It 
 was the place in which he had laid dying and imconscious, with 
 the winter stars looking down through the broken garret-roof, and 
 the dog's fidelity alone watching beside him. He shuddered as he 
 recalled it : for the moment the thought stole on him, would it not 
 haye been better that his life should have ended there ? The rich- 
 ness and the frailty of his nature alike had needed light and colour, 
 and the sweetness of delight, and the vivid hues of beauty and of 
 pleasure. Now that, like Adam, he had long toiled alone in the 
 pleak and barren earth of his exile, like Adam he might have 
 gathered the bitter wisdom of far-reaching knowledge ; but also. 
 like Adam, the gates of Paradise had closed on him for ever. He 
 was a wanderer, and without joy ; there were times, as he had 
 said that night, when he wished to God that it had been given him 
 to die in his youth. 
 
 As he passed now down the stairs, the black, sweeping folds of a 
 woman's dress touched him t he paused to give her space. In the 
 gleam of the lamp-light a face, still beautiful, though haggard and 
 darkened, was turned on him : it was the face of Beatrix Lennox. 
 
 She started, and a gentler, better look shadowed and softened 
 her features. 
 
 'Tom/" 
 
 She knew him, — knew him as soon as her eyes lighted on him in 
 that dusky yellow gloom,— this woman who, in the midst of a 
 reckless, sensuous, unscrupulous, world-defiant life, had borne 
 him a tenderness as silent as death, pure as light. His face was 
 graven on her heart, — that face which she had first known in all 
 the splendour and all the radiance of its earliest manhood, — which 
 she had recognised once in the blackness of the stormy, snow- 
 veiled winter night, — which she knew now in the dignity and the 
 Badness of its later years. 
 
 He paused a moment, surprised and uncertain. All that past 
 time was so dim to him, all remembrance of her had been so 
 merged in the misery he had endured on the night of their last 
 parting, when he had learned that the one he then loved had for- 
 saken him, and had been so swept away in the blank of starvation 
 and of bodily illness which had succeeded it, that he had little 
 memory of all he had owed her in that wintry midnight when she 
 had found him sinking into the sleep of death. It was confused, 
 and it made indistinct even his knowledge of her as she stood be- 
 
332 Ckandos, 
 
 Bide him now, after the passage of so many years. Her eyes> once 
 
 8o victorious in their empire, so unsparing m their sorcery, dwell 
 on him with an extreme desolation. 
 
 ' ' Ah ! you have forgotten me ? Well you may ; even Death 
 forgets me, I think." 
 
 Her voice, so liquid and so silver-sweet, stirred his memory 
 jis the features in their change could not do. He took her hands 
 in his. 
 
 "Forgotten? Never. Do not so wrong my gratitude. Somo 
 part of my life seems a blank to me ; but that life lived in me at 
 all was owing to you. And now that we meet, how can I thank 
 you ? There are no words for such a service." 
 
 She smiled, though her eyes still dwelt on him with that desolate 
 and longing look. 
 
 '*Is it so great a service to save life? Mercy were rather the 
 other way. Yet perhaps not for you ; you have made a noble use 
 of adversity. But it was little enough / did. I would have served 
 you, God knows ; but the power was never mine." 
 
 He looked at her with a pang at his heart. All the companions 
 of that joyous royalty, in which Fortune had seemed but the slave 
 to obey ms wish and to crown his desire, were dead or lost, for- 
 gotten or unknown to him, now; and her voice struck chords 
 long unsounded and better left in peace, — awoke memories of a 
 worid abandoned for ever, of a youth for ever gone. Those long 
 nights of pleasure, those dazzling eyes of women, those chimes 
 of laughter without a care, those flower-smothered Cleopatran 
 revels, those hours of careless joyance that had not a thought of 
 the morrow, — how far away they seemed ! He stood looking down 
 on her in the sombre shadow of the wretched staircase, his thoughts 
 rather in the past than with her. He did not know that she loved 
 him, — he had never known it, — Gloved him so that she, the reckless 
 and lawless Bohemian, would for his sake, had it been possible, 
 have led the noblest life that ever woman led on earth, — loved him 
 so that, through that purer love hating herself, she would no more, 
 in the days of her beauty, have wooed him to her than she would 
 have slain him, no more have oflPered him her tenderness than she 
 would have olTei'>d him hemlock, — loved him too well ever to 
 summon him amiAidt her lovers. 
 
 " How is it that we have never met ?" he asked her, — " never 
 met until in such a place as this and at such an hour ? " 
 
 She smiled. Bite had looked on his face many and many a time, 
 unseen herself ; she had suffered for him in his bitterness, she had 
 j^loried in his endurance, though she had never gone nigh him, but 
 had rather withdrawn herself from every chance of recognition. 
 
 ' ' You have never seen me ? I have been lon^ dead, you know. 
 Women die when their beauty dies. Oome within: I have one 
 word to say to you." 
 
 She turned into a chamber somewhat lower on the staircase* 
 ooor, dark, chilly, in the feeble light of flickering candles. 
 
 " You live here ? " 
 
 When be had known this woman^ she had commanded what she 
 
* Pale comme un tieau sotf tfauiomne,** 333 
 
 would from peers and princes, who had been only too proud to be 
 allowed the honour of ruin for her sake. 
 
 She flung off her the heavy folds of her cloak ; and, as the richei 
 hues of the dress beneath were dimly caught in the faint light, 
 there was something still of the old regality which had made 
 Beatrix Lennox the fairest name and the haughtiest queen in tho 
 vhole of the dauntless army of the Free Companions. 
 
 ** No ; I am not quite so bad as that yet. I came here to-night 
 to see one who is dying fast, with not a living soul to tend him." 
 
 ** Ah ! you belied the charity of your heart, then ? at least you 
 know the mercy of human pity still, as you knew it once for me." 
 
 ** Hush ! Chanty? Mine ? You do not know what you say. 
 Is repenting of a mmionth part of a torrent of evil — charity ? The 
 man who dies there was my victim. Years ago I di'ew him on till 
 he fooled away everything he owned for my sake. I cared no 
 more for him than for the sands of the sea ; but it amused me t« 
 watch how far his folly would go. He loved his wife ; I made him 
 hate her. He had ambition ; I made him scoff at it. He had 
 riches ; I made him squander them for an hour's caprice of mine. 
 He had honours ; I made him trail them in the mud, like Ealeigh's 
 cloak, that I might set my foot on them. Well, then I flung him 
 away like a faded flower, like a beryl out of fashion ; and I find 
 him, years after, dying in want and shame. Call mine charity r 
 Call me a murderess, rather ! " 
 
 There were no tears in her eyes ; but there were more intense 
 misery and remorse in the calm words than ever tears yet uttered. 
 
 He looked on her with infinite compassion. 
 
 " / call you nothing harsh : you were at least my savioiir." 
 
 Her beautiful, dark, wild eyes gazed at him with gi-atitude, in 
 which no acceptance of the forgiveness of herself mingled. 
 
 ** Ah, Chandos, I am heart-sick of the world's babble about t/otir 
 sex's tempting. It is we who tempt you ; it is lue who bUudfold 
 vou, — we who are never satisfied till we have won youi- lives to 
 break them, — we who curse you in sin and in pleasure, in license 
 and in marriage, — ive who, if we see you at peace, think our vanity 
 is at stake till we drive peace away ! The moralists rant of us as 
 martyrs ! They little know that our mockery of love destroys a 
 thousand-fold more lives than it has ever blessed." 
 
 She spoke with passionate bitterness. He answered nothing; 
 he felt the truth of her words too weU ; and yet with the thoughts 
 of love there stole on him one fresh, one .v.f<- memory, — that of the 
 ehild Castalia. 
 
 Beatrix Lennox roused herself with the smile which even in its 
 Badness had something of the sorcery that nature had given her» 
 and that death alone could take away. 
 
 ** Forgive me! It was not to speak of these things that I 
 brought you here. It was but to ask you, have you found yet 
 vho IS your worst foe ? " 
 
 " Yes ; I was my own." 
 
 *' WeU, you were, — ^because you loved others better thaii you 
 k>yed yourself. But that is not my meaning. Long ago. did ycra 
 
334 
 
 Chandos. 
 
 ever receive an acLonymous letter that warned you against Johs 
 Trevenna?" 
 His face darkened at the name. He paused, silent for a moment. 
 
 She gave him no time to reply. 
 
 '• If you did, I wrote it." 
 
 "You?" 
 
 *' I ! T dared not warn you more openly ; I was in his power, 
 as he had so many in his power. I knew that he hated you 
 terribly, bitterly. There was something between you he never 
 pardoned. Why was it ? What wrong had you ever done him ? " 
 
 <* None : I only served him." 
 
 *' Ah ! then it was that he could not forgive ! I knew it as 
 women know many things men never dream that they even divine. 
 I knew it by a thousand slight signs, a thousand half-betray ale, 
 which escaped his caution and your notice, but which told his 
 secret to me. As for its root, I knew nothing. It was jealousy ; 
 
 lares grow to choke the wheat, it is always our hands that sow 
 themP' , ^ 
 
 ' * A woman ? " He thought of the words that, lon^ years before, 
 had been spoken by the old man whom his adversity had slain. 
 " There was no love -feud between us; and I doubt if love ever 
 touched him ; he was not one to harbour it." 
 
 ** An egotist can always love well enough to deny what he loves 
 to another. Be the cause what it will, he hated you,— hates still, 
 I have no doubt, though the world has found out an idol and a 
 celebrity in him. Ah, Heaven I what a travesty of all justice is 
 that man's success ! " 
 
 ** It is the due of his intellect." 
 
 It was not in him to disparage the merits or the a,ttainments oi 
 his foe. She looked at him with a wonder in which mingled some- 
 thing of impatience, more of veneration. 
 
 " You speak weU of your worst traitor ! " 
 
 *' I but give him the due of his abilities ; you would not, Burely, 
 have me do less?" 
 
 *' But you know he is your vilest enemy." 
 
 " Yes ; he has declared himself so." 
 
 " And still you give him generous words P " 
 
 " Words r 'Wbat are words ? If it ever came to deeds, I might 
 prove little better thar ->* in brute vengeance." 
 
 The animal lust, the evil leaven, which lie in the loftiest and the 
 purest forms of human nature, ready to rouse and steep themselver 
 m Cain's revenge, were on him as he spoke. He knew how this 
 man's outrage had power to move him ; he knew how, if vengeance 
 ever came into his hand, he would have passion in its using, beside 
 "R-hich all the tolerance and self-knowledge gathered from suffering 
 v.ould break like reeds, would crumble as ashes. 
 
 She watched him still with that ssone blent wonder and reverence 
 in her aching eyes. 
 
** Pale comme tM beau tfoir ttautomne,** 555 
 
 " Ohandos, for less than this Iscaxiot's crime men haye cursed 
 their foes living and dying ; and you — ^you still are just to In'm ! " 
 
 ** Because the man is vile, would you have me sink so low 
 myself as to deny him his meed of intellect, and decry his success, 
 like a mortified woman who depreciates her rival ? He is famous, 
 and his intellect deserves his fame. But think me none the better 
 that I say so. There are times when I could find it in me, if a 
 reckoning came between us, to wring life out of him as I might 
 wring it out of any snake that poisoned me." 
 
 There was the vibration of intense passion in the words, though 
 they were low-spoken. As the evil influence of Trevenna had 
 betrayed his youth and drawn his manhood to its ruin, so it entered 
 him now and tilled him with the virus of brute longing, and diook 
 to their roots the proud patience and the pain-taught self-discipline 
 which he had learned in the years of his exile. There were tunes 
 when, remembering the friendship and the gifts he had lavished on 
 this man, and remembering the taunts, the mockery, the hatred, 
 the injury with which he had in turn been requited, he could have 
 gone back to the old barbaric weapons, and dealt with the traitor 
 hand to hand, blow for blow. 
 
 The venom of envy could never enter him ; but he would have 
 been more than human if, through these many years of loss, and 
 weariness, and divorce from all he had once loved and owned, the 
 triumphant passage of the man who would but for his aid have 
 been obscured in a debtor's prison, the plaudits that the world 
 bestowed on the man whom he knew base as any assassin who 
 slew what had saved and succoured him, had not possessed an 
 exceeding bitterness for him, — had not sickened him oftentimes of 
 all hope or belief in justice, earthly or divine. Once G^evenna 
 had hoped to wreck his genius as well as his peace, his intellect as 
 well as his fortune, his soul as well as his beauty and his heritage. 
 Once Trevenna had loved to think that his well-planned murder 
 would kill in its victim all higjher instincts, all likeness of honour, 
 and all purity of conscience : it was possible that, even at the end, 
 his wish might find fruition,— that, under the weight of accumu- 
 lated wrongs, long-chained passions and long-stained endurance 
 might give way and find their fall in dealing retribution, which, 
 just in its chastisement, would still be the forbidden justice of 
 some involuntary and avenging crime. Some thought of this 
 passed over the mind of the world-worn and reckless Bohemian 
 who gazed at him. She stooped forward eagerly, and, in the 
 yellow shadows, the softened emotion that was upon it lent the 
 fairness of other years to her face. 
 
 " Chandos, whatever he be, he is beneath you. An evil impulse 
 wrung from you is more than all his baseness is worth. He has 
 robbed you, I believe, of much ; but his worst robbery will be if 
 ever he wrench from you your better, your nobler nature.'* 
 
 An impatient sigh escaped him. 
 
 " That is to speak idly. I am no better than other men ; and I 
 am no demi-god, to rise above all natural passions and see evil 
 tiiuinph unmoved. It were a poor. Dalti^ vanity to noint at his 
 
3j6 Chandoi 
 
 successes and tell men they were unjust because the winner of 
 them was my foe. He is famous ; let them make him so. But not 
 the less, if ever the power of chastisement come into my hands, 
 shall I hold the widest as his due. Eobbed me, you say P Yes, I 
 believe now that half my ruin was robbery, or little better ; but 
 the theft was wisely to windward of the law. .If he thieved from 
 me, there was no proof of it." 
 
 She shook her head. 
 
 " He was too keen, too prudent, too wise. Devour your sub- 
 stance I know that he did ; but he would have ever been mindful 
 of Bible precedent, and would only have taken your inheritance 
 by persuading you to disinherit yourself for some pottage of 
 
 Eleasure or of indolence. Men who break laws are, at their best, 
 ut half knave, half fool : he is too able to be numbered among 
 them." 
 
 "Doubtless I the world's greatest criminals are those who 
 never stand in a dock," he answered her, as his mind went back 
 to the story of the blind Hebrew. *' There is a man here, a Jew, 
 whose history tells that: he rejects all assistance, almost all 
 sympathy ; but he merits both. Will you see him, if it be 
 possible?" 
 
 "Surely, — for you. A blind Jew? I have noticed him as I 
 passed; but I am no fit missionary of consolation to any living 
 thing ! J, Beatrix Lennox ! " 
 
 " Well, you," he said, gently, — " you aro Jiero on an errand of 
 mercy to-night." 
 
 She flashed on him a glance almost fierce, had it not been bo 
 melancholy. 
 
 ** Orand. chose ! I am here because one whom I muidered lies 
 dying, without a creature to tend his death-bed. A noble mission, 
 truly ! Ah, Chandos, I am not one of those miserable cravens 
 who, having given all the flower of their years to the working of 
 evil, buy a cheap virtue back by insulting a God they disbelieved 
 in over their revels, with the offer of the few tame, barren, un- 
 tempted years they have left them ! That is a wretched travesty, 
 a tarrible blasphemy ; do not think I stoop to it. And yet you~- 
 you who know human nature so well, and are so gentle to it, 
 though it basely abandoned you — you,?iWho have the heart of a 
 poet and the tolerance of a philosopher— will believe me when I 
 tell you that there are times when I hate myself more utterly than 
 any ever hated me, justly though they had cause? You will 
 know that there may be so vast an evil in us, and yet that there 
 may linger some conscience?" Her words swept on, without 
 waiting for answer. " You never knew my story. None will ever 
 know it, —as it was. I was sold into marriage, almost in child- 
 hood, as slave-girls are sold to a harem. Well, if I hated my 
 bondage as they hate theirs, where was the wonder ? where wai 
 the sin P But that matters nothing. Those who err can always 
 find apology of their error; I will be no such coward. Still, it 
 was through this that John Trevenna had his hold on me. My 
 hu(>l3And "^^her dark, imperial face still flushed and the long 
 
" Pale comme un beau soir (Tautomne." ^J7 
 
 nazel eyes still flashed at the words — *' held his wife's charms only 
 as his property, to turn to such account as he would. He was 
 very poor, very extravagant. He found that rich men, fashionable 
 men, admiring me, gave horses and carriages, and venison, and 
 game, and dinners, and invitations to great houses, and anything 
 and everything, and would play on in our drawing-rooms at 
 whist and billiards till the stakes and the bets rose to thousands 
 and tens of thousauds. You can guess the rest. I was his decoy- 
 loird. What a school of shamelessness for a girl not twenty ! How 
 I loathed it ! how I loathed it ! — only the more because it was 
 glossed over with fashion. Well, Trevenna had immense sway 
 over Colonel Lennox ; he had it over every one, when he cared to 
 attain it. He saw my hatred of the part I was driven to play ; he 
 contrived to lighten it. He never hinted any love ; it served to 
 give me confidence in him ; he was the only man who never spoke 
 of it to me, never so much as whispered a thought of it. He 
 earned my gratitude by freeing me from my husband's persecu- 
 tion ; but he made me understand that, in return, I must serve 
 bim by acquainting him with all the embarrassments, all the 
 weaknesses, of the innumerable men about me. I was glad to 
 comply : the terms seemed light, and, mind you, they were only 
 tacitly offered. I bought my freedom by being his tool. I did 
 not know I did harm then : I have believed, since, that I did more 
 than when I allured them by my coquetries that my husband 
 might win their gold at pool or at cards. That was how I came 
 into Trevenna' s power; that was why I dared not write more 
 openly to you of a hatred I had fathomed, though he had never 
 uttered it. Forgive me, Chandos, if you can, for so much weak- 
 ness, so much selfishness ! " 
 
 He had listened, absorbed in the history she told, in the dark 
 and cruel pressure which had been upon one whom the world had 
 held so heartless, so reckless, so wayward, so dazzling : he started 
 at the last words like one whose dream is broken. 
 
 *' Forgive ! I have nothing to forgive. I had no claim that you 
 ahould care for my friends or my foes. And this was the way he 
 gained his power ! My God ! is it possible " 
 
 He did not end his words ; the thought swept past him, extra- 
 vagant and vague, were the taskmaster of Beatrix Lennox and 
 fche taskmaster of the Castilian Jew one and the same? She 
 looked up ; she saw his face darken ; she heard his breath catch 
 as, for the first time, the possibility that his enemy was the tyrant 
 whose hand had lain so heavy on the Hebrew, flashed on him. 
 
 ** What is it?" 
 
 "Your words have brought a strange fancy to me; that is all. 
 A groundless one, perhaps, yet one I must follow." 
 
 She rose ; and her deep, sad eyes dwelt on him with a love that 
 she had never let him read, — she in whose hands love had been 
 hut a net and a snare. 
 
 '* Follow it, then, and Gk>d speed you I It is of your enemy, of 
 my bondmaster P " 
 
 He bent his head in silence. Thoughts had rushed in on him 
 
3j8 Chandos. 
 
 with so sudden and so passionate a force that to frame them to 
 
 words was impossible; they were baseless and shapeless as a 
 
 dream, but they came with an irresistible might of conviction. 
 
 He waited a moment, with the mechanical instinct of courtesy. 
 «* Can I not aid you ? The dying man whom you spoke of, can 
 
 I do nothing for him ? " 
 
 She gave a gesture of dissent, almost savage, — if the softness of 
 
 her inalienable grace could have ever let her be so. 
 
 " Why always think of others instead of yourself? You had 
 
 never been ruined but for that sublime folly! No; you can do 
 
 nothing for him. He will be dead by the dawn. I killed him. 
 
 I never cared for him ; but I do care that you should not look on 
 
 my work. It has been thoroughly done : no woman ever wrecks 
 
 by halves." 
 There was in the half-ironic, half- scornful calmness of the words 
 
 a grief deeper than lies in any abandonment of sorrow. He 
 
 stooped over her an instant, touched, and forgetting his own 
 
 thoughts in hers. 
 
 " I do not say. Feel no remorse ; for that were to say, Deny the 
 
 truest of your instincts. But you were cruelly wronged, cruelly 
 
 driven. There is much nobility still, where so much tenderness 
 
 lingers. Farewell : we shall meet again ?" 
 
 She looked at him with that long, lingering look that had so 
 
 hopeless a melancholy. 
 
 " Ah ! I do not know. Death will be here to-night; perhaps he 
 
 wiU be gentle and generous for once, and take me with him, — at 
 least, if his promised sleep have no awakening. There is the fear, 
 
 — the old Hamlet-fear, never set at rest either way ! " 
 
 He left her ; and she leaned awhile against the bare table, her 
 hands clenched in the still rich masses of her hair, her lips pressed 
 in a close weary line, her eyes fiUing slowly with tears. 
 
 "Ah!" she mused, in the achijag of her heart, **have nine- 
 f cnths of us ever any real chance to be the best we might P If I 
 had lived for him, if he had ever loved me, or one like him, 
 no woman would have been truer, gentler, purer, stronger to serve 
 him, or more utterly under his law and at his feet, than 1 1 " 
 
 He left her, and went again upward to the Hebrew's chamber. 
 A strange instinct of vengeance, a sudden impulse of belief, urged 
 him on. Though no hint had been dropped that the Jew's tyrant 
 was the enemy of his own life, a conviction strong as knowledge 
 nad centred in him that the man spoken of was John Trevenna. 
 He thrust the door open hurriedly, and entered ; the little lamp 
 still burned dully there, but the blind IsraeUte and the dog were 
 both gone. Standing alone in the desolation of the narrow 
 chamber, he could almost have believed that the tale he had 
 heard had been a di-eam of the night, and the antique form ol 
 the old man but one of its sleep-born phantoms. There had passed 
 but the space which he had spent with Beatrix Lennox since he 
 had been told the recital : yet either answer was purposely denied 
 to his questions, or the refuge the Jew had sought amidst the 
 people of bi>^ nation was too secret to be unearthed, for no search 
 
"Pale comme un Beau soir etautomne,** 339 
 
 and no inquiry brought a trace of him; he was lost, with the 
 vague outline of his history left unfilled, lost in the wide wilder- 
 ness of a large city's nameless poverty. 
 
 With its memory upon him, Chandos went out into the grey, 
 subdued light of the now-breaking dawn ; the thoughts which had 
 moved him had stirred depths which time had long sealed. For 
 many years he had striven to put from him the remembrance alike 
 of his wrongs and of his losses ; he had believed the first to be 
 beyond avenging, as the latter were beyond redemption ; he had 
 etnven to live only the impersonal life of the thinker, of the 
 scholar, to leave behind him alike the unnerving weight of regret 
 and the baneful indulgence of a vain suspicion. But here the 
 things of those dead days had risen and forced themselves on him ; 
 to his mind came what until then had not touched him, — the belief 
 that his foe had dealt him wider treachery than the mere treachery 
 of friendship, — that Trevenna had done more than leave him 
 unwarned in a dangerous downward course, but had robbed him 
 and trepanned him under the smooth suiface of fair and honest 
 service. The utter extravagance and heedlessness of his joyous 
 reign had left him no title to accuse another of causing any share 
 of the destruction which followed on it ; and the organisation of his 
 mind was one to which such an accusation could but very slowly, 
 and only on sheer certainty, suggest itself. Yet now, looking back- 
 ward to innumerable memories, he believed that, in the pale of the 
 law, his traitor had been as guilty of embezzlement as any within the 
 law's arraignment; he believed that his antagonist had tempted, 
 blinded, robbed, and betrayed him on a set and merciless scheme. 
 
 Eecalling the points of the Spanish Jew's relation, slight and 
 nameless as the recital had been in much, something that was nea?^ 
 the actual truth came before his thoughts. He remembered how 
 heavily the claims of a money-lender's house had pressed on him 
 for obligations in his own name, and for those where his name had 
 been lent to others. If his foe and the Hebrew's tjaant were one, 
 how vast a network of intrigue and fraud might there not have 
 been wound about him ! It was but imagination, it was but 
 analogy and possibility, that suggested themselves vaguely to 
 him: yet they fastened there, and an instinct for the "wild 
 justice " of revenge woke with it, passionate and unsparing. To 
 fling his foe down and hold him in a death-gripe, as the hound pulls 
 down the boar, was a longing as intense upon him in its dominion 
 as it was on David of Israel, when the treachery of men and ihe 
 triumph of evil-doers broke asunder his faith and wrxmg the fire 
 of imprecation from his lips. 
 
 As he looked back on all he had suffered, all he had lost, all ho 
 had seen die out from him for ever, and all that for ever had for- 
 saken him, he felt the black blood of the old murderous instinct 
 latent in all human hearts rise and burn in him : utterly foreign to 
 bis nature, once grafted, it took the deadlier hold. 
 
 " O God I " he said, half aloud, in his clenched teeth, as he 
 passed the entrance of the misej-aJbLa house, ** shall his crimefl never 
 find him out f*' 
 
34° Chathioi. 
 
 These crimes had given his betrayer a long immunity, they had 
 given him a lifetime of success ; mey had given him riches and 
 mvour and the fruition of ripe ambitions ; they had given him the 
 ilenire of his heart and the laurels of the world : — would the time 
 Bver come when they shoald be quoted against him and strip him 
 ''wre in the sight of the people? The bitterness of unbelief, the 
 v<jnriness of desolation, fell on Chandos as the doubt pursued him. 
 ilo had cleaved to honour for its own sake, and had loved and 
 •rved men, asking no recompense; and he remained without 
 ivward. Pui'suing fraud, and tyranny, and the wisdom of sell- 
 love, and the tortuous routes of vmscrupulous sagacity, his enemy 
 [nospered in the sight of the world, and put his hand to nothing 
 cliat ever failed him. There was a pitiless, cold, mocking sarcasm 
 111 the contrast, which left the problem of human existence dark as 
 night in its mystery, which shook and loosened the one sheot- 
 iii ichor of his life, — ^his loyalty to truth for truth's own sake. 
 
 The heart-sickness of Pilate's doubt was on him ; and he asked 
 ill his soul, ♦• What is truth ?" 
 
 As he passed out into the narrow-arched doorway, some young 
 jeveUers reeled past him, — handsome, dissolute, titled youths, wlio 
 had been flinging themselves in the air in the mad dances till the 
 dawn, at a bSl of the people, dressed as Pierrots and Arlequins. 
 They were going now to their waiting carriages, talking and 
 liiughing, while the sound of their voices echoed through the 
 blilEiess of the breaking day in disjointed sentences. 
 
 '* Castalia ! Beau nom ! Selling lilies with a face like a Titian : 
 — how poetic I " 
 
 "Very. But somebody, apparently, had left her to the very 
 diill prose of wanting her bread, — a common colophon to our 
 idyls I" 
 
 "Wandering with a few flowers; and Villeroy coula neither 
 tempt her nor trap her ! He must have been very bite ! Or 
 ehe " 
 
 " A Pythoness. He is terribly sore on the subject. Pardieu t I 
 wish we had her here ! Women grow dreadfully ugly." 
 
 They had passed, almost ere the sense of the words had reached 
 his ear and pierced the depths of his thoughts : involuntarily he 
 paused where he stood in the entrance. 
 
 "Castalia!" 
 
 He murmured the name with a pang ; the indefinite words he 
 had heard suggested so terrible a Me for her ; and his heart went 
 out to her in an infinite tenderness, — that beautiful child, bril- 
 j-^nt as any passion-flower, desolate as any stricken fawn ! " 
 
 "tfhoisaheP" 
 
 Beatiix Lennox, standing imseen near him, heard alike the 
 i-evellaf s* words and his echo of the name. 
 
 He tiarted and turned to her. 
 
 " ' She whom they spoke of P I do not know ; at least, I hope to 
 l&javen I do not I '^ 
 
 * ' But the one who is in your thoughts ? " 
 
 8h«t who loyed lam, had caught the softness of his yoioe and its 
 
" Pale comme un beau soir d'atttomne,** 34) 
 
 eager dread as he had repeated the name that had suddenly floated 
 to his ear in the depths of Paris. He paused a moment; then lie 
 answered her : — 
 
 *' You have a woman's heart ; if it can feel pity, know it for her. 
 She is nameless, motherless, friendless; and I could only— as a 
 harsh mercy, yet the best left to me— leaAe her." 
 
 Her face grew paler ; her lips set slightly. 
 
 " You loved her, Chandos ?" 
 
 An impatient sigh escaped him. 
 
 •*No ! at least tnose follies are dead with my youth. If we had 
 met earlier " 
 
 "Love is not dead in you; it will revive," she said, simply. 
 «* Tell me of her." 
 
 "There is nothing to tell. Her parentage is unknown; sh« 
 lives below YaUombrosa, and has but this one name,— CastaUa, 
 She will have the beauty and the genius of a Corinne; and 
 ehe lies under the ban of illegitimacy, with no haven except a 
 convent." 
 
 •' But if she be the one of whom those youths spoke P The name 
 is rare." 
 
 •• Hush ! do not hint it ! If harm reach her, I shall feel myself 
 guilty of her f.it«." 
 
 •• What, then ? You only forsook her when you had wearied of 
 herP" 
 
 ** No : you mislnko me. No man could weary of that exquibite 
 life ; and it is ns soilleBs as it is fair. I meant but this . — I believe 
 her young heart was mine, though no love-words passed between 
 us ; and I lia\-e doubted sometimes if my tardy mercy were not a 
 cold and brutal cruelty. Because passion has no place in my own 
 life, I forgot that regret could have any place in hers." 
 
 He spoke gravely, and his memory wandered from his listener 
 away to that summer eve when some touch of the old soft folly 
 had come back on him as his lips had met Castalia's, — away to the 
 hours when the lustrous eloquence of her beaming eyes had re- 
 flected his thoucchts, almost ere they had been uttered, in that pure 
 and perfect sympathy without which love is but a toy of the senses, 
 a plaything of the passions. 
 
 Beatrix Lennox looked at him long in silence. 
 
 ** She M dear to you P" 
 
 "HI let her be so, it would be the sure signal for her loss to 
 me." 
 
 Then bending his head to her in farewell, he went out into the 
 dawn alone. 
 
 Beatrix Lennox stood in the dark and narrow entrance, watching 
 him as be passed away in the twilight of the dawn, through whicli 
 the yellow flicker of the street-lights was burning dully. Her 
 hlack robes fell about her like the laces of the Spanish women ; her 
 face was very pale, for there was no bloom of art on its cheeks to- 
 night, and her largo eyes were suffused with tears over the dark- 
 i^ess of their hazel gleam. There was beauty still in her, — the 
 beauty of an autumn evening, that has the faded sadness of dead 
 
34!i Chandot, 
 
 hopes, and the tempest-clouds of past storms on its pale Bunles* 
 skies and on the red fire of its fallen leaves. 
 
 "He loves her, or he will love," she mummred, in her solitude 
 ■* I will seek out this child, and see if she be worthy of him. Ah 
 no woman will be that ! A great man's life lies higher than <mi 
 love, loftier than our reach." 
 
 A feyr nours later, in the wi-iting- cabinet of her Roman villa, a 
 famous diplomatist sat,— one who wove her fine nets around all 
 the body politic of the Continent, who schemed far away with 
 Eastern questions and Western complications, who had her hand 
 in Austria, her eyes on Syria, her whisper in the Vatican, her 
 sceptre in the Tuileries, her allies among the Monsignori, her keys 
 to all the bureaux secrets, her subtle, vivacious, deleterious, danger- 
 ous power everywhere. 
 
 She was a terrible power to her foes, a priceless power to her 
 party. Those brilliant falcon eyes would pierce what a phalanx of 
 mimsters could not overcome; that unrivalled silver wit could 
 consummate what itonferences and coalitions failed to compass; 
 that magical feminine subtlety could dupe^ and mask, and net, and 
 seduce, and wind, and unravel, and give a poison-drop of treachery 
 in a crystal-clear sweetmeat of frankness and compliment, and join 
 with both sides at once, and glide unharmed away, compromised 
 with neither, as no male state-craft ever yet could do. The only 
 mistake she made was that she thought the growth of the nations 
 was to be pruned by an enamelled paper-knife, and the peoples 
 that were struggling for liberty as drowning men for air, were to 
 be bound helpless by the strings of Foreign Portfolios. 13ut the 
 error was not only hers ; male state- craft has made it for ages. 
 
 Now it was of an idle thing she was speaking. One of hei 
 attendants stood before her, a slight, pale, velvet- voiced Greek, 
 long in her service, and skilled in many tongues and many ways. 
 He was reciting, with his finger on a little note- book, the heads of 
 some trifling researches,— very trifling he thought them, he who 
 was accustomed to be a great lady's political mouchard. 
 
 '• Still wandering ; close on Venetia ; will soon want food ; takes 
 no alms ; left Vallombrosa two months ago ; is known only by the 
 name of Castalia ; parentage unknown ; reared by the charity of 
 the Church; supposed by the peasants to have tied to a strangei 
 who spent the spring there in a villegiatura. That is all, madame." 
 
 She listened, then beat her jewelled fingers a little impatiently. 
 
 "That is not like your training, — to bring me an unfinished 
 sketch." 
 
 ** There is nothing to be learned, madame," 
 
 The amused scorn of his mistress's eyes flashed lightly over him. 
 
 ** If a thing is on the surface, a blind man can feel it. iio ; and 
 tell me when you come back both the name of this stranger and 
 the name of her mother." 
 
 •« It is impoBsible, madame.*^ 
 
" Record one lost soul more.'* 343 
 
 She gave a Bign of her hand in dismissal. 
 
 '• You must make impossibilities possible if you remain with me." 
 
 The voice was perfectly gentle, but inflexible. Her servant 
 bowed and withdrew. 
 
 *' I will know what she is to him," murmured Heloise de la 
 Vivarol. 
 
 The fair politician had not forgotten her oath. 
 
 Two weeks later, the Greek, who dared not reappear with his 
 missioEi unaccomplished, sent his mistress, with profound apology 
 for continued failure, a trifle that, by infinite patience and much 
 difficulty, had been procured, with penitent confession of its theft, 
 from a contadina of Fontane Amorose, — a trifle that had been 
 taken from the dead, and secreted rather from superstitious belief 
 in its holy power than from its value. It was a little, worn, thin, 
 silver relio-case : on it was feebly .scratched, by some unskilful 
 hand, a laame,^*' Valeria LulU." 
 
 CHAPTEB Vm. 
 
 "RECORD ONE LOST SOTJL MORB." 
 
 In his atelier, early in thb Aext day, an artist stood paincn g. 
 The garden was very tranquil below ; and the light within shone 
 on casts, antiques, bronzes, old armour, old cabinets, and half- 
 completed sketches, all an artist's picturesque lumber. He had a 
 fair fame, and, though not rich, could live in ease. He did not 
 care for the gay Bohemianism of his brethren ; he had never done 
 so. A sensitive, imaginative man, — poet as well as painter, — of 
 7ivid feeling and secluded habits, he preferred solitude, and made 
 companions of his own creations. He stood before one now, 
 lovingly touching and retouching it, — a man with a rich Spanish 
 beauty that would have been very noble, but for a look of wavering 
 indecision and a startled, timorous, appealing glance too often in 
 his eyes. 
 
 It was not there now ; he was smiling down on his picture with 
 a blissful content in its promise. It had the pure, clear, cool 
 colour of the French school, with the luxuriance of an overflowing 
 fancy less strictly educated, more abundantly loosened, than 
 theirs ; it was intensely idealic, far from all realism, withal volup- 
 tuous, yet never sensual. The ty^e of his nature might be found 
 in the picture ; it was high, but it had scarcely strength enough 
 in it to be the highest. Still, it was of a rare talent, a rare poetry, 
 and he might well look on it contented ; he only turned from it to 
 smile more fondly even still in the face of a young girl who leaned 
 her hands on his shoulder to look at it with him,— a girl with the 
 glow in her laughing loveliness that was in the warm autumnal 
 sunlight without, the loveliness rich and full of grace of a Spaniard 
 of Mexico. 
 ** You aro happy, Agostino, with it and with me F" 
 
j^ Chandos, 
 
 *' Mi qiierida ! you and it give me all of happiness I evei 
 know." 
 
 As lie stood before his picture, in the peace of the early day, the 
 door opened, a light quick step trod on the oak floor. 
 
 ** Ah, cher Agostino I how go the world and tiie pictnresP 
 You and La Sefiora are a study for one ! " 
 
 The painter started, with a sudden shiver that ran through all 
 his limbs ; a deadl;^ pallor came under the warm olive tint of his 
 oheek; he stood silent, like a stricken man. The Spanish girl, 
 who had hurriedly moved from his embrace, with a blush over her 
 face, did not see his agitation; she was looking shyly and in 
 wonder at the stranger who entered so unceremoniously on their 
 solitude. 
 
 *' Haven't seen you for some time, my good Agostino," pursued 
 Trevenna, walking straight up towards the easel, without taking 
 the trouble to remove his hat from over his eyes or his cigar from 
 between his lips. ** What are you doing here P — anything pretty ? 
 Queer thing, Art, to be sure ! Never did understand it, — never 
 should. Let me see : a young lady without any drapery, — unless 
 some ivy on her hair can be construed into a concession to society on 
 that head,— and a general atmosphere about her of moist leaves and 
 hazy uncomfortableness. Now you've * idealised ' her into some- 
 thing, I'll be bound, and will give her some sonorous Hellenic 
 title, ehP That's always the way. An artist gives his porter's 
 daughter five francs and a kiss to sit to him, dresses her up with 
 some two-sous bunches of primroses from the Marche des Fleurs, 
 paints her while they smoke bad tobacco and chatter argot together, 
 and calls her the Genius of the Spring, or something as crack-jaw. 
 Straightway the connoisseurs and critics go mad : it's an ' artistic 
 foreshadowing of the divine in woman ; ' or it's an * idealic repre- 
 sentation ojf the morning of life and the budding renaissance of the 
 earth ; ' or it's a * fusion of many lights into one harmonious 
 whole ; ' or it's some other art-jargon as nonsensical. And if you 
 talk the trash, and stare at the nude * Genius,' it's all right ; out 
 if you can't talk the trash, and like to look at the Uve grisette 
 dancing a rigolhoche^ it's all wrong, and you're * such a coarse 
 fellow ! ' That's why I don't like Art ; she's such a humbug. 
 ' Idealism \ ' Why, it's only Eealism washed o?2k and vamped up 
 with a little glossing, as the raw-boned, yello'^r- skinned ballet- 
 hacks are dressed up in paint and spangles and gossamer petticoats 
 and set floating about as fairies. ' Idealism !' — that's the science 
 of seeing things as they aren't ; that's all." 
 
 With which Trevenna, with his glass in his eye and his cigar in hi 
 teeth, completed his lecture on Art, hitting truth in the bull's eye, 
 as he commonly did, refreshing the Hudibrastic vein in him for hie 
 compulsory hypocrisies by a sparring-match with other people's 
 humbugs. He Ued because everybody lied, because it was pohtic, 
 because it was necessary, because it was one of the weapons that cut 
 a way up the steep and solid granite of national vanity and social 
 conventionalitieB; but the man himself was too jovially cynical (if 
 such an antithesiB may be ueed) not to bo naturally candi4. He 
 
" Record one last soul more,** I45 
 
 would nerer have had for his crime the timorona conventional 
 Ciceronian euphemism of Viscerunt ; he would have come out from 
 the Tullianum and told the people, with a lauffh, that he'd killed 
 Lentulue and the whole of that cursed set, because they were 
 horribly in the way and were altogether a bad lot. He held hip 
 secret cards closer than any man living ; but all the same he nevei 
 
 Eandered with his actions imder specious names to himself, and he 
 ad by nature the '* cynical frankness" of Sulla. Indeed, this 
 would sometimes break out of him, and cleave the dull air of 
 English politics with a rush that made its solemn respectabilities 
 aghast, — though the mischief happened seldom, as Trevenna, like 
 Jove, held his lightning in sure command, and was, moreover, the 
 last man in the universe to risk an Icavus flight. 
 
 Meanwhile, as the great popular leader uttered his diatribe 
 against Art, the painter had remained silent and passive, like a 
 slave before his taskmaster. The girl had left them at a mui-- 
 mured word in Spanish from him, and they stood alone. Trevennu 
 dropped himself into the painting-chair with his easy familiarity. 
 
 "You are not lively company, clier Agostino, nor yet a wel- 
 coming host," he resumed. " Didn't expect to see me, I dare say ? 
 I haven't much time to run about ateliers ; still, as I was staying 
 at the Court, I thought I'd give you a look. So you've mamed, 
 eh ? Very pretty creature, too, I dare say, for men who imder- 
 etand that sfyle of thing ; myself, I'm a better judge of a houilla- 
 haisse than of a mistress. Married, oh ? You know what Bacon 
 says about marriage and hostages to fortune, don't you ? " 
 
 The artist's dry lips opened without words ; his eyelids were 
 raised for a moment, with a piteous, hunted misery beneath them ; 
 he knew the meaning of the question put to him. 
 
 "Don't know very well what Bacon meant, myself," pursued 
 Trevenna, beating a careless tattoo with the mahl-stick. " Wives 
 and brats are hostages most men would be uncommonly glad to 
 leave unredeemed, I fancy, — goods they wouldn't want to take out 
 of pawn in a hurry, if they once got rid of 'em. So you've married ? 
 Well, I've no objection to that, if you see any fun in it : 7 shouldn't. 
 You've learned one piece of wisdom : you never try dodging now. 
 Quite right. Wherever you mi^ht go, / should know it." 
 
 The man who stood before him, like a slave whom the blood- 
 hounds have run down and brought back to their bondage, shud- 
 dered as he heard. 
 
 "Oh, God!" he murmured, "can you not spare me yet? I 
 am so nameless a thing in the world s sight, beside you ! You 
 have such vast schemes, such vast ambitions, so wide a repute, so 
 broad a field : can you never forget me, and let me go ? " 
 
 " Cher Agostino," returned the Right Honourable Member. 
 "you are illogical. A thing may be insignificant, but it may be 
 wanted. A pawn may, before now, have turned the scale of a 
 champion game of chess. Take care of the trifles, and the big 
 events will take care of themselves. That's my motto ; though, of 
 course, you don't understand this, seeing that your trade in life is 
 to scatter broad splashes of colour and leave fancy to fill 'em up,— 
 
54^ Chanaos. ** 
 
 to paint a beetle's back as if the universe hung in the pre- 
 Raphaolism, and to trust to Providence that your daub of orange 
 looks like a sunset, — to make believe, in a word, with a little pot 
 of oil and a little heap of coloui'ed earths, just for all the worW aa 
 children play at sand-building-, in the very oddest employment 
 that ever a fantastic devil set the wits of a man after I You are 
 unpractical, that's a matter of course ; but you are more :— you are 
 desperately ungrateful !" 
 
 A quiver of passion shook the artist's frame ; the scarlet flood 
 flushed the olive of his delicate cheek ; he recoiled and rebelled 
 against the tyranny that set its iron heel upon his neck, as years 
 before the beautiful lad, whom the old Hebrew loved, had done so 
 in the gloomy city den. 
 
 "Ungrateful! Are men grateful whose very life is not theii 
 own? Are men grateful who hourly draw their breath as a 
 scourged dog's ? Are men grateful who from their boyhood up- 
 ward have had their whole future held in hostage as chastisement 
 tor one poverty-sown sin ?— grateful for having their spirits broken, 
 their souls accursed, their hearts fettered, their steps dogged, their 
 sleep haunted, their manhood ruined ? If they are grateful, so am 
 I ; not else." 
 
 Trevenna laughed good-humouredly. 
 
 «My good fellow, I always told you you ought to go on the 
 stage : you'd make your fortune there. Such a speech as that, 
 now, — all a Vimprovistey too, — would bring down any house. 
 Decidedly you've histrionic talents, Agostino ; you'd be a second 
 Talma. All your raving set apart, however (and you're not good 
 at elocution, tres-cher; who can 'fetter' hearts? who can 'break' 
 spirits? It sounds just like some doggerel for a valentine), you 
 are ungrateful. I might have sent you to the hulks, and didn't 
 My young Jew, you ought to be immeasurably my debtor." 
 
 He spoke quite pleasantly, beating a rataplan with the mahl- 
 stick, and sitting crosswise on the painting-chair. He was neve» 
 out of temper, and some there were who learned to dread that 
 bright, sunny, insolent, mirthful good humour as they never 
 dreaded the most fiery or the most sullen furies of other men. 
 Even in the political arena, opponents had been taught that there 
 was a fatal power in that cloudless and racy good temper, which 
 never opened the slightest aperture for attack, but yet caught them 
 so often and so terribly on the hip. 
 
 "Very ungrateful you are, my would-be Eubens," resumed 
 Trevenna. "Only think! Here is a man who committed a 
 downright felony, whom I could have put in a convict's chains 
 any day I liked, and I did nothing to him but let him grow up, 
 and turn artist, and live in the pleasantest city in the world, and 
 marry when he fancied the folly, and do all he liked in the way 
 he liked best ; and he can't see that he owes me anything ! Oh, 
 the corruption of the human heart ! " 
 
 With which Trevenna, having addressed the exposition to the 
 Dryad on the easel, dealt her a Httle blow with the mahl- stick, and 
 made a looii^ vmel blur across the stiU moist paint of her beautiful^ 
 
" Record one lost soul moreS* ^'/ 
 
 gravely-smiling mouth, that it had cost the painter so many hotin, 
 BO many days, of loving labour to perfect. 
 
 Agostino gave an involuntary ciy of anguish. He could have 
 borne iron blows rained down on his own head like hail, better 
 than he could bear that iTiin of his work, that outrage to his 
 darling. 
 
 "I do it in the interest of morality; she's too pretty and too 
 sensual," laughed Trevenna, as he drew the instrument of torture 
 down over the delicate brow and the long flowing tresses, making 
 a blurred, blotted, beaten mass where the thing of beauty hia 
 glowed on the canvas. He would not have thought of it, but that 
 the gleam of fear in his victim's eyes, as the stick had accidentally 
 slanted towards the easel, had first told him the ruin he might 
 make. To torment was a mischief and a merriment that he never 
 could resist, strong as his self-control was in other things. 
 
 It was the one last straw that broke the long-suffering camel's 
 back. With a cry as though some murderer's knife were at his 
 own throat, the painter sprang forward and caught his tyrant's 
 ai*m, wrenching the mahl-stick away, though not until it was too 
 late to save his Dryad, not until the ruthless cruelty had done its 
 pleasure of destruction. 
 
 ''Merciful God!" he cried, passionately, "are you devil, not 
 man ? Sate yourself in my wretchedness ; but, for pity's sake, 
 spare my works, the only treasui-e and redemption of my weak, 
 worthless, accursed life !" 
 
 Trevenna shrugged his shoulders, knocking his cigar-ash off 
 against the marvellous clearness of limpid, bubbling, prismatic, 
 sunlit water at the Dryad's feet, that had made one of the chief 
 beauties and wonders of the picture. 
 
 "Agostino, hon enfant^ you should go on the stage. You speak 
 in strophes, and say 'good-day' to anj'body like an Orestes seeing 
 the Furies ! It must be very exhausting to keep up that perpetual 
 melo-dramatic height. Try life in shii't-sloovos and slippers ; it's 
 as pleasant again as life in the ti-agic toga. Bo logical.^ What's 
 to prevent my slashing that pictui*e aero?;-, 'g'ht and left, with my 
 pen-knife, if I like? Not you. You ii. ; i; your life 'weak and 
 worthless ; ' far be it from me to disagree -^rith you ; but what you 
 think you * redeem' it in by painting young ladies au naturel from 
 immoral models, putting some weed on their head and a pond at 
 their feet, and calling it ' idealism,' I can't see : that's beyond me. 
 However, I'm not an idealist : perhaps that's why." 
 
 With which he swayed himself back in the painting- chair, and 
 prodded the picture all over with his cigar, leaving little blots of 
 ash and sparks of fire on each spot. Martin and Gustavo Dore are 
 mere novices in the art of inventing tortures, beside the ingenuity 
 of Trevenna's laughing humour. 
 
 The man he lectured thus stood silent by, paralysed, and quivering 
 with an anguish that trembled in him from head to foot. Agostino 
 had not changed ; the yielding, timorous, sensitive nature, blending 
 a vivid imagination with a woman's susceptibility to fear, was 
 unaltered in him,, and laid him utterly at t^e mercy of eyery 
 
S4B Cfuindm, 
 
 Btrongftr temperament and sterner will, eyen when he wa8 most 
 roused to the evanescent fire of a futile rebellion. 
 
 •* Oh, Heaven !" he moaned, passionately, ** I thought you had 
 forgotten me I I thought you had wearied of my misery, and would 
 ](!ji\e mo in a little peace ! You are so rich, so famous, so success- 
 ful ; you have had so many victims greater far than I ; you stand 
 60 high in the world's sight. Can you never let one SO poor and 
 powerless as I go free ?" 
 
 " Poor and powerless is a figure," said Trevenna, with a gesture 
 of his cigar. *• You will use such exaggerated language; your 
 beggarly little nation always did, calling themselves the chosen of 
 Heaven, when they were the dirtiest little lot of thieves going, and 
 declaring now that they're waiting for their Messiah, while they're 
 buying our old clothes, picking up our rags, and lying au plaisir 
 in our police-courts ! You aren't poor, cher Agostino, for a 
 painter ; and you're really doing well. Paris talks of your pic- 
 tures, and the court likes your young ladies in ivy and nothing 
 else. You're prosperous, — on my word, you are ; but don't flatter 
 yourself I shall ever forget you. I don't forget ! " 
 
 He sent a puff of smoke into the air with those three words ; 
 in them he embodied the whole of his career, the key-note vi 
 his character, the pith and essence at once of his success and of his 
 pitilo8sues8. 
 
 A heavy, struggling sigh burst from his listener as he heard ; it 
 was the self- same contest that had taken place years previous in the 
 lamp-lit den of the bill -discounting offices, the contest between 
 weakness that suffered mortally, and power that unsparingly 
 enjoyed The terrible bondage had enclosed Agostino's whole 
 life ; he felt at times that it would puisue him even beyond the 
 grave. 
 
 *' Is there no price I can pay at once?" he said, huskily, his 
 voice broken as with physical pain, — " no task I can work out 
 at a blow ? — no tribute-money I can toil for, that, gained, will 
 buy mo peace ? " 
 
 " As if I ever touched a sou of his earnings, or set him to paint 
 my walls for nothing ! Mercy I the ingratitude of the He Drew 
 race ! " cried Trevenna, amusedly, to his cigar. 
 
 The black, sad, lustrous eyes of the Spanish Jew flashed with a 
 momentary fire that had the longing in them, for the instant, if 
 etnko bis tyrant down stone-dead. 
 
 " Take my money ? No I You do not seek that, because it is 
 a drop in the ocean beside all that you possess, all that you have 
 robbed other men of so long I I make too little to tempt you, or 
 you would have wrung it out of me. But you have done a million 
 times worse. You have taken my youth, my hope, my spirit, my 
 liberty, and killed them siW. You have made a mockery of mercy, 
 tliat you might hold me in a captivity worse than any slave's. 
 You have niade me afraid to love, lest what I love should be 
 dragged beneath my shame. You have made me dread that she 
 should bear me chfldren, lest they be bom to their father's fate. 
 You lamye ruined ftU man]iood in me, and made xae weak and base 
 
Record one lost tout more. 
 
 *nd terror- stricken as any cur that cringes before his master's 
 whip. You have made me a poorer, lower, viler wretch than I 
 could ever have been if the Law had taken its course on me, and 
 beaten strength and endurance into me in my boyhood, by teaching 
 me openly and unflinchingly the cost of crime, yet had left me 
 some gate of freedom, some hope of redemption, some release to a 
 liberated life when my term of chastisement should have been over, 
 — left me all that you have denied me since the hour you first had 
 me in your power, in a cruelty more horrible and more unending 
 than tne hardest punishment of justice ever could have been." 
 
 The torrent of words poured out in his rich and ringing voice, 
 swifter and more eloquent the higher his revolt and the more vain 
 his anguish grew. This was his nature to feel passionately, to 
 rebel passionately, to lift up his appeal in just and glowing pro- 
 testation, to recoil under his bondage suffering beyond all expres- 
 sion, but to do no more than this, — to be incapable of action, to be 
 powerless for real and vital resistance, to spend all his strength 
 in that agonised upbraiding, which he must have known to be 
 as futile as for the breakers to fret themselves against the granite 
 sea-wall. 
 
 Trevenna listened quietly, with a certain amusement. It wae 
 always uncommonly droll to him to see the struggles of weak 
 natures; he knew they would recoil into his hand, passive and 
 helpless agents, conquered by the sheer, unexpressed force of his 
 own vigorous and practical temperament. Studies of character 
 were alwavs an amusement to him; he had a La-Bruyere-like 
 taste for their analysis ; the vastness of his knowledge of human 
 nature did not prevent his relishing all its minutiae. What the 
 subjects of his study might suffer under it, was no more to him 
 than what the frog suffers, when he pricks, flays, cuts, beheads, 
 Rud lights a lucifer match under it, is to the man of science in his 
 piu-suit of anatomy and his refutation of Aristotle. 
 
 "Very well done! pity it's not at the Porte St. Martin. All 
 bosh ! StiU, that's nothing against a bit of melodrama anywhere," 
 he said, carelessly. "Shut up now, though, please. Let's go to 
 business." 
 
 The artist seemed to shiver and collapse under the bright, brief 
 svords ; the heart- sick passions, the flame of sudden rebellion, and 
 the fire of vain recrimination faded off his face, his head sank, his 
 lips trembled : just so, years before, had the vivid grace of his 
 youth shrimk and withered under his taskmaster's eye. 
 
 "You paint the Princess Eossillio's portrait? pursued hid 
 catechist. 
 
 Agostino bent his head. 
 
 " And go to her, of course, to take it P " 
 
 The Spanish Jew gave the same mute assent. 
 
 "Can t you speak ? Don't keep on nodding there, like a man- 
 darin in a tea-shop. You'd words enough just now. You paini 
 it in her boudoir, don't you, because the Bght's best ? " 
 
 Agostino lifted his heavy eyes. 
 
 " SixKse yoQ know, why ask me f '* 
 
1^0 Cfiandoo. 
 
 " Leave questions to me, and reply tout href," said Mb interro^ 
 ^ator, with a curt accent that bore aoundant meaning. *' You've 
 Been a Eussian cabinet that's on the right hand of the fire-place ?'* 
 
 *' I have." 
 
 **Ah! you can answer sensibly at last I Well, that cabinet's 
 madame's despatch-box. You know, or you may know, that she 
 is the most meddlesome intriguer in Eui'opo; but that's nothing 
 to you. In the left-hand top drawer is her Austro-Venetian 
 correspondence. Among it is a letter from the Vienna Nuncio. 
 ^Vhen you leave the boudoir to-day, you will know what that 
 letter contains." 
 
 Agostino started; a dew broke out on his forehead, a flush 
 stained his clear brown cheek with its burning shame ; his eyes 
 grew terribly piteous. 
 
 "More sin! more dishonour!" he muttered, in his throat. 
 " Let me go and starve in the streets, rather than drive me to 
 such deeds as these ! " 
 
 Trevenna laughed, his pleasant bonhomie in no way changed, 
 though there was a dash more of authority in his tone. 
 
 " Quiet, you Jew dog ! Eeally, you do get too melodramatic to 
 be amusing. There's no occasion for any heroics , but — you'll be 
 able to tell me this time to-morrow." 
 
 The artist covered his face with his hands, and his form shook 
 to and fro in an irrepressible agitation. 
 
 •' Anything but this ! — anything but this ! Give me what labour 
 you will, what poverty, what shame ; but not this ! I can never 
 look in peace into my darling's eyes, if I take this villany upon 
 my life!" 
 
 ** Nobody's alluding to villany," said Trevenna, with a tranquil 
 brevity. " As to your darling's ftyes, they're nothing to anybodj' 
 except yourself. If the only men who ' look into ' women's eyes 
 are the honest ones, the fair sex must get uncommon few lovers. 
 You've heard what I said. Know what the letter's about. I 
 don't tell you how you're to know it. Get the princess to show it 
 you. Yen re a very handsome fellow, — black curls and all the rest 
 of it, — and her Highness is a connoisseur in masculine charms." 
 
 "With which Trevenna laughed, and got up out of the depths of 
 the painting- chair. 
 
 Agostino stood in his path, a deep-red flush on his forehead, the 
 blaze of fi'eshly-lightened rebellion in his eyes. 
 
 "You use your power over me to force me to such things in 
 your service as this ! Whsd, if they were spoken ? what if they 
 were cited against you ? You, high as you are in your success 
 md your wealth and your rank, would be thought lower yet than 
 / have ever fallen. Do you not fear, even you, that one day you 
 may sting and goad me too far, and I may give myself up to your 
 worst work for the sake of obtaining my vengeance ? " 
 
 Trevenna smiled, with a certain laughing good-tempered in- 
 dulgence, such as a man may extend to a child who menaces him 
 with its impotent fury. 
 
 *• Trei'Cher, who would heUeve you t Say anything you like ; it's 
 
" Record one tost soul more*'* 351 
 
 nothing to me. I have a little bit of paper by me that, once upon 
 a time, M. Agostina Mathias signed with a name not his own. I 
 was very lenient to him ; and if he doesn't appreciate the clemency 
 the world will, and think him an ungrateful young Hebrew cur, 
 who turns, like all curs, on his benefactor. Prosecute you now it 
 wouldn't, perhaps, since the matter's been allowed to sleep : but 
 criminate you and disgrace you it would most decidedly. You'd 
 be hounded out all over Europe ; and for your pretty Spaniard, I 
 heard a Court Chamberlain admiring her yesterday, and saying she 
 was too good for an atelier : — she'd soon be his mistress, when she 
 knew you a felon. Ah, my poor Agostina, when you once broko 
 the law, you put your head into a steel-trap you'll never draw 
 it out of again. Only fools break the laws. Excuse the per- 
 sonality I " 
 
 Under the ruthless words of truth Agostino f«hrank and cowered 
 again, like a beaten hound; he had no strength against his task- 
 master, — he never could have had : he was hemmed in beyond 
 escape. Moreover, now he had another and a yet more iiTosistiblo 
 rein by which to be held in and coerced, — the love that he bore, 
 and that he received from, his young wife. 
 
 "You'll do that, then?" said Trevenna, with the carelessness 
 of a matter of course. ' ' Bring some picture to show me to-morrc^' 
 morning, — Darshampton Likes pictures, because it couldn't tell a 
 sixpenny daub from a Salvator Eosa, — and remember every lino 
 of the Nuncio's letter. You understand ? I don't want to hear 
 your means ; I only want the results." 
 
 " I will try," muttered Agostino. He loathed crime and dis- 
 honour with an imutterable hatred of it ; he longed, he strove, to 
 keep the roads of right and justice ; his nature was one that loved 
 the peace of virtue and the daylight of fair dealing. Yet, by his 
 unconquerable fear, by his wax-Like mobihty of temper, by his 
 past sin, and by his future dread, he was forced into the very 
 paths and made the very thing that he abhoiTed. 
 
 ''People who 'try' aren't my people," said the member for 
 Darshampton, curtly, "Those who do are the only ones that 
 Buit me." 
 
 Agostino shrank under Ms eye. 
 
 "I will come to you to-morrow," he murmured, faintly. He 
 had no thought, not the slightest, of how he should be able to 
 accomplish this sinister work that was set him ; but ho knew that 
 he must do it, as surely ao his countrj^nen of old must make their 
 bricks without straw, for their conquerors and enslavers. 
 
 Trevenna nodded, and threw down his mahl-stick with a final 
 lunge at the Dryad. 
 
 ♦' All right ! of course you will. You ought to be very grateful 
 to mo that I let you off so easily. Some men would make you 
 give up to them that charming Spanish Senora of yours, as Maurice 
 de Saxe took Favart's wife de la part du rot. But that isn't my 
 line. I've coveted a good many things in my day, but I neyer 
 •oveted a woman." 
 
 With which he threw his smoked-out cigar away, and went 
 
3/) a Chandos. 
 
 across the atelier and out at the door, with a careless nod to his 
 victim. He had so much to fill up every moment of his time, that 
 he could ill spare the ten minutes he had flung away in the amuse- 
 ment of racking and tormenting the helplessness of the man he 
 tortured, and he knew that he would be obeyed as surely as though 
 he spent the whole day in further threats. 
 
 Trevenna had two especial arts of governing at his fingers' 
 ends : he never, by any chance, compromised himself, but also he 
 never was, by any hazard, disobeyed. He had a large army of 
 employes on more or less secret service about in the world ; but as 
 there was not one of them who held a single trifle that could 
 damage him, so there was not one of them who ever ventured not 
 to " come up to time " exactly to his bidding, or to fail to keep hia 
 counsel with silence a la mort. 
 
 The artist Agostino, left to his solitude, threw himself forward 
 against the broad rest of the chair, his arms flung across it, his 
 head bent down on them : he could not bear to look upon the 
 defaced canvas of his treasured picture ; he could not bear to see 
 (lie light of the young day, while he knew himself a tool so 
 worthless and so vile. He might have been bo happy ! and this 
 chain was for ever weighting his limbs, eating into his flesh, 
 dragging him back as he sought a purer life, waking him from his 
 sleep with its chill touch, holding him ever to his master's will 
 and to his master's work, — will and work that left him free and 
 unnoticed perhaps for years, and then, when he had begun to 
 breathe at liberty and to hope for peace, would find him out 
 wherever he was, and force him to the path they pointed ! 
 
 Agostino had hoped oftentimes that as his bond-ruler rose in the 
 honour of men and the success of the world, he would forget so 
 nameless and so powerless a life as his own : he had found his 
 hope a piteous error. Trevenna had said truly he never forgot ; 
 the smallest weapon that might be ready to his hand some day he 
 kept continually finely polished and within his reach. The painter 
 knew that he must learn what was indicated to him, — by betrayal, 
 or chicanery, or secret violence, or whatsoever means might open 
 to him, — or be blasted for life by one word of his tyrant. He 
 cbhorred the dishonour, but he had not courage to refuse it, 
 knowing the cost of such refusal. It was not the first time by 
 many that such missions had been bound on him : yet every time 
 they brought fresh horror and fresh hatred with ^em. But he 
 wag hunted and helpless ; he had no resistance ; throughout Ms 
 life he had paid the price exacted, rather than meet the fate that 
 waited him if it were unpaid. He clung to the sweetness, the 
 tranquillity, the growing renown, and the newly-won love of his 
 existence ; he clung to them, even embittered by the serpent's 
 trail that was over them, with a force that made him embrace any 
 alternative rather than see them perish, that laid him abjectly at 
 the mercy of the one who menaced them. 
 
 Lost in his thoughts, he did not hear the footfall of the Spanish 
 girl as she re-entered the atelier. She paused a moment, amazed 
 gnd terrified, as she saw his attitude of prostarate grief an<) 
 
* Record one loit soul more,** • ct 
 
 dejection, then threw herself beside him with endearing worda 
 and teaxftil caresses, in wonder at what ailed him. He raised 
 himself and unwound her arms from about him, shunning the 
 gaze of her eyes. She thought him as true, as loyal-hearted, as 
 great, as he knew himself to be weak and criminal and hopelessly 
 enslaved. 
 
 • I What is itP What has happened P" she asked him eagerly, 
 trymg to draw down his face to hers. 
 
 He smiled, while the tears started woman-like beneath his 
 lashes. He led her gently towards the mined canvas. 
 
 *• Only that ;— an accident, my love I " 
 
 The brightness of the Dryad all blurred and marred by thd 
 ruthlessuess of tyranny was a fit emblem of his life. 
 
 By noon that day, in the boudoir of the Italian princess, all 
 ghmmenng with a soft glisten of azure and silver through it£ 
 rose-hued twilight, he chanced to be left for a few moments in 
 solitude. Her Highness had not yet risen. 
 
 " O God ! " he thought, " do devils rule the world ? There art 
 always doors opened so wide for any meditated sin ! " 
 
 Then, with a glance roimd him like a thief in the night, his hand 
 was pressed on the spring of the Eussian cabinet; the letter of the 
 Nuncio lay uppermost, with its signature folded foremost ; a moment, 
 and its delicate feminine writing was scanned, and each line remem- 
 bered with a hot and terrible eagerness that made it graven as 
 though bitten m by aquafortis on his memory. The note was put 
 back, the drawer closed ; the ai'tw» stood bending over his palette 
 and pouring the oil on some fair carmine tints, when the Princesfi 
 of Naples swept into the chamber. 
 
 She greeted him with a kindlr, careless grace, \\'ith a pleasant 
 emile m the brown radiance of her eves ; and she saw that his 
 cheek turned pale, that his eyelids* drooi)od, that his voice 
 quivered, as he answered her. 
 
 '^ roverof com' e hello!'' thought Irene RossilHo; and she 
 laughed a httle, as she thought that even this Spanish Jew of a 
 painter could not come into hor preaeiic© without succumbing to 
 
 7 
 
BOOK THE EIGHTH. 
 CHAPTEE I. 
 
 THE CLAIMANT OF THE PORPHYRY CHAMBEB. 
 
 Before the door of an Italian albergo, some men had been 
 di-inking and laughing in the ruddy light of an autumn day, just 
 upon the setting of the sun, — men of the mountains, shepherds, 
 goatherds, and one or two of less peaceable and harmless 
 callings, — rough comiades for a belated night on the hill-side, 
 whose argument was powder and ball, and whose lair was made 
 with the wolves and the hares. The house, low, lonely, poor, was 
 overhung with the festoons of vines, and higher yet with the great 
 shelf of roadside rock, from which there poured down, so close 
 that the wooden loggia was often splashed with its spray, a 
 tumbling, foaming, brown glory of water that rolled hissing into 
 a pool dark as night, turning as it went the broad black wood of a 
 mighty mill-wheel. The men had been carousing carelessly, and 
 shouting over their wine and brandy snatches of muleteer and 
 boat- song, or the wild ribaldry of some barcarolle, their host 
 drinking and singing with them, for the vintage had been goo(?-, 
 and things went well with him in his own way, here out of 
 the track of cities, and in the solitude of great stretches of sear 
 simbumt grass, of dense chestnut- forest, of hiUs aU purple and 
 cloud-topped in the vast, clear, dream-like distance. Now, flushed 
 with their di-ink and heedless in their revels, rough and tumul- 
 tuous as wild boors at play, they were circled round the doorway 
 in a ring that shut out alike all passage to the osteria and all 
 passage to the road; and they were enjoying torture with that 
 strange instinctive zest for it that underlies most human nature, 
 and breaks out alike in the boor who has a badger at his mercy 
 and the Caesar who has a nation under his foot. 
 
 They had the power and they had the temptation to torment, and 
 the animal natures in them, hot with wine and riotous with mirth 
 rather than with any colder cruelty, urged them on in it ; one or 
 two of them, also, were of tempers as coarse and as savage as any 
 of the brutes that they hunted, and peals of brutal laughter rang 
 out from them on the sunny autumn air. 
 
 •' Sing, my white-throated bird ! " cried one. " Dance a measure 
 with me ! " cried another. ** Pour this down your pretty lips, and 
 ku8 UB for it I" ''You'll be humble enough before we've done 
 
The Claifoant of the Porphyry Chamber, 355 
 
 with you, my proud beauty ! " •* We'll tie you up by a rope of that 
 handsome bright hair ! " *' Come, now, laugh and take it easy, or, 
 by Bacchus, we'll smash those dainty limbs of yours like maize- 
 stalks!" 
 
 The shouts echoed in tumult, ringing with laughter, and broken 
 with oaths, and larded with viler words of moimtain-slang, that 
 had no sense to the ear on which they were flung in their poUuting 
 mirth. In the centre of the ferocious revelry, beneath the bronzed 
 and crimson canopy of the hanging porch-vine, and with the 
 western light shed full upon her, stood Castalia. The tall, litho, 
 voluptuous grace of her form rose out against the darkness of the 
 entrance-way like the slender, lofty height of a young palm ; the 
 masses of her hair swept backward from her forehead. Her face 
 was white as death to the Hps; an unutterable horror was on it, 
 but uo yielding fear; it was proud, dauntless, heroic with the 
 spirit that rose higher with every menace. Her eyes looked 
 steadily at the savage, flushed faces round her, so coarse, po 
 loathsome in their mirth ; her hands were folded on her bosom, 
 holding to it the book she carried. They might tear her limb from 
 limb, as they threatened, like the fibres of the maize; but tho 
 royal courage in her would never bend down to their will. Thej- 
 had hemmed her in by sheer brute strength, and their clamour of 
 hideous jest, their riot of insolent admiration, were a torture to 
 her, passing all torture of steel or of flame ; but they could noi 
 wring one moan from her, much less could they wring one suppli- 
 cation. 
 
 ** Altro !" laughed the foremost, a sunburnt colossal mountain - 
 thief of the Appenine. *' Waste no more parley with her. If she 
 will not smile for fair words, she shaU squeak for rough ones. My 
 pretty princess, give me the first kiss of those handsome lips of 
 yours!" 
 
 He launched himself on her as he spoke, his hand on the gold of 
 her hair and the linen broideries of her delicate vest ; but her eyes 
 had watched his movement : with a shudder like the antelope's 
 under the tiger's claws, she wrenched herself from him, pierced the 
 circle of her torturers before they could stay her, and, before they 
 could note what she did, had sprung with the mountain swiftness 
 of her childhood on to the rocks overhanging the water-wheel. 
 Another bound in mid-air, light and far-reaching as a chamois's, 
 and she stood on the broad wooden ledge of the wheel itself, that 
 was stopped from work and was motionless in the torrent, with 
 the foam of the spray flung upward around her, and the black 
 pool hissing below. A yell of baffled rage broke from her tor- 
 mentors; yet they were checked and paralysed at tho daring 
 of the action and at the beauty of her posture, as she was poised 
 there on the wet led^e of the wheel- timber, her hair floating oack- 
 ward, her eyes flashing down upon them, her hands still holding 
 the book, the roar and the surge of the torrent beneath her 
 moving her no more to fear than they move the chamois that 
 spring from rock to rock. They forgot their passiont and their 
 
3^6 Chandos. 
 
 fury for the moment in amaze and in admiration, wrung out from 
 them by a temper that awed them the more because they could 
 comprehend it in nothing. 
 
 "Come down!" they shouted, with one voice; "come down! 
 You haye gone to your death ! " 
 
 Where she stood on the wood- work, with the water splashing her 
 feet and the boiling chasm yawning below, she glanced at them 
 and smiled. 
 
 " Yes ; I have that refuge from you." 
 
 " Per fede ! " thundered the mountaineer who had first menaced 
 her, " there are two can play at that game, my young fawn ! " 
 
 With a leap, quick and savage as his own rage, he sprang on to 
 the shelf of rock. There was only the breadth of the falling water 
 between them ; she had cleared it, so could he. She looked at the 
 pool, cavernous and deep, at her feet, then let her eyes rest on him 
 calmly, 
 
 *' Do it, if you dare ! " she said, briefly ; and her gaae went back- 
 ward to ihe torrent with a dreaming, longing, wistful tenderness. 
 ** You will save me ! " she murmured to the water. " There is 
 only one pain in dying,— to leave the world that has his Me." 
 
 She swayed herself lightly, balancing herself to spring with 
 unerring measure where the eddy of the torrent was deepest. 
 Arresting her in the leap, and startling her persecutors, a voice, 
 deep and rich, though hoUow with age, feU on the silence. 
 ' ' Wait ! Will you be murderers ? 
 
 Out of the darkness of the entrance issued the taU, bent, 
 v/asted form of the blind Hebrew, majestic as a statue of Moses, 
 with his hands outstretched, and his sightless eyes seeking the 
 sunlight. 
 
 "I am blind," he said, slowly; *'but I know that wrong ia 
 being done. Maiden, whoever you be, do not fear ; come to me ; 
 and the curse of the God of the guiltless fall on those who would 
 seek to harm you ! " 
 
 The men, stilled though sullen, riotous rather than coldly cruel, 
 stood silent and wavering, glancing from her, where she waa 
 poised amidst the dusky mist of the foam-smoke, to the austere 
 and solemn form of the old man suddenly confronting them : they 
 were shamed by his rebuke ; they were awed by her courage ; they 
 hung like sheep together. 
 
 "Take care!" murmured the host, who was alarmed, and 
 wished the scene ended. "Let her go. The Jew has the evil 
 eye.'* 
 
 A faint smile flitted over the withered, saturnine face of the 
 Israelite. 
 
 " Yes," he answered, with a bitterness that under the turn oi 
 the words was acrid with remorse, — "yes, I have the evil eye. 
 Many souls have been cursed by me ; many men have wished that 
 their mothers had never borne them when once I have looked 
 on their faces; many lives, that were goodly as the youiig 
 bay-tree ere I saw them, withered and fell under my glance. Ltl 
 
The Claimant of the Porphyry Chamber, ^c^'j 
 
 ^^\fi maiden come in peace to me ; and go, or worse will happen 
 unto you." 
 
 The subtlety of the Hebrew turned to just account the boorish 
 and superstitious terrors of the men : they slunk together in awe 
 of him. 
 
 ** It was only play," they muttered : ** we meant no harm." 
 
 The blackness of the stem sightless eyes that were turned on 
 them filled them with terror ; they crossed themselves, and wished 
 the earth would hide them from his poison-dealing glance. Castalia, 
 where she stood, watched him with that meditative, far-reaching 
 gaze that had aU the grave innocence of a child, all the luminous 
 insight of a poet. She held her perilous station still high above on 
 the plank of the wet mill-wheel, with the white steam of the 
 torrent curling round. 
 
 With the instinct of the blind, Ignatius Mathias turned towards 
 her. 
 
 •' Come down, my child : I will have care of you." 
 
 " I will come when they have left." 
 
 The Jew turned to them with a gesture majestic as any prophet's 
 command. 
 
 * * You hear her ; go ! " 
 
 With sullen, muttered oaths, snarling like dogs baflGled of a 
 bone, the mountaineers slunk from him into the osteria, to drown 
 their wrath and quench their superstitious fears in some fresh 
 skins of wine. Then he lifted his eyes to the place where he kne-^ 
 that she was, and where the rushing of the torrent told him her 
 danger. 
 
 ** 1 cannot aid you ; I have no sight ; but you will trust me I" 
 
 She looked at him a moment longer, then, with the deer-like 
 elasticity and surety of her mountain training, sprang once more 
 across the width of the falling stream, and down the stone ledges, 
 slippery with the moisture and holding scarce footing for a lizard, 
 and came to him. 
 
 ** Yes, I will trust you. I thank you very greatly." 
 
 He raised his hand, and touched her hair. 
 
 "I cannot see you. Your voice is sweet, and sounds very 
 young ; but it is proud. It is not the voice of a wanderer ; it 
 speaks as though it ought to command. What are you ?" 
 
 ** Very friendless." 
 
 " Truly. Are you far from your home P** 
 
 *' Very far." 
 
 " And why have you left it ? " 
 
 '* Partly, because they said unjust evil.** 
 
 ^« Of you?" 
 
 '* Of me and of one other. I would not stay where tJie false 
 speakers dwelt." 
 
 "You had better have sought the refuge beneath the water, 
 then ; you will find no footing to your taste on earth. Axe you 
 alone, wholly alone ?** 
 
 "YeB." 
 
3:58 Chandos, 
 
 *' Ahl and are still but a child, by the clearness of your Toioa 
 To-day is but a sample of the dangers that lie in wait for you : th« 
 lions will not let such a fawn go by in peace." 
 " There is always death." 
 
 ** Not always. And where is it you are bound now ?** 
 *'I want to go to large cities/' 
 
 "To go to the lion's den at once, then. Large cities 1 And 
 for you, who chose the risk of your grave rather than a rough 
 caress from these men of the hills? Do you know what cities 
 are?" 
 
 *'No; but I must go to them." Her hands pressed the book 
 closer ; she thought that in cities alone could she see or hear what 
 she sought. 
 
 The austere, worn, darkened face of the Hebrew grew gentler ; 
 she moved his pity, all pitiless though he had been ; she recalled 
 to hiTn the youth of his dead darling, when, far away in the buried 
 past, his heart had beat and his life had loved in the summer glories 
 of the sierras. He was very old, but that memory lived still. 
 
 " And do you know the way to any cities ?" 
 
 " Not at aU." 
 
 **Fow do you guide yourself, then?" 
 
 ** By chance." 
 
 "Ajid chance ^lays you cruel caprices, my homeless bird I 
 What chance was it led you to those men ?" 
 
 She shuddered ; but the passionate blood that ran in her, flushed 
 lier cheek and glowed imperially in her eyes. 
 
 "They were boors, and had boors' barbarity ! I asked my way, 
 and wantod a little bread, if they would sell it me at the osteria ; 
 and, before I could see them, those men were round me, bidding 
 me liaugh and dance and sing." 
 
 '* Mayhap if you had done so you would have put them in good 
 humour." 
 
 He was blind, and could not see the look ttiat glanced on him 
 from the dark shadows of her lashes. 
 
 ** // — ^beg their sufferance, by obeying their bidding, by amusing 
 their idleness like any strolling tambourine-singer ? They should 
 have killed me first I" 
 
 "Verily, you should have emperors' blood in you I You well- 
 Tiigh killed yourself to escape them." 
 
 ' * Well, what else was there to do ? Men can avenge themselves ; 
 j7omen can only die." 
 
 He bent his eyes on her as though, sightless as they were, he 
 would fain read her features. 
 
 " You have grand creeds. Who taught them ?" 
 
 " They are not creeds, I think ; they are instincts." 
 
 " Only in rare natures. But have you none in all the world to 
 shield you from such risks ?" 
 
 " None. But I can shield myself." 
 
 " How do you live, then ?" 
 
 " I have sold the flowers, and sung an office here and there* 
 Ood is always good." 
 
The Claimant of the Pirrphyry C 
 
 Tho tears welled slowly into her eyes. She would not say what 
 ehe had suffered. 
 
 ** But why is it that you wander thus? You can come of no 
 peasant blood?" 
 
 She was silent. She could not have spoken of the thoughts that 
 lay at her heart, — of the goal that made her search for the sake of 
 life itself. The words which had been said to her in the Italiar. 
 town had wakened shame and frozen her to silence, though neither 
 hor purpose nor her will faltered. 
 
 •* What has sent you out alone ? Have any done you wrong ?" 
 
 " Only they who spoke evil unjustly." 
 
 "If you hold ^Aa« a wrong, do not come into cities. But you 
 speak faintly. Have you broken your fast ?" 
 
 "Not to-day." 
 
 She spoke very low ; she could not lie, but she could not bear to 
 say the truth, — that she had eaten but a little milk and millet- 
 bread in the past twenty-four hours. She had intense strength to 
 endure, and she had too much pride to complain, though a faint 
 weakness was on her, and her limbs seemed weighted with lead in 
 the aching exhaustion that comes from want of food. His sight- 
 less eyes sought her with a grave compassion ; the self-restraint 
 and force of endurance touched the iron mould of his nature as 
 softer things might not have done. 
 
 " Well, see here. I am poor, but I am a little wealthier than 
 you. I go to cities where my people are good. I am very aged; 
 but still I can give you some guidance, some shield, at least from 
 insult. Come with me." 
 
 " No. It is a gentle charity ; but I cannot take charity." 
 
 "Whoever you are, you should be the daughter of kings! 
 Listen. You are but a child, and I claim the title of age. I am 
 blind, as you see ; I am solitary, I have no companion save only 
 my little dog ; you can aid me in much. Lend me your sight, and 
 I will lend you my counsel. It will be quittance of all debt 
 between us. I go to Venice ; come there, and from there you can 
 do what you will." 
 
 "To Venice!" 
 
 Her eyes lightened ; it was the city of which she had heajd most 
 from him whom she sought, — the city whence Chandos had come 
 into the beech-woods below Vallombrosa. 
 
 " Yes," answered the Jew. " One is gone thither whom I fol- 
 low. Your eyes will be fair friends to me; let me have their 
 companionship on the road, at least." 
 
 She wavered. The longing on her was ^eat to reach Venice. 
 She thought that there the silence that reigned between her and 
 the life she had lost might be broken. 
 
 " Shall it be so ?" he asked her. 
 
 " If it will not weary you," 
 
 "That is well! Who should serve each other, if not the 
 desolate ? And yet I spoke not altogether wrongly when I told 
 those ruffians that I had the evil eye. Not in the sense of their 
 fools' superstitions, but my eyes have been evil ; sight has been 
 
j6o Chandos. 
 
 blasted from them in a just judgment. My life has been long, and 
 cruel, and darkly stained. You have no fear of me ? " 
 
 She looked at him with a musirg, lingering gaze. The face she 
 saw was stern and harsh and ploughed with deep lines ; but she 
 read its true meaning aright. 
 
 •• No," she said, simply ; *' I have no fear.'* 
 
 The brown, furrowed brow of the old man cleared. Because he 
 had forfeited the right to trust, trust was the sweeter to him. 
 
 <« So 1 — that is right. Youth without faith is a day without sun. 
 Yours will not bo wronged by mo. Wait a while, then ; 1 need 
 food, and they shall bring you some grapes. Your hands are hot. 
 "When I have fairly rested, we will begin to travel onward. Guide 
 me to the shade. Are there no trees ? There ; let us stay there, 
 nave no fear; your persecutors will not return." 
 
 So they rested beneath the gold-flecked boughs of a broad syca- 
 more that grew beside the pool of the water-mill, with the depth 
 of shadow flung on the white Syrian head of the old man, and the 
 deep space of the eddying stream, and the sun through the leaves 
 lighting on the grace of her young limbs and the musing beauty of 
 her eyes, as, where the book of " Lucrece" lay open on the grass, 
 they dwelt on the words that Castalia knew by heart as a child 
 knows his earliest prayers,— that had never spoken to any as they 
 opoke to her, — that were richer in her sight than all the gold of the 
 world, and were to her as in Oriental ages the scroll that their 
 prophets and kings had traced were in the sight of the people's 
 awed love and listening reverence. 
 
 •' It was not true to say I was alone," she mused; " not alone 
 while his thoughts are with me." 
 
 And in them solitude, and danger, and the gnawing of famine, 
 and the heart- sickness of her young life, cast adrift on the fever 
 and the wilderness of the world, were alike forgotten where she 
 leaned, in the autumn light, beside the only man among his 
 creditors who had not uncovered his head before the dignity of 
 calamity in tho porphyry hall of Olarencieux. 
 
 CHAPTEB n. 
 
 **11A0I8TER DE VIVI8 LAPIDIBTT8,*' 
 
 Undeb the great smoke pall that overhung Darshampton there 
 were riots, — riots of the eternal conflict which has been waged 
 since the Gracchan Proletariate, and will be waged on, God knows 
 how long, through the cycles of the fnture. Prices were high ; 
 trades were bad ; political ignorance was run mad, catching half- 
 truths and whole wrongs as it went, but braying of them so that 
 the sane were fain to stop their ears, in the same blander ae the 
 buiTowing ostrich makes. Workers had struck almost to a man ; 
 masters would not or could not yield ; there were misery, error, 
 
** Magtster de f^vis tapidihus.** 30 j 
 
 Wfld justice, tUnd injustice, crippled creeds groping in twilight 
 wrong codes hunger-sharpened, right premisses and wrong deduc- 
 tions, the ignoratio elenchi of individual suffering, that though I 
 itself an injured world, the passion of starving lives that persuadcl 
 themselves want of bread was resistless logic; all the eterna) 
 antagonisms of Labour and Capital were camped here as it were 
 on one common battle-ground, with the angiy smoke loomin^' 
 above their hostile battalions. ° 
 
 The mighty-sinewed iron-workers, like the Moyen-Age smiths 
 of Antwerp and Bruges, the pale delicate artisans of the loom, wan 
 and frail as the flax they wove, the gaunt giants of the blasting- 
 furnaces, and the sickly weavers of fine linens, the men poisoned 
 with stifling air, the men scorched with foundry flames, the men 
 dying of steel-dust in their lungs, the men livid with phosphorus- 
 flames inhaled to get daily bread, the men who died like so 
 many shoals of netted herrings, that the Juggernaut of trade 
 might roll on,— all these were here, or their representatives, men 
 who were told, and believed it, that it was the Ai^istocratic Order 
 which wronged them, never thinking that it was the merciless 
 Thor of Commercial Cupidity which crushed them under its sledge- 
 hammer, beating gold out of their bruised flesh. All these were 
 here, filling the vast squares and the dark streets with clamour 
 and menace and sullen ominous murmui*,— the volcanic lava 
 which runs beneath the fair surface of the careless world, which 
 Boon or late will break from bondage and overflow it— to fertilize 
 or to destroy P 
 
 To fertilize, if light be given them; to destroy, if darkness be 
 locked in on them. 
 
 The thirst for liberty was in them,— the liberty that the sons of 
 men knew while yet the earth was in her youth,— the liberty of 
 pathless woods, of trackless seas, of wild fresh winds, of free 
 unfettered life. They wanted it, though they had never known it. 
 These — who from the birth to the grave were pent in factories, and 
 eheds, and garrets, in gas-glare, and crowded alleys, and dens of 
 squalid vice, with the whirr of machines ever on their ear, and the 
 dead weight of smoke ever in their breath, wanted life,— wanted 
 the sweet west winds thejr never breathed, the strong ocean air 
 they never tasted, the waving seas of grass they never looked on, 
 the unchained liberty of boundless moorland they had never seeii 
 but in their dreams, the human heritage of freedom that in all 
 ages through is taken from the poor in ^rice for the scant barren 
 ponidge of daily sustenance. Ah, God ! it is a bitter price to pay, 
 — a whole life given up for food enough to keep alive in knowledge 
 that life is endless pain and endless deprivation ! 
 
 They wanted this grand simple freedom that instinct made them 
 pine for, though its knowledge had never been theirs or their sires' ; 
 —and their teachers told them they needed the ballot-box and the 
 game-laws' repeal ! 
 
 It is many centuries since Caius Gracchus called the Mercantile 
 Classes to aid the people against the Patricians, and found too late 
 that th^ were deadlier oppreasors than all the Optimates ; but the 
 
^6% Chandos. 
 
 error etiil goes on, and the Money-makers still chum it into j;old, 
 as they churned it then into the Asiatic revenues and the senatorial 
 amulets. 
 
 The trades had struck. They were wrong, very wrong, in the 
 application of theories and predicates which had their root in right. 
 But it were hard not to be wrong in philosophies when the body 
 starves on a pinch of oatmeal, with the whole width of the known 
 world drawn in between the four pent walls of a factory-room or 
 the red-hot stones of a smelting-house. It is the law of necessity, 
 the balance of economy : human fuel must be used up, that the 
 machine of the world may spin on ; but it is not perhaps marvellous 
 that the living fuel is sometimes unreconciled to that symmetrical 
 rule of waste and repair, of consumer and consumed. 
 
 They were sullenly angry, tempestuously^ bitter, these surging 
 tumultuous masses, now raging like seas in a storm, now more 
 ominously silent, with the yellow sickly gleam of the pale sun 
 shining through the reeking fog on to their faces, here so white 
 and eager and emaciated, there so black and dogged and bull- dog 
 like, here so gaunt with old age of hungered patience, there so 
 terrible with youth of vicious desperation. They were at war with 
 all the world in the aching of their hearts, in the dimness of their 
 insight ; at war even with their darling whom they had so often 
 crowned, their hero whom they had long been content to follow 
 as hounds follow their feeder. 
 
 They were riotous and desperate. The furnaces had long been 
 cold, the looms had long been idle, the wheels had long been silent 
 throughout their country ; their own Unions had been hard on 
 them, and there were dark tales afoot of what had been done on 
 renegades in the Unions' name. Their employers would not yield, 
 and it was said that strange hands were pouring in and taking the 
 work they had left, — taking it at peril of answering with life and 
 limb for the temerity. They were very bitter, very savage, very 
 maddened, in the nauseous fog-mist steaming round them, in the 
 cold northerly cutting air, burdened black with smoke, though 
 through them the chimneys had so long been without warmth. 
 They were fierce in their wrath ; their hearths were fireless, their 
 children had no food, their women were dying of fever, their old 
 people lay dead by the score of famine ; their hand was against 
 every man's, and they clamoured even against their Eepresentative. 
 He was faithless to them, he was untrue to his pledges ; he feasted 
 in foreign palaces, and forgot them ; he sold them for the sake of 
 office ; he grew great himself, and let them perish ; he joined the 
 ministry, and denied all that he had said to them. Thus they 
 murmured, and yelled, and hooted against him, in their restless 
 misery. The love of a People is the most sublime crown that can 
 rest on the brow of any man ; but the love of a Mob is a mongrel 
 that fawns and slavers one moment to rend and tear the next, 
 sycophant whilst bones are tossed to it, savage when once not 
 surfeited. 
 
 They loved him with a bold, rough love, that was a million-fold 
 truer than his own heart ever had been ; they were proud of him ; 
 
" Magister de Vtvis LapidibusJ" ^6^ 
 
 they would have died for him ; they believed in him ; but, irritated 
 against him, they were capable of killing their ^od, and weeping 
 over it, when shattered, like Africans. Imprecations even on him 
 were hurled at intervals through the city, while the crash of falling 
 slates, of shivered glass, of flung stones, of levelled bricks, was 
 added to the hurricane of noise, where, clamorous for bread, or 
 incensed at the etranger-hands hired by their employers, the mob 
 wrecked a provision-shop or tore down a machine-house. It was 
 a pandemonium under the dark murky atmosphere ; in the dull 
 glare cast from the westward flames, where some had fired a 
 factory ; in the midst of thousands let loose and made savage with 
 hunger ; in the storm of curses thundered out from the bared hollow 
 chests gnawed with want, — curses that blasted even their idol's 
 name. He had sold them for the bribe of office ; he had betrayed 
 them for the possession of power ; he had gone over to their 
 oppressors for the sake of his own aggrandizement ! 
 
 Perhaps it was but a multitude's reaction and caprice ; perhaps 
 it was that the great, weary, fettered heart of the people, earnest 
 with all its tyrannous error, and tossed by demagogues from lie to 
 lie, vaguely felt that its own living, aching humanity was but 
 used as a stepping-stone for ambition, — vaguely felt that what it 
 trusted was not true! Be it which it would, they upbraided 
 and menaced and cursed him. He was theirs, and he coalesced 
 with the nobles ; he was theirs, and he went to banquet in palaces ; 
 he was theirs, and he was betraying them to sit in the Cabinet 
 Council and to wear the gewgaws of honours ! 
 
 The murmur and the thi'eat rose louder and louder, stretched 
 wider and wider. When the tempest was at its height, into the 
 surging waves of the stormy human sea Trevenna rode leisurely 
 down. 
 
 Staying at the country-seat of a millionaire some ten miles 
 away, whither rumours came with every hour of the Darshampton 
 riots, he had heard how his subjects had mutinied against him,— 
 heard as he was shooting over a pheasant- cover that had been 
 specially reserved for him, with sundry other good shots of the 
 nobility of rank and the princes of the plutocracy. He had given 
 his gun to a loader, without a second's hesitation, and ordered a 
 horse to be saddled. His friends had crowded round him, and 
 sought to dissuade him ; he had shrugged his shoulders. *' They 
 curse me behind my back ; let's see what they'll dare say to my 
 face." There was no bravado in it; but there was the cool 
 audacity, the dauntless zest in peril, which made him, despite all 
 his seK-love and caution, bold in a fray as a mastiff ; his teeth 
 clenched, his hand gripped a riding- switch with a meaning force : 
 the lion-tamer had no thought of leaving his lion-whelps to riot 
 unchecked; and he rode now into Darshampton, with the 
 gentlemen who were his hosts and fellow-guests, about him like a 
 ■zohiifi of courtiers round a king. 
 
 ' It is very unwise to risk it," whispered one of them. " They 
 are at wild work, and your life is of national value." 
 
 Trevenna laughed, and bowed his thanks for the compliment. 
 
3(54 , Chanctos, 
 
 "Nobody's life's of value, my dear lord: there are always 
 plenty to fill the vacancies. There aren't two people whose death 
 woula lower the Consols for two days. To affect the money- 
 market is the acme of greatness : I'm afi'aid the exchanges would 
 scarce stay twelve hours below par for me yet." 
 
 And he rode leisurely down, as he would take his morning 
 canter along the park, into that sea of turbulent, hooting, 
 swaying, sullen, fog-soaked human life that, for the first moment 
 since his clarion-words had challenged Darshampton, were angered 
 against him and upbraiding him as a renegade. There was 
 laughter in his eyes as they glanced over the heaving mass. To 
 his worldly wisdom and bright sagacity, there was an irresistible 
 comedy in this passionate, raving, undoubting sincerity of a 
 hungry multitude ; there was an inexpressible ridicule for him in 
 these poor purblind tools that rushed with such ardour to do his 
 work for him, thinking all the while they were doing their own, — 
 never knowing that they but tunnelled the way, or threw the 
 bridge, by which he would pass to his ambitions, while they would 
 lie gasping, kicked aside and unknown. To his shrewd common 
 sense there was something unutterably droll in the sight of men 
 in love with an idea, amorous of a principle, sincere in anything 
 except self-love ; there was something unutterably ludicrous in 
 the notion of men who starved for lack of a crust crazing their 
 heads about the world's government. Trevenna was a democrat, 
 because he hated everything about him, delighted to lead, and 
 held a bitter grudge against the pestilential tyranny of class ; but 
 at heart he cared not a button more for the people than the most 
 supercilious of aristocrats, and, had he been given a supreme 
 power, would have been as strong a tyrant in his own way as ever 
 made a nation the miU-horse to grind for his treasuries and fill his 
 granaries. He had a thorough, manly, passionate contempt for 
 the differences of rank; but all the same his one motive was 
 simply to get rank for himself, and such a sentimentality (as 
 he would have called it) as pity for the suffering of multitudes 
 could never enter into the strong, practical astuteness of his saga- 
 cious temper. 
 
 But bold he was, bold as a lion, and more politic even than 
 bold : so he rode now down into the close-wedged ranks of the 
 crowds, into the sulphurous heat from the distant flames, into the 
 clamour and the uproar and the storm of rage, till his horse could 
 push way no more, and he faced the whole front of those who 
 were clamorous against him, with the dull red light shining foil 
 on the keen brave blue of his eyes. 
 
 They were amazed to see his apparition rise there so suddenly 
 out of the cloud of smoke and fog : he was their idol, moreover, 
 though they had cursed him when they had no bread, as men beat 
 the god Pan when he sent them no game for the hunting ; and e 
 silence fell for a moment on them : in it he spoke : — 
 
 ** So, fellows, you are damning me, they say. Tell me my 
 laults to my face, then ! " 
 
 There was the familiar, half-brusque, half-bantering; toiie that 
 
** Magister de VtvU Lapidilus,*' 365 
 
 was so popular with the throngs he challenged ; but bejieath that 
 
 there was something of the grand insolence of Scipio ^milianus : 
 
 ** Surely you do not think I shall fear those free whom I sent in 
 chains to the slave-market I " 
 
 ** You sold us for office \ " ** You have broken your pledges ! " 
 ** You have been false to your promises ! " *• You have aban- 
 doned Eeform!" "You have been bribed by Courts!" "You 
 have recanted your creeds I " " You have joined the aristocracy ! " 
 "You have feasted in palaces!" "You have turned ti-aitor!" 
 "You only seek your own dignities, and leave us to starve!" 
 Sullen, hoarse, savage with uncouth oaths, yelled out in the 
 northern accent, the charges were hurled against him. The mul- 
 titude were waking, in their irritation, to the truth, and vaguely 
 feeling their way to it,— vaguely feeling that they were only used 
 by the idol whom they had hugged the belief they had created and 
 could dethrone. 
 
 He heard them quite patiently, his bold frank eyes resting on 
 them with a certain insolent amusement that lashed them like 
 cords : it was the amusement of the lion-tamer who lets his 
 mutinous cubs fret and fume beneath his gaze, knowing that a 
 crack of his whip will break them into obedience. 
 
 He laughed a Uttle. 
 
 " You rebuke me for taking office ? Why did you re-elect me 
 after my acceptance of it, then ? " 
 
 The mob, indignant to have their own inconsistency and muta- 
 bility brought in their teeth against them, broke out into tenfold 
 uproar ; shrieks, curses, yells, hooting, menaces, crossed each other 
 in horrible tumult ; a shower of stones was hurled thi'ough the 
 darkened air, a thousand hands struck out with massive iron 
 weapons or cleft the mist with flaming fire-brands. His horse 
 reared and fretted, while the masses of half-naked figures were 
 jammed and crushed against its flanks ; a thousand arms were 
 stretched out, brawny and tenible in their threats, ten thousand 
 voices thundered imprecations, hungry savage eyes glared on him 
 like wild beasts', hot breath panted on him from mouths foul with 
 curses and livid with famine. Trevenna sat firm as a rock, with 
 the fresh sanguine colour in his face unblenched, and his eyes 
 watching the riot as though it were an opera ballet. Had 
 Trevenna been Napoleon, he would have won at "Waterloo ere 
 Blucher could turn the day, or else would have died with the Old 
 Guard. 
 
 The missiles of iron, and stone, and lead, and wood, and slate, 
 flew about him, hissing and roaring through the fog; his horse 
 plunged nervously, but he never swerved in his saddle, never 
 moved his head to avoid the blows that with every second rained 
 at him, as the angered worshippers pelted their god because their 
 bodies were fasting. At last, a flint, sharp, jagged, heavy, struck 
 him, cutting through his clothes and wounding him in the shoulder ; 
 the blood poured out down his arm. 
 
 With a careless glance at it, he thrust his hand into the breast 
 cl his ooatj took oat his cigar-case, struck a fusee, and began to 
 
360 Chandos, 
 
 emoke,— saaoke, as calmly and with as much indif erence ae if he 
 were on the couch of a smoking-room. 
 
 The crowds fell back, the thu'sty menacing eyes stared vacantly 
 at him, the yells dropped down into a low, unwilling, sullen 
 muttering of wonder ani admiration ; the cool bravery, the calm 
 sang-froid, of the action struck a chord i lever dumb in the English 
 heart ; they had pelted their god, and, lo ! he was but the greater 
 for it. They loved him once more with all a people's swift, 
 passionate, volatile repentance ; they broke out into riotous checr- 
 mg, they tossed his name upward to the murky skies, with all the 
 old faith and honour. Without speaking a word, he had con- 
 quered. 
 
 *' That was like the Clarencieux blood ! " thought Trevenna of 
 his own coolness, with a smile. Then, sitting there in his saddle, 
 he spoke, — spoke with all his skill and all his eloquence, rating 
 them soundly like a whipper-in rating his hounds, till the great 
 masses hung their heads penitent and ashamed before him, yet 
 speaking so that they loved him more fuidously than they had ever 
 done, and making them, to a man, believe that all he took, all he 
 did, all he said, all he projected, were only with one view, — their 
 service. And on the morrow the whole nation was full of adoring 
 applause for the self-devotion and the courage and the serenity 
 with which a Cabinet Minister had risked lus life to quell the 
 northern riots, and to lead the people back to conciliation and to 
 quietness with the charm of his eloquence and the spell of his 
 personal daring. 
 
 " Magister de Vivis Lapidibus " was the title given in the Gothic 
 age to the sculptors of the Gothic fanes. Trevenna might have 
 borne it : it was out of the living stones of other men's lives that 
 he carved the superstructure of his envied triumphs. It is only 
 to those who have this supreme art that success comes. 
 
 CHAPTEE in. 
 
 "TO TELL OF SPRING-TIDE PAST." 
 
 It was the blossoming-time of the early year in Venice, with the 
 glow on the variegated marbles, and the balmy breezes stirring 
 calm lagunes, and the scent of a myriad of spring-born flowers 
 filling the air with their fragrance from the green-wreathed ruins 
 of arches and the deep embayments of pillared casements. The 
 world was waking after winter, and the joy of its renewed life 
 laughed in every smile of colour, and crowned the earth with a 
 diadem of leaf and of bud like a young Bacchus rousing from sleep 
 to his revels. 
 
 *' How its ^jjuth renews ! " said Chandos to his own thoughts; 
 " and we oaij^imow the yalue of ours when its beauty has faded 
 for oyer I " 
 
" To ttU of spring-tide past.'' 36} 
 
 "L'artiste est un dieu tomb^ qiii se souvient du temps ou H 
 cr^ait Tin monde." The memones of his perished worid were with 
 him,— the world in which his word had been as the thyrsus of 
 Dionysus, a wand beneath whose touch all the earth laughed round 
 him into fragrance. He had resisted the mandragora-steeped 
 despair in which the great lives of Byron and De Quincey quenched 
 theii' pain and ebbed away ; he had taken the broken wreck of his 
 peace boldly and calmly, and had sustained himself, sustained his 
 courage, by desires loftier than happiness, by the treasuries of in- 
 tellect, by the consolations of freedom. He had borne with the 
 desolation of life for the sake of his manhood until it had ceased to 
 be wholly desolate, because filled with the dignity of a high and a 
 pure labour. He had done this, and done it so that no Ciceronian 
 lament for exile ever was heard to pass his lips,— done it so that 
 thi-ough it there had come to him the power most foreign to the 
 careless sensuousness of his inborn nature, — the power of serene 
 and unswerving endurance. He had suffered, but he had never 
 lamented. He had known that to yield to suffering was to debase 
 manliness, and that resistance and conflict are the only noble 
 weapons with which adversity can be worthily met. He had been 
 Btung, and bruised, and cheated ; he had been offered the bitter- 
 ness of the hyssop and vinegar when his whole life was athirst for 
 the living waters of loyalty and joy. Men had fooled him, betrayed 
 him, forsaken him; but he had never in turn abandoned them, 
 never reviled the humanity with which he had common bond, 
 never abjured the faith and the creeds of his youth.. The love he 
 had borne men when they were at his feet, and the suns of a cloud- 
 less day had been shed across his path, lived with him still, now 
 that he had been stabbed deep by their traitor-blades and had 
 passed through the starless night of bereavement and of despair. 
 _ Yet at times the anguish of a great longing stole on him ; at 
 times the lust of a great vengeance seized him. At times he would 
 wake from some dream of his youth, some dream that had borne 
 him, for its hour, back to the home he had lost, —borne him to the 
 fresh shelter of its forest leafage, to the sight of its beloved beauty, 
 to the lulling echo of its familiar waters; wake, and, seeing the 
 grey gleam of some foreign city in its wintry dawn or the torrid, 
 reddened sun-glow of some eastern sliy around him, clench his 
 teeth like a man in tortui-e to keep down the great tearless sob that 
 shook him as the wind shakes reeds. At times he would break 
 from the noble and tranquil repose of philosophy, from the tr3a- 
 Buries of intellectual creation, from the calm of deep and scholarly 
 ambition and meditation, — break from them as men break from the 
 stillness of monastic cloisters and the coldness of monastic vows, 
 with an agony of desire for the vivid joys and the vivid hues that 
 had died from his life, — with as passionate an agony for the mere 
 bloodthirst of revenge, that, under the goad of a giant wrong, will 
 change the purest nature to the sheer brute instinct of self- wrought 
 amends, of Mosaic justice. 
 
 He drifted now through Venice, beneath the marble walls and 
 the casemente dark and narrow, out of whoee twilight glowed the 
 
368 Chamtos, 
 
 smile of the flo-wera birth, with the water lazily parting under his 
 boat's prow, and tho green of spring-time foliage hanging over the 
 jasper ledges. His heart was with spring-times that were past, 
 when there had been no shadow on the earth for him, and the kiss 
 of a woman's lips had made his idle golden paradise. *' Love ! '* 
 ho thought, with a momentary regret that was in itself almost a 
 passion. *' It can live no more in my life; it is dead with all the 
 rest." Yet now — for the instant at least— ho would have given 
 the kingship of half the world, had he owned it, to steep himself 
 once more in the sweet, senseless delirium ; he could have mur- 
 mured, with Mirabeau when he looked back in his dungeons to tho 
 hours of his love, " Jouisaance! jouissance! que do vies je don- 
 norais pour toi ! " 
 
 '• If I returned to her ?" he mused, in a doubt, in a desire, that 
 had long haunted him, mingled with an anxiety that was almost 
 remorse. " And yet — a child's love ; it may be forgotten ere this, 
 r.osides, God knows her fate now ; and, whatever it may be, I 
 liave no right to sacrifice her life to mine." 
 
 But there, in the sunset radiance, in the lulling of the water's 
 liuirmur, in the heavy fra^ance of tho many blossoms, the thoughts 
 of his youth were with him, and they wandered alone to Castalia. 
 Ho had not known it whilst he had been with her, but in absence 
 tho desire of his heart had gone to her in what was scarce less than 
 love. He had thrust it from him, because on her the world would 
 have visited that love as dishonour. 
 
 As he passed through the charmed peace of the silent city in the 
 first hour of his arrival there, all odorous and rich in the hues of 
 tho flowers' spring-tide luxuriance, the vessel floated down the 
 ••oiseless highway into a sequestered, desolate street, whose dark 
 walls faced each other with all life, all movement, banished, only 
 with the intense glow of the sun on its many-coloured stones, and 
 tho wreathing of stone-clinging leafage filling the gaps of its 
 broken sculptures. It was that in ^hich, a few years before, the 
 young patriots of Venice had given him the homage of their song 
 of liberty. It was lonely, decayed, abandoned, with no sound in 
 it but the endless lapping of the water on its sea-stairs ; but it 
 was grand, despite that, with its mute records of the glory that 
 once had reigned there, its imperishable memories of things for 
 ever perished. 
 
 The keel grated on the marble steps, worn and glistening with 
 the splash of the water- spray ; he landed, and passed up them to 
 the place where he had once made his dwelling in Venice. The 
 arc of a vast archway spanned the slope of the stairs, shutting out 
 the light of the sun, and leaving only a flickering ray of the day- 
 light's brilliance to lie across the interspaces of dense shadow that 
 were cast dovniward from the mighty structure and the massive 
 camn^s, rich in jasper, and porphyry, and agate, which loomed in 
 the height above. In the depth of the gloom, midway on the 
 stone flight, a resting figure leaned in the passive, motionlesa 
 ?epose of fatigue or of exhaustion, — a form that would have 
 arrested an artist's glanca in long-lingering admiration, that waa 
 
" To tell of Spring ^ tide past. " 3 'iy 
 
 Venetian in its perfect grace, Titian-like in its perfect coloin-, that 
 was set as a brilliant painting in an ebony framework in that 
 cavernous ^loom of the arch, in exquisite harmony yet in exquisite 
 contrast with the antique and melancholy nwjesty of the forsaken 
 palace-way. The head was drooped forward ; but there was no 
 sleep in the eyes that gazed wearily down on the ebb and flow of 
 the gliding canal ; the lids were heavily weighted, but it was not 
 with slumber, but with an unshed mist of tears ; the lips were 
 slightly parted, as with pain» but there was on them a proud fixity 
 of resolve; the hands leaned on the twisted osier handle of h 
 basket, from which spring flowers fell unheeded in coils and masses 
 of blossom down about her on the worn stone. The single flash of 
 sunlight that found entrance beneath the marbles fell, intense and 
 concentred in its heat and its glow, alone on the scattered foliage 
 and on the golden gleam of her uncovered hair. The attitude, 
 the flower-fragrance, the languor of repose, were the same as they 
 had been under the beech-shadows of Tuscany ; but the dreaming 
 peace of childhood was banished for ever. 
 
 He saw her as, coming out of the splendour of the day, he 
 glanced, half blinded, up the twilight of the palace-steps ; and her 
 name left his lips with a cry,—" Castalia ! " She looked up with 
 a look in her eyes that smote him with a pang keen and heavy as 
 a murderer's remorse, and, starting from her musing rest, sprano- 
 towards him with all the wealth of the spring buds and blossoms 
 scattered into the gliding darkness of the water; then— like a shot 
 fawn— she fell downward at his feet, the shower of her glistening 
 hresses trailing on the sea- wet marbles of the stair. 
 
 If he had never loved her, he loved her then. He lifted her, seuso- 
 less to his touch, into his arms, where she had rested through the 
 tumult of the storm ; he murmured to her a thousand names that 
 had never been on his utterance since the days of his youth, when 
 there was no toy so fair to him as the fairness of woman ; he swept 
 the burnished weight of her hair back from the face from which he 
 had exiled the smile of its childhood, the light of its peace. Por 
 the moment he was once more young ; for the moment time and 
 calamity, and the bitterness of disillusion, and the coldness of dead 
 hopes and dead desires, were as though they had never been ; for 
 the moment passion once again transfigured all existence, and 
 blinded him with its warm golden glow so sweet because so tran- 
 pient, so strong in power and so vain in reason. The cost of it is 
 oftentimes deadly and far-reaching ; but its lotus dream of forget- 
 fulness is worth it while it lasts. 
 
 The shock of joy had stunned her ; she lay unconscious in his 
 embrace. No living thing was near them in the (Wkness of the 
 old sea-palace ; there was only the sound of the retreating oars 
 beating out a soft, sad, distant music ; there was only the one 
 broad beam of vivid light that flushed tJie tint of tiie fallen carna- 
 tion-buds to scarlet, and burned on the loosened splendour of her 
 hair that swept across his breast. He stooped his head over her, 
 gazing on her with a love that had silently grown, bom in absence 
 ^.liA from i»ty, and that sprang up like a txopio flower which 
 
 8 8 
 
37° 
 
 Chandos, 
 
 springs to its height in one short Eastern night, with the Enlddel^ 
 eight of her young beauty. 
 
 As though his kiss waJiened her and called back the mind from 
 its trance, her heart, where it beat on his own, throbbed faster ; 
 her eyes opened wide and startled, as they had opened when he 
 had roused her from her sleep in the storm ; for an instant she lay 
 
 Eassive in his arms, gazing upward at him with the glory of a joy, 
 ewildered as a dream, dawning, as the day dawns, on her face. 
 
 ** O God, be pitifal ! Let me never wake." 
 
 Such dreams so often had mocked her. 
 
 " Oastalia, look at me, hear me. I am with you. Have you 
 loved me so well, then ? " 
 
 At the sound of his voice a flush like the scarlet heat of the 
 fallen carnation-leaves glowed in her cheek ; her eyes looked up- 
 ward to him, but half conscious still. 
 
 "At last! at last!" 
 
 The murmur broke from her, stifled with the rush of tears ; she 
 quivered from his embrace, and crouched down at his feet, till her 
 face was veiled from him. The knowledge of love was on her, and 
 it stilled and filled with the dread of his scorn the anguish of joy 
 with which her heart seemed breaking as a nightingale's breaks 
 with the rapture of song. 
 
 He stooped to her, and his hand touched her with a gentleness 
 that thrilled her with its caress like fire. 
 
 " Castalia, have you loved me despite my desertion, — through all 
 my cruelty?" 
 
 Her brow drooped still, till the bright masses of her hair bathed 
 his feet. 
 
 " Eccellenza ! I have only prayed God to let me see your face, 
 and die." 
 
 The words were so low they barely stirred the air, yet he heard 
 them; and his eyes grew dim : it was long since any had ^ven him 
 love ; it had an infinite sweetness for him. He stood silent and 
 motionless a moment, looking down on her where she knelt with the 
 Venetian light shed like an aureole about her. Then the old 
 dominion, the reckless sovereignty, of passion vanquished him ; he 
 drew her once more into his arms, he lifted again her bowed head, 
 that sunk downward like a broken flower vn the chill dark marble 
 of the water-stairs ; the gaze that had never., sleeping or waking, been 
 absent from her memory, met hers with a look that made her senses 
 sick and faint with the paradise of joy that doubted its own being. 
 
 ** Castalia, we are both alone ; let us be the world to one another." 
 
 She lay passive in his hold ; her face was turned upward to him 
 with the radiance of the sun fallen across her proud bright brow ; 
 her lips trembled ; she heard him with a breathless incredulity, a 
 breathless ecstasy. 
 
 *• Oh, my lord, you mock me ! Love ! your love ! — for me I " 
 
 It seemed to her the gift of so divine a world, the treasury of so 
 vast a sovereignty, the benediction of so godlike a mercy ! She 
 could not thiiS: that it could be her own. She could not kold a 
 lifetime of service and of sacrifice title sufficient for it. 
 
" To thine own self he tme,** ^Jt 
 
 He drew her closer and closer to his breast, and, fbr aK anis »rer, 
 spent his kisses on her lips. 
 
 *' Do you doubt novj?" 
 
 With the touch of his caresses the consciousness alike of the 
 passion she wakened and the passion she cherished stole on her ; 
 the barrier between them, that her veneration for him had raised 
 by the deep humility of its own worship, seemed to fall as his eyes 
 gazed down into hers ; for the first time the knowledge of what 
 love he might bear her, of what love she might render him, came 
 to her with the glow of its warmth, with the wonder of its deep 
 and hushed delight. The carnation flush of her face burned deeper 
 in its soft shame ; a sigh trembled through her, where she rested 
 in his arms as a hunted bird rests in its haven of shelter. 
 
 " Por the pity of God — if I am dreaming, kill me while I di'eam!" 
 
 The words died in their prayer ; her gaze met his, heavy with the 
 voluptuous weight of new-bom thoughts, the eyes of Sappho under 
 the first breath of love. His hand wandered among the floating 
 gold of her sun-Kghtened tresses ; his Ups sought ever and again 
 tiie warmth of hers. 
 
 * ' Let me dream with you, if I can ! Let me dream, too, once 
 more,--dream that you give me back my youth 1 " 
 
 CHAPTEE IV. 
 
 "TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRTJE." 
 
 He gazed down on her, and wondered how he could ever haye left 
 her. 
 
 The flight of a few months had brought her loveliness to its per- 
 fection ; and the silence of endurance, the passion of suflFering, har. 
 left on it a heroism and a power that gave tenfold more beauty to 
 the luxuriance of its youth, more intensity to the splendour of its 
 hues. Young though she was, hers was already a life to be a poet's 
 mistress, to comprehend and to inspire loftiest ambitions, highesi 
 eff'oit^, noblest thoughts, to gain from the lips of a man the words 
 of Dante,— 
 
 " Quella che imparadisa la mia mente, 
 Ogni basso pensier dal cor m'avulse.* 
 
 As the full consciousness of his presence and of his love wakened 
 in her, as the sense of his words and the truth of her dream dawned 
 on her till her heart seemed breaking with its rapture, she drew 
 herself from his embrace, and sank down beside him, her head 
 bowed upon his hand. 
 
 •' Ah ! this is but your pity?" 
 
 The words were low-breathed as a sigh. 
 
 To her, he was so far above her, far as the stars in their diyixie 
 Z&ajesty ; to her it seemed thstt she could have nothing to raise bar 
 
3^1 "^ Ckandos, 
 
 into fitness with his life. For all answer he lifted her head upward 
 as he stooped oyer her. 
 
 " Only pity P Look in my eyes, and see I " 
 
 Once Defore he had said the last words to one whom they had no 
 power to stir, whose heart was chill as ice against his own. Now 
 the whole fervour of a southern natnre thrilled in answer to them. 
 Castalia looked up, and met his gaze ; then the burning colour 
 flushed her cheek and her bosom, a light like a flash of sunlight 
 trembled over her face, her lips parted with a deep broken breath. 
 From his eyes she had learned what her reverence in its humility 
 could not realise ; she never asked, she never doubted, again 
 whether he loved her. 
 
 And the weight and the wonder of its joy seemed to kill hex with 
 its glory. 
 
 " What can I give the« back, O liberal 
 And princely giver, who hast brought the gold 
 And purple of thine heart?" 
 
 her own heart askod. 
 
 "Oh, my lord, my king!" she murmured, while her lips hesi- 
 tatingly touched his hand in the kiss of a slave's veneration, ** I 
 am not worthy ! A word from you, a smile from you such as you 
 give the dogs, were all / prayed for ! What can 1 render you P I 
 am nameless and desolate ! " 
 
 Of the gifts of her o'^ti loveliness she never thought ; she had 
 known them no moro than the passion-flower knows its own hues. 
 
 •' You will give mo yourself, and you wiU give me youth,— gii'ts 
 more precious than the treasuies of a world, Castalia ! My love ! — 
 all my youth through I sought your likeness, and never found you ! 
 You waited to be the angel of consolation to the darkness of years, 
 that were without a joy iu them until you brought one." 
 
 " Ah I you are not hajipy ?" 
 
 He smiled,- -a smile in which the melancholy of his fate was 
 tinged with impassioued tenderness for her. 
 
 ''"When I look on you, I am." 
 
 ** Oh, my lord ! if 1 can make you so one houi", I shall have lived 
 enough." 
 
 He understood her. This vivid, intense, devotional love was very 
 precious to him ; he had dreamed of it in the ideals of his poetic 
 fancies; and it was doubly sweet now that it came to him after the 
 desert waste of many years, in which no smile had lightened for 
 him, no Ups touched his own. "WTiere he rested in the sliadow and 
 the solitude of the old palace- entrance, the dead days revived once 
 more for him. Once more he lost himself in the languoi and the 
 warmth and the oblivion of passion, as he murmured to h or a thou- 
 sand caressinff names, and diew fi'om her the story of her wander- 
 ings, touched oeyond words by the pathetic simplicity of that search 
 for him through the vastness of an unknown world. 
 
 "I sought you, Eccellenza; yes," she murmured, while she 
 looked np at him with an appealing deprecating prayer, " I could 
 not stay whsn yon were ^one ; my heart was dead, my life was 
 
** To thine otan self be time." 3^3 
 
 iMToken, And I heard them speak eyil against you, and the Padre 
 Giulio lifted up his voice with them ; and I would not wait and eat 
 the bread of those who had once touched your name. For I heard 
 that name at the last, and I knew you then greater than any kings ; 
 I knew the book that I loved as your book, the thoughts I had 
 treasured as your thoughts. But, though I sought you, it was not 
 to seek your pity, not to ask your mercy. I never meant that you 
 should know that I was near : — if ever I met you, I only meant to 
 watch you from a distance, to hear your voice, to see your face, 
 while you knew nothing. You believe me ?— you believe it P " 
 
 The terror on her was great, lest he should think that she had 
 followed him to appeal to his compassion, to force herself on his 
 life. His eyes were dim, his voice quivered, as he answered her,— 
 
 ** Believe it ? Yes ! each word that your lips say. My darling, 
 my darling, what you have suffered ! and suffered thiough and for 
 me!" 
 
 "Eccellenza," she said, under her breath, **I would suffer a 
 thousand years of tfuit for this one hour." 
 
 •* Hush ! hush I or I shall love you too well ; and all that / love 
 1 lose. Such courage, such patience, such fidelity; and you aak, 
 whatyou have that you give me ?" 
 
 '• Those are nothing," she said, dreamily. " The mercy is— to 
 let me render them, it has been so long, O God ! so long ! Here 
 in Venice it was a little happier. The people speak of you ; they 
 love you, though they say it beneath their breath, because of the 
 tyranny. They said you would come here with the spring ; and so 
 —I waited." 
 
 The words were simple, spoken with the tears of remembered 
 anguish heavy on her lashes ; but aU her story was told in them. 
 *• She had waited," with the faiti of a child, the passion of a 
 woman : it was the epitome of the intense volition and the silent 
 power of sacrifice that met in her nature. It was the ideal oi 
 which he had once vainly dreamed; it moved him now to an 
 emotion keen to pain. 
 
 " Oastalia, in my youth I loved many, yet my youth never had 
 euch love as yours. What you have suffered while I knew nothing 1 
 And you never loathed me for my cruelty?" 
 
 *♦ Cruelty P You were never cruel. You saved my life; it was 
 yours to take or to leave, to command or to neglect." 
 
 " But I left you to this loneliness, to this peril ! How have you 
 lived, fragile and friendleaa, and dowered with the danger of such 
 teautyP" ^ 
 
 Her face grew pale. The paat was terrible to her, —a time never 
 to be dwelt on without a horror of remembrance ; and she would 
 not wound him by confessing all she had endured. 
 
 *' It is over," she said softly ; •♦ let it sleep." 
 
 ** It will never sleep in my memory. And now, now that w« 
 have met, what does the thought of my love bring you P " 
 
 Her eyes dwelt on his, deep and dreamy as the night, with the 
 fire of a tropic nature in tiieir depths ; her voice was hui^ed beloT 
 her breath. 
 
^j^ Chandos. 
 
 " How can I say ? I know now how possible it le to die of joy "j 
 I feel as if I should die so to-night ! " 
 
 He drew her nearer still into his embrace. The words sent a 
 chill through him ; all that his heart had clung to had been taken, 
 soon or late. 
 
 " Gk)d forbid ! Live to bless me, Castalia; live to be my love, 
 my consoler, my mistress, my wife ! " 
 
 The last word left his lips in unconsidered impulse. She was 
 his so utterly, his to cherish or destroy, to honour or dishonoui', to 
 lead as he cnose, to make what he would ; the absolute defence- 
 lessness of her life, the absolut/e abandonment of her trust, forbade 
 liiTn to seek from her aught that others would have held her 
 sacrifice. 
 
 Where she rested in his arms, she trembled from head to foot, 
 the liquid darkness of her eyes grew burning with the bewildered 
 vision of a future that passed all which her thought had ever 
 reached ; her senses seemed blind and faint ; she felt as though 
 angel hands had been laid on her and had raised her upward into 
 the light of eternal suns. 
 
 " No, no ! " she murmured, while her gaze dwelt on his with all 
 the humility and all the idolatry that were in her; "I have no 
 title I I was bom of shame, they say ; I am without name, or kin, 
 >r worthiness. I am yours to neglect, to smile upon, to forsake, 
 to command, — as you will ! Let me be as your slave ; let me follow 
 and serve and obey you as spaniels may ; let me live in your sight, 
 and have honour enough in one word, in one touch : — ^that is aU 
 that I am meet for from you ! " 
 
 The words moved him as no words that had claimed her justice 
 or his tenderness would ever have done, — words that had the 
 sublime self-oblivion and self-devotion of Heloise. 
 
 '* Not so ! You were worth empires if I had them in my gift. 
 Castalia, ihere is but one passion possible between us now. The 
 world, as its bigotry stands, would call that passion your shame, 
 unless my name were bestowed with it, — unless the marriage- 
 benediction were on you. I have little left to give ; but such as I 
 have shall be yours." 
 
 The scarlet flush deepened over her bosom ; her head drooped 
 till her lips touched his hand again in their reverent kiss; her 
 voice was broken and lost in tears. 
 
 '* Ah, God ! what can I say to yon ? how can my life repay you ? 
 You gave me aU— gave me the world — ^when you once gave me 
 your love I " 
 
 Past the darkened arch of the entrance a gondola floated slowly 
 down the solitary and neglected street, — a vessel richlj^ arrayed, 
 and piled in the prow with a fragrant load of gathered violets and 
 red carnation buds. Lying back in it was a form, delicate and 
 patrician, covered with costly laces and velvets ; her cheek rested 
 on her hand ; her hand glittered with diamonds. She looked up 
 languidly as the boat dropped past the high and massivo sculpturt 
 
" To thine mvn self be irue." ^y^ 
 
 of the mighty archway. The gloom was deep as twilight boneatL 
 its arc, yet her eyes pierced it and caught the hues of the fallen 
 flowers, the gleam of the golden haii', — eyes falcon-bright, pitiless, 
 and unerring, — the eyes of Heloise de la VivaroL 
 
 " She has found mm ! " she said, in her teeth. "And he ioyes 
 her. So it comes round, — so it comes round ! " 
 
 So her vengeance came rouud to her, — her vengeance vowed in 
 the years that were gone. Women may forget their love, and 
 change it ; but there are few who ever forget the oath or the desire 
 of jealousy. 
 
 The flitting by of that single gondola was unseen by them, the 
 noise of its oars drowned in the ripple of the water beneath the 
 wide slope of the stairs. He surrendered himself once more to the 
 forgetfiihiess and the sweetness of passion ; and her life seemed to 
 rest in a trance divine as that which comes to the lotus-eaters. 
 The darkness of the vast stone pile enclosed them in its shadow 
 and its solitude ; the red gold of the fast-declining sun only stole 
 in a single ray across the lustre of her eyes as they looked up to 
 his. The heavy fragrance of the fallen flowers weighted the aii- ; 
 the delicious monotone of the water's ebb and flow below agaiast 
 the marble alone stirred the stillness. Time passed on ; neither 
 counted its flight. The sun set, the odorous ni^ht fell ; it seemed 
 to her at once brief as a moment,, long as a lifetime, since she had 
 found him whom she had grown to nold her sovereign and her 
 religion. 
 
 Through the gloom, as the depth of night fell, a yoice came from 
 above them. 
 
 " Castalia, art thou not home P" 
 
 **Who is that?" Chandos said, swiftly. '^Who calls you by 
 your name?" 
 
 " Ah ! I had forgotten him ! " she murmured, with that soft con- 
 trition with which she had once pleaded her forgetfulness of the 
 Tuscan priest. " I was wrong to say I was wholly friendless. He 
 has been very good. He is a Jew, old, and blind, and poor ; but 
 he led me here, and he brought me to some women of his nation, 
 who have been gentle to me, because they knew me to be homeless 
 and motherless." 
 
 As she spoke, the old man came slowly down the steps, feeling 
 his way with that wavering uncertain movement of his hands that 
 Was in so pathetic a contrast with the dignity of his austere and 
 venerable age. A gleam of the white luminous Venetian moon fell 
 across the majesty of his bowed head and lofty form. 
 
 " Good God !— at last ! " 
 
 The words escaped involuntarily as he rose to his feet, facing the 
 figure of the Israelite. He had sought the old manfer and dili- 
 jjently since the night when he had found fjim wandering in the 
 streets, — sought him on the va^e, baseless, shapeless thoughts and 
 the unemng instinct of the desire for yengeanoe. 
 
3^5 Chandm. 
 
 The Jew pansed and listened ; his quick ear apprised him of het 
 presence, and of another beside hers. 
 ** Castalia, who is with thee ?" 
 
 "ItisII" ^ ^ 
 
 At the sound of his voice the Jew started, and over the brown 
 worn sternness of his face, Ohandos saw the look that had come 
 there when he bad spoken his name in the blind man's ear. 
 
 "It is I," he continued, as he passed up the sea-stairs, and 
 stood beside the Israelite on the breadth of the marble landing- 
 place. ** You have been good and pitiful to a life that is very dear 
 to me, I hear. Take my deepest gratitude for every tenderness 
 you have shown her, every pang you have striven to spare her." 
 
 Over the old man's face swept the look of pain and of shame that 
 had been there in the after-midnight in Paris,— a look that 
 hardened instantly into a rugged iron calm. 
 
 *' I have served her little," he said, briefly. " The maiden has 
 gained her own bread by the choifs of her Church, and the sale of 
 flowers while flowers bloomed. I owe her more than she owes me. 
 And what is she to you 9" 
 " The only thing I love." 
 
 A sigh rose to the Hebrew's lips. Oastalia's life had been 
 precious to him ; he had grown to listen for her voice, and her 
 step, and her presence, as the aged listen for the only thing that 
 reminds them of the world in which they once had place : he knew 
 that sho would be lost to him now. But the rigid austerity of his 
 face kept its reticence. 
 
 " Love ! And you left her to wander and starve ?" 
 *' I had no knowledge of her fate. Had I left her as you think, 
 I should merit now your worst reproach, your worst rebuke." 
 
 ** Pardon me, sir. / should not have doubted your mercy. Yet, 
 for the child's sake, I would hear more. Is she your daughter F" 
 *'Minel God forbid I" 
 
 The Hebrew turned his sightless eyes on Castalia. 
 "Wilt thou leave us?" 
 
 She passed from them into the darkness of the palace-entrance. 
 The Hebrew bent his face so that the moonlight which he felt was 
 on it, should not be shed there. 
 
 " Sir, I have no title to arraign you. Yet they tell me she has 
 a marvellous loveliness. Will you make of her but your mistress ?' ' 
 " No ; she shall bear my name." 
 ** Verily ? And you were ever so proud ! " 
 "I am too much so now, perhaps. Yet I may justly be too 
 proud to mislead what trusts me." 
 
 ♦' Ah ! your creeds were never those of your fellow-men. They 
 are not of the world, sir, — not of the world ! " 
 
 There was an acrid bitterness in the Israelite's words, because 
 he felt a poignant suff'ering ; he moved to foal his feeble way down 
 the steps, to escape the presence that was one continual rebuke to 
 him. Chandos laid his hand on him and arrested him. Memoriea 
 were rising from the vague chaos of far-ofi" remembrance; know* 
 ledge was coming to him dimly and with difficulty. 
 
" To thine own self be true.*' 377 
 
 *' "Wait ! We havo other words to speak. Who was your chief, 
 your tyrant?" 
 
 For a moment the Hebrew's frame shook in every fibre ; the 
 next, the complete control, the steel-like power of endurance, in 
 him returned, — immovable. 
 
 *' That secret will be buried with me." 
 
 "Buried? It is not buried; it is clear to me. Answer me. 
 Your bondmaster was my foe ?" 
 
 His face grew eager, and quivered with swift-rising passion, in 
 which all softer memories were lost. The Hebrew's features never 
 changed ; they were cast in bronze, when he would. 
 
 ** It may be so. Perhaps your foes are many." 
 
 ** You equivocate I Answer me, — yes or no. It was John Tre- 
 venna ?" 
 
 '* I equivocate in nothing ; I simply keep silence. I shall keep 
 it until death." 
 
 The answer was so unmoved in its iron serenity that not even 
 the man who watched and who heard him could gather one sign 
 by which to know the truth. 
 
 " Keep it ? And he tortured you, chained you, cursed you ! " 
 
 There was a magnificent grandeur in the old man's attitude as 
 
 "What of that? I swore the oath to the God of Israel; I 
 keep it because he spared the life of the youth. The Gentiles take 
 oaths by our God, to break them ; ours are redeemed, come what will.'* 
 
 Chandos stood silent a moment. On his nature, even in the first 
 agony of the desire for vengeance, the appeal could not be lost. 
 He recognised the greatness of the fidelity, even whilst it stood 
 like a barrier of granite between him and the justice of retribution, 
 the knowledge of his past. But, as he gazed on the Hebrew, the 
 light of remembrance broke on him; the crowd of the porphyry 
 chamber came back on his memory ; a great cry broke fi-om him. 
 
 ** Wait! /swear that this darkness shall be made light. You 
 were among the claimants on Clarencieux ? " 
 
 The Jew turned his sightless eyes, his rugged face upon him, 
 impassive as death. 
 
 "Say that I was; what does that prove? There were many 
 claimants, and just ones." 
 
 " It proves enough to me ! h. Jew firm was the largest of my 
 creditors : that firm was yours. Your tyrant ruled it : that tyrant 
 was my traitor. My wealth went to him : he devoured it. The 
 world called me mad : I was so, for I was his dupe ! Answer me : 
 your torturer and my enemy were one ? " 
 
 The Hebrew's features were impenetrable as the night ; he waa 
 etirred no more than were the marbles around him. 
 
 " You speak widely, sir, and without warrant. It is vain to 
 appeal to me. I neither deny nor afi^rm ; I keep the silence for 
 which I sufiered." 
 
 " Suffered !— and for a fiend ? " 
 
 •* Suffered, — for my oath's sake." 
 
 The grandeur of the resistance to him wrung his reverence from 
 
378 Chandou 
 
 diandos, even whilst the anguish, the fire, the impotence cA 
 awakening wrath and awakening knowledge rose in tumult. 
 
 *' Keep it ! " he said, while his voice rang with the might of his 
 passions. " Kept or broken, it shall avail nothing to guard him 
 from my vengeance. I know enough, without more knowledge, to 
 stamp his irSamy in the sight of men. Those lost deeds, that 
 hidden usury, that trading in the trust and the necessities of his 
 friends, — it will blast his name through Europe ! " 
 
 The Hebrew's harsh calm tones answered him with judicial 
 brevity. 
 
 "What do you know? Nothing! You suspect; — jrou will 
 speak on suspicion ; baseless and unproved, the accusation will 
 recoil harmless from the accused, to brand the accuser as a libellist 
 and a false witness." 
 
 Chandos quivered in every limb as he heard ; the rage of justice 
 paralj'-sed from its stroke, of truth impotent to make manifest its 
 truth, seized him with maddening misery. He was once again in 
 the coils of the net that had wound itself so long about his life to 
 fetter and destroy. 
 
 " Oh, God ! " he said, ** why wiU you shield your destroyer and 
 mine ? why will you shelter the iniquity you have said you repent ^ 
 Your own soul is noble : what sympathy have you with the villany 
 you have abjured ? Youi' own sacrifice has been grand : why will 
 you have so much tenderness of sins that are vile as murder ? " 
 
 ' ' I have none ; but I am true to him by whom my son waa 
 spared." 
 
 * ' What ! are traitors, aad tyrants, and criminals to find such 
 loyalty, whilst honest men are betrayed and abjured by the score ? 
 Have you no pity, no remorse, for the wrongs of a life ? " 
 
 '* Sir, if I had ever known either pity or remorse, T had not been 
 what I was." 
 
 Chandos' hand clenched on the old man's shoulder. Conviction, 
 strong, unbearable, intense, was on him that this Hebrew held the 
 secret of his enemy's hatred, and that John Trevenna was the curse 
 of both their fates ; yet he was as impotent to wring the truth as 
 to force blood from the cold black marbles beneath their feet. 
 
 " Listen ! I have pitied you from my heart, honoured your 
 endurance fi'om my soul ; but I have the wrongs of a lifetime to 
 avenge. I Icnoiu, as though the proof were by me, that my foe is 
 one with your master, that fraud and treachery and baseness had 
 more share in my ruin than my own extravagance. Speak now, 
 or — as we believe in one God — the law shall make you." 
 
 The Hebrew turned his blind eyes on him with the patience of 
 his race. 
 
 " The law ? It did its worst on me : had it power to make me 
 ik?" 
 
 Great Heaven ! crime gets such loyalty as this, while I foimd 
 love and friendship traitors ! " 
 
 The Jew's bronzed faoe grew paler, his close-set lips shook slig\tly 
 under the snowy whiteness of his beard ; but he remained im- 
 movable. Chandos stood above him, bis eyes black, his teeth set 
 
** To thine own self be true** ^79 
 
 *• Man— man ! if you ever loved, if you ever hated, give me my 
 
 Vbngeance ! " 
 
 *• Sir," said the Hebrew, with his grave and caustic speech, 
 " beware ! You lust for an evil thing." 
 
 •* No ! I claim a barren justice." 
 
 " Justice is not given on earth. Hear me. You urge me to 
 
 ©yil » 
 
 •*I urge you to the service of truth, to the chastisement of 
 infamy " 
 
 ** It may be so ; yet hear me. You tempt me to evil, because you 
 tempt me to forswear the sole fidelity in gratitude that redeems my 
 baseness. I know your life ; I know your thoughts ; I know that 
 you have loved men well, served them unweariedly, taught them 
 high and gracious things. When you heard my story, you called 
 it a mart^'dom whose nobility men seldom reached : why call it 
 now a sheltering of evil, because your own wish is to behold that 
 evil unearthed ? You told me then I had atoned for my past : why 
 tell me now I only stain it further ? This is unworthy you, — un- 
 true to your creeds. "Were your passions now unloosened, youi" 
 life now unbiassed, you would be the first to say to me, * Before 
 all, keep youi- oath sacred.' " 
 
 Chandos' hand fell, his breath came loud and quick ; he stood 
 like one pierced to the heart with an exceeding bitterness. 
 
 *' Sir," went on the Hebrew's unbroken, impassive voi "it is 
 true that you have a secret of mine that you can tortuio i^o with, 
 if you will; but I have read your natui'e wrong if you will use 
 against me the weapons that I, unconscious, placed in youi' hold. 
 You have passed thi*ough vast calamities since the day that I stood 
 amidst your spoilers ; they will have failed to teach you what I 
 believe they have taught you, if you tempt another to dishonoui- 
 because through that dishonour you believe your own desires would 
 be served, your own revenge gained to you." 
 
 Chandos stood silent still ; a mortal struggle shook him. 
 
 '* I am no god. What you ask of me is a god's divine, impartial 
 justice ! I claim a man's right, a man's weakness, a man's sin of 
 vengeance." 
 
 * 'It may be so : yet, if you be true to yourself, it is that very 
 impartiality of justice — aU hard though it may be— that you will 
 render." 
 
 There was a long silence, in which only the lapping of the water 
 sounded. No demand that honour had ever made on him had been 
 so merciless in cruelty as this, no contest that had wrung his life 
 60 hard to meet. His voice was very low as it fell at last on the 
 stillness. 
 
 ** You are right I I tempt you no more." 
 
 The Hebrew bowed his head. 
 
 ** There a great life spoke." 
 
 Then, slowly, with his sightless, feeble movement, he passed 
 down the water-stairs till the dignity of his dark, bent form, waa 
 lost in the breadth of the shadows. Chandos let him go, unarrested. 
 He stood there, blind to all around him, dead to all memory say« 
 
SSo Ckandoc, 
 
 one. The blackness of night was on his soul, and the nolence oi 
 baffled passion shook him as a storm-wind the strength of the 
 cedars. There was but one terrible thirst upon him,— the thirst 
 for his vengeance. 
 
 Where he stood, his arm dropped as though the nervous force of 
 it were broken ; his eyes gazed without sight down the shaft of the 
 
 gloomy stairs, where the water glistened cold and gliding in the 
 icker of the moon. The conviction of his foe's guilt was scored on 
 his mind as though he had beheld it written up through the length 
 and breadth of the lands ! the meshes of his own impotence for 
 chastisement and retribution bound him helpless as one paralysed ; 
 the human lust of evil possessed him as his madness possessed 
 
 A while, — and in the soft Venetian darkness of the young night 
 Castalia stole to him, she touched his hand with the suppliant kiss 
 of her tender homage, she raised upward to his face the di-eamy 
 lustre of her eyes. 
 
 *' My lord, is regret with you because you were too merciful to 
 me P If it be, say it. My hfe is only lived for you." 
 
 Hifl arms drew her to mm in the vibration of the passions that 
 beat in him. 
 
 •* Eegretl— when in you I find all the consolation I shall ever 
 know? Castalia, dark hours come on me; you must not fear 
 them. My heart is sick because of its own failure. Tempted, I 
 am weak as water, I am cruel as murderers. I have lived, and 
 striven, and suffered, and sought to serve men, only at the last to 
 reel back into a barbarian's lust.—to be athirst with a Cain's 
 desires ! " 
 
 For the evil that his foe had wrought him had not yet reached 
 its end, and it poisoned now the first sweet hours of reviving 
 happiness. 
 
 It might go farther yet, and close his life in crime. 
 
 OHAPTEE V. 
 
 THE CODES OP ABTHUB. 
 
 In the darkness of large, jutting marble blocks, in another 
 quarter of Venice, Ignatius Mathias held his almost nightly vigil, 
 — the vi^l which had but one aim and but one reward, — to hear 
 the passing footstep of his son. Agostino had come to Venice in 
 the restlessness of one who has peace nowhere and vainly thinks 
 with each new refuge to escape what haunts him. He lived the 
 life that a hare leads in hunting seasons : the season may pass and 
 leave the animal in safety, unmolested under the shade of fern and 
 thyme, but none the less with every hour must its heart beat, and 
 its sleep be broken, and its nerves tremble at every crack of the 
 branches, every sough of the wind, lest its hunters be out on its 
 
The Codes of Arthur, ^%t 
 
 seeiifc. iears would go, and his tyrant need nothing of him ; but all 
 the same lie was never sure but that some cruel task might any day be 
 required at his hands, and no alternative left him but to do its work, 
 however abhorrent, or to brave the shame of public slander and pub- 
 lic exposure, from which the feminine terrors of his nature had so 
 long shrunk as more unendurable than death. But of this tyranny 
 that ruled his life his father knew nothing: he heard of the 
 painter's fame, of his talent, of his growing wealth, of his adoration, 
 of his art, of his love for his Spanish wife, and he believed Agostino 
 happy with the happiness that he had himself sacrified all to pur- 
 chase for *' the lad." He was ever but a youth in the old man's 
 thoughts, a beautiful, yielding, caressing, tender-natured boy, 
 won by a smile, crushed by a stem word, as he had been when the 
 eyes whose blindness now kept him ever young in their memory 
 had last looked upon the graciousness of his early years. That 
 Agostino could grow older with the growth of time never came to 
 the remembrance of one who had parted with him in his boyhood ; 
 he had eternal youth in the love of the sightless man. There is 
 thus far mercy for the blind, that they know nothing of the stealing 
 change that robs the beauty which is cherished from the eyes that 
 cherish it, slowly and cruelly, until the last change of all. 
 
 Ignatius Mathias stood now, so guiding himself by the marvel- 
 lous compensative instinct which his calamity confers, that he was 
 secured from all passers-by by the jutting-out of the stone, and his 
 long, black, floating garments could scarce be told from the marble 
 that shrouded him. If by any chance a stray moonbeam wandered 
 through to the deep shelter of the statueless niche, it would have 
 seemed to any casual passer-by that it was filled by some sculp- 
 tured figure of prophet or of priest which was in perfect keeping 
 with the solemn and melancholy grandeur round. He was listen- 
 ing eagerly, intently ; but his hands were clenched on the marble 
 where he leaned, and his heart ached with the burden of remoiso, 
 the dry, tearless, hopeless grief of age. 
 
 It had pierced him to the quick to remain steeled to Chandos' 
 prayer, as it had been bitter to him to show no sign of respect in 
 the porphyry hall at Clarencieux, when all the heartless crowd 
 ftbout him had been moved and awed by the dignity of adversity. 
 The keen Israelite could reverence from his soul the man who in 
 his deadliest passions was still obedient to the demand and the 
 duty of justice ; and he felt that he too had sinned towards him. 
 
 '•ItwasaviUanoussinto robhim," bemused, — " vilest treachery, 
 vilest murder. He heaped coals of fire on my head with every one 
 of his just words ; and yet it would bring him nothing even if he 
 knew all. We were alwajrs within the law. He would wreck all 
 the nobility of his nature in the blood-hound thirst of vengeance ; 
 he would do what would belie his life. Pshaw ! why do I deal 
 with these sophistries ? If he slew his foe, and slew me, it would 
 be no more, as he said, than barren justice. But give it him I 
 never will. Sin or martyrdom, whichever it be, added crime or 
 atoning fidelity, I wiU die silent ; I will be true to him by whom 
 my 8(Ha waa fi|^red« — true to the last" 
 
^99 Ckandos, 
 
 His face set in stem, Tinflinohiiig resolve, the firmnese of dlenoet 
 
 the dignity of faithfulness, which would be true to ita bond, even 
 if that bond were forged by crime, lent it nobility ; then the canietic 
 and ironic bitterness in which his temper had steeled itself long; to 
 all gentler things passed over it. 
 
 * Why should I care for owe.^" he muttered. ** There were 
 thousands. If I ever spoke, I should unloose hell-dogs ; if I ever 
 made atonement by turning traitor, what lives I should have to 
 summon out of their graves to hear my mea culpa, if I called all 
 my auditors ! " 
 
 The smile was evil on his face, though that evil was more sad 
 than other men's sorrow. His hands had been as millstont^s, 
 grinding all that went through them to powder, that the grist 
 might feed the yawning sack of money-lust. If all his accuser«i 
 would rise against him, the tomb must yield up its dead. 
 
 A slight sound caught his ear; he started, and listened as 
 Indians listen. He had kept this vigil long and often, in divers 
 scenes and divers hours, — under the cold shadow of green leaves, 
 under the driving snow of winter nights, under the broad gables 
 of antique houses, under the drenching rains of autumn skies, 
 under the mild stars of vintage eves, moving unweariedly in the 
 changing, restless track of an artist's wanderings, content if reward 
 came in the echo of a laugh, in the distant murmur of a voice, in 
 the passing of a far-oflp footfall. Unseen, Tinthanked, unrecom- 
 pensed, save by such fleeting things as could be borne on summer 
 air or heard through winter blasts, his great and silent love 
 endured. A step passed by him ; he held his breath as it went ; 
 he knew that his son was nigh. Then the faint sound died to 
 silence, and the light died from his face ; this was all, all that was 
 left him, — one moment to be scored against a martyrdom ; and his 
 lips moved in voiceless prayer and thanksgiving. He breathed his 
 blessing on the life that passed by him in the hush of the night ; 
 he was grateful even for so little. It sufficed ; his son lived. 
 
 Where the silver lustre of the Venetian moon poured down 
 through lofty casements of a desolate palace-chamber, Chandos, as 
 he looked into the eyes that once more spoke to him in the lan- 
 guage of his youth, strove to put from him the remembrance of his 
 traitor, the thirst for his vengeance ; and he could not. The dark- 
 ness of a violent and unsparing hatred had seized him. Hate was 
 foreign to his nature, yet it had sprung in growth fast as poison- 
 plants from poison-seeds in the rank soil of Afiica. With his foe 
 in his hands now, he could have stamped his life out with as little 
 mercy as men show who crush a rattlesnake. The fangs of a snake 
 had bitten him ; the coils of a snake strangled him ; the virus of a 
 snake entered his whole life to change and wither and consume it. 
 The snake was Treachery ; and he could have killed the traitor 
 with the fierce meed of such justice as men took when the sword 
 made alike law and judge and avenger. 
 
The Codes oj Arthur , 383 
 
 He strove to thrust it from him, and it would return, — return to 
 darken and embitter tlie sweetness of a love long denied to him, 
 vivid and voluptuous as any that had usurped him in the years 
 when the fairness of woman had made his paradise. Ho had left 
 her a child, to pity, to caress, to play with, without deeper 
 thought ; he found her in a few brief months, extreme as her youth 
 still was, a woman in her superb beauty, her coui*age, her genius, 
 her patrician grace, her far-reaching meditative thought, her 
 endurance of suffering, her fearlessness through danger. With 
 the simplicity of a child, she had left Yallombrosa on the sting of 
 coarse jests of the peasantry, that she had resented without wholly 
 comprehending, of imputed dishonour to her and to him which 
 had roused her like a young lioness, though she had but dimly 
 known their meaning, — left it, and flung herself on the unknown, 
 untraversed world with the simplicity of a child. She was now 
 abandoned to him, to his wiU, to his wish, to his power, asking him 
 nothing of his life, yielding him an absolute submission, and seeking 
 no more of him or of the world than the one joy of his presence. 
 But the intense strength of a supreme passion vibrated through the 
 unquestioning idolatry she rendered him. * ' Poco spero, nulla chiede,^^ 
 had been the soul of the reverence she bore him , but with it ran 
 the burning warmth of the suns tiiiat had shone on her from her 
 birth. 
 
 It was the love of which he had dreamed, — the love which he 
 had desired, and never found. 
 
 In those long hours of the spring night, while the lulling of the 
 water sounded softly through the open casements, and no light was 
 about them except the light of the great stars above Venice, he 
 almost resigned himself to theii* enchantment, he almost cheated 
 himself into the beh'ef that the years of his youth had revived, — 
 almost, The desire of vengeance, the bafiled justice, the impotence 
 to cast off one stone from the granite cairn that had been heaped 
 to crush his peace beneath it, all these that were upon him forbade 
 him the one lotus-di aught he longed for, — forgetfulness. 
 
 Love itseK is youth, and cannot revive without bringing some 
 light of youth back with it. 
 
 With her, his life seemed once more what it had been when, in 
 the languor of the East, and under the glow of Southern skies, he 
 had loved and been loved in the careless vivid sweetness of a poet's 
 passions, deep-hued and changing as a sapphire in the sun. But 
 when later he left her for the few short hours remaining of the 
 night, left her lest foul tongues should touch her defenceless inno- 
 cence, the spell broke. His soul was set upon his vengeance, — set 
 in the impotence of David's desperation: "How long, O Lord? 
 how long?" It seemed to him as though no retribution could 
 eyer serve to wash out his wi'ongs, and stamp his traitor what he 
 iv^as in tJie sight of the people who followed and believed in him ; 
 it seemed to him as though no justice that could rend the living 
 lie of this man's life asunder, and show its hidden vHeness to the 
 world he fooled, would ever cut deep enough, ever reach wide 
 enough, ever avail enough to fwenp^ tho eadless treachery with 
 
^94 ChandQs. 
 
 wMch his foe had taken food and raiment and wealth from him 
 with one hand, to thieve and stab him with the other. "My 
 God ! " he thought, as he went alone through the stillness of the 
 after-midnight, ' ' what could vengeance do sufficient ? None could 
 give me back all the world I have lost, all the years I have con- 
 sumed, all the joy he wrecked for ever, all the youth he slew in me 
 at one blow. Vengeance I the worst would be as a drop beside an 
 ocean. 
 
 If the means came to his hand to strike his enemy down from 
 the eminence of station and the fruitage of achieved ambition, it 
 could do at its best so little ; if it could destroy the future, it could 
 efface nothing of the past, it could change none of these years that 
 had seemed so endless, through whose course he had dwelt in 
 banishment and bitterness and seen his Iscariot caressed and 
 crowned. Though his hand should ever dash down the brimming 
 cup of Trevenna's success, the uneven balance between them could 
 never be redressed ; the world-wide wrong must ever remain un- 
 requited, uneffaced. What could give him back all it had killed 
 for ever in him ? What could bring back to earth the gallant and 
 beloved life of the old man whom it had slain ? What could restore 
 him to all he had forfeited through it ? What could make him 
 ever again as he had been when its ruin had blasted the glory from 
 his years for ever ? 
 
 Where ho went in the silence of the late night, past the gi-ea1 
 Austrian palaces, that were filled with revelry and music, and the 
 fragrance of flowers, and the masking of Carnival balls, with the 
 gay riots of the melodies echoing through the conquered city, and 
 the wreathing of gold and silk and many- coloured blossoms hang- 
 ing all alight with lamps over the melancholy and the dignity of 
 the time-honoured, sea-worn marbles, the rich, rolling, silver 
 cadence of a Bacchic chant, sung with careless mirth and deep 
 Olympian laughter, rang across the waters and above the strains 
 of the Austrian music. It was the voice of Philippe d'Orvale. 
 
 In his Carnival di'ess, with its scarlet-and-gold floating back, 
 and the light of the stars and the crescents of lamps glittering on 
 its jewelled brilliance, he came down a flight of stone stairs from 
 some reckless revehy, the song on his lips, the laughter still given 
 back in answer to a challenge from some fair maskers that leaned 
 above, the fragrance of wine only just dashed from the auburn 
 silver-flecked waves of his beard. " Vivre selon son cceur /" was 
 the epitome of " the Mad Duke's " life, as of Diderot's ; and, as in 
 Diderot's, there was a grand, careless. Titan majesty in this hand- 
 some head, tossed back in such fiery defiance, such sunny laughter, 
 against the laws of conventionalitj^ and the snow bamers of preju- 
 dice. Life was too rich with him to be stinted by a niggard 
 measure ; its joys, its passions, its treasures, its scope, too wide, to 
 be meted out by the foot-rule of custom ; and while men of his 
 own years grew grey about him, the prince-Bohemian laughed at 
 Time, and found the roses of his wine-feasts' blossom never fading 
 to his hand. 
 His Bacchan ohAunt paused ; a gentle, softened look gleamed 
 
The Codes of Arthur. 385 
 
 from the flash of hia brown, fearlesa eyes, as in the shudow cf th« 
 Bti'eet ho saw Chaudofe, 
 
 " Ah I c't^i toi I " A nd in the touch of ids hand as it fell on the 
 shoulder of the man lie loved best, there was the welcome of a 
 friendship close as bi otherhood. 
 
 Not a tree had ever been felled at Clarencieux, not a picture been 
 stirred, not a horse, useless from age, been shot, not a trifle in the 
 whole length of the chambers, not an unfinished sketch in the for- 
 saken atelier, not a dia<.Tdered manuscript in the solitude of the 
 Greu^ie Cabinet, been touched, under Philippe d'Orvale's reign. 
 With him the exile was honoured ; with him the memory of the 
 disinherited was kept green and cherished and sacred in the hearts 
 of the people. *' I am tut his viceroy : keep your homage for the 
 absent," he had said once when the peasantry had addressed him 
 as their lord. 
 
 ** So ! you aro in Venice ? " he said, softly, where he paueed in 
 the deeper shadow, with the festoons of light and the arabesques of 
 flower- wreathed balcony far above, reflected in the black surface of 
 l^e canal. ** I half hoped to meet you here when I came for this 
 riotous Carnival time with which our Austria Felix tries to drown 
 the murmurs of her prey. You have not been long ? " 
 
 ** I camo but to-day. Lulli needed me " 
 
 '* LuUi P what ails him ? " This princely Bohemian, whose own 
 strength was so supeib and whose existence so joyous, had always 
 had a singular compassion and tenderness for the cripple whose art 
 was his only happiness : his home had always been open to him, 
 his aid always ready for him. The strong hand of the aristocrat 
 had often raised the fame of the musician above the envy or the 
 rivalry that had tried to crush it, and not a little of the wealth 
 given to Lulii for his music had gone in secret from D'Orvale, un- 
 guessed by the recipient. 
 
 ** Nothing ails hjm," Chandos answered, wearily; his thoughts 
 were far in other things. *' But a singer has been arrested here for 
 giving some of his music in public, — some song of freedom too free 
 for Austria ; and his heart is set on her liberation." 
 
 **Ahl 1 will soo to that. They shall give her hor liberty ii 
 twenty-four hours. The fools! Every weakness persecuted be- 
 comes strength against its persecutor when once hunted into martyr- 
 dom. And they will not know that ! " 
 
 *' ^Vhon they do, human life will have entered on a very difi'erent 
 phase from what wo hvo in." 
 
 Philippe d'Oi*valo t ashed a quick glance on him. This wild 
 headlong, insouciant rioter could read men like a book. 
 
 *' Tell me, tell me ; you have had some fresh pain, — some; new 
 wrong ? " 
 
 ** Scarcely; but 1 have had fresh temptation, and 1 ha\'e iittle 
 strength for it." 
 
 ** You always underrate your otrengtli ! " 
 
 "Not I. Somotimos I think th^it wero imposslblo. We flatter 
 ourselves we havo strength, we piida ourselves on our codes, ob 
 our philosophies, on mr forbearance; and the moment a spark is 
 
 C 
 
386 Ckandos. 
 
 dropped on oiir worst passions, they flare alight, and oonsmne all 
 
 else ! " 
 
 ** May-be ! But the age rants too much against the passions. 
 Prom them may spring things that are vile ; but without them life 
 were stagnant, and heroic action dead. Storms destroy ; but storm 
 purify." 
 
 " There is truth in that ; but we are, at our best, half passion, 
 half intelligence, and at a touch the brute wil'ji'.ise in us, and 
 strangle all the rest. No man can wholly suppress the animal iu 
 him ; and there are times when he will long to kill as animals long 
 for it." 
 
 '* Ay ! " Philippe d'Orvale's fair fi-ank face flushed, and his right 
 hand clenched ; he had known that longing. 
 
 " Tell me — tell me whether to-night I was weak as a fool, or did 
 but barren justice. I barely can tell myself. John Trevenna hat 
 been the foe of my life ; you know that " 
 
 "Know it! Yes! — a hound who turned on his master! By 
 my faith, when I see that man in honour and eminence, I know 
 what Georges Cadoudal meant when he said, * Que de fautes j'ai 
 commis de ne pas etoufier cet homme-la dans mes bras ! ' If there 
 be a regret in my life, it is that / did not kill him where he stood 
 laughing and taunting on your hearth, while you went out to youi 
 exile ! " 
 
 ' ' You left it for me ! " There was a terrible meaning in the 
 brevity of the words. ** Well, to-night I could have had my ven- 
 geance on him, to-night I could have unearthed his villany to hold 
 it up before the nation that takes him as a chief; to-night I know 
 as though I saw it written before me that he betrayed me, chicaned 
 mo, robbed me as usurers rob ; and — I let justice go I " 
 
 ** Let it go ! Are you mad ? " 
 
 *' That is what I doubt ! I would sell my own life for justice on 
 him; I fear I could kill him with less thought than men kill 
 adders ! — and yet I let it go. I could not reach it without forcing 
 another to break his oath, to forswear his conscience, to sin against 
 lihe only redemption of his life : what could I do ? " 
 
 '* Do ? I would have crushed ten thousand to have struck at 
 him ! Tell me more." 
 
 '* I cannot. It is another's secret, not my own ; were it mine, 
 you should know it. All the laws of justice and humanity bound 
 me powerless ; I could not break through them. I had honoured 
 this man's fidelity when I was in ignorance whom it was rendered 
 to : I could not dishonour it because I learned that it was shown 
 to my enemy." 
 
 " Few men would have stayed for that." 
 
 "May- be! It was hard for me to stay for it. It is hard as 
 death now ! It were surely small crime to tempt any one to 
 betray a traitor ; it were but to turn against him his own poisoned 
 weapons. One oath broken more or less, what would it be in self- 
 defence against one who has broken thousands, broken every tie 
 and bond of gratitude, of honesty ? And yet — right is right. I 
 could not bid another tuiii betrayer because T had been betrayed. 
 
Et tu, Brute ! 387 
 
 Look ! to have my justice of vengeance, I must have done injustice 
 to one placed, in his own unconsciousness and by his own trust, 
 in my power. Which could I choose ? — to forego it, or to wrong 
 him ? " 
 
 Philippe d'Orvale lifted his lion's head with a toss of his lion's 
 mane; his eyes rested on Chandos with a loyal, flashing, noble 
 Ught. 
 
 " Forego it ! Your vengeance were ill purchased by any false- 
 hood to yourself." 
 
 Chandos stretched out his hand in silence ; D'Orvaie's met it in 
 a close firm grasp. They said no more; they understood each 
 other without words : only, as they parted farther on in the late- 
 ness of the night, the prince-Bohemian's regard dwelt on him with 
 something that was wistful for once almost to sadness, — a thing 
 that had no place in the brilliant and heedless career of the ** mad 
 duke." 
 
 " Chandos, you were made for Arthur's days, not for ours. 
 Those grand creeds avail nothing — except to ruin yourself. Yet 
 you would rather have them ? "Well, so would I, though I am but 
 a wine-cup roysterer." 
 
 As he spoke, the lights burning above among a sea of flowers 
 and colours, in crescents and stars and bands of fire, shone on the 
 leonine royalty of his head and the majesty of his height, all 
 lustrous with the scarlet and the gold and the diamonds of his 
 Carnival attire. There was an unusual softness in his brown, bold 
 eyes, an unusual touch of melancholy in his voice : — that one 
 memory of him was never to pass away from Chandos. 
 
 CHAPTEE VL 
 
 BT TU, brute! 
 
 Through the brilliance of the earliest sim-dawn a gondola shot 
 swiftly through the silent highways, with the light on the water 
 breaking from under its prow in a shower of rippling gold, and the 
 brown shadows lazily sleeping under the arches of bridges, and 
 xinder the towering walls, as though thoy were loath to wake and 
 flee before the rising of day. It was just morning ; no more, but 
 morning in all its radiance, with the scarlet heads of carnations 
 unclosing, and the many-coloured hues warm over land and sea, 
 with the darkness only left in the hushed aisles of churches, and 
 the breath of the sea- wind blowing balmily from the Adriatic. 
 
 Guide Lulli, where he leaned in the vessel, saw it aU with 
 an artist's eye, felt it all with an artist's heart, and wove magical 
 dreams of sound from the melody of the oars. Life had been but 
 captious with him, giving him the head of a seraph and the limbs 
 of a stricken child, the heart of a man and the frame of a paralytic, 
 breaking his youth into weakness and torture and starvation an<^ 
 
388 Chandos. 
 
 strengthlessness, ealling his manliood into the fame of the world 
 and crowning him with the great masters ; it had been cruel and 
 lavish at once, taking from him all happiness, all knowledge of 
 happiness, all consciousnegg of what health could mean or freedom 
 from pain be like, all sense of *'the wild joys of living" and of 
 the liberties and heritage of manhood, taking them from him, 
 ^'om the hour of his birth, and making every desire of his hear* 
 an unending pang ; yet — giving him in one Art, giving him with 
 the eye, and the ear, and the temperament of genius, a sovereignty 
 wide as the world, and a treasury of beauty that could only be 
 closed when the touch of death should make his sight dark and 
 his hands motionless. Others, beholding him, saw but a pale, 
 shattered, silent cripple, with great wistfol eyes, ever seeming to 
 seek what they never found, — a man whom a child could cheat, 
 whom a buffoon could mock, whom a stare could make nervously 
 and unbearably wretched ; but others had come to know that this 
 man had a kingdom of his own in which he was supreme, had 
 a power of his own in which he was godlike, and hved as far 
 above the fever and th© fret of their own lives as the stars 
 move above them in th©i^ courses. He heard what they never 
 heard, he saw what they never saw; and to LulU's sublime 
 transcendentalism the whole universe was but as one chaunt 
 of God. 
 
 As his gondola glided now, he was looking dreamily upward : he 
 ^\^as in Venice because the young Venetian had been arrested for 
 ringing a song of liberty from one of his operas, might be im- 
 ])risoned, might be scourged perhaps, and he came to save her 
 iiom chastisement, or to insist that he had a right to share it. 
 He knew nothing of her except the fact that she had suffered 
 through singing his music in defiance of the usurpers; but he 
 liad a lion-boldness where wrong menaced weakness, and a pure 
 chivalrous instinct conquered, whenever it was needed, the shrink- 
 ing sensibilities and the physical feebleness of this man, whom 
 other men had called for three parts of his life— a fool. The buzz 
 and the fret and the money-seeking crowds of the world passed by 
 liim unnoticed, unheard ; he took no more heed of the stir about 
 him than if he had been a palm-tree set in their midst, and they 
 1 hought him a fool accordingly ; but let one spark from the flame 
 I'f wrong, one blow from the gauntlet of tyi'anny, fall on any- 
 thing near him, and the enthusiast, the dreamer, the isolate.l 
 visionary, became on the instant filled v ith fire and with action. 
 And for this yet more they called him fool : the man who does 
 not care for his own purse and his own palate, but only rouses for 
 tome alien injuiy, what is he but the Quixote of all ages ? 
 
 As he went now, to welcome to Venice the one friend of his 
 Ufe, he looked up at "^liat towering marble and the blue of the 
 cloudless skies above. Above a lofty archway, out of an oval 
 casement, with her arms resting on the jasper ledge, and the umber 
 'Tarkness behind her, so that as the £un fell full upon her face 
 ! nd her hair she was like one of those old master-pictui-es where 
 .he golden head of a woman gazes out from a black unbroken 
 
Et tu, Brute i ^89 
 
 mirface of deepest shade, leaned Castalia. Her eyes were glancin'« 
 above,^ following a flight of white pigeons whose wings flashed 
 silver in the light ; and on her face was the look, more spiritualised 
 than any smile, more intense than any radiance, more hushed and 
 yet more passionate than any words can paint, of that happinesa 
 which is *' the sweetest vintage of the vine of life." 
 
 Lulli glanced up and saw her there, leaning down over the dark 
 mosaics ; he strove to rise, ere the boat had swept past. 
 
 ♦'Valeria!" ^ 
 
 As the name left his lips, reason and memory and the space of 
 vears were all as naught ; he was back in the days of his youth and 
 his poverty ; he believed that his lost one lived unchanged, unaged ; 
 with the warmth of southern suns upon it, and made richer and 
 fairer yet by that higher and softer light it wore, the face of his 
 lost darling looked on him once more from the jasper setting of the 
 Venetian casement. A gondola, that had followed him from his 
 dwelling, glided up swiftly in his wake, and came side by side with 
 his own; from the awning a woman's hand was stretched, and 
 touched his arm. 
 
 " Signer Lulli, one word with you." 
 
 "With me? Whom ?» 
 
 " A friend to you, and to one you lost ? Let us wait a momenl 
 there in the shadow." 
 
 The speaker who had arrested him leaned from beneath her awn- 
 ing, her hand lying on the side of his gondola ; he could not see 
 her features, but her voice was very melodious and low. 
 
 ** There was once a life that was very dear to you in the old 
 days at Aries ? " 
 
 He trembled violently. The thought of touching at last the 
 secret buiied so long overcame him, as when they come, at last, 
 upon the gold vein, the toil-worn and heart- sickened gold-searchers 
 are beaten with thefr joy. 
 
 "Dear to me? Yes, God knows! You bring tidings of 
 Valeria ? " & s 
 
 She whose form was lost in the shapeless folds of a Carmelite's 
 habit, and whose face was obscured by the hood of the order, 
 stooped from under the black shade of the gondola. 
 
 " Land ; and I will tell you all I have to tell." 
 
 He obeyed her, his weakened limbs bearing hini slowly and with 
 labour up the water-stairs. Fronting them was the porch of a 
 church,— a great, grey, dim, noble place, with marvellous carvings 
 of time -browned stone, and feathery grasses floating from its colossal 
 height,^ and Titan statues that looked blind and weary down from 
 their niches on the water below, as though evil days had fallen on 
 them and on their Venice. 
 
 The entrance was wide and of vast depth, a lofty cavern, roofed 
 and walled with carvings on which countless hearts and hands had 
 spent their lifetime's labour ; and from it, in the body of the build- 
 ing, were seen by changing glimpses, as the air moved the vast 
 moth-eaten fall of Genoese velvet to and fro, glimpses of twilight 
 ^looju with the ethereal tracery of the ivory pyx gleaming white 
 
390 Chandos. 
 
 from the shadow, and the marble limbs of a crucified Christ nailed 
 against a dark pillar of Sienna marble. She motioned him to rest 
 on the stone bench within the porch, and stood herself beside him. 
 He never askod hor who she was ; he never thought of her save 
 as one who know Valeria ; her religious habit made her sacred 
 in his eyes, and his soul held but one thought, — the fate of the 
 one lost to him. His eyes sought the Carmelite's with longing 
 anxiety. 
 
 ' * Speak now I Valeria P" 
 
 " Is dead." 
 
 Tho word was spoken very gently, but it dealt him a keen blow ; 
 though he had long said that she was dead to him, — said it in the 
 bitterness of his soul when he had first heard of her flight to dis- 
 honoui', — he had unconsciously cherished hope that some day, ere 
 it should be too late, he would find her. 
 
 " Dead P and without one word for me ! But that face yonder ? 
 — ^it was hers ! " 
 
 His heart was full, and he spoke on its impulse; he never 
 remembered that he addressed a stranger ; he only knew that he 
 spoke to one who might give him some link with his long-broken 
 past. His life had been entirely uneventful, and the few things 
 that hod marked it held him for ever, as they could never have 
 held a life of action. 
 
 ' ' Sho brings you some memory ? " pursued his questioner. The 
 voice was subdued, and yet had a certain imperious command in it 
 that would not be resisted and was unaccustomed to delay as to 
 disobedience. Tho eyes of the cripple turned with pathetic entreaty 
 upon her. 
 
 " You must know that she does, or why speak to me of her? 
 Whoever you are, whoever she be, tell me, for the love of mercy." 
 
 *' She whom you now saw is her daughter." 
 
 The Provencal's face flushed scarlet, his ejres lighted with an 
 infinito tenderness, that flashed and darkened into the fiery wrath 
 that had ^lsed to arise in them against the unknown lover of the 
 last of his name. 
 
 His teeth set ; his hands clenched. 
 
 "Her daughter? My God! And Ae " 
 
 ** He — led Valeria where dishonour was forgotten in recklessness, 
 and shame was lost in diamonds and wine and evil laughter." 
 
 '*His name?" It was but a whisper; yet a vibration ran 
 through it that told without words the strength which this frail 
 and suffering-worn cripple would find against the spoiler and 
 poUuter of the only life round which his memory, his imagination, 
 and his heart had ever woven the fair, if the vain, dreams of love. 
 
 " Can you bear its telling ? " 
 
 " I will not bear its denial. His name ? and may my worst 
 vengeance light " 
 
 *' Hush ! You know not whom you curse." 
 
 " Nor care ! If he live, my hate shall find him. His name ? ^ 
 
 " Wait ! Be calmer ere you hear it." 
 
 '* Calmer ! when her child lives there ? " 
 
Ei tu, Brute! ^^ 
 
 ** Hei child kuows nothing of her parentage; nor what that 
 parentage is can I well tell. Valeria's life grew very evil." 
 
 T]\o dark blood grow purple over Lnlli's delicate features, his 
 iips turned white as death ; he suffered excruciatingly ; no noble 
 was more tenacious of the honour* of his name than he. 
 
 * * Speak ! Who was her tempter ? Who liu'ed her first to her sin ? " 
 
 *' AVait ! Hear her history first. She was a beautiful, heartless, 
 wayward, unscrupulous woman, to whom honour was nothing, to 
 whom levity and shame were sweet." 
 
 ^ * ■ He made her that, if ever she became it. The greater, then 
 his crime. His name ? " 
 
 *' Patience : do not hasten your own bitterness." 
 
 '* I hasten to end it. It can only be quenched in vengeance." 
 
 *' She lived for a while in sinful magnificence; but she died in 
 the utmost poverty, in a Tuscan village. It is a common fate." 
 
 He shook in his whole frame as he heard. 
 
 *' And then you bid mo withhold my curse ? She died in want, 
 after a short, shameful life of gilded vice ? No curse is wide enough 
 to reach him, if he drove her to that infamy." 
 
 ** It was scarce his fault ; she loved the fatal power of her beauty 
 but too well. She died at Fontane Amoroso : if you need a witness, 
 it is here." She stretched out to him a small, silver, heart-shaped 
 rehc-box, worn and almost valueless, on which were rudely graven 
 the words "Valeria Lulli." A moan broke from him as he saw 
 it ; his face grew white, his eyes filled with tears. 
 
 "Oh, God! I gave her this myself; she was a child then, — a 
 child so beautiful, so innocent ! " His voice sank, his head drooped ; 
 the sight, the touch, of the little reUc struck him to the heart ; the 
 hour of its gift came back on him as though lived but yesterday,— 
 the hour when, with many a denial of self, he had treasured up 
 coins till he had bought the thing that had been the wish of her 
 heart, and slung it, as his recompense, round the fair thi-oat of the 
 laughing child, who paid him with her kisses. 
 
 " She left it, on her death-bed, with a contadina for me. I had 
 known her in days evil to us both. There were a few feeble lines 
 to me with it, unfinished. The peasant kept it, telling no one of 
 it, and thinking it of value for its holiness, till a few months ago, 
 when the child Castalia was lost from Fontane, the woman's con- 
 science woke, and she sent it to me. I have left the world ; I am 
 in a religious order now : thus it was long in finding me. Once 
 received, and hearing also for the only time of this young girl's 
 life, my first wish was to seek out you, and leave you to become, 
 if you should choose, the avenger of the dead, the protector of the 
 living." 
 
 The words had a pathetic and solemn earnestness. Lulli bowed 
 his head, and pressed his lips on the silver heart. 
 
 *' I swear to be both," he said, simply. ** And now, once more, 
 his name ?" 
 
 ** Her lover was — Ohandos !" 
 
 A cry, such as that which men give on a battle-field, broke from 
 him,— a cry of torture. 
 
an2 Chandos. 
 
 *'It is false— false as hell!" he swore, in the agouy of hia 
 passion. " No lie ever touched his lips ; no treachery ever belonged 
 to him." 
 
 "No," said the Carmelite, gently: "you are nght. But 
 Valeria Lulli was only known to him as — Flora de I'Orme." 
 
 The Proven9ars attenuated form seemed suddenly to shrink and 
 wither and lose all life as he heard ; the name came back on hia 
 memory after long oblivion of it ; he had used to hear it in those 
 days that were gone, the name of the magnificent, reckless, extra- 
 vagant adventuress who had wasted her lover's gold right and left, 
 and given but a mockiDg laugh at his ruin. 
 
 "He met her in Aries," pursued the voice of his companion, 
 with a gentle pity in its intonation. " She left Aries with him. 
 She was known to him only by her nom de fantaisie. What her 
 life became you are aware." 
 
 He scarcely heard her; his hands had clenched on the stone- 
 work ; he quivered from head to foot ; the flame in his eyes had 
 died in an anguish beside which the mere fury for vengeance was 
 dwarfed and stilled as he gazed down on the silver relic. 
 
 " Christ ! have pity. I swore my oath against hnn r\ 
 
 The words were inarticulate in his throat ; everj^ fibre in him 
 thrilled with the fire of his rage against Valeria's tempter, and every 
 debt his life had owned bound him in fealty to the man whom in 
 his blind haste he had, unknowing, cursed. He loved with such 
 loyalty, such faith, such honour, such self-oblivion, as those with 
 which patriots love their country, the one in whom he had found 
 the succour of his existence, the giver of every earthly gift that 
 had redeemed him from the bondage of poverty and pain ; and in 
 him he must now for ever see the foe on whom he had sworn to 
 wi*eak the wrongs and the shame of the dead. 
 
 The man to whom he had held his very life a debt to be yielded 
 up if need arose, from whose lips alone he turned for the sole praise 
 he heeded, whose liberal and royal charity had lifted him fi-om a 
 beggar's death-bed into the light of the world's renown, and to 
 <7hom his heart had clung more tenderly and truly in the darkness 
 of adversity than even in the splendour of fair fortune, was the 
 iiijurer against whom through the long course of so many years 
 he had cherished his silent and baffled hate ! 
 
 The dead love and the living love, the bonds that bound him to 
 her memory and the bonds that bound him to his gratitude, 
 wi^enched him asunder,— divided,— agonized. Choosing betwixt 
 them, he must sin, whichever he cleaved to, — be faithless, which- 
 ever he elected. 
 
 He let his head fall on the cold stone arm of the bench; h« 
 f3iew nothing, felt nothing, was conscious of nothing ; he only 
 seemed numbed and killed with this one thought, — the feud that 
 rose to stand for ever between him and the man he loved with the 
 love of the son of Saul for David. 
 
 " Oh, God ! " he moaned ; " and I ate of his bread, I was saved 
 by his mercy ! " 
 
 The Carmelite looked at him, then gently glided away, leaving 
 the silver relic in his hand. He never heard her or remembered 
 
Et tu, Brute ! 393 
 
 her ; he sat in the grey shadows of the church- entrance as though 
 he were turned to stone, silent and senseless as the robed statues 
 of the Hebrew kings that had kept their motionless vigil above, 
 while the centuries passed uncounted, and the glory of Yenetia fell. 
 
 He could not have told how long or ho^ 3rief a time had swept 
 by : he had sense and memory for nothing save the one knowledge 
 that had come to him. The street and the church were alike 
 deserted : nothing aroused him. He sat there as in a stupor, his 
 clasped hands clenched above his head. The lapping of the water, 
 the warmth of the sun, the flight of time, were all lost to him ; 
 the groat pall of the velvet wavered with the wind, the gleam of 
 the white passion was seen from out the gloom within ; all was 
 still, and he had no consciousness except his misery. 
 
 A hand touched his shoulder ; the only voice he loved fell on 
 his ear. 
 
 *' Lulli ! you here ? What ails you P " 
 
 The Proven9al started and shuddered under the touchy as at the 
 touch of flame ; he staggered to his feet, his eyes looking at hia 
 solitary friend with the wild piteousness of a dog that has been 
 struck a death-blow by its master's hand. His lips parted, but no 
 sound came from them ; he gasped for breath, and could find no 
 words ; there, face to face with the saviour of his life, with the 
 spoiler of the honour dearer than his own, the force of the old 
 love borne so long, the force of the old vengeance so long sworn, 
 rose in twin strength, wrestling with and strangling each other. 
 
 Chaudos gazed, amazed and touched with a vague dread : he 
 laid his hand on Lulli, and drew him gently within the hushed 
 aisles of the church, where the still, brown, sleeping shadow sAept 
 80 darkly, only broken by the pale gleam of some white carving or 
 the glow of some blazoned hue. 
 
 " You are suffering greatly. Tell me " 
 
 «' Tell you,— oh, Christ ! How can I tell you ? " 
 
 " Wliy not ? Did I ever fail you ? " 
 
 The words had the gentle compassion that he had first heard 
 when he had lain dying among the bleak and rugged hills of 
 Spain; the voice had ever been sweet to him as the echoes of 
 music, welcomed as the weary drought-marched forests welcome 
 the stealing breath of the west wind : it pierced him to the heart, 
 it killed him with its very gentleness. He threw his arms 
 upward, and his cry rang shrill and agonised as a woman's. 
 
 '' Great God, have pity ! Let my curse light on my own head I 
 I knew not what I did ! " , • v 
 
 Chandos laid his hands upon his shoulders and held him there, 
 in the twilight of the lofty narrow aisle, with the Crucifixion 
 looming cold and white out of the mist of shade. His eyes looked 
 down in Lulli's, where he stood above him, and stilled him aa 
 a dog is stilled byits master's gaze. 
 
 < ' You rave I What grief has befallen you P " 
 
 A convulsion shook the Proven9al's frail, yielding form: he 
 loved 80 utterly the life he had voted to vengeance, the life on 
 
394 Chandos* 
 
 which in his eight rested the crime of Valeria's fall, of Valeria** 
 shame, of Valeria's death. 
 
 "Grief! grief!" he muttered, in his throat; **it is shame, — 
 black, burning, endless shame ! I have broken your bread, while 
 you wrought her dishonour ; I have cursed you, when my whole 
 life is but a bond to you for debts beyond life, above life ! Which 
 is the worst sin, the worst dishonour ? / know not 1 " 
 
 " Sin ! dishonour ! And whose ? " 
 
 '• Hers, and mine, and yours." 
 
 The syllables left his lips stifled and slowly ; the last two barely 
 stirred the silence. He had honoured the man to whom he spoke 
 then as though he were a deity ; he had obeyed him as though he 
 were a king. 
 
 ** Mine I No other living should say that to me. Mine ! And 
 for what?" 
 
 Lulli lifted his head: his wasted, misshapen frame gathered 
 suddenly vitality and vigour ; there was the dignity of wrong and 
 of manhood in the carriage of his head. 
 
 " For this : — you were the lover of Valeria." 
 
 "Of Valeria?" 
 
 He repeated the name mechanically ; it had been unspoken 
 between them for so long ; it had scarce a meaning on his ear. 
 
 ' ' You brought her to the pomp of vice ; she died in the misery 
 of vice. I, your debtor, lived on the alms of the destroyer of the 
 last of my name. Valeria was your mistress, — Flora de I'Orme." 
 
 The words ran cold and clear ; in the moment of their speech he 
 had forgotten all save the disgrace that had made him the guest, 
 the debtor, the alms-taker, of the one by whom she had been 
 tempted into the ruin that had devoured her in her youth. 
 Chandos stood silent, his eyes fixed on LuUi's face ; back on his 
 thoughts rushed a flood of forgotten memories, — memories of the 
 splendid, vile, pampered beauty who had stooped her rich lips to 
 his wine and wound the scarlet roses in his hair in many a 
 careless, riotous hour, — memories of the night when, in the 
 studio at Clarencieux, he had paused before the picture of Aries 
 and been haunted for a moment with the doubt of that which he 
 now heard. 
 
 " Valeria ! " he echoed, slowly, an intense pity and contrition in 
 the tone of his voice ; " Valeria ! Is it possible ? " 
 
 ** It is true." The musician's words had a fierce, dogged misei7 
 in them, and his hand clenched on the silver heart. " A Carmelite 
 has given me her story. She died long ago ; but her wrongs do 
 not sleep with her." 
 
 Chandos looked at him a moment, and a great pain passed over 
 his face. Had this man also forsaken him? He could have said 
 that this woman had been shameless ere ever he saw her, that her 
 heart was false as her form was perfect, that gold and luxury 
 bought her love as it would, that she had been vain, merciless, 
 evil, corrupt to the core ; but he held his peace, since to speak in 
 his own defence would have been to pierce and wound the cripple 
 who still believed in her. 
 
Et tu. Brute ^ 30^ 
 
 /* If this he true," ho said, simply, " you will not doubt my 
 faith to you, at least ? You will know that I was as ignorant a's 
 you ? She came from Aries— it might have told me ; but I never 
 thought that she had other name than that by which she called 
 herself. You know— you must know— that the vilest thing on 
 earth should have been sacred to me had I been told you heeded it." 
 '*I believe! Nothing but truth was ever on your lips. Yet 
 none the less were you her lover, her tempter, her destroyer ; none 
 the less does the curse of her shameless life, of her bondage to evil, 
 lie with you, — you alone." 
 
 He spoke hoarsely : his hand was clenched on the relic, his head 
 was lifted, his eyes flashed, and over the spiritual faii'ness of his 
 face the darkness of avenging hatred gathered. 
 
 Chandos looked at him, and a slight, quick sigh escaped him. 
 *' You too!" he said, involuntarily. *'Well, the wrong I did 
 you was in ignorance : if it must part us, let us part in peace." 
 
 To the man who had loved him, as to the enemy who had 
 betrayed him, he alike never quoted the claim of the past, never 
 argued the one reproach, '*I served you." But in the words 
 there was a weariness beyond all speech, there was the et tu, Brute, 
 which once had pierced even the adamant of his traitor's hate ; and 
 it cut to the heart of the hearer deep as a scourge cuts into the 
 bared flesh; its very gentleness rebuked him with the keenest 
 reproach that could have pierced him. His life-long debt, his 
 subject reverence, his deathless gratitude, his loyal love for the 
 man by whose mercy he was still amidst the living, and by whose 
 aid the creations of his genius had been given their place and their 
 name among men, rushed back on his memoiy in a tide that swept 
 aside the passions of the hom^ and broke asunder the chains of his 
 oath. He seemed to himself vile as any ingrate that ever stabbed 
 the heart of his benefactor. The moment of supreme temptation 
 had come to him, the test that should prove whether he was as 
 others were, — loyal only whilst the gift of generous service bound 
 him, faithless and without memoiy the instant that ordeal came. 
 The hour was here for which he had often longed, the hour that 
 could try the truth of his allegiance, and in it he had been 
 wanting. 
 
 All the tenderness of his nature, all the remorse of his heart, 
 went out in wretchedness to the man whom he had arraigned and 
 upbraided and wounded as though no debt of life, no years of 
 charity and pity and succour, had stood between them ; he had no 
 thought left except the sin of his own unworthiness. He bowed 
 down at Chandos' feet, his face sunk on his hands, his supplication 
 passionate with all the swift and mobile emotion of his nation and 
 his temperament. 
 
 '* Monseigneur, forgive me ! I knew not what I said. I swore 
 an oath before Heaven to avenge her, but I break it now and for 
 ever, if it must light on you. Let my curse recoil on my head ; 
 let the weight of my forsworn words be on my life ; let me forsake 
 ^he dead and abjure my bond. Better any crime than one thought 
 of bitterness to you ! Forgive me, foi ^he pity of Gbd, what th« 
 
^^ Chandos. 
 
 vileness of my passion spoke. If you killed me now with yom 
 own hand, you would have right. / should be bound to let my 
 last breath bless you ! " 
 
 Wild, incoherent, senseless, the words might be, yet they were 
 made rich and sweet as music by the faithful love that spoke ir 
 them ; they gave full recompense to Chandos for many weajpy years 
 of patient faith in human life and patient forbearance with its 
 traitors and time-servers. Against all trial, and through all 
 suffering, the heart of this cripple was true to him , in his creeds, 
 the one fidelity sufficed to outweigh a thousand Iscariot kisses. 
 
 He stooped and raised him gently. 
 
 " Forgiveness ! It is I who must ask it. Whatever debt you 
 think you owed me in the past, you have paid and overpaid now." 
 
 Lulli stood before him, lus head still sunk, his face very white in 
 the grey hues of the darkened aisles. 
 
 " No : there are debts which we can never pay, which we never 
 wish to pay," he murmured, faintly. Though his fidelity had 
 stood its trial, the trial was not less terrible to him ; in the man he 
 loved and honoured he stiU saw the destroyer of Valeria, the un- 
 known foe on whom his hate so long had fastened. 
 
 **But her daughter?" he said, suddenly, as the remembrance 
 flashed on him,—" that beautiful child,— here in Venice " 
 
 " Here ? Where ? " His voice, hoarse and rapid, cut asunder 
 the Proven9ars words ; his face grew livid, a hideuus dread pos- 
 sessed him. ^ i. V „ 
 
 " The daughter she left in Tuscany,— the young girl,— Castaha. 
 
 " Hold !—0 Heaven ! " 
 
 Chandos staggered forward, as he had done wher the bolt of his 
 ruin had struck him : the sweat of an unutterable terror was on 
 his brow ; the agony of an unutterable guilt devoured him. 
 
 " Her daughter— Aer'8 .' " 
 
 The words were stifled in his teeth ; he could not breathe his 
 thought aloud ; the fire of a love whose very wish was nameless sin 
 consumed him ; the blankness of an utter desolation feE on him, 
 passing all that his life had known of misery. 
 
 The Proven9al watched him, paralyzed, silenced with a great 
 bewildered fear ; he swayed heavily back ; guilt seemed to thrill 
 like poison in his blood ; his face was dark with the flushing of the 
 black, stagnant veins ; he reeled blindly against the sculpture of 
 the marble Christ. 
 
 " Love between ua ! Great God ! what horror I ** 
 
 With the mellow flood of artificial light that still shone there, 
 instead of the glory of the risen day, shed about her. Heloise de la 
 Vivarol stood before her mirror in the dressing- cnamber of the 
 Venetian palace that was honoured by her for a brief space : her 
 haughty, delicate, regal head was lifted ; the grey, heavy serge of 
 a religious habit fell back from the briUiantly-tinted hue of her 
 foce and the stiU exquisite grace of her form : it was the habit she 
 
Liberta. ^f 
 
 had worn at a prince's Carnival ball, shrouding her beauty, foi 
 once, under an envious disguise and in a whimsical caprice, that 
 she might more surely be unknown by those titled maskers with 
 whom she had played the carte and tierce of her state- craft fence. 
 By mere hazard, the caprice had served her well ; her subtle, un- 
 en-ing wit waF ever served well, alike by the weapons she forged 
 and the accidents that favoured her. 
 
 Now, her glance flashed a cruel triumph at her own reflection, 
 that was given there with the glow from the silver branches on its 
 bright hawk eyes and on its arched, smiling, mocking lips. She 
 had waited nigh twenty years, but she had her vengeance. 
 
 **/ have divorced them!" she thought, "for ever, — for ever I 
 And none cai\ trace my hand in it, sufi'er as he may, search as 
 he will." 
 
 And none eyer did. 
 
 CHAPTER Vn. 
 
 LIBERTA. 
 
 There was a great tumult rising through Venice. Swelling at 
 the flrst from a distant quarter, it had been borne nearer and 
 nearer through the silence of the city of the waters, the tumult aa 
 of a surging sea, as of the roar of sullen winds,— the tumult of a 
 people, long sufi'ering and launched at last against their oppressors. 
 The sound had not penetrated the depth of the church aisles ; only 
 its low muffled echoes could reach there, and they had been unheard 
 by those who stood in its solitude, lost in the misery of their own 
 passions. In the clear golden morning, in the luxuriance of colour 
 and of beauty. In the warmth of the fragrant air, in the hush of 
 the tranquil streets, revolt had risen as it had risen in the great 
 northern hive of labour; but here, in the "sun-girt South," it rose 
 for liberty ; there in the gaunt, smoke-stifled Black Country it rose 
 for wages. Venice was athirst for her freedom ; the north-men had 
 been hungry for so many more coins a week. 
 
 They were but the youths whose hearts were sick, and whose 
 lives were aimxdss, like the life of Leopardi, the children of eighteen 
 or twenty summers, whose blood was kindled and whose souls were 
 pure with patriot fire ; who would have flung themselves away like 
 dross to cut the fettering withes from their Venetia ; whose ardour 
 thought the world a tournament, where it sufficed to name "God 
 and the Eight" to conquer and to see the foe reel down; who fed their 
 eager fancies on the memory of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, and 
 who refused to see that the nations of their own day adored the 
 Greeks in story, but called a living patriot an "agitator" if he 
 failed, and sent him to the cell, the scourge, the death of felons. It 
 was the boyhood of Venice that had risen. The past day had been 
 an Austrian festa for an Austrian chief, and the music, the laughter, 
 
39@ ChafuioB. 
 
 the glitter, the salvoes of artillery, the wi'eaths of flowers, all the 
 costly follies, had (hfiven the iron deeper into the souls of those who 
 closed their shutters to the sound of revehy, and mounaed, refusing 
 to be comforted, desolate amidst the insolence of the usurper's 
 magnificence and mirth. The festa, following on the arrest of a 
 songstress beloved of the city, who had been seized for singing an 
 ode of liberty, had broken their patience down, had driven them 
 mad, had made them believe once more, in their old sublime fatal 
 blindness, that a pure cause and a high devotion would prove 
 stronger than the steel and the granite of mailed might. They ex- 
 piated the error as it is ever expiated ; they were made the burnt- 
 sacrifice of their own creeds. 
 
 They met with little mercy : in the sight of their foes they were 
 but seditious malcontents, to be shot down accordingly, or pinioned 
 aUve like young eaglets taken for a caravan cage. The soldiers of 
 Austria made swift work with them, — so swift that the hundreds 
 who had risen with the dawn with the shout of " Liberia" upon 
 their lips as with one voice, and the noble insanity of the liberator's 
 hope beating high in their fearless breasts, were, almost ere the 
 first echo of the chaunt had rung through the silent highways to 
 wake the slumbering spirit of a Free Kepublic, shot down, cut 
 down, well-nigh as quickly as seeding-grasses fall beneath the 
 scythes, — were driven as the deer are driven under the fire of the 
 guns, yielding never, but overborne by the weight of numbers and 
 the trained skill of veteran troops, never losing their courage and 
 their resistance and their scorn, but losing order and adhesion, 
 and seeing their young chiefs fall in the very moment of their first 
 gathering, seeing their long- counted enterprise, their long- watched 
 opportunity, their long-cherished hope of union and strength and 
 victory, fade and wither and perish under the upward course of 
 the bright morning sun. 
 
 The tumult had been brief ; the chastisement would be life-long 
 for such as lived under the heavy iron pressure cf the battalions 
 that forced them down, through the mitraille of the balls that 
 hissed along the brown, still waters and shook the echoes of the 
 mighty palaces. They were young, they were nobly trained ; they 
 chose death rather than life in a prison- cell with a convict gang, 
 than the shame of the gyves and the scourge. One band of them, 
 some hundi'ed, fought inch by inch, step by step, their backward 
 passage into the great porch of the church, into the dim and solemn 
 loneliness of the aisles, gaining breath from their enemies for a 
 while, holding aloft still their standard, — the coloui's of a free 
 Italy. 
 
 Suddenly, and with the tempest of sound without as suddenly 
 entering therewith the forcing open of the large bronze doors, 
 they fell backward, with their faces ever to the foe, into the dark- 
 ness and the silence of the edifice. The burst of clamour rolled 
 strangely through the stillness of the avenues of stone ; the conflict 
 of the world seemed to pour like hell let loose into the sacred hush 
 and peace; the throng of hot, heroic, fever-flushed, tyranny- 
 Vrung life, with the vivid colours of the banP'^T-folda flung high 
 
Liberia. ^oo 
 
 above their ardent, sun-warmed faces, filled as though they had 
 sprung from the sealed tombs where the great of Venetia lay dead, 
 the grey, cayernous gloom of the porch, the twilight of the stretching 
 aisles, the marble space beneath the marble Christ. Crueller 
 wrong had never sought the refuge of sanctuary, the shelter of the 
 altar, the shadow of the Cross. But they did not come here to ask 
 for peace, to demand protection : they came to die with their colours 
 untouched, with their limbs unfettered. 
 The bronze gates of the larger entrance were forced open by their 
 
 Eressure in the very moment that a horror, beside which all Chandos 
 ad ever borne looked pale and painless, rose from the depths of 
 his past to seize the one dream of revived happiness that had come 
 to him. In the tirst instant that its blow fell on him, he had no 
 sense but of unutterable loathing, of sickening despair, before the 
 abyss of unconscious guilt that had yawned beneath him, — no 
 consciousness but of the living love that burned in him passionate 
 as the love of his earliest years, and the dead love that made it 
 hopeless and forbidden and accursed, that made it a sin before 
 which all his life shuddered and recoiled, that made each kiss of 
 her lips poison, each word of his tenderness crime. 
 
 As the thunder from the streets smote his ear, and the flood of 
 the daylight poured in, he was shaken from his trance of misery 
 as men are started from a nightmare : his eyes were bloodshot, his 
 face flushed red, his limbs shook ; he was blind and deaf, he knew 
 neither where he was nor who had spoken; but his hands fell 
 heavily on the shoulders of Lulli, swaying him backward. 
 
 *' It is false ! Castalia — her child — mine ! God ! such horror 
 could not be. Do you know what she was ? — a shameless, love- 
 less, profligate woman, a vampii*e, whose thirst was gold,— a 
 Delilah, who stole her lover's strength to shear him of all value. 
 Castalia sprung from her ? It is a lie, I tell you, coined to pollute 
 and to divorce from me the fairest thing that ever lived or loved 
 me ! " 
 
 Lulli stared fear- stricken in his face. 
 
 ** Loved you ? " he echoed ; ** loved yoit .« " 
 
 " Ay, loved me as I was never loved. And you tell me a life 
 60 pure as that was born from a courtesan ! You tell me that I — 
 1 " 
 
 The words died in his throat ; he could not shape in them the 
 ghastly thought that he flung from him as men fling off an asp's 
 coil about their limbs. He gasped for breath, where he stood 
 there above the man who had brought this lemui-e from his past : 
 there was the ferocity of a maddened beast in him. 
 
 The bronze doors were bui-st open ; the shock of the firing with- 
 out pealed through the stillness ; the throng of the young soldiers 
 poured in. They saw him, — him to whom they had rendered the 
 nomage of their song of liberty in the summer night of a few 
 Vears past,— and the echoes of the vaulted roof rang again with 
 one shout, one Yiva to his name. 
 
 They knew his face well, — it had long been amcnig them in 
 V'enioe ; they knew his words well, that in the poems of his early 
 
(^oO Chandos. 
 
 manhood and in the deeper thoughts of hie later years had borne 
 8o far the seeds of freedom ; they honoured him and loved him. 
 
 His eyes dwelt on them a while without light or sense ; he felt 
 drunk as with an opiate under the storm of disbelief and sickening 
 terror that possessed him. They filled the space about him under 
 the crucifix that hung aloft, with the sad, paaeionless, thorn- 
 crowned face of the statue bending above from out the darkness, 
 and the white limbs stretched in martyrdom. The folds of the 
 standard streamed above the crowd of upturned faces with the glow 
 of their earliest manhood and the resolve of their settled sacrifice 
 set as with one seal upon all. They had fallen in close in their 
 ranks, and stood so still in unbroken phalanx. Alone and fore- 
 most was the youth with the head like the head of a Gabriel, who 
 had spoken in the summer eve the gratitude of Venice^ to the 
 teacher and the lover of liberty. Their weapons were in their 
 hands, and their blood poured from their wounds on the black 
 mosaic pavement worn by priestly feet. Some had their death- 
 wound, and knew it ; but they only pressed their hand closer, to 
 stay for a moment the stream that carried life with it, and they 
 looked with a smile to his face. 
 
 One — a child in years, scarcely seventeen, with the flushed fair 
 features of childhood still— stooped and touched his hand with a 
 kiss of homage. 
 
 " Signore, wait and see how we can die ; see we do not dishonour 
 your teaching." 
 
 The simplicity of the words pierced his heart ; through the wi'eck 
 of his own misery, thiough the sirocco of his own passions, they 
 came to him with the weary, eternal sigh of that humanity which, 
 however it had deserted him, he had never, in requital, forsaken. 
 Death would have laid its seal upon his lips, and chained his hand, 
 and veiled his sight, ere ever he would be cold to the sufferings of 
 his fellow-men, silent to the prayer of the peoples. 
 
 That love, unswerving and unchilled, for mankind, which had 
 given so noble a glow to the dreams of his youth and filled with so 
 gentle a patience the temper of his later years, survived in him 
 now amidst all the desolation of his fate, all the horror that glided 
 from the shadows of his past and seized the one hope left him. 
 As the heart of Vergniaud was, to the last on the scaffold, with the 
 human life in which he had placed too sublime a faith, for which 
 he had dreamed of too sublime a destiny, so his heart was still, 
 even in his own torture, with those young lives self-given up to 
 slaughter. The boy's touch roused him ; he looked at the heaving 
 mass that pressed about him, at the pale, brave faces that turned 
 to h;jn with one accord in the gloom of the aisle. He saw at a 
 glance they were there as sheep are hemmed into the shambles , 
 he divined what folly had brought them,— folly nobler, perhaps, 
 than most prudential wisdom. He pressed forward into their van 
 on the simple instinct of their defence, while they fell back and 
 made way for him, watching him reverently as he passed. He 
 had loved Venetia, he had served Liberty ; he was sacred in their 
 sight. In the front the standard caught a baam from the goldeu 
 
Liber ta. 401 
 
 air without, and was wafted higher and higher by the brealh oJ a 
 free sea-wind; behind, far in the gloom, the altar-lights burned 
 dully, rayless in the blackness of the shadow shrouding them, — 
 meet symbols of the clear noontide of freedom, of the midnight 
 mists of creeds and churches. He forced his passage to where that 
 banner floated. 
 
 ** Children, childi-en ! what are you doing ? Why will you spend 
 your lives like water ? " 
 
 The youths of the front file, the first rank that would receive the 
 shock of the bayonets or the fire of the musketry with which the 
 soldiers would in another moment come to drive them down into 
 obedience, lowered their arms as guards lower them to monarchs. 
 
 '* Better to lose our lives than spend them in usurpers' prisons ' 
 Leave us while there is time, signore; you can trust us to di» 
 weU." 
 
 They left the space free, — the space out into the glowing sun- 
 light, into the fragrant air. He stood still, and motioned thei? 
 weapons up. 
 
 " You know mt >)etter than that." 
 
 Their eyes filled; he had lived much amidst them, and hie 
 written words had sunk dee^ into their hearts. The young patriot 
 who held the banner — held it with his left hand, because Qie right 
 wrist had been broken by a spent ball — flashed back on him an 
 answering comprehension. 
 
 "We know the greatness of your nature — yes; but the greater 
 your life, the less should you expose it here. There will be 
 slaughter ; the world must not lose you." 
 
 He heard but vaguely, half without sense of what was spoken ; 
 his life seemed on fibre with the torment that possessed him, — the 
 hideous doom from which his whole soul shuddered. Instinctively 
 his eyes sought the musician ; the look that was in them was worse 
 to Lulli than if he had seen them glazed and fixed in death. 
 
 ** Go you," he said, briefly : " I wait with these." 
 
 The flush and light that only stole there when in music he lost 
 the feebleness and the pain of his daily bein^*, came on Lulli' s face. 
 
 ** I deserted you one moment," he murmured low ; *' not again, 
 ^never again ! " 
 
 The tramp of the Austrian soldiery came nearer and nearer, ring- 
 ing like iron on the stone pavements without ; the flash of metal 
 glanced in the sun beyond the great bronze doors of Cinque Cento 
 arabesque ; the arch of the entrance was filled with dark faces and the 
 glitter of tiie levelled steel ; behind were the dim, solemn, majestic 
 aisles of the church, with the white Passion gleaming through the 
 gloom, and the ethereal tracery of the pyx rising out of the sea of 
 shadow; in front, hemming them in with a circle of bayonets, and 
 blocking up the lofty space through which the blue sky and the 
 sunlit air of the Uving day were seen, were the mercenaries of 
 Austria. 
 
 Some touch of reverence for the sanctuary that their Church had 
 made sacred from earliest time to all who sought the refuge of its 
 altars^, stilled their zest for slaughter and held back their weapons ; 
 
4-02 Chandos, 
 
 there was a momeut's pause and silence. The boy-patriota only 
 gathered closer in their ranks, and looked out on the bristling line 
 of rifles in the sunlight of the day. Chandos forced his way to the 
 front, and stood between them and their foes. 
 
 *' O children ! why will you give the unripe corn of your young 
 life to such reapers as these ? " he said, passionately. " You serve 
 Venice in nothing; you but drain her of all her youngest and 
 purest blood ! Why will you not learn that to contain your souls 
 in patience for a while is to best perfect youi' strength for her ? 
 Why will yon not believe that there is a world-wide love higher 
 even than patriotism, — that while men suffer, and resist, anywhere 
 upon earth, there we can find a country and a brotherhood ?" 
 
 They heard in silence, their young faces flushing ; they knew 
 that he who spoke the rebuke to them spoke but what he had 
 himself done, — that, under exile and wretchedness, he had not fled 
 to the refu^ of death, but had made of truth his kingdom, and of 
 mankind hie brethren. 
 
 **It is better to die than to liye fettered!" they murmured, as 
 they lifted their eyes to his. 
 
 '* True ! But when the freedom of a nation, the deliverance of 
 a people, rest on our bearing with the chains a while, that we may 
 strike them off with surety at the last, the higher duty is to endure 
 ip. the present, that we may resist in the future. Malefactors 
 nave died nobly: it is the greater task to live so." 
 
 His voice, rich and clear with the music of the born orator, rang 
 through the silence of the church, moving the hearts of the young 
 Venetians like music, and stirring even the fierce and sullen souls 
 of the German soldiery, though to them the language of its utter- 
 ance was unknown. He had the power in him wMch leads men 
 by the magic of an irresistible command, — the power that, in forms 
 widely different, his enemy and he alike possessed. In the early 
 ages of the world he would have been such a ruler as Solomon was 
 in the eight of Israel, such a liberator and leader of a captive 
 people as Arminius or Viriathus, when the life of a country hung 
 on the life of one man, and fell when that life fell. 
 
 The Austrian in command, to whom his face was unknown, 
 thought him the leader of the revolt, and wondered who this chief 
 was that thus swayed even whilst he rebuked his followers. He 
 lowered his sword courteously. 
 
 ** Signore, surrender unconditionally, or we must fire." 
 
 Chandos stood between the ranks of the combatants, unarmed, 
 his head uncovered, — behind him the dark hues of the paintings, 
 within the whiteness of the sculpture and the shade of the vaulted 
 aisles, a single breadth of light falling across his forehead and the 
 fairness of his hair. 
 
 *'I cannot dictate surrender to them, for they have done no 
 crime," he said briefly ; ** and to shoot them down you must fij:e 
 first through me." 
 
 The Venetians nearest him pressed round him, shielding him 
 with theii' weapon*, aad oo?enng hi<» hands, his dressy his feet, 
 ■rith their kias^. 
 
Liberia, 
 
 403 
 
 " Signore 1" they shouted with one breath, «* we will suiTender 
 to saye you. You shall not die for us. We can find some way to 
 till ourselves afterwards ! " 
 
 He put them gently back ; his eyes rested on them with a gi-eat 
 tenderness. 
 
 "No : you shall not sun-ender. I know what surrender means. 
 Besides, it is only cowards' resort. Do you think I am so in love 
 with life that I fear to lose it ? I could not die better than with 
 you." 
 
 As the words left his lips, through the ranks of the soldiery, 
 through the serried lines of steel, as the men in amaze fell back 
 before her, and she thrust aside the opposing weapons as she would 
 have thi'ust aside the stalks of a field of millet, through the 
 radiance of the day, and the gloom of the ribbed stone arches, Cas- 
 talia forced herself with the chamois-like swiftness of her mountain- 
 training and the dauntless courage that ran in her blood. Before 
 the Austrians could aiTest her, she had pierced theii' phalanx, 
 crossed the breadth of the marble pavement, and reached Chandos, 
 where he stood beneath the sculpture of the crucifix. His face 
 grew white as the face of the sculptui-ed Chiist above, as he saw 
 her. 
 
 « Oh, God! what love!" 
 
 Involuntarily, with a great cry, he stretched his arms out to her. 
 At that instant a large stone, cast over the heads of the soldiery 
 from an unseen hand behind them, was hurled through the air, and 
 struck the colours of a Free Italy from the grasp of the youth who 
 held them : he reeled and dropped dead : the blow had fallen on 
 his temple. As the banner was shivered from his hold, the folds 
 drooping earthward, Castalia caught it and lifted it in the front of 
 the German troops. Her eyes flashed back on them with a daring 
 challenge ; her face was lighted with the glow that liberty and 
 peril lend to brave natui-es as the sun lends warmth. 
 
 Then, with a smile that had the heroism of a royal fearlessness, 
 with the fidelity of a spaniel that comes to die with its master, she 
 came and stood by Chandos, her eyes looking upward to him, her 
 hand leaning on the stafi" of the standard. Unconsciously, in the 
 violence of the tortui-e that consumed him at her sight, her touch, 
 her presence, he drew her to his breast, crushing her beauty in an 
 embrace in which all was for the moment forgotten, save the love 
 he bore her, save the love that sought him even through the path 
 of death. 
 
 Boused by the echo of that rallying-cry, infuriated by theii 
 comrade's faU, seeing her loveliness given into their defence, the 
 Venetian youths sprang forward like young lions, their swords 
 circling above their heads, their hearts resolute to pierce the net 
 that held them, or to perish. The Austiian raised his sword : — 
 
 "Fire!" 
 
 Obedient to the command, the first file dropped on one knee, the 
 second stood above them with their rifles levelled over the shoul- 
 ders of the kneeling rank, the bayonets were drawn out with a 
 sharp metallic clash, the double line of st«el caught the morning 
 
404 Chandoi, 
 
 rays upon the glitter of the tubes: every avenue of escape woo 
 closed. 
 
 Chandos stooped his head over her, where he held her folded in 
 his arms, to shield her while life was in him. 
 ''You do not fear?" 
 
 She smiled still up into his eyes ; she saw in them an agony 
 great as that which the sculptor had given to the marble agony 
 upon the cross. 
 
 " I have no feai" with you." 
 
 His embrace closed on her in the vibration of a dyiiig man's 
 farewell. 
 
 " Death will be mercy for us T* 
 
 With the sunlight of her hair floating across his breast, he stood 
 looking straight at the levelled musketry ; her eyes rested on his 
 face alone, and never left their gaze. With his arms thus about 
 her, with her head resting on his heart, she had no fear of this 
 fate ; he wished it, he resigned himseK to it ; she was content to 
 die in the dawn of her life, with him, and at his will. 
 
 Guide Lulli stood near them. He was forgotten — he had no 
 thought that it could be otherwise ; but where he leaned his deli- 
 cate withered limbs on the sculpture beside him, his eyes rested 
 calmly on the circle of the soldieiy, on the gleam of the rifle - 
 barrels ; weak as a woman in his frame, he had no woman's weak- 
 ness in his soul. He had forsaken the man he loved for one 
 moment in life ; he would be faithful to him through the last pang 
 of death. 
 
 The sudden crash of the volley rolled through the silence ; the 
 white thick clouds of smoke floated outward to the brightness of 
 the day, and downward through the length of the violated church. 
 Castalia never shrank as it pealed above her ; she only looked up 
 still to the face above her. There was not a sound, not a moan ; 
 when the smoke cleared slightly, they stood untouched, though 
 shots had ploughed the stone above them and beneath them ; but 
 under the white sculpture of the Passion the young lives of 
 Venice lay dying by the score, their li;^s set in a brave smile, their 
 hands still clenched on their sword-mlts. A voice rang out like 
 thunder on the stillness : 
 
 " Brutes I — do you murder in cold blood ? 
 
 Thrusting his way through the dense crowds of the entrance, as 
 Castalia before him had tnrust her's, Philippe d'Orvale strode 
 through the soldiery into the church, felling down with a blow of 
 his nughty arm a rifle that was levelled at Chandos ; with his hair 
 dashed off his forehead, his glance flaming fire, he swung round 
 and faced the German levies, grand in his wrath as a god of 
 Homer. 
 
 " So ! you turn the church to a slaughter -house ? Not the first 
 
 time by many. By my faith, a fine thing, to shoot down those 
 
 brave children I Cowards, tigers, barbarians, fire agam at your 
 
 peril!" 
 
 The passion and ike dignity of the reprimand stilled them for a 
 
Liberta. 405 
 
 moment by the force of surprise ; but only for that, only to rouse 
 their savage ruthlessness in tenfold violence. ,;Dressed, in one of 
 his Bohemian caprices, in the boat-dress of a harcarolo,—toT he 
 loved to mingle with the people in their own garb and in their own 
 manner, — and but dimly seen in the midst of smoke and the twi- 
 light of the building, they failed to recognise him ; they took him 
 for a Venetian and a revolutionist. Infuriated by his words an^ 
 by his forced entrance, the Austrian in command gave the v.cTd to 
 fire again. The volley of the second line rolled out as he stood in 
 the midst between the soldiery and the body of the church, as a 
 lion stands at bay ; he staggered slightly, and put his hand to hia 
 breast; but he stood erect still, his bold, brilliant eyes meeting 
 the sun. 
 
 •'You have killed me; that is little. But kill more of them, 
 and, by the God above us, I will leave my vengeance in legacy to 
 France, who never yet left debts like that unpaid ! " 
 
 Then, as Chandos reached his side, he reeled and fell backwards ; 
 he had been shot through the lungs. ^ 
 
 "If it stop the carnage, it was well done," he said, as the blood 
 poured from his breast. 
 
 Awed at their work, recognising him too late, terror-stricken to 
 have struck one for whose fall vengeance might be demanded by 
 a nation that never slurs its dishonour or lets sleep its enemies, the 
 Austrians in command, motioning back their soldiery, pressed 
 towards him, to raise him, to succour him, to protest their lamen- 
 tation, their ignorance, their horror. Chandos shook them from 
 him, and swept them back. 
 
 "His blood is on your heads: you murdered him! Stand 
 off!" 
 
 Philippe d'Orv^le had known that his death-wound had struck 
 him in the instant that the ball had crushed through the bone and 
 bedded itself where overy breath of life was drawn ; but the care- 
 less laughter of his wit, the fine scorn of the old Noblesse, was on 
 his face as he looked at the Austrians. 
 
 " So ! brave humanity, messieurs ! You apologize for shedding 
 my blood, because ray blood is called princely ; if I had been a gon- 
 dolier, you would have kicked my corpse aside ! No, dear friend, 
 let me lie. No good can be done, and it will be but for a moment." 
 
 A voiceless sob shook Chandos as he hung over him ; he knew 
 also that but for a moment this noble life would be among the 
 living. 
 
 The thoughts of Philippe d'Orv^le were not of himself; they 
 were with those children of Venice, who were perishing from too 
 loyal and too rash a love for her. His eyes gathered their lion 
 fire as they rested on the Austrians ; his voice rang stern and 
 imperious. 
 
 " If you regret my death, give me their lives." 
 
 The officers stood mute and irresolute : they dared not refuse ; 
 thev dared not comply. 
 
 ♦•"^Oive me their lives!" his voice rolled clearer and louder, 
 
4o6 Chandos, 
 
 commanding as a monarcli's, "without conditions, free and un- 
 touched for ever. Give me them, or, by Heaven, I will leave 
 France to avenge me. Give me them, I say !" 
 
 There was no resistance possible, in such an hour, to such a de- 
 mand, they submitted to him ; they pledged their honour that the 
 lives he asked for as his blood-money should be spared. 
 
 " That is well ; that is well," he said, briefly, as the rush of the 
 air through his wound checked his utterance, where he lay back 
 in Chandos' arms just beneath the sculpture of the Passion. "All 
 that youth saved! No shot ever told better. Ah, Chandos! do 
 not suffer for me, caro. It is a fair fate, — a long life enjoyed, and 
 a swift death by a bullet, with your eyes on mine to the last. 
 Dieu de dieu ! what room is there for regret ? I am spared all the 
 lingering torbores of age. That is much !" 
 
 " Oh, God !— to lose you ! " 
 
 The cry broke from Chandos in an anguish mightier far than if 
 his own life had been ebbing out with every wave of the blood that 
 flowed out on the marble floor. He had lost all else, — and, at the 
 last, this life he loved was taken ! 
 
 Philippe d'Orvale's eyes looked up at him, tender as a woman's. 
 
 " Chut ! If / be content, what matter ? ' The king will enjoy 
 his own again.' You will take from your friend dead what you 
 refused from him living. Make my grave in Clarencieux, Chan- 
 dos,— under the forests somewhere, — that your step may pass over 
 it now and then, and the deer come trooping above me." 
 
 "Hush! hush! You kiU me." 
 
 Hot and bitter tears welled into Chandos' eyes, and fell on the 
 brow that rested against his breast : he would have accepted exile 
 and poverty for ever rather than have bought the joys and the 
 wealth of a world at such a price as this. 
 
 Philippe d'Orvale smiled, — the sun-lit, careless, shadowless smile 
 that had always been on the lips of this bright, fearless reveller, 
 though the blood was pouring faster and faster out as his chest 
 heaved for breath, and the dullness and numbness of death were 
 stealing over the colossal limbs that were stretched on the marble 
 floor. 
 
 "Nay; I tell you I am fortimate. My roses have never lost 
 their fragrance yet, and now — I shall not see them wither. Do 
 not grieve for me, Ernest ; it is well as it is, — very well ! Ah, 
 Lulli! is it you?" 
 
 He stretched out one hand to the Proven9al, who bent oyer him 
 convulsed with the unrestrained impassioned grief of his tem- 
 perament ; it seemed to him strange and terrible beyond compare, 
 that this mighty magnificence of manhood should be laid low 
 while death passed by his own strengthless, pain-racked frame and 
 left unsevered his own frail bonds to earth. 
 
 An intense stillness had fallen over the scene of the carnage 
 where the pruce-Bohemian lay dying in the broad space of the 
 arched aisle; the soldiers of Austria stood mute and motionless; 
 the young Venetians gazed heart-broken at the man who had 
 
Liberia, 4c; 
 
 given his life for theirs. All those who wore wounded lay as stiil 
 as the stiffened dead beside them, lotting existence ebb out ol 
 them with the same fortitude as his. The tumult had died; a 
 stricken awe had come upon the multitude. Above, in the twilight 
 of the dim vaulted vista of columns, the free colours of liberty' 
 still floated, catching a gleam of light stiU on their folds. Castalia 
 held them where she stood looking down on the first death that 
 her eyes had ever watched, as the purple stream of the blood 
 flowed to her feet, and each breath, as it convulsed the vast, torn, 
 heaving chest, dealt a separate pang to her as though her own life 
 went with it. 
 
 The glance of Philippe d'Orvale, growing more languid now, and 
 losing the fiery brilliance of its gaze, dwelt on her with a gleam of 
 wonder and of light. 
 
 *' Who is that ?" he asked, as he raised himself slightly. 
 
 She knelt beside him, holding the standard still, while its bright 
 hues di'ooped on the marble. 
 
 **They call me Castalia." 
 
 He looked at her dreamily. 
 
 ** Castalia ! Ah ! you have eyes that are like some I loved once. 
 I loved so many, — so many ! Life has been sweet, — sweet as wine. 
 Stoop down and touch me with your lips; it will bo a better 
 assoilzement than a priest's chrism." 
 
 She lifted her eyes to Chtindos, where she knelt beside nim ; he 
 bent his head in silence, then at the sign from him she stooped 
 softly nearer and nearer, and let her lips rest on the French Prince's 
 brew in the farewell he asked. 
 
 He smiled, and touched her hair with his hand. 
 
 **I thank you, helle enfant,'" he said gently; the light was 
 fading fast out of his gaze, his senses were fast losiiig all their 
 hold on earth, as wave on wave of his life-blood surged from the 
 broken, shattered bones of his breast. He lifted himself slightly 
 with a supreme eflPort, and the sunlit laughter with which he had 
 ever met existence was on his face as he met his last hour. 
 
 ** Your foe waited for the ' Mad Duke's' death ! Well, we have 
 cheated him : he will see the rightful lord go back to his heritage. 
 It irked me reigning there, Chandos, while you were exiled. No 
 Austrian bullet ever did a better stroke. Nay ! why mourn me ? 
 I have drunk the riches of life, and I am spared the ^all of the 
 lees. Your hand closer, dear friend. I do not suffer ; it is nothing, 
 nothing ! Let me see your eyes to the end, Ernest. So ! — that 
 is well!" 
 
 And with these words his head fell back, and under the white 
 sculpture of the Passion Philippe d'Orvale lay dead. 
 
 While "Venice was hushea m awe at the greatness of the victim 
 who had fallen, and the vengeance of tyrannjr was stayed in 
 obedience to his last wish, the Prince who had died for the People 
 
4>o8 Chandoi, 
 
 wa3 borne with reverent hands into the gloom of a state- chambei 
 of his own palace, and laid reverently down, with the radiance of 
 the morning shut out, and the gleam of funeral lights burning 
 round. A pall of purple covered the limbs ; fine linens veiled the 
 breadth of the chest, with its yawning, blood-filled cavity. The 
 face was still left unshrouded, with its fair, frank brow pale in the 
 pallor of the wax-light, the luxuriance of the curling beard flecked 
 with silver threads, the eyelids closed as in a peaceful slumber. 
 There was but one watcher with him. Beside the bier Chandoa 
 knelt, motionless as the dead, with his forehead resting on the hand 
 which in life had never clenched but in a righteous cause, and 
 which, once clasped in friendship or in pledge, would have been 
 cut off sooner than have let go its bond. That hand, cold as ice, 
 and lying open like the strengthless palm of a child, had given him 
 his home, given him more than empires ; that hand, by its last 
 act and will, had restored him the one longing of his life, had 
 summoned him from exile to the honour of his race once more ; 
 that hand had swept aside a score of years, and brought him back 
 his birthright. This gift of a recovered joy such as dreams some- 
 times had mocked him with, came to him in the very hour thai a 
 horror worse than guilt laid his heart desolate. One desire of his 
 soul was bestowed on him in the very moment that all others were 
 laid waste and banned as sin, — one resurrection of dead hopes 
 granted him in the very moment that all other hopes were blasted 
 from his hold. It was his once more, this land that he had never 
 forgotten, this thing that he had mourned as Adam mourned the 
 forfeited loveliness of paradise, this lost treasure to which his 
 memory had gone, waking or sleeping, with every flicker of green 
 leaves in morning twilight, with every sough of summer winds 
 through arching aisles of woodland, with every spring that bloomed 
 on earth, with every night that fell ; — and it was his only when the 
 one friend that had cleaved to him loyally was stretched dead before 
 his eyes, only when the poison of his past rose up and turned to 
 incestuous shame the love which had seemed the purest and the 
 fairest treasure that his life had ever known ! He knelt there, 
 wh^e the daylight was shut out and the stillness was unstirred as 
 in a vault. That he had regained his birthright by the seal of 
 eternal silence laid for ever on those brave lips that no lie had ever 
 tainted, could assuage in nothing the bitterness of his regret ; to 
 have summoned Philippe d'Orvale back amidst the Uving, he 
 would have taken up for ever a beggar's portion and a wanderer's 
 doom. 
 
 Where he had sunk down, with his arms flung over the motion- 
 less limbs, and his frame shaken ever and again by a great tremor 
 as the scorch of passions that he had been told were guilt thrilled 
 through him, a woman's hand was laid upon his shoulder. As he 
 started and raised his eyes, he saw, in the pale silvery shadows 
 of the death-lights burning round, the gaze of Beatrix Lennox 
 bent upon him. 
 
 "Ab! I am too late," she said wearily. "I am always too 
 late for good : for evil one is sure to be ready.*" 
 
Liberia. 409 
 
 Her voice was very low ; she stood looking not at him, but at 
 the noble head that had fallen never to rise again, at the mouth 
 that still wore its last smile, from which no chaunt of laughter, no 
 melody of welcome, would ever again ring out. 
 
 Chandos rose and stood in silence also. There was too great a 
 wretchedness on him to leave him any wonder at her coming there, 
 at her forcing her entrance into the state-chamber where the 
 guards without denied all comers. He thought some tie might 
 bind her to Philippe d'Orvale's memory: he had never known 
 that it was himself she loved. 
 
 "He had a lion's heart, he was true as the sun, he never lied, he 
 never broke a bond, he never failed a friend ; no wonder the world 
 had no name for him but ' Mad !' " she said, as her voice fell on 
 the stillness of the funeral chamber. '*He died but four hours 
 ago, they say ; and I — ^was those four hours too late. It is always 
 so with me !" 
 
 ' ' He was dear to you ? " 
 
 '* No ! If he had been, do you think I could stand calmly here ? 
 But he was a superb gentleman : he died superbly. The world has 
 few grand natures ; it can ill spare them. Besides, I have much 
 to say to you." 
 
 "Hush! not here." 
 
 "Yes, here. What I shall say is no desecration to his presence. 
 He would have been the first to be told it, had he Uved. 
 
 She waited some moments ; then, with her face turned from him^ 
 she spoke : — 
 
 " Chandos, she whom you love " 
 
 " Spare me that I ^^ 
 
 " What ! is she false to you ? " 
 
 " Would to God she were, rather than ■ ^ 
 
 '* Eather than what ? " 
 
 He shuddered. 
 
 * ' I cannot teU you ! " 
 
 " You must— if but for her sake. It is — - 
 
 " That Valeria Lulli was her mother." 
 
 * * That is the truth ! 'SVhat if she be ? " 
 
 " What ? She wae my mistress ! " 
 
 " It is false ! It is basely, utterly false ! " 
 
 He caught her hands in his. 
 
 "Prove it, prove itl — and no saint was ever mei'ciftil as 
 
 you " 
 
 " I can prove it. Valeria Lulli gave her birth ; but her father — 
 lies there." 
 
 He drew a deep gasping breath, like a man who has escaped 
 from the close peril of some awful death. 
 
 "This is true?" 
 
 " True as that we live." 
 
 She turned from him, that she might not see his face in that 
 moment of supreme deliverance. There was a long, breathless 
 silence, the siiea^e which is a greater thanksgiving than any 
 words can utter. 
 
410 Chandos. 
 
 He lifted his head at last, and his eyes, dwelt on her with a looli 
 that repaid her for twenty years of unspoken, unrequited love. 
 " Her father— 7?e / Oh God ! " 
 
 ** Yes, it is strange. And, yet, why do we say so ? Life is full 
 of wilder mystery than any fiction fancies. Months ago, in the 
 autumn, you bade me feel a woman's pity for your young, forsaken 
 Tuscan. I sought for her ; I wished to know if she were worthy oi 
 you. You had told me where you had left her ; I went there to 
 find her gone, — lost out of all sight and knowledge. The belief ol 
 the people and of the priest was that she had fled with you. I 
 knew the falsehood of that, and I set myself to the discovery, first, 
 of her histoiy, then of herself. It took me long, very long; but 
 at last I succeeded. Women rarely fail when they are in earnest. 
 The priest told me, after long conferences with him, that her 
 mother had confided to him a sealed packet, but he was never to 
 open it unless some imminent danger assailed the child ; then, and 
 then only, he might read what it held, and act as he might see fit. 
 She had died without confession, — died what he considered impeni- 
 tent. He was a grand old man in his ^creeds of duty ; he had 
 never violated the sanctity of the seals to sate his curiosity or to 
 lighten his charge of Castalia. I had less self-restraint. I per- 
 suaded him that the moment had arrived. He was very hard to 
 convince ; he considered the command of the dead woman sacred. 
 At last, however, I overcame his reluctance. We opened the 
 papers : from them I learned that she was the daughter of Valeria 
 LuUi and of the Due d'Orvale." 
 ** She had been his mistress ?" 
 
 " No, his wife ; but she had disbelieved that she was so ; hence 
 her concealment of herself and of her offspring. ^ The account of 
 her life is very incoherent ; written as women write under wrong 
 and grief. It is plain to see that she was passionate, jealous, 
 doubtless of extraordinary beauty, but of a fervid, uncontrolled 
 temperament, — one to beguile him into hot love, but soon to weary 
 him. There are many such women, and then you are blamed for 
 inconstancy ! She had left Aries because persecuted by a roue. 
 She went to Florence, and there saw Phdippe d'Orvale. H« 
 heard her voice in a mass at Easter, and sought her out. A 
 passion, ardent as his always was, soon sprang up between them. 
 Of course he had no tLo ught of marriage ; but she had the same 
 pride that Guitlo Lulli cherishes so strongly. She would not yield 
 to him ; in the end she vanquished him. The marriage was per- 
 formed privately, and remained secret. Eeasons connected with 
 his great House made this imperative for a brief while ; but he 
 kept her in the utmost luxury in a palace of his on Como, and 
 intended shortly to announce their union. It is easy to see by 
 her own confession that her jealous love left him little peace, and 
 must have been unendurable to such a temperament as his ; but 
 throughout she speaks of his unvarying tenderness, lavish gene- 
 rosity, and sweetness of temper. It is conceivable that he went 
 back to his old freedom when once the restless tyranny of hex 
 passion began to gall him ; but she never hints that his Irindneae 
 
Liberia, 41 v 
 
 or his affection altered. He left her once for Paris, intending but 
 a short absence. While he was away, she received anonymous 
 letters, telling her that her marriage had been a false one, that his^ 
 equerry in a priest's guise had performed it ; that he was faithless 
 to her, and already loved another. A woman who had read his 
 nature aright would have known a fraud impossible to Philippe 
 d'Orvale ; but she was very young, very impulsive,— at once, as 
 I think, weak and passionate. She flew to Paris ; he had gone to 
 stay with you at Clarencieux. She knew her cousin was there, 
 and went thither to declare her marriage, or arraign the Duke if 
 he confessed it false. She was his wife, but she knew so little of 
 D'Orvale as that ! In the Park, as it chanced, the Duke was that 
 moment riding with the Countess de la Vivarol and other ladies. 
 She heard her husband's laughter ; she saw the beautiful women 
 he was with. She knew so little the worth of the heart she had 
 won, that she believed all the falsehoods told her in the letters, 
 which were most likely penned by the libertine whom she had 
 repulsed; or by some forsaken mistress of her husband's. Her 
 first impulse was to accuse him before all his friends, the 
 next to flee from him and from every memory of him, and hide 
 herself and her shame where none could ever reach her. That she 
 did. She made her way back into Italy, where she gave birth to 
 her child. She would not even let him know that she had borno 
 him one. There is little doubt that the shock of what she believed 
 his cruelty, had unsettled her reason. That the Duke sought her 
 far and wide, though unsuccessfully, is shown by the difficiilties 
 which she relates beset her in her avoidance of discovery by him." 
 
 He heard in silence, his breathing quick and loud, his hand on 
 the dead man's. 
 
 "Go on; go on!" 
 
 " The remainder is soon told. I read this record of a life thrown 
 away by such blind folly, such mingling of utter creduHty and 
 mad mistrust ; her marriage-ring was enclosed in it, the certifi- 
 cate of the child's birth, and other matters. She, of course, wrote 
 her absolute belief that she was not his wife. I reasoned other- 
 wise. D'Orvale might be a voluptuary, but his honour was true 
 9,s steel. A false marriage would have been a fraud impossible to 
 him : he would never have betrayed any one. So — I sought out 
 the evidence. Most would have gone to him. That is not _my 
 way. I have known the world too well to call the accused into 
 the place of witness. I sought Castalia, and I sought evidence of 
 the marriage, ere I went to her father. I found the priest who 
 had performed the rites, with difficulty ; he had joined the Ordei 
 of Jesus, and was in Africa. With patience I reached every link, 
 those who had witnessed it and all. The marriage was perfectly 
 valid, legally recorded, though its privacy had been kept. It is 
 easy to conceive that, with his nature, which loved enjoyment and 
 loathed regret, when he found Valeria irrevocably lost to him, he 
 had no temptation to re-open a painful thought by relating his 
 connection with her. Doubtless other loves chased her memory 
 away, though doubtless tiiat memory always prompted his extreme 
 
4 1 2 Chandos. 
 
 tenderness towai-ds Lulli. That the union wau strict to the law, 
 you will see when I show you the proofs ; and in all that you 
 choose to claim for her, Castalia must be recognised as a daughter 
 of the house of D'Orvale." 
 
 He heard in perfect stillness, the sudden relief of the deadly 
 strain which had been on him for the past hours leaving him 
 giddy and speechless ; he doubted his own hearing : he had 
 touched joy so often only to see it wither from him, he dreaded 
 this too was a dream. A thousand thoughts and memories rushed 
 on him : that superb courage which flashed from Castalia's eyes, 
 that imperial grace which had marked her out among the Tuscan 
 contadini, as Perdita was marked out among the peasants of her 
 foster-home, that pride of instinct in her which had repelled insult 
 as worse than death, — they were the heritage in her of the man 
 who lay dead beside him, the heritage of a great dauntless race, 
 that in the annals of centuries had never failed a friend or quailed 
 before a foe. His hand closed tighter on Philippe d'Orvale's, and 
 his head drooped over the lifeless limbs, the stilled heart that never 
 again would beat with the brave pulse of its gallant life. 
 
 ** K he were but living " 
 
 In the first moment of a release so sudden that it seemed to break 
 all his strength down beneath his joy, his heart went out to the 
 slaughtered friend whose love had been with him to the last. The 
 dignities, the titles, the possessions that would accrue to her through 
 her heirship with the mighty race she issued from, never passed oyer 
 his memory ; the inheritance that ho remembered in her, the in- 
 heritance that he thanked God for in one who would bear his name 
 and hold his honour, was the inheritance of her father's nature. 
 
 "You noblest among women ! " he said, brokenly, as he took 
 the hands of Beatrix Lennox in his own and bent over them as men 
 bend above an empress's. " How can I thank you ? What can I 
 render you for the mercy you have brought me, for the torture you 
 have taken from my life ? So vast a gift, — so unasked a service ! 
 What words can ever tell you my gratitude ?" 
 
 She smiled, but the smile was very sad. 
 
 "You remember, long ago, I told you I would serve you if I 
 could, though it were twenty years later ? Well, I have kept my 
 word ; but there is no need of thanks for that : it cost me nothing." 
 
 " No cost ! It is such a debt as leaves me bankrupt to repay it; 
 my life, her life, will never suffice to return it." 
 
 Her eyes were very beautiful as they dwelt on him in the dim- 
 ness of the darkened chamber. 
 
 * ' Chandos, it is paid enough. You will know happiness once 
 more. It is your native sunlight ; could my lips pray, they should 
 pray that it may shine on you for ever." 
 
 And there was that in the words, as they were spoken, which told 
 him the truth at last, — told him of what sort and of what strength 
 this woman's tenderness for him had been. 
 
 "Hush!" she said, softly, with that weary smile which had in 
 it more sorrow than tears, 
 more. It only pains me. 
 
 . "No; do not thank me; do not say 
 Ah, Christ ! I have done so little good V 
 
Liber ta, mt 
 
 As she spoke, into the shadows of the chamber of death Oastalia 
 entered. 
 
 She knew no cause for his long absence. She had borne the 
 silence awhile with the absolute submission to him that mingled 
 with the passion of her love ; at last the latter conquered ; she came 
 to seek him, came to know what this barrier was which had risen 
 up between them with the morning light. She paused as she saw 
 him not alone. Her face was very pale ; the suffering and martyr- 
 dom that she had witnessed had wrung her heart, and stirred the 
 depths of a nature that had in it the love of liberty, and the 
 tenderness for the people, for which her father had died ; but as 
 she waited, beyond the gleam of the funeral-lights, the royalty was 
 on her which had seemed to rest like a crown on her young head 
 when she had lived among the peasants of Tuscany, and had made 
 them speak of her with a hushed awe as a fairy's changeling. 
 
 Beatrix Lennox looked on her long in silence, with a quick deep 
 sigh ; there was that in her loveliness which far passed beyond 
 mere beauty, mere youth ; and between her face and the kingly 
 majesty which was stretched dead on the bier there was, in that 
 moment, a strange likeness. 
 
 The heart of this adventm-ess, whom the world had long con- 
 demned, had thus much of rare nobility and self-forgetfiilness in 
 it; it could rejoice in others' joy, rejoice that what it had itself 
 forfeited still lived to gladden others. It was untainted by that 
 which corrodes many whose acts are blameless ; it was untainted 
 by the gall of envy. 
 
 Beatrix Lennox looked on this life that opened to the fulness of 
 existence while her own was faded, that would lie in the bosom of 
 the man she loved, that would rest in the golden glory of joy whilst 
 she herself had nothing left but regret and remorse and the 
 phantoms of dead years ; but there was no bitterness in her ; there 
 was only a heartfelt thanksgiving for him. 
 
 " She is worthy even of you," she said, softly; then she paused 
 a moment, looking down into the lustrous, meditative, poetic eyes 
 of CastaHa with a searching, thoughtful gaze. ' ' You will have a 
 great trust," she said, simply, *' and a great treasure ; but there is 
 no need to say to you^ guard both dearer than life." 
 
 Then, silently, with one backward farewell glance at the dead 
 man Ijdng there, she passed slowly and musingly from the 
 chamber. Chandos followed her, and took her hands once more 
 within his own. 
 
 " Wait, /do not judge as the world judges. You have come 
 as the angel of mercy to me ; you have released me from a misery 
 passing all I had ever known. You will live in our love and 
 reverence for ever ; you will let us both strive to repay you ? " 
 
 " You have more than repaid me by those words only. I have 
 much still to tell you, — to place with you. But she will never see 
 my face again. You know what my life has been ! " 
 
 He stooped nearer, and, looking upward, she saw a divine com- 
 passion on his face. 
 
 **I know that it has had magnai*^*^*,^^. snany blameless liyei 
 
414 Chandos. 
 
 kave never reached. Hear me. Do you think, in view of each 
 au act as yours, I could hold a Pharisee's creed ? God is my 
 witness, there is no one whom I would more fearlessly trust with 
 her than you, none that I more surely know would reverence her 
 youth and leave untouched her innocence. Can I say more ?" 
 
 " More ! You have said far above what I merit. But what you 
 mean cannot be. I am no meet associate for his daughter, for 
 your wife. She must be above suspicion: she could not be so 
 were / once seen beside her. No, my years have been too evil to 
 leave me any place with hers ; but they will not he wholly desolate 
 in future, for I shall have your pity always, and, sometimes, your 
 remembrance." 
 
 She touched his hand with her lips ere he could stay her, and 
 hot tears fell on it as she stooped ; then she went from him,— -con- 
 tent, because she had given him happiness; content, because it had 
 been hers to serve him. 
 
 He passed back into the chamber where the lights burned around 
 the solitude of the dead, and his arms closed on what he cherished 
 with a convulsive pressure as though she were just rescued from 
 her grave. He could not speak for many moments, but held her 
 there as a man holds the dearest treasure of his life ; then he drew 
 her to the bier, where the brave, serene face smiled on them in 
 eternal rest. 
 
 " Your lips were the last to touch his ; thank God that it was 
 so. I have much to tell you ; it is best told here. My love, my 
 love ! could you be more sacred to me, you would be so for his 
 
 ■ I" 
 
 That night, in the palace where the dead man lay, — the palace 
 that, with most of his vast chieftainship, of his princely appanage, 
 would fall to the only one who owned his name, — Guido LuLU 
 stood before her in whose eyes the smile of his lost Valeria looked 
 once more upon him. 
 
 *' Castalia," he said, softly, *'you will be very great in the 
 world's sight ; but you will not forget that your mother loved me 
 once, when she was a bright and gracious child, and I had no 
 thought through the length of summer days and winter nights 
 save to make her pleasure ?" 
 
 She stooped to him with that grace which, even when the ban 
 of peasants' scorn and of a foundling's shame had rested on her, 
 had been so proud, and had so much of royalty in it. 
 
 "Ah ! can you think so basely of me as to need to ask it ? My 
 fondest reverence will be ever yours ; and as for greatness, what 
 {JTieatness can there be like " 
 
 "His love?" added the musician, gently, while his own ga^e 
 dwelt also on the man who had come to him as his saviour in the 
 bleak and burning heat of Spain, when both were in their youth. 
 "Eight. There will be your proudest coronal; and by yoU;. 
 through you, some portion of my debt will be pai** to him." 
 
 Chandos sUenced him with a gesture. 
 
Lex TcUionis. 
 
 415 
 
 I* Hush! You paid it long ago, Lulli; paid it afresh to-day; 
 paid it when you gave me a rarer thing than gold, — fidelity." 
 
 " Not so. There are debts that, I have told you, are too noble 
 to be repaid like counted coin. Mine is one of them. Let it rest 
 on me ever, ever. It will be my last thought, and my sweetest in 
 my death-houi\" 
 
 There was an exceeding pathos in the brief and simple words ; 
 with them he turned and passed from the chamber. He looked 
 back once, himseK unseen, and his face grew pale with a certain 
 
 Eang. The light that shone on their lives would never come to 
 im ; the lotus-lily of which they ate his lips could never touch. 
 There was no bitterness on him, no sin of envy, no thought save 
 a voiceless prayer for them ; yet still the pain was there. No joy 
 could ever be his own, no fragrance of Eden reach him. He must 
 dwell for ever an exile from that golden world in which men for 
 awhUe forget that no dreams last. Had it been his to give, he 
 would have poured on them the glory of the life of gods ; but in 
 their love he saw all his own life had missed, all his own life for 
 ever was denied. 
 
 As he went back alone into his desolate home, into the music- 
 room where the things of his heart were, it was deep in shade ; 
 only across the keys of the organ at the end a white pui-e light 
 was streaming from the rays of a lamp that swung above. 
 
 A smile came on his lips as he saw it ; to hitn it was as an 
 allegoiy. Heaven-painted. 
 
 " Alone ! while I have you ?" he mui-mured. 
 
 The artist was true to his genius ; he knew it a greater gift than 
 happiness ; and as his hands wandered by instinct over the familiar 
 notes, the power of his kingdom came to him, the passion of his 
 mistress was on him, and the grandeur of the melody swelled out 
 to mingle with the night, divine as consolation, supreme as victory. 
 
 CHAPTER Vni. 
 
 LEX TAI.IONTS. 
 
 With the sunset a storm had broken over Venice, rolling its 
 funeral mass for the souls of those who had died for Uberty. At 
 midnight it lulled somewhat ; the thunder grew more distant, and 
 died away in low, hoarse anger ; sheets of heavy rain succeeded, 
 and through the hot sulphui'ous air the wind arose in litful and 
 tempestuous gusts. In its violence, the Jew kept his patient vigil. 
 All through the day he had heard the noise of the tumult, the 
 echoes of the firing, the shrieks of women, the clash of swords ; he 
 had heard the terror-stricken stillness that fell over the city when 
 a gTeat man was slain ; he had heard the murmur of many tongues, 
 that told him many strange, conflicting tales. And his heart was 
 iU at rest ; he feared for his son. Death had been abroad in the 
 streets ; death had smitten the inT>ocent with the guilty : whom 
 might I^ not haye touched ? Ag scon as darkness geve hini the 
 
^ 1 6 Chandm. 
 
 safety and the secrecy that for Agostino's sake he kept, he made 
 his way to the place where his son dwelt. He heeded neither the 
 fury of the winds nor the beat of the rain ; he thought some pass- 
 ing sound, some echo of a voice, some stray word borne to his 
 eager ear, might tell him what he sought. From sunset to mid- 
 night he waited in the shadow of the stone -work, waited and 
 listened. Darkness and li^ht were alike to him ; no sun-rays ever 
 pierced the gloom before his sight, even when the heat of noon told 
 him the golden glow that shone on all the world, denied alone to 
 him and to the Legion of the Blind. 
 
 He stood and listened, his long white hair blown back in the 
 wild wind, the rushing storm of driving rain beaten against him 
 unheeded ; he waited to hear the one step that should tell him the 
 son he loved still lived : to know that he was near, to be conscious 
 of his presence for one fleeting moment, were enough for the great 
 patient heart of the Hebrew. 
 
 For these only he watched now, — watched in vain. No sound 
 repaid him ; hoiu's had passed, and there had been nothing. The 
 storm had drenched his garments, and his snowy beard was heavy 
 with water; still he listened,— listened so eagerly that the caution 
 he had exercised so long to remain unseen was forgotten as he 
 leaned out from the shadow, hearkening in the rush of the rain for 
 the footfall he knew so well. He forgot that the darkness which 
 veiled the world from him could not shroud him from sight; he 
 could not tell that the wavering light of the lamp which swung 
 above from the doorway near fell on his olive brow, upturned as 
 though in the Psalmist's weariness of prayer. He had worn the 
 fetters of his taskmaster so long ; he had so long borne the burden 
 and the weight of this iron silence bound on him ; death seemed so 
 long in its coming ! It took the young, the beloved, the fair, the 
 cMld from its mother's bosom, the beauty of youth from the lover's 
 embrace, the glory of manhood from its fruitage of ambition, from 
 its harvest of labour ; and it would not come to him, but left him 
 here, poor, old, sightless, solitary, alone in the midst of all the 
 peopled earth. 
 
 And yet there was a vague hope in his soul to-night : he felt as 
 though death wore not far from him, as though the release of its 
 sweet pity would soon stoop to him, and touch him, and bid his 
 bitterness cease ; and ere it came, he longed to hear once more his 
 darling's stejy —to feel once more near him the existence born ol 
 his dead love, — the heart to which once he had been dear. He had 
 strength in him to be silent unto death, to accept his martyrdom 
 and bear it onward to his grave, untold to any living thing: all he 
 asked was to listen once to a single living echo of his lost son's 
 voice. Through the hush of the midnight the beat of oars trembled ; 
 a gondola grated against the stairs. It came, — that sound which 
 thrilled through the rayless darkness which was ever around him, 
 as it never trembled on any ear whose sense was Hnked with the 
 power of sight, — that sound of Agostino's voice, as it spoke to the 
 boatmen, — that sound which was the sole joy left to the blind. 
 His son came towards him nearer and nearer up the wet stone 
 
Lex Talionis* 417 
 
 steps ; he leaned forward, knowing not how the light shone dovm 
 on his face, and an unspoken blessing trembled on his lips in the 
 tongue of the patriarchs of Judea : if he died to-night, he would 
 have prayed with his last breath for the son of tho love of his 
 youth. 
 
 The footfall paused : it was beside him now, so close that he 
 could hear every breath. A loud, wild cry broke through the 
 night. Agostino staggered back, white-stricken, ghastly as Saul 
 in the cave of Endor. A moment, and he gazed there paralyzed 
 with spectral awe, with superstitious horror ; then, unwitting what 
 he did, senseless, and breathless, and prostrate, he fell down at the 
 old man's feet in the supplication of lus childhood. 
 
 *' Father ! father ! dead or living, for the love of God forgive me !" 
 
 The Hebrew stood above in the flickering shadowy light ; and on 
 his face there was the strife of a terrible conflict. All his soul 
 yearned to the man flung there in that j)assionate prayer at his 
 feet : yet for his very sake he must deny him ! 
 
 " I do not know you," he said, and his voice trembled sorely. 
 **None call me father." 
 
 There liavo been heroisms far less noble than this one h*woic lie. 
 
 Agostino looked uj), his face all flushed with warmth, his eyes 
 alight with bewildered, questioning amaze ; the voice, once heard, 
 bore buck a thousand memories of by- gone years. The words 
 might deny, but the voice blessed him. 
 
 •' Forgive me !" he implored, scarce conscious of what he said, 
 bnt remembering alone the sin with which he had wi'ung the old 
 man's heart so long ago in the days of his boyhood, — the sin which 
 had pursued him ever since. " Whether you come to me in spirit 
 or in life, come only to mo in pardou, by the love you bore me ! " 
 
 The Hebrew stood mute and motionless, his tall and wasted 
 frame swaying like a reed, his face changing with swift and un- 
 controllable emotions, under the force of the imploring conjuration. 
 His sightless eyes gazed instinctively down upon his son; but 
 their blindness gave them, to Agostino, a look unearthly and with- 
 out sense. 
 
 '* Father ! speak, God !" he cried, " or you will kill me ] ' 
 
 The infinite love restrained in him broke through the rigid fixity 
 of the old man's set features as the sun breaks through the dark- 
 ness of a winter dawn ; his hands were stretched out seeking to 
 touch the beloved head lifted to him ; he could hold his silence no 
 more, — no more be as one dead to the son who knew him still. 
 
 His answer trembled, tender beyond all words, through the 
 sighing of the wild winds and the rush of tho beating rain. 
 
 ' ' Agostino ! my child ! what have / to pardon ? Eise, rise ; 
 guide my hands to you ; let my arms feel you ere I die ! You 
 have your mother's face, and I cannot behold it ; I am blind ! " 
 
 In the dim light of the chamber within, kneeling at the old 
 man's feet reverently as ever Isaac knelt at the feet of Abraham, 
 Agostino heard his father's history, — heard quivering mtk 
 
 E E 
 
4l8 Chandos. 
 
 torture, his breath caught by sobs, his kiss touching the withered 
 hands that were to him as the hands of a martyr, great tears in 
 his eyes that never left their gaze upon those in whose dark- 
 ness he could still read love. He heard to the end. Then, 
 when he had heard, he wept convulsively ; the torrent of his agony 
 loosened- 
 
 *' You have borne this martyrdom through him ! this curse foi 
 his sake ? " 
 
 " Silence ! His name is sacred to me. My son, he had mercy ; 
 be spared you." 
 
 Agostino sprang to his feet as an arrow springs from the bow. 
 
 " Spared me ? Oh, God, you have thought that ? " 
 
 The old man bent his head with the patient dignity with which 
 he had ever borne the burden laid upon him. 
 
 "He spared you; yes I For it I bless his name. My life 
 mattered nothing." 
 
 "Spared me? He cursed me from my youth up!" his voice 
 rang as steel rings : the bondage of half a life was broken at last. 
 " He loosed me from the law's chastisement to break me down into 
 slavery worse than the worst tortures the sternest law ever dealt 
 yet. He let me escape a moment to fetter me for an eternity. 
 He traded in my misery ; he traded in my crime. He set me to 
 do the vilest work, and, when I shi-ank from it, threatened me 
 with my buried sin. He made my life one endless dread; he 
 never let me know one moment's peace, one hour's security. Ah, 
 Heaven ! why do I speak of it as past ! He does it still. I am his 
 tool, his serf, his hound. Every day I wake, I know that I may 
 rise only to be commanded some fresh infamy to serve him ! " 
 
 The old man, as he heard, rose also, and stood erect ; hia 
 sunken eyes filled with the fire of his dead manhood, his mouth set 
 like a vice ; years of living vigour, of mighty strength, seemed 
 poured into his veins : his olive face was dark as night. 
 
 " What ? he was faithless to me ? You have sufi'ered ? " 
 
 ' ' SuflFered ! It is no word for what I have borne thi-ough him. 
 But what is his crime to me, beside his crime to you ? I was 
 guilty, I merited my punishment ; but you, — you who endured 
 indignity and torment for my sake and for his, you who had no 
 error, save too firm a loyalty to him, too noble a tenderness to 
 me !'; 
 
 His voice fell in a deep tearless sob ; he had the heart of a 
 woman, and his father's sacrifice was holy in his sight as any 
 martyrdom. 
 
 *' He has been your tyrant ? " 
 
 The question was hard as iron. 
 
 " Mine! what matters that? It is nothing beside your cap- 
 tivity!" 
 
 " Yes ! By it my bonds are loosed ; by it my oath is broken. 
 He has had my patience long, my truth long, my servitude long ; 
 now ho shall aave my justice. " 
 
 His whole height was erect, his blind eyes blazed with fire, his 
 arm wm outstretched in imprecation ; he stood like one of the 
 
Lex Talionis. 4ip 
 
 prophets of his own Palestine, cursing in the name of Jehovah a 
 Rostile host, an ingrate land. 
 
 Agostino, looking upward, caught the same fire from him, 
 caught the kindling glow of liberty and of revenge. He had 
 writhed and rebelled under his own bonds, though ever only to 
 sink more hopelessly under the fetters ; but before the martyrdom 
 of his father there rose in him that nobler rage for another's 
 wi'ong which would have made him content to perish himself, if in 
 his fall he could have dragged down his tyrant : it is the emotion 
 which makes tyrannicides. 
 
 " Ay ! " he cried passionately, " let us be avenged if the power 
 be still with us. Let him shame me, ruin me, kill me ; but let me 
 see him struck down ere I die. His guilty secrets have been the 
 curse of both our lives ; let them be told against him ! 1 was 
 
 impotent ; but you " 
 
 The figure of the aged Hebrew towered in the gloom, and on his 
 face was the stern ruthless justice of the Mosaic law. 
 
 *' As he dealt with us, so will I deal with him ; there is no bond 
 with traitors. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. It is just. 
 Go ! fetch the man he strove hardest to destroy. He is in Venice ; 
 bring him here." 
 
 The weaker nature of his son trembled as he touched, at last, the 
 liberty, the atonement, the avenging blow for which he had so 
 long thirsted. The slave had been a slave so long, he trembled 
 before the daring that would loose his chains. 
 
 ' ' But only to have shared such infamy was so vile ! I cannot 
 
 bear that he should know us its accomplices " 
 
 "Silence! What matter? We were beasts of burden; we 
 carried what loads our master laid on us, — dead men or blood- 
 stained weapons. Go ; bring him quickly ! — quickly ! Do you 
 hear ? " 
 
 An ashen hue stole over the Dron2;e of his face, his lips were 
 pressed in a straight line under the flowing of his beard, his hands 
 moved with a swift impatient movement. Augostino looked up at 
 him in fear. 
 
 " Father ! wait. You are too weak." 
 
 The old man's voice rang, stem and imperious, across his own. 
 *' I shall be strong to do this ere I die. Go to him ; tell him I 
 will give him his vengeance. Go to him ; I command you — brin^ 
 him here." 
 
 The inflexible command brooked no disobedience ; it swayed his 
 listener with the old force of the Jewish parental power. Agostino 
 was once more the youth before his father's might, under his father's 
 hand. He dared dispute no longer. 
 
 The old man sat, and waited. Moments seemed hours to him ; 
 the flame of his life was burning low, he dreaded lest it should die 
 out ere it should have time to shine upon his vengeance and ligni 
 the fires that would devour his tyr&nt's fame and crumble it to 
 ashes in the sight of men. His pulse beat faintly, his heart wa.^ 
 oppressed, his limbs felt chill as ice ; but he had said that ho had 
 strength in him to do this thing ere he pcvssed awajr among tha 
 
.--. Cfiahdui. 
 
 410 
 
 vanishad crowds ; and lie sat there with his ears straining eagerly, 
 his lips braced, his whole force strung, to keep him in the powers 
 of thought and speech and memory, on which his hold was now fast 
 Blackening. ,. . 
 
 His son knelt near him; he had sent the bidding to the one 
 whom it summoned, and he crouched near like a beaten dog. For 
 the moment, ho had panted to break his bonds at any cost ; but the 
 vehemence of that impulse had its reaction ; he felt^ sick _ with 
 shame, he trembled with dread : the whip had done its invariable, 
 inevitable work ; it had made the spaniel a coward to the core. 
 Moreover, he loathed his own sins ; he held himself viler than the 
 harshest judge would ever have held him, and he feared un- 
 speakably the sight of the man who had cleaved to honour at all 
 cost, the man whom he might have saved, had he but had the 
 courage to risk a personal peril. 
 
 Where the Hebrew sat with his head bent forward, his hand 
 clenched on the wood- work near him, his quick hearing caught a 
 distant sound ; his lips moved eagerly. 
 
 " He comes ! Bring him,— bring him quickly ! Let me speak 
 while I can!" 
 
 Agostino started to his feet, and staggered out, at the imperious 
 command, — out into the gloom of the stone passages. From the 
 wild night without, Chandos entered. The storm had risen afresh, 
 the lashing of water and wind had beaten on the black sea-piles, 
 the darkness of the hot tempestuous air was impenetrable, the 
 rains were pouring down in torrents; thici^gh the tempest, heed- 
 less that his hair was drenched and that the lightning scorched his 
 eyes, he had come, with but one memory on him, with but one 
 hope, — his vengeance. 
 
 Passionate as his love was, dear as his heritage, closely as he 
 had cloven to a barren honour through barren years of bitterness, 
 he would have been capable in that instant of throwing honour 
 and heritage and love away, if by them only he could have pur- 
 chased this one thing. No life so utterly and so surely attains 
 strength, that it may not give way and fall at the last ; no hfe is 
 Ro absolutely free of baser passions, that when the slaughter-lust 
 is on it, it may not reel headlong into crime. 
 
 As he 5n*-ered, with the glow of passion upon his face, on which 
 the grief t'^at the day had borne and the light of recovered hap- 
 piness mi..i 2;Iqc\, there wars in him the beauty that the Spanish lad 
 had liken® (. i the day 3 01 his youth to the golden-haired sovereign 
 of gwria ; and as Agostino saw him, involuntarily, unconsciously, 
 ^'^ '^iiM'W himself at the feet of this man, whose wrongs he had 
 /i^iedin sih?".e through the pusillauimity of a selfish terror; he 
 -ibased Yikiu. iC there as Eastern slaves before their rulers. 
 
 *' Forg*' vo me, if you can ! I can never forgive myself. I was 
 Ilk) oni^^/ho meB a murder done, and will not raise his voice to 
 stay tbb lifted bla'le, lea it be thrust into his own throat instead. 
 I lor^ you-^'hoiioured you, —though your eyes never fell on me 
 but twio© f my boyhood ' *nd yet I never told you where the 
 asftaAsIn hi'^ ." 
 
Lex Talionis. 4a . 
 
 Cfhandos forced him upward by sheer strength ; light flashed 
 from his eyes, his lips parted with feyered eagerness, his whole 
 frame thrilled with one desire alone. 
 
 *' I see who you are ; I see what you know. If you can give me 
 vengeance, there is no guilt on earth / will not pardon you. 
 Vengeance, I say I Give me but jtjstice, and it will beggar the 
 widest vengeance that men ever took. Your father sent for me : 
 lead on, — quick ! " 
 
 The softness of his love, the bereavement of the noon, were alike 
 flung off hiTTi as though they had no place in his life ; the world 
 held nothing for him save this only, — a lifetime of wrong, left 
 unavenged so long. 
 
 Agostino looked at him in one fleeting look ; then the crouched, 
 shuddering, beaten shame came on him that had moved him when 
 in the oak-forest he had seen the hopeless melancholy of the face 
 that he had once known brilliant as the Spanish sun that had 
 shone on them when they had first met. He had lived in the 
 world, he had made fame, he had carried himself fairly before 
 men ; but he had been but a slave, and a slave's weakno^S and 
 prostration were in his nature for ever. 
 
 He gave a heart-sick, shivering sigh. 
 
 "Ah, you may pardon, but I cannot pardon myself. You have 
 known calamity and desolation ; but you have never known the 
 worst pang of all, — to be disgraced in your own eyes !" 
 
 Even in that moment the anguish of the accent readied and 
 touched his hearer. He turned and looked an instant on the face 
 that he had once seen in its boyish grace, with the hot amber light 
 of Granada upon it. 
 
 *' He who feels disgrace so keenly is on the surest road to leave it 
 behind him for ever. Now, lead on,— quick, for the sake of Heaven ! " 
 
 The wax-Hke, flexible, impressive nature of the Castilian Jew 
 was awed and stilled by the might of the avenging power he had 
 summoned. He led the way in silence,— led him into the great 
 chamber where the blind man sat, lonely and old and poor, but 
 grand as the sightless seer of Chios. 
 
 The light from above beamed on the massive bronze of his fore- 
 head and on the snow-white falling beard. His eyes strained into 
 the gloom they could not pierce ; he rose at the sound of the foot- 
 step, and stood erect as the Prophet of his own rabbinical tale, 
 when he rose to bless the Israel whom his taskmaster had bade 
 him curse. 
 
 •' Come hither," he said, briefly, and his voice gathered the force 
 of his manhood. " You craved a perilous thing, and I refused it ; 
 the lust is mine now, and I will yield you what you sought. * He 
 who rises by the sword shall perish by the sword : ' it is just. 
 You shall deal with him as by the law of Moses :— * every man 
 shall be put to death according to his sin.' Come hither and listen 
 while my Ups have still speech." 
 
 Where Chandos stood against him, his face was eager with a 
 fiery hunger, flushed and set with a mighty passion ; xiis breatli 
 caught in quick easpa 
 
422 Ckandfks, 
 
 **Bnt— your oath P" 
 
 The bond was not his, yet he remembered the sanctity of the 
 vow that had been in his path as a rock. 
 
 His slight ironic smile wavered an instant over the Jew's stem 
 mouth. 
 
 "Sir, you are thiice a madman! You guard other men's 
 honour as well as vour own, even to your own hindrance. Be at 
 ;<3st. My oath is Droken justly. It was sworn for so long as my 
 son waa saved by him. He has cursed my son ; I am released. 
 Traitors shall be slain by their own weapons. I was silent and 
 faithful whilst I believed silence and fidelity due. He has been 
 false to me ; the bond is rent by his own hand. You said anght 
 in the night that is past ; he whom I served was your enemy." 
 
 The oak-wood of the bench on which his hands were clenched 
 broke like a reed in Chandos' grasp as he heard. He had known 
 this iniquity ere yet it had been told ; but its utterance fell on him 
 like the stroke of an iron mace. His foe's life, had it been by him 
 in that one moment, had not been worth a moment's purchase ; 
 it would have been broken asunder as the strong rail was snapped 
 in his hands. 
 
 '* Tell me all," he said, briefly. 
 
 ** Sir, to tell you all the iniquity that / wrought were to speak 
 for a score of years, and I shall not live as many minutes," said 
 the Israelite, in his grave, caustic satire. ' ' ' When thou cuttest 
 the harvest in the field, leave a sheaf for the fatherless,' said the 
 law. Well, wo kept the law so well that we sheared the last 
 wheat-ear from eveiy land m oui* reach. * No man shall take the 
 miUstones to pledge ; for he taketh a man's life to pledge,' the law 
 has written. Well, we obeyed so well that we took the millstones 
 and ground the life to powder between them. But, of all that we 
 wronged, we wronged you most. You had had mercy on him 
 when he was a debtor and wretched ; you had given him food, and 
 shelter, and comfort, and friendship, and the smile of the world ; 
 and in payment he wrung your life dry of all wealth and all peace, 
 as men wring a skin dry of wine." 
 
 He paused ; life was flickering dully and feebly in him. Chandos 
 shook with rage where he heard. 
 
 ** Do you think I have not known that f More, — more ! To be 
 told my wrongs is no vengeance." 
 
 " Patience. Your vengeance lies in them. Your enemy never 
 broke the laws of his land ; he was too wary in wisdom : he plun- 
 dered, but he plundered within the statutes. The worst felons are 
 thoae who can never be brought to the bar. He persuaded you to 
 waiite your substance ; he drew it — much of it — into his hands ; 
 but it was always you who signed your own death-warrant. I 
 have had your signatures by the hundred ; the sums they signed 
 away were cheated from you, because lies were told you of their 
 use and their purport ; but you were very careless in those matters, 
 and he was very able. There is not one of them that is foraged ; 
 they were all legal, though they were villanies." 
 
 ** Oh, God ; is he never to be reached, then P" 
 
l,ex Talionls. 413 
 
 It rang out firoxn him in a loud cry, like the cry of a drowning 
 
 man from whose hands the last plank slips. 
 
 "Patience! Havel not said you shall have your vengeance 
 and mine ? You cannot bring him to the felon's dock, but you 
 shall gibbet him in the sight of the nations ; you shall rend his 
 robes asunder ; you shall teead his crowns beneath his feet. Half 
 — nay, a tithe — of what I can tell would suffice to drive him out 
 in shame and cover his head with ignominy. The breath of his 
 Life now is to be untainted before the country that holds him a 
 chief ; lay bare his conniption, and ruin will blast him, he will fall, 
 stricken to the roots." 
 
 His breath caught, his cheek grew ashen; the strength was 
 dying in him, and the stagnant course of his blood was nigh ceasing 
 for ever ; but he had a ruthless will, he forced life back to him, and 
 his words rang clear as a herald's menace. 
 
 " Let me say the chief thing first; my breath will fail ere you 
 know one-thousandth part. Briefly, take my signet-ring, here, 
 to one of my people in Paris, — Joachim Eosso, a worker in silvers 
 — in the street where you found me. At that sign, bid him give 
 you the sealed papers he keeps for me. He knows nothing of what 
 18 in them ; but he has guarded them for me many years. He is 
 a good friend and faithful. In them you will find the record of 
 all I have no strength to tell you, — the proofs of the trade that 
 your foe and I di'ove in men's necessities. This Englishman, my 
 bondmaster, was very keen, very wise ; and when he held me by 
 my son's danger and by my own gratitude, he held me by iron 
 chains ; he knew he could trust me to sujffer anything and keep 
 silence. — But" — his sardonic smile passed over his lips — " he dealt 
 with a Jew, and the Jew could meet the fox with a fox's skills 
 He had heavily weighted me into slavery ; and while I believed 
 him true to the lad, my tongue should have been rooted out rather 
 than be made to utter one syllable against him. But a Jew's life is 
 lived only to cheat, they say ; and I outwitted even my tyrant so 
 far. I kept papers he never knew ; I compiled proofs he never 
 dreamed. Had he been true to me in his dealing with Agostino, 
 they would have been burnt by Joachim the day that I died. He 
 broke faith with me ; I turn the blade of his own knife against 
 him ; I net him in the threads of his own subtlety." 
 
 There was the sternness of the Leviticus law in the words as 
 they rolled out from the hollow chest of the sightless man where he 
 stretched his hands in imprecation. 
 
 ** As he sowed, so let him reap; as he dealt, so let him be dealt 
 with ; as he filled his unjust ephah with ill-gotten wheat, so let the 
 bread he has made thereof be like poison to consume him ! " 
 
 The fierce unflinching justice thrilled like a curse through the 
 stillness of the chamber. 
 
 Chandos' hand closed on the signet-ring; his face was veiy 
 white, and through his teeth his breathing came with a low hissing 
 sound, as though the weight of the evil of his traitor lay like lead 
 on his chest. 
 
 ** One word ;— my ruin was worked by fraud '" 
 
434 Chandos. 
 
 The Hebrew bent his head, and the red shame that had before 
 come there in the sight of Chandos flickered with momentai7 
 warmth over the bloodless olive of his cheek. 
 
 ** Sir, I duped men without a pang of conscience. I have said 1 
 ^as very evil. My work throve in my hands so well because I was 
 without one yielding or gentle thing in me. But when we duped 
 you, even I shrank. You trusted him so utterly, you were such a 
 madman in your generosity, such a fool in your lack of suspicion, 
 BO niL%-\Q in your utter weakness of carelessness and faith ! And 1 
 knew \ihat you had served him, fed him, sheltered him, — that you 
 trusted him as a brother. "When you were drawn down into qui 
 bottomless pit, even / abhorred the work ! " 
 
 ** There was fraud, thenP" 
 
 His voice was hoarse ; the syllables slowly panted out ; till the 
 life of his foe was wholly in his power, he felt as lions feel when 
 cage -bars hold them from their tormentors. 
 
 ** Fraud ? — surely ! But I doubt if the law could touch it : it 
 was deftly done. He led you on into a million extravagances ; he 
 blinded your sight ; he cheated you utterly. You set your name 
 to your friends' bills, and we bought those biUs in, and then we 
 wrung the money out of you ; you signed what you thought leases 
 and law trifles, and you signed in reality what made you our debtor 
 for enormous sums. You gave him blank cheques ; when he filled 
 them up to pay for your pictures, for your horses, for your mis- 
 tresses' jewels, he drew his own percentage on them all. You 
 gave him fatal power over your properties, and he undermined 
 them. Yet I doubt if, at this distance of time, you could aiTaign 
 him for fraud. You disputed nothing then ; you could scaro€ 
 dispute now, after the lapse of so many years. It was viler 
 work than murder; he killed you by inches; he drained your 
 blood drop by drop ; he made the earth under your feet a hollow 
 crust, and at his signal the crust broke, and you sank into the pit 
 that he had dug. But he kept within the law ; he kept within 
 the law!" 
 
 There was a world-wide sarcasm in the acrid words; he had 
 known so many criminals — great men in their nations — whose 
 crimes were never guessed, because "within the law !" 
 
 "But what matter! See here." His withered fingers grasped 
 like steel the arm of the man he had aided to rob. *' In my papers 
 you will find the whole detail of our business system. You will 
 find the list of the men we helped to ruin. You will see how he 
 stripped bare to the bone the friends whom he fed, and drove, and 
 laughed and jested with. You will see how the chief of his riches 
 was made, — how in real truth he was but a usurer, who churned 
 into wealth the needs of his associates in the world that he fooled. 
 Tell the tale to the world ; it will blast him for ever. Show how 
 the man you succoured repaid you. Let them behold the first stepa 
 by which their favourite rose to his power ; trace the vile subways 
 by which he travelled to dignity. Point to the dead, the exiled, 
 the cursed, whom he dwelt with in friendship while he drove hia 
 tarter in their shame and their want. Go and unmask him ; go 
 
Lex Talionis. 4»5 
 
 and condemn him. You will find proofs in my legacy that will 
 brand him your destroyer and theirs. Go ! though he be brought 
 into no felon's dock, you will scourge him, dishonoured for ever, 
 out of the land where he stands now a chief ! " 
 
 The deep, rich voice of the Hebrew rolled out like an organ- 
 swell ; the vitality of manhood was lent for a moment to the wasted 
 powers of age. Faithful through all ordeals to his very grave, he 
 turned in his death-hour to stamp out the traitor whom in that 
 hour he had found false to his bond. , 
 
 Chandos stood beside him, his lips parted, his eyes filled with 
 fire ; his face was dark with the passions of that bloodthirst which 
 had risen in him. ..... , 
 
 "Dishonour him! dishonour him!" he said, in his ground 
 teeth. •' If I slew him, I should be too merciful ! " 
 
 There was silence for a while in the chamber ; they who heard 
 knew the width and the depth of his vast wrong, knew that no 
 chastisement his hand should take could be too deadly. The old 
 man's white head sank, his hands trembicd where they were kmtted 
 
 " And* forget not that I wronged you equally,— that I forged the 
 steel that pierced and wove the net that bound you ! To-night 
 my soul will be requii-ed of me ; it is dark with evil, as the night 
 is dark with storm. Could it be free of your curse, I could die 
 
 Chandos stooped to him ; and his voice, though the fire of his 
 hate burned in it, was hushed and gentle with pity. 
 
 ''My curse! When you succoured what I love? When you 
 render me my vengeance ? Not equally did you wrong me ; you 
 never ate my bread, you never owned my trust. Your martyr- 
 dom may surely avail to buy your pardon both from God and 
 
 The large, slow tears of age welled into the Hebrew's sightless 
 eyes ; the hard, brave, ruthless natui'e was stricken to the core by 
 the mercy it had never pelded ; he lifted his hands feebly, and 
 rested them on the bowed head of the man whom he had wronged. 
 
 *' May the desire of thine eyes be given thee, and thine offspnng 
 reign long in the land ! May peace rest on thee for ever ! for thou 
 art just to the end,— to the end." , . ,.^ ^, .,. v v. 
 
 Purer blessing was never breathed upon his Me than this wnicn 
 his spoiler and his foe now uttered. 
 
 Then, as the darkness that had veiled his sight so long was lost 
 in the darkness of death, the old man stretched his arms outward 
 to his son, seeking what his silent unrequited love had found at 
 last only to lose for ever. ^ , , • v . u t 
 
 «* Nearer to my heart I nearer,— nearer. God cherish tnee I— 
 God pardon thee! Ah! will any love thee as I have loved; 
 Death is rest ; yet it is bitter. In the grave I cannot hear thy 
 coming, I cannot hearken for thy step ! " „ v i j 
 
 And, with his blind eyes seeking thirstily the face so well beloved, 
 on which they could not look, even to take one farewell gaze, a 
 deep-drawn sigh heaved tiie heart that had been bound under iti 
 
426 Chandos, 
 
 iron bonds of silence for so long, the weaiy limbs stretched out- 
 vard as a worn wayfarer's stretch upon a bed of rest, and, in a 
 hush of fltilliiess aa the tempest lulled, the long life of pain -fTB^ 
 ended. 
 
 CHAPTEK IX. 
 
 "KINO OVER HIMSELF." 
 
 There was a groat banquet in the City of London,— a banquet held 
 chiefly in honour of the brilliant statesman, the popular favourite, 
 who had quelled the riots of the North with so fearless a courage, 
 so admirable an address, — who was the key-stone of his party, the 
 master-mind of his cabinet, the inspirer of his colleagues, the 
 triumphant and assured possessor of that virtue of Success whic^ 
 vouches for, and which confers, all other virtues in the world's 
 sight. The gorgeous barbarism, the heavy splendour, the ill- 
 assorted costly food, the ponderous elephantine festivity, were in 
 his honour ; the seas of wine flowed for his name ; the civic dig- 
 nities were gathered for his sake; the words he spoke were 
 treasured as though they were pearls and rubies ; the great capital 
 crowned him, and would have none other than him. 
 
 These things wearied other men ; this pomp, so coarse and so 
 senseless and so repeated in their lives, sickened most whom it 
 caressed as it caressed him ; but on Trevenna it never palled. The 
 rich and racy temper in him never lost its relish for the comedy of 
 life ; and the vain-glorious pleasure of his victories was never sated 
 by the repetitions that assured him of them. The Ave Imperator 
 was always music on his ear, whatever voices shouted it ; the sense 
 of his own achievement was ever delightful to his heart, and was 
 never more fully realized than when there were about him those 
 public celebrations of it,— the feasting and cheering and toasting 
 and servile prostrating which to most statesmen are the hardest 
 and most hateful penalty of power, but in which he took an un- 
 flagging and unafi'ected pleasure with every fresh assurance of his 
 celebrity that they brought him. His part in the mighty farce was 
 played with the elastic vivacity, the genuine enjoyment, of a jovial 
 humourist ; it had no assumption in it, for it was literally incessant 
 amusement and infinite jest to him ; and the good humour, the 
 mirth, the vitality with which he came ever among the people, and 
 went thi'ough all the course of public homage and pubHc con- 
 viviality, were but the cordial expression of the temper with which 
 he met life. 
 
 To-night, at the civic dinner given in his honour, all eyes turned 
 on him, acclamations had welcomed his entrance, no distinction 
 was held sufficient for such a guest, and compliment and tribute 
 and reverential admiration were poured on him in the speeches that 
 toasted his name and quoted his acts, his fame, his ever-growing 
 strength, his master-intellect, his place in the councils and in the 
 
" King (wer Himself.*^ 4a; 
 
 Sove of the nation ; and he enjoyed with all a wit's keen relish the 
 verbiage and the hjrperbole and the cant, and enjoyed but the more 
 for them the ascendency he held, the fearless footing he had made, 
 the ambitions crowned to their apex, and the future of ambitions 
 eyen higher yet, which had come to the force of his hand, to the 
 compelling 01 his genius. Of a truth he was a great man, and ha 
 knew it ; ne had brought to his conquest such patience and such 
 qualities as only great men possess ; he was a giant whose tread 
 was ever certain, whose eyes ever saw beyond his fellows, whose 
 armour was ever bright, whose grasp was ever sure. It was 
 natural that on the breathless, pushing, toiling weaknesses of the 
 Lilliputians around him he should look with a Babelaisan laugh, 
 with a Sullan contemptuousness of unflinching and unsparing 
 victory. 
 
 The banquet ended early ; for a measure of considerable moment 
 was passing, — a measure framed and carried through two readings 
 by himself, and its thii'd reading was to take place with the present 
 night. The crowded feast had given him all the idolatry and 
 applause of the City of London, — given it with wines, and massive 
 meats, and soups, and sauces, and gold plate, and interminable 
 speeches, as is its custom in that strange antithetical relic of 
 barbarism which must gluttonously feed what it intellectually 
 admires ; and from it he went to the arena of his proudest conquest, 
 to the field in which it is so hard to keep a footing when against 
 the wi-estler is flung the stone '^ adventurer," — to the place where 
 many mediocrities pass muster, but where a combination of qualities 
 the most difficult to gain and the most rarely met in unison ca- 1 
 alone achieve and sustain a permanent and high success. K any 
 had asked him to what crown among his many crowns he attache "1 
 the proudest value, he would have answered, and answered rightly, 
 to the sway that he had mastered over the House of Coromons. 
 
 As he drove to Westminster, the carriage rolled past the statue 
 of Philip Chandos at which, going and coming fi*om the councils of 
 his country, he oftentimes glanced with the sweetness of his attain- 
 ments made sweeter by the look he cast at that colossal marble, 
 which he would banter and talk to and jeer at with that dash of 
 buffoonery which mingled with the virile sagacious force of his 
 nature as it has mingled with many a great man's acumen. 
 
 '* Ah !" he murmured to himself now, with a cigar in his teeth, 
 as he caught sight of it in the gaslight, ** the Mad Duke's been 
 shot in a brawl, they say, — in the only end fit for him. I will have 
 your Clarencieux, now. Crash shall go the old oaks, and we'll 
 smelt down the last Marquis's coronet into a hunting-cup for me 
 to diink out of ; my hounds should have their mash in it, only the 
 nation might think me insane. Is there anything you particularly 
 loved there, I wonder ? If there were, it should be flung in the 
 fire. The great hall was your beggared successor's special pride. 
 Well, we'U bum it down when I get there, — by accident on pur- 
 pose ! A flue too hot will Boon lay its glories in ashes. Tout vieni 
 d point a qui sait attendre." 
 
 All things had come to his hand, and ripened there to a marvel- 
 
42(1 (JftancCos, 
 
 lous harvest ; but even the exultation of success and the gravity ol 
 power had not charged in him the woman-like avidity of hatred, 
 the grotesque rapacity of spoliation, which he still cherished against 
 the inanimate things of gold and silver and stone and wood which 
 had been the household gods of the race he cursed. It remained 
 the single weakness in a steel-clad life. 
 
 As he entered the House, to which he had once come on sufirage, 
 and which he had made the scene of as complete a triumph as the 
 perseverance and the ability of man ever wrung from hostile for- 
 tune and hostile faction, all eyes turned eagerly on him. There 
 was the murmur of welcome and impatience ; the benches were all 
 full, at midnight, with a crowded and heated audience. His mea- 
 sure had been received with a vehement partisanship, violence in 
 opposition, violence in alliance ; and his coming was watched for at 
 once with irritation and anxiety. He made his way to his seat, 
 cool, keen, bright, — as he would have gone alike to be crowned as 
 a king or to be hanged as a scoimdrel. Moments of emergency 
 were the tonics that he loved best, the wine that gave the fullest 
 flavour of his life ; and none could have arrived to him that would 
 ever have found him unprepared,-— none save one which to-night 
 waited for him. 
 
 Other members Lad risen as he entered, but there were loud 
 imperious cries for his name ; the Commons were in one of their 
 tui-bulent tempers, when they riot like ill-broke hounds, and they 
 would have none other than the man who had learned to play upon 
 their varying moods as a skilled hand plays on an organ. He had 
 brought his measure through the tempestuous surf of two readings ; 
 it was now for him to ride it through the last breakers and pass it 
 into the haven by which it would become law. It was thought 
 strangely careless that he should be late on such a night ; but this 
 was the temper of the man, — to be daringly independent at all 
 hazards, and to take his revenge on a party that had been glad of 
 him, but that had never fairly relished his alliance, by caprices 
 which made them wait his pleasure, which kept them ever uncer- 
 tain of his intentions, and for which his popularity gave him fuU 
 and free immunity. 
 
 As he rose to speak, the winged words paused on his lips, hia 
 eyes grew fixed with a set, astonished gaze; he stood for a 
 moment silent, with his hand lying on the rail ; his glance met 
 that of Chandos. 
 
 Among the nobles and the strangers who had come down to 
 listen to the debate, he saw the form that he had once seen sense- 
 less and strengthlese on the wretched pallet in a Paris garret, 
 where he had watched the throbbing of the heart under the naked 
 breast, and had thought that he would have well loved to still it 
 for ever with an inch of steel, had not a wider torture been found 
 in letting it beat on to suffer. The burden of the years seemed 
 fallen from Chandos, and to him had retiu-ned, though saddened 
 and grave with thought, and with a melancholy that would never 
 now wholly pass away, much of the proud, sun-lightened beauty 
 of his early maniuiod. The vivid sweetness of ^^saioii waa onoe 
 
" King over Himself.** 429 
 
 more his ; the irheritance of his fathers was recovered ; the might 
 of avenging justice had been given to his hand ; above all, he was 
 an exile no more. He looked as he had looked in the days of the 
 past. 
 
 The animal thii'st to kill, of which he had spoken, had risen ; 
 his veins seemed to run fire ; there was a wild triumph in his 
 blood even while the heart- sickness at his traitor's baseness was 
 upon him. It was his to avenge, to chastise, to payback a lifelong 
 wrong, tc unmask a lifelong infamy, to hurl ms foe from the 
 purples of power and point out in the sight of the people the 
 plague-spot on the breast of the man they caressed. It was his, 
 this vengeance which would cast his traitor down, in the midst oi 
 the fulness of life, from the height of his throned successes. It 
 was his at last, this power denied oo long, which should pierce the 
 bronze of his enemy's laughing mockery and shatter to dust the 
 adamant of his invulnerable strength. It was his at last, this 
 avenging might which should reach even the brute heart that had 
 seemed of granite, caUous to feel, impenetrable to strike. And he 
 felt drunk with it as with alcohol ; he felt that its worst work 
 would never plough deep enough, never blast wide enough. 
 
 " God," he thought, " how can vengeance enough strike him ? 
 None can give me back all that he killed for ever ! ' Just to the 
 end.' He shall have justice, — the justice of the old law, — a ' life 
 for a life.*" 
 
 And, as their eyes met, the chiU of the first fear his life had ever 
 known passed over Trevenna; a vague, shapeless horror seized 
 him ; he knew that never would the disinherited have returned to 
 his forsaken land unless the doom of banishment had been taken 
 from him, unless some power of all that he had been dispossessed 
 of had recoiled back into his grasp. For the moment— one brief, 
 fleeting, uncounted second— he stood paralyzed there, the unformed 
 dread, the venomous hatred in him making him forgetful of all, 
 save the eyes that were turned on him, eyes that seemed to quote 
 against him the whole history of his life. He had no conscience, 
 he had no shame, he had never known what fear was, and he had 
 ascended to an eminence from which he would have defied the 
 force of the world to eject him ; and yet in that single instant a 
 terror scarce less keen, less ghastly, than that which an assassin would 
 feel at sight of the living form of the prey he had left for dead, 
 came on him as In the lighted assembly, in the midnight silence in 
 which his own words were awaited, he saw the face of Chandos. 
 
 It passed away almost as instantaneously as it had moved him; 
 the bold audacity, the dauntless courage, the caustic mirth, the 
 mocking triumph of his temper re-asserted themselves ; instantly, 
 ere any others had had space to note the momentary pause, and the 
 momentary paralysis which had arrested the eloquence on his lips 
 and chained his gaze to the features of the man whom he had 
 wronged, he was himself again ; he recovered the shaken balance 
 of his priceless coolness ; he looked across the long s^ace parting 
 him from his antagonist with a full, firm, laughing insolence in 
 the Bunny bravery of his blue eyes ; hJ/=» voice rolled out on the 
 
4je Chandos. 
 
 hushing murmurs and the broken whispers of the great gathering, 
 mellow, resonant, far-reaching as a clarion, clear as though each 
 syllable were told out on a silver drum. 
 
 The man he hated was before him ; the man in whom he had 
 seen incarnated all the things against which his life had been 
 arrayed, all the wrongs that he had cherished till the cockatrice 
 brood had bred a giant's vengeance ; the man whom he had hated 
 but the more, tiie more he injured him ; the man whom he best 
 loved, of any in the world, should see the eminence, the power, the 
 sovereignty which he — the adventurer, the outsider — had aspired 
 to and won. Chandos was before him, witness of his sway, 
 spectator of his triumph, hearer of his words. He swore in las 
 teeth, even in that moment when their glance first met, that 
 oratory and triumph and sway should never be so victorious aa 
 they should be to-night ; that he would fight as he had never 
 fought, that he would win as he had never won, that this chamber 
 should ring with acclamations for him as it had never yet rung 
 with them, favoured and crowned there though he was. The one 
 whom of all others in the breadth of the empires he would have 
 chosen as the beholder of his fame fronted him. To Trevenna the 
 hour was as it was to Sulla when the great desert King whom he 
 had conquered and weighted with chains, and brought from the 
 golden suns and royal freedom of his own warm land to the bath 
 of ice of the TuUianum, stood fettered to behold the ovation given 
 to the welcomed victor of the Jugurthine War. 
 
 To Trevenna it was the crown of the edifice that his own mighty 
 patience and unresting brain had raised out of the dust and ashes 
 of a banned and nameless life, when into his own arena, before his 
 own idolaters, the man in whom the whole passions of that life had 
 seen their deepest hate embodied came to behold his triumph. 
 Though he should have died for it with the dawn, he would have 
 made that night the night of his supreme success, or perished. 
 There was in him the temper which in old days made men take 
 oath to their gods to gain the battle, though they should, as its 
 price, be uast headlong to the foe. In that moment he rose beyond 
 egotism into something infinitely grander ; in that moment, how- 
 ever guilty, be was great. 
 
 And he spoke greatly. 
 
 The fire of personal hate, the weakness of personal triumph, did 
 but serve as spur and as stimulant to the genius in him. To know 
 that tiie eyes of Chandos looked on him was to lash his strength into 
 tenfold performance ; to know that Chandos heard his words was to 
 form them into tenfold eloquence. It was not only to invective, to 
 rhetoric, that he rose ; but the brilliance of thought, the closeness 
 of argument, the fineness of subtlety, the vastness of memory, were 
 beyond compare. Men who had held him a master ere this listened 
 breathless, and marvelled that even they never had known what 
 his power could be. Wit, reason, learning, raillery, wisdom, and 
 logic were pressed, turn by turn, into his service, and used with 
 such oratory as had rarely rung through that chamber. He was 
 wnat he had never been ; he surpassed all that he had ever achieved; 
 
" King over Himself" 4jH 
 
 and when his last woi*ds closed, thunder on thunder of applause 
 rolled out as in the days when Sheridan bewitched or Chatham 
 awed the listening and enchanted crowds. Once his eyes flashed 
 on Chandos as the cheers reeled through the body of the House ; 
 no other caught that glance in which the victory of a lifetime was 
 expressed. 
 
 He to whom it was given saw it, and his head sank slightly ; 
 darkness gathered over his face ; the thought of his heart was bitter, 
 less in that moment for himself than of mankind. He thought, 
 " How great, to be so vile ! " 
 That night was the proudest of John Trevenna's triumphs. 
 The bill passed, carried by an overwhelming majority, which 
 secured stability to the Treasury benches and sealed the trust of 
 the nation in them. If he had been high in men's fame and favour 
 before, he was unapproached now, as on their tongues through the 
 whole of the late night his name and his genius alone were spoken. 
 For it had been genius to which he had risen, genius that had 
 given the fii-e to his words, the persuasion to his speech, the resist- 
 less force to his command, that had borne him out of himself into 
 that loftier power which makes of men as they listen the reeds that 
 sway to the wind of the magical voice, — genius that had wakened 
 in him under the consciousness of one glance that watched, of one 
 ear that heard. And for once, in its pride and its dominion, cau- 
 tion and coolness ^»htly forsook him ; his eyes glittered, his fore- 
 head was flushed, his smile laughed as one warmed with wine, as 
 he went out to the night. 
 
 As the air of the dawn blew on his face, his shoulder was grasped 
 by a hand that forced him forward. Chandos' words were spoken 
 low on his ear : — 
 
 ' ' Out yonder ! — come in peace, or I shall forget myself, and deal 
 with you before the men you fool." 
 
 Trevenna gave one swift glance upward. Though bold to the 
 core with a leonine courage, he shrank, and quailed, and sickened. 
 That one glance told him more than hours could have spoken. He 
 felt as though a knife had been plunged and plunged again into his 
 Veart, seeking the life and draining his blood. 
 
 " Lead on ! " he said, between his teeth ; " lead on, whatever you 
 want. You and I need not waste pretty words, heau sire.^^ 
 
 He felt the hand that was on his shoulder clench closer and 
 closer till it tightened like an iron clasp. In the darkness, through 
 the throngs, under the fitful glare of the gas, the pressure of that 
 hand forced him a-^ay out of the masses and the noise and the 
 tumult of the streets, d^wn into the quiet of the cloisters, where 
 the grey beauty of the Abbey rose in tiie haze of the starless mists 
 of earliest dawn. 
 
 Then, where they stood alone under the darkling pile, that clasp 
 Aoosed its hold and flung him backward as men fling snakes off their 
 wrist. Chandos faced him in the dim grey solitude ; the passions 
 that had been held in rein whilst he watched for his foe broke 
 loose as he stood alone with the man whose present held so proud 
 an eminence, whose past he had traced into such sinks o£. 7illany« 
 
431 Chandos. 
 
 whose favour was so sightless in the nation's sight, whose guilt h&d 
 been so vile to net, and pierce, and drain, and rob, and ruin him. 
 
 " YoTi have fooled your world for the last time to-night; with 
 another day it will know you as you are, — ^you usurer who traded 
 in your friends' worst needs ! " 
 
 The words cut the air like the cords of a scourge lead- weighted. 
 In that instant it was all he could do not to stamp out under his 
 feet the life before him, as men tread out an unclean beast whose 
 breath is poison. Ere the words were spoken, Trevenna had known 
 that the day of his retribution had come to him, — a day his acumen 
 had never foreseen, a day his skill had never forecast. One glance 
 had told him that his prey had changed to his accuser, that the 
 man he had exiled and beggared and reviled had come back to take 
 his vengeance. For a moment the sickness of the despair that he 
 had often dealt, and often laughed at, blinded him, and made the 
 pale shadow of the stormy dawn reel round him : the next, his 
 blood rose before peril, and his wit grew but keener in danger. He 
 planted himself firmly, with his arms folded across his chest. 
 
 *'We need not waste pretty words, but we need not use such 
 ugly ones," he said, coolly. " If you called me out to talk libel, 
 why — there are courts ir; tiphich you'll have to make it good. You 
 always were bitter about my success ; but you needn't be tragic. 
 You're savage, I suppose, because the Mad Duke's dead, and I 
 shall get my way and buy up Clarencieux for auld lang syne ! " 
 
 Chandos' hands fell once more on both his shoulders, swaying 
 him back, and holding him motionless there, as they had held the 
 frail form of the musician under the marble Crucifixion at Venice. 
 In the gloom his eyes burned down into his foe's ; his face was 
 darkly flushed and mercilessly set, as though it were cast in stone : 
 the muscles swelled like cords upon his arms and throat. He 
 could have strangled this vampire that had drained all the best life 
 of his youth ! — the worst chastisement that he could ever wreak 
 was so tardy, so tame, so vain, so ill-proportioned, beside the 
 vastness of his wrongs ! 
 
 ' * Speak one more He, and I shall kill you. Clarencieux is mine ; 
 but for your infamy, I had never lost it. Sil6:ice ! — silence, I tell 
 you, or I shall choke you like a dog ! The Jew who was your victim 
 and your tool confessed aU to me in his dying hour. Not a thing 
 in your life is hidden from me ; not a thread in your network of 
 viU.any has escaped me. You are free of the law, perhaps, — you 
 were too wise to break it in the letter ; but the world shall know 
 
 fou as I know you ; the world shaU be your judge and my avenger, 
 will give you justice, — pure justice. I will unmask you as you 
 are, and l^ave the rest to foUow. The men you mined, the friends 
 you traded iu, the usuiies that made your wealth, the frauds you 
 worked under a legal shield, the treacherous, shameless, accursed 
 trade you drove in the lives of those who trusted you and fed you 
 and sheltered you, — I shall leave my vengeance to them ; they 
 will repay it more utterly than I could now if I laid you dead, like 
 the snake you are ! " 
 Where Treyenna 8t(>*~\, his bright and fear^jess fiace grew white 
 
** King over Himself.*' 433 
 
 as a woipnn'B, a tremor shook him as the wind shakes a leaf, a oold 
 
 sweat w^z ilanli on his forehead : he answered nothing ; he was too 
 wise to di'oam of vain denial, too bold still to betray terror ; but he 
 knew that he had fallen into the power of the one living man 
 whose most merciless vengeance would be but sheer and simple 
 justice, he knew that the serpent of his unsparing hate had re- 
 coiled and fastened its venomous fangs into his own veins; he 
 knew that the antagonist who stood above him, holding him there 
 in that grasp of steel, would speak no more than he had power to 
 work out to the uttermost letter ; he knew that from that hour, at 
 Chandos' will and choice, the magnificent superstructure of his 
 proud ambitions would crumble like a toy of sand, and the bead- 
 roll of his riches and his dignities wither uke a scroll in fire under 
 the scorch of shame. The agony and desolation of a lifetime were 
 pressed into that one instant, which seemed eternity. 
 
 Yet the courage in him neither cowed nor pleaded. 
 
 *' It is easy to put lies in dead men's mouths!" he said, with 
 his old insolence ; ** and Jews have borne false witness since the 
 world began. It will take a little more than a vamped-up slander 
 to unseat me, mon beau monsieur !" 
 
 Chandos swayed him to and fro as though he were a child. The 
 voice, the glance, the presence of his enemy maddened him ; he 
 feared the work of his own passions; he felt di-unk with the 
 delirium of hate and wrong. 
 
 " Silence ! — if you care for your own life, — you traitor, who ate 
 my bread and betrayed me, who took my shelter and robbed me ! 
 The commerce you drove in men's miseries, the friends you netted 
 into your bondage, the thefts that made up your wealth, the secrets 
 yon stole to trade in, the slaves you ruled with your tyrannies, — I 
 know them ; with another day, the world will kiiow them through 
 me. Listen ! All the evil you churned into gold with that dead 
 Hebrew for your tool, all the years that you throve on that barter 
 of men's disgrace and men's fears, all the iniquities that went to 
 make up your rise into wealth, all the tortures you dealt on the 
 servant who served you so faithfully, when, to screen your own 
 crime, you sent him out in old age among felons, all the shame 
 and the sin of your past, I know, and can prove to disgrace you 
 for ever. I warn you ; I will not have 30 much likeness with you 
 as to steal on you, even in justice, like a thief in the night ; but — 
 as God lives— if the law fail to give me redress, I will so blast your 
 name thi'ough all Europe, that the foulest criminal who hides for 
 a murder shall be held to be worthier than you,— you who slew like 
 Iscariot, never knowing Iscariot's remorse. Sum up the lives you 
 destroyed ; they will be your accusers, they will be my avengers ! " 
 
 The breathless magnificence of the fiery wrath was poured out 
 on the hush of the night ; the moment in which e jery joy and 
 power he }'\6. possessed had been struck down by his enemy's hand 
 was dealt back at last, as with one blow he shivered to the dust 
 the honours, the dignities, the ambitions, the victorious and secure 
 successes of the career that had so bitterly mocked, so mercilessly 
 pursed, his own. 
 
 F F 
 
454 
 
 Chandos. 
 
 Trevenna staggered slightly, and an oath of prurient olasphemy 
 v.as crashed tlurough the locked firmness of his clenched teeth. 
 Ho saw at a glance how he had been given over to his antagonist's 
 power ; he kSiew without words how out of the multitude of his 
 unmatched successes one rope-strand had given way and dragged 
 the whole superb edifice of a life's labours with it. He never 
 denied : he was too keen to sham a guiltlessness that would have 
 availed nothing save to render him contemptible ; he never gave a 
 sign of terror : he was too bold not even in that moment to retain 
 his courage. But he laughed, — a hard, rasped, bitter laugh, that 
 sounded horribly on the silence. In that instant of supreme peril, 
 of utter desolation, the keenest pang to him was not even his own 
 extremity, his own shame, but was the restoration of the disin- 
 herited to the land of his birth and of his love ; it was stranger 
 still, though part and parcel of his nature, that the cynic humour 
 of his temper found a broad farcical mockery of himself in the ruin 
 that recoiled on him in the hour of the most splendid domination 
 his genius had ever yet attained. 
 
 He saw that the man he had wronged knew how he had wronged 
 him ; he saw that enough had been told of the ruined lives which 
 had been the stones to upbuild the stately temple of his celebrity 
 and his eminence, to drive him out for ever a dishonoured outlaw ; 
 but he laughed for all that, and his eyes, glittering like blue steel 
 through the mists, met those of Chandos without flinching. 
 
 ** Life's a see- saw; I always said so. Are you going to ride 
 atop again ? Scarcely fair ; you fooled away such lordly chances !" 
 
 *' I fooled away my faith, and gave it to a liar and a trickster, 
 who took my hand in friendship while he stabbed me in the back!" 
 
 "Damn you! I hated you; I never said I didn't. I cursed 
 you ' in your uprising and your downlying,' as the * man after 
 God's own heart' cui'sed his enemies." 
 
 " And why P How had I ever wronged you P " 
 
 ** Did you never ^ess P " 
 
 He spoke with tne snarl of a bulldog at bay ; an agony was on 
 him as intense as the worst torture he had ever dealt to others ; 
 but the firmness of his attitude never changed, and his voice, 
 though bitter as gaU, never shook. 
 
 Chandos' eyes dwelt on him with the kingly scorn with which 
 the eyes of Viriathus might have looked upon the traitor liegea 
 who sold biTT i for Eoman gold to Roman steel. 
 
 •' You ate my bread, and betrayed me; it was enough to beget 
 your hate." 
 
 Wider rebuke no words ever uttered. 
 
 Under them, for the instant of their utterance, a red flush burnt 
 in Trevenna's face, a pang of shame smote a shameless heart. 
 The memory of both went backward to that distant time when no 
 jjift had been too great for the royal largesse of the one to lavish 
 on the other, whose only coin of requital had been — treachery. 
 
 "Well, that ivas enough, — more than enough. We're all 
 iuckoos at soul, and kick out those who feed us. But my hate 
 went further back than that. I hated you when you wore a child. 
 
" King over Himself.*' 435 
 
 and I trampled out your sweetmeats in the street. 1 hated you 
 when I was an ugly young clown, and you rode with your servants 
 after you and 5^0 ar gold hair a -flying in the wind. I hated you 
 when you were a baby-aristocrat, when you were a boy-patrician. 
 I hated your laugh, and your voice, and your womanish beauty ; 
 and I swore to pull you down and get up in your place. I cursed 
 you then, as I curse you now ! " 
 
 The intense virulence that ran thi-ough the words left no doubt 
 of their veracity. 
 
 Chandos, whore he stood, gazed at him mute with amaze ; to his 
 own knowledge, he had never beheld this enemy of his whole life 
 until the days of his young manhood, when with his gold he had 
 released from a debtors' prison one who had proved the tempter 
 and destroyer of all he owned on earth. This animosity that 
 stretched out to the childish years of his bright infancy stole on 
 him like the cold, clinging, sickly coils of an asp. 
 
 "Are you a madman?" he said, under his breath. "In my 
 childhood ! — how could I wrong you then ? " 
 
 Trevenna looked at him doggedly, with a red sullen fire in his 
 blue eyes, like the angry flame in a mastiff's eyeballs. It was 
 deadly as death to him to part with that one secret, — the secret of 
 his life. 
 
 ' ' Answer me ! answer ! or, by God, I shall do worse to you ! 
 Why was it?" 
 
 " Because I was your father's bastard ! " 
 
 The reply left his lips very slowly ; to him it was as the drawing 
 of a jagged steel out of a deep festering wound. 
 
 His listener fell back as though a shot had struck him, his face 
 death-white, his eyes dilated with abhorrence. 
 
 ♦ ' Great God ! My father's ! ' ' 
 
 Trevenna laughed, — a short contemptuous laugh. 
 
 '* Ay ! why not ? You dainty gentlemen never remember your 
 illegitimate sons and brothers that are flung off to go to hell as 
 they will ; but they may crop up awkwardly in spite of you. 
 They are unowned mongrels, banned before they're born; but 
 they've the same blood in them as you have." 
 
 Chandos breathed heavily; a sickening loathing was upon 
 him. 
 
 "It is false! false as your own life! — a fraud vamped up to 
 cover your own villany. You have no bond of blood with mine ! '* 
 
 *' But for that bond of blood, you would have been free fi'om 
 me. I have as much of your ancestry in me as you have." 
 
 l^e' words were dogged, but they bore truth with them. Chan- 
 dos lifted his arm with an involuntary gesture to silence with a 
 blow the lips that claimed kinship with him. 
 
 " You hound ! you dare to say that Philip Chandos " 
 
 " Was my father just as much as he was yours. Curse him and 
 his memory both ! Pshaw ! You can strike me if you like ; 1 
 only say the truth. Look here. I loved my mother ; I never 
 loved anything else; — even mongrels love their dams, you know I 
 <— wid ene was one of your father's mistres^^s. Ho paid her oil 
 
43 <5 Chandos. 
 
 when he married a Duke's daughter, — paid handsomely, that 1 
 don't deny, but she neither forgot nor forgave, and she trained me 
 to avenge hei. She used to take and show me you in all your 
 grace and your luxury, and she would say in my ear, * There is 
 your father's heir : when you are both men, make him change 
 
 E laces with you.' I was taught to hate and destroy you, as other 
 oys are taught their prayers. I did it thoroughly, I fancy. I 'd 
 vengeance for a foster-nurse, and sucked hate as Caligula sucked 
 blood : both Caligula and I took to the milk kindly ! I had as 
 much of the famous * Clarencieux race' in me as you had ; and you 
 had all the gifts of the gods, while I was a nameless cross-breed cur, 
 only bred to be kicked to the streets. You won the chariot-race, 
 while the people shouted, * A patrician !' — /was sent out to wrestle 
 with the base-born in the Eing of Cynosarges. Well, I swore with 
 Themistocles to drag in the Eupatrid to wi'estle with the Bastard, 
 and teach him that the Bastard could throw him. Don't you know 
 •WW why I hated you ?" 
 
 Chandos stood silent, livid, breathless ; this endless hate borne 
 io him from his birth up seemed to press on him with a weight like 
 granite ; this kinship claimed to him by the traitor, whose guilt he 
 would have compassed heaven and earth to have exposed and have 
 arraigned, revolted him with a loathing horror. 
 
 "Why? — why?" he echoed, mechanically. "No! — you are 
 only viler than I knew before. What wrong had I ever wrought 
 you?" 
 
 * ' How had Abel wronged Cain ? By having the favour of e&rth 
 and heaven!" said Trevenna between his teeth, that were still 
 tight- shut. ** I hated you because I was not as you were. Every 
 good you did me, every gift you gave me, every liberality that 
 marked you the noble and I the adventurer, — you the patron and 
 I the debtor, — only made me hate you the more, only made me 
 swear the more to tempt and hunt and drag you down, and see your 
 pride in the dust, and your heritage given to the spoilers, my 
 brilliant, careless, kingly hrot?i€r !" 
 
 The word hissed through the stillness of the dawn with the lust 
 of a Cain centred in it. If a word could have slain, that word 
 should have slaughtered. 
 
 Chandos shivered as he heard it, — such a shiver as will pass 
 through the bravest blood wheix the gleam of an assassin's knife 
 flashes out through the gloom. The bond that his vilest foe 
 claimed to him seemed to taint and shame him with its own 
 pollution. 
 
 "This cuts you hard? Come! I have some vengeance yet, 
 then. You can't break our kinship ! But — you are just; you will 
 be just to me," pursued Trevenna. "I knew that I had the 
 making of a great man in me, and I was born into the world 
 cursed beforehand as a harlot's son whom every fool could jibe at. 
 I knew that I had the brain and the strength and the power to 
 reach the highest ambitions, and I found myself clogged at the 
 starting-point with the ton-weight of bastardy. I was shut out 
 from every fair chance, because my mother had worn no jeold toy 
 
"King over Himself. '\ 437 
 
 on her finger ; my whole existence was damned, because a bat 
 sinister stretched across it. The blot on my birth, as idiots call it, 
 was the devil that tempted me ; and no gifts and no good faith of 
 yours could touch me while you remained what I envied : they 
 only made me hate you the more, because now and then thej 
 burned down into what cant wiU call Conscience. I hated the 
 world ; I hated youi- order ; I hated your race and your house, and 
 all things that were yours. I swore that I would win in the teeth 
 of it all ; I swore that I would conquer, cost what it should. I was 
 guilty, you'd say ; pshaw ! what of that ? ' He who wins is the 
 saint; he who loses, the sinner.' What did I care for guilt, so 
 long as I once had success ? I proved the mettle I was made of ; J 
 carved my own fortunes ; I trod down my own shame under foot 
 so that none ever guessed it ; I vindicated my own rights against 
 all the world. I triumphed : what else mattered to me ! " 
 
 There was a certain dauntless grandeur in the words, despite all 
 the shameless hardihood, the brutalized idolatry of self, that ran in 
 them ; his means had been vile, but his indomitable resolve had ita 
 element of greatness, and the hour of his direst extremity could 
 not make this man a coward. There was that in the words which, 
 foul as they were to himself, touched Chandos to the same pas- 
 sionate regret for this vileness of nature that ran side by side with 
 this splendour of courage, as had moved him when he listened to 
 the genius of the traitor whose secret villanies he came to unmask 
 ai:d avenge. 
 
 '* Oh, Christ ! " he cried, involuntarily, " with so much greatness, 
 how could you sink into such utter shame ? Why have hated and 
 tortured me ? Why not have trusted me ?" 
 
 For the moment, over Trevenna's face a softer, better look 
 passed, though it died instantly. This man, whom he had wrought 
 worse work on than murderers do, knew the depths of his iniquity, 
 and yet had a noble regret for him ! 
 
 '* Why ! Don't you know what hate is, that you ask?" he 
 said, savagely. ** Oh, I don't lie to you now, because you have got 
 me at last in your power ! I would not recall one thing in the 
 past if I could. You suffered : I would suffer a hell myself to 
 know that. You have your Clarencieux back ? Well, that is 
 more bitter to me than the shame that you threaten. But you will 
 never have back the years that I ruined ! " 
 
 Chandos moved to him with a sudden impulse, as a lion moves 
 to spring, 
 
 ** Are you devil incarnate ? God ! Can you face me now and 
 think without one pang of remorse of all you robbed from me for 
 ever ? My wealth, my treasures, my lands, were as nothing ; it 
 was the years that you killed, the youth that you murdered, the 
 idiih. that you withered, that you can never restore ! I would 
 forgive you the gold that you stole, and the riches you scattered ; 
 but the life that you slew in me, — never I" 
 
 He tui-ned away ; he was sick at heart, and he could not bear 
 to look on the face of this man who had betrayed him as Judas 
 betrayed, and now claimed the kinship of blood. 
 
^^8 C/inndos, 
 
 Trevenna placed himself in liie patii. 
 
 " One word. You will take your vengeance P" 
 
 "I will have justice. You know its measure I" 
 
 "Very well! I thank you for your warning. I shall be dead 
 before the sun rises. I do not wait for disgrace while the world 
 holds an ounce of lead in it." 
 
 It was no empty menace, no stage-trick of artifice, no piece of 
 melodrame : it was a set and firm resolve. He who had counted 
 no cost all his life through to attain triumph, would not have 
 counted a death-pang to escape defeat. 
 
 Chandos' face was dark and weary beyond words, as the paleness 
 of the earljr dawn shone on it. 
 
 *' You will end a traitor's life by a suicide's death ? So be it : so 
 died Iscariot." 
 
 Trevenna said nothing either in prayer or plea ; he stood with a 
 bold, dogged determination on the features that had a few moments 
 ago flushed with victorious pride and lightened with a glow of 
 intellect. He was made of too tough a courage, too bright a 
 temper, to know a coward's fear of death ; and death to him meant 
 only annihilation, and conveyed no thought of a possible "here- 
 after." Yet, as he felt the course of the brave blood through his 
 veins, the strength of the virile life in his limbs, as he felt the 
 might and the force of his brain, and the power of his genius to 
 achieve, an anguish passing any physical pain or poltroon's terror 
 came upon him. 
 
 "To kill all that, while fools live on, and beget fools by the 
 million!" he said, ferociously, in his ground teeth. 
 
 It was the man's involuntary homage to his own intellect, his 
 irrepressible longing to save, not his body from its dissolution, but 
 his mind from its extinction. It was a sufi'ering that had its 
 dignity; it was a regret far higher and far nobler than a mere 
 regret for the loss of life. 
 
 Chandos stood silent, his face whit« and set. He thought how 
 mercilessly his foe had done his best to stamp out all intellect and 
 peace and power from his own existence, — how brutally he had 
 doomed him to perish like a dog in the years of his youth, in the 
 brilliance of his gladness. Trevenna would have but the fate him- 
 self that he had dealt with an uJispariiDg hand. It was no more 
 than justice, tardy and insufficient justice, take it at its widest. 
 "^e lifted his eyes, and turned them full upon his betrayer. 
 
 " Did you ever remember that with me V 
 
 The one reproach struck a throb that was near akin to shame 
 Irom the mailed callousness of Trevenna's conscience ; but his gaze 
 did not flinch. 
 
 "No," he said, suUenly, "I never did. I would have killed 
 yon a thousand times, if you could have died a thousand deaths, 
 Ycm are right enough ; I don't deny it. You only take blood for 
 blood.'^ 
 
 " I do not take even that. I but give you to' the world's chaa« 
 tisement, that the world may know what it harbours." 
 
 '* Call it what name you like ! Words matter nothing. You will 
 
" King (wer Himself," 439 
 
 have your vengeance, — a swift one, but a sure. See, hero, Ernest 
 Ohandos. You know what I am, what I have been. You have 
 seen how I could keep hold of one purpose through a lifetime ; you 
 have seen what eminence and what power I have gained in the 
 teeth of all arrayed against me. And you know, as we stand here 
 to-night, that I will never live for one taste of Defeat. I don't 
 complain ; I don't plead,— not I ! You are acting fairly enough. 
 Only put no disguise on it. Let us understand one another. You 
 will take your vengeance, of course, since you have got one ; but 
 you may be sure as we both live to-night that you shall only find 
 my dead body to give to the public to kick and to strip. That's 
 aU. It is good Hebrew law, — a life for a hfe. You've fair title 
 to follow it. Only, know what I mean to do ; I shall die in an 
 hour." 
 
 There was no quiver in his voice ; there was no tone of entreaty : 
 he spoke resolutely, coolly ; but to the uttermost iota he meant 
 what he said, and his own death was as sure as though he had 
 plunged a knife in his entrails. Ohandos shuddered as he heard. 
 All his life through, the web of Trevenna's subtlety had encora- 
 passed him, and it netted him now. He had a justice to do, in 
 which the rights of the world met the rights of his own vengeance ; 
 and by it he would drive out this man, who claimed the same blood 
 as his own, to a suicide's grave, by it he was made to stand and 
 to feel as a murderer ! He knew that the hour which should find 
 his traitor self- slaughtered would be but late rind meet chastise- 
 ment of a lifetime's triuia^iar/t guilt; and the burden of that 
 slaughter was flung on his hands, so that, giving to justice its coui'se 
 and its due, he was weighted with the life that through justice 
 would fall. 
 
 *' So be it !" he said, in his throat; " if you die for your crimes, 
 what is that to me ? Murderers die for theirs ; your brute hatred 
 has been viler than any murderer's single stroke." 
 
 "Perhaps so! Well, you can hang me, when I am dead, aa 
 high as Haman ; but you shall never pillory me alive. You give 
 me my death-warrant, and I dare say it's just enough ; only re- 
 member it's the blood of the man that lies yonder you shed, and 
 hut for that blood you had never had my hate or my envy. You 
 are just ; you'll be just even to me, and put so much down to the 
 credit side when you tell the world of my wickedness. Farewell ! 
 K you are to reign again at Clarencieux, tell your heir, when you 
 have one, that the Bastard of your House beat you hollow till he 
 was betrayed by a Jew's fluke, and that even when he was beaten 
 he showed himself still of your cursed race, and died — game to 
 the last." 
 
 There was not a touch of entreaty or of shrinking in the firm, 
 contemptuous words ; he laughed shortly, as he ended them, and 
 turned away. The caustic mirth, the ironic audacity of his teni- 
 per, fo\md a terrible satire in his own fall, and triumphed still in 
 the thought of how long and how proudly he had vanquished the 
 race against which he had pitted himself. 
 
 Ohandos stood motionless ; his forehead was wot with dew ; he 
 
44© Chandos. 
 
 breathed heavily in the grey twilight, out of whose mists the 
 beauty of the great pile where his father's ashes lay rose dim and 
 shadowy, and mighty as the dead it guarded. 
 
 " Just to the end." 
 
 The dying words of the Hebrew's blessing came back upon hia 
 memory. Which was justice ?— to yield up the traitor to the death 
 he merited and the obloquy he had earned, or to remember the 
 birth and the breeding that from its first hour had stained and 
 wai-pod the strong tree which without their fatal bias might have 
 grown up straight and goodly and rich in fruit ? Vengeance lay 
 in the hollow of his hand, to slajr with or to spare. With the dawn 
 this man would perish, — perish justly in late-dealt retribution for 
 a long career of g-uilt, of treachery, of base and pitiless hate. lie 
 merited a felon's death ; let him drift on to a suicide's ! 
 
 Trevenna stood a moment, in his eyes the red, angry fire of a 
 chained hound stili burning, but on his close-braced lips no tremor, 
 — all the courage, all the insolence, all the resolve that were in 
 him summoned to meet the awful chastisement that had suddenly 
 fallen upon him in the plenitude of his power and his pride. 
 
 *' Beau sire,'" he said, with that pride of intellect which in its 
 arrogance was far above vanity or egotism, " there is not one of 
 your haughty line who will beat the mongrel for power ! You and 
 your people were born crowned ; but I have won my diadem out 
 of the mud of the sewers and in the face of the whole world sot 
 against me. You have nothing so grand in all your princely 
 escutcheon as that. Pshaw ! if a dying Hebrew had not turned 
 virtuous and playedking's evidence, I'd have had my grave by Philip 
 Chandos yonder, and been even with him to my death. You have 
 a fine vengeance at last * Few men kill as much brain aa you'll 
 kill in me ! " 
 
 He motioned his right hand towards the Abbey, and turned 
 away,— to die before the dawn. The action was slight, and had no 
 supplication in it ; but it was very eloquent,— eloquent as were the 
 words in their contemptuous self -vindication, their insolence of 
 self-homage. 
 
 Chandos involuntarily made a gesture to arrest him. 
 
 "Wait!" 
 
 The word had the command of a monarch in it. His head 
 sank on his hands, his whole frame quivered; one who had 
 brotherhood with him went out to lie dead with the breaking 
 of day. 
 
 **0h, God!" he moaned, in a mortal suffering. "I cannot 
 send you to your death ; and yet " 
 
 ^d yet— his whole soul clung to the justice that would strike 
 the traitor down in his crime : half a lifetime of torture claimed its 
 meet requital. To spare this man passed his strength. 
 
 Trevenna mutely watched him without a sign of supplication, 
 but with an acrid, ruthless hate, — ^the hate of a Cain who saw 
 his brother rise from the muiderous blow that had struck him 
 to the efvrth, and deal back into big own heart the fratricidal 
 stroke. 
 
" King over Himse/f." 44J 
 
 Chandos stood with his head dropped on his chest, his breathing 
 loud and fast ; to let go his vengeance was harder than to part 
 with his own life. The wrongs of years that seemed endless in 
 their desolation bound him to it with bands of iron. Yet he knew 
 that, if he took it, his foe would die ere the sun rose, — die in his 
 guilt, cursing God and men, as he had once bidden his own 
 existence end. 
 
 There was a long, unbroken silence. 
 
 A justice higher, pui'er, loftier than the justice of revenge stirred 
 in him ; a light like the coming of the day came on his face. He 
 remained true to the vow of the days of his youth, and, though 
 men had abandoned him, he forsook not them nor their God. Ho 
 was king over himself, — sovereign over his passions. He lifted 
 his eyes and looked at his betrayer ; there was that in the gaze of 
 which Shakspeare thought when he wrote, ' ' This look of thine 
 will hurl iny soul from heaven ! " It spoke wider than words ; it 
 pierced more deeply than a death-thrust. 
 
 ** I give you your life," he said briefly; ** learn remorse in it 
 if you can ! Go, — and show to others hereafter the mercy you 
 need now." 
 
 The words fell gravely on the stillness. Over his enemy's brow 
 a red flush of shame leaped suddenly, his firm limbs trembled, he 
 shook for a moment like a reed under the condemnation which 
 alone bade him go and sin no more. Of mercy he had never 
 thought ; as he had never known it, so ho had never hoped it. It 
 pierced and beat him down as no revenge could ever have power 
 to do ; under it he suffered what he had never suffered. While 
 their lives should last, he knew that bond of pardon would be 
 held unbroken ; and for once he was vile aixl loathsome in his own 
 sight. 
 
 ''Damn you!" he said, fiercely, while his white lips trembled, 
 ** you are gi eater than I at the last ! For the fii'st time in my life 
 I wish to Gcd I had not harmed you ! " 
 
 In the savage words, as they choked in their utterance, was the 
 only pang of remorse that John Trevenna had ever known. 
 
 In the vast shadowy space of the porphyry chamber Chandoa 
 stood, with the lustre of starlight sleeping at his feet, and the 
 glories of his race made his once more. In the silence, that was 
 only broken by the dreamy distant sound of many waters, he 
 looked upon his birthright, — looked as the long-banished alone 
 look on the land for whose beauty they have been an-hungered 
 through a deadly travail, for whose mere fragrance they have been 
 athirst through the scorch and Molitude of desert wastes. 
 
 Every sigh of forest leafage came to him like a familiar voice ; 
 fcvery brealli of woodland air touched his forehead like a caress ol 
 one beloved ; the odour of ihe grasses, as the deer trod them out, 
 wsi9 sweet to him as joy ; the free fresh wind seemed bearing back 
 liis youth ; the desire of his eyes was given back to h'"^ the passion 
 
44^ Chandos. 
 
 of his heart was granted him. He gazed, and felt as though no 
 
 faze were long enough, on all for -which his sight had ached in 
 lindness through so many years of absence ; and, where he stood, 
 with the life that he loved folded in his arms and gathered to his 
 heart, his head was bowed, his lips trembled on hers, his strength 
 broke down : the sentence of severance fell off him for evermore. 
 
 Through the hush of the night a munnur like the sough of the 
 sea swelled through the silence, — the murmur of a great multitude 
 whose joy lay deep as tears. It was the welcome of a people. 
 
 The sound rose, hushed by the death which had given them back 
 their lord, through the stillness of the night, through the endless 
 aisles of forest, reaching the halls of the great race whose 
 sovereignty had returned and whose name was once more in the 
 land. 
 
 Where he stood, they saw him ; his eyes rested on them in the 
 soft shadows of the night, and his hands were stretched to them in 
 silence, — a silence that spoke beyond words, and fell in turn on 
 them, upon the vast throngs that looked upward to his face, unseen 
 so long, upon the strong men who wept as children, upon the aged 
 who were content to lay them down and die because the one they 
 loved had come to them from his exile ; and that hour repaid him 
 for his agony. 
 
 He had dealt with his enemy, and reached a mercy that the 
 world would never honour, laid down a vengeance that the world 
 would never know. No homage would ever greet his sacrifice ; 
 when death should come to him he must fall beneath the stroke 
 with that victory untold, that foe unarraigued. He would see his 
 traitor triumph, and lift up no voice to accuse him; he would 
 behold men worship their false god, and hold back his hand from 
 the righteous blow. But through bitterness he had cleaved to 
 truth, through desolation he had followed justice, and while men 
 forsook him he had remained constant to them, constant to himself. 
 He had followed the words of the Greek poet ; he had been "faith- 
 ful to the dreams of his youth," and peace was with him at the 
 end. 
 
 In the hush of the night, with the sanctity of a people's love upor 
 him, the bitterness of the past died ; the ciiicifixion of his passions 
 lost its anguish ; the serenity of a pardon hard to yield, yet godlike 
 when attained, came to him with the self-conquest he had reached, 
 and the promise of the future rose before him, — 
 
 Even aa the bow which Ood hath bent in heaven. 
 
 TUB END. 
 
 taiNTKD BY J. S. VIRTUE AND CO., LIMITED, CITY ROAD, LONDON. 
 
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 Every In?h a Soldier. 
 
 By E.H.COOPER. -Geofiory Hamilton 
 By V. C. COTES.-Two O-.rls on a Barge 
 By C. EGBERT CRADDOCK. 
 
 His Vanished Star. 
 
 By H. N. CRELLIN. 
 
 Romances of the Old Seraglio. 
 
 By MATT CRIM. 
 
 The Adventures of a Fair Rebel. 
 
 By S. R. CROCKETT and ot!ters. 
 
 Tales ot Our Coast. 
 
 By B. M 
 
 Diana Barrington. 
 
 iToper Prids. 
 
 A Family Likeness. 
 
 CROKER. 
 
 The Real Lady Hi'da. 
 Married or Single .' 
 Two Masters. 
 IntheKingdomoflCirry 
 interference. 
 A Third Person, 
 Beyond the Pale. 
 
 Pratty Miss Neville. 
 A Bird of Passage. 
 'To Let.' I Mr. Jervis, 
 Village Tales. 
 
 By W. CY PLES. -Hearts of Gold. 
 By ALPHONSE DAUDET. 
 
 The Evangelist ; or, Port Salvation. 
 
 By H. COLEMAN DAVIDSON. 
 
 Mr. Sadler s Daughters. 
 
 By ERASMUS DAWSON. 
 
 The Fountain of Youth. 
 
 By J. DE MILLE.— A Castle In Spain. 
 By J. LEITH DERWENT. 
 
 Our Lady of Tears. | Circes Lovers. 
 
 By DICK DONOVAN. 
 
 Tracked to Doom. I The Mysteryof Jamaica. 
 
 Man from Manchester. | Terrace. 
 The Chronicles of Michael D.anevitch. 
 The Records of Vincent Trill, 
 
 By RICHARD BOWLING. 
 
 Old Corcorans Money. 
 
 By A. CONAN DOYLE 
 
 The Firm of Qirdiestone. 
 
 By S. JEANNETTE DUNCAN. 
 
 A Daughter of To day. | Vernon s Aunt. 
 
 By A. EDWARDES.— A Plaster Saint 
 
 By Q. S. EDVVARDS.-Snazellepariila. 
 By G. MANVILLE FENN 
 
 Commodore Junk. 
 Tlie New Mistress. 
 Witness to the Deed. 
 The Tiger Lily, 
 The White Vir 
 Black Blood. 
 Double Cunning. 
 A Bas: of Diamonds, &c. 
 A Fluttered Dovecote. 
 
 rgin. 
 
 King of the Castle 
 Master of Ceremonies. 
 Eve at the Wheel. <feo. 
 The Man with a Shadow 
 One Maid's Mischief 
 Story of Antony Grace. 
 This Man's Wife. 
 In Jeopardy. 
 
 By PERCY FITZGERALD. -Fatal Zero. 
 By R. E. FRANCILLON. 
 
 One by One. I Ropes of Sand. ' 
 
 A Dog and his Shadow. Jack Doyle's Daughter 
 A Real Queen. | 
 
 By HAROLD FREDERIC. 
 Seths Brothers Wife. | The Lawtou Girl. 
 By PAUL GAULOT.-The Red shirts. 
 By CHARLES GIBBON. 
 Robin Gray. I The Golden Shaft 
 
 Loving a Dream. The Braes of Yarrow. 
 
 Of nigh Degree. I 
 
.8 CHAtrO & WlNfeUS. P«blisher3>^n^t^Mmi^^ 
 
 Th. Fos.iger ^ ^ ioODMAN. 
 ^^gJ^&rrBA^RlNQ GOULD. 
 ***'^^'Sy CECIL GRiFFITh. 
 Goriuthla^Mar^azi^n^^^ GRUNDY. 
 T.e Day. orchis Vanig^^^^^^ 
 
 Thp Track of a Storm. | Jetsam. 
 
 TheTracKo ^^^^^^ HAMILTON. 
 
 ^^^^^^TrxHOMrrSARDY. 
 
 UudertbeG^aenwood^Tree^^^^^ 
 
 A Waif of the Plains. A Prot g. e of Jack 
 A Ward of the Goiden 
 Gate. [Springs. 
 
 A Sappho of Green 
 Col. Btarbottle'8 Client 
 Susy. I Sally Dowa 
 BeU.Ringer of Angel. .^^^ 
 
 By JULIAN HAWTHORNE. 
 
 KQuen'tir"- iKlo^nS^rsDi. 
 
 iS^iror^- I SpWr^^Stmera. 
 
 BV Sir A. HELPS.-IvandeBirou. 
 Bv L HENDERSON.— Agatha Page. 
 ^ By Q. A. HENTY. 
 Rujub the Juggler. I The Queen s Cup. 
 
 Dorothy 8 Double. 1 
 
 Bv JOHN HILL. The Common Ancestor. 
 ^ By TIGHE HOPKINS. 
 
 •Twixt Love and Duty. | Nugents of Carriconna. 
 For Freedom. I The Incomplete Adveuiurer. 
 
 Incomplete Adventurer. 
 By Mrs. HUNQERFORD 
 
 _ Protgee 
 
 Hamlin s. 
 Clarence. 
 Barker 8 Luck. 
 Devils Ford, [celsiar.' 
 The Crusade of the • Ex- 
 Three Partners. 
 
 Lady Verner's FUght. 
 The Red-House Mystery 
 The Three Graces. 
 Professor s Experiment. 
 A Point of Conscience. 
 The Coming of Chloe 
 
 Nora Creina 
 
 An Anxious Moment. 
 
 April s Lady. 
 
 Peter s Wife. 
 
 Lovice. 
 
 mine 01 unioe. ^ 
 
 By Mrs. ALFRED HUNT. 
 The Leaden Casket. I Self- Condemned. 
 That Other Person. Mrs. JuUet. 
 
 By C. 4. CUTCLIFFE HYNE. 
 Honour of Thieves. 
 
 By R. ASHE KING. 
 
 A Drawn Game. ^_ 
 
 By GEORGE LAMBERT. 
 The President of Boravia. ^ ^ . ^ r. 
 
 By EDMOND LEPELLETIER. 
 Madame Sans Gene. „ 
 
 By ADAM LI LB URN. 
 A TraKedy in Mai-ble. 
 "^ ^ By HARRY LINDSAY. 
 Rhoda Roberts. 
 
 Bv HENRY W. LUCY. -Gideon Fleyce 
 By E. LYNN LINTON 
 
 By JUSTIN H. MCCARTHY. 
 
 A London Legend. | The Royal Christopher. 
 
 By GEORGE MACDONALD. 
 Heather and Snow. lJ*^^^*^*^Vicr»iTTn 
 
 By PAUL & VICTOR MARGUERITTE 
 The Disaster ..r-Arvc 
 
 By L. T. MEADE. 
 A Soldier of Fortune. 1 The Voice of ta« 
 In an Iron Grip. Charmer. 
 
 ^^ ^'^bTlEONARD MERRICK. 
 
 ^^^^^^^^^"rtra'm^mitford , 
 
 The Gun Runner. I The King s Assegai. 
 
 By D. CHRISTIE MURHAY. 
 
 Patricia Kemball. 
 Under which Lord 7 
 ' My Love ! ' | lone 
 PaatonCarew. 
 Bowing the Wind 
 
 The Atonement of Learn 
 
 Dundas. 
 The World Well Loat. 
 The One Too Many. 
 Dulcie Everton. 
 
 With a Silken Thread. 
 
 By JUSTIN McCarthy 
 
 A Fair Saxon. 
 Linl«y Rochford. 
 Dear Lady Disdain. 
 Camiola „ , , .^ 
 Waterdale Neighbours 
 My Enemy s Daughter. 
 Miu Misanthrope. 
 
 Donna Quixote. 
 
 Maid of Athens. 
 
 The Comet of a Season. 
 
 The Dictator. 
 
 Red Diamonds. 
 
 The Riddle Ring. 
 
 The Three Disgrace!. 
 
 The Way ot the World. 
 BobMartin s Little Girl. 
 Time's Revenges. 
 A Wasted Crime. 
 In Direst Peril. 
 Mount Despair. 
 A Capful o Nails 
 Tales in Prose & Verai, 
 A Race for Million*. 
 This Little World. 
 
 A Life's' Atonement 
 
 Joseph's Coat. 
 
 Coals of Fire. 
 
 Old Blazer's Hero. 
 
 Val Strange. | Hearts. 
 
 A Model Father. 
 
 By the Gate of the Sea. 
 
 A Bit of Human Nature. 
 
 First Person Singular. 
 
 "^'"■'"BriS-URRAY a'nT fi ERMm 
 
 The BisWa' Bible. 1 Paul Jones s Alias. 
 
 OneTravell^r^Re^u^rn^.^ NISBET. 
 
 '^'^"^'^'By \V. E. NORRIS. 
 SamtAnns. ^^ q. l^Bllly Belle.. 
 
 ^^^^'^^VMrs.OLlPHANT. 
 
 The sorceress. ^^^^^^^^ 
 
 Held in Bondage. 
 Strathmore. 1 Chandos 
 Under Two Flags. 
 Idalia. (Gage. 
 
 Cecil Castlemaine s 
 Trlcotrin. | Puck. 
 Folle Farlne. 
 A Dog of Flanders. 
 Pascarel. | Signa. 
 Princess Napraxine. 
 Two Wooden Shoes. 
 
 By MARGARET A 
 Gentle and Simple. 
 
 By JAMES PAYN. 
 
 In a Winter City. 
 Friendship. 
 Moths. I Riiffins. 
 Pipistrello | Ariadua. 
 A Village Connnune. 
 Bimbi. | Wand*. 
 Frescoes. | Othmar. 
 In Maremma. 
 Byrlin. | Gmlderoy. 
 Santa Barbara. 
 Two Offenders. 
 PAUL. 
 
 Under One Roof. 
 Glow worm Tales 
 The Talk of the Town, 
 Holiday Tasks. 
 
 For Cash Only 
 The Burnt Million. 
 The Word and the Will. 
 Sunny Stories. 
 A Trying Patient. 
 A Modern Dick Whit- 
 tington. 
 
 Lost Sir Massingberd. 
 Less Black than We're 
 
 Painted. 
 A Confidential Agent. 
 A Grape from a Thorn. 
 In Peril and Privation. 
 The Mystery of Mlr- 
 By Proxy. [bridge. 
 
 The Canon's Ward. 
 Walter 8 Word. 
 High Spirits. 1 w^s ..«.•. 
 
 By WILL PAYNE. 
 Jerry the Dreamer. ^^. . ,^r».r»r» 
 
 By Mrs. CAMPBELL PRAED. 
 Outlaw and Lawmaker. I Mrs. Tregaakiaa. 
 Christina Chard. | Nulma. 
 
 By E. C. PRICE. ^, , 
 
 Valentlna. | Foreigners. | Mrs. Lancaster's Rival. 
 
 By RICHARD PRYCE. 
 Miss Maxwell's Affections. _ _ 
 
 By Mrs. J. H. RIDDELL. 
 
 Weird Stories. _ „ 
 
 By AMELIE RIVES. 
 Barbara Dering. | Menel. 
 
 By F. W. ROBINSON. 
 The Hands of Justice. I Woman in the Dark. 
 
 By HERBERT RUSSELL. 
 True Blue. 
 
CJU1 i^d^jVlNDLiS^^^^her^^^ 
 
 Tnii Piccadilly (v6) NovEi^s—coiitmued 
 By CHARLES READE. 
 
 i)_gLJid^tiH's Ldrig. torid<^ri. W.C. 
 
 Peg Wofflneton ; and 
 Chrlatie Johnstone. 
 
 Hard Cash. 
 
 Cloister & the Hearth. 
 
 Never Too Late to Mend 
 
 The Course of True 
 I.ove Never Did Kun 
 Smooth ; and Single- 
 heart andDoubleface. 
 
 Autobiographv of a 
 Thief; Jack of all 
 Trades ; A Hero and 
 a Martyr ; and The 
 Wandering Holr. 
 Griffith Gaant. 
 
 Love Me Little, Love 
 Me Long. 
 
 The Double Marriage 
 
 Foul Play. 
 
 Put Yourself in His 
 Place. 
 
 A Terrible Temptation. 
 
 A Simpleton. 
 
 A WomaJuHater. 
 
 The Jilt, vV otht-r.Stories : 
 & Good Storlen of Man 
 and other Animals. 
 
 A Perilous Secret. 
 
 Readiana ; and Bible 
 Characters. 
 
 ., .. ■ ' tJnaraciers. 
 
 By W CLARK RUSSELL. 
 
 My Shipmate Ionise. 
 Alone onWideWlde Sea. 
 The Phantom Death. 
 Is He the Man ? 
 Good Ship Mohock.' 
 The Convict Ship. 
 Heart of Oak. 
 The Tale of the Ten. 
 The Last Entry. 
 RUSSELL. 
 
 Round the Galley Fire 
 In the Middle Watch. 
 On the Fo'k sle Head. 
 A Voyaee to the Cape. 
 Book for the Hammock 
 Mysteryof 'Ocean Star' 
 The Romanes of Jenny 
 
 Harlowe. 
 Aa Ocean Tragedy. 
 
 By DORA ^^^^kzl^i.. 
 A Country hweetheart. | The Drift of Pate 
 
 By BAYLE ST. JOHN. 
 A Levantine Family. 
 
 nr V ^y ADELINE SERGEANT. 
 
 Dr. Endicott s Experiment. 
 
 ^ „ By GEORGE R. SIMS. 
 
 Once upon a Christmas Time 
 
 m,.u .^y HAWLEY SAIART. 
 
 Without Love or Licence. I The Outsider 
 The Master of Rathkelly. Beatrice & Benedick 
 Long Odds I A Racing Rubber. 
 
 By T. W. SPEIGHT. 
 
 A Minion of the Moon. 
 The Secret of Wyvern 
 Towers. 
 
 A Secret of the Sea. 
 The Grey Monk. 
 The Master of Trenance 
 The Doom of Siva. 
 
 * r„ By ALAN ST. AUBYN. 
 *i.^®T ^ Of Trinity. i In Face of the World. 
 The Junior Dean. Orchard Damerel. 
 
 Master of St Benedict's. The Tremlett Diamonds 
 To his Own Master. I Fortune's Gate. 
 By JOHN STA F FORD. -Doris and L 
 By RICCARDO STEPHENS. 
 The Cruciform Mark ^ ''":». 
 
 -.„ . By R A. STERN DALE. 
 The Afghan Knife. 
 
 ^ By R. LOUIS STEVENSON. 
 The Suicide Club. ^t^^vfi^. 
 
 Pr«„^ «*^>; BERTHA THOMAS. 
 
 Froud Maisie | The Violin-Plaver. 
 
 By ANTHONY TROLLOPE. 
 
 J^f..^^*''^*"''®*^"*- I Scarborough 8 Family. 
 Fran Frohmann. | The Land Leaeuers 
 
 L.w^?H,''*^'^'^^ES E. TROLLOPE. 
 
 Like bhips upon the I Anne Furness 
 
 n .,, * K, ^. , J Mabel's Progress. 
 «.. ^Z '^AN TURGENIEFF, &c. 
 stones from Foreign Novelists 
 
 By MARK TWAIN 
 
 1^ 
 
 Tom Sawyer, Detective. 
 Pudd nhead Wilson. 
 The Gild*d Age. 
 Prince and the Pauper. 
 Life On the Mississippi. 
 The Adventures of 
 
 Huckleberry Finn. 
 A Yankee at the Court 
 
 of King Arthur. 
 Stolen White Elephant. 
 £1.000,000 Bank-note 
 
 Mark Twain s Choice 
 
 Works. 
 Mark Twain's Library 
 
 of Humour. 
 The Innocents Abroad. 
 Roughing It ; and The 
 
 Innocents at Home. 
 A Tramp Abroad. 
 ■I'heAmerican Claimant. 
 Adventui-esTomSawyer 
 Tom Sawyer Abroad. , , „_ „...„-„„, 
 
 Mistri^sj^udit^: »^RASER=TYTLER. 
 
 B«,i.Hn *^^ SARAH TYTLER. 
 
 Thl n1 u.!!°?P5!:- iM»s Cirmichael s God 
 
 Thf S;.'*'^>l»al Ghosts. desaes. I Lady BeL. 
 
 ?hf w'f l."?^",'' ^*''^- RacnelLangtou. 
 
 The Witch-Wife. | Sapphira 
 
 ^^ ^ By ALLEN UPWARD. 
 
 The Queen against Owen I The Prince o/Balklstan 
 
 ^^ ^ By E. A. VIZETELLY. 
 
 The Scorpion : A Romance of .Spain 
 
 By FLORENCE WARDEN. 
 
 Joan, the Curate. -v ^.i. 
 
 By CY WARM AN. 
 
 The Express Messenger, 
 
 By WILLIAM WESTALL. 
 
 Vfi MflTtrtna A n -p. 
 
 A Queer Race. 
 
 Ben C ough. 
 
 The Old Factory, 
 
 Red Ryvinslon. 
 
 Ralph Norbreck's Trust, 
 
 Trust-money 
 
 Sons of Beiial. 
 
 Her Two Millions. 
 Two Pinches of Snuff. 
 Rov of Roy s Court. 
 Nigel Fortescue. 
 Birch Dene. 
 The Blind Musician. 
 Strange Crimes 
 The PLantom City. 
 
 By ATHA WESTBURY. 
 The Shadow of Bilton Fembrook 
 
 By C. J. WILLS. 
 An Easy-golnsr Fellow. 
 
 By JOHN STRANGE WINTER 
 Cavalry Life and Regimental Legends 
 A Soldier's Children. 
 
 By MARGARET WYNMAN. 
 My Flutations. 
 
 By E. ZOLA. 
 
 The Fortune of the Rougons. 
 The Abbe Mouret's Transeression 
 
 The Downfall, 
 The Dream 
 Dr. Pascal, 
 Monev. 
 Lourdes. 
 
 By 
 
 oy - 1. L.. 
 
 A Nineteenth Century Miracle 
 
 The Fat and the Thin. 
 His Excellency. 
 The Dram-Shop. 
 Rome. I Paria. 
 Fruitfulnesa. 
 
 z z. 
 
 CHEAP EDITIONS OF POPULAR NOVELS. 
 
 Post 8vo. illustrated boards, 2S. each. 
 
 By ARTEMUS WARD. 
 
 Artemns Ward Complete, 
 
 TV ^ „ ?y EDAIOND ABOUT. 
 
 The FeUah. 
 
 By HAMILTON AIDE. 
 
 Carr of Carrlyon. | Confidences. 
 
 „ ,, _By Mrs. ALEXANDER. 
 
 Maid, Wife, or Widow '/ I A Life Interest. 
 Blind Fate^ Monas Choice, 
 
 Valerie s Fate. \ By Woman s Wit, 
 
 By GRANT ALLEN. 
 
 Phlllstia, I ' Babylon 
 Strange Stories. 
 For Maimie's Sake. 
 In all Shades. 
 The Beckoning Hand. 
 The Devil's Die, 
 The Tents of Shem. 
 The Qreat Taboo. 
 
 Dumaresqs Daughter, 
 Duchess of Powyaland, 
 Blood Royal, [piece- 
 Ivan Greet's Master, 
 The Scallywag. 
 This Mortal Ooil. 
 At Market Value, 
 Under Sealed Orderi. 
 
 By E. LESTER ARNOLD. 
 
 Phra the Phoenician. 
 
 BY FRANK BARRETT. 
 
 Fettered for Life. Found Guiltv 
 
 Little Lady Linton. * '^ ■ - 
 
 Between Life <t Death, 
 
 Sin of Ol^a ZassouUch. 
 
 Folly Morrison, 
 
 Lieut, Barnabas. 
 
 Honest Davie. 
 
 A Prodigal 8 Progress. 
 
 A Recoiling Vengeance. 
 For Love and Honour 
 John Ford, Ac 
 Womiin o' Iron Bracets 
 The Hardin^ Scandal. 
 A Mjssinx Witness, 
 
 By SHELSLEY BEAUCHAAIP. 
 
 Grantley Orange. 
 
 By FREDERICK BOYLE. 
 
 Kgf£i% lOlu^niclesofNoniai.'. 
 
30 eHAfTO & WiNDUS, Publishers^ iil St. MaHm's Ldne, London, W.C. 
 
 Two-Shilling Novels — continued. 
 By Sir W. BESAN T and J. RICE. 
 
 Ready-Money Mortlboy 
 My Little Girl. 
 With Harp and Crown 
 This Son of Vulcan. 
 The Golden Butterfly. 
 The Monks of Thelema 
 
 By Oella 3 Arbour. 
 Chaplain of the Fleet. 
 The Seamy Side. 
 Ths Case of Mr. Lucraft. 
 In Trafalgar's Bay. 
 The Ten Years' Tenant. 
 
 By Sir WALTER BESANT. 
 
 All Sorts and Condi Ta<j bpll of St. Paul's. 
 
 tlons of Men 
 The Captains Room. 
 All in & Garden Fair. 
 Dorothy Foreter. 
 Uncle Jack. 
 The World Went Very 
 
 Well Then. 
 Children of Gibeon. 
 Herr Paulus. 
 For Faith and Freedom. 
 Ti Call Her Mine. 
 The Master Clansman. 
 
 fhe Holy 
 
 Armorel of Lyonesse. 
 S.Katherine s by Tower 
 Verbena Camellia Sts- 
 
 phanotis. 
 The Ivory Gate. 
 Tne Eebel Queen. 
 Beyond the Dreams of 
 
 Avarice. 
 The Revolt of Man. 
 Ill Deacon's Orders. 
 the City of Reluge. 
 
 By AMBROSE BIERCE. 
 
 In the Midst of Life. 
 
 BY BRET HARTE. 
 
 Califomian Stories 
 Gabriel Conroy. 
 Luck of Roaring Camp 
 An Heiress of Rod Dog 
 
 By ROBERT BUCHANAN 
 
 Flip. I Maruja. 
 
 A Phyllis of the Sierras. 
 A Waif of the Plains. 
 Ward of Golden Gate. 
 
 The Martyrdom of Ma- 
 deline. 
 The New Abelard. 
 The Heir of Linne. 
 Woman and the Man. 
 Rachel Dene. | Matt. 
 Lady Kilpatrick. 
 
 Shadow of the Sword 
 A Child of Nature, 
 God and the Man. 
 Love Me for Ever. 
 Foxglove Manor. 
 The Master of the Mine 
 Annan Water. 
 
 By BUCHANAN and MURRAY. 
 
 The Charlatan. 
 
 By HALL CAINE. 
 
 The Shadow of a Crime. I The Deemster. 
 A Sou of Hagar. | 
 
 By Commander CAMERON. 
 
 The Cruise of the "Black Prince.' 
 
 By HAYDEN CARRUTH 
 
 The Adventures of Jones. 
 
 By AUSTIN CLARE. 
 
 For the Love of a Lass. 
 
 By Mrs. ARCHER CLIVE. 
 
 Paul Feiroll. 
 
 Why Paul Ferroil Klllel his Wife. 
 
 By MACLAREN COBBAN. 
 The Cure of Souls. | The Red Sultan. 
 
 By C. ALLSTON COLLINS. 
 The Bar Sinister. 
 By MORT. & FRANCES COLLINS 
 
 Sweet Anne Page. 
 Transmigration. 
 From Midnight to Mid 
 
 night. 
 A Fight with Fortune. 
 
 Sweet and Twenty. 
 The Village Comedy. 
 You Play me False. 
 Blacksmith and Scholar 
 Frances. 
 
 By WILKIE COLLINS. 
 
 Armadale. | AfterDark. 
 
 No Name. 
 
 Antooina. 
 
 Basil. 
 
 Hide and Seek. 
 
 The Dead Secret. 
 
 Queen of Hearts. 
 
 Miss or Mrs. ? 
 
 The New Magdalen. 
 
 The Frozen Deep. 
 
 The Law and the Lady 
 
 The Two Destinies. 
 
 The Haunted Hotel. 
 
 A Rogue's Life. 
 
 By M. J. COLQUHOUN. 
 Every Inch a Soldier. 
 
 By DU TTON COOK. 
 Uo. I Paul Foster 8 Daughter. 
 
 My Miscellanies. 
 The Woman in White. 
 The Moonstone. 
 Man and Wife. 
 Poor Miss Finch. 
 The Fallen Leaves. 
 Jezebel's Daughter. 
 The Black Robe. 
 Heart and Science. 
 ■I Say No I' 
 The EvU Genius. 
 Little Novels. 
 Legacy of Cain, 
 Blind Love. 
 
 By C. EGBERT CRADDOCK. 
 
 The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountaona. 
 
 By AlATT CRIM. 
 The Adventures of a Fair Rebel. 
 
 By B. M. CROKER. 
 
 1 Ne\'ill 
 
 Pretty Miss Ne\'ille. 
 Eiaua Barrington. 
 •To Let.' 
 
 A Bird of Passage. 
 Proper Pride. 
 A f.ivii.ily Likeness. 
 A Tniid Per.^on. 
 
 By VV. 
 
 Hearts of Gold. 
 
 Village Tales and Jungle 
 
 Tragedies. 
 Two Masters. 
 Mr. Jervis. 
 The Real Lady Hilda. 
 Married or i^in^le ? 
 Interference. 
 CYPLES. 
 
 By ALPHONSE DAUDET. 
 
 The Evangelist; or, I'ovt Salvation. 
 
 By ERASMUS DAWSON. 
 The Fountain of Youth. 
 
 By JAMES DE MILLE. 
 A Caatle in Spain. 
 
 By J. LEITH DERWENT. 
 Our Lady of Tears. | Circe s Lovers. 
 By DICK DONOVAN. 
 
 lu tn<j Giip of the Law. 
 From Iniormation Re- 
 ceived. 
 Traclied to Doom. 
 Link by Link 
 Suspicion Aroused. 
 Dark Deeds. 
 Riddles Read. 
 
 The Mau Hunter 
 Tracked and Taken. 
 Caught at Last I 
 Wauted ! 
 V/ho Poisoned Hetty 
 
 Duncan ? 
 Man trom Manchester. 
 A Detective's Triumphs 
 The Mystery of Jamaica Terrace. 
 The Chronicles of Michael Dane\'itch. 
 
 By Mrs. ANNIE EDVVARDES. 
 A Point of Honour. | Archie Lovell. 
 
 By M. BETHAM=EDWARDS. 
 Felicia. | Kitrv. 
 
 By EDWARD EOOLESTON. 
 Rosy. 
 
 By G. MANVILLE FENN. 
 The New Mistress. I The Tiger Lilv. 
 
 Witness to the Deed. | Tlie White Virgin. 
 
 By PERCY FITZGERALD. 
 Bella Donna. I Second Mrs. Tiilotson. 
 
 Never Forgotten. Seventy - five Brooke 
 
 Polly. Street. 
 
 Fatal Zero. | The Lady of Erantome. 
 
 By P. FITZGERALD and others. 
 Strange Secrets. 
 
 By ALBANY DE FONBLANQUE. 
 Filthy Lucre. 
 
 By R. E. FRANCILLON. 
 Olympia. I Km,' or Knave'? 
 
 One by One. liomaiices of the Law. 
 
 A Real Queen. Ropea of Sand. 
 
 Queen Cophetua. I ADagaa-ihis Shadow. 
 
 By HAROLD Fi^EDERIC. 
 Seth s Brother's Wiie. | The I.awton Gul. 
 
 Prefaced by Sir BARTLE FRERE. 
 Pandurang Hari. 
 
 By EDWARD GARRETT. 
 The Capel Girls. 
 
 By GILBERT GAUL. 
 A Strange Manuscript. 
 
 By CHARLES GIBBON. 
 Robin Gray. , In Honour Bound. 
 
 Fancy Free. Flower of the Forest. 
 
 For Lack of Gold. I The Braes of Yamc w. 
 
 What will World Say ? ; The Goldeu Shalt. 
 
 lu Love and War. 
 For the King. 
 In Pastures Green. 
 Queen of the Meadow 
 A Heart's Problem. 
 The Dead Heart. 
 
 By Win lAAl GILBERT. 
 Dr. Austin 8 Guests. I The Wizard of 
 James Duke. | Mountain 
 
 By ERNEST GLANVILLE. 
 The Lost Heiress. I The Fossicker, 
 
 A Fair Colonist. 1 
 
 Of High Degree. 
 By Mead ana Stream. 
 Lovin^-; a Dream. 
 A Hard Knot. 
 Hearts De.ight. 
 Blood-Money. 
 
_jCHATTO^WlNj)^S Publisher.. ,„ 5t M. .- . 
 
 Quaker'e'oul^s'^E.S AUCDONELL. 
 Th?|'vi!^r^T"AR'NE^S. MACQUOID. 
 
 teenth Century | ^''^ ^^^^^ Republic. 
 
 RedS^prde?"^-^- ^'^•^j'NO GOULD 
 
 Corinthla^iLSS'l- QRIFFITH. 
 TheDay.s^oT.f/v?J?EVGRUNDV. 
 Brueton^-L^Ji"'^ "ABBKRTON. 
 
 under the^^USo^oJ^X^rfe"^^^^'- 
 Oarth^^ JULIAN HAWTHORNE 
 
 Ellice QuenMn. 
 
 f ortune s Fool 
 
 Miss Cadot^na. 
 
 Sebastian Strome 
 
 Dust. ^ 
 
 Ivan iflJ:' ARTHUr7i"£lPS. 
 
 Rujubthejul'^e.^- ""• "^^'^^^'• 
 
 ALeadinfU.^^'^^"ERAlAN. 
 
 2an>bratheX^^;J^«^ »'LL. 
 Treason TeloS^ '""^^ "'^'- 
 TheLov^^s^-l";^- C^SMEL H1>EY. 
 The#oL^;fi-4'^''>^QE riOOPER 
 e?-Lfc„"^NQERFOR» 
 
 Beatrix R.-vnUoluh. 
 Love— or a N.-.n^.o 
 DavidPoindf-teis Dis- 
 
 appeanni. ft. 
 The Spest/e of the 
 
 Camera. 
 
 7> 'J" ^^angiiters. 
 
 AS<,M„o,?o^„l„-.T- AlBADR. 
 ™.Ma^„.';EONARD MERRICK. 
 Touch .^.Jg:!'^'*'^ «'j>DUEMASS. 
 
 The Dead Mans Secret I ^"^P" 
 
 By D. CHRISTIE MURRAY 
 
 A Maiden an Forlorn 
 
 in Durance Vile 
 
 Marvel. 
 
 A Mental Struggle 
 
 A Modern Circe 
 
 Aprils Ladv 
 
 Peters Wife 
 
 Lady Verner,-, Flitht 
 
 The Three Grai e, ^ 
 
 TJnsatisfactorv :.o/er 
 Lady Patty. 
 Nora Creina. 
 Professor'.j Experiment 
 
 Pi^f 2^^"'^'^" Nature 
 
 Time B Revenges. 
 A Wasted Crime. 
 In Direst Peril 
 Mount DesrHr. 
 A Capful o Nails 
 
 Bv MADfc- i/tf^?.?.f ^'^'"^augiit 
 Colonial FaL^a^c'^FfctL^^s'^^"^^^- 
 
 A DrawnG^^e.'^- ^•"fV^ssi'^r'^'^- 
 'The^Wearln. of the IKL;p'^-• 
 Tr,H*^^^'^^<^'^'D LEPELLETIFJ> 
 Midarae Sans Gene "^"^ •-•''-'-u i lUK. 
 
 Th» T^ ^y JOHN LEYS. 
 The Lmdsays. ^ • ^. 
 
 ^LJ^u LVNN LINTON. 
 
 '^Dull^dlf''^"*^'^'^-- 
 r«ebel of the Fatnilv 
 Sowing the Wind, 
 i"? ?ne Too Many. 
 DulcieEvertou. 
 
 ratriciaKeniball 
 
 The World Well Lost 
 
 Lnder which Lord? 
 
 Pas ton Cftrew 
 
 ' My Love / ■ 
 
 lone. 
 
 With a Silken Thread 
 
 8.<..o„P,!fc."'^^R^ "'• LUCY. 
 
 Waterdalo Nei^hbovrs '^^T^)^\'-^'"'' 
 My Eneciv-8 ".iuchter" r-^ r^' l\"'f"^ 
 A Fair Saxon. ^ I 7u^ ^^^:\ "^ a Season 
 
 LialeyRochford. Rprt n,-^l!''°!i 
 
 A Model Father 
 •Josephs Coat 
 Coals of Fire 
 y,*^ Strange. [Hearts. 
 Old Blazer s Hero. 
 The Way of the World 
 Cynic Fortune. 
 rWTk ?,Atouement. 
 By the Gate of the Sea , 
 
 AGameof^kS^^'^V^sV^^.'^^- 
 •Ball.p,.«- HUMe'I^IJ^^V^.— 
 
 -.nf|e^--0ijNa;te. 
 
 ^^i^^i! ^^^^^ff ^ffisi- 
 
 Whiteladie?^ '^''' ^^'?"ANT. 
 
 The Primrose Path. | En^^n^''"* '^«''«s« In 
 
 Phc.J'e^sF^r^u^ne.'^^'^ERTb'REILLY. 
 
 OUIDA. 
 
 I TWO Lit. Wooden s,.oes 
 
 Bimbi. 
 I PlpistrcIIo 
 
 A Vniage commune. 
 
 Held in Bondage. 
 
 Strathmore. 
 
 Chandos. 
 
 Idalia. 
 
 Under Two Flaps 
 
 Cecil Castleniaine EGage 
 
 Tncotrin. ^ 
 
 Puck. 
 
 Folic Farine. 
 
 A Dog of Flanders 
 
 Pascarel. 
 
 Signa. 
 
 Princess Napraxine. 
 
 In a Winter City. 
 
 Fr'ipship. "TdlaK""- ^'*- 
 
 GenS'aJ]^^?,?'^'^'^ AONES PAUL. 
 
 TheMvster%L^.?e1.L^ '^^'^^ 
 
 ^ By Mrs. CAMPBEI f PDAcr. 
 
 ?^,«R'',r»ee of a station*''-^ ^^^* 
 Onf. ^ "' "J Countess A-liian 
 Ktrna^"c1ia\7'"^'^^ ,' ^- ^-Saski.s. 
 
 Othmar 
 Fresoon.?. 
 In Maremma. 
 Guilderov 
 Ruffino. ■ 
 Syrlin. 
 
 Santa Barbar.a 
 
 Two Olfi-n.Jers' 
 
 Ouidaa Wudom 
 
 and Pat.ios. 
 
32 CHATTO & WINDUS, Publishers, iii St. Martin's Lane, London, W.C. 
 
 Two-Shilling Novels — conhnned. 
 
 By E. C. PRICE. 
 Valentina. I Mrs. Lancaster sRival. 
 
 The Foreigners. | Gerald. 
 
 By RICHARD PRYCE. 
 Miss Maxwell s Affections. 
 
 By JAMES PAYN. 
 
 Bentinck's Tutor. 
 
 Murphy's Master. 
 
 A County Family. 
 
 At Her Mercy. 
 
 Cecil s Tryst. 
 
 The Clyfifards of Clyffe. 
 
 The Foster Brothers. 
 
 Found Dead. 
 
 The Best of Husbands. 
 
 Walter s Word. 
 
 Halves. 
 
 Fallen Fortunes. 
 
 Humorous Stories. 
 
 £200 Reward. 
 
 A Marine Residence. 
 
 Mirk Abbey 
 
 By Proxy. 
 
 Under One Roof. 
 
 High Spirits. 
 
 Cailyon s Year, 
 
 From Exile. 
 
 For Cash Only. 
 
 Kit. 
 
 The Canon s Ward. 
 
 The Talk of the Town, 
 Holiday Tasks. 
 A Perfect Treasure. 
 What He Cost Her. 
 A Confidential Agent. 
 Glowworm Tales. 
 The Burnt Million. 
 Sunny Stories. 
 Lost Sir Massingberd. 
 A Woman's Vengeance. 
 The Family Scapegrace. 
 Gwendoline s Harvest. 
 Like Father. Like Son. 
 Married Beneath Him. 
 Not Wooed, but Won. 
 Less Black than Were 
 
 Painted. 
 Some Private Views. 
 A Grape from a Thorn. 
 The Mystery of Mir- 
 
 bridge. 
 The Word and the Will. 
 A Prince of the Blood. 
 A Trying Patient. 
 
 By CHARLES READE. 
 
 A Terrible Temptation. 
 
 Foul Play. 
 
 The Wandering Heir. 
 
 Hard Cash. 
 
 Singleheart and Double- 
 face. 
 
 Good Stories of Man and 
 other Animals. 
 
 Peg Woffingtou. 
 
 Griffith Gaunt. 
 
 A Perilous Secret. 
 
 A Simpleton. 
 
 Readiana. 
 
 A Woman Hater. 
 
 H. RIDDELL. 
 
 I The Uninhabited House. 
 
 The Mystery in PaUce 
 I Gardens. 
 
 The Nun s Curse. 
 
 Idle Tales. 
 
 It is Never Too Late to 
 
 Mend. 
 Christie Johnstone. 
 The Double Marriage. 
 Put Yourself in His 
 
 Place 
 Love Me Little, Love 
 
 Me Long. 
 The Cloister and the 
 
 Hearth. 
 Tlie Course of True 
 
 Love. 
 The Jilt. 
 The Autobiography of 
 
 a Thief. 
 
 By Mrs. J. 
 Weird Stories. 
 Fairv Water. 
 Her Mother s Darling. 
 The Prince of Wales s 
 
 Garden Party. 
 
 By AMELIE RIVES. 
 Barbara Derine. 
 
 By F. W. ROBINSON. 
 Women are Strange. I The Woman in the Dark 
 The Hands of Justice. | 
 
 By JAMES RUNCIMAN. 
 Skippers a.nd Shellbacks. | Schools and Scholars. 
 Grace Balmaign s Sweetheart. 
 
 By VV. CLARK RUSSELL. 
 Round the Galley Fire. | An Ocean Tragedy 
 On the Fo k sle Head. 
 In the Middle Watch. 
 A Voyage to the Cape. 
 A Book for the Ham- 
 mock. 
 The Mystery of the 
 
 ' Ocean Star.' 
 The Romance of Jenny 
 
 Harlowe. 
 
 By DORA RUSSELL. 
 A Country Sweetheart. 
 
 By GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA, 
 Gaslight and Daylight. 
 
 By GEORGE R. SIMS. 
 
 My Shipmate Louise. 
 Alone onWideWide Sea. 
 Good Ship 'Mohock.' 
 The Phantom Death. 
 Is He the Man ? 
 Heart of Oak. 
 The Convict Ship. 
 The Tale of the Ten. 
 "The Las-^^ Entry. 
 
 The Ring o Bells 
 Mary Jane s Memoirs 
 Mary Jane Married. 
 Tales of To day. 
 Dramas of Life. 
 Tinkletops Crime. 
 My Two Wives. | 
 
 By ARTHUR SKETCHLEY. 
 A Match in the Dark. 
 
 Zeph. 
 
 Memoirs of a Landlady. 
 Scenes from the Show. 
 The 10 Commandments. 
 Dagonet flbroad. 
 Rogues and Vagabonds. 
 
 Back to Life. 
 
 The LoudwaterTragedy. 
 
 Burgo s Romance. 
 
 Quittance in Full. 
 
 A Husband from the Sea 
 
 By HAWLEY SMART. 
 
 Without Love or Licence. I The Plunger. 
 Beatrice and Benedick. Long Odda. 
 The Maater of RathkeUy. | 
 
 By T. W. SPEIGHT. 
 Tlie Mysteries of Heron 
 
 Dyke. 
 The Golden Hoop. 
 Hoodwinked. 
 By Devious Ways. 
 
 By ALAN ST. AUBYN. 
 A Fellow o£ Trinity. r Orchard Damerel. 
 The Junior Dean. In the Face of the World. 
 
 Master of St.Benedlct's The Tremlett Diamonds. 
 To His Own Master. | 
 
 By R. A. STERNDALE. 
 
 The Afghan ICnife. 
 
 By R. LOUIS STEVENSON. 
 
 New Arabian Nights. 
 
 By BERTHA THOMAS. 
 
 Cressida. I The Violin-Player. 
 
 Proud Maisie. | 
 
 By WALTER THORNBURY. 
 
 Tales for the Marines. | Old Stories Retold. 
 
 By T. ADOLPHUS TROLLOPE. 
 Diamond Cut Diamond. 
 
 By F. ELEANOR TROLLOPE. 
 Like Ships upon the i Anne Furness. 
 Sea. I Mabel's Progress. 
 
 By ANTHONY TROLLOPE. 
 
 The Land Leaguers. 
 The American Senator. 
 Mr. Scarboroughs 
 
 Family. 
 GoldenLion of Granpera 
 
 Frau Frohmann. 
 Marion Fay. 
 Kept in the Dark. 
 John Caldigate. 
 The Way We Live Now 
 
 By J. T. TROWBRIDGE. 
 Farnell's Folly. 
 
 By IVAN TURGENIEFF. &c. 
 Stories from Foreign Novelists. 
 
 By MARK TWAIN. 
 
 A Pleasure Trip on the 
 
 Continent. 
 The Gilded Age. 
 Huckleberry Finn. 
 MarkTwain 8 Sketches 
 Tom Sawyer. 
 A Trainii Abroad. 
 Stolen White Elephant. 
 
 By C. C. FRASER=TYTLER. 
 Mistress Judith. 
 
 By SARAH TYTLER 
 
 Life on the Irlississippi. 
 The Prince and the 
 
 Pauper. 
 A Yankee at the Court 
 
 of King Arthur. 
 The £1,000,000 Bank- 
 
 Note. 
 
 The Huguenot Fami'y. 
 The Blackball Ghosts. 
 What She Came Through 
 Beauty and the Be«st, 
 Citoyenne Jaqueline. 
 
 The Bride s Pass 
 Buried Diamonds, 
 St. Mungo s City. 
 Lady BeU. 
 Noblesse Oblige. 
 Disappeared. 
 
 By ALLEN UPWARD. 
 The Queen against Owen. | Prince of Balkistan. 
 
 ■ God Save the Queen ! ' 
 By AARON WATSON and LILLIAS 
 
 WASSERMANN. 
 The Marquis of Carabas. 
 
 By WILLIAM WESTALL. 
 Trust-Money. 
 
 By Mrs. F. H. WILLIAMSON. 
 A ChUd Widow. 
 
 By J. S. WINTER. 
 Cavalry Life. | Regimental Legends. 
 
 By H. F. WOOD. 
 The Passenger from Scotland Yard. 
 The Englishman of the Rue Cain. 
 
 By CELIA PARKER WCOLLEY. 
 Rachel Armstrong ; or. Love and Tlieoio^y. 
 
 By EDMUND YATES. 
 
 The Forlorn Hope. I Castaway. 
 
 Land at Last. I 
 
 By I. ZANGWILL. 
 
 Ghetto Trageiies. 
 
 OGDEN, SMALE AND PliTTY, LIMITED, PRINTERS, GREAT bAFFRON HILL, E.C,