■MMMWMIIMWalrWWMMMtNMWi*^^ LI. '-^ARY UHIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE [l S H M A^E % llofad t^laxujc//^ Alan/ Blizab^ (Sf^a^cldo^) BY THE AUTHOR OF "LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET," "VIXEN," "MOHAWKS" ETC ETC St8«0tiiiJcO (!POit(0ti LONDON : 61MPKIN, MAESHALL, HAMILTON, KENT & CO., UMITED. STATIONERS' HALL COURT. 1891. [4Ii rigUi rwerrecj,] MISS BRADDON'S NOVELS. Now Ready at all EooKSELLicr/j' and Bookstalls, Price 2s. Gd. each, Clotu gilt. THE AUTHOR'S AUTOGEArn EDITION OF MISS BRADDON'S NOVELS. " No one can be dull who lias a novel by Mips P.raddon In hnnd. The most tiresome jouniey is b"gtiiled, and the most wearlsouie Uliie-s lo brij^litened, by any one ol her books." "iliss Braddou Is the Qneen of the circulating libraries." The Woild. LONDON! SIMPKIN & CO., Limited, Stationers' Uall Court. Aivi at all Railway Bookstalls, Booksellers', and Libraries. ~r CONTENTS CHAP. I. ' The Harvest is Past, the Summeu is Ended 11. 'Her Teet go Down to Death' III. 'Cruel as the Grave' • • • IV. The Furnace for Gold , V. 'Sweet to the Soul, and Health to th Bones' v;. *TnE End of that Mirth is Heaviness' viL 'The Crown of Old Men' VIII. ' She Stretcheth out her Hand to the Poor' IX. ' As Snow in Summer ' ... X. 'My Soul Failed when He Spake' « XI. 'The City is Full of Violence' xn. 'Death is Come up Into our Windows' xiiL 'The Breaker has Come up Before Them' XIV. 'She is More Precious than Eubies' XV. 'As a Eoe from the Hand of the Hunter xvL 'Cau the Flag Grow "Without Water?' XVII. *A Man's Heart Deviseth his Way' . :^iii. ' Marred in the Hand of the Potter ' XIX. 'Set Mb as a Seal Upon Thine Heart' XX. 'Behold, Thou art Fair, my Love' XXL 'And it Brought Forth Wild Grapes' XXII. ' How Weak is Thine Heart ! ' xxni. 'As A Bird that Wandereth from her Nest PAGE 5 14 22 35 44 54 G4 74 84 99 113 122 13G 147 155 ICl 172 178 183 194 201 208 219 iv Contents CHAP. PAGB XXIV. 'As Messengers of Death* , , ^ , S.'U XXV. 'Scattered toward all Winds' . , , 240 XXVI. 'Their Roots shall be as Rottenneso'. . 251 XXVII. 'The Rod hath Blossomed, Pride hath Budded* 2G3 xxviii. 'Until the Day Break and the Shadows Flee' 280 XXIX. 'My Beloved is Mine, a>'D I am His' . . 293 XXX. ' Tnouan Tnou set thy Nest Among the Stars' 30G xxxL 'These are the Men that Devise Mischief' 314 XXXII. 'And the Great Man IIumbletu Himself' . 324 xxxin. 'And the Day shall bk Dark over Them' 340 xxxiv. 'The Kingdoms of Nations Gathered To- gether' 349 XXXV. 'And the Firstborn of the Pooe shall Feed' 363 XXXVI. • For, lo ! the Winter is Past ' . . , 377 xxxvii. 'Let him Drink and Forget his Poverty' , 389 xxxviiL 'Darkness for Light, and Light for Dark- ness' 396 XAXix. 'Thou dost Dwell among Scorpions' , , 401 XL. 'And a Stormy Wind shall Rend it' . , 421 XLi. 'The Morning is Come unto Thee' . , 433 X«iL * Ib the Midst of Babylon He shall Di«' , 44} ISHMAEL CHAPTER I *THE HARVEST IS PAST, THE SUMMER IS ENDED* Pen-Hoel, the old chdteau of Pen-Hocil, reared its steep roof and conical turrets in the midst of a laud of orchards, and hill- Bides, and marshy, fertile meadows populous with cattle, and narrow lanes, with here and there a cluster of old stone cottaG^os and a dingy old inn, which called itself a village. The cottag 'h were substantial and roomy, the banas and rickyards had a wealthy air. Here there was a flock of turkeys in a held, there A procestion of gray-brother geese marching along a lane. Yonder, across the salt meadows, the shallow winding stream- lets, shadowed by the gray foliage of many a willow — a broad stretch of wet sand glistened in the light, aud far away beyond the level sands glimmered the gray of a distant sea. This was Brittany ; and the house of Pen-Hoiil was one of the oldest chateaux in the province, and the man who owned it counted himself one of the best in the land. He was the descendant of a good old Breton family — a race that had never been rich, and wliich had been going downward tinancially for the last hundred years. But Raymond Caradec, of Pen-Uoiil, did not value himself by the length of his purse. The traditions of his family were to him as gold and silver are to other men. He never forgot to assert his superiority to the common herd. It seemed to him that all the honours and achievements of his race, from the days of St. Louis, had been lying by and accumu- lating at compound interest to swell his dignity. Hard for such a man as tliis to taste the flavour of dis- honour! And yet such a cup, bitter as gall, had been given to him to drink in days gone by, when the tall stalwart lad yonder, dark-haired, dark-browed, sullen, was a little chilvl. The boy looked a somewhat difficult subject to-day as he 6 Ishmael lour.gtil in a moody attitude against the gray old stone parapet, clothed with ferns, coloured with lichens, rich with the slow growth of ages. He leant with folded arms resting upon the stone, and his handsome dark eyes looking far away to that silvery light upon the sea beyond the barren waste of wet brown sands. Tar away on his right the fortress of Mont St. Michel frowned against the sky, a conical mass of granite rock and granite towers, looking like an Egyptian pyramid in the distance. Along the green valley wound the shallow, sluggish Couesnon, the stream which divides Normandy from Brittany ; and on an inland summit the white houses of Avranches flashed in the sunlight, reminding the lad yonder of a city that is set on a hill and cannot be hid. The chateau of Pen-Hoel stood upon a picturesqiTe height, a green cliff which rose abruptly from the fertile level below, and thus commanded a wide view over the pastoral country ; and away to the rocks and the sea, Tombelaine, Mont St. Michel, Cancale. That broad gravel terrace on the height was a delightful walk for a September afternoon such as this — .the air clear and mild, ^h.e eky a soft, mournful gray, touched with sunlight towards the vrcst, an odour of dead leaves and burning turf from the village in the green valley below. Between this broad terrace and the chateau there was a garden, a garden rich in such flowers as flourish abundantly in that genial climate. The nine long windows and glass door of the ground-floor, the ten windows of the upper story, looked upon this garden from the gray stone front of the chateau. At each end of the building there was a Norman tower with a conical roof, and in the middle of the fa9ade over the glass doorway there was a cupola surmounted by a gilded vane. Under the cupola hung the big bell of Pen-Hoel — a bell that had sounded many a call to arms in days gone by, but which now rang only for breakfast and dinner. In days gone by — days of adventure, danger, honour, fame. But the days upon which Raymond Caradec brooded with sad and bitter memory this afternoon as he paced slowly up and down the terrace were days of trouble and vexation, pain, grief, shame, dishonour — days which he would fain have for- gotten, which he might have forgotten, perhaps, had not the presence of this overgrown, idle, sullen youth of eighteen for ever reminded him of that miserable period of his life. Monsieur Caradec had been married twice. His second wife was in the salon yonder, a pretty, fragile-looking young woman, sitting at an open window reading a novel, and looking up every now and then to talk to her two children, who were playing together one minute, squabbling or fighting the next, ' The Harvest is Past, the Simimer is Ended ' 7 now rushing out upon the terrace, now running back into the salon. His second wife was pretty, fair-haired, delicate, somewhat insignificant in face and Hgure. His first wife was superbly handsome— a Judith, a Cleopatra, a queen among women — tall, moulded like a statue, every line and curve perfection ; eyes of darkest lustre, raven hair, classic profile, peerless complexion. She had all these charms of face and figure, but she was unfor- tunately the possessor of a diabolical temper ; and after leading her husband a life of unspeakable torment for three years, she ran away from him with his treacherous friend and her lover just as Caradec of Pen-Hoel began to flatter himself that he had got the mastery of that j^assionate nature, that he had schooled the wildling to endure restraint and domesticity. Guilt soon learns to lie. Coralie d'Estrange was all candour and innocence when she was given to Monsieur Caradec— a girl fresh from the galling restraints of an enclosed convent, glad to mai-ry anybody who would give her liberty of speech and action, fine clothes, and a little gaiety ; but, educated by her seducer, the frank and too-outspoken girl became the sullen, crafty woman, cunning enough to hoodwink even keen>eyed liaymond Caradec. Thus it was that, although there had been much bitterness between husband and wife, and although Raymond knew that his wife hated him, her flight with his false friend was a thunderclap. He had believed in his friend's honour in the abstract, and the seducer had played so deep a game, had so steeped himself in hypocrisy, and had so coloured his every word and every act with falsehood, that he had appeared to the husband as that one man whom his wife most detested. There had not been a flaw in the acting of their comedy. And one fine morning they vanished, slipped quietly away in the broad noon, carrying the three-year-old boy with them. Before Raymond knew that this triple disappearance, which might mean an accident by land or sea, really meant an elopement, Lucien Rochefort and his mistress had sailed for the Isle of Bourbon, where the traitor had an estate. At this distance the lovers may possibly have considered themselves beyond the reach of Raymond Caradec's vengeance. If so, they poorly understood the master of Pen-Hoel. He followed them to their voluptuous retreat in the Indian Ocean, their fairy palace in a land of volcanoes — a white- walled villa, with its back against the mountains, and its feet in the sea. He followed them there as he would have followed them to the farthest confines of earth. "Within an hour of landing he challenged his false friend, met him next morning at B'lnrise, 8 Ishmael and ran him througli the heart in a romantic dell on the shord of that tropical ocean. He left the island by the next steamer with the traitor's blood hardly dry upon his sword, and he left his wife and son without ever having seen the face of either, or made a single inquiry as to their circumstances. It was only when the island was a vanishing speck upon the horizon line — a spot of darkness on the blue of the ocean, which might be earth or cloud— that Eaymond Caradec remembered the existence of the child, and that, in so leaving the island, he was leaving the boy in his mother's keeping, and leaving him to all the chances of evil naturally involved in such companionship; but even this consideration did not soften him, ' She chose to steal him from me,' he said to himself, with a scornful shru^ of his shoulders. ' Let her keep the viper she hatched. Wliat should I have to do with him ] ' He included the unoffending child in his savage hatred of the woman who had deceived him. She was pure and innocent when she bore him that only child ; but there had been no love between them even in those early days, and he had never loved the boy. Six months after the child's birth Eochefort returned from the Isle of Bourbon, where he had been summoned to his father's death-bed soon after leaving college, and where he had lived for some years. He appeared unexpectedly one day at Pen- Hoel, was welcomed warmly by its master ; and in the com- panionship of his old college friend Raymond found a resource against the gloom and dreariness of a loveless home. He talked of his wife's faults freely to his friend, made him arbiter in their disputes ; and he was secure in the belief that the two hated each other. And now love and friendship had both proved false, and the man who had been to him as a brother was lying in his early grave on yonder tropical shore, and the woman who had been his wife was an outcast. What was the after-life of the woman and the child so for- saken by their natural protector, so given over to evil destiny — a prey for the gods 1 Yonder dark-browed boy, Sebastien, could tell what that life was like if he cared to unlock those firm lips of his to tell the story of immerited sorrow, unmerited shame. Madame Caradec did not remain long in the Isle of Bourbon after her lovei-'s death. Sebastien had only the faintest, dimmest memories of that volcanic island— a vision of lofty mountain-peaks, snowclad and dazzling ; a fertile shore, fruits, flowers such as he never saw in his older years ; a blue, bright sea, and curious black faces, friendly and smiling, with flashing teeth and strange rolling eyes. It was all as a dream. Such things had been a part of his life, and he a part of them, The Harvest is Past, the Summef is Ended* 9 enjoying the sea and the flowers and the hot blue sky with a kind of half-conscious, sensuous existence, like the life of any other young animal rolling upon the sunlit sands. Then came a long experience of a ship — storms and fine weather, rain and sunshine. He remembered that part of his life vividly. The sailors, and how good they were to him ; and how he loved a certain three — two blacks and a white — who were his special friends and protectors. His mother ? "Well, he hardly knew of her as his mother in those days — had never been taught to call her by that name. He knew that there was a handsome lady on board, who wore fine gowns and sparkling rings, and who lolled all day in a low chair on deck, under an umbrella, fanning herself, and talking to a gentleman who was always smoking. The lady spoke to Stibastien sometimes, the gentleman never. The lady's French maid looked after Sebastien : dressed and undressed him, put him to bed in a berth on the top of her own — a funny little berth, with a round scuttle port staring in at it like a giant's eye — an eye that watched him sleeping or waking, and of which he felt sometimes a strange, indescribable fear, as if it were alive and a thing of evil. The ship was a steamer. A horrible monster in a black and fiery pit — a monster with gigantic arms and legs of shining steel, a living thing that throbbed and plunged by day and night — drove the great ship through the water, and very nearly drove Sebastien out of his mind when he tried to understand what the great fiery thing was and what it did. Even in those days he had a passionate yearning for all kinds of knowledge, to understand the meaning of all things : why the stars shone and what they were ; why the waves rolled and rose in this way or that, and the nature of that strange white light which gleamed and flashed upon the ever-moving waters ; where the world ended, and where dead people went. He questioned the sailors upon all these subjects ; and his favourite Blackie, who had a vivid imagination, answered him very fully out of his own African inner consciousness, enriched by the superstitions and traditions of his race ; so that, when he landed at Havre at four years old, Sebastien Caradec was steeped in Malagasy folk-lore, and knew very little else. His next memories were of a house among trees and flowers —not such trees or such flowers as he had known yonder, by the Indian Ocean. Everything here was on a smaller scale and of a less lavish loveliness. The house was small, but it was full of prettiness and bright colour. The garden was only a lawn, with a bank of flowers and a belt of foliage surrounding it, and a fountain in a marble basin in the middle of the grass ; it was 10 Ishmacl eo small that Subastien liad explored its innermost recesses in ten minutes, and had to begin again and go on beginning again all day long, since his sole amusement was to be found in this garden; save on those rare occasions when Lisette,the maid, took him for a long walk in the big, wonderful city a little way oif — a city of streets that had no end, of houses that seemed to reach to the skies — horses, carriages, fountains, endless shojDS, number- less peofjle, a perpetual trampling to and fro, and the sound of trumpets and drums, a bright vision of helmets and prancing steeds, or a little troop of foot soldiers marching by, with a giant in front, swinging a gilded staff, and strange-looking men in white leather aprons, marching two and two. Then came the splendour of carriages flashing past, carriages drawn by four horses. The Citizen King was ruler in that old-fashioned Paris, and Prince Louis Napoleon was still beating the j-iavements of West-end London, and hatching the policy of the future — dreaming of a new Paiis, in which he should be master, a Paris all beauty and luxury, vivid, glorious as the crystalline city of the Apocalypse. Who shall say how glorious were the dreams behind that inscrutable brow, which had faced failure and defeat, a father's stigma, the world's contempt, prison and exile, and which still pressed steadily forward to the goal ? The handsome lady who had been on boai'd the ship sat among the flowers iit the verandah, and fanned herself, and talked to the gentleman who smoked, just as she had done on the deck of the steamer. He was a stoutish man, very dark, with blue-black hair, and black, almond-shaped eyes ; and Sebastien hated him without knowing why. The man was never absolutely unkind to the boy. He only ignored him. The woman was sometimes kind, sometimes cruel. She would play with the child, and caress him passionately in the morning, and fling him from her in the evening, in a bluest of anger, for which he had given her no cause. Lisette said Madame was a good soul, but was not always herself. Sdbastien wondered what it was to be not oneself, and why this mother of his changed so curiously— soft and fair, and gentle and caressing in the morning ; red and angry, with eyes that flashed fire, at night. She went out very often in her carriage with the dark gentleman ; after midday it was more usual for her to be out of doors than at home. She went to races, to drive in the Bois, to dine at a fashionable restaurant, and almost every evening to the opera or theatre. Her toilet was a solemn business, which occupied her and Lisette for an hour and a half at a stretch ; and then she came downstairs rustling in silk or satin, with an Indian shawl upon her shoulders, a plume of feathers * The Harvest is Past, the Summer is Ended * 11 in her bonnet. Everytliing about her was ricli and beautiful. The sheen of satin, the glow of colour, caught the child's eye and fascinated him. ' Mamma, how pretty you are ! ' he cried one day ; and then she caught him up in her arms and kissed him, and called him her little angel, and took him out to look at her horses, the beautiful golden bays, nodding their thoroughbred heads in glittering bright harness, champing their bits. Sdbastien had often patted the horses and admired the carriage, but he had never ridden in it, had never sat by his mother's side upon those brocaded cushions. One day he asked her to take him with her, pleaded to her piteously as little children plead for trifles — as if this one thing were a matter of Kfe or death. The dark man was standing by, and she turned to him with an entreating look — looked at him as a slave looks at her master. ' May not I take him ? ' she asked. ' Why shouldn't 1 1 ' ' Why shouldn't you ? Because I did not buy that carriage for another man's brat to sit in. Take that little howler indoors, Jean' (to the servant), 'and strangle him if he doesn't hold his tongue. You ought to have left him in Bombon with his darkeys, as I advised you. He would have done very well there, and he is in everybody's way here.' In everybody's way. That was a hard saying, and although Sebastien was not quite seven years old when he heard it, the full meaning of the speech went home. He never asked to go in his mother's carriacre after that unforgotten day. He never again went into the portico when she was going to her cariiage ; never loitered in front of the steps to pat the horses' satin coats, to look into their full, brown eyes— brown under a violet film, large kind eyes which he had loved to contemplate. He shrank away from that pompous equipage and the smart livery servants as fiom an unholy tbing. The men had a way of grinning, of muttering confidences to each other, which he hated. Lisette was the only person in the house whom he liked, and the time was fast coming when he should cease to trust even her. It seemed to him that he had been living for summers and wintei-s innumerable in that house in the Bois de Boulogne. The geraniums, and verbenas, and heliotropes, and calceolarias, a mass of scarlet, and purple, and gold, being renewed again and again ; the leaves falling and returning again ; and yet he was not nine years old. Days so idle and empty, a life so mono- tonous, seemed endless. He was nearly nine years old, and he was only an idle little vagabond in fine clothes. He could hardly read, although Lisette pretended to teach him — and 12 lahmael Lisette was eiipposed to be a superior person, quite above the average lady's-maid. But in a house where the mistress lived only for dress and pleasure, and had, moreover, a certain failing which was only spoken of in whispers— that terrible failing of being sometimes just a little ' out of herself' — it was not to be supposed that the maid would be orderly or indus- trious. Lisette dressed like a woman of fashion in Madame Caradec's cast-off clothes, and her favourite occupation was to stroll in the Bois, or to roam the streets of Paris under the excuse of giving the boy an airing. S6bastien had many such airings, and grew to hate the streets of Paris, where Lisette indulged all the instincts of the true fidneur, looking into print-shops, jewellers', booksellers', milliners' ; looking on at street row^ listening to street music, reading the bills of the theatres. The house in the Bois was the kind of house which agents always call a hijou house, and was much better worthy that qualification than many houses so called. It had been built by a famous opera-singer in the zenith of her career, and sold by her in her decline. It was a thing of beauty in the genre Louis Quatorze, for people had not then discovered that your only true loveliness lies in the genre Louis Seize. It was a small house, on two floors ; the rooms panelled in white and gold ; ceilings and doors painted with Cupids and rose garlands ; looking-glasses wherever they could be introduced ; gilding everywhere ; sofas and chairs andportihes of Gobelins tapestry. The rooms on the upper floor all opened out of a spacious central landing, lighted from the top ; the staircase descended in a circular sweep from this gallery, and every sound on the floor below travelled vipward through this wide opening, and was distinctly heard upon that upper story where Scbastieu slept in a little room next to Lisette's bed-chamber. Thus it happened that he was startled from his sleep one night by the sound of voices below — loud, angry, menacing ; and then cam-e a peal of bitter laughter, and then a woman's shriek. He leapt from his little bed, and rushed to the gallery, and looked over the gilded balustrade. There was no one in the hall below, where the lamp shed a soft light tempered by ruby glass — a light that tinged the marble pave- ment and the white bear-skin rug at the foot of the stairs with roseate gleams. The hall was empty, but those angry voices were still sounding in the drawing-room. ' Why did I ever trust my life with such a brute 1 What could I see in you to like ? ' 'You saw plenty of money : that is what you like !' 'The Harvest is Fast, the Summer is Elided' 13 'The meanness— to remind — obligations — insufferable vul- garity ! ' The words came in gasps like javelins hurled in the face ii a foe. ' You are insatiable — a bottomless pit for money I ' * A gambler — a profligate ! ' * You di'ink like a fish ! ' * Drink — oh, execrable liar — drink t Not an hour, not a day, will I live under sucli insults. Here, and here, and here — take them back— every one ! Take your diamonds ! Do you suppose I vahie such dirt from a man capable V And then came a burst of hysterical sobbing, a muttered oath in the man's bass voice, a door flung open below, a stag- gering, uncertain rush up the stairs, the swirl and rustle of a woman's satin gown, a figure lurching against Sebastien as he clung to the balustrade, pushing past the poor little trembler, unconscious of that childish presence. ' Adieu 1 ' called the bass voice from below ; * remember, when / say adieu, it means for ever.' There was no reply from above. The swaying, tottering figure had vanished through the open door of Madame's bed- chamber. Stifled sobs, angry mutterings sounded faintly from within ; but there was no reply to that voice below. ' Very well, then, it is adieu,' said the voice, and then came the sound of footsteps crossing the hall. The heavy outer door was opened and slammed to again with a reverberation that sounded like the closing of a chapter in a life-history. CHAPTER II *UER FEET GO DOWN TO DEATH* "WnEN that outer door sliut with its sonorous clang, Sdbastien had a feeling as of freedom and safety suddenly recovered. The dark man was gone. Those sinister eyes, which had so often con- templated him with a moody look, were on the outside of the house. While the man was inside, the boy had lived in ever-j)resent dread of him and of that darkling look. He was gone now, and the manner of his departure meant that he was gone for ever. Sdbastien crept through the half-open door into his mother's bedroom, a little white figure in a nightgown. He crept across the thick Aubusson carpet, and squatted down on the edge of the estrade iipon which his mother's bed stood — a regal bed, tall, splendid, draped with amber satin and heavy old Flanders lace. How beautiful the room was in the soft light of the shaded lamp ! Sebastien had never entered it till to-night. Among the mysteries and secrets of that house this room had been the most mysterious. Sebastien had never dared to cross the threshold of that door. He had seen his mother emerge, radiant and beautiful, like a goddess from a temple ; but the temple was not for his feet to enter, and the boy — petted in one hour, thrust angrily aside in the next — had lost all the natural audacity of childhood. But to-night his mother was in trouble, and he wanted to comfort her if he could. He clambered upon the bed, and put his arms round her, and kissed her wet cheek. She murmured some broken words, and then dropped into a heavy sleep, dis- turbed now and again by a groan or a little cry as of pain. The boy slipped gently from her side, and sat on the estrade, with his head leaning against the bed, and looked wonderingly round the room. Yes, it was very beautiful : a room modelled upon that old stately pattern of Versailles in the days of the great king ; a miniature reproduction of that room in which the mighty Louis lay dying, with Madame de Maintenon and all his courtieia watching the la-st flicker of that expiring light. Dressing- tabl^ with scattered trinkets amidst a litter of ivory brushes, silvei hand-mirror, cut-crystal bottles, fans, jewel-caskets, sachets wardrobe with doors of marqueterie and ormolu, one door half o}>en and revealing the heaped-up satins and cashmeres on the shelves within. Everything was costly and more or less artistic, and the mistress of all this 'mery lay Ihcre like a log, sleeping off the fumes of wine. 'Her Feet go down to Death* 15 The days that followed that night were the happiest days of Scbastieu's childhood. His mother and Lisette went off to the sea next morning, carrying the boy with them. It was August, and divine weather. They stayed at Dieppe, at an hotel facing the sea, and sat upon the beach half the day, and drove about the country the other half, and dined together in a pretty little room with a balcony overlooking the sea ; and after dinner Sebastien went to bed and slept soundly, steeped in fresh air and sunjhine, and the bliss of fancjing himself beloved by his mother ; while Madame Caradec and Lisette went to the casino, where the lady gambled and the maid looked on. These halcyon days lasted for about a fortnight, by the end of which time Madame Caradec had spent or lost all her money. She went back to Paris, expecting to find her lover subjugated by this hard treatment, unable to endure life without her, and ready to grovel at her feet for pardon. Instead of this state of things, she found an auctioneei-'s bill posted against the walls of her bijou villa. Minions of the law were in possession of the splendours that had been nominally hers. The door of the fairy palace in the wood was shut against her for evermore. The blow was sharp, and went home. Still in the zenith of her charms Madame Caradec had believed until this moment that her power over her slave was limitless. From the day of her arrival at Bourbon, beautiful, triumphant, happy in her escape from a husband she hated, and in her union with a lover she adored, Laurent Deschanel, the rich creole, had been her devoted admirer. He had followed her like her shadow, had endured all the arrows of an insolent tongue, and all the outrages which a proud and passionate woman, doubly sensitive on account of her false jjosition, her blighted name, could heap upon the man who dared to assail her constancy, to try to tempt lier from the lover for whom she had sacrificed home and country. She had laughed at his love, and tlie sordid tempta- tions which he offered — a settlement — jewels — a position such as Lucien Eochefort could never give her. Then came the bloody close of her brief day of bliss ; and she was alone in a remote colony, without a friend, without a counsellor, outlawed by her sin, and almost penniless. Laurent Deschanel seized his opportunity. A month after Lucien's death, when Madame Caradec had tasted the cup of bitterness and desolation, he came to her in a new character — he came as consoler, adviser, friend. He offered her his purse just as she was beginning to feel the horror of being penniless in a strange land. She received him with scant civility, but accepted the use of his purse ; and six months afterwards she left the 16 Ishmael island wliei-e her presence was a scandal, as Laurent Deschanel's mistress. The man adored her, but he was a Creole, with all thft Creole vices. They led a life of sensuous ease, of frivolous pleasure, recognising no higher law than their own fancy, no higher aim than the enjoyment of the hour. Their life, for the most part, had been made up of quarrels and reconciliations, and many of those quarrels had been every whit as violent as that last dispute after which Monsieur Deschanel had cried ' Good- bye for ever.' Coralie fancied this quarrel would end as the others had ended, and that Laurent would be all the more her slave because of that fortnight of severance. He would have discovered the emptiness of life without his idol, Madame Caradec did not know that her slave had for some time past been somewhat weary of his chains, and that an ido who takes too much fine-champagne and chartreuse, and has fits of floom and nervous crises of passionate despair in her cups, bewailing the bitterness of Fate and the loss of honour, is apt to pall upon her worshipper. She woke from a dream of despotic power to find herself an outcast, friendless in the streets of Paris, face to face with stem reality for the first time in her life. Mistress and maid put their heads together, and, after much driving to and fro in a hired carriage, they found lodgings in a somewliat tawdry hotel in the rue St.-Honor6. The rooms were expensive, the furniture was gavidy, and Sebastien saw his small fif^ure, in a velvet tunic and lace collar, reflected at every angle in the tall looking-glasses which adorned the room. It seemed to him as if the cliief furniture of the apartment consisted of looking-glasses and ormolu clocks. He heard the monotonous tick, tfck, tick on every side, go where he would. _ The street was narrow, and the heavily-draped windows let in the gloom of a dull, gray evening. Everything was difi'erent from the lovely little house in the wood yonder. 'Mamma,' cried Sebastien, hanging on his mother's satin gown, 'when are we going home again i' ' Never 1 ' she answered, angrily, with hoarse, thickened accents, which the boy knew too well— her evening voice, ' We have no home,' After this came other changes. They seemed to be always removing to new lodgings. Lisette managed everything. Madame seldom left her room till late in the afternoon. At one time they occupied an apartment in the Champs-Elysdes — pretty little rooms with low ceilings, an entresol looking into a small garden where Sdbastien could play in his lonely, dreary fashion, very tired of solitude and confinement. On fine even- ings he went out with Lisette, and saw the lamps and heard the music in a garden near, and played with strange children, while ' Her Feat go doion to Death ' 17 Lisette conversed with her numerous friends. His mother was seldom at home of an evening. He saw less of her now than eveu under the Deschanel dominion, severe as that regime had been. Strange faces came and went across the shifting scenes of Si^bastien's life at this period— faces which never grew friendly or welcome to him. There was a stout elderly man, with a gray moustache, who seemed to have some kind of authority, and with whom Scbastien's mother had terrible quarrels, which recalled the acene in the villa. He disappeared when they left the Champs-Elys^es ; and now their lodgings got shabbier and shabbier, until Sebastien, after having been awakened suddenly out of his sleep one night, hudilled hastily in his clothes, and hurrird off in a fiacre, awoke in the gray winter liglit to a wretched, bare-looking little room with whitewashed walls. He had never seen such a room in his life before. It was like a cell in a prison. There was no furniture but a narrow iron bed- stead and a rash-bottomed chair. He got up and stood upon the chair to look out of the window, and turned sick and cold at the sight of the yard below him. He was ona sixth story. Long rows of windows faced him on the other side of a quadrangle : shabby windows with every variety of blind or curtain— with clothes hanging out to dry— with all those signs of humble poverty which were new to Sebastien. He took fright suddenly. Why had he been brought to such a place 1 A\)\n\\.Vmg stories of child stealers, wherewith Lisette had beguiled the weariness of long winter evenings, flashed across his mind. He had been stolen— last night when he was too sle&py to be quite sure who carried him downstairs and put him in the fiacre— axiA brought to this dreadful place, a prison for stolen children. He was going torush out of the loom in a panic, when he heard a familiar voice close b}'. It was Lisette singing the last popular refrain, ' Fautpas fermer Vceil,^ in her Porte St.-Martin voice, close by. Yes, Lisette was in the adjoining room, with which the door of his little cell, or closet, communicated. He rattled at the door, which was bolted, and Lisette opened it and admitted him to a bare- looking room with a few poor sticks of furniture, a chest of drawers with a cracked marble top, a tawdry gilt clock that bad long left off going, a round table, and a wretched little bed in a corner. There was a smaller room within, for INIadame Caradec, who must have her den ia which to sleep half the day. There was a coffee-pot on a black ii'on stove, which projected into the room, and there were some preparations for breakfast, scanty enough, on the table. Everything had a barren, poverty-stricken look. Sebastien did not know that his mother and her confidential servant had lived on credit aa long c 18 Ishmael as tradesmen would trust them, and that this sudden plunge into abject poverty was the natural result of exhausted credit To S^bastien the change appeared unnatui-al. But Sebastien was not a pampered child. He was not accustomed to have his comfort studied, his wishes gratified. He had been flung about like a ball all his little life, put here or put there, caressed or thrust aside, as suited the convenience of his owners. And now he ate his breakfast of a roll without any butter, and a cup of coffee, without venturing to question Lisette about the sudden change in his surroundings. As the time went on the boy grew accustomed to tliia squalid life. It was a long, long winder— joyless days, dismal ni"hts, for his mother and Lisette were never at home of an evening. He spent those long evenings in utter solitude, locked ''in the bare, cheerless room, listening to all the sounds of the huge, uncleanly barrack in which he lived— sounds of brawling, strife, drmiken fury, drunken mirth ; cries of murder sometimes, and the crash of funiiture thro-um over, the dull thud of a cruel blow ; children squalling, naked feet pattering along the brick-floored passage; vulgar voices singing vulgar songs, whistling, screaming, laughter; and now and then, for variety, a visit from the police. So the boy passed his tenth birthday, steeped in ignorance —for Lisette had long ago abandoned her feeble attempts at tuition— and very weary of his first decade of existence. J^is mother and her companion had found an occupation for their evenings at a theatre in this wretched quarter — a theatre frequented by workmen and their womenkind, and v'liere the entertainment was of the strongest order. Madame Caradec's beauty and Lisette's impudence were their only Cfconmiendations for the dramatic profession. Madame waa engaged as a showy figure in a fairy spectacle. She had but to "stand where slie was put— a nymph draped in spangled gauze in a tinsel grotto. Lisette, the brighter and cleverer of the two, was entrusted with a speaking part, and sang her hall dozen couplets, in the approved style, ' with intention.' Sebastien was not allowed to go to the theatre where his mother was engaged. It was to him a mystery, but he heard the two women talk of it as they sat late into the night drinking some yellow liquid, which looked like melted gold, in their glasses, and which they spoke of laughingly by all kinds of strange names. S(5bastien used to hear them talking late into the night^'from the little iron bedstead in his cell. He had toolittle ai»r and exercise in the long dreary day to sleep well at night. Life went on after this fashion all through the winter. On ? atidaya Madame Caradec slept till evening, or else rose rather *EeY Feet go down to Death* 19 earlier than nsiial and went out ■with Lisette, dressed in her best gown, for a day's pleasure. Sdbastien never knew where they went, or what their pleasures were, save from their disjointed talk after these revels about the dishes they had eaten and the wine they had drunk. His mother's best gown and bonnet had a slovenly air now. The satin was frayed, the sleeves were worn ragged at the edges. The Indian shawl had lost ita beautiful coloui-ing, and had been darned in ever so many places by Lisette, who now dressed as well as her mistress with the cast-oflF finery that had been flung to her in days gone by. A good deal of this finery had gone to 'my aunt,' but enough was left to make the maid as much a lady as Madame. Spring came. March winds — bitter, biting winds, which seemed to work their own will in the great bare barrack, with its endless corridors and its hundred rooms, cai-]5etless boards, bricked passages, a house that was old before it had lost its air of raw newness, woodwork shrunk, panels of the doors split, staircase walls green with dirt and grease. Every one who rubbed against the wall seemed to leave the taint and smear of a sordid existence behind ; every one who mounted the stairs left the print of dirty boots. There were no shutters, no curtains, no draperies to shut out the cold. The east wind shrieked and whistled in the passages as in a mountain glen. Madame Caradec complained that a villainous cough, which had fixed its claws upon her at Christmas, would never be any better so long as she lived in that infected hole. She was very angry when Lisette suggested that the cough might go if she would leave off di'inking brandy. ' Why do you drink it yourself if it is poison ? ' she asked. 'I only take a taste now and then to keep you company,' answered Lisette ; which was not true, although there is no doubt the maid was much more sober than the mistress. The bleak March made Madame's cough much worse. It grew so bad that she was obliged to give up her engagement — her twenty francs a week — at the theatre, her Sundays' feastings on the boulevard or in the suburbs. Her cheeks were hollow, her eyes brilliant with hectic light. She was no fit occupant for a tinsel grotto, for Juno's jjeacock car, or the palace of the fairy queen. Lisette, wlio had developed some talent in the soubrette line, was now the only bread-winner, and her thirty francs a week did not go very far. Before that month of March was over everything that could be taken to my aunt had been so taken, even to Madame Caradec's last satin gown and Indian shawl, and the large Leghorn bonnet with its marabout plumage. She had only a peignoir left ; but aa 20 Ishmael she hardly ever rose from her bed n-^w, this did not much matter. She was sorely ill, and suffered a great deal. AVhile Lisette was at the theatre, Sebastien used tx) sit by his mother's bed for hours, deeply sorry for her, full of silent pity. He gave her brandy when she asked for it if there was any there to give. "Who could refuse her the only thing that seemed to give her relief from that terrible oppression, that labour and pain in every breath she drew ? The boy understood dimly, from Lisette's talk, that it was wi'ong to drink brandy ; but he knew that sick people must have physic, and this yellow stuff, which shone and sparkled in the glass, seemed the only physic that was of any use to his mother. A doctor came in once or twice a week and looked at her, and went through ceilain formalities with a stethoscope, and took his fee of a couple of francs, and went away again, without having been of any more use than the organ-grinder down in the street below, grinding the same aira from the ' Dmne Blanche ' and the ' Domino Noir ' over and over again on certain days of the week. One day, when the doctor had paid his visit, Lisette followed him into the corridor, and came back a few minutes afterwards with her wicked little Parisian face all blotted with tears — that nndacious countenance which nad so many grimaces for the blouses in the pit and galler}' yonder. Sebastien asked her why she was crying, but she frowned at him and pointed to the bed for her only answer ; and he knew that she was sorry for his mother, whose breathing was so painful, and whose hands and face scorched him when he caressed her. There were two red fever-spots on her hollow cheeks, and her eyes shone like glass. Later in the evening, when Lisette had put on her cloak and bonnet to go to the theatre, Sebastien heard her talking with one of her gossips in the corridor. • She will die,' said Lisette, ' and who is to pay for her funeral ? She was born a lady, poor thing. It would be hard if she were taken away upon the poor people's common bier to be flung into their common grave.' ' Is there no one 1 ' asked the neighbour. * There are three or four. I have written to them all. One answered — he who once thought gold too common for her — that she might starve or rob for ought he cared. Another sent me twenty louis at the beginning of her illness, but told me not to trouble him again. Ajnother gave no answer. There is only the husband left. I think, perhaps, he would pay for the funeral for the sake of being sure he had got rid of her,' ♦ Why don't you write to him 1 ' 'Her Feet go doion to Death' 2l ' She would be so angry,' murmured Lisette. •How can that matter 1 She will be dead before lie can answer your letter.' The neighbour was right. Lisette wrote to Raymond Caradec, of Pen-Hoel, by the next day's post ; and Coralie was dead before her husband came in person to answer her hand- maid's letter. She was lying on her shabby bed in the wretched lodging, two tall wax candles burning on the little table beside her pillow, and a little spray of box lying between them. They had folded her hands upon her breast, and laid a cheap little metal crucifix and a tv/enty sous rosarj'' above them. All the taint and soil of her sins had vanished from the marble face. It was almost as beautiful as the day she came out of her convent school to plight her faith to Raymond Caradec. His youth came back to him, all the fervour and hope of that day, as he stood looking down at his dead wife in the chilly, gray March afternoon, amidst the sordid suri'oundings of the work- man's quarter, bare walls, dirt, squalor. He, the proud bearer of a good old name, the dishonoured husband, knelt down and touched the marble hand with his lips. He had hated her while she lived ; but pity melted the ice at his heart ; the awfulness of death was stronger than anger or revenge. He said a prayer, dipped his finger in the holy water beside the bed, crossed himself, and went back to the sitting-room, where Lisette and Sebastien stood waiting for him. The boy's pale face turned towards him wistfully as if entreating for a father's kindness. Caradec hardly glanced at his son. He took out his purse and unfolded three or four bank-notes, which he handed to Lisette. ' There is money for the funeral. Let it be simple but decent,' he said ; ' and let there be no name on the coffin or the headstone. Initials and a date will be enough. She will be buried at Montmartre, of course 1 ' ' That is nearest,' said Lisette. ' And the nearest is best. Why loiter on the last stage of a journey?' said Caradec, with a saturnine smile. 'The boy will go back to Brittany with me.' Sebastien put his arms round Lisette's neck. After all, she was the only friend he had ever known since he parted from his eailor friends on the steamer — she had nursed him when he was sick, she had amused him when he was well : all he had ever known of motherly care was that which he had received from her. * May not she go with us 1 ' he asked. 22 Ishnael • No, child ; there is nothing for Mademoiselle to do at) Pen-Hoel ; and such an accomplished young person would not like to be buried iu a country chateau,' answered the Count, Bcoffingly. He had a carriage at the door. Lisette put S6basticn's poor little wardrobe into a small valise, and the three went down- Btairs together, the workmen whom they met on the stairs, the women and children at their open doors — all staring at the tall, dark gentleman who had such a grand look, and who was leading the shabby, out-at-elbows little lad down the dirty stair by the collar of his threadbare jacket. Everybody wanted to know a hat it all meant. Lisette had ample entertainment offered ;r by her gossips when she went upstairs again. A'goutie' here, and another '■ goutte' there, would she but only talk her fill, and tell all that could be told about the handsome corpse lying in the candle-lit room yonder, and the handsome gentlemau who had just go:ve downstairs. CHAPTEE III * CRUEL AS THE GRAVE' Monsieur Caradec and his son left the rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau that evening by the Malle Poste for Brest, quite the rapidest way of travelling in those days. They sat side by side IE. the coupe, with one other traveller, and travelled all that night and all the next day. It was in the twilight of a cold spring evening that Sebastien saw the towers and pinnacles of Mont St.-Michel stand darkly out against the yellow simset sky, and the gray sea deepening to purple towards the distant horizon. The whole of the journey had been full of interest to him. His young limbs had been cold and cramped half the time ; but his yo\;ng eyes had devoured the landscape, his young soul had dnmk deep of delight. The trees and fields, the hills and valleys, the winding streams and dark mysterioua woods — all these were new to the young captive of the city, who had longed with a passionate longing for escape from the blank and drear monotony of stone walls, dirt, and squalor. Tha'% house in the Faubourg INIontmartre had hung upon him like ft nightmare, had crushed his young spirit, dulled his yo\mg blood. Whast ineffable rapture, then, to be borne swiftly along theaa dewy eo» JSisj roads to see the rivsr shining uudsr the stars. te> • Cniel as the Grave ' 23 •watch the moon rushing among tlie clouds — l;e never snspecte({ it was the clouds that went so fast, and not the luonn — to hear the kine lowing in their willowy pastures — the village cock crowing as tlie mail-cart drove past farms and cottages in the sunrise ! What a delight to descend at the village inn for a hasty snatch of food, a cup of coffee, a crust of bread and butter, and then up again and away ! — the post-cart stops for neither king nor kaiser — and so, and so, till in the deepening dusk they alighted at the bottom of the hill crowned by the turrets and gable ends of Pen-Hoiil. After this came a life of solitude and abandonment almost as rjomplete as that of the fairy palace in the wood near Passy. The Count had taken his boy back to the chateau because it was the easiest way of disposing of him, not for any love that he bore to Sdbastien. What love could he feel for a boy wha seemed to him the incarnation of past wrongs ? His own son, yes ; but it was of Coralie he thought when he looked at the boy, albeit St^bastien was a true Caradec — dark-eyed, tall, broad- shouldeied, with marked features, and a proud carriage of the head. Raymond let his son run wild, saw as little of him a>- possible, and thought he had done his duty to the boy in the way of education when he had engaged the services of the village priest — a benevolent old man, born in the peasant class, and no marvel of erudition — as Sdbastien's tutor, father Bressant was horrified when he found that, at eleven years of age, Sebastien could neither read nor write, and the first year of his tuition was devoted to these elements of all learning and the Church catechism. In the second year the cur6 taught his pupil a little Latin, and the histoiy of France as made and provided by the historians of Port-Royal. The hours given to study were of the shortest, for StSbastien chafed against the confinement within four walls. Ilis wild, free life satisfied all the longinga of his nature. He rode, he fished, he shot and hunted with the mstinct of a born sportsman. He had hardly a friend of hi.s own class, but he made friends for himself of gamekeepers and peasants, of peachers and fishermen, of smugglers and coast- guardsmen. He spent many a night far afield under the stars, engaged in some kind of sport, and crept into the house ac daybreak before any of the servants were astir. The wanderers of the countryside, the pUlawer with his little cart of foul rags, the peddler with his pack, the colporteur with his case of books — • he conversed with all these, and was at home with them at once. He talked with them of that great city which they visited now and again, full of wonder and respect for its splen> dours, and which he knew and loathefh 24 Ishmael By the time be liad been two years at Pen-Hoiil he loved the place and its surroundings with an intense love. There was not a bank or a coppice, a willow or a waterpool, a clump of Spanish chestnuts or an old wall feathered over with fern-fronds, which S^bastien did not know by heart. The gardeners and farm labourers, the grooms and gamekeepers, and all the villagera around loved him. He was as a king among them. If there had been need of a new Vendee, Sebastien Caradec could have raised a regiment. All the countryside would have flocked to the sound of his drum. Everybody loved the bold, frank, handsome, open-handed boy, except his father. Eaymond Caradec could not forgive his son for the traitorous blood in hia veins, for his involuntary share in the past. He had been his mother'a companion in her vicious career — in her degringoladc. He had drunk of the cup of her pleasures, pei'haps basked in the luxury of sin. The Count had never dared to question his son as to that past history. There were hideous pages in the boy's life which he shrank from opening. But sometimes, on those rare occasions when the father and son were alone together, Raymond Caradec would fall into a reverie, seeing with his mind's eye that past life with all its loathsome details — feasting, revelry, fine clothes, a thick, hot mist of wine-fumes and lamp- light clouding the atmosphere of a gaudily-furnished saloon. Friends had told him something of his wife's existence in Paris — the money she had squandered, the train she had led. He asked no questions ; he winced at the sound of his wife's name. But there are people who will put their finger-tips upon gaping wounds by way of friendship ; and Raymond Caradec knew what manner of life the dead woman had lived. He associated his innocent son with all that horror and shame. What blessing could he hope from a boy reared in such iniquity ? Yet there were times when the boy's frank o:-tlook and noble face impressed him in spite of himself, and he was almost kind to his son. Unhappily, these intervals of fatherly feeling were of the rarest. When Sebastien had been about a year and a half at Pen- Hoel, and had become, as it were, a living part of the hills and ■woods, forgetful of all the life he had known before he came there, the Count went to Paris with an old college friend who had dropped upon Pen-Hoel unexpectedly — from the stais as it were— one autumn night, and who, after staying three days at the ch&teau, tempted IMonsieur Caradec to accompany him to the great city, where he had a wife and an apartment in the rue St.-Guillaum*e. It was late in October : the hops were picked, the apples were garnered, the sarrasin fields were brown and bare, autumn winds shrieked and howled round the old house as if they would have blown down its quaint old turrets, the ' Cruel as thi Grave ' 25 Lrazon wcatliercnck groaned and scrooped in its iron socket, llie solid old caseiiieiits rattled and shook — a dreary season for the master of Pen-Hoel, who had long ceased to care for sport. Everybody would be coming back to Paris after the season of villegiatura. The theatres were opening. The town would be at its best. Raymond Caradec, who felt himself becoming prematurely old, a creature sunk in gloom and hopelessness, accepted the invitation, but with reserve. ' You and your wife wnll find me sorry company,' he said. * I have let myself rust too long.' 'Never too late to rub the rust off,' answered Monsieur Lanion, his friend. ' My wife is a very good little person, and will do her utmost to enliven you.' Thus urged, Raymond risked the experiment. He felt a little dere — you do rot see' — she murmured The Furnace for Gold 85 significantly ; and on the strength of such vagno hints, Baymond grew to believe tliat his sou was brutal t(; the invalid step- mother whenever he, the master, was out of the way. CHAPTER IV THE FURNACE FOR GOLD Thus it cane about that, although the little brothers throve and greW^rosy in their companionship with the tall, dark lacj, Ivaymond Caradec was willing to admit that Subastien's society was dangerous to the children ; and when, one autumn after- noon towards dusk, he found his wife in tears on account of the jtt'olonged absence of her babies, he was quite ready to be angry with his eldest son as the cause of those tears. ' Sebastien took them out directly after breakfast, although Marie told him the morning was too cold for them,' whimpered Adcle. 'Cold ! Why, my child, the ■weather is lovely.' ' I only know that I have been shivering all the afternoon, answered his wife, leaning out of her easy chair to spread her thin white hands above the wood fire. 'But cold or not, Sebastien has kept those dear children out all day, and no one knows where he has taken them or what he has done with them.' Here she broke down altogether and sobbed hysterically as if it were as likely as not that Sebastien had gone far afield on purpose to lose the little ones in a wood like the wicked uncle in the story. It was the season of failen leaves and robin- redbreasts. ' My cherished one, pray don't distress yourself ! ' imjilored Caradec, bending over his wife's chair. ' I have no doubt tho boys are amusing themselves in the village, or in some orchard within half a mile.' ' They are not to be found within miles. I have sent all about the country in search of them — men on horseback. It seems that Sebastien harnessed the two donkeys to the little cart, and took a basket of provisions from the kitchen, and a bottle of wine, and cloaks and things, just as if he were running away with my darlings. Never, never, never to see their mother's face again.' More sobs with increasing symi>tom3 of 36 Ishmael hysteria ; and hysteria with Madame Caradec was an awfol thing — a thing to be dreaded by all about her. * He has taken the boys for a picnic, of course,' said Caradec, when he had soothed his wife into brief tranquillity. ♦ It is not the first time he has taken the cart.' ' A i)icnic in such weather — nearly the end of October 1 * gasped Adcle ; ' and they tell me he took wood and matches, aa if to light a fii e. He is the very spirit of mischief.' More followed to the same tune in the deepening dusk. Matters grew worse when the lamps were lighted ; and as the night grew late Raymond himself became seriously alarmed. Scouts were sent in every direction ; but it was not till the late autumn dawn that the sleepless household were in anywise enlightened as to the fate of the three boys. At that bleak hour one of the mounted gamekeepers came back with the news that the little donkey-cart had been seen crossing the sands to Mont St.-Michel early in the afternoon of the previous day. The boys had doubtless slept at the little inn within the fortress walls. The tide was full when the gamekeeper received this information, and, instead of crossing to the rock in a boat to follow uj) the trail, he deemed it his duty to return and tell his master what he had heard. Madame Caradec had been hysterical all night. Nurse and lady's-maid had had their hands full in attending upon her ; but she grew worse on hearing that the cart had been seen on those ])erilous sands. Her darlings had been swallowed alive in a quicksand. It was a hideous vengeance of Sebastien's. He was jealous of her children. He hated her. He was just the kind of boy to commit murder and suicide. He had it all in his face. Raymond Caradec ordered his horse and rode off to the Mount, galloping across the low, level fields beyond Pontoi'soD, past the waggons laden with sand from the spongy shores of the Couosuon, and picking his way over the sandy flats, out of which the rock rose like an Egyptian pyramid. There was no causeway between solid earth and the Mount in those days. The citadel stood solitary, aloof, girt by blue waves or shining Band. At this time in the morning the tide was going out, and Raymond's keen glance explored the sandy flat, from which the waves were slowly crawling, in search of the little donkey-cai't with the three boys. If they had been prisoners at the Mount last night, overtaken by the tide, they ought to be on their way home now. There was no sign of the cart on the sands, but Monsieur Caradec found it in the inn yard, and the donkeys in the inn stables. The boys had arrived there at two o'clock yestei'day, The Furnace for Gold 8? had explored tlie monastery and little town, and had picnicked on the sands. They had been seen making their wood fire and boiling their coffee while the tide was still far out, and this was the last anybody had heard or seen of them. And now it was time for Eaymond Caradec's heart to sink and grow cold with an awful fear. Of all places on this earth that he knew there was no spot more dangerous to the rash or inexperienced rover than this sandy waste around St. Michel. Not a year passed but the sea had its victim in some imprudent traveller ; and now his little children, the fair-haired babies he loved, had been devoured by that murderous sea. Of the eldest one he thought with only anger — bitter rage against the boy whose crime or whose folly had sacrificed the children he loved. He talked to a dozen natives of the rock, all of whom told him the same story. The boys had been seen in the street, on the ramparts, and at the inn ; but after four o'clock, when they picnicked on the sands, no mortal eye among the dwellers at Mont St. Michel had beheld them. They were to come back for the donkey-cart ; but cart and donkeys were there to show that the tall youth and his little brothers had not returned. The natives shrugged their shoulders, and evidently appre- hended the worst. It was a sad story. The lad was so good to his little brothers. He carried the youngest on his shoulder across the sands, a rosy-cheeked cherub, with golden curls flying in the wind. Those terrible Uses I It was not the first time. Raymond Caradec turned from them with a face white as death. He guided his horse out of the inn yard and through the citadel gate mechanically. Whither was he to go next, or what was he to do 1 He knew not ; but with a vague notion of doing something, he rode slowly on to the sands as if to seek the particular spot which had engulfed his children. He knew not if they had been swallowed by one of those quicksands — the Uses, as the natives called them, which abound on this level waste — or overtaken by the rising tide. A barefooted peasant, a man who earned his living in tha Bummer-time as a guide to travellers, and gtarved and idled in the winter, ran after the horseman. *Sir,' he said, 'there is Tombelaine. The lad and his brothers might have gone there.' ' Not likely ; but there is just a chance.' Tombelaine is the twin islet which rises a little way from the Mount — a barren rock — the resort only of fishermen and the rare smugglers who attempt the perils of this most unpro- pitious shore. " Tombelaine ? Yes, the rock rose yonder, to the right its base still washed by the tida Haymond spurred his 38 Ishmael horse to a gallop with his face towards that harren isle. The man rushed after him, shouting to him at the top of his voice to beware of the Uses, to take the sand where it was hard and wrinkled, to avoid the soft ground, at peril of his Ufe. The Count neither heard nor heeded, but galloped on towards the rock. Providence was kind to him as to drunken men in their t)eril. The waves washed against his stout charger's bi'east as le stood close beside the rock. Thank God ! His call was answered by his eldest boy's deep baritone, and by two little piping voices that sounded like the treble cry of the seagulls. They were alive. They stood shivering on the rock waiting for the tide to go do's\'n. They were very cold, those two little ones, and, oh, so hungry. The father took them from their brother's arms without a word, and clasf^ them to his breast there, with the water dashing about his horse's flanks and the salt sea wind blowing over him. He rode off with his children, hugging them, sheltering them with his strong right arm as they squatted in front of his saddle, and guiding his horse with his left hand. This time he took heed of the guide's warning. He walked his horse slowly, picking his way across the flat, choosing the long stretches of sand upon which the waves had left their print, crossing the river at a spot where the footsteps of the fishermen who had passed but a little while before served as a guide. Of the other son left behind on the rock he was hardly conscious. He did not draw rein till h% was in front of the chateau of Pen-Hoel, where Ad^le was standing watching for his return — a fragile figure robed in white, and wrapped in the Indian shawl that had been his wedding gift. Never had he been so completely her slave as in this moment, when, in her joy at seeing her children, she flung her arms about her husband's neck and kissed and blessed him with an impassioned affection which she had never given him till to-day. They all went to the salon together, and mother and father sat in front of the wood fire, warming, comforting, and feeding the cold, hungry children. Then, when the treasures of a foolish woman's love had been poured out upon the restored children, came the bitterness of a weak woman's hate and jealousy for the eldest son. Why had he done this thing? Why had he exposed her darlings to the peiils of cold, sickness, death — kept them starving all night upon a bleak unsheltered rock ? Why, except to torment and torture her, whom he had always hated, of whom he had always been wickedly jealous. 'I have not forgotten the look he gave me when first I came here,' she said, vindictively. The stepson came into the room while the stepmother was The Furnace for Gold 39 bewailing his wickedness. Pale, haggard, -with wild eyes and disordered apjiarel, he stood before his father. * S6bastien, you have given my wife and mi? a night of agony,' said Raymond Caradec. 'What in the name of all that is evil was your motive for endangering the lives of these children ? ' ' If their lives were in danger, mine could not be particularly safe,' answere^i the young man bitterly. lie felt the slight implied in his father's speech. Ilis owa peril was ignored ; he counted for nothing. ' If my brothers had perished, I must have perished with them,' he said. ' You don't suppose I took them to that ro'/^'c with the intention of passing the night tliere V ' But I believe you did,' cried Adele, pale with passion ; *I believe you capable of any wickedness against me and mine. You would" have left my innocents there to be drowned while you got away in a boat to Jersey or somewhere ; only your villainous scheme failed, thank God ! ' 'Father,' exclaimed Scbastien, with his eyes aflame, 'do you believe this infamy of your son ?' 'I believe nothing. I understand nothing, upon my soul. I don't know whether to think you a villain or a fool. I know what your mother was, and that the blood in your veins is bad enough.' 'Stop!' cried Sebastien, with a voice whose indignant power quelled even an angry father. ' Not a word about my mother. She is in her grave, and God is the only judge who shall pass sentence on her sins. AVe have been living very unhappily in this house for a long time. I have been in everybody's way. I am an outcast in my father's house, as Ishmael was in the house of Abraham — although, heaven knows, I never mocked at my stepmother — and I should be happier and better in the wilderness of the outside world. I should have turned my back upon Pen-Hoiil before now if it were not for my little brothers, who love me.' His proud young face softened as he turned to the little ones. They were looking on with eyes that had grown large with wonder, listening to every word, but understanding very little, oidy scai'ed by a vague sense of unhappiness, the panic of an atmosphere charged with all bad feelings. At the word 'love' from the elder brother's lips the childish faces flushed, and the eyes of the youngest brimmed over. ' Yes, yes, S6baetien, we both love you.' 'As for yesterday's business, it was an accident which might have hai^pened to any one. We had our picnic on the sands, and were turning to go back to the Mount, when Frederic saw 40 • Ishmael TomLelaine, and asked rae to take Iiim and his brother there- was it not so, my child ?' ' Yes, yes,' answered Frederic, tlie elder boy. •At first I refused, for the tide w;ls rising, aiid there was not much time for exploring the rock ; but they both begged nie. So we ran to Tombelaine, and the children went scrambling over the islet until they found a seagull's nest, and when they were tired of looking at the nest and the birds, they made me take them into the cavern, and while we were groping about in the dark there, playing hide and seek ' ' I wasn't frightened, was I ? ' cried Louis, the younger boy, * though it was so dark. Frederic was, though.' 'While we were at play the tide was rising, and when we came out of the cave the rock was hemmed round with water — no escape except by a boat. It was growing dark too, though it was not six o'clock, a mist rising. I shouted with all my tnight, stood on the highest point of Tombelaine, and shouted as long as i had any strength left — shouted at intervals of a few minutes until it was pitch dark, and then — well, my poor Uit^ pets were cold and hungry — we had left our basket with tha remains of our dinner within reach of the tide. I had not so much as a bit of bread to give them. We crept into the cave, and I held them in my arms all night, and tried to keep them warm ; and I sang to them and told them stories, and they managed to sleep a good deal in spite of the cold ; and we heard the wind roaring and the waves sobbing. It was the middle of the night when the tide went down, and there was a thick white fog over sea and land. I knew the danger of attempting to cross the sands in such a fog, so I waited till morning, though it was a weary thing to sit there and hear the waters slowly creeping around us again in the winter dawn. The tide had not long turned when you rode out to us,' he concluded, addressing his father. He had never taken his eyes from his father's face while he told his story. Not once had he glanced at his stepmother. He treated Madame Caradec and her accusations with scathinor indifference. But Raymond had not been unmindful of his wife while his son was speaking. He had noted her sighs and stifled sobs, her writhings of silent agony, her clutches at her children, clasping them to her breast convulsively as if to save them from a human tiger ; and he knew that, if he forgave his son too readily for the folly that had cost a night of agony, he would be made to rue his indulgence. Hereafter he would be told that he had no real love for his wife or her children, that tlie son of his dead and gone Hagar was more to him than the offspring of this spotless Sarah. The Furnace for Gold 41 Tlie strong man was so completely under the dominion of the weak woman that in this crisis of his life Eaymond Caradec thought not of what was just and right, but only of how he must needs act to save his wife's tears, to heal her wounded feelings. She had flung her arms round his neck an hour ago, in the hysterical joy of her sons' return, and had laid her pale, fair cheek against his as she had done but few times in their wedded life. His whole being was moved by the tenderness that little gush of love had awakened. It was of her, and her only, he thought as he turned coldly from his first-born. ' It was a foolish business, and you have given us an infinity of trouble,' he said. Sebastien took up his hat and left the room without a word. His teeth were chattering, his lips were blue, his limbs ached from the constrained position in which he had sat half the night through. Nobody had oflfered to chafe his hands and feet before the wood fire yonder, or to administer wine d la fran^aise and warm food. The little children had been ^ed and comforted with luxurious fare, and had basked in their mother's lap before the merrily-blazing logs ; but for this first-born — this Ishmael — well, there was the kitchen hearth, wider and warmer even than that of the salon, and as much food and wine as he could want. He had but to ask for it. There was all the difference. On one side, mother and father devouring their children with kisses, on the other the kitchen and the old servants, rough peasants for the most part, who could neither read nor write, but who were devoted to Sdbastien. Sebastien did not go to the kitchen for warmth and food. He went out of his father's house cold and hungry as he had entered it. He shook the dust of Pen-Hoel off his feet. * Cest fini, fct,' he said to himself. * Va poiir le desert.'' _ The wilderness he thouglit of as he walked downhill to the bridge that spanned the moat was that great wilderness of which he had known something in his childhood — that stony-hearted stepmother, Paris, who could be hardly harsher to him than the fair-faced fragile being who had sobbed and sighed him out of his father's house and his father's love. Yes, he would go back to Paris, and work for his bread — work among common labourers if need were, and eat dry bread and drink sour wine ; but the bread and wine should be of his own earning. By the sweat of his brow would he live, as his father Adam lived before him, by the work of his own strong arms and dexterous hands, rather than be a debtor for the decencies and luxuries of a gentleman'a life to those who loved him not. He walked quickly down the chestnut avenue, his heart beating loud with anger and wounded love ; but when he had 42 Ishnacl crossed tbe old Norman bridge under the portcullis, lie slackened his steps, and began to think more deliberately of his position. He explored his pockets, and found that his whole stock of worldly wealth consisted of a franc and a half — not a large amount with which to begin the battle of life. He was prepared to walk to Paris ; but he knew that he must eat on the way there, and to eat he mubt have money. He could live on the humblest fare, sleep in the humblest shelter that offered itself ; but even for black bread and a pallet under a peasant's thatch he must have money. Father Bressant was the only man to whom Sdbastien cared to apply in his need, and the village priest was not so rich as a village innkeeper or a peasant who had saved money ; but he knew that the good cur^ loved Lim and would trust him, and that he had been for a long time secretly indignant at the scurvy treatment his pupil received from father and stepmother. S^bastien went straight to the presbytery and told the priest his story unreservedly. The time had come at which he mu. t leave his father's house. There had been no quarrel — he had used no hard words to his father or his fathei-'s wife ; but there was bad blood between them, and it was best for all that he should go. Father Bressant argued against this decision. It was a sin for a son to desert his father's house— to take upon himself to choose a life below his own rank in the world. 'It is the life to which my father has degraded me,' an- swered the young man. ' He has let me eat and drink wnth hia s«rvants ; he has left me dependent upon servants for kindness. You know what kind of home I have had up yonder. Can you ask me to go back to it ? ' The priest could and did so ask him, considering it his priestly duty ; but when he found that the lad's will was iron in this matter, that he would go to Paris if he starved and begged upon the way — if he arrived there famished, and with bare, bleeding feet — the kind old man opened his purse and gave all its con- tents to his pupil, a sum of nine and a half louis. He forced the whole amount upon Sebastien, who declared that a quarter of it would be enough. ' You don't know how long it may be before you get work in Paris,' he said. * Food and fuel are dear there ; you will find it difficult to live. Why not try St. Malo, or Eennes 1 ' * Too near home ; too cramped and narrow,' answered Sdbastien. ' I want to be lost in a great crowd, forgotten in the wilderness of working-men, until I can make myself beloved and respected for my own sake. You know that, though I am no Solomon, Ian pretty clever with my hands. I can use a carpenter's tooia The Furnace for Gold 43 or a mason's hammer. I shall get work in Paris, yon may be sure, and shall learn more there in a week th^n I could learn in a year at Pen-IIoel. I shall disgrace nobody, I shall vex nobody, 1 shall be in no one's way. They set me down as a boor, an ignoramus, up yonder, Father Bressant,' with a jerk of his head in the direction of Pen-IIoel, ' because I have kept company with gamekeepers and fishermen, having no better company offered me, mark you ; but I feel that it is in me to be of some use in the world, and I would rather dig for sand on the shores of the Couesnon than lead the life I am leading now.' ' If you go to Paris, you will fall in with Eepublicans and Freethinkers ; you will forget your God.' sighed the priest. ' I think not, father. My belief in the God of truth and justice, of mercy and love, lies pretty deep in my heart. That faith has comforted me often v.-hen life went hard with me. I don't think it will be plucked out by the first bad company I may fall among. I have heard men sneer at all those things you have taught me before to-day, and have let their words go by me like the wind. I am not afraid of what Paris can do to me.' Father Bressant sighed again and shook his head dolor- ously. He was an old man, a believer in Papal supremacy and the elder Bourbons. He hated Eepublicans and Bonapartists. And Paris was just now a divided camp, occupied by these two heresies, the Red Eepublicanism of Louis Blanc and Changarnier, the masked Imperialism of the Prince-President. The priest gave Sebastien a kind of testimonial, or certificate of identity and good character, which might serve him in default of other papers when he went in search of employment ; and then the two, master and pupil, walked together for a mile or so on the first stage of the young man's joui-ney ; and then they parted with eyes not innocent of tears. The outcast stood on a Mttle knoll beside the road, looking back at the kind old man's bent shoulders and white hair falling upon his rusty black cassock. Sebastien watched the stooping figure until it vanished in the perspective of tangled bi'amble and chestnut and ash as the parallel lines of high unshorn hedges melted into one. Never till this moment had it occurred to him what an old man his tutor was. Should they two ever meet again 1 he wondered. He must work his hardest, and make haste to restore the money borrowed to-day, lest the good old priest's declining days should be made harder for the lack of that little store. He must be sparing, too, and live on bread and water rather than impose upon his old friend's generosity. Having this in his mind, he denied himself the indulgence of the diligence, when, on inquiring at Avranches, he discovered that the journey to Paris would cost him something over three 44 hhmael louis. The autumnal weather was capital for walking — albeit the sliortness of the hite October dajs was an inconvenience ; but Sdbastien was fearless and hardy, and was used to roaming after nightfall. He tramped somewhat wearily into the narrow streets of Villedieu, luminous with its furnaces and copper-mills, when the church clock was chiming the first quarter after ten, looking about him for a shelter which should be cheap and decent. It was nearly eleven before he found such a lodging ; but later, as he advanced upon his journey from Villedieu to Thorigny, and that wooded heart of Normandy known as the Bocage, thence to Caen, and from Caen to Lisieux and Evreux, he grew cleverer in finding quarters for the night, and contrived to spend very little of Father Bressant's money ; and he had only spent five-and-twenty francs in all when he entered the great city in the wintry twilight, friendless, houseless, unknown, but liis own master, and possessed of the infinite riches of youth and hope. CHAPTER V *BWKET TO THE SOUL, AND HEALTH TO THE BONES* Raymond Caradec's runaway son stood in the midst of the great city, where the river flows between the old Palace of the Medicis and the new Palace of the Legislature, spanned by historic bridges, darkened by the shadows of historic towers — a river whose waters, lapping against the granite quay with a little babbling sound like the prattle of a child, could tell of tragedy and comedy, death, sin, vice, hate, love, mirth, woe, were it a little more articulate — a river which, to the mind of the man who knows Paris, does recall a world of strange and terrible memories — a river which has run red with blood in the days that are gone. On that fatal vigil of St. Bartholomew, for example, when the streets were heaped with Huguenot corpses, and King Charles's cut-throats held their obscene orgies amid the slain, while the king himself looked out of his window in the Louvre yonder, arquebuse levelled, animating the butchery with his shouts, shoo!:iiig at the fugitives who tried to swim the stream. The river will be flecked with sanguine stains once again before he who looks across the water to-night in this October of ISIJO is much older. * Sweet to the Soul, and Health to the Bones* 45 To the young man from the green hillside across the quiat Coucsnon Paris to-night seemed altogether a strange city, lie had never taken kindly to the long, narrow streets of tall houses, or even to the glittering boulevard with its formal avenue of young trees. But he had come to Paris for apurpose — come to win his independence, to earn freedom, fearlessness, and the right to hope. He had fed for the last year or so upon stories of men who had entered Paris shoeless, shirtless, carrying a few rags in an old cotton handkerchief, a few sous for total reserve fund against starvation, and who, years afterwards, had become men of mark, a power in the city. He came stuffed to the brim with ambition ; believing in himself, without conceit or an-ogance, but with that unquestionable faith in his own force and his own capacity which cannot be plucked from the breast of the conqueror elect in the world's strife. One who has studied the philosophy of Bohemianism has Baid that, from the hour in which the penniless man leaves off trying to get work and sits down in his hunger and his shabbi- ness, that man is lost. And in every gi-eat city there are two classes of men, the workers and the loungers ; the latter with a natural bent towards the gutter ; the former, brave, patient, heroic, and bound to win. The idler talks of bad luck. ' Pas de chance ' is hia favourite motto. The worker seizes the twin demons of poverty and obscurity as the infant Hercules throttled the snakes that beset his cradle. The struggle may be long and weary. Life is a waiting race, in which the best horse is bound to win. And now night was closing in, and the traveller had to find himself a shelter before the police grew troublesome. He was travelling at a disadvantage, without papers save that certificate of the parish priest's ; and he had been sharply interrogated an hour ago at the Octroi. He remembered the names of two epots in Paris — the theatre at which his mother acted, and the rue de Shelas, the dreary street of tall, stone, barrack-like houses, a new street beyond the rue Poissonifere, where his mother had died. He had hated the street with a deadly hatred ; and yet to-night, friendless and alone, he turned hia face automatically towards the last home he had known in Paris, The Rue de Shelas seemed at the other end of the world to this tired wanderer, who had tramped so many weaiy miles under good and evil weather within the last week. He had made this last day's march longer than that of any previous day, and he was thoroughly beaten. He had bought himself a blouse and a coloured sliirt at Caen, and his coat aud fine linen were tied in a little bundle slung across his shoulder. He WAd 46 Ishmael dad as workmen are clad, yet lie did not look like a workman ; and the blouses he met on his way glanced at him suspiciously jis at a wolf in sheep's clothing. He left the glitter and dazzle of the lighted boulevard as soon as he could, and plunged into the labyrinth of murky streets, through which the interminable rue de Lafayette now pierces, a mighty artery leading from weal til to poverty, from idleness to labour, from daintiness and delight to hard fare and anxious hearts, from the ffommevx to tire blouse. It was long before Sdbastien turned into the well- remembered street, which stood upon the verge of civilisation in those days — dreary waste places and houses newly begun surrounding it on all sides. It was only eight years since Sdbastien had looked his last wpon that sordid quarter from the fly in which he sat, timid unquestioning, at his fathei's side. And yet he had an idea that everybody he had known in that period of his exisitence would be dead and buried, lie expected to find old landmarks swept away. The eai-ly years of life are so long, heart and brain so ai'dent, outpacing Time the plodder, who becomes Time the fjal- loper in after-years. The street was there ; the house was there. Sebastien remembered the number, a big black figure of seven, painted upon each side of the doer. He looked up at the front of the house, ami it seemed to him like the Tower of Babel : windows above windows, lighted and dark, curtained, uncur- tained. The house was there, but the people he had known were dead most likely — dead or gone away. He rang the bell, and the door w;is opened by some invisible means, whereupon he entered, and beheld a short, middle-aged, slatternly woman sitting at a table in a little room on the left of the stone passage. It was exactly the same figure he used to see there iu days gone by^the same face, not older by an hour, it seemed to him — the greasy black gown, the large sallow face surmounted by a red cotton kerchief arranged as a cap, the long brass earrings. It was the same fat Jewess who had kept the house and tyrannised over the lodgers. But although Sebastien remembered Madame Eigol, the portress, that substantial matron had utterly forgotten him. The gamin of eleven, too frail and small for his years, had developed into a broad-shouldered youth of nineteen, six feet two, with the limbs and carriage of an athlete. ' Can I have a room here 1 ' the young man asked ; where- upon Madame Uigol, as in duty bound, took out a greasy ledger, and ])ut the stranger through a kind of catechism before she would allow him the privilege of admission to that stony paradise. He answered the questions exactly as he liked, drawing freely upon his imagination ; and Madame Rigol put down what he told her in a purely mechanical way. His namel * Sioeet to the Soul, and Health to the Bones * 47 Ishraael. Christian name? Ishmael also, Ounoas! but Madame Hijiol was used to queer names in that greasy register, and she put down ' Ishmael Ishmael' wUhout a word. \Vhen it came to the question of papers, slie put ' S.P.' (sans papicrs), and the business was settled. But her face and manner became keen and eager when she asked him for a month's rent, eighteea francs, in advance ; and this given, she was perfectly satisfied. ■ fihe took a particular key from a board adorned with almost as many keys as a pianoforte, and went j>antiiig up the winding stone staircase to show the new lodger to his room. The odours ni)on that greasy stair were almost unendin-able to the young man whose noatVils still remembered the fiesh, sweet air of fields and hedgerows, the salt breath of the sea. lie felt that life must be terrible in such a den. But he need come there only for the night's rest, he argued with himself. He would have the whole of Paris for his dwelling-place by day. A man must have a shelter wei'e it never so bad. And he had made up his mind to be sparing of good Father Bressant's cash. Poverty must not be over-nice. Madame Rigol panted on, getting more asthraatical with every stair, till she ojjened a door on the fifth story, and ushered the new lodger into a bare little whitewashed den, with an old wooden bedstead and the sparest provision in the way of furni- ture. But there was a stove, on which the portress put_ some stress, as indicating an excess of luxury, and there was a window through which the wintry stars were shining. Tiie room had not been occupied for some time, and felt cold and damp ; but there were no foul smells here, and ISIadame Ptigol volunteered to light a fire for the traveller, and even to make him some cofTee. The lad's handsome face and frank manner made her kindly disposed to him. She went downstairs to fetch materials for fire and coffee while Sebastien surveyed the dark outside world from the window. Lamps fjdimmered here and there in the darkness below. lie saw the external boulevard yonder— a long gray line— a,nd beyond lay tliat dreary border-land of waste and squalor which in those days stretched between the outskirts of the town and the fortifications — that master-work of the Citizen Ktag's reign. masLer-work which had cost the king his popularity. It was a dismal quarter of the town. Yonder, folded in the shadows of night, lay the cemetery of Montmartre, the field of rest, Sdbastien could only distinguish the spot afar off by the (tarkness whicli brooded over the place of graves. She was lying under those shadows — that unhappy mother, the sinner, lost on earth, to be redeemed, he hoped, in heaven : for if a future state be needed for the good, how much more for the sinners — 48 Ishmael not for their punishment, but for their reclamation ? S^bastien thought of his dead mother to-night with deepest sadness. She had sinned; she had oulwaged her husband, the common lav of morality. Yet, in her first fall, might there not have been soma blame due elsewhere? His father was a hard man. There "vrere times when Sebastien had told himself that the master of Pen-Hoel had a stone instead of a heart. lie was tender enough, nevextheless, to the weak, self-indulgent second wife. He had grown senile in middle age, the slave of a selfish woman's feeble prettiness. Madame Rigol came in presently pufiing like a steam-engine, but beaming with good nature. She was of the college-bed- maker's temper, and liked a young bachelor, for whom she coul(l perform those small services which are rarely unremunerative. She explained to Sebastien as she lighted the fire and brewed the coffee that any service she rendei'ed him in this way would be a question apart. The rent was paid to the landlord ; that was a fixed sum ; no profit accrued to her therefrom. But if it were in arrear, by all the sacred names in the calendar, was not she (Madame Rigol) made to suffer ] As a stranger in Paria, perhaps Monsieur would like her to provide his breakfast every morning. It would be but a matter of a few sous. Sebastien thanked her, but declined the favour, * I shall have to live aa other workmen live,' he said, ' and I must go out at daybreak. I shall breakf;»st anyhow — anywhere.' She asked him what his trade was. * A mason,' he answered boldly. ' Monsieur is a gdcheur, no doubt ; he is too young, surely, «o be a limousinant,' ejaculated Madame, scrutinising him jharply. His hands were bronzed and roughened by an outdoor life, oroadened by a good deal of amateur carpentering, but they were not the hands of a stonemason. He had not the faintest notion what these technical distinc- tions meant, so he only nodded his head and knelt" down by the stove to warm his hands. ' There was a theatre somewhere hereabouts — the Escurial I ' he said. Madame Eigol threw up her hands. A theatre ! but yes, an altogether admirable theatre ; but it had failed three years ago. The manager had spent too much on his fairy spectacles, people said. And there had been lions, tigers, rope-dancers, a circus, what you will Pas de chance t The poor man was now at Clichy, and the Escurial had become a cafe'-chantant. ' Ah 1 ' Madame sighed, and stuck her arms akimbo, * the loveliest woman that ever walked those boards lived and * Siveet to the Soul, and Bealth to the Bones ' 49 died in this house. She had but one fault, tho p*or, dear Boul ! ' S^bastien bent his head lower over the little black stove, and said not a word. But when once Madame Rigol was fairlj launched on the flood of talk, she requiied no assistance to keef her going. ' Oh, but she was a lovely creature, a magnificent woman ! ' she exclaimed. 'A \iii\e passee, perhaps, when she came to this house. She had lived. She had occupied a palace in the wood beyond Passy. Her carriages, horses, diamonds, laces, cash- meres — splendid ! fit for a princess I And then there came a« end of all that. She was of a passionate nature, and wine maddened her. She quarrelled with a laillionaire — twio) millionaire — who adored her ; and when she came here she could not live without her little taste of cognac. It was a slow poison, and I saw her die by inches.' ' What became of her maid \ ' asked S^bastien. ' What, you knew them ? ' exclaimed the portress. 'She must have had some kind of servant,' answered Sdbastien, neither admitting nor denying. 'Naturally. She had a companion — a servant, if you will — LJuette Fontaine. Lisette acted souhrettes at the Escurial. She was the delight of all the gamins in the faubourg. They called after her as she walked along the street. That is popularity, mark you. She left this house soon after Madame's death, and took a smarter lodging nearer the theatre, and afterwards she went to the new theatre at Belleville.' 'Is she there now, do you suppose V asked Sebastien, eagerly. lie would have given a great deal to see Lisette — not altogether a perfect woman, perhaps. But she had been almost his only friend in those sad early days which ended in the gloom of death within these walls. ' No. She left the theatre a year ago. Some say that she married a clcarcutier in the quarter, otlieis that she eloped with a nobleman. ' I have never been able to fiiid out what became of her.' Sebastien left his coffee-pot on the stove, and went out into the streets to buy himself some supper. He would not be treated like a fine gentleman by Madame Rigol. He wanted to cater for himself, and rough it like the commonest labourer in Paris. That rough begmui ng was a feature in the programme of all those successful careeis which he had heard of. It was growing late, but there were shops still open in this squalid qnarter^a wine shop among others, which was also an ordinary at which workmen dined oil' a substantial meal of soup and meat, with bread included, for seven sous. S^ba^tien — B CO Ishmael henceforth Ishmael — went into this little eating and drinking house, and took a supper of bread and cheese while he listened to the conversation round him. Presently he ventured to talk to some workmen who were smoking and drinking cheap red wine at the table where he sat. Could they tell him anything about the masons of Paris ? Where could a man get work I 'Are you a skilled mason 1 ' asked one of them. * No ; but I am strong, and I am not afraid of work.' ' That means you have never handled a hammer in your life, said the man, inclined to sneer. ' You may get employment as a bricldayer's labourer, perhaps, to hand the bricks or to mix mortar — gdcheur or gur^on they call him. A gari^on earns aa much as three francs a day. But even that is difficult for -a stranger.' ' I am not afraid of difficulty,' answered IshmaeL The man told him where to look for work; and he was out next morning at daybreak, visiting all the new constructions of the quarter. It was not till he had wandered as far aa BelleviUe that he got a promise of employment. There were hands enough for the job at present ; but the foreman liked the look of the young stranger's broad shoulders, and he should take the place of the first guckeiir who chose to chomer. Ishmael waited about all day, looking at the work going on, and familiarising himself with the duties of a gdclieur. lie dined on the ordinaire at the little wine shop, sitting at the saa\e table as before, and beginning to feel accustomed to the place. It was not so teirible an ordeal to him to descend into this lower grade, as it must have been to a spoiled favoui-ite of fortune. He had associated with peasants in his own home ; but these Parisian workmen seemed to him creatures of a coarser clay. They were infinitely cleverer ; but their clever- ness was unlioly, devilish. They believed in nothing — neither in the goodness of God nor of man. They scotfed at all sacred thjngs in the past and the present. Political feeling ran high. The Republic was not Republican enough to please the majority. There were a few Bonapartista who would like to see the old Imperial eagle spread his winga over the greater part of the civilised world once more — who wanted the wars of Italy and Egypt, Germany and Spain over again. But these were in a weak minority. There were malcontents who had never forgiven the closing of the national workshops ; others who abused Louis Blanc for having promised a millennium which he was unable to realise. * Charlaians all,' said one. ' What can these white-handed gentry know of the rights of labour 1 Working men will never be propeily governed till a working-man is President.' * Sweet to the Sotd, and Health to the Bones* 51 'Down with- Presidents! What do we want with a President 1 ' cried another, growing husky over his quart of wine at twelve sous and his garlic sausage. ' Your Piesident is only a monarch in disguise. He is a leech who sucks tho blood of the working-man. To-day his ministers modestly ask for two million francs out of the public purse — to-morrow they will ask twice as much. A few years ago he was an adventurer in America, dependent upon Louis Philippe's bounty ; after that a prisoner at Ham ; and then a gentleman at large in the streets of London, waiting upon fortune. And now he and his friends — Morny and Fialin, soi-disant Persigny — have all the trump cards in their hands. He has the army at his orders — can shoot us all down whenever the fancy seizes him. The Government of Prance should be a great confederation of working-men — a small minority of men who work with their brains^ an enormous majority of men who work with their hands — every man to have a direct influence upon the legis- lature, every man ' ' If there were no Court, the higher branches of trade would stagnate,' said a cabinet-maker. ' Whether it is at the Elysee, or the Tuileries, we must have a Court. They say that, if the Prince- President were Emperor, and had things his own way, trade would be better than it has been since the time of Louis XIV.' This provoked unanimous derision. It was the bourgeoisie who had a hankering for the glitter and swagger of an empire, not the working classes. What they wanted was trade union, otherwise trade despotism, international societies, syndicates, co-operation, the power to dictate terms to their employers. Sebastien, otherwise Ishmael, sat still and heard everythino-. His eager, receptive intellect caught the spirit of the present moment, steeped itself in the surrounding atmosphere. He was of good blood, bore an ancient name ; but pride of race had shown itself to him on its darker side. He was ready to be as much a leveller as the strongest Democrat there. He listened and believed the worst that was said against the man who held the reins of the state chariot — always a hated personage witli one particular section of the Parisian world. He, who had nothing to look to but labour to win him a place in the world, friends, fortune, fame, was ready to exalt the nobility of labour, to assert the rights of the working-man as against heaven-bom generals and senators paid by the state. Ishmael was on the ground at Belleville at six o'clock next morning ; and before ten he was taken on to the works in the capacity of a gdcheur, the foreman instructing him in the rudi- mentary arts of that office. The Pai'isian workman is given to chomage, rarely works more than four days a week, and a 52 Ishmael vacancy of llils kind is not long in arising. Thoa, before he had been three days in the great city, Scbastien found himself in the way of earning his bread. He was to be paid two francs and a half a day for his labour, and he was to give one franc out of the two and a half to the foreman for his bounty in taking on an untried hand, a youth without recommendation or papers. But the gain of thirty sous a day was a solid fact, and Sebastien felt that he had passed the first mile-post on the long high-road that leads to fortune. Had he come to Paris crowned with laurels from a provincial university, rich in medixls and diplomas, the writer of a prize poem, the discoverer of a new phmet, tlie inventor of a new mode of locomotion, charged with science or poetry as with the electric current — in a word, a genius, he would inevitably have Bpent the first few yeai's of his city life in rags and starvation ; perhaps to end his days untimely by a few sous' worth of charcoal, or a leap from one of the bridges. But as he was passing ignorant, and brought only his youth, hia strength, and the cunning of liis hands to the great labour market, he obtained employment immediately. He not only found a place in the mighty wheel, but he kept it. He was sober where other men were given to drink — he was earnest, patient, industrious, ambitious, among m^ who, for the most part, were idle Jiuneurs on the boulevard, or loungers in the street — for the Boulevard de la Chapefle and the Passage Mdnilmnntant have their idlers as well as the Boulevard des Capucines, or the Place de la Madeleine. He was scoffed at for his virtues, suspected for his superior air and manners, his reserve as to his antecedents. He was called Mouchard, Orleanist, Chonan in disguise ; but he held his peace and went his way, offending no one, yet with a look of reserved force whiuh indic-ited that it wei-e not over-safe to be offensive to him. To the fellow-workmen who were inclined to be friendly he was civil, listened to their wrongs and discussed their claims and the privileges for which they clamoured. Little by little he caught the tone of his surroundings, and was almost as Parisian as his companions ; but he never sank to tlieir level. Instinctively, without a hint from the man himself — save that implied in the name which he bore — they penetrated the secret of his existence. He was a gentleman by birth, the cast-off son of a noble father. They called him the marquis, not in derision, for at nineteen he had the tone of a man born to be the leader of men. He did not long remain a gdcheur, condemned to stir lime and sand in a smoking heap. He showed himself skilful enough to be set to better work before he had been three weeks in the employment of the Belleville builder. The work upon * Sioc&t to the Soul, ami Health to tlic Bones ' 53 which he was engaged wa.g the erection of a block of workmen's houses, tho beginning of a p:;ighty boulevard, great white stone mansions rising gigantic from the midst of a broad plateau, fringed on the further side by the squalid courts and alleys of INIenilmontant ; wooden sheds, housns of plaster and canvas, the d,ens and lairs of abject poverty and reckless crime — seething boil-pot of want, vice, disease, misery, into which the police made an occasional raid in pursuit of some arch-ofi'euder at peril of their lives. The builder was not slow to notice a youth who would work, who worked as if his muscular arm delighted in its labour, as if the choral swing of the hammer were to him as the melody of a bridal song. He picked Sebastien out from the ruck, heard his Btory — hypothetical story — from tho foreman, and observed him afterwards with a keener interest. After all, there is something in good blood, and when a gentleman does take it into his head to work, Jacques Bonhomme is handicapped against him. This was what the builder said to himself as he watched the muscular form — straight, slim, and tall — the finely-shaped head so loftily posed upon the neck of a young Alcides, the clearly-cut yet massive features, marked brows, aquiline nose, falcon eye, a mouth firm as if moulded out of marble. No common workman this, assuredly, and yet he lived as the other men lived, went to his seven-sous ordinary, or his tapis franc, after his work, and had a nest high up in one of those dreary barracks yonder, near the new hospital, which had been built with the bequest of a benevolent lady, by name Laborissiure. One of Sebastien's first acts on finding himself in the way of earning his bread was to send Father Bressant the bulk of his money. There was a deficiency of two louis and a half for the month's rent and the expenses of the journey, but this sum Sebastien meant to make good out of his savings before he waa many months older. Life is passing cheap in a gi-eat city to vigorous, temperate, Felf-denying youth. Nasmyth, a young man reared in the comfort and <-le2:ance of a successful artist's household, had the courage to live the first year of his London life upon ten shillings a week — a voluntary sacrifice to the spirit of manly independence, since larger means were well within his reach — and, in so doing, set an example to industrioua youth which should endure for all time — a nobler thing than even the hammer wljjch made his name for ever famous. And Sebastien Cai-adec had the Nasmyth temper, the love of mechanical work for its own sake, the eye and the hand of thp anist in stoue or in iron. CHAPTER VI 'the end of that mirth is heaviness* Time oxit of mind the Faubourg St.-Aiitoiue lias been the quarter of furniture dealers and furniture makers. Of late years there has been an invasion of German workmeu in the quarter, to the detriment of native talent; but in 1850 the ebcnistes of Paria ■were, for the most part, Frenchmen who had succeeded to the pi'imitive and scarcely improved tools of Boule and his sons. Here and there, even in these latter days, a native of P;ms holds Lis own against the thrifty hard-working and hard-living square heads, and, by the delicacy of his workmanship and the grace of his designs, demonstrates that the glory of the French eMniste, the artist-artizan, whose work was once renowned all the civilized world over, has not utterly departed. Such an one was Pere Lemoine, a man well on in his seventh decade, more or less of a drunkard always, and betimes an idler, but an artist to the tips of his finger nails. Had P5re Lemoine abjured the bottle and worked steadily in the yeara that were gone, he would have occupied a very different lodging from that wretched gi-ound-lloor den looking into the yard of a huge ban'ack-like pile between a patch of waste land and a little cluster of filthy courts and alleys, the remnants of a ])ast age — alleys that had seen the fall of the Bastille and the days of the Red Terror ; alleys in wliich the glorious memories of July were still fresh, and which had sent forth their contingent of revolt in '32 and in '48. Ptire Lemoine might have been at tlie top of the tree, an illustrious ornament to the fm-niture trade, said the dealers and the middle-men who knew the man and his work. But for that man who will oniy work when driven by absolute ■want, who loves not his art for its own sake, and who would rather wallow among a herd of other wallowers in some low drinking cellar than sit beside the cheery hearth of a prosperous liome, there is no hope. Upon the downward path which that man treads there is no end but the pauper's grave. Pure Lemoine might have been a master in the trade, and he ■was a slave — a rich man, and he w^as a beggar ; but he had taken his own way of living, and he was wont in his cups to defend his choice between the two great high roads of life. Well, he would argue, he was as poor as Job. There were men with not a tithe of his talent who had made fortunes; but what would you ? — it! was not his nature to be a drudge. Tlie man ' The End of that Mirth is Heaviness ' 65 who makes a fortune by his trade is yonr stolid, mindlesa mechanic, your mere machine of a man, your sordid plodder, who never shares a measure of vitriol or a litre of little-blue with a friend, or takes a night's pleasure — a fish-blooded creature, content to starve and pinch himself and his family, and to toil early and late for thirty years or so in order to be rich at the dull end of his dreary life, when such poor senses as he possessed at the beginning are half-dead within him. ' I don't envy such a slave his frock-coat and his fine house at Asnieres, or his money in the funds,' exclaimed Pere Lemoiue contemptuously, lolling over the stained old marble table at his favourite brasserie, ' The Faithful Pig.' ' A man who has not enjoyed friendship, good company, a song or a dance, good wine, and his polichinelle of cognac now and then at a merry rendezvous like this — such a man, I say, has never lived. Nom d'un caniche I what should I do with a frock-coat or a villa in the suburbs ? I detest the country, and I love to take my ease in my blouse and my slippers. I have worn a frock- coat in my day — I who talk to you ; and I tell you that the day is not far distant when we shall all wear blouses, when there will be no more fine gentlemen, and the fi'ock-coat will go the way of red heels and hair powder — to the gutter, to the rag- heap, with all such trumpery ! There is no true nobility but in the ma,n himself. Thews, sinews, heart, brains — there is your only patent of rank.' Not much nobility in the speaker sprawling across the table in that low den of 'The Faithful Pig' — an inner and sacred apartment devoted exclusively to regular customers. And such customers ! There were men in dubious linen and sham jewellery, tawdry, fine, audacious, whose only trade was iniquity. There were girls still in the very dawn of girlhood, yet steeped to the lips in the knowledge of evil, hovering near the crowded tables and exchanging infamous jests with the drinkers: shabby finery, slipshod feet, glassy eyes, a hectic flush upon hollow cheeks — the livery of vice, the stamp of early death ; and amidst the Babel of voices, the crescendo of oaths, the reek of coarse tobacco and coarser spirits, there sounded the melancholy strains of a cracked tenor, as an old cahotin, at a table in the corner — thirty years ago a famous opera-singer and spoilt darling of duchesses — sang a sentimental ballad about the old house at home and the mother's grave to a little circle of half- tipsy amateurs. The fouler the atmosphere, the viler the place and the people, the more certain was the success of that plaintive ditty. "The old cahotin had lived upon it for the last seven years, ever since he left off trying to exist res})ectably as a teacher of singing — coureur da cachets — in the Faubourg St.-Germain. 66 Ishmael It was in this low haunt that the troHeur spent his evenings — for hira veritable nodes ambrosiann. After all, the atmo- Bphere of man's happiness does not depend upon the laws of abstract beauty, or who would not set sail for the spicy isles of the Indian Ocean, or the silent forests beside the Amazon 1 A man's idea of hajipiness is the life which suits him best ; and to drink, and talk, and laugh, and denounce the powers that be in a low tavern was Pere Lemoine's ideal existence. He came to 'The Faithful Pig' wMth alacrity every evening, in fair weather or foul. He left late in the night with fond regret. There were nights, indeed, when he never left at all, but lay all his length among the sawdust beside the pewter counter, ciivant son via, till the cold, gray dawn stared at him through the holes in the shutter, and the gar^on came, sleepy and unwashed, to open the windows and broom away the traces of last night's orgy- Pere Lemoine, taking his life thus easily, had never yet been able to extricate himself from the clutches of the middle-man. He worked as he liked, when he liked, in his own den. Wheu he had finished a jiiece of furniture — cabinet, escritoire, honheur dujour, as the case might be — he summoned his agent and ally, an Auvergnat, known in Parisian slang as a charabia, who jiut the article on his truck ar.d carried it round to the furniture dealers, to di.*;pose of it for the best price he could get ; and then there was ])layed, over and over again, a neat little comedy in three acts, wherein the trolleur enacted the pigeon and the charabia the hawk — a little plot so transjxarent that old Lemoine, who was no fool, must have seen through it after very few repetitions ; only it suited his temper better to be duped over and over again, to be the prey of an ignorant peasant who had l>egun life as a shoeblack on the Boulevard du Temple, than to work hard and live temperately. The first act of the comedy consisted of two scenes. Scenfc 1, the departure of the charabia in the morning with the piect of furniture, cheery, jocund, full of hope ; scene 2, the return ot that faithful Auvergnat at eventide, gloomy and despairing. The furniture trade is going to the dogs, he declares. France is on the eve of a revolution, and people are afraid to furnist houses -which may be consumed in the general bonfire next week. He has hawked that escritoire, a masterpiece, all ovei Paris, and not a dealer would bid for it. End of act i. Act ii. consists of a single scene : return of the charabia three days after to say that he has found a dealer who will give just half the price Lemoine has asked for that escritoire. Lemoine, in low water, but not quite run dry, declines. Act iii. occurs a, week later. By this time Lemoine haa *The End of that Mirth is Heaviness* 57 exchanged his last sous for cheap cognac, alias vitriol, and is an easy prey for the Auvergnian hawk. The benevolent ckarahia comes to offer a kindness. He is only a poor messenger, o. hewer of wood and a carrier of water; he cannot pay as the rich merchant would pay, he does not want the furniture at all, and if he offers anything for it, he does so out of pure good nature, to oblige his employer. He will not offer as little as that miserly dealer in the Rue Vivienne, a man who has half the nobility for his customers ; no, he will give ten per cent, more than that Harpagon offered. Lemoine, languishing for more vitriol and the intellectual society of ' The Faithful Fig,' accepts the offer, parts with his handiwork for half its value, and thus affords the charahia the opportunity of growin:> /ich and blossoming some day into a prosperous furniture-dealer in the Faubourg St.-Antoine. Naturally, this little comedy cannot be played too fre- qiiently. The charahia must sometimes perform his commissioa with aj^proximate fidelity. But the game may be played a good many times in the course of a year with such a man as P5re Ijemoine, whose alcoholised brain has long lost the capacity for remembering the details of a year's existence. ' Vogm la galere ' is the drunkard's motto. The Lemoines, husband and wife, had lived in that ground- floor den in the rue Sombreuil for nearly forty years. The house had been built not long after the Terror, while the fail of the old fortress prison-house yonder was yet green in the memory of those who watched the barrack-like pile rising from the dreari- ness of a level waste. Pere Lemoine couid ]ust remember the wreck of the Bastille. The roar of cannon and the cries of a maddened crowd were the earliest sounds he could recall as he looked backward along the cloudy avenue of the past. The picture of those days wlien he was a barefooted little galopin at his father's knees seemed far more vivid than that of ten years ago. He was a married man and a father long before the Revolution of July, 1830, which drove Charles X. into exile and gave France her Citizen King. He and his wife were among the crcTrd at the review on the Boulevard du Temple, when Fieschi's infernal machine exjiloded and Marshal Mortier fell dead by the side of his king. There was nothing that Pere Lemoine remembered in his life better than the building of the Rue Sombreuil. He had played as a barefooted gamin among the builder's rubbish, the stone-dust and shavings, had "watched the carpenters at work and the gdcheur mixing his mortar, had seen the tall white houses rise stone by stone out of the ground. His -father was an eb6iiste like himself, working independently at hia ov/n 58 Ishmael goodwill, just as Pere Lemoine worked now ; and as soon as the boy was old enough to hold hammer or chisel, he began to learn his father's trade. There was an elder brother, a soldier, following the fortunes of the First Consul, and there was a sister who woi'ked at a great military outfitter's in the Faubourg du Temple, and who came home at night with arms and fingers aching after ten hours' stitching at serge coats and trousers. It was a great epoch for the Lemoine family when they moA'ed into the ground-tloor rooms on the south side of the big white house. It was all so clean, so white, so dazzling, such a contrast to the narrow alley from which they emerged — a dark- some passage where all the houses looked as if they were on the point of falling into each other's anus, a passage steeped in the foulness of centuries, reeking with indescribable odours. In this new white barrack all the sanitary conditions were as vile as they could be, no one knowing or caring about sanitation in those days. But the house was new, and foul odours had not had time to grow. The Lemoines were prosperous in those early days of Con- sulate and Em]iiie, prosperous because industrious and tem- perate. Pierre's father was a first-rate workman, and although it pleased him to be independent and to supply the dealers at his own pleasure, he was regular in his habits, and turned out plenty of work in the year. At twenty young Lemoine married a neighbour's daughter, and took his wife home to the family nest. There was a slip of a room off the living room, which did well enough for the j'oung couple. The elder brother was otherwise accomraoilated far off in a foreign grave. He liad fallen at Auer.stadt, and his sword and a smoky wreath of immortelles hanging above the chimneypiece, amidst Mere Lemoine's battet'ie de cuisine, were the only tokens left of his existence. The mother owed her dead boy's sword to the thoughtful kindness of a young ofiicer, who had since that time trodden the same dark road, and found a grave on the great highway to Russia. When the Citizen King came to rule over his loving subjects, P^re et Mtjre Lemoine the elder were both dead, and Pierre and his wife lived in the liue Sombreuil with their only child, a pale, graceful girl ot nineteen, with large violet eyes, and chestnut hair which was the admiration of all the gossips in the neigh- bouiliood. Pierre and his wife were known &s phe et m^re, and the last generation was forgotten. Mere Lemoine and her daughter did not get on very happily together. The mother was a pffl'son of fretful dis].>osition, given to tears, and not innocent of a liking for wine and spirits. She • 'fhe End of that Mirth is Heaviness ' 59 was not a confirmed drunkard in those days, but was just beginning a system of secret tippling which must inevitably lead to a bad end. Jeanneton, the daughter, was fond of !)leasure, and somewhat vain of her pale, fair prettiness, which lad won her too many outspoken compliments from students and clerks as she went to her work across the river yonder, in the Quartier Latin, a dangerous neighbourhood for youth and beauty in those days. Pore Lemoine had ajiprenticed his daughter to a clear- starcher in a good way of business in a dull, shabby street near the Rue de Fleurus ; but dull and shabby as the street was, it boasted one of the most popular restauiants in the students' quarter, a house called ' The Pantagruel,' in which all the quick- witted dare-devils of the Sorbonne and the Maison Dieu loved to assemble, and where they made and unmade dynasties and governments, or fancied they did, which was almost the same thing. At first Jeanneton rebelled sorely against her apprenticeship to the art of clear-starching ; it was killing, cruel, abominable, she told her parents. There was no other trade in all Paris that would have been so hateful. It was spirit-breaking drudgery to stand stoojung over an ironing-board all day iron- ing shirt-fronts and golfering frills. In 1832 the frilled shirt- front was not yet altogether ex])loded. There were elderly gentlemen who still wore those decorations. The whole busi- ness was distasteful to Jennneton. She complained of the heat of the stoves, the weight of tlie irons, the smell of the starch ; and she came home of an evening white as the shirts she had ironed, and dissolved into tears at the Kast word of reproach. Her appetite was wretclied. Moved b^' the^-e complaints, Jlcre Lemoine herself began to make a trouble of her daughter's avocation, and had more than one violent quarrel with her husband on the subject. P6ie Lomoine was well started upon the downward course by this time, and spent half his earnings upon cheap brandy. The girl was d3'ing by inclies, Mtre Lemoine told her husband ; it was a blackamoor's slavery to which he had sold her yonder, and they were not a penny the richer for her sulfering.s. ' Pei'hiips you would I'ather i-he wei'e in the stieets,' growled Lemoine, who thought cleiir-starching a genteel ti-aJe, and that be had done very well for his daughter when he got her accepted •-ts pupil of Madame Eebciiue, at the sign of the ' Garden of Eden,' witliout a sous of premium. AVhen she had worked for INladame a year gratis, she was to receive twelve francs a week, which was to be increased six months afterwards to eighteen. At the outfitters in the Faubourg du Temple his sister had 60 Ishmael never earned more tlian two francs a day, toiling early and late ; and the stooping over her work all day had given her a chest complaint, which carried her to Pere Lachai.se before she was thirty. Lemoine would hear of no complainings. He was not a duke, or a millionaire, he protested savagely, but an honest mechanic, and his daughter must work as he worked ; which comparison, seeing that Pere Lemoine seldom laboured more than three days out of the seven, hardly bore upon the case of a girl who had to go to her work every morning except Sunday at six o'clock, and was seldom free to come home till seven. The tears and sullen looks went on for about six months. Then came a change : smiles, alacrity, a more careful toilet, the poor little cotton gown and grisette's muslin cap adjusted aa jauntily as if they had been the satin and leghorn of a countess. Tlie mother and father heard the girl singing as she went to her work in the cold early morning, long before they thought of leaving their dingy pallets. ' She has got the better of all that nonsense, and is growing fond of her trade,' said P5re Lemoine. ' See how wise we were not to listeu to her rigmaroles ! That is the only way to manage a girl of her age. They are as full of fancies as the great ham fair is full of mountebanks and pickpockets.' After this period of joyousness and alacrity there came another change. Jeanneton was gay and sad by turns — to-day in tears, to-morrow full of wild spirits, laughing, chattering at the humble supper table, cheeks flushed, eyes flashing. At such times she looked her handsomest, and Mere Lemoine sighed to think so much beauty was being wasted in a clear stai'cher's workshop. Neither father nor mother was thoughtful enough or careful enough to read all these signs and tokens, which would have had a very clear significance for wise and loviijg parents. Neither of them ever thought of following Jeanneton to her work, or asking any questions of Madame Eebeque. There had been no com- plaints ; therefore, it might be supposed the girl did her duty. She left home at the same hour every morning ; and if she had taken to being much later at night, it was because there waa overtime work to be done, for which she was paid liberally, in proof of which there were the four or five francs she handed her mother at the end of the week. One bright spring morning Jeanneton left the Rue Sombreuil at the usual hour, carrying all her wardrobe neatly packed in a birge red cotton handkerchief. Neither father nor mother was astir to see her depart, and it was late in the forenoon that Mere Lemoine, by no means a notable housewife, went into the • The End of that Mirth is Heaviness ' 61 darksome closet whei-e the girl slept to give a stroke of the broom, and discovered a little bit of a note pimied on to the patchwork counterpane : — ' I am going away with the man of my choice for good fortune or eviL Don't fret about me, poor old mother. I should have died at that odious laundry business if it had not been for my Rend. I shall come back some day, perhaps, a lady, in a bonnet and an Indian shawl, and then you and the father will be pleased with me. If ever my Een^ is rich, I will send you money. God bless and keep you, poor little mother ! Rene is a follower of a person called Voltaire, and says there is no God, and that we are all fools to believe in justice and mercy up in the skies, where there are only the stars and millions of miles of empty space. But I like to think there is Someone up there above all those dear little stars. Adieu, and forgive your poor Jeanneton.' The damsel's parents were as furious as if they had guarded and treasured this one daughter as the apple of their eye. Not Shylock himself stormed and chafed worse at the elopement of Jessica, albeit she carried off good store of ducata to her lover, thai) Pere Lemoine at Jeanneton's evanisliment. lie rushed off to Madame Eebuque, half stupefied and wholly savage with strong drink, to demand of her what she had done with his daughter. The laimdress treated his angry interrogations with the high baud. 'My faith, what do I know of your daughter? She is no affair of mine. It was for you and her mother to see that she conducted herself wisely. Name of a name ! she has been troublesome enough for the last three months : coming to her work late — alwayu wancuig to leave early for some excuse or otlier.' • Leave early ! ' echoed Pore Lemoine. ' Why, she has been working till ten o'clock at night, she told us. She brought ua the money she was paid for oveitime.' ' I pay for overtime ! What a farce ! ' cried the laundress. * If she has brought you money, it was for no overtime with me.' There was no more to be got out of Madame Eebeque, who did not want to say all she knew le=it the matter should be made troublesome to herself in any way. One more apprentice gone to the bad made no difference to her. It was the way that half of them went. What would you have ? Father Lemoine went out of the clear-starcher's shop sobei'ed, quieted, crestfallen. La Eebcque's black eyes and fiery-apple cheeks, grenadier bust and shoulders, bare arms set fiercely akimbo, had been too much for him. He went slowly along the shabby little street, and, halfway down, encountered 62 Ishmaet a band of noisy students, long-liaired, sallow, lanlf, with Byronfc collars and short ])ipes, issuing out of the Pantagruel, where they had been eating their midday breakfast merrily. Lemoine turned and followed them as they strolled off towards the Luxembourg. These were the wolves his poor lamb had met every day, and among such as these her seducer was doubtless to be met. ' Eeue ' — he was not likely to forget that name. He did not know that it was a name just then made popular by a famous poet, and therefore likely to be chosen as an alias by aspiring youth. The students had to pass Madame Rebeque's window, with its smart muslin curtains and hyacinths in dark blue glasses. A couple of them stopped in front of the window and peered inside. ' Take care that the JReboque does not see you looking after her chickens,' said a third. ' She is the kind of woman to throw a bowl of dirty water over you if she caught you peeping. You would not be the first to be so baptised.' ' I was looking for that pretty pdlotte, that little gentUle Jeanneton^ said the other. ' Lost time, my friend. The pdlotte has no eyes for any of us,' said the other. ' She is devoted to that unknown with the black moustachios, who breakfasts twice a week at the Pan- tagruel.' ' The Prince Rend. Ah, I know the gentleman. A regular lion of the Boulevard du Temple.' They passed on merrily, with much fooling as they went. Ptire Lemoine turned upon his heel. It seemed to him that these students had told him all they had to tell. They admired his daughter as one of the belles of Madame Reb^que'a establishment ; but Jeanneton's lover was not one of them. He felt in his trousers-pocket, and *ound a franc and a few sous, quite enough to warrant his entrance into a cafe restaurant such as the Pantagruel. He went in and took his seat in a dark little corner, where a blouse of dubious cleanliness would not offend the eye of customers of a superior class, notwithstanding which laudable delicacy, the waiter looked askance at Monsieur Lemoine's unshaven chin and greasy blue raiment. He ordered a bouillon and a fine champagne, otherwise best cognac. The tables were all deserted after the breakfast hour ; and he had the place to himself, which was exactly what he wanted. The waiter brought him his soup and the brandy bottle. He helped himself in a leisurely way, and then filled a second glass. * Let us chat a little,' he said, pointing to the glass, which the waiter accepted with a gracious bow. The lady of the • The End of that Mirth is Heaviness ^ 63 counter had gone to some obscure den in the background to eat her own breakfast, and there was no one to object to the waiter's hobnobbing with this very dubious-lool-cing customer. The big sandy cat, a well-known character, was prowling in a foi-est of table legs, picking up a savory morsel here and there, and rubbing herself against one of the legs as if in a vague ex- pression of gratitude to the universe in general. ' There is a gentleman who breakfasts here sometimes, the Prince Rend — a gentleman with a dark moustache ? ' ' Connu,' answered the man, sipi>iug the bright yellow spirit. * I have the honour to wait upon him.' ' Do you know who and what he is? ' ' There are wiser than I who would be glad to know that, answered the waiter, shrugging his shoulders. * He is not a student, and he is not a mechanic. He is pretty free with his money, whatever he is. Some take him for an author, or a poet — one of the new romantic school, which -wasjoliment hissed the other day at the Theatre Fran(;ais ; others say he is a nobleman in disguise. There was one who hinted that he is a thief, like Mandi'in, or Cartouche.' ' That man spoke the truth, whoever he was ! ' cried Pfere Lemoine savagely. ' He is a thief, this villain, for he has stolen my only daughter — as good a girl as ever lived — the staff and comfort of my life ; ' and here the ebpniste broke into a passion of sobs, burying his head in his folded arms upon the table of the Pantagruel. He went back to his hole in the Rue Sombreuil at nightfall, steeped in fiery liquor, having idled away the afternoon among the lowest brasseries in the Quartier Latin ; bat he made no further efFort to discover the true character of the persou known ■>a Prince Roue, or the fate of his oiUy d;iu;,diter, CHAPTER VII 'the crown of old men* TnnEE years and more had gone by since Jeanneton'a elopement, and it was Aiuaist — the season at which Paris is at its worst.and in which sultry period the Rue Sombreuil was a place to be avoided as carefully as the Jews' quarter in Rome or Frankfort. A heavy stagnant atmosphere of heat brooded over the Place de la Bastille and the Faubourg St.-Antoine, and hung like a ragged veil upon the cemetery yonder, and the wild crags and precipices of the stone quarries by the buttes Chaumont. The crowded population of the big house which the Lemoines inhabited existed as best they might upon the scanty allowance of fresh air which found its way into their rooms from the deep well on which their windows looked, or came down into the yard below for coolness. The very Uowers which here and thei-e decorated a window-sill languished in their eartlien pots. The very scarlet- runners drooped upon their strings. Only the foul smells flom'ished and fattened in this sickly, sufibcating August heat. An odour of stale cabbage and sour dish-water was in the very air men breathed. People talked of last year's awful visitation of cholera, and predicted a return of the scourge, gloating ghoul- like over the picture of greater horrors to come, a more terribla cup of atUiction to be drunk than the death-chalice of the year gone by. There had been a long drought, which promised well for the cornfields and the vineyards, but which was felt as an actual scourge in the crowded neighbourhoods of Paris — no welcome rain to wash the gutters, to flush the primitive sewers of that period, to cool the hot pavements, and splash with refreshing sound upon the stony roads. All was fiery and dry, as if Paris had been one huge furnace. Father Lemoine carried his cabinet work into the yard, and woiked just outside his den, using the window-sill as a shelf for his tools. The children came and stood about him as he worked^ and made their remarks upon the mysteries of his craft — his glue-pot, his chisels, his gouges, and fine little nails. But the work stood still a good many hours of every day, sometimes fot days together, with a piece of old sacking over it, while P6re Lemoine amused himself at * The Faithful Pig,' reading the news, playing dominoes, talking politics, grumbling against the new king and his miuistera. Paris had uatuially expected the « The Croion of Old Men * 65 toilienninm after the glorious days of July ; and tlie reign of the elected monarch had as yet fallen some way short of the Parisian idea of a millennium. The old faubourg of St.-Antoine, populous as an ant-hill, was the seething hot-bed of revolu- tionary feeling ; and men who drank in those historic wine-shops were more drunken with strong words than with strong wine. Lemoine, the trolleur, was an ardent politician in these days, a member of the society of the Eights of Man, and full of undisciplined eloquence about his own right to work as little and to drink as much as he liked. M^re Lemoine was not always at home iu this sultry weather. Her husband's earnings had been a diminishing quantity during the last year or so, not because he worked worse or was worse paid for his work, but because he worked less than of yore. Drunken habits were beginning to exercise their usual effect. He was idle and irregular in his life, worked with fury for a couple of days, and then left off for three, or worked like a demon for a morning, and spent the whole afternoon out of doors. M^re Lemoine found that she must do something for her own part to swell the family budget, or eke go very often without fricot, or a morsel of meat in the pot-au- feu. She had been educated in all the arts of fine laundry work, and to that kind of work she naturally returned. She went to Madame Rebfeque, and engaged herself to that person as ironer for four days a week ; the other two days would be Quite sufficient to devote to the menage in the Eue Sombreuil, which already left much to be desired in the way of purity, and fell far short of a Dutch interior in neatness and polish. At Madame Reb^que's the bereft mother heard various details of her daughter's lapse from good ways. How la pdlotte, as she was called in the laundry, had first been seen walking with a tall man in a frock-coat in the gardens of the Luxembourg ; how she had been observed to wear a blue bead necklace and a pair of real gold earrings ; and how she had been seen at a later period driving with the same man — a handsome man with a thick black moustache — in a fort^/ sous (hired carriage) ; how she was known to have gone to dances at the Pr^ Catalan ; how she had told Herminie, that stout girl in the blue cotton frock, that her lover was a nobleman's son, and that she had no cause to be ashamed of him. His family lived eit a ch&teau near Nlmes, and he was to take her to live there with thera. She was to live like a lady, learn to play the piano, and she was to wear silk gowns with gigot sleeves. All this Merte Lemoine heard from the workwomen. Madame Kebeque still pretended to have had no hint of her apprentice's danger. s 66 Ish7nael ' VVlio knows if the poor child was not telling the truth all the time ? She may be living as a lady in a grand chateau, and her husband may have made her promise to hold no communication with her parents,' said M^re Lemoine, who would fain have induced the laundry to look at the sunny side of the picture. The laundresses laughed aloud over their ironing-board. 'They all tell the same story, these fine gentlemen,' said one — ' a stern father, a grand chateau, the family name, impos- sible to make a marriage of inclination until the father dies, and then she will be mistress of the chateau and tout le trem- hlement. And most likely your fine gentleman is only a clerk at ninety francs a month, or a student in law or medicine, with a father keeping a shop somewhere in the provinces. It is only fools who believe such stories ; but the pdlotte was a born innocent — always moping by hei-self, or crying in corners, never taking kindly to her work or to our company. Such a girl is an easy prey for a scoundrel.' No one was able to tell Mere Lemoine anything more about the Prince Rene than that he was tall and good-looking, with a black moustache and a military walk. He had not been seen in the quarter since Jeanneton's elopement. And now it was more than three years since the girl's flight, and not a line had come from her to tell whether she was still among the living. ' She is dead, I hope,' said Jacques Lemoine, brutally ; but the mother still kept a tender corner in her heart for the girl, to whom she had not been over-kind when they two were together. It was the end of August, and the evening air was heavy with an impending thunderstorm. There had been many thunderstorms during that month of sultry weather, and the leaden-hued skies seemed charged with electricity. To-night, as M6re Lemoine walked home from her laundry, there was that terrible stillness which comes before the warring of tlie heavens. Lights were burning dimly in some of the windows of the Sombreuil barrack ; but the general impression of the courtyard as Mfere Lemoine went in through the archway was one of cavernous darkness. Her own room was dai ker still, and she had to grope upon the chimney-piece for matches and a tinder-box. While she was fumbling about among dirty brass candlesticks and saucepan lids, something stirred upon the hearth and startled her violently — something which she touched with her foot presently, •while her trembling hands struck a light. What was it — a dog, »The Crown of Old Men* 67 It was very Imnian. A wliite face looked up at her, passive, ghastly in the blvie liglit of the sulphur match. ' Mother ! ' came like a cry of pain from pale, quivering lips. *Mon Dieu !' cried the mother, falling on her knees beside that crouching figure, while the match fell and expired upon the cold hearth by which the wanderer squatted. ' My child Jeanneton, and alive ! ' ' Not very long to live, mother, or I should not be here to-night,' the hollow voice answered. It was not Jeanneton's old voice. Something told M6re Lemoine that it was the voice of one whose life was fading, just as the match had flickered out upon the hearth a moment before. ' No, no, fillette ; don't say that. Suppose there has been trouble — let that pass. Our hearts are not stone ; we know how to forgive. Wait while I strike another match. You ai-e tired and faint. There is a drop of wine in the cupboard, I dare say, and that will revive you.' The tinder-box flashed again ; another match was struck, and the candle lighted. The mother set it on the table, and then turned to look at her daughter, who still crouched on the hearth, with her head and shoiUders resting against the side of the chimney-piece. Alas ! what a change was there I La pdlotte, as they had called her at the laundry, had been once of a lily-like fairness. She had now a yellow tint, as of a face moulded out of wax. Her cheeks were hollow, her lips had a purple tinge ; her eyes had that awful lustre which tells of lung disease ; her shrunken hands were almost transparent, and the shoulders — the jX)or bent shoulders — and hollow chest indicated the extremity of weakness. ^ Pauverette,' sobbed the mother, lifting this vanishing creature in her arms, on her lap, as when she was a child of ten or eleven. Alas ! as light a burden now as in those earlier days. ' My pet, what has befallen you ? ' ' Only misery, mother ; the fate that befalls every womaai who puts her trust in an idle-r. No, I will not speak evil of him. It was Destiny more than he that was unkind. If the world were more just, men more merciful to each other, my life would have been different.' ' Tell me everything, chdrie ; fear not your poor old mother. The father will be home presently, and we will tell him any story you will ; but have no secrets from me.' ' I will not, mother,' she answered faintly. ' Oh, how good you are ! I thought you would thrust me out of doors — spurn me with your foot when you found me on your hearth. I wilj tell you by-aud-by — everything — but not yet.' 68 Ishnael The dry lips faltered as if the speaker was going to faint } then Mere Lemoine placed the girl in an old arm-cliair — a Voltaire — whicli the ibeniste occupied in his hours of leisure. She rushed to the cupboard and brought out a bottle with a remnant of -wine left from last night's supper — another bottle in a secret corner on the shelf above held a few spoonfuls of brandy. She mixed the two in a tumbler, and gave it to her daughter, who drank greedily. ' My mouth was parched,' she murmured, putting down the glass with her tremulous hand, while her mother brought out some fragments of charcuterie — the remains of an assiette assortie purchased for the morning's breakfast — odd pieces of pork and sausage. M6re Lemoine put these on the table with knife and fork, aa«l plate, and a loaf of bread. ' I have walked a long way since daybreak,' faltered Jean- neton 'The roads were hot and dusty — my feet burnt like fire. It was like walking on red-hot iron.' ' Where have you come from V ' Toulon,' answered the girl. ' Toulon ! What took you to Toulon ?' ' Fate ! Don't ask me anything to-night, mother. Let me have one night's rest under a roof — in a bed. I have not slept in one for nearly a month.' ' JMy poor child ! And the chateau near Nlmes, and the rich father ? ' ' What ! you heard of that ? ' ' Yes, I am at work with La Eebbque. Your father does not earn so much as of old ; one must help a little.' ' Poor mother ! Yes, the chateau, the noble father, the silk gowns, and carriages, and piano : the life that I was to lead far away. AD. lies, mother ; lies which only a baby or an idiot would believe. But that is past and gone. Mother, I have come to bring you trouble.'" ' Never mind the trouble. Eat something, my pet ; try to eat.' Jeanneton made an attempt, but those savoury morsels of pork had no flavour for her dry lips. The wine had comforted lier — she drained the glass — but she had no appetite — her throat seemed thick and swollen — she could with difficulty swallow two or three mouthfuls of bread. 'I am not hungry, mother ; I think I have got out of the way of eating. Come, let me show you something.' She rose with an agitated air, took up the candle, and led the way to that narrow closet of a chamber in which she Ivid slept as a girl — the room where she left the letter pinned on her coverlet on the morning of her fii-iht- *The Croion of Old Men' 69 Jeanneton leant over the bed and held the candle, shading the light with h«r too transparent hand. A child of two years old, with a shock of curly flaxen hair, was sleeping placidly on the tattered patchwork counterpane, wrapped in a ragged shawl • Yours V said the mother, and not another word. ' Mine,' answered the daughter. ' Will you take care of her, and bring her up as your own wlien I am gone V 'Oh, but you are not going to die,' remonstrated M6re Lemoine, kneeling down to caress the child. ' With a bed to sleep in and gootl food, you will soon get str'^ng again and recover your pretty looks. And — who knows? — jOu may find a kind husband yet who will provide a good home for you and this gamine here.' 'Don't talk nonsense, mother. You know and 1 know that I am dying. I have known as much for the last three months. It has been a slow death ; but the end is coming. Promise me not to send this little one to the Enfants Trouves. I could not rest in my grave if I thought she was to be sent there.' ' Never, my Jeanneton : I swear it.' * God bless you, mother, for that promise.' 'Perhaps her father may come to claim her some day,' suggested Mtjre Lemoine, dying with curiosity about her daughter's past now that she was recovering from the shock of the meeting. 'Never. He has other business in life than to claim his child. She must be your own, mother — yours only. And you will take care of her — watch her better than you watched me — you will be wise by exjjerience,' said Jeanneton with a hys- terical sob. She seemed half-sinking with fatigue ; she had walked fifteen miles under the burning August sky on the sun-baked roads, carrying her child the greater part of the way, obliged to stop to rest every half-hour or so by the roadside, in shade or sunlight. Her mother undressed lier, taking off the dusty raiment, which was tidier than might have been espaoted under the circumstances, and supplying a ragged old petticoat and camisole of her own for night-gear. And then Jeanneton sank wearily down upon the bed beside her baby girl, the b«d upon which she had slept lightly enough in days gone by. 'Oh, how sweet it is to be in a bed !' she murmuied ; 'and yet all my bones ache.' She was asleep in a few minutes, the child's head nestling against her bony shoulder, her wasted arm ; but her breathing »pas laboured, and she started every now and then in her sleep with a murmur of pain, 70 Ishmael Happily this was one of Pore Lemoiiie'a late nights. It was tweh^e o'clock when he came in from ' The Faithful Pig,' and he was too far gone to be told of Jeanneton's return. That must wait till next morning. When morning came poor Jeanneton was in no condition to plead her own cause with an offended father upon earth. Only the lieavenly Father of us all could understand the language which those dry lips babbled to-day in the delirium of high fever. The glassy eyes gazed upon Mere Lemoiiie and knew her not : they seemed to see things and people far away. The trolleur, in a sombre mood after last night's revelry, inclined to see life under the bhickest hue, was grimly pitiful of his daughter's dying state, and did not urge that she should be flung out of doors. But he spoke of her, even in her sick- nefis, with undisguised bitterness. This is what such creatures bring upon themselves when they forsake a good home and a loving father and mother to follow a villain. He was furious at the idea that his wife had sworn to rear the child — not to send her to the Enfants Trouvcs, the only natural home for such canaille. ' To the hospital she shall go,' he said, * before we are many hours older. Cr^ nom I is it not enough to have reared one vijjer ? Would you let another of the same brood warm itself in our bosoms to sting us by-and-by, when we are old and feeble ?— and this one has a villain's blood in her veins. From Toulon she came, vou say, that trash yonder 1 No doubt she has left her Rene there in the prison. That would be his natural end. To the hospital with that base-born brat? I shall take her there myself after dark.' His wife began to cry. What was she that such shame and misery should befall her 1 she demanded. An honest working woman, able to earn her pdtee as well as ever her husband earned his. She worked four days in the week, while he worked scarcely three, and half his earnings were spent at 'The Faithful Pig.' Suppose she chose to bring up her d3-ing daughtei-'s child ? She had a right to spend the few pence the child's maintenance would cost out of her wages at the laundry. And by-and-bj^, when she was old, the grand- daughter would be a help to her. She defied her husband, and bade him take the little one to the Foundling Hospital at his peril. If he did, she would make the faubourg ring with the story of his cruelty. She stormed with such vehemence that Jacques Lemoine was fain to sneak out of the house and repair to a little restaurant in the Rue de la Roquette, famous for its piecls de mouton roidette at seven sous, and its Bordeaux at twelve sous the litre, *The Crown of Old Men* 71 When he was gone Mfere Lemoine borrowed a pinch of tllleul from a neighbour and brewed a tisane for her sick daughter, which powerful remedy had, strange to say, no effect on the galloping pulse or dry, hard skin. The grandmother washed and dressed the child, and let her toddle about the livii>g-room, and even into the yard. She was a pretty little thing, as like what the mother was in her girlhood as the bud is like the flower, yet with a more exquisite delicacy of feature — pale, and with large blue eyes. She had a sorrowful look, as if the dreamy, half-unconscious first years of life had brought her few childish joys ; yet betimes the little face broke into smiles, and the wide blue eyes laughed merrily, as children's eyes do laugh, at the wonderland of childish fancies and dreams. She coukl talk a little after her baby fashion, and toddle about tli6 ard, pointing to rays of sunlight flickering on the wall, and erying, 'Pretty, pfetty,' enraptured with a kitten which graciously suffered the caress of her soft little arms. In the afternoon, the tismie having proved ineffectual, Mero Lemoine called one of her gossips in to look at her daugliter. The gossip opined that the poor young woman was in a desperate way, and recommended Madame Lemoine to fetch an apothecary whom she knew of in a street hard by. The apothecary was out when Mere Lemoine went in search of him, and it was not until nightfall that he came to look at Jeanneton. He knelt down beside the pallet, felt the sufferer's pulse, loc)ked at the large dim eyes, so bright yesterday, so dnll to-day. 'I can do nothing,' he said. 'She is sinking fast. You had better go for a priest at once. You should have called me sooner.' Mere Lemoine, in self-justification, told the circumstances of her daughter's home-coming. 'Poor thing ! To walk fifteen miles in her state was simple suicide. It could only be wonderful energy of mind which enabled her to accomi)lish it. Her case must have been hopeless a month ago — gallojjing consumption. Ptie Lemoine had been so disturbed by his wife's vehemence, that work was naturally impossible, and it was the usual mid- nio-ht hour when he came home, not drunk, but alluine, as he and his friends called it. He roared out an angry greeting as he crnsses and looking up at the sky. She had growTi up as a pagan in a Christian city, with the bells of Notre Dame ringing within earshot. She could do nothing useful for herself, or for other people, except cook and clean up a little, in her poor untaught way, for that wretched old man and his wife. She was a regular Cinderella, and there are no good fairies nowadays to come to Cinderella's relief. Paquerette had never heard the story of Cinderella, or she miglit have thought of her to-day as she sat gazing idly up at the sky while all the world was going forth to its pleasure. She liad MO hope of going any further than the yard, or of seeing any more of the sky than she saw now. Iler hands hung list- lessly at her sides ; her head leant wearily against the dirty stone wall behind her. She was slipshod, slovenly, with her hair rolled up in a loose knot that seemed too big for her head. She was sitting thus, hopeless, idle, unfriended, when the three young women — the demoiselles Benolt — came back from mass. This picture of forlorn girlhood struck them all three at once. ' That poor child I Just look at her ! I should like to massacre those wicked old people,' muttered Lisbeth, who always used strong language. ' She looks the picture of misery,' said Toinette, vdth a com- pasionate sigh. 'If we coidd only do anything to cheer her a little,' mur- mured Pauline. After all, the race of good fairies is not quite extinct. Thoy are human, the good fairies of the present, and their power is limited. They cannot tairn a melon into a Lord Mayor's coach ^6 tsJunaei or a lizard fnto a prize ft)Otman ; but there is much that caa hi done, if people will only do it, with the wand called charity. The good Samaritan who went out of his way and took soma trouble to help his fellow-creature is a grander ideal than Cinderella's fairy, who had the command of all "Wonderland, and never took any trouble at all. 'What a fine day, Paquerette ! Are not your old people going to take you out this afternoon 1 ' The girl shook her head. • They never go into the country, and grandmother never goes out till after dark,' she said piteously. ' What foolish people ! We are all going to Vincennes for a picnic. Have you ever been there t ' 'I have never been anywhere,' said Pdquerette, with a reproachful air. There was a kind of cruelty in asking her such a question. Surely they must know that she was never taken out for J;er pleasure. ' And you have never been to a picnic 1 ' asked Pauline. Paquerette answered dumbly, only by a shake of her head. The tears came into her eyes. Wliy did they tease her by such silly questions ? Why could they not take their pleasure and let her alone 1 The three girls lingered in the yard a few paces from Pdquerette, putting their heads together and whispering. ' We could lend her a gown and a cap,' said Pauline. ' It would not cost much to take her. Ten sous for the omnibus there ancl back. There is enough in the basket for all.' ' If Madame Morice would not 3iind,' speculated Toinette. ' Why should Madame Morice mind 1 The girl L-j well- behaved : she wiU interfere with nobody.' A little more whispering, and then Pauline, the youngest of these three lowly graces— she who had been the first to speak to Paquerette — went over to the lonely child and said : ' Would you like to go to Vincennes with us this afternoon ? We'll take you, if your people will let you go. I can [end you a gown. We are pretty much of a size, I think.' Paquerette started up from her rickety little stoiil crimson with wonder. 'You don't mean it ! ' she cried, clasping her hands. 'Oh, you couldn't be so kind ! ' ' Nonsense, child, it is no great matter,' answered Lisbeth, in her frank, loud voice, 'We shall be very glad to have you with as, poor little thing. Run and speak to your old people ; there is no time to be lost, and then come up to our )'oom. You know the way.' * She Streichcth out her Hand to the Poor' 81 •Oh, yes, Mademoiselle. I have not forgotten your goodnesa in teaching me to sew.' The three girls went indoors while Ptiquerette ran into the den where her grandfather was taking his cotfee at the table near the fireplace in his morning dress of shirt, trousers, and slippers. lie looked as if he had not washed or combed his liair for a v/eek ; but he was only saving himself up for a swimming-bath by the Pont Neuf, an indulgence which he generally gave himself on a Sunday afternoon. He was not quite so bad as he seemed. He lolled at ease in the dilapidated old Voltaire, his naked feet half out of his tattered old slippers, and reposing on a chair opposite. He sii:)ped his coffee and gazed dreamily at his work — a bonheur-du-jour in amboyna wood, richly inlaid — a work of art. The charahia was to come for it to-morrow morning, and take it about to the dealei'S till he got Pcre Lemoine his price, out of which Monsieur Charabia naturally took a handsome com- mission. There were about half a dozen hours' work still wante 1 for those finishing touches which would make the little bureau perfect, and that labour would most likely be put off till tl e very last. Pure Lemoine would dawdle away his Sabbath in luxurious idleness, and stroll homeward after midnight, trh hon-zig, to snatch two or three hours' feverish sleep, and then up and to work at earliest dawn, by the light of a tallow candle, so as to be ready for the Auvergnat. The coffee was good, the arlequiii suggested a dejeilner at the Rocher de Cancale, and the grandfather was amiably disposed to poor little Cinderella. 'Come and have your breakfast, child,' he said. 'I begaji to think you had taken the key of the fields.' 'I shouldn't know where to look for the fields if I had the key,' she answered ; and then she came round to the back of the old man's chair and leant over him. 'Grandfather,* the demoiselles Benoit have asked me to go to Vincennes with them this — afternoon — directly. May I go T The old man shrugged his shoulders and gave a long whistle, expressive of surprise. He knew of the three girls ov the fourth floor, and that they were very respectable young persons. He wondered that they should take any notice of such a ragamuffin as his granddaughter. 'Will it cost any money?' he asked, cautiously ; 'for if it will you can't go. The bag is empty — not a sous till the charahia gets me a price for my bureau yonder.' ' They did not -say anything about money. They offered to take me to a picnic, that was all ; and Mademoiselle Pauline will lend me one of her gowns.' 'One of her gowns ! What a duchess ! If I had two coats 52 Ishmacl one of them would be always au clou [with the pawnTDroker"}. "Well, you can go, child. If those girls are simple enough to pay for you, I see no objection to your having a day's pleasure. Your pocket will be empty ; so there is no chance of your being swindled by any of your co-operative dodges ; or else the word picnic has a sound I don't like. It means handing round a plats after dinner, and for every man to pay his scot.' ^ Bon jou7; ph'e,' cried Paquerette. She did not give the troUeur time to change his mind. She ran across the yard to the steep black staircase upon which the Eenolt apartment opened ; a terrible staircase in truth, an air- shaft for all insalubrious odours, a dark well whose greasy walls were thick with the grime of half a century, an atmosphere of infection, rank, sour, musty, tainted with every variety of foulness, animal vegetable, mineral. Paquerette was inured to such odours. She took bold of the greasy rope which hung against the slimy wall and served as a banister-rail, and ran lightly up the corkscrew stair, hustled by, or hustling, three or four blouses and one frock-coat who were hurrying down, eager to be off and away for their day's amuse- ment. The door on the fourth landing was open, and the demoiselles Benoit were waiting for her. 'Come, Paquerette, we want to catch the one o'clock omni- bus,' cried big Lisbeth ; and then the door was shut, and the three girls began their protegee's toilet. They meant to do the thing thoroughly, having once taken it in hand. Lisbeth was one of the most thorough-going young women in Paris, a workwoman such as there are few, and everything she did was done well and earnestly. She had trained the two young cousins in the same spirit. In the midst of poverty, surrounded by dirt, slovenliness, drunkenness, and all evil habits, they had kept their lives pure and clean ; and the place they inhabited was an oasis of purity in the murky old house. All three girls stood for r. minute or two looking at Pdque- rette as if slie had been a work of art. Was she pretty ? They hardly knew ; but they knew that she might be made to look gentille. There was an air of elegance in the slim, fragile figure, the swan-like throat, the slight droop of the head, which the Benott damsels, substantially built, felt rather than under- stood. But of that order of beauty which was appreciated iu the Faubourg St.-Antoine PAquerette had not a trace. The sparkling eyes, the beauU du diable, fresh complexion, girlish plumpness were not here. There was rather a look of sickli- ness a waxen pallor, and an attenuatinn whiL-h, froiu a cun . c>i- tioHRl point of view, was fatal to beauty. *Shc SirctcJiclh out her llau'l to tJic Poor' S'i Instructed by ber friends, Paquerette plunged ber bead and sboulders into £•, shallow wooden tub, and made sucb use of soaj) and water as sbe bad never done before, emerging flusbed and breatbless from tbis novel ordeal to scrub berself vigorously witb a larplauding the three couples, but with their e^-es on Ishmael and his partner ; and ' Hurrah ! ' echoed Ishmael, drawing his partner a little closer to his breast, light-hearted, elated, he scarce knew why. The other- two cou])les stopped breathless and panting, and stood .1 oof out of the little circle of sunburnt greensward ; but Ishmael and his partner waltzed on, unconscious that they were alone, unconscious of spectators, feeling like two birds with outspread wings hovering in a world of light and air, steeped in blue sky and sunshine, far above this common earth. When they at last came to a stop, the girl's head dropped upon her partner's shoulder in a sudden giddiness. It seemed to her as if they had swoopofl down from that blue, bright world, and that it was the shock of touching the earth again which made her senses reel and her sight grow dim. She recovered herself almost immediately, and released herself from Ishmael's supporting arm. ' Thank you,' she said naively. ' How delicious dancing ia ! ' • And how exquisitely you dance ! ' answered Ishmael, looking at hor with eyes which seemed to her to glow and dazzle like the sun-rays that meet on a burning glass. ^ As Snoiv m Smnmer' §0 'Please do not laugh at nie, Mousieur ; 1 never danced with any one in my life until to-day. I have danced by myself in the yaid sometimes when there was an organ ; but, of course, that is different.' * I am very glad of that,' said Ishmael. 'Glad of what?' * That I am the first partner you ever danced with. That makes a beginning in life, does it not ? — a kind of landmark. And now shall we go for a little walk ? You are breathless still. We must not dance any more just yet.' He offered his arm, through which she slipped her little ungloved hand after an instant or so of hesitation. She had never taken any man's arm before. Miranda, in her desert island, could hardly have been more innocent of the manners and ways of the outer world. Ishmael looked down at her wonderingly, admiringly. He had seen many more beautiful women since he had lived in Paris : the women at the theatres, for instance — dazzling, gorgeous creatures, with eyes that flashed liquid light, complexions of ivory or alabaster. He had seen aristocratic loveliness go by him in carriages — patrician beauty innocent of the actress's art ; for in those days ladies of rank had not taken to rouge and enamel. This slender thing, stealing a little upward glance at him now and then, tremu- lously, was splendid neither in form nor colour. Yet there was an aristocratic refinement in the almost too delicate features — the little nose so finely chiselleil, yet undecided between the Greek and the retrouss^, the small round chin sloping somewhat weakly at the base, and the pure half-tints of the pale com- plexion, the violet blue of the large dreamy eyes, with their long auburn lashes and i)encilled brows. No Joan of Arc or Agnes Sorel type of woman this, but rather of the Louise de la Vallifere mould — a woman to sin, her heart being tempter, and to be sorry for her sin for ever after. ' Paquerette,' murmtued Ishmael, thoughtfully, perceiving the relation between the white spring flower and this pale fragile prettiness ; ' were you christened Paquerette 1 ' 'I don't know,' she answered, cliildislily ; 'I don't remember.' ' Of course not,' he said, smiling at her simplicity ; ' one does not usually remember one's baptism. But have you no other name 1 ' 'Not that I know of . My grandfather once said that he called me Paquerette because I was such a poor white little thuig when he first took care of me.' ' And you have neither father nor motl>er living 1 * Neither,' sighed Paquerette 90 Ishnaet 'Can you remember your pareiit3, or did they boui die while you were a baby ? ' He was not questioning her out of idle curiosity, or with the idea of making conversation, while they strolled by the shabby, dusty trees in the people's much-trampled wood. He wanted to get rearer to this pale flower-like creature ; to know how this delicate spray could have shot forth from the rugged tree of hard-working humanity. ' I never saw either father or mother,' the girl answered, eadly. * I used to think till a year ago that my grandfather and his wife were my father and mother, only a good deal older than other girls' fathers and mothers. And then some one in the house — the old tinman on the filth floor, who lived there before I was born — told me that my mother died while she was young. She was very pretty, he said. He remembered her when she was smaller and younger than I am now. I asked him why she died so young, but he did not know. She went away, and then she came back with me, and then she died, and M'as buried among the poor people at Pfere Lachaise. There is no cross to tell where she lies. I have gone there sometimes on a Sunday afternoon, and walked about over the long grass imder which she is lying with so many otliers, all nameless. And after a few years the great common grave will be opened again, and more collins will be put in till it is full — the dead lying above and below each other in crowds, just as the living are crowded story above story in the big houses like ours.' ' It is hard,' said Ishmael, setting his teeth, for to this staunch Republican all inequalities of rank and wealth seemed liard, ' but it will not always be so. The living and the dead will have their rights by-and-by. The hewers of wood and di'awers of water will not always be flung into a common grave. I remember hearing something of a new law made last winter, which was to secure decent burial for the poor. And so you live with your grandfather and grandmother, Mademoiselle Paquerette,' be went on. ' I suppose they are very fond of your He fancied that the love of an old couple for an orphan grandchild must be something over and above the common love of parents — tenderer, more blindly indulgent. ' They are not always unkind,' Pdquerette answered, inno- jently. ' Not always. Are they ever unkind to you ?' * Sometimes. They are very poor. Grandfather works very hard — now and then. He makes beautiful things — bureaux or escritoires for the furniture-dealers. But he cannot always sell what he has made for a good price ; and then he gets uahappy ^ As Snoiu in Summer 91 flf'j \'(M'y niigry with grandmother and me. And tliey both li.i\e to take a good deal of wine and brandy for their rheu- matism : and when one is old that gets into one's head, and one does not know what one says or does.' ' I hope you never take wine or brandy, Mademoiselle Paquerette,' Ishmael said earnestly. ' They never give me any — they have none to spare,' the gir answeied with child-like simplicity ; ' and I hate the smell of the stuff. I have to fetch it for grandmother from the winesliop.' * I hope you will always hate it,' said Ishmael. ' Strong driwk is the curse of gi-eat cities. In Brittany nobody gets drunk ; we drink only cider. But there we are always in the fresh air — our brains are not dulled by the stifling atmosphere of small crowded rooms,' he continued, recalling that crowded wine-shop near his lodging where the men heated themselves and maddened themselves as they sat in the oven-like room, under the low blackened ceiling, drinking their coarse spirit and smoking their rank tobacco, and holding forth to one another with an eloquence that was ranker and coarser than potato brandy or cabbage-leaf tobacco, could Ishmael but have under- stood it aright. He had to explain to PAquerette where Brittany was, and what kind of a place. Her ignorance upon all possible subject'? was of the densest. The whole world outside the Faubouig St.-Antoine and Pfere Lachaise was a blank to her. The faubouig was her only idea of town, the cemetery her sole notion of country. She listened to Ishmael's description of his nativo province Avith eyes that grew wider and wider with wonderment. The sea, what was it like % And rocks, what were those ? Hills, valleys, orchards, windmills, river, willow- shaded, flocks of turkeys, processions of geese, broad stretches of yallow sand : everything had to be explained to her. Ishmael grew eloquent as he went on, full of enthusiasm for that dear land which he had left ; not for lack of love on his part, but because parental love was lacking there for him. He told Paquerette all about the village of Pen-Hoel and its surroundings, and his own wild, fi-ee life there ; but he never mentioned the name of the place, or the ch&teau, or uttered a word which could indicate that he had been anything higher than a peasant in Iiis native place. His past life was a profound secret, which he had no intention of revealing to any ont. His youth and its belongings were dead and buried, and he stood alone — a young Caesar who had just passed life's Rubicon, and had taken up arms against fate. By-and-by came more dancing, while the sun went down in a sky of crimson and gold behind a meagre avenue of shabby- limes, their spring foliage already tarnished with the dust of 9§ hhnad the cit}", and while umber shadows stole across the scattereo patches of scrubby wood and copse. Tlie old Savoyai-d hadl sent his dog round among the company with a hat in his mouth, and had been so satisfied with the result, that he was smiling over his barrel-organ, and grinding away with renewed energy, while his faithful mongrel sat beside him, wagging a poor stump of a tail, the moie ornamental half of which had been demolished piece by piece in various fights with other mongrels. Again Paquerette and Ishmael waltzed together to the old- fashioned 'Due de Reichstadt' waltz, which enjoyed a revival of popularity just now on the organs of Paris, as a delicate compliment to him who called the dead boy cousin. Again the fair small head reclined against the stone-mason's stalwart shoulder, and the strong arm sustained the girl's slim figure, so that her little feet seemed to skim rather than to tread the dusty turf. They were dancing still when Paquerette's friends began to urge the prudence of turning their faces homewards. Spring da,ys may be ever so delicious, but spring evenings are always chilly. A cold wind was creeping up from the unseen river, the last gleam of gold and red had faded in the west. The world was a misty gray world under silvery stars, that were just beginning to glitter in a cold gray sky. The baskets had been packed with empty plates and glasses ; the empty bottles — alias negroes — given as a perquisite to the old Savoyard. The day of rest and pleasure was over. Throughout the wood little parties of holiday folk were tramping homeward — fathers carrying sleepy children on their shoulders, mothers dragging babies in little chaise carts ; lovers with arms wreathed round maidenly waists ; here and there the red legs of a soldier striding towards the barrack ; everywhere departure save where, silent and stealthy in the darkness of copse or grassy hollow, some homeless wretch watched the departing multitude, hopeful of being able to pass a quiet night under the stars unassailed by the authorities of the city. Ishmael stopped reluctantly when the organ-grinder ground his last bar. He had danced many a waltz in the least disrepu- table dancing places of the workmen's quarter ; but never had he felt the very inspiration of the dance as he had felt it tct-day on the disadvantageous turf under the open sky. The has- tringues yonder, even the best of them, reeked with odours of cheap wine and brandy, and a vile decoction of wine and spices known as sang de boeuf. Their very atmosphere was poisoned by bad company and evil language. Ishmael had always left such places disgusted with himself for having been induced to enter them ; but to-day he had felt himself in respectable company ; he had heard not one foul word. He felt that he * As Snow in Summer' 03 would like to see more of his little partner of to-day, of those three candid-looking, decent girls, her companions. ' Your little friend dances exquisitely,' he said to big Lisbeth. • I think you must have taught her.' * Not I, indeed,' answered Lisbeth, laughing at his implied compliment, so evidently meant to conciliate. ' She has taught herself, poor little thing, skimming about the yard, like a bird or a butterfly. The only joy she has had in life, I believe, has been to dance to the sound of an organ when one has chanced to come our way, which has not been often.' ' She seems to have had a very unhappy childhood, poor little thing ! ' said Ishmael, walking beside Lisbeth as they made their way towards the point at which the party was to disperse. He had no intention of leaving the four girls at that point, but meant to offer them his escort to their home. 'The old trolleur and his wife are an ogre and ogress, answered Lisbeth, indignantly. 'Figure to yourself, then, Monsieur, this is the first day's pleasure that poor thing has ever known ; and if it were not for my cousin lending her a gown — but I ought not to speak of such things ; only when one is angry * ' You are right to feel angry. Poor child, poor child ! ' So even the neat pink cotton frock, the modest muslin cap, were borrowed plumage. Poor little Cinderella ! Hitherto Ishmael had believed his own unloved childhood to be altogether exceptional — a kind of martyrdom unknown before in the story of mankind. And here was this fragile girl, ever so much un- happier, steeped to the lips in squalid poverty, the drudge of a drunken old man and woman. The very thought of Fate's injustice towards this weakling made his blood boil. He looked down at the girl pityingly, tenderly almost, as he walked by hor side along the dusty road. So pale, so delicate, wan and wasted even, in the very springtime of life ! The bud had not unfolded into the blossom, and yet it was already faded. Such a faint snowdrop prettiness ! He had admired women before to-night, had dreamed more than one dream of the passing moment ; but he had never before been deeply interested in a woman's character, or a woman's fate. And Paquerette interested him both ways. He wanted to know^what kind of girl she was : he wanted to know all that could be known of her sad story. ' Let me see you home. Mademoiselle,' he said to Lisbeth, in whom he recognised the head of the Benoit family. ' Monsieur is very good. We thought of returning by the omnibus.' ' On such a lovely spring night ? The omnibuses will bo crowded to suflfocation. It will be an affair of waiting till mid- 04 Ishmaei night for places. Don't 3'ou think it would be much pleasanter to walk home 1 ' ' It is a long way,' said Lisbeth, pleased at the idea of saving so many sous ; ' but if the others are not too tired ' ' Not at all,' protested Toinette. ' The night air is so fresh, I could walk to Asnieres, or Bougival.' ' But Pdquerette, she has danced so much, she must be very tired,' said Pauline. ' Tired ! Oh, no, not in the least,' cried Paquerette. * It will be delicious to walk home ; although the omnibus was heavenly,' she added, gratefully remembering her first drive. So they all set out along the dusty road, which was less arid now under the cool softness of night. Paquerette found herself liancfing upon Ishmael's arm somehow, just as in their first dance she had seemed to glide unconsciously into his arms. He had taken the little hand in his and slipped it through his arm with an air of mastery which implied protection, friendship, shelter, the guardianship of the strong over the weak. He asked Paquerette no questions about herself or her life as they walked back to the Faubourg St.-Antoine. After the story he had heard briefly from Lisbeth Benolt, he felt that it would be almost cruelty to touch upon the poor child's sur- roundings. He wanted to know more of her story ; he was moved and interested as he had never been till now ; but he felt that he must make his discoveries for himself, not from those delicate lips with their tint of pale rosebuds. He spoke of himself, or rather, of his province, which was another part of himself, the orchards and fields, and winding river, the sea and rocks of that land where the borders of Nor- mandy and Brittany almost touch across the narrow boundary of the Couesnon. He told her of that land of legends ; of fairies, and of poulpicains, the impish husbands of fairies ; of Druid monuments and haunted fountains ; of Christian miracles and pagan shrines ; told her of that good King Gradlon, of Cornuailles, who is to the Breton a? King Arthur to the Cornish- man. Never had Paquerette been so interested. Her eager questions led the speaker on. Fairies, what were they 1 She had never heard of them. The sea 1 Ah, yes, she had heard often of the sea, and she longed to know what it was like — how big, what colour, and did it really roar in stormy weather, as her grandfather had told her, as if with the might of ten thou- sand lions ? and did the waves really, really, rise mountains high, glistening walls of white water ? and were there silvery shining lights upon the waves, which looked like enchantment, and only meant rotten fish ? She longed, of all things, to behold the sea, and the country, and the vineyards and mountains * As Snoto in Summer* 05 which the charahia had told her about when he sat smokinc: hia pipe with her grandfather. Ishmael inquired who this charahia was of whom slie spoke as a familiar friend. The charahia was grandfather's friend, Paquerette told him. It was he who took away a piece of furniture when grandfather had finished it, and carried it round to the dealers. Sometimes he got a very good price, and then he stayed to supper, and there was africoi, and grandmother made a saladier of wine d, la Frangaim afterwards, and then the charahia grew merry and talked of his native Auvergne. There were bad times, when nobody would give a fair price for the furniture ; and then, when there was hardly bread to eat, the charahia came forward and bought grandfather's work himself rather than that they should all starve. Grandfather was a troileur — a man who worked on his own account and sold liis work to the dealei's. ' The charahia must be a very benevolent person, or a rank thief,' said Ishmael. ' He is altogether a new character to me. What kind of a man is he ? ' 'Stout, broad-shouldered, with a dark face, and short black hair — not a very nice-looking man,' answered Paquerette, simply; 'but grandfather says he means well, excejjt when he is angry, and then he says the charahia is a blood-sucker, and is growing fat upon his flesh and bones. Grandmother says the charahia is rich, and that we ought to make much of him.' ' And you. Mademoiselle raquerette, do you like this Auvergnat 1 ' asked Ishmael. Paquerette had never been called Mademoiselle until to-day. It was a kind of promotion. ' Like him — I?' she said, wonderingly. ' I don't think he cares very much whether I like or dislike him. He has hardly ever spoken to me ; but he sits and stares at me sometiuiuis with great black eyes, which almost frighten me. I have to fetch the wine and brandy when he cones to supper. I hate him,' she added, with a shudder ; ' biit I mustn't say so. You won't tell grandfather ? ' ' Not for the world, ISIademoiselle. I am afraid, from the way you speak, that these grandparents of youis are not very kind to you.' 'They are not so kind as you,' the girl answered, softly, for there was a protecting friendliness in his tone which awakened in her a new sense of sympathy ; ' but they do not mean to be unkind. It is only because life is so hard for them.' They were near the Rue Sombreuil by this time, and in a few more minutes tliey entered the gloomy arc-liwMy of the common lodging-hoiL-.e — not so large as those bairacks of a 06 Ishmael hundred rooms, to be built a few years later under the Haiissmann rule, but large enough to hold a good deal of misery and foulness of all kinds. The yard looked very dreary in the faint light of a moon which was just rising above the towers of Notre Dame. A guttering candle flared with a yellowish flame upon the bare old table in the trollew^s room, "llie door was open, and M8re Lemoine was standing in the doorway gossiping with a neighbour. She wore a smart little coloured shawl over her shabby gown, and her Sunday cap, which was an interesting specimen of dirty finery. She was in that condition which her friends called poivre, and had the peculiar solemnity of maimer which sometimes goes with that state. ' It is that torchon at last ! ' she exclaimed. ' Don't you think you have given me enough of inquietude this evening, ■p'tite gredine, roaming the streets after dark, you that have been brought up as carefully as a Mam'selle ? And now ' — with a suppressed hiccough — 'you come home with a strange Monsieur in a blouse ! ' P§,querette and Ishmael had the start of the others by some five minutes. ' You knew I was with kind friends, grandmother,' said the girl. ' This gentleman came home with me. Mam'selle Benoit raid her cousins are just behind us.' On this M5re Lemoine curtseyed to the stranger with a dignified air, and regretted that her husband was not at home to invite him to supper ; but if he would break a crust with them, he would be heartily welcome. Ishmael, moved by curiosity about Pdquerette, or interest in Pfiquerette, snapped at the invitation. ' I dined too well to be able to eat anything,' he said, ' but I should not be sorry to rest for a little while without deranging Madame. It is nearly five miles from Vinoennes, though the walk seemed a mere bagatelle ; and I have a longish way to go to my lodgings.' Madame Lemoine threw up her hands in wonderment. ' They had walked all the way from Vincennes ! That j^aressewse of hers, for example, who always loitered on every errand 1 Wonders would never cease.' ' It was a lovely walk,' said P%uerette. ' Mademoiselle Benoit asked me if I would rather go in the omnibus, and it was my own choice to walk. You are not tired, are you, IVIonsieur ? ' appealing to Ishmael. ' I feel as if I could walk five miles more.' ' Tired ? no, Mademoiselle, not absolutely tired ; but I fcUould be glad to rest for a little quarter of an hour.' 'As Snow in Summer* 97 The Benolt girls were parting with the goggle-eyed youth and his sister under the archway. Paquerette flew across to them as they came into the yard to thank them for their goodness to her, ' And the gown ? ' she said. ' Shall I come up to your room and change it for my own ? ' * Not to-night, child,' answered Pauline, kindly ; * you must ba tired after that long walk. I will bring down your things at six o'clock to-morrow morning, and then you can return me mine. I suppose you are always up at six ? ' * I will be up at six to-morrow morning,' answered Paquerette, ashamed to own the lateness of her normal hour. What was there to induce early rising in that ground-floor den, where the trolleur and his wife sometimes slept half throu,:;h the sunny forenoon, coiled in the darkness of their hole like dogs in a kennel ? Tlie Benoit girls kissed Paquerette, wished Ishmael a brief good-night, and ran ofl" to their dingy staircase. Ten o'clock was striking from the tower of Notre Dame — not a very dissi- pated hour, albeit Mere Lemoine pretended to be shocked at the lateness of her granddaughter's return. Ishmael was invited to walk mto the hvmg-room, and to seat himself in the trolleur's greasy old Voltaire, an heirloom which had grown dirtier and more rickety year by year during P3,querette's progress from baby to girl, but which was still regarded as the acme of comfort. The stranger looked round the room wonderingly. There was not one feature to redeem the all-pervading dreariness ; even the fine old walnut-wood annoire, tall, capacious, a relic of old-world industry and comfort, had been degraded from its sober antique beauty by neglect and hard uS&ge. The brass lock and hinges had fallen into disrepair ; the heavy door yawned ajar, revealing a heterogeneous collection of old clothes, crockery, boots, hardware, and empty wine bottles. Nothing in the room suggested neat or careful habits in the occupants. In one corner the cabinet-maker's bench stood above a heap of shavings which must have been accumulating for weeks ; in another a basket of tools had been flung down anyhow among dirty plates and saucepans. A greasy pack of cards on the table beside the battered brass candlestick showed how Mfere Lemoine and her gossip had been amusing them- selves. Not a primrose or a spray of wallflower from the flower- market ; not one sign of womanly niceness, of the household fairy's care, in all the room. Ishmael sighed as he glanced at Paquerette, who stood shyly beside the smoky hearth, straight, ulim, fragile-looking in her white and pink raiment. H 98 Ishmael * Poor cliild,' he said to himself, * she loolcs sweet and innocent as a spring liower in the woods at Pen-Hoel ; but what honest man would ever dare to marry a girl from such a home as this?' While Ishmael sat beside the hearth replying to the grandmother's polite interrogai )ries, P^re Lemoine came in, unexpectedly early, xmexpectedl/ sober. He had not been to * The Faithful Pig,' but to a political meeting of ehenistes in a wine-shop in the Hue de la Roquette, where they assembled secretly in a back room, and in fear of the police, all such meetings at this time being illegal. Although he had taken his glass or two, he was in a perfectly respectable condition, full of the meeting, and of the importance of the syndicate of cabinet-makers, of which he was only an outsider. ' But they know that I can speak,' he said, proudly, * those scoundrels of the Left. I am not good enough to be one of their syndicate, a poor devil who lives from hand to mouth, works as the whim seizes him, as all true artists have always worked, from Palissy downwards. They let me speak, for they know I am not without eloquence. They have called me some- times their old Danton — the mouth of thunder — the lion-headed one. Thei'e is again a talk of a co^tp dJetat. He — Prince Louis Bonaparte — has sworn that there is no such thing in his thoughts ; but the ehenistes neither trust him nor the Chamber — and the ehenistes are a power in Paris. Let the Elysde and the Chamber look to it. The pulses of the national heart beat here — the life-blood of France ebbs and ilows h^re ! ' ' Monsieur, here, is no friend to the President,' said M6re Lemoine ; ' he is a man after your own heart.' ' Pardon, Madame,' ansAvered Ishmael, ' I have been in Paris only half a year. I reserve my opinion. If Louis Bonaparte means well to the people, I am with him heart and hand. But I wait to know more of the Prince President and his policy. He has dealt fairly with France so far, and this rumour of an impending coup d)4tat may be groundless. It was talked of nearly a year ago, and has not come yet.' ' The time has not come — the necessity has not come,' said Lemoine, fresh from the secret discussion at the wine-shop. ' Wait till the sands are running out in the glass ; wait till that man's day of power is waning ; and then see what he will do to keep the sceptre in his hand. Remember the Consulate and the Empire. Remember the \%th Brumaire. We shall see the same game played over again by an inferior player. Louis Bonaparte has the army at his back. It was said to-night by one who knows that Courtigis, the general in command at Vineennes, has orders to fire upon the Faubourg with the biggest ^My Soul Failed when Ue Spal-e* C9 of his cannon in case of insurrection, while three regiments of cavalry are to clear the streets and sabre every insurgent who ventures out of his hole. If necessary, he is to burn every house in the Faubourg. It will be a fierce struggle, friend ; but I hope when the fight comes you will be found on our side.' ' I shall be on the side of liberty and right, be sure of that, answered Ishraael. CHAPTEE X *Hir SOUI FAILED WHEN UB SPAKE ' IsHMAEL saw TO more 5f Paquerette for nearly a month after that night in May, although he asked Madame Morice more than once during that time why she did not organise another picnic with those nice girls her friends of the Faubourg St. Antoine. Madame Morice had other plans, or the Benolt girls were otherwise engaged. He might have found some excuse for calling iu the Rue Sombreuil had he so chosen ; but he shrank with loathing from that dingy room, half Avorkshoj?, half kitchen — the trolleur in his greasy blouse, the trollewr's wife with her crafty questions, her bloodshot eyes, looks as evil as those of the fabulous witches dear to his native province. He was sorry for Paquerette ; he sympathised with the innocent, helpless creature, whose youth had been overshadowed by this ogre and ogress. But to choose a wife from such a den — ^he, with manly aspirations and gentle blood in his veins — no, that was not possible. Neither was it possible for him to entertain one dishonourable wish about that childlike creature. And yet he ardently desired to see Paquerette again ; out of curiosity, out of a purely philanthropic yearning to be of some good to so unhappy a being. One Saturday afternoon, just bef.jre midsummer, Ishmael, coming home from work earlier than usual, heard a shrill confusion of voices in the little room behind Madame Morices shop. The door was half open to the common passage, to admit euch summer airs as might wander that way, and Madame Morice caught sight of the blouse going by. ' It is Monsieur Ishmael himself,' she cried. * Come in, if you please, Monsieur. You have been aslnng me about picnics for the last three weeks, and now is yom- oppoituiiity. The 100 Ishmael demoiselles Benolt and I have been discussing a grand fete foi to-morrow.' ' I am with yon, ladies,' answered Ishmael. ' I wish I had a big balloon and could carry you all off to Brittany by to-morrow evening. It is the feast of St. John, our greatest festival. When the sun goes down every rock and every hill begins to shine with its bonfire in honour of Monsieur St. Jean — a hundred fires, a thousand fires, all sparkling and gleaming in the twilight. And then comes the joyous sound of music, and a procession of girls in their holiday clothes come to dance round the fires. She who can dance round nine bonfires before the first stroke of midnight will have a husband before the year is out. And the farmers bring their beasts to pass them through the sacred fire — sure safeguard against cattle disease for ever after. And from valley to valley sound the shepherds' horns calling and answer- ing each other through the night ; and beside ma,ny a fire there are placed empty chairs, that the spirits of the beloved dead may come and sit there to hear the songs and watch the dances.' ' What a strange people you Bretons are ! ' exclaimed Madame Morice. ' We are a people who honour our ancestors and believe in their God,' answered Ishmael, gravely. ' It seems to me some- times that in Paris you have neither the memory of the past, nor a creed in the present.' ' We remember our revolutions,' replied Madame Morice, whose husband was a politician ; ' they are the landmarks in our history.' ' You were discussing a picnic,' said Ishmael. The three Benoit girls and Madame Morice were seated round a table furnished with dainty little white cups and saucers, a plate of delicate biscuits, and a chocolati^re which breathed odours of vanille. As a grocer's wife, Madame could aflbrd to entertain her friends with such luxuries once in a way. She handed Ishmael one of the little toy cups and saucers, which he took with the air of an elephant picking up a pin. ' Yes, we were talking of a grand excursion,' answered practical Lisbeth Benolt ; ' but I am afraid it is too far, and will cost too much. We want to go to Marly-le-Eoi, and spend the day in the woods, and have a picnic dinner at a restaurant in the village, where there is a nice little garden with an arbour in which one can dine, Madame Morice knows all about it. We ■went there on her sister's wedding-day. The people are civil, and the dinner not too expensive. But the journey there and back — that is a serious question.' The three Benott girls shook their heads gravely. There arose a serious discussion. There was the railway fare «% Soul Failed ichcn lie. SpaJx' iOl to a certain station on the line, which only took them about half way to Marly-le-Eoi, and then there was the diligence, and then the dinner. It would cost at least twelve -francs a head, all told, travelling third class on the railway and in the cheapest part of the diligence, and limiting the dinner to bouillon, bouilli, salad, and dessert. It seemed a frightful price to pay for one day's pleasure, but then, what a delight it is to escape out of the diist of Paris into the real country, the grand old royal forest, the village which could not be more primitive were it a hundred miles from the metropolis ! The Benoit girls had given themselves no pleasure since that day at Vincennes. They had been saving their money for some stupendous festival ; and this idea of Marly, which they had seen and admired so intensely two years ago, had obtained possession of them. Bougival — Asnicres ? No : they wanted the forest, the old forsaken fountains, the watur-pools, the memories of a stately past. So, after an infinitude of talk, calculation, argumentation, it v/as finally settled that they should all go to Marly. It was to be a small, select p;u'ty this time. Madame Murice'a married sister and her husband, Monsieur and Madame DLUiic, were to be invited to join, and would dovdjtless be charmed to revisit scenes associated with the tender memories of a wedding- day. But no one else was to be asked. There should be no risk of grumbling and recrimination at the costliness of the day's pleasure. And, again, a diligence will only accommodate a certain number. A large party is always diliicult to manage en voyage. Ishmael began to look blank. 'Your friend. Mademoiselle Pixquerette, you will take her, will you not ? ' he asked, appealing to Lisbeth. Mademoiselle Benolt sighed and shrugged her shoulders. 'Not po.ssible,' she said. 'Poor little Paquerette would dearly love to go, I am sure ; but that wicked old troUeur would not give her twelve francs for a day's pleasure ; tliough I dare say he spends twice as much every week at " The Faithful Pig."' ' But you might pay for her, Mademoiselle Benolt,' said Ishmael, eagerly. 'That is to say, you might allow me to find the money, and say nothing about it to Mademoiselle Paquerette. She is only a child ; she would never ask who paid for her.' 'She is little more than a child, I admit,' replied the practical, outspoken Lisbeth ; ' and yet I hardly know if it is a right thing to do. You seem to admire Paquerette very much, Monsieur : I hope you mean well by her.' iO^ hhmael 'Monsieur Ishmael means well by all the woiU, 1 wil) answer for tliat,' interjected Madame Morice. Ishmael reddened a little at this. 'Believe me that I am incapable of one evil thought in regard to your poor little friend,' he answered, gravely. ' Perhaps you go a shade too far when you say I admire her. I am very sorry for her, poor child ; such a blighted girlhood is a thing to give every honest man the heartache. But I own that, if Mademoiselle Paquerette were ever so much handsomer and ever so much more fascinating, I should hardly go to the trollew's den in search of a wife.' ' Precisely,' said Lisbeth ; 'and, since that is so, I should think the less you and Paquerette meet the better ' ' What nonsense, Lisbeth ! ' cried Pauline. ' Why should you deny poor little Paquerette a day's pleasure, which Monsieur was so generous as to oiTer her out of sheer compassion ? Paquerette is not so silly as to misunderstand his kindness ; and think what rapture it would be to her to see the woods and the real country, and to dine under green leaves in a garden full of roses and carnations. It would be too cruel to depi-ive her of such a pleasure,' ' There are some sweets that leave a bitter taste after- wards,' said Lisbeth ; but the rest of the party took no more notice of her than the Trojans of Cassandra. They were all on Ishmael's side. What other feeling than pure pity could he entertain for such a poor little waif as Paquerette, and why deprive her of the kindness he so generously offered ? Lisbeth was overruled. The hour for meeting at the railway station was fixed, and Ishmael bade the ladies good afternoon, and went up to his own room under the tiles. Ishmael's apartment was in every way different from the troUeui^s den in the Rue Sombreuil. He had furnished his lodging himself, with divers substantial pieces of furniture picked up at the second-hand dealers. A fine old cherry-wood armoire, solid and substantial as the cabinet work of Rennes or Vitry ,' a mahogany bureau, style First Empire, ponderou'^, ungraceful, but passing good of its kind. The little iron bedstead in a corner was screened by a chintz curtain. Thera were four rush-bottomed chairs, a writing-table in the window, and two deal shelves of Ishmael's own making, filled with useful books, cliieily on mechanics, for this young man had set himself to learn the constructive arts in all their bearing on his trade of mason and builder. He had taken up mathematics also, of which he had learned only the elements from gODil Ptire Bres.s.uit, of P. n-TTicil. The room was keiJt with the purity and neatness of a monastic * My Soul Failed loken He Spake* l03 cell. Here, at the little stove iii the corner, Islimael brewed hia coffee in the early morning ; here, late into the night, he sat at yonder -writing-table, studying, reading, thinking, inventing ; for that busy brain of his was full of plans arid visions — bridge? yet to be built, railways in the far future, aqueducts, viaducts, new roads, new levels. For at least three nights out of seven he gave himself up to hard study, locking his door upon the outside world, lighting his lamp in the early dusk, and working till the small hours. Then, after, perhaps, but three hours' sound sleep on his hard pallet, he was up again, brewing his cotfee, and off to his work in the chilly morning, while the market carts were slowly rumbling into the city laden with fruit and vegetables from distant gardens, and great mountains of sea-fish and river-fish were being sold by auction, and the Btomach of Paris, yonder by St.-Eustache, the great central market, was only just beginning its daily functions. Thei^e were other nights which Islimael spent out of doors ; but these nights were not wasted in the haunts of vice or folly. The young workman had entered with heart and soul into the thronging life of Parisian politics. He went with the repre- sentatives of the Left in their championship of Eepublican ideas, their dreams of an ideal Republic— universal suffrage, univei-sal enlightenment. He was a member of two Republican societies ; adored Victor Hugo ; spoke on occasion, and was no mean orator; and he was willing to shed his blood in support of his 023inions should the hour of conflict come. He knew that among the class with which his lot was cast there were many doubtful specimens, many vile examples of the genus working- man ; but it seemed to him that the great heart of the people was a noble and a true heart, and that the faults and sins of the people were the faults and sins of circumstance. In a life where thei'e were so many eleiiients of degradation, so few of re- finement, so many temptations to baseness, so few inducements to lofty thoughts, he did not look for ideal perfection ; but he saw the rudiments of perfectability, and he told himself that, with better surroundings and a better education, the working-men of Paris would shrink with horror from the low wine-shop and the lower dancing-room, which now constituted the paradise of their idle hours : would turn with loathing from the abject houris of the hastringue^ the sordid sirens of the Passage Mdnilmontant, or the Rue des Filles-Dieu. He had seen what their pleasures were, and had recoiled shuddering from the edge of that loathsoma gulf into which so many had gone down. He lived among them, won their liking, and yet was not of them. He thought of his lost home sometimes as he walked back from his work, tliOU'dit of the half-brothers he had loved so 10-i Ishnael well, and wondered what they were doing in the quiet eventide, and whether they still missed their playmate. He was not angry with his father for the hard words that had hastened his exodus from the old home. He knew that the stepmother's venomous hate had been the true cause of all iinkindness on his fathei-'s part, helped not a little by those bitter memories of the ])ast which had set a brand upon the eldest son from the very Iteginning. He was not angry with Fate for having banished him from his birthplace — for having landed him on a lower level in life. He had an indomitable belief in his own power to climb. Already — though he had not been a year in Paris — he had achieved a reputationfor superior skill and supeiior industry. He could command good wages. He saw bef&re him a future in which he would be able to save money — to buy a plot or two of land, perhaps — in those desert wastes and outskirts between the exterior boulevards and the fortifications, where land was so cheap, and where it might some day be of much greater value. The coming time was to be an age of improvements. Railways were altering the face of the earth. The builder would play an important part in all the undertakings of the future. Already Ishmael imagined a ti^is in which he was to be an employer of labour. His workmen should not be crowded in filthy holes, or given over to Satan and all his works. He would found a brotherhood of industry and temperance. He would build a lay monastery — a mighty barrack for workmen and their families, full of light, and air, and cleanliness. Men so lodged would be healthier and stronger, better physically and morally ; better workmen, giving better value for their wages. Ishmael (.lid not foresee that perfect machinery of trade-unionism which forbids the individual man to work better than his brothers, and insists upon the minimum of labour all round. Father Bressant's money had long been returned to him out of Ishmael's savings, and the apartment at Menilmontant had been furnished from the same source. An occasional letter from the good priest told Ishmael how the little world of Pen-Hoel v.as going on. Monsieur de Caradec was fairly well — he had hunted and shot a little in the season ; but he had an air of not being altogether happy. Madame was an invalid always, as of old ; but the doctor laughed, and said her complaint was only a chronic peevishness, which was likely to increase with years. The two boys throve splendidly, and their growth was visible to the eye. Next winter Father Bressant was to begin their education, and prepare them for the Polytechnic at Eennes. Midsummer and the woods of Marly, "What could be a more delicious combination ? PSquerette, joyous, though a little "My Soul Failed ivhcn lie Spahe* 105 asliamec! of herself in another borrowed gown, thought that heaven itself could hardly be so lovely as this forest glade in which she was wandering with big Lisbeth and Ishmael — a glade where the sujishine glinted athwart tremulous semi-transparent leaves, and sprinkled the mossy ground with flecks of emerald light that looked like jewels. All the way they came from the city to the village seemed to have been between groves of flowering acacias ; the atmosphere was full of their subtle perfume. Paquerette's nostrils had never inhaled such sweet odoui's. And the sky and the water ! never had she imagined such a lovely azure. Surely the sky above the liue Sombreuil was of a different colour. A faint rose-flush lighted her pale cheeks as she walked in that leafy glade, and listened resjiectfuUy, yet understanding very little, while Ishmael expounded the political situation— the chances for and against a coup dJe'tat, or a tranquil termination of the Prince President's term of power — to Lisbeth, who had a masculine intellect, read newspapers, and was deeply interested in public afl[;iirs. ' A new era has come,' she said. ' We loved the Citizen Iving and his good queen for their own sakes— kind, harmless pfebple wishing good to all classes — but under a Eepublic one feels that the people count for much more — have a light to know how they are being governed — and to question and to understand every act of the Chamber.' * It is a pleasure to meet a lady who is interested in public matters,' answered Ishmael, understanding that this little speech of Lisbeth's was in some wise an apology. Paquerette strayed away from them every now and then to gather flowers, or to examine mosses or butterflies, like a happy child. The wood was all-suflicient for her happiness. The sun- shine, the sweet air, the sense of mystery in those aisles of glancing sunlight and flickei'iug shades, the idea of a glad, green world stretching away and away into immeasurable distance, the first vague dawning sense of the intinite stealing over a mind that had never before understood anything beyond the squalidest, saddest realities — all this was a kind of intoxication, and Pdquerette flew from flower to flower, screaming with rapture at the vision of a butterfly, lifted out of herself and o3 the common earth by this new delight. The prudent Lisbeth had made up her mind that Ishmael and P&querette were not to be left too much alone. That long walk from Vincennes, in which they had gone so far ahead of the rest, seeming so engrossed in each other, had aroiised the wise damsd'a suspicions. It was all very well for Ishmaol to protest that he only pitied the poor chihl. All the world knows lOa ishnaet that pity is akin to love ; and, since he had said that he would not take a wife from that hole in the Rue Sombreuil, there was an end of the matter. Poor little Paquerette's heart must not be broken. So in all their ramblings — and they went half the way to St.-Germain — Lisbeth took care to be near her protegee. That did not prevent Ishmael talking to Paquerette, or P&querette hanging upon his words with obvious delight. She did not listen while he talked politics : those were dark to her. But, seeing her rapture in flowers and trees and all living things, he began to talk of these, telling her the names of flowers, the habits of insects and birds, squirrels, rabbits, weasels, moles, field-mice, water-rats — all the free creatures that haunt woods and waterpools. They had been the companions of his boyhood, his books, his study. ' How can you bear to live in a great town, where there are no such things ? ' Paquerette asked, wonderingly. ' I endure my life in the town because I look forward to th« day when I shall be able to have my nest in the country,' he answered. 'Not to live there alwaj's. Life among woods and fields is a long pastoral dream, an everlasting idyl. A man must have work, movement, progress ; and those he can only have at their best in a great centre like Paris. But it ia worth while to toil for a week in stony places for one such day as this at the end of the six.' ' I can understand that,' said Paquerette. * And now tell me about your own country, as you told me that night — the fairies, the saints, the sacred fires, the sea and the fishing-boats, the wild-boar hunt in which you were nearly killed,' Ishmael laughed and reddened. ' I am afraid I talked of nothing but myself that night,' he Baid. ' I like to hear you talk of yourself,' she answered simply. By the time they went back to the village street of Marly Paquerette had a lapful of wild flowers, mosses, twigs, tufts of grass, toadstools, and coloured pebbles, which she had collected in her woodland walk. Slie carried her treasures frankly in the skirt of her cotton frock, not ashamed of showing the clean white petticoat and stockings, albeit her shoes were of the shabbiest. The feet in the well-worn shoes were small and slender, like the bare hands which held up the bundle of flowei's and mosses. ' I must get a basket for you to carry home your botanical collection,' said Ishmael, laughing at her enthusiasm ; and while the rest of the party were settling down at the humble eating- house and exploring the little garden in which they were to dine, Ishmael went all over the village to find a shoj) wher