University of Virginia Library

HIGH LIFE IN EUROPE.

LEAVES FROM THE HEART-BOOK OF ERNEST CLAY

1. CHAPTER I.

In a small room, second floor, front, No. —
South Audley street, Grosvenor square, on one of
the latter days of May, five or six years ago, there
stood an inkstand, of which you may buy the like for
three halfpence in most small shops in Soho. It was
stuck in the centre of the table, like the largest of
the Azores, on a schoolboy's amateur map—a large
blot surrounded by innumerable smaller blotlings.
On the top of a small leather portmanteau near by,
stood two pair of varnished-leather boots of a sumptuous
expensiveness, slender, elegant, and without
spot, except the leaf of a crushed orange blossom
clinging to one of the heels. Between the inkstand
and the boots sat the young and then fashionable author
of — —, and the boots and the inkstand
were tolerable exponents of his two opposite
but closely woven existences.

It was two o'clock, P. M., and the author was stirring
his tea. He had been stirring it with the same
velocity three quarters of an hour—for when that cup
should be drank, inevitably the next thing was to
write the first sentence of an article for the New
Month. Mag., and he was prolonging his breakfast,
as a criminal his last prayer.

The “fatigued” sugar and milk were still flying
round the edge of the cup in a whity blue concave,
when the “maid of all work” of his landlord the
baker, knocked at the door with a note.

The tea, which, for some minutes, had turned off a
decreasing ripple from the edge of the arrested spoon,
came to a standstill at the same moment, with the
author's wits. He had seized his pen and commenced:—

2. CHAPTER II.

Lady Mildred's bays panced proudly up Bond
street, and kept on their way to the publisher's, at
whose door they fretted and champed the bit—they
and their high-born mistress in attendance upon the
poor author who in this moment of despondency complained
of the misappreciation of the world. Of the
scores of people who knew him and his companion
as London celebrities, and who followed the showy
equipage with their eyes, how many, think you, looked
on Mr. Ernest Clay as a misappreciated man?
How many, had they known that the whole errand
of this expensive turn out was to call on the publisher
for the price of a single magazine paper, would have
reckoned those sixteen guineas and the chariot of a
noble lady to come for the payment—five hundred
pounds for your romance, and a welcome to all the
best houses and costliest entertainments of England
—a hundred pounds for your poem and the attention
of a thousand eager admirers—these are some of the
“lengthening shadows” to the author's profits which
the author does not reckon, but which the world does.
To the rest of mankind these are “chattels” priced
and paid for. Twenty thousand a year would hardly
buy for Mr. Clay, simple and uncelebrated, what Mr.
Clay, author, etc., has freely with five hundred. To
whose credit shall the remaining nineteen thousand
five hundred be set down? Common people who pay
for these things are not believers in fairy gifts. They
see the author in a station of society unattainable except
by the wealthiest and best born, with all that
profuse wealth could purchase as completely at his
service as if the bills of cost were to be brought in to
him at Christmas; and besides all this (once more
“into the bargain”) caressed and flattered as no
“golden dulness' ever was or could be. To rate the
revenue of such a pampered idol of fortune, what man
in his senses would inquire merely into the profits of
his book!

And in this lies the whole secret of the envy and
malice which is the peculiar inheritance of genius.
Generous-minded men, all women, the great and rich
who are too high themselves to feel envy, and the poor
and humble who are too low to feel aught but wonder
and grateful admiration—these are the fosterers and
flatterers, the paymasters of the real wealth and the
receivers of the choicest fruits of genius. The aspiring
mediocrity, the slighted and eclipsed pretenders
to genius, are a large class, to whose eyes all brightness
is black, and the great mass of men toil their lives
and utmost energies away for the hundredth part of
what the child of genius wins by his unseen pen—by
the toil which neither hardens his hands not trenches
on his hours of pleasure. They see a man no comelier
nor better born than they—idle apparently, as the
most spoilt minion of wealth, vying with the best born
in the favor of beautiful and proud women, using all
the goods of fortune with a profuse carelessness, which
the possession of the lamp of Aladdin could not more
than inspire, and by bitter criticism, by ingenious
slander, by continual depreciation, ridicule, and exaggeration
of every pretty foible, they attempt to level
the inequalities of fortune, and repair the flagrant injustice
of the blind goddess to themselves. Upon the
class generally, they are avenged. Their malice
poisons the joy and cripples the fine-winged fancy of
nineteen in the score. But the twentieth is born
proud and elastic, and the shaft his scorn does not
fling back, his light-heartedness eludes, and his is the
destiny which, more than that of kings or saints, proves
the wide inequality in human lot.

I trust, dear reader, that you have been more amused
than Lady Mildred at this half hour's delay at the
publisher's. While I have been condensing into a
theory by scattered observations of London authors,
her ladyship has been musing upon the apparition of
the family carriage of the Gores at Mr. Clay's lodgings.
Lady Mildred's position in society, though she had
the entree to all the best houses in London, precluded
an intimate acquaintance with any unmarried girl—
but she had seen Eve Gore and knew and dreaded her
loveliness. A match of mere interest would have
given her no uneasiness, but she could see far enough
into the nature of this beautiful and fresh-hearted girl
to know that hers would be no divided empire. All
women are conscious that a single-minded, concentrated,
pure affection, melting the whole character into
the heart, is omnipotent in perpetuating fidelity.

“Ernest,” said Lady Mildred, as the chariot sped
from the publisher's door, and took its way to the
Park, “you are grown ceremonious. Am I so new a
friend that you can not open a note in my presence?”

Clay placed the crushed letter in her hand.

“I will have no secrets from you, dear Lady Mildred.
There is probably much in that note that will surprise
you. Break the seal, however, and give me your advice.
I will not promise to follow it.”

The blood flushed to the temples of Lady Mildred
as she read- but her lips, though pale and trembling,
were compressed by a strong effort of self control.
She turned back and read the note again in a murmuring
undertone:—

“Hear me before you condemn, dear Lady Mildred,”
passionately exclaimed Ernest, as she clasped her
hands over the letter and her tears fell fast upon them:
“I was wrong to leave the discovery of this to chance
—I should have dealt more frankly with you—indeed,
if I had had the opportunity—”

Lady Mildred looked up, as if to reproach him for
the evasion half uttered.

“I have seen you daily, it is true, but every hour is
not an hour for confession like this, and besides, my
new love was a surprise, and what I have to confess is
a change in my feelings still more recent—a constantly
brightening vision of a life (pardon me, Lady Mildred!)
deeper a thousand fold, and a thousand times
sweeter and more engrossing than ours.”

“You are frank,” said his pale listener, who had recovered
her self-possession, and seemed bent now, as
usual, only on listening and entering into his feelings.

“I would be so, indeed,” he resumed; “but I have

not yet come to my confession. Life is too short,
Lady Mildred, and youth too vanishing, to waste feeling
on delusion.”

“Such as your love, do you mean, Ernest?”

“Pardon me! Were you my wife—”

Lady Mildred made a slight motion of impatience
with her hand, and unconsciously raised the expressive
arching of her lip.

“I must name this forbidden subject to be understood.
See what a false position is mine! You are
too proud to marry, but have not escaped loving me,
and you wish me to be contented with a perfume on
the breeze, to feel a property in a bird in the sky. It
was very sweet to begin to love you, to win and join
step by step, to have food for hope in what was refused
me. But I am checked, and you are still free. I stand
at an impassable barrier, and you demand that I should
feel united to you.”

“You are ungrateful, Ernest!”

“If I were your slave, I am, for you load me with
favors—but as your lover, no! It does not fill my
heart to open your house to me, to devote to me your
dining hours, your horses and servants, to let the
world know that you love me, to make me your
romance—yet have all the common interests of life
apart, have a station in society apart, and ambition not
mine, a name not mine, and hearth not mine. You
share my wild passions, and my fashionable negations,
not my homely feelings and everyday sorrows. I have
a whole existence into which you never enter. I am
something besides a fashionable author—but not to
you. I have a common human heart—a pillow upon
which lies down no fancy—a morning which is not
spent in sleep or listlessness, but in the earning of my
bread—I have dulness and taciturnity and caprice—
and in all these you have no share. I am a butterfly
and an earth-worm, by turns, and you know me only
on the wing. You do not answer me!”

Lady Mildred, as I have said before, was an admirer
of genius, and though Ernest was excusing an infidelity
to herself, the novelty of his distinctions opened to
her a new chapter in the book of love, and she was
interested far beyond resentment. He was talking
from his heart, too, and every one who has listened to a
murmur of affection, knows what sweetness the breathings
of those deeper veins of feeling infuse into the
voice. To a palled Sybarite like Lady Mildred, there
was a wild-flower freshness in all this that was irresistibly
captivating. A smile stole through her lips instead
of the reproach and anger that he expected.

“I do not answer you, my dear Ernest, for the same
reason I would not tear a leaf out of one of your books
unread. I quite enter into your feelings. I wish I
could hear you talk of them hours longer. Their
simplicity and truth enchant me—but I confess I can
not see what you propose to yourself. Do you think
to reconcile and blend all these contradictory moods
by an imprudent marriage? Or do you mean to vow
your butterfly to celibacy, and marry your worm-fly
alone, and grovel in sympathy rather than take love
with you when you soar, and keep your grovelling to
yourself.”

“I think Eve Gore would love me, soaring or creeping,
Lady Mildred! She would be happier sitting by
my table while I wrote, than driving in this gay crowd
with her chariot. She would lose the light of her life
in absence from me, like a cloud receding from the
moon, whatever stars sparkled around her. She
would be with me at all hours of the day and the night,
sharing every thought that could spring to my lips,
and reflecting my own soul for ever. You will forgive
me for finding out this want, this void, while you loved
me. But I have felt it sickeningly in your bright
rooms, with music and perfume, and the touch of your
hand all conspiring to enchant me. In the very hours
when most men on earth would have envied me, I
have felt the humbler chambers of my heart ache with
loneliness. I have longed for some still and dark retreat,
where the beating of my pulse would be protestation
enough, and where she who loved me was blest
to overflowing with my presence only. Affection is a
glow-worm light, dear Lady Mildred! It pales amid
splendor.”

“But you should have a glow-worm's habits to
relish it, my dear poet. You can not live on a blade
of grass, nor shine brightest out of doors in the rain.
Let us look at it without these Claude Lorraine
glasses, and see the truth. Mr. Thomas Gore offers
you £300 a year with his neice. Your own income,
the moment you marry, is converted from pocket-money
into subsistence—from the purchase of gloves
and Hungary water into butcher's meat and groceries.
You retire to a small house in one of the cheaper streets.
You have been accustomed to drive out continually,
and for several years you have not only been free from
the trouble and expense of your own dinner, but you
have pampered your taste with the varied chefs d'œvre
of all the best cooks of London. You dine at home
now, feeding several mouths beside your own, on what
is called a family dinner—say, as a good specimen, a
beefsteak and potatoes, with a Yorkshire pudding.
Instead of retiring after your coffee to a brilliantly
lighted drawning-room, where collision with some
portion of the most gifted society of London disciplines
your intellect and polishes your wit and fancy,
you sit down by your wife's work-table, and grow
sleepy over your plans of economy, sigh for the gay
scenes you once moved in, and go to bed to be rid of
your regrets.”

“But why should I be exiled from society, my dear
Lady Mildred? What circle in London would not
take a new grace from the presence of such a woman
as Eve Gore?”

“Oh, marvellous simplicity! If men kept the gates
of society, a la bonne heure!—for then a party would
consist of one man (the host), and a hundred pretty
women. But the “free list” of society, you know,
as well as I, my love-blind friend, is exclusively masculine.
Woman keeps the door, and easy as turns the
hinge to the other sex, it swings reluctant to her own.
You may name a hundred men in your circle whose
return for the hospitality of fashionable houses it
would be impossible to guess at, but you can not
point me out one married woman, whose price of
admission is not as well known and as rigidly exacted,
as the cost of an opera-box.—Those who do not give
sumptuous parties in their turn (and even these must
be well bred and born people), are in the first place
very ornamental; but, besides being pretty, they must
either sing or flirt. There are but two classes of
women in fashionable society—the leaders or party-givers,
and the decoys to young men. There is the
pretty Mrs. —, for example, whose habitation
nobody knows but as a card with an address; and why
is she everywhere? Simply, because she draws four
or five fashionable young men, who would find no inducement
to come if she were not there. Then there
is Mrs. —, who sings enchantingly, and Mrs.
—, who is pretty, and a linguist, and entertains
stupid foreigners, and Mrs. —, who is clever at
charades, and plays quadrilles, and what would Mrs.
Clay do? Is she musical?”

“She is beautiful!”

“Well—she must flirt. With three or four fashionable
lovers—”

“Lady Mildred!”

“Pardon me, I was thinking aloud. Well—I will
suppose you an exception to this Mede-and-Persian
law of the beau monde, and allow for a moment that
Mrs. Clay, with an income of five or six hundred a
year, with no eyes for anybody but her husband,
poor, pretty, and innocent (what a marvel it would be

in May Fair, by-the-way!), becomes as indispensable
to a partie fine as was Mr. Clay while in unmarried
celebrity. Mind, I am not talking of routs and balls,
where anybody can go, because there must be a crowd,
but of petits soupers, select dinners, and entertainments
where every guest is invited as an ingredient to
a well-studied cup of pleasure. I will suppose for an
instant, that a connubial and happy pair could be desirable
in such circles. What part of your income
of five or six hundred a year, do you suppose, would
dress and jewel your wife, keep carriage and servants,
and pay for your concert-tickets and opera-boxes—all
absolutely indispensable to people who go out? Why,
my dear Ernest, your whole income would not suffice
for the half. You must `live shy,' go about in hackney-coaches,
dress economically (which is execrable
in a woman), and endure the neglects and mortifications
which our pampered servants inevitably inflict
on shabby people. Your life would be one succession
of bitter mortifications, difficulties, and heart-burnings.
Believe me, there is no creature on earth
so exquisitely wretched as a man with a fashionable
wife and small means.”

Lady Mildred had been too much accustomed to
the management of men, not to leave Ernest, after this
homily, to his own thoughts. A woman of less
knowledge and tact would have followed up this argument
with an appeal to his feelings. But beside that,
she wished the seed she had thus thrown into his
mind to germinate with thought. She knew that it
was a wise principle in the art of love to be cold by
daylight. Ernest sat silent, with his eyes cast musingly
down to the corner of the chariot, where the smallest
foot and prettiest chaussure conceivable was playing
with the tassel of the window-pull; and reserving
her more effective game of feeling for the evening,
when they were to meet at Mrs. R—'s, she set him
down at his clubhouse with a calm and cold adieu,
and drove home to bathe, dine alone, sleep, and refresh
body and spirit for the struggle against love and
Eve Gore.

3. CHAPTER III.

Genius is lord of the world. Men labor at the
foundation of society, while the lowly lark, unseen
and little prized, sits, hard by, in his nest on the earth,
gathering strength to bear his song up to the sun.
Slowly rise basement and monumental aisle, column
and architrave, dome and lofty tower: and when the
cloud-piercing spire is burnished with gold, and the
fabric stands perfect and wondrous, up springs the forgotten
lark, with airy wheel to the pinnacle, and
standing poised and unwondering on his giddy perch,
he pours out his celestial music till his bright footing
trembles with harmony. And when the song is done,
and mounting thence, he soars away to fill his exhausted
heart at the fountains of the sun, the dwellers
in the towers below look up to the gilded spire
and shout—not to the burnished shaft, but to the
lark—lost from it in the sky.

“Mr. Clay!” repeated the last footman on Mrs. K's
flower-laden staircase.

I have let you down as gently as possible, dear
reader; but here we are in one of the most fashionable
houses in May Fair.

Pardon me a moment! Did I say I had let you
down? What pyramid of the Nile is piled up like
the gradations between complete insignificance and
the affect of that footman's announcement? On the
heels of Ernest, and named with the next breath of
the menial's lips, came the bearer of a title laden
with the emblazoned honors of descent. Had he en
tered a hall of statuary, he could not have been less
regarded. All eyes were on the pale forehead and
calm lips that had entered before him; and the blood
of the warrior who made the name, and of the statesmen
and nobles who had borne it, and the accumulated
honor and renown of centuries of unsullied distinctions—all
these concentrated glories in the midst
of the most polished and discriminating circle on
earth, paled before the lamp of yesterday, burning in
the eye of genius. Where is distinction felt? In
secret, amid splendor? No! In the street and the
vulgar gaze? No! In the bosom of love? She
only remembers it. Where, then, is the intoxicating
cup of homage—the delirious draught for which
brain, soul, and nerve, are tasked, tortured, and
spent—where is it lifted to the lips? The answer
brings me back. Eyes shining from amid jewels,
voices softened with gentle breeding, smiles awakening
beneath costly lamps—an atmosphere of perfume,
splendor, and courtesy—these form the poet's Hebe,
and the hero's Ganymede. These pour for ambition
the draught that slakes his fever—these hold the cup
to lips, drinking eagerly, that would turn away in solitude,
from the ambrosia of the gods!

Clay's walk through the sumptuous rooms of Mrs.
R— was like a Roman triumph. He was borne on
from lip to lip—those before him anticipating his
greeting, and those he left, still sending their bright
and kind words after him. He breathed incense.

Suddenly, behind him, he heard the voice of Eve
Gore. She was making the tour of the rooms on the
arm of a friend, and following Ernest, had insensibly
tried to get nearer to him, and had become flushed
and troubled in the effort. They had never before
met in a large party, and her pride, in the universal
attention he attracted, still more flushed her eyelids
and injured her beauty. She gave him her hand as
he turned; but the greeting that sprang to her lips
was checked by a sudden consciousness that many
eyes were on her, and she hesitated, murmured some
broken words, and was silent. The immediate attention
that Clay had given to her, interrupted at the
same moment the undertoned murmur around him,
and there was a minute's silence, in which the inevitable
thought flashed across his mind that he had overrated
her loveliness. Still the trembling and clinging
clasp of her hand, and the appealing earnestness of
her look, told him what was in her heart—and when
was ever genius ungrateful for love! He made a
strong effort to reason down his disappointment, and
had the embarrassed girl resumed instantly her natural
ease and playfulness, his sensitive imagination
would have been conquered, and its recoil forgotten.
But love, that lends us words, smiles, tears, all we
want, in solitude, robs us in the gay crowd of everything
but what we can not use—tears! As the man
she worshipped led her on through those bright
rooms, Eve Gore, though she knew not why, felt the
large drops ache behind her eyes. She would have
sobbed if she had tried to speak. Clay had given her
his arm, and resumed his barter of compliment with
the crowd, and with it a manner she had never before
seen. He had been a boy, fresh, frank, ardent, and
unsuspicious, at Annesley Park. She saw him now
in the cold and polished armor of a man who has
been wounded as well as flattered by the world, and
who presents his shield even to a smile. Impossible
as it was that he should play the lover now, she felt
wronged and hurt by his addressing the same tone of
elegant trifling and raillery which was the key of the
conversation around them. She knew, too, that she
herself was appearing to disadvantage; and before a
brief hour had elapsed, she had become a prey to another
feeling—the bitter avarice which is the curse
of all affection for the gifted or the beautiful—an ava-arice
that makes every smile given back for admiration,

a germ torn from us—every word, even of thanks for
courtesy, a life-drop of our hearts drank away.
contains the mordent secret of most hearts vowed to
the love of remarkable genius or beauty.

The supper-rooms had been some time open; from
these and the dancing hall, the half-weary guests
were coming back to the deep fauteuils, the fresher
air, and the graver society of the library, which had
served as an apartment of reception. With a clouded
brow, thoughtful and silent, Eve Gore sat with her
mother in a recess near the entrance, and Clay, who
had kept near them, though their conversation had
long since languished, stood in the centre of a small
group of fashionable men, much more brilliant and
far louder in his gayety than he would have been
with a heart at ease. It was one of those nights of
declining May, when the new foliage of the season
seems to have exhausted the air, and though it was
near morning, there came through the open windows
neither coolness nor vitality. Fans, faded wreaths,
and flushed faces, were universal.

A footman stood suddenly in the vacant door.

“Lady Mildred —!”

The announcements had been over for hours, and every
eye was turned on the apparition of so late a comer.

Quietly, but with a step as elastic as the nod of a
water-lily, Lady Mildred glided into the room, and
the high tones and unharmonized voices of the different
groups suddenly ceased, and were succeeded by
a low and sustained murmur of admiration. A white
dress of faultless freshness of fold, a snowy turban,
from which hung on either temple a cluster of crimson
camelias still wet with the night dew; long raven
curls of undisturbed grace falling on shoulders of that
undescribable and dewy coolness which follows a
morning bath, giving the skin the texture and the
opaque whiteness of the lily; lips and skin redolent
of the repose and purity, and the downcast but wakeful
eye so expressive of recent solitude, and so peculiar
to one who has not spoken since she slept.
These were attractions which, in contrast with the
paled glories around, elevated Lady Mildred at once
into the predominant star of the night.

“What news from the bottom of the sea, most
adorable Venus?” said a celebrated artist, standing
out from the group and drawing a line through the
air with his finger as if he were sketching the flowing
outline of her form.

Lady Mildred laid her small hand on Clay's, and
with a smile, but no greeting else, passed on. The
bantering question of the great painter told her that
her spell worked to a miracle, and she was too shrewd
an enchantress to dissolve it by the utterance of a
word. She glided on like a spirit of coolness, calm,
silent, and graceful, and, standing a moment on the
threshold of the apartment beyond, disappeared,
with every eye fixed on her vanishing form in wondering
admiration. Purity was the effect she had produced—purity
in contrast with the flowers in the
room—purity (Ernest Clay felt and wondered at it),
even in contrast with Eve Gore! There was silence
in the library for an instant, and then, one by one, the
gay group around our hero followed in search of the
new star of the hour, and he was left standing alone.
He turned to speak to his silent friends, but the manner
of Mrs. Gore was restrained, and Eve sat pale and
tearful within the curtain of the recess, and looked as
if her heart was breaking.

“I should like—I should like to go home, mother!”
she said presently, with a difficult articulation. “I
think I am not well. Mr. Clay—Ernest—will see,
perhaps, if our carriage is here.”

“You will find us in the shawl-room,” said Mrs.
Gore, following him to the staircase, and looking after
him with troubled eyes.

The carriage was at the end of the line, and could
not come up for an hour. Day was dawning, and
Ernest had need of solitude and thought. He crossed
to the park, and strode off through the wet grass,
bathing his forehead with handfuls of dew. Alas!
the fevered eyes and pallid lips he had last seen were
less in harmony with the calm stillness of the dawn
than the vision his conscience whispered him was
charmed for his destruction. As the cool air brought
back his reason, he remembered Eve's embarrassed
address and his wearisome and vain efforts to amuse
her. He remembered her mother's reproving eye,
her own colder utterance of his name, and then in
powerful relief came up the pictures he had brooded
on since his conversation in the chariot with Lady
Mildred, visions of self-denial and loss of caste opposed
to the enchantments of passion without restraint
or calculation, and his head and heart became
wild with conflicting emotions. One thing was certain.
He must decide now. He must speak to Eve
Gore before parting, and in the tone of his voice, if it
were but a word, there must be that which her love
would interpret as a bright promise or a farewell. He
turned back. At the gate of the park stood one of
the guilty wanderers of the streets, who seized him
by the sleeve and implored charity.

“Who are you?” exclaimed Clay, scarce knowing
what he uttered.

“As good as she is,” screamed the woman, pointing
to Lady Mildred's carriage, “only not so rich! Oh,
we could change places, if all's true.”

Ernest stood still as if his better angel had spoken
through those painted lips. He gasped with the
weight that rose slowly from his heart; and purchasing
his release from the unfortunate wretch who
had arrested his steps, he crossed slowly to the
door crowded with the menials of the gay throng
within.

“Lady Mildred's carriage stops the way!” shouted
a footman, as he entered. He crossed the hall, and
at the door of the shawl-room he was met by Lady
Mildred herself, descending from the hall, surrounded
with a troop of admirers. Clay drew back to let her
pass; but while he looked into her face, it became
radiant with the happiness of meeting him, and the
temptation to join her seemed irresistible. She entered
the room, followed by her gay suite, and last of
all by Ernest, who saw with the first glance at the
Gores that he was believed to have been with her during
the half-hour that had elapsed. He approached
Eve; but the sense of an injustice he could not immediately
remove, checked the warm impulse with
which he was coming to pour out his heart, and
against every wish and feeling of his soul, he was
constrained and cold.

“No, indeed!” exclaimed Lady Mildred, her voice
suddenly becoming audible, “I shall set down Mr.
Clay, whose door I pass. Lord George, ask Mr.
Clay if he is ready.”

Eve Gore suddenly laid her hand on his arm, as if
a spirit had whispered that her last chance for happiness
was poised on that moment's lapse.

“Ernest,” she said, in a voice so unnaturally low
that it made his veins creep with the fear that her
reason was unseated, “I am lost if you go with her.
Stay, dear Ernest! She can not love you as I do!
I implore you remember that my life—my life—”

“Beg pardon,” said Lord George, laying his hand
familiarly on Clay's shoulder, and drawing him away,
“Lady Mildred waits for you!”

“I will return in an instant, dearest Eve,” he said,
springing again to her side, “I will apologize and be
with you. One instant—only one—”

“Thank God!” said the poor girl, sinking into a
chair and bursting into tears.

Lady Mildred sat in her chariot, but her head
drooped on her breast, and her arm hung lifeless at
her side.

“She is surely ill,” said Lord George; “jump in,
Clay, my fine fellow. Get her home. Shut the door,
Thomas! Go on, coachman!” And away sped the
fleet horses of Lady Mildred, but not homeward.
Clay lifted her head and spoke to her, but receiving
no answer, he busied himself chafing her hands,
and the carriage-blinds being drawn, he thought momently
he should be rid of his charge by their arrival
in Grosvenor square. But the minutes elapsed, and
still the carriage sped on; and surprised at last into
suspicion, he raised his hand to the checkstring, but
the small fingers he had been chafing so earnestly arrested
his arm.

“No, no!” said Lady Mildred, rising from his
shoulder, and throwing her arms passionately around
his neck, “you must go blindfold, and go with me!
Ernest! Ernest!” she continued, as he struggled an
instant to reach the string; but he felt her tears on
his breast, and his better angel ceased to contend with
him. He sank back in the chariot with those fragile
arms wound around him, and, with fever in his brain,
and leaden sadness at his heart, suffered that swift
chariot to speed on its guilty way.

In a small maison de plaisance, which he well knew,
in one of the most romantic dells of Devon, built
with exquisite taste by Lady Mildred, and filled with
all that art and wealth could minister to luxury, Ernest
Clay passed the remainder of the summer, forgetful
of everything beyond his prison of pleasure,
except a voice full of bitter remorse, which sometimes,
in the midst of his abandonment, whispered the
name of Eve Gore.

4. CHAPTER IV.

The rain poured in torrents from the broad leads and
Gothic battlements of — Castle, and the dull and
plashing echoes, sent up with steady reverberation
from the stone pavement of the terrace and courts,
lulled to a late sleep one of most gay and fashionable
parties assembled out of London. It was verging
toward noon, and, startled from a dream of music, by
the entrance of a servant, Ernest Clay drew back the
heavy bed-curtains and looked irresolutely around his
luxurious chamber. The coals in the bright fire
widened their smoking cracks and parted with an indolent
effort, the well-trained menial glided stealthily
about, arranging the preparations for the author's
toilet, the gray daylight came in grayer and softer
through the draped folds which fell over the windows,
and if there was temptation to get up, it extended no
farther than to the deeply cushioned and spacious
chair, over which was flung a dressing-gown of the
loose and flowing fashion, and gorgeous stuff of the
Orient.

“Thomas, what stars are visible to the naked eye
this morning?” said the couchant poet with a heavy
yawn.

“Sir!”

“I asked if Lady Grace was at breakfast?”

“Her ladyship took breakfast in her own room, I
believe, sir!”

“`Qualis rex, talis grex.' Bring mine!”

“Beg pardon, sir?”

“I said I would have an egg and a spatchcock,
Thomas! And, Thomas, see if the duke has done
with the Morning Post.”

“I could have been unusually agreeable to Lady
Grace,” soliloquized the author, as he completed his
toilet; “I feel both gregarious and brilliant this
morning and should have breakfasted below. Strange
that one feels so dexterous-minded sometimes after a
hard drink!—Bacchus waking like Aurora! Thomas,
you forgot the claret! I could coin this efflux of
soul, now, into `burning words,' and I will. What
is the cook's name, Thomas? Gone? So has the
builder of this glorious spatchcock narrowly escaped
immortality! Fairest Lady Grace, the sonnet shall
be yours at the rebound! A sonnet? N—n—no!
But I could write such a love-letter this morning!
Morning Post. `Died at Brighton Mr. William
Brown.' Brown—Brown—what was that pretty girl's
name that married a Brown—a rich William Brown.
Beverley was her name—Julia Beverley—a flower for
the garden of Epicurus—a mate for Leontium! I
loved her till I was stopped by Mr. Brown—loved her?
by Jove, I loved her—as well as I loved anybody that
year. Suppose she were now the widow Brown? If
I thought so, faith! I would write her such a teminiscent
epistle—Why not as it is—on the supposition?
Egad, if it is not her William Brown, it is no
fault of mine. Here goes at a venture!

When Mr. Clay had concluded this “airing of his
vocabulary,” he enclosed it in a hasty note to his
friend, the secretary of legation at the court of
Tuscany, requesting him to call on “two abominable
old maids, by the name of Buggins or Bridgins,” who
represented the scan. mag. of Florence, and could
doubtless tell him how to forward his letter to “the
Browns;” and the castle-bell sounding as he achieved
the superscription, he descended to lunch, very much
lightened of his ennui, but with no more memory of
the “faithless Julia,” than of the claret which had
supplied some of the “intensity” of his style. The
letter—began as a mystification, or, if it had an object
beyond the amusement of an idle hour, intended as a
whimsical revenge for Miss Beverley's preference of
a rich husband to her then undistinguished admirer
—had, in the heat of composition, and quite unconsciously
to Clay, enlisted real feelings, totally disconnected
with the fair Julia, but not the less easily fused
into shape and probability by the facile alchymy of
genius. The reader will see at once that the feelings
expressed in it could never be the work of imagination.
Truth and bitter suffering show through every line,
and all its falsehood or fancy lay in its capricious address
to a woman who had really not the slightest
share in contributing to its material. The irreparable
mischief it occasioned, will be seen in the sequel.

5. CHAPTER V.

While the ambassador's bag is steadily posting over
the hills of Burgundy with Mr. Clay's letter to Julia
Beverley, the reader must be content to gain a little
upon her majesty's courier and look in upon a family
party assembled in the terraced front of a villa in the
neighborhood of Fiesole. The evening was Italian
and autumnal, of a ripe, golden glory, and the air was
tempered to the blood, as daylight is to the eye—so
fitly as to be a forgotten blessing.

A well-made, well-dressed, robust gentleman, who
might be forty-five, or a well-preserved sixty, sat at a
stone table on the westward edge of the terrace. The
London Times lay on his lap, and a bottle of sherry
and a single glass stood at his right hand, and he was
dozing quietly after his dinner. Near a fountain below,
two fair English children played with clusters of
ripe grapes. An Italian nurse, forgetting her charge,
stood with folded arms leaning against a rough garden
statue, and looked vacantly at the sunset sky, while
up and down a level and flowering alley in the slope
of the garden, paced slowly and gracefully Mrs.
William Brown, the mother of these children, the
wife of the gentleman sleeping over his newspaper,
and the heroine of this story.

Julia Beverley had been married five years, and for
three years at least she had relinquished the habit of
dressing her fine person to advantage. Yet in that
untransparent sleeve was hidden an arm of statuary
roundness and polish, and in those carelessly fitted

shoes were disguised feet of a plump diminutiveness
and arched instep worthy to be the theme of a new
Cenerentola. The voluptuous chisel of the Greek
never moulded shoulders and bust of more exquisite
beauty, yet if she had not become unconscious of the
possession of these charms altogether, she had so far
lost the vanity of her girlhood that the prudery of a
quakeress would not have altered a fold of her cashmere.
Her bonnet, as she walked, had fallen back,
and, holding it by one string over her shoulder, she
put away behind her “pearl-round ear” the dark and
heavy ringlet it had tangled in its fall, and, with its
fellow shading her cheek and shoulder in broken
masses of auburn, she presented a picture of luxurious
and yet neglected beauty such as the undress pencil
of Grenze would have revelled in portraying. The
care of such silken fringes as veiled her indolent eyes
is not left to mortals, and the covert loves who curve
these soft cradles and sleep in them, had kept Julia
Beverley's with the fidelity of fairy culture.

The Beverleys had married their daughter to Mr.
Brown with the usual parental care as to his fortune,
and the usual parental forgetfulness of everything else.
There was a better chance for happiness, it is true,
than in most matches of convenience, for the bridegroom,
though past his meridian, was a sensible and
very presentable sort of man, and the bride was naturally
indolent, and therefore likely to travel the road
shaped out for her by the very marked hedges of expectation
and duty. What she had felt for Mr. Clay
during their casual and brief intimacy, will be seen by-and-by,
but it had made no barrier to her union with
Mr. Brown. With a luxurious house, fine horses,
and her own way, the stream of life, for the first year
of marriage, ran smoothly off. The second year was
chequered with misgivings that she had thrown herself
away, and nights of bitter weeping over a destiny
in which no one of her bright dreams of love seemed
possible to be realized, and still habit riveted its thousand
chains, her children grew attractive and attaching,
and by the time at which our story commences,
the warm images of a life of passionate devotion had
ceased to haunt her dreams, sleeping or waking, and
she bade fair to live and die one of the happy many
about whom “there is no story to tell.”

Mr. Brown at this period occupied a villa in the
neighborhood of Florence, and on the arrival of Mr.
Clay's letter at English Embassy, it was at once forwarded
to Fiesole, where it intruded like the serpent
of old on the domestic paradise to which the reader
has been introduced.

Weak and ill-regulated as was the mind of Mrs.
Brown, her first feeling after reading the ardent epistle
of Mr. Clay, was unmingled resentment at its freedom.
Her husband's back was turned to her as he sat on the
terrace, and, ascending the garden steps, she threw the
letter on the table.

“Here is a letter of condolence on your death,”
she said, the blood mantling in her cheek, and her
lips arched into an expression of wounded pride and
indignation.

Alas for the slight pivot on which turns the balance
of destiny—her husband slept!

“William!” she said again, but the tone was fainter
and the hand she raised to touch him, stayed suspended
above the fated letter.

Waiting one instant more for an answer, and bending
over her husband to be sure that his sleep was real,
she hastily placed the letter in her bosom, and, with
pale brow and limbs trembling beneath her, fled to
her chamber. Memory had required but an instant
to call up the past, and in that instant, too, the honeyed
flatteries she had glanced over in such haste, had
burnt into her imagination, effacing all else, even the
object for which he had written, and the reproaches
he had lavished on her unfaithfulness. With locked
doors, and curtains dropped between her and the
glowing twilight, she reperused the worshipping
picture of herself, drawn so covertly under the semblance
of complaint, and the feeling of conscious
beauty so long forgotten, stole back into her veins
like the reincarnation of a departed spirit. With a
flashing glance at the tall mirror before her, she stood
up, arching her white neck and threading her fingers
through the loosened masses of her hair. She felt
that she was beautiful—still superbly beautiful. She
advanced to the mirror.

Her bright lips, her pliant motion, the smooth transparence
of her skin, the fulness of vein and limb, all
mingled in one assurance of youth, in a wild desire
for admiration, in a strange, restless, feverish impatience
to be away where she could be seen and
loved—away to fulfil that destiny of the heart which
seemed now the one object of life, though for years
so unaccountably forgotten!

“I was born to be loved!” she wildly exclaimed,
pacing her chamber, and wondering at her own beauty
as the mirror gave back her kindling features and
animated grace of movement; “How could I have
forgotten that I was beautiful?” But at that instant
her husband's voice, cold, harsh, and unimaginative,
forced its way to her ear, and, convulsed with a
tumultuous misery, she could neither struggle with
nor define, she threw herself on her bed and abandoned
herself to an uncontrolled agony of tears.

Let those smile at this paroxysm of feeling whose
“dream has come to pass!” Let those wonder who
have never been startled from their common-place
existence with the heart's bitter question—Is this all!

Reader! are you loved?—loved as you dreamed in
youth you might and must be—loved by the matchless
creature you painted in your imagination, lofty-hearted,
confiding, and radiantly fair? Have you spent your
treasure? Have you lavished the boundless wealth
of your affection? Have you beggared heart and
soul by the wild abandonment to love, of which you
once felt capable?

Lady! of you I ask: Is the golden flow of your
youth coined as it melts away? Are your truth and
fervor, your delicacy and devotedness, your unutterable
depths of tenderness and tears—are they named
on another's lips?—are they made the incense to
Heaven of another's nightly prayer?—Your beauty
is in its pride and flower. Who lays back with idolatrous
caress the soft parting of your hair? Who
smiles when your cheek mantles, and shudders when
it is pale?—Who sits with your slender fingers clasped
in his, — dumb because there are bounds to language,
and trembling because death will divide you?
Oh, the ray of light wasted on the ocean, and the ray
caught and made priceless in a king's diamond—the
wild-flower perishing in the woods, and its sister culled
for culture in the garden of a poet—are not wider
apart in their destiny than the loved and the neglected!
—“Blessed are the beloved,” should read a new
beatitude—“for theirs is the foretaste of Paradise!”

6. CHAPTER VI.

The autumn following found Mr. Clay a pilgrim
for health to the shores of the Mediterranean. Exhausted,
body and soul, with the life of alternate
gayety and passion into which his celebrity had drawn
him, he had accepted, with a sense of exquisite relief,
the offer of a cruise among the Greek Isles in a friend's
yacht, and in the pure stillness of those bright seas,
with a single companion and his books, he idled away
the summer in a luxury of repose and enjoyment such
as only the pleasure-weary can understand. Recruited
in health, and with a mind beginning to yearn once

more for the long foregone stimulus of society, he
landed at Naples in the beginning of October.

“We are not very gay just now,” said the English
minister with whom he hastened to renew an acquaintance
commenced in his former travels, “but the
prettiest woman in the world is `at home' to-night,
and if you are as susceptible as most of the cavaliers
of the Chiaja, you will find Naples attractive enough
after you have seen her.”

“English?”

“Yes—but you can not have known her, for I think
she was never heard of till she came to Naples.”

“Her name?”

“Why, you should hear that after seeing her.
Call her Queen Giovanna and she will come nearer
your prepossession. By-the-by, what have you to do
this morning?”

“I am at your excellency's disposal,”

“Come with me to the atelier of a very clever artist
then, and I will show you her picture. It should be
the man's chef-d'œuvre, for he has lost his wits in
painting it.”

“Literally, do you mean?”

“It would seem so—for though the picture was
finished some months since, he has never taken it off
his easel, and is generally found looking at it. Besides,
he has neither cleaned pallet nor brush since the last
day she sat to him.”

“If he were young and handsome—”

“So he is—and so are scores of the lady's devoted
admirers; but she is either prudent or cold to a degree
that effectually repels hope, and the painter pines with
the rest.”

A few minutes walk brought them to a large room
near the Corso, tenanted by the Venetian artist,
Ippolito Incontri. The minister presented his friend,
and Clay forgot their errand in admiration of the
magnificent brigand face and figure of the painter,
who, after a cold salutation, retreated into the darkest
corner of the point of view, and stood gazing past them
at his easel, silent and unconscious of observation.

“I have seen your wonder,” said Clay, turning to
the picture with a smile, and at the first glance only
remarking its resemblance to a face that should be
familiar to him. “I am surprised that I can not
name her at once, for I am sure I know her well.
But, stay!—the light grows on my eye—no!—with
that expression, certainly not—I am sure, now, that I
have not seen her. Wonderful beauty! Yet there
was a superficial likeness! Have you ever remarked,
Signor Incontri, that, through very intellectual faces,
such as this, you can sometimes see what the countenance
would have been in other circumstances—without
the advantages of education, I mean?”

No answer. The painter was absorbed in his picture,
and Clay turned to the ambassador.

“I have seen somewhere a face, and a very lovely
one, too, that was strangely like these features; yet,
not only without the soul that is here, but incapable,
I should think, of acquiring it by any discipline, either
of thought or feeling.”

“Perhaps it was the original of this, and the painter
has given the soul!”

“He could as soon warm a statue into life as do it.
Invent that look! Oh, he would be a god, not a
painter! Raphael copied, and this man copies; but
nature did the original of this, as he did of Raphael's
immortal beauties; and the departure of the most
vanishing shadow from the truth would be a blot irremediable.”

Clay lost himself in the picture and was silent.
Veil after veil fell away from the expression as he
gazed, and the woman seemed melting out from the
canvass into life. The pose and drapery were nothing.
It was the portrait of a female standing still—perhaps
looking idly out on the sea—lost in revery perhaps—
perhaps just feeling the breath of a coming thought,
the stirring of some lost memory that would presently
awake. The lips were slightly unclosed. The
eyelashes were wakeful yet couchant in their expression.
The large dark orbs lustrous and suffused,
looked of the depth and intense stillness of of the midnight
sky close to the silver rim of a moon high in
heaven. The coloring was warm and and Italian, but
every vein of the transparent temple was steeped in
calmness; and even through the bright pomegranate
richness of a mouth full of the capability of passion
there seemed to breathe the slumberous fragrance of
a flower motionless under its night-burthen of dew.
It portrayed no rank in life. The drapery might have
been a queen's or a contadina's. It was a woman stolen
to the canvass from her inmost cell of privacy,
with her soul unstartled by a human look, and mere
life and freedom from pain or care expressed
form and countenance—yet, with all this, a radiance
of beauty, and a sustained loftiness of feeling
parent as the altitude of the stars. It was a matchless
woman incomparably painted; and though not a
man to fall in love with a semblance, Clay felt and
struggled in vain against the feeling, that the creature
drawn in that portrait controlled the next and perhaps
the most eventful revolution of his many-sphered existence.

The next five hours have (for this tale) no history.

“I have perplexed myself in vain since I left you,”
Clay said to the ambassador, as they rolled on their
way to the palace of the fair Englishwoman;“but
when I yield to the secret conviction that I have seen
the adorable original of the picture, I am lost in a
greater mystery—how I ever could have forgotten her
The coming five minutes will undo the Sphinx's riddle
for me.”

“My life on it you have never seen her,” said his
friend, as the carriage turned through a reverberating
archway, and rapidly making the circuit of a large
court, stopped at the door of a palace blazing with
light.

An opening was made through the crowd, as the
ambassador's name was announced, and Clay followed
him through the brilliant rooms with an agitation to
which he had long been a stranger. Taste, as well
as sumptuous expensiveness, was stamped on everything
around, and there was that indefinable expression
in the assembly, which no one could detect or
appreciate better than Clay, and which is composed,
among other things, of a perfect conviction on the
part of the guests, that their time, presence, and approbation,
are well bestowed where they are.

At the curtained door of a small boudoir, draped
like a tent, a Neapolitan noble of high rank turned
smiling to the ambassador and placed his finger on
his lip. The silken pavilion was crowded, and only
uniforms and heads, fixed in attention, could be seen
by those without; but from the arching folds of the
curtain came a female voice of the deepest and sweetest
melodiousness, reading in low and finely-measured
cadence from an English poem.

“Do you know the voice?” asked the ambassador,
as Clay stood like a man fixed to marble, eagerly
listening.

“Perfectly! I implore you tell me who reads!”

“No!—though your twofold recognisance is singular.
You shall see her before you hear her name.
What is she reading?”

“My own poetry, by Heaven! and yet I can not
name her! This passes belief. I have heard that
voice sob—sob convulsively, and with accents of love—
I have heard it whisper and entreat—you look incredulous,
but it is true. If she do not know me—nay,
if she has not—” he would have said “loved me”—
but the look of scrutiny and surprise on the on the countenance
of the ambassador checked the imprudent

avowal, and he became aware that he was on dangerous
ground. He relapsed into silence, and crowding
close to the tent, heard the numbers he had long ago
linked and forgotten, breathing in music from those
mysterious lips, and, possessed as he was by suspense
and curiosity, he could have wished that sweet moment
to have lasted for ever. I call upon the poet, if
there be one who reads this idle tale, to tell me if
there is a flattery more exquisite on earth, if there is
a deeper-sinking plummet of pride ever dropped into
the profound bosom of the bard, than the listening to
thoughts born in pain and silence, articulate in the
honeyed accents of woman! Answer me, poet!
Answer me, women beloved of poets, who have
breathed their worshipping incense, and know by
what its bright censor was kindled!

The voice ceased, and there was one moment of
stillness, and then the rooms echoed with acclamation.
“Crown her!” cried a tall old man, who stood near
the entrance covered with military orders. “Crown
her!” repeated every tongue; and from a vase that
hung suspended in the centre of the pavilion, the
fresh flowers were snatched by eager hands and
wreathed into a chaplet. But those without became
clamorous to see the imposition of the crown; and,
clearing a way through the entrance, the old man took
the chaplet from the busy hands that had entwined it,
and crying out with Italian enthusiasm, “A triumph! a
triumph!” led forth the majestic Corinna to the crowd.

The ambassador looked at Clay. He had shrunk
behind the statue of a winged cupid, and though his
eyes were fixed with a gaze of stone on the magnificent
creature who was the centre of all regards, he
seemed by his open lips and heaving chest, to be gasping
with some powerful emotion.

“Give me the chaplet!” suddenly exclaimed the
magnificent idol of the crowd. And with no apparent
emotion, except a glowing spot in her temples, and a
quicker throb in the snowy curve of her neck and
bosom, she waved back the throng upon her right,
and advanced with majestic steps to the statue of Love.

“Welcome, Ernest!” she said in a low voice,
taking him by the hand, and losing, for a scarce perceptible
moment, the smile from her lips. “Here,
my friends!” she exclaimed, turning again, and leading
him from his concealment, “honor to whom honor
is due! A crown for the poet of my country, Ernest
Clay!”

“Clay, the poet!” “The English poet!” “The
author of the poem!” were explanations that ran
quickly through the room, and as the crowd pressed
closer around, murmuring the enthusiasm native to
that southern clime, Julia Beverley sprang upon an ottoman,
and standing in her magnificent beauty conspicuous
above all, she placed the crown upon Clay's
head, and bending gracefully and smilingly over him,
impressed a kiss on his forehead, and said, “This for
the poet!”

And of the many lovers of this superb woman who
saw that kiss, not one showed a frown or turned away,
so natural to the warm impulse of the hour did it
seem—so pure an expression of admiration of genius—
so mere a tribute of welcome from Italy to the bard,
by an inspiration born of its sunny air. Surrounded
with eager claimants for his acquaintance, intoxicated
with flattery, giddy with indefinable emotions of love
and pleasure, Ernest Clay lost sight for a moment of
the face that had beamed on him, and in that moment
she had made an apology of fatigue and retired, leaving
her guests to their pleasures.

7. CHAPTER VII.

“Un amour rechauffe ne vaut jamais rien,” is one
of those common-places in the book of love, which
are true only of the common-place and unimaginative.
The rich gifts of affection, which surfeit the cold
bosom of the dull, fall upon the fiery heart of genius
like spice-wood and incense, and long after the giver's
prodigality has ceased, the mouldering embers lie
warm beneath the ashes of silence, and a breath will
uncover and rekindle them. The love of common
men is a world without moon or stars. When the
meridian is passed, the shadows lengthen, and the
light departs, and the night that follows is dark indeed.
But as the twilight closes on the bright and warm passion
of the poet, memory lights her pale lamp, like
the moon, and brightens as the darkness deepens; and
the warm sacrifices made in love's noon and eve, go
up to their places like stars, and with the light treasured
from that fervid day, shine in the still heaven of
the past, steadfast though silent. If there is a feature
of the human soul in which more than in all others,
the fiend is manifest, it is the masculine ingratitude
for love. What wrongs, what agonies, what unutterable
sorrows are the reward of lavished affection, of
generous self-abandonment, of unhesitating and idolatrous
trust! Yet who are the ungrateful? Men lacking
the imagination which can reclose the faded form
in its youthful beauty! Men dead to the past—with
no perception but sight and touch—to whom woman
is a flower and no more—fair to look on and sweet to
pluck in her pride and perfume but scarce possessed
ere trampled on and forgotten! Genius alone treasures
the perishing flower and remembers its dew and fragrance,
and so, immemorially and well, poets have been
beloved of women.

I am recording the passions of genius. Let me
say to you, lady! (reading this tale understandingly,
for you have been beloved by a poet), trust neither
absence, nor silence, nor untoward circumstances!
He has loved you once. Let not your eye rest on
him when you meet—and if you speak, speak coldly!
For, with a passion strengthened and embellished
tenfold by a memory all imagination, he will love you
again! The hours you passed with him—the caresses
you gave him, the tears you shed, and the beauty
with which you bewildered him, have been hallowed
in poetry, and glorified in revery and dream, and he
will come back to you as he would spring into paradise
were it so lost and recovered!

But to my story!

Clay's memory had now become the home of an all-absorbing
passion. By a succession of mischances,
or by management so adroit as never to alarm his pride,
a week passed over, and he had found no opportunity
of speaking alone to the object of his adoration. She
favored him in public, talked to him at the opera,
leaned on his arm in the crowd, caressed his genius
with exquisite flattery, and seemed at moments to
escape narrowly from a phrase too tender or a subject
that would lead to the past—yet without a violation
of the most palpable tact, love was still an impossible
topic. That he could have held her hand in his, unforbidden—that
he could have pressed her to his
bosom while she wept—that she could have loved
him ever, though but for an hour—seemed to him
sometimes an incredible dream, sometimes a most
passionate happiness only to believe. He left her at
night to pace the sands of the bay till morning, remembering—for
ever remembering—the scene by the
fountain at Florence; and he passed his day between
her palace and the picture of poor Incontri, who loved
her more hopelessly than himself, but found a sympathy
in the growing melancholy of the poet.

“She has no heart,” said the painter; but Clay had
felt it beat against his own, and he fed his love in
silence on that remembrance.

They sat upon the rocks by the gate of the Villa
Real. The sun was just setting and as the waves
formed near the shore and rode in upon the glassy

swell of the bay, there seemed to writhe on each wavy
back a golden serpent, who broke on the sands at their
feet in sparkles of fire. At a little distance lay the
swallow-like yacht, in which Clay had threaded the
Archipelago, and as the wish to feel the little craft
bounding once more beneath him, was checked by the
anchor-like heaviness of his heart, an equestrian party
stopped suddenly on the chiaja.

“There is Mr. Clay!” said the thrilling voice of
Julia Beverley, “perhaps he will take us over in the
yacht. Sorrento looks so blue and tempting in the
distance.”

Without waiting for a repetition of the wish he
had overheard, Clay sprang upon a rock, and made
signal for the boat, and before the crimson of the departing
day had faded from the sky, the fair Julia and
her party of cavaliers, were standing on the deck of the
swift vessel, bound on a moonlight voyage to Sorrento,
and watching on their lee the reddening ribs and lurid
cruption of the volcano. The night was Neapolitan,
and the air was the food of love.

It was a voyage of silence, for the sweetness of life
in such an atmosphere and in the midst of that matchless
bay, lay like a voluptuous burthen in the heart,
and the ripple under the clearing prow was language
enough for all. Incontri leaned against the mast,
watching the moonlit features of the signora with his
melancholy but idolizing gaze, and Clay lay on the
deck at her feet, trying with pressed-down lids to recall
the tearful eyes of the Julia Beverley he had loved at
the fountain.

It was midnight when the breath of the orange
groves of Sorrento, stealing seaward, slackened the
way of the little craft, and running in close under the
rocky foundations of the house of Tasso, Clay dropped
his anchor, and landed his silent party at their haven.
Incontri was sent forward to the inn to prepare their
apartments, and leaning on Clay's arm and her husband's,
the superb Englishwoman ascended to the
overhanging balcony of the dwelling of the Italian
bard, and in a few words of eloquent sympathy in the
homage paid by the world to these shrines of genius,
added to the overflowing heart of her gifted lover one
more intoxicating drop of flattery and fascination.
They strolled onward to the inn, and he bade her good
night at the gate, for he could no longer endure the
fetter of another's presence, and the emotion stifled in
his heart and lips.

I have forgotten the name of that pleasant inn at
Sorrento, built against the side of its mountain shore,
with terraced orange-groves piled above its roof, and
the golden fruit nodding in at its windows. From the
principal floor, you will remember, projects a broad
verandah, jutting upon one of these fruit-darkened
alleys. If you have ever slept there after a scramble
over Scaricatoja, you have risen, even from your
fatigued slumber, to go out and pace awhile that overhanging
garden, oppressed with the heavy perfume of
the orange flowers. Strange that I should forget the
name of that inn! I thought, when the busy part of
my life should be well over, I should go back and die
there.

The sea had long closed over the orbed forehead of
the moon, and still Clay restlessly hovered around the
garden of the inn. Mounting at last to the alley on
a level with the principal chambers of the house, he
saw outlined in shadow upon the curtain of a long
window, a female figure holding a book, with her
cheek resting on her hand. Her threw himself on the
grass and gazed steadily. The hand moved from the
cheek, and raised a pencil from the table, and wrote
upon the margin of the volume, and then the pencil
was laid down, and the slender fingers raised the
masses of fallen hair from the shoulder, and threaded
the wavy ringlets indolently as she read: From the
slightest motion of that statuary hand, from the most
fragmented outline of that bird-like neck, Clay would
have known Julia Beverley; and as he watched her
graceful shadow, the repressed and pent-up feelings
of that evening of restraint, fed as they had been by
every voluptuous influence known beneath the moon,
rose to a height that absorbed brain and soul in one
wild tumult of emotion. He sprang to his feet to rush
into her presence, but at that instant a footstep started
from the darkness of a tree, at the extremity of the
alley. He paused and the shadow arose, and laying
aside the book, leaned back, and lifted the tapering
arms, and wound up the long masses of fallen hair,
and then kneeling, remained a few minutes motionless,
with the face buried in the hands.

Clay trembled and felt rebuked.

Once more the flowing drapery swept across the
curtain, the light was extinguished, and the window
thrown open to the night air; and then all was still.

Clay walked to and fro in an agitation bordering on
delirium. “I must speak to her!” he said, murmuring
audibly, and advancing toward the window. But
hurried footsteps started again from the shadow of the
pine, and he stopped to listen. All was silent, and
he stood a moment pressing his hands on his brow,
and trying to struggle with the wild impulse in his
brain. His closed eyes brought back instantly the
unfading picture of Julia Beverley, weeping on his
breast at the fountain, and with one rapid movement
he divided the curtains and stood breathless in her
chamber.

The heavy breathing of the unconscious husband
fell like music on his ear.

“Julia!” he exclaimed in a hoarse whisper, “I am
here—Ernest Clay!”

“You are frantic, Ernest!” said a voice so calm
that it fell on his ear like an assurance of despair.
“I have no feeling for you that answers to this freedom.
Leave my chamber!”

“No!” said Clay, dropping the curtain behind him,
and advancing into the room, “wake your husband if
you will—this is the only spot on earth where I can
breathe, and if you are relentless, here will I die!
Was it false when you said you loved me? Speak,
Julia!”

“Ernest!” she said, in a less assured tone, “I have
done wrong not to check this wild passion earlier, and
I have that to say to you which, perhaps, had better
be said now. I will come to you in the garden.”

“My vessel waits, and in an hour—”

“Nay, nay, you mistake me. But go! I will
follow instantly!”

Vesuvius was burning with an almost smokeless
flame when Clay stood again in the night-air, and every
object was illuminated with the clearness of a conflagration.
At the first glance around, he fancied he
saw figures gliding behind the lurid body of a pine
opposite the window, but in the next moment the curtain
again parted, and Julia Beverley, wrapped in a
cloak, stood beside him on the verandah.

“Stand back!” she said, as he endeavored to put
his arm around her, “I have more than one defender
within call, and I must speak to you where I am.
Will you listen to me, Ernest?”

Clay's breast heaved; but he folded his arms and
leaned against the slender column of the verandah in
silence.

“Were it any other person who had so far forgotten
himself,” she continued, “it would be sufficient
to say, `I can never love you,' and leave my privacy
to be defended by my natural protector. But I wish
to show to you, Ernest, not only that you can have
no hope in loving me, but that you have made me the
mischievous woman I have become. From an humble
wife to a dangerous coquette, the change may
well seem startling—but it is of your working.”

“Mine, madam!” said Clay, whose pride was

aroused with the calm self-possession and repulse of
her tone and manner.

“I have never answered the letter you wrote me.”

“Pardon and spare me!” said Clay, who remembered
at the instant only the whim under which it
was written.

“It awoke me to a new existence,” she continued,
without heeding his confusion, “for it first made me
aware that I could ever be the theme of eloquent admiration.
I had never been praised but in idle compliment,
and by those whose intellect I despised; and
though as a girl I had a vague feeling that I was
slighted and unappreciated, I yielded gradually to the
conviction that the world was right, and that women
sung by poets and described in the glowing language
of romance, were of another mould, I scarce reasoned
upon it. I remember, on first arriving in Italy,
drawing a comparison favorable to myself between
my own beauty and the Fornarina's, and the portraits
of Laura and Leonora D'Este; but as I was loved by
neither painters nor poets, I accused myself of presumption,
and with a sigh, returned to my humility.
My life seemed more vacant than it should be, and I
sometimes wept from an unhappiness I could not define;
and I once or twice met persons who seemed
to have begun to love me, and appreciate my beauty
as I wished, and in this lies the history of my heart
up to the time of your writing to me. That letter,
Ernest—”

“You believed that I loved you then!” passionately
interrupted her listener, “you know now that I
loved you! Tell me so, I implore you!”

“My dear poet,” said the self-possessed beauty,
with a smile expressive of as much mischief as frankness,
“let us be honest. You never loved me! I
never believed it but for one silly hour! Stay!—
stay!—you shall not answer me! I have not left my
bed at this unseasonable hour to listen to protestations.
At least, let me first conclude the history of
my metempsychosis! I can tell it to nobody else,
and like the Ancient Mariner's, it is a tale that must
be told. Revenons! Your very brilliant letter awoke
me from the most profound lethargy by which beauty
such as mine was ever overtaken. A moment's inventory
of my attractions satisfied me that your exquisite
description (written, I have since suspected,
to amuse an idle hour, but done, nevertheless, with
the fine memory and graphic power of genius) was
neither fanciful nor over-colored, and for the first time
in my life I felt beautiful. You are an anatomist of
the heart, and I may say to you that I looked at my
own dark eyes and fine features and person with the
admiration and wonder of a blind beauty restored to
sight and beholding herself in a mirror. You will
think, perhaps, that love for the writer of this magic
letter should have been the inevitable sequel. But I
am here to avert the consequences of my coquetry,
and I will be frank with you. I forgot you in a day!
In the almost insane desire to be seen and appreciated,
painted, sung, and loved, which took possession of me
when the tumult of my first feeling had passed away,
your self-controlled and manageable passion seemed
to me frivolous and shallow.”

“Have you been better loved?” coldly asked Clay.

“I will answer that question before we part. I did
not suffer myself to think of a love that could be
returned—for I had husband and children—and
though I felt that a mutual passion such as I could
imagine, would have absorbed, under happier circumstances,
every energy of my soul, I had no disposition
to make a wreck of another's happiness and honor,
whatever the temptation. Still I must be loved—I
must come out from my obscurity and shine—I must
be the idol of some gifted circle—I must control the
painter's pencil and the poet's pen and the statesman's
scheme—I must sun my beauty in men's eyes, and
be caressed and conspicuous—I must use my gift and
fulfil my destiny! I told my husband this. He secured
my devotion to his peace and honor for ever, by
giving me unlimited control over his fortune and himself.
We came to Naples, and my star, hitherto
clouded in its own humility, sprang at once to the ascendant.
The “attraction of unconscious beauty” is
a poet's fiction, believe me! Set it down in your
books, Ernest—we are our own nomenclators—the
belle as well as the hero! I claimed to be beautiful,
and queened it to the top of my bent—and all Naples
is at my feet! Oh, Ernest! it is a delicious power
to hold human happiness in your control—to be the
loadstar of eminent men and bright intellects! Perhaps
a woman who is absorbed in one passion, finds
in her lover's character and fame room enough for her
pride and her thirst for influence; but to me, giving
nothing in return but the light of my eyes, there
seems scarce in the world celebrity, rank, genius
enough, to limit my ambition. I would be Helen!
I would be Mary of Scots! I would have my beauty
as undisputed and renowned as the Apollo's! Am I
insane or heartless?”

Clay smiled at the abrupt naiveté of the question,
but his eyes were full of visible admiration of the
glowing pictures before him.

“You are beautiful!” was his answer.

“Am I not! Shall I be celebrated hereafter, Ernest?
I should be willing to grow old, if my beauty
were `in amber'—if by some burning line in your
book, some wondrous touch of the pencil, some bold
novelty in sculpture, my beauty would live on men's
lips for ever! Incontri's picture is beautiful and like,
but it is not, if you understand, a conception—it is not
a memoir of the woman as the Cenei's is—it does not
embody a complete fame in itself, like the `Bella' of
Titian, or the `Wife of Giorgione.' If you loved
me, Ernest—”

“If you loved me, Julia!” echoed Clay, with a
tone rather of mockery than sincerity.

“Ah, but you threw me away; and even with my
own consent, I could never be recovered! Believe
me, Ernest, there never was a coquette, who, in some
one of her earlier preferences, had not made a desperate
and single venture of her whole heart's devotion.
That wrecked, she was lost to love. I embarked
with you, soul and heart, and you left to the
mercy of the chance wind a freight that no tide could
bring to port again!”

“You forget the obstacles.”

“A poet! and talk of obstacles in love! Did you
even ask me to run away with you, Ernest! I would
have gone! Ay—coldly as I talk to you now, I
would have followed you to a hovel—for it was first
love to me. Had it been first love to both of us, I
should now be your wife—sharer of your fame! And
oh, how jealous!”

“With your beauty, jealous?”

“Not of flesh-and-blood women, Ernest! With a
wife's opportunities, I could outcharm, with half my
beauty, the whole troop of Circe. I was thinking of
the favors of your pen! Who would I let you describe!
What eyes, what hair, what form but mine
—what character, what name, would I even suffer you
to make immortal! Paul Veronese had a wife with
my avarice. In his hundred pictures there is the
same blue-eyed, golden-haired woman, as much linked
to his fame as Laura to Petrarch's. If he had
drawn her but once, she would have been known as
the woman Paul Veronese painted! She is known
now as the woman he loved. Delicious immortality!”

“Yet she could not have exacted it. That would
have required an intellect which looked abroad—and
poets love no women who are not like birds, content
with the summer around them, and with every thought
in their nest. Paul Veronese's Bionda, with her soft

mild eyes and fair hair, is the very type of such a
woman, and she would not have foregone a caress for
twenty immortalities.”

“May I ask what was my attraction, then?” said
the proud beauty, with a tone of pique.

“Julia Beverley, unconscious and unintellectual!”
answered Clay, drawing on his gloves with the air of
a man who has got through with an interview. “You
have explained your `metempsychosis,' but I was in
love with the form you have cast off. The night
grows chill. Sweet dreams to you!”

“Stay, Mr. Clay! You asked me if I had been
`better loved,' and I promised you an answer. What
think you of a lover who has forgotten the occupation
that gave him bread, abandoned his ambition, and at
all hours of the night is an unrewarded and hopeless
watcher beneath my window?”

“To-night excepted,” said Clay, looking around.

“Incontri!” called Mrs. Brown, without raising
her voice.

Clay started and frowned, as the painter sprang
from the shadow of the pine-tree which had before
attracted his attention. Falling on his knee, the unhappy
lover kissed the jewelled fingers extended to
him, and giving Clay his hand in rising, the poet
sprang back, for he had clapsed the handle of a stiletto!

“Fear not—she does not love you!” said Incontri,
remarking his surprise, and concealing the weapon in
his sleeve.

“I was destined to be cured of my love, either
way,” said Clay, bowing himself off the verandah with
half a shudder and half a smile.

The curtain closed at the same moment over the
retreating form of Julia Beverley, and so turned
another leaf of Clay's voluminous book of love.

8. CHAPTER VIII.

Clay threw the volume aside, in which he had been
reading, and taking up “the red book,” looked for
the county address of Sir Harry Freer, the exponent
(only) of Lady Fanny Freer, who, though the “nicest
possible creature,” is not the heroine of this story.
Sir Harry's ancestral domain turned out to be a portion
of the earth's surface in that county of England
where the old gentry look down upon very famous
lords as too new, and proportionately upon all other
families that have not degenerated since William the
conqueror.

Sir Harry had married an earl's daughter; but as
the earldom was not only the fruit of two generations
of public and political eminence, Sir Harry was not
considered in Cheshire as having made more than a
tolerable match; and if she passed for a “Cheshire
cheese” in London, he passed for but the rind in the
county. In the county therefore there was a lord
paramount of Freer Hall, and in town, a lady paramount
of Brook-street: and it was under the town
dynasty that Miss Blanch Beaufin was invited up from
Cheshire to pass a first winter in London—Miss
Beaufin being the daughter of a descendant of a Norman
retainer of the first Sir Harry, and the relative
position of the families having been rigidly kept up to
the existing epoch.

The address found in the red book was described
upon the following letter:—

Lady Fanny was a warm-hearted, extravagant
beautiful creature of impulse, a passionate friend of
Clay's (for such women there are), without a spice of
flirtation. She was a perennial belle in London; and
he had begun his acquaintance with her by throwing
himself at her head in the approved fashion—in love
to the degree of rose-asking and sonnet-writing. As
she did not laugh when he sighed, however, but only
told him very seriously that she was not a bit in love
with him, and thought he was throwing away his
time, he easily forgave her insensibility, and they became
very warm allies. Spoiled favorite as he was
of London society, Clay had qualities for a very sincere
friendship; and Lady Fanny, full of irregular
talent, had also a strong vein of common sense, and
perfectly understood him. This explanation to the
reader. It would have saved some trouble and pain
if it had been made by some good angel to Sir Harry
Freer.

As the London coach rattled under the bridged
gate of the gloomy old town of Chester, Lady Fanny's
dashing ponies were almost on their haunches with
her impetuous pull-up at the hotel; and returning
with a nod the coachman's respectful bow, she put
her long whip in at the coach window to shake hands
with Clay, and in a few minutes they were again off
the pavements, and taking the road at her ladyship's
usual speed.

“Steady, Flash! steady!” (she ran on, talking to
Clay, and her ponies in the same breath). “doleful
ride down, isn't it?—(keep up, Tom, you villain!)—
very good of you to come, I'm sure, dear Ernest, and
you'll stay; how long will you stay? (down, Flash!)
—Oh, Miss Beaufin! I've something to say to you
about Blanch Beaufin! I didn't answer your Nota
Bene—(go along, Tom! that pony wants blooding)—
because to tell the truth, it's a delicate subject at
Freer Hall, and I would rather talk than write about
it. You see—(will you be done, Flash!)—the
Beaufins, though very nice people, and Blanch quite
a love—(go along, lazy Tom!)—the Beaufins, I say,
are rated rather crockery in Cheshire. And I am
ashamed to own, really quite ashamed, I have not
been near them in a month. Shameful, isn't it?
There's good action, Ernest! Look at that nigh
pony; not a blemish in him; and such a goer in single
harness! Well, I'll go around by the Beaufins
now.”

“Pray consider, Lady Fanny!” interrupted Clay
deprecatingly, “eighteen hours in a coach.”

“Not to go in! oh, not to go in! Blanch is very ill,
and sees nobody;—and (come, Tom! come!)—I only
heard of it this morning—(there's for your laziness,
you stupid horse!,—We'll, just call and ask how she is,
though Sir Harry—”

“Is she very ill, then?” asked Clay, with a concern
which made Lady Fanny turn her eyes from her
ponies' ears to look at him.

“They say, very! Of course, Sir Harry can't forbid
a visit to the sick.”

“Surely he does not forbid you to call on Blanch
Beaufin!”

“Not `forbid' precisely; that wouldn't do—(gently,
sweet Flash! now, Tom! now, lazy! trot fair through
the hollow!)—but I invited her to pass the winter
with me without consulting him, and he liked it well
enough, till he got back among his stupid neighbors
—(well done, Flash! plague take that bothering
whipple-tree!)—and they and their awkward daughters,
whom I might have invited—(whoa! Flash!)—if I

had wanted a menagerie, set him to looking into her
pedigree. There's the house; the old house with
the vines over it yonder! So then, Sir Harry—such
a sweet girl, too—set his face against the acquaintance.
Here we are!—(Whoa, bays! whoa!) Hold the
reins a moment while I run in!”

More to quell a vague and apprehensive feeling of
remorse than to wile away idle time, Clay passed the
reins back to the stripling in gray livery behind, and
walked round Lady Fanny's ponies, expressing his
admiration of them and the turnout altogether.

“Yes, sir,” said the lad, who seemed to have caught
some of the cleverness of his mistress, for he scarce
looked fourteen, “they're a touch above anything in
Cheshire! Look at the forehand of that nigh 'un,
sir!—arm and withers like a greyhound, and yet what
a quarter for trotting, sir! Quite the right thing all
over! Carries his flag that way quite natural; never
was nicked, sir! Did you take notice, begging your
pardon, sir, how milady put through that hollow?
Wasn't it fine, sir? Tother's a goodish nag, too,
but, nothing to Flash; can't spread, somehow; that's
Sir Harry's picking up, and never was a match; no
blood in Tom, sir! Look at his fetlock: underbred,
but a jimpy nag for a roadster, if a man wanted work
out on him. See how he blows, sir, and Flash as
still as a stopped wheel!”

Lady Fanny's reappearance at the door of the
house interrupted her page's enlogy on the bays; and
with a very altered expression of countenance she resumed
the reins, and drove slowly homeward.

“She is very ill, very ill! but she wishes to see
you, and you must go there; but not to-morrow.
She is passing a crisis now, and her physician says,
will be easier if not better, after to-morrow. Poor
girl! dear Blanch! Ah, Clay! but no—no matter;
I shall talk about it with more composure by-and-by
—poor Blanch!”

Lady Fanny's tears rained upon her two hands as
she let out her impatient horses to be sooner at home,
and, in half an hour, Clay was alone in his luxurious
quarters, under Sir Harry's roof, with two hours to
dinner, and more than thoughts enough, and very sad
ones, to make him glad of time and solitude.

Freer Hall was full of company—Sir Harry's company—and
Clay, with the quiet assurance of a London
star, used to the dominant, took his station by Lady
Fanny on entering the drawing-room, and when dinner
was announced, gave her his arm, without troubling
himself to remember that there was a baronet who had
claim to the honor, and of whom he must simply make
a mortal enemy. At table, the conversation ran mainly
in Sir Harry's vein, hunting, and Clay did not even
take the listener's part; but, in a low tone, talked of
London to Lady Fanny—her ladyship (unaccountably
to her husband and his friends, who were used to
furnish her more merriment than revery) pensive
and out of spirits. With the announcement of coffee
in the drawing-room, Clay disappeared with her, and
their evening was tête-a-tête, for Sir Harry and his
friends were three-bottle men, and commonly bade
good-night to ladies when the ladies left the table.
If there had been a second thought in the convivial
squirearchy, they would have troubled their heads
less about a man who did not exhibit the first symptom
of love for the wife—civility to the husband. But
this is a hand-to-mouth world in the way of knowledge,
and nothing is stored but experiences, lifetime
by lifetime.

Another day passed and another, and mystery seemed
the ruling spirit of the hour, for there were enigmas
for all. Regularly, morning and afternoon, the high
stepping ponies were ordered round, and Lady Fanny
(with Mr. Clay for company to the gate) visited the
Beaufins, now against positive orders from the irate
Sir Harry, and daily, Clay's reserve with his beautiful
hostess increased, and his distress of mind with it, for
both he and she were alarmed with the one piece of
unexplained intelligence between them—Miss Beaufin
would see Mr. Clay when she should be dying!
Not before—for worlds not before—and of the physician
constantly in attendance (Lady Fanny often
present), Clay knew that the poor girl besought with
an eagerness, to the last degree touching and earnest,
to know when hope could be given over. She
was indulged, unquestioned, as a dying daughter;
and, whatever might be her secret, Lady Fanny
promised that at the turning hour, come what would
of distressing and painful, she would herself come
with Mr. Clay to her death-bed.

Sir Harry and his friends were in the billiard-room,
and Lady Fanny and Clay breakfasting together, when
a note was brought in by one of the footmen, who
waited for an answer.

“Say that I will come,” said Lady Fanny. “and
stay, George! See that my ponies are harnessed immediately;
put the head of the phaeton up, and let it
stand in the coach-house. And, Timson!” she added
to the butler who stood at the side-table, “if Sir Harry
inquires for me, say that I am gone to visit a sick
friend.”

Lady Fanny walked to the window. It rained in
torrents. There was no need of explanation to Clay;
he understood the note and its meaning.

“The offices connect with the stables by a covered
way,” she said, “and we will get in there. Shall you
be ready in a few minutes?”

“Quite, dear Lady Fanny! I am ready now.”

“The rain is rather fortunate than otherwise,” she
added, in going out, “for Sir Harry will not see us
go; and he might throw an obstacle in the way, and
make it difficult to manage. Wrap well up, Ernest!”

The butler looked inquisitively at Clay and his mistress,
but both were preoccupied, and in ten minutes
the rapid phaeton was on its way, the ponies pressing
on the bit as if the eagerness of the two hearts beating
behind them was communicated through the reins,
and Lady Fanny, contrary to her wont, driving in unencouraging
silence. The three or four miles between
Freer Hall and their destination were soon traversed,
and under the small porte-cochere of the ancient mansion
the ponies stood panting and sheltered.

“Kind Lady Fanny! God bless you!” said a tall,
dark man, of a very striking exterior, coming out to
the phaeton. “And you, sir, are welcome!”

They followed him into the little parlor, where Clay
was presented by Lady Fanny to the mother of Miss
Beaufin, a singularly yet sadly sweet woman in voice,
person, and address; to the old, white-haired vicar,
and to the physician, who returned his bow with a
cold and very formal salute.

“There is no time to be lost,” said he, “and at the
request of Miss Beaufin, Lady Fanny and this gentleman
will please go to her chamber without us. I can
trust your ladyship to see that her remainder of life
is not shortened nor harassed by needless agitation.”

Clay's heart beat violently. At the extremity of
the long and dimly-lighted passage thrown open by
the father to Lady Fanny, he saw a while curtained
bed—the death-bed, he knew, of the gay and fair
flower of a London season, the wonder and idol of
difficult fashion, and unadmiring rank. Blanch Beaufin
had appeared like a marvel in the brilliant circles of
Lady Fanny's acquaintance, a distinguished, unconscious,
dazzling girl, of whom her fair introductress
(either in mischief or good nature) would say nothing
but that she was her neighbor in Cheshire, though
all that nature could lavish on one human creature
seemed hers, with all that high birth could stamp on
mien, countenance, and manners. Clay paid her his
tribute with the rest—the hundred who flattered and
followed her; but she was a proud girl, and though

he seized every opportunity of being near her, nothing
in her manner betrayed to him that he was not counted
among the hundred. A London season fleets fast,
and, taken by surprise with Lady Fanny's early departure
for the country, her farewells were written
on the corners of cards, and with a secret deep buried
in the heart, she was brought back to the retirement
of home.

Brief history of the breaking of a heart!

Lady Fanny started slightly on entering the chamber.
The sick girl sat propped in an arm chair,
dressed in snowy white; even her slight foot appearing
beneath the edge of her dress in a slipper of white
satin. Her brown hair fell in profuse ringlets over
her shoulders; but it was gathered behind into a
knot, and from it depended a white veil, the diamonds
which fastened it, pressing to the glossy curve of her
head, a slender stem of orange-flowers. Her features
were of that slight mould which shows sickness by
little except higher transparency of the blue veins,
and brighter redness in the lips, and as she smiled
with suffused cheek, and held out her gloved hand to
Clay, with a vain effort to articulate, he passed his
hands across his eyes and looked inquiringly at his
friend. He had expected, though he had never
realized, that she would be altered. She looked
almost as he had left her. He remembered her only
as he had oftenest seen her—dressed for ball or party,
and but for the solemnity of the preparation he had
gone through, he might have thought his feelings
had been played upon only; that Blauch Beaufin
was well—still beautiful and well; that he should
again see her in the brilliant circles of London; still
love her as he secretly did, and receive what he now
felt would be under any circumstances a gift of
Heaven, the assurance of a return. This and a world
of confused emotion, tumultuously and in an instant,
rushed through his heart; for there are moments in
which we live lives of feeling and thought; moments,
glances, which supply years of secret or bitter memory.

This is but a sketch—but an outline of a tale over
true. Were there space, were there time to follow
out the traverse thread of its mere mournful incidents,
we might write the reverse side of a leaf of life ever
read partially and wrong—the life of the gay and unlamenting.
Sickness and death had here broken
down a wall of adamant between two creatures, every
way formed for each other. In health and ordinary
regularity of circumstances, they would have loved as
truly and deeply as those in humbler or in more fortunate
relative positions; but they probably would
never have been united. It is the system, the necessary
system of the class to which Clay belonged, to
turn adroitly and gayly off every shaft to the heart;
to take advantage of no opening to affection; to
smother all preference that would lead to an interchange
of hallowed vows; to profess insensibility
equally polished and hardened on the subject of pure
love; to forswear marriage, and make of it a mock
and an impossibility. And whose handiwork is this
unnatural order of society? Was it established by
the fortunate and joyous—by the wealthy and untrammelled,
at liberty to range the world if they liked,
and marry where they chose, but preferring gayety to
happiness, and lawless liberty to virtuous love? No,
indeed! not by these! Show me one such man, and
I will show you a rare perversion of common feeling
—a man who under any circumstances would have
been cold and eccentric. It is not to those able to
marry where they will, that the class of London gay
men owe their system of mocking opinions. But it
is to the companions of fortunate men—gifted like
them, in all but fortune, and holding their caste by
the tenure of forsworn ties—abiding in the paradise
of aristocracy with pure love for the forbidden fruit!
Are such men insensible to love? Has this forbidden
joy—this one thing hallowed in a bad world; has it no
temptation for the gay man? Is his better nature
quite dead within him? Is he never ill and sad where
gayety can not reach him? Does he envy the rich
young lord (his friend), everything but his blushing
and pure bride? Is he poet or wit, or the mirror of
taste and elegance, yet incapable of discerning the
qualities of a true love; the celestial refinement of a
maiden passion, lawful and fearless, devoted because
spotless, and enduring because made up half of prayer
and gratitude to her Maker? Does he not know distinctions
of feeling, as he knows character in a play?
Does he not discriminate between purity and guilt in
love, as he does in his nice judgment of honor and
taste? Is he gayly dead to the deepest and most
elevated cravings of nature—love, passionate, single-hearted,
and holy? Trust me, there is a bitterness
whose depths we can only fathom by refinement!
To move among creatures embellished and elevated
to the last point of human attainment, lovely and unsullied,
and know yourself (as to all but gazing on and
appreciating them) a pariah and an outcast! to breathe
their air, and be the companion and apparent equal of
those for whose bliss they are created, and to whom
they are offered for choice, with the profusion of
flowers in a garden—(the chooser and possessor of
the brightest your inferior in all else)—to live thus;
to suffer thus, and still smile and call it choice and
your own way to happiness—this is mockery indeed!
He who now stood in the death-room of Blanch
Beaufin, had felt it in its bitterest intensity!

“Mr. Clay!—Ernest!” said the now pale creature,
breaking the silence with a strong effort, for he had
dropped on his knee at her side in ungovernable emotion,
and, as yet, had but articulated her name—“Ernest!
I have but little time for anything—least of all
for disguise or ceremony. I am assured that I am dying.
I am convinced,” she added firmly, taking up
the watch that lay beside her, “that I have been told
the truth, and that when this hourhand comes round
again, I shall be dead. I will conceal nothing. They
have given me cordials that will support me one hour,
and for that hour—and for eternity—I wish—if I may
be so blest—if God will permit—to be your wife!”

Lady Fanny Freer rose and came to her with rapid
steps, and Clay sprang to his feet, and in a passion of
tears exclaimed, “Oh God! can this be true!”

“Answer me quickly!” she continued, in a voice
raised, but breaking through sobs, “an hour is short—
oh how short, when it is the last! I can not stay with
you long, were you a thousand times mine. Tell
me, Ernest!—shall it be?—shall I be wedded ere I
die?—wedded now?”

A passionate gesture to Lady Fanny was all the
answer Clay could make, and in another moment the
aged vicar was in the chamber, with her parents and
the physician, to all of whom a few words explained
a mystery which her bridal attire had already half unravelled.

Blanch spoke quickly—“Shall he proceed, Ernest?”

Her prayer-book was open on her knee, and Clay
gave it to the vicar, who, with a quick sense of sympathy,
and with but a glance at the weeping and silent
parents, read without delay the hallowed ceremonial.

Clay's countenance elevated and cleared as he proceeded,
and Blanch, with her large suffused eyes fixed
on his, listened with a smile, serene, but expressive of
unspeakable rapture. Her beauty had never been so
radiant, so angelic. In heaven, on her bridal night,
beatified spirit as she was, she could not have been
more beautiful!

One instant of embarrassment occurred, unobserved
by the dying bride, but, with the thoughtfulness of
womanly generosity, Lady Fanny had foreseen it, and,

drawing off her own wedding-ring, she passed it into
Ernest's hand ere the interruption became apparent.
Alas! the emaciated hand ungloved to receive it!
That wasted finger pointed indeed to heaven! Till
then, Clay had felt almost in a dream. But here was
suffering—sickness—death! This told what the hectic
brightness and the faultless features would fain
deny—what the fragrant and still unwithering flowers
upon her temples would seem to mock! But the
hectic was already fading, and the flowers outlived the
light in the dark eyes they shaded!

The vicar joined their hands with the solemn adjuration,
“Those whom God hath joined together let
no man put asunder;” and Clay rose from his knees,
and pressing his first kiss upon her lips, strained her
passionately to his heart.

“Mine in heaven!” she cried, giving way at last to
her tears, as she closed her slight arms over his neck;
“mine in heaven! Is it not so, mother! father! is
he not mine now? There is no giving in marriage in
heaven, but the ties, hallowed here, are not forgotten
there! Tell me they are not! Speak to me, my
husband! Press me to your heart, Ernest! Your
wife—oh, I thank God!”

The physician sprang forward and laid his hand
upon her pulse. She fell back upon her pillows, and
with a smile upon her lips, and the tears still wet upon
her long and drooping lashes, lay dead.

Lady Fanny took the mother by the arm, and with
a gesture to the father and the physician to follow,
they retired and left the bridegroom alone.

Life is full of sudden transitions; and the next
event in that of Ernest Clay, was a duel with Sir Harry
Freer—if the Morning Post was to be believed—
“occasioned by the indiscretion of Lady Fanny, who,
in a giddy moment, it appears, had given to her admirer,
Sir Harry's opponent, her wedding-ring!”

9. CHAPTER IX.

Late one night in June two gentlemen arrived at
the Villa Hotel of the Baths of Lucca. They stopped
the low britzka in which they travelled, and, leaving
a servant to make arrangements for their lodging,
linked arms and strolled up the road toward the banks
of the Lima. The moon was chequered at the moment
with the poised leaf of a treetop, and as it passed
from her face, she arose and stood alone in the
steel-blue of the unclouded heavens—a luminous and
tremulous plate of gold. And you know how beautiful
must have been the night, a June night in Italy,
with a moon at the full!

A lady, with a servant following her at a little distauce,
passed the travellers on the bridge of the Lima.
She dropped her veil and went by in silence. But
the Freyherr felt the arm of his friend tremble within
his own.

“Do you know her, then?” asked Von Leisten.

“By the thrill in my veins we have met before,”
said Clay; “but whether this involuntary sensation
was pleasurable or painful, I have not yet decided.
There are none I care to meet—none who can be
here.” He added the last few words after a moment's
pause, and sadly.

They walked on in silence to the base of the mountain,
busy each with such coloring as the moonlight
threw on their thoughts, but neither of them was
happy.

Clay was humane, and a lover of nature—a poet,
that is to say—and, in a world so beautiful, could never
be a prey to disgust; but he was satiated with the
common emotions of life. His heart, for ever overflowing,
had filled many a cup with love, but with
strange tenacity he turned back for ever to the first.
He was weary of the beginnings of love—weary of
its probations and changes. He had passed the period
of life when inconstancy was tempting. He
longed now for an affection that would continue into
another world—holy and pure enough to pass a gate
guarded by angels. And his first love—recklessly as
he had thrown it away—was now the thirst of his existence.

It was two o'clock at night. The moon lay broad
upon the southern balconies of the hotel, and every
casement was open to its luminous and fragrant stillness.
Clay and the Freyherr Von Leisten, each in
his apartment, were awake, unwilling to lose the luxury
of the night. And there was one other under
that roof waking, with her eyes fixed on the moon.

As Clay leaned his head on his hand, and looked
outward to the sky, his heart began to be troubled.
There was a point in the path of the moon's rays
where his spirit turned back. There was an influence
abroad in the dissolving moonlight around him which
resistlessly awakened the past—the sealed but unforgotten
past. He could not single out the emotion. He
knew not whether it was fear or hope—pain or pleasure.
He called, through the open window, to Von Leisten.

The Freyherr, like himself, and like all who have
outlived the effervescence of life, was enamored of the
night. A moment of unfathomable moonlight was
dearer to him than hours disenchanted with the sun.
He, too, had been looking outward and upward—but
with no trouble at his heart.

“The night is inconceivably sweet,” he said, as he
entered, “and your voice called in my thought and
sense from the intoxication of a revel. What would
you, my friend?”

“I am restless, Von Leisten! There is some one
near us whose glances cross mine on the moonlight,
and agitate and perplex me. Yet there was but one
on earth deep enough in the life-blood of my being
to move me thus—even were she here! And she is
not here!”

His voice trembled and softened, and the last word
was scarce audible on his closing lips, for the Freyherr
had passed his hands over him while he spoke,
and he had fallen into the trance of the spirit-world.

Clay and Von Leisten had retired from the active
passions of life together, and had met and mingled at
that moment of void and thirst when each supplied
the want of the other. The Freyherr was a German
noble, of a character passionately poetic, and of singular
acquirement in the mystic fields of knowledge.
Too wealthy to need labor, and too proud to submit
his thoughts or his attainments to the criticism or
judgment of the world, he lavished on his own life, and
on those linked to him in friendship, the strange powers
he had acquired, and the prodigal overthrow of his
daily thought and feeling. Clay was his superior,
perhaps, in genius, and necessity had driven him to
develop the type of his inner soul, and leave its impress
on the time. But he was inferior to Von Leisten
in the power of will, and he lay in his control like
a child in its mother's. Four years they had passed
together, much of it in the secluded castle of Von
Leisten, busied with the occult studies to which the
Freyherr was secretly devoted; but travelling down
to Italy to meet the luxurious summer, and dividing
their lives between the enjoyment of nature and the
ideal world they had unlocked. Von Leisten had
lost, by death, the human altar on which his heart
could alone burn the incense of love; and Clay had
flung aside in an hour of intoxicating passion the one
pure affection in which his happiness was sealed—
and both were desolate. But in the world of the
past, Von Leisten, though more irrevocably lonely,
was more tranquilly blest.

The Freyherr released the entranced spirit of his

friend, and bade him follow back the rays of the moon
to the source of his agitation.

A smile crept slowly over the speaker's lips.

In an apartment flooded with the silver lustre of the
night, reclined, in an invalid's chair, propped with pillows,
a woman of singular, though most fragile beauty.
Books and music lay strewn around, and a lamp, subdued
to the tone of the moonlight by an orb of alabaster,
burned beside her. She lay bathing her blue
eyes in the round chalice of the moon. A profusion
of brown ringlets fell over the white dress that enveloped
her, and her oval cheek lay supported on the
palm of her hand, and her bright red lips were parted.
The pure, yet passionate spell of that soft night possessed
her.

Over her leaned the disembodied spirit of him who
had once loved her—praying to God that his soul
might be so purified as to mingle unstartingly, unrepulsively,
in hallowed harmony with hers. And presently
he felt the coming of angels toward him, breathing
into the deepest abysses of his existence a tearful
and purifying sadness. And with a trembling aspiration
of grateful humility to his Maker, he stooped to
her forehead, and with his impalpable lips impressed
upon its snowy tablet a kiss.

It seemed to Eve Gore a thought of the past that
brought the blood suddenly to her cheek. She started
from her reclining position, and, removing the obscuring
shade from her lamp, arose and crossed her hands
upon her wrists, and paced thoughtfully to and fro.
Her lips murmured marticulately. But the thought,
painfully though it came, changed unaccountably to
melancholy sweetness; and, subduing her lamp again,
she resumed her steadfast gaze upon the moon.

Ernest knelt beside her, and with his invisible brow
bowed upon her hand, poured forth, in the voiceless
language of the soul, his memories of the past, his
hope, his repentance, his pure and passionate adoration
at the present hour.

And thinking she had been in a sweet dream, yet
wondering at its truthfulness and power, Eve wept,
silently and long. As the morning touched the east,
slumber weighed upon her moistened eyelids, and
kneeling by her bedside she murmured her gratitude
to God for a heart relieved of a burden long borne,
and so went peacefully to her sleep. * * *

It was in the following year, and in the beginning
of May. The gay world of England was concentrated
in London, and at the entertainments of noble
houses there were many beautiful women and many
marked men. The Freyherr Von Leisten, after
years of absence, had appeared again, his mysterious
and undeniable superiority of mien and influence
again yielded to, as before, and again bringing to his
feet the homage and deference of the crowd he moved
among. To his inscrutable power the game of society
was easy, and he walked where he would through
its barriers of form.

He stood one night looking on at a dance. A lady
of a noble air was near him, and both were watching
the movements of the loveliest woman present, a creature
in radiant health, apparently about twenty-three,
and of matchless fascination of person and manner.
Von Leisten turned to the lady near him to inquire
her name, but his attention was arrested by the re
semblance between her and the object of his admiring
curiosity, and he was silent.

The lady had bowed before he withdrew his gaze,
however.

“I think we have met before!” she said; but at
the next instant a slight flush of displeasure came to her
cheek, and she seemed regretting that she had spoken.

“Pardon me!” said Von Leisten, “but—if the
question be not rude—do you remember where?”

She hesitated a moment.

“I have recalled it since I have spoken,” she continued;
“but as the remembrance of the person who
accompanied you always gives me pain, I would willingly
have unsaid it. One evening of last year, crossing
the bridge of the Lima, you were walking with
Mr. Clay. Pardon me—but, though I left Lucca
with my daughter on the following morning, and saw
you no more, the association, or your appearance,
had imprinted the circumstance on my mind.”

“And is that Eve Gore?” said Von Leisten, musingly,
gazing on the beautiful creature now gliding
with light step to her mother's side.

But the Freyherr's heart was gone to his friend.

As the burst of the waltz broke in upon the closing
of the quadrille, he offered his hand to the fair girl,
and as they moved round to the entrancing music, he
murmured in her ear, “He who came to you in the
moonlight of Italy will be with you again, if you are
alone, at the rising of to-night's late moon. Believe
the voice that then speaks to you!” * * *

It was with implacable determination that Mrs.
Gore refused, to the entreaties of Von Leisten, a renewal
of Clay's acquaintance with her daughter.
Resentment for the apparent recklessness with which
he had once sacrificed her maiden love for an unlawful
passion—scornful unbelief of any change in his
character—distrust of the future tendency of the
powers of his genius—all mingled together in a hostility
proof against persuasion. She had expressed
this with all the positiveness of language, when her
daughter suddenly entered the room. It was the
morning after the ball, and she had risen late. But
though subdued and pensive in her air, Von Leisten
saw at a glance that she was happy.

“Can you bring him to me?” said Eve, letting her
hand remain in Von Leisten's, and bending her deep
blue eyes inquiringly on his.

And with no argument but tears and caresses, and
an unexplained assurance of her conviction of the repentant
purity and love of him to whom her heart
was once given, the confiding and strong-hearted
girl bent, at last, the stern will that forbade her happiness.
Her mother unclasped the slight arms from her
neck, and gave her hand in silent consent to Von Leisten.

The Freyherr stood a moment with his eyes fixed
on the ground. The color fled from his cheeks, and
his brow moistened.

“I have called him,” he said—“he will be here!”

An hour elapsed, and Clay entered the house. He
had risen from a bed of sickness, and came, pale and
in terror—for the spirit-summons was powerful. But
Von Leisten welcomed him at the door with a smile,
and withdrew the mother from the room, and left Ernest
alone with his future bride—the first union, save
in spirit, after years of separation.

THE MARQUIS IN PETTICOATS.

(THE OUTLINE FROM A FRENCH MEMOIR.)

I introduce you at once to the Marquis de la Chetardie—a
diplomatist who figured largely in the gay
age of Louis XV.—and the story is but one of the
illuminated pages of the dark book of diplomacy.

Charles de la Chetardie appeared for the first time
to the eyes of the king at a masquerade ball, given at
Versailles, under the auspices of la belle Pompadour.
He was dressed as a young lady of high rank, making
her début; and, so perfect was his acting, and the deception
altogether, that Louis became enamored
of the disguised marquis, and violently excited the
jealousy of “Madame,” by his amorous attentions.
An eclaircissement, of course, took place, and the result
was a great partiality for the marquis's society,
and his subsequent employment, in and out of petticoats,
in many a scheme of state diplomacy and royal
amusement.

La Chetardie was at this time just eighteen. He
was very slight, and had remarkably small hands and
feet, and the radiant fairness of his skin and the luxuriant
softness of his profuse chestnut curls, might
justly have been the envy of the most delicate woman.
He was, at first, subjected to some ridicule for his
effeminacy, but the merry courtiers were soon made
aware, that, under this velvet fragility lay concealed
the strength and ferocity of the tiger. The grasp of
his small hand was like an iron vice, and his singular
activity, and the cool courage which afterward gave
him a brilliant career on the battle-field, established
him, in a very short time, as the most formidable
swordsman of the court. His ferocity, however, lay
deeply concealed in his character, and, unprovoked,
he was the gayest and most brilliant of merry companions.

This was the age of occult and treacherous diplomacy,
and the court of Russia, where Louis would
fain have exercised an influence (private as well as political
in its results), was guarded by an implacable
Argus, in the person of the prime minister, Bestucheff.
Aided by Sir Hambury Williams, the English ambassador,
one of the craftiest men of that crafty period, he
had succeeded for some years in defeating every attempt
at access to the imperial ear by the secret emissaries
of France. The sudden appearance of La
Chetardie, his cool self-command, and his successful
personation of a female, suggested a new hope to the
king, however; and, called to Versailles by royal mandate,
the young marquis was taken into cabinet confidence,
and a secret mission to St. Petersburgh, in
petticoats, proposed to him and accepted.

With his instructions and secret despatches stitched
into his corsets, and under the ostensible protection of
a scientific man, who was to present him to the tzarine
as a Mademoiselle de Beaumont, desirous of entering
the service of Elizabeth, the marquis reached St. Petersburg
without accident or adventure. The young
lady's guardian requested an audience through Bestucheff,
and having delivered the open letters recommending
her for her accomplishments to the imperial
protection, he begged leave to continue on his scientific
tour to the central regions of Russia.

Congé was immediately granted, and on the disappearance
of the savant, and before the departure of
Bestucheff, the tzarine threw off all ceremony, and
pinching the cheeks and imprinting a kiss on the fore
head of the beautiful stranger, appointed her, by one
of those sudden whims of preference against which
her ministers had so much trouble to guard, lectrice
intime et particulière—in short, confidential personal
attendant. The blushes of the confused marquis, who
was unprepared for so affectionate a reception, served
rather to heighten the disguise, and old Bestucheff
bowed himself out with a compliment to the beauty
of Mademoiselle de Beaumont, veiled in a diplomatic
congratulation to her imperial mistress.

Elizabeth was forty and a little passée, but she still
had pretensions, and was particularly fond of beauty
in her attendants, female as well as male. Her favorite,
of her personal suite, at the time of the arrival of
the marquis, was an exquisite little creature who had
been sent to her, as a compliment to this particular
taste, by the Dutchess of Mecklenberg-Strelitz—a kind
of German “Fenella,” or “Mignon,” by the name of
Nadége Stein. Not much below the middle size,
Nadége was a model of symmetrical proportion, and
of very extraordinary beauty. She had been carefully
educated for her present situation, and was highly
accomplished; a fine reader, and a singularly sweet
musician and dancer. The tzarine's passion for this
lovely attendant was excessive, and the arrival of a new
favorite of the same sex was looked upon with some
pleasure by the eclipsed remainder of the palace
idlers.

Elizabeth summoned Nadége, and committed Mademoiselle
de Beaumont temporarily to her charge;
but the same mysterious magnetism which had reached
the heart of the tzarine, seemed to kindle, quite as
promptly, the affections of her attendant. Nadége
was no sooner alone with her new friend, than she
jumped to her neck, smothered her with kisses, called
her by every endearing epithet, and overwhelmed her
with questions, mingled with the most childlike exclamations
of wonder at her own inexplicable love for
a stranger. In an hour, she had shown to the new
demoiselle all the contents of the little boudoir in which
she lived: talked to her of her loves and hates at the
Russian court: of her home in Mecklenberg, and her
present situation—in short, poured out her heart with
the naif abandon of a child. The young marquis had
never seen so lovely a creature; and, responsibly as he
felt his difficult and delicate situation, he returned the
affection so innocently lavished upon him, and by the
end of this first fatal hour, was irrecoverably in love.
And, gay as his life had been at the French court, it
was the first, and subsequently proved to be the deepest,
passion of his life.

On the tzarine's return to her private apartment, she
summoned her new favorite, and superintended, with
condescending solicitude, the arrangements for her
palace lodging. Nadége inhabited a small tower adjoining
the bedroom of her mistress, and above this
was an unoccupied room, which, at the present suggestion
of the fairy little attendant, was allotted to the
new-comer. The staircase opened by one door into
the private gardens, and by the opposite, into the corridor
leading immediately to the imperial chamber.
The marquis's delicacy would fain have made some
objection to this very intimate location; but he could
hazard nothing against the interests of his sovereign,
and he trusted to a speedy termination of his disguise

with the attainment of his object. Meantime, the
close neighborbood of the fair Nadége was not the
most intolerable of necessities.

The marquis's task was a very difficult one. He
was instructed, before abandoning his disguise and delivering
his secret despatches, to awaken the interest
of the tzarine on the two subjects to which the documents
had reference: viz., a former partiality of her
majesty for Louis, and a formerly discussed project of
seating the Prince de Conti on the throne of Poland.
Bestucheff had so long succeeded in cutting off all
approach of these topics to the ear of the tzarine, that
her majesty had probably forgotten them altogether.

Weeks passed, and the opportunities to broach these
delicate subjects had been inauspiciously rare. Mademoiselle
de Beaumont, it is true, had completely
eclipsed the favorite Nadége; and Elizabeth, in her
hours of relaxation from state affairs, exacted the constant
attendance of the new favorite in her private
apartments. But the almost constant presence of
some other of the maids of honor, opposed continual
obstacles and interruptions, and the tzarine herself
was not always disposed to talk of matters more serious
than the current trifles of the hour. She was
extremely indolent in her personal habits; and often
reclining at length upon cushions on the floor of her
boudoir, she laid her imperial head in the lap of the
embarrassed demoiselle, and was soothed to sleep by
reading and the bathing of her temples. And during
this period, she exacted frequently of the marquis, with
a kind of instinctive mistrust, promises of continuance
for life in her personal service.

But there were sweeter hours for the enamored La
Chetardie than those passed in the presence of his
partial and imperial mistress. Encircled by sentinels,
and guarded from all intrusion of other eyes, in the
inviolable sanctuary of royalty, the beautiful Nadége,
impassioned she knew not why, in her love for her
new companion, was ever within call, and happy in
devoting to him all her faculties of caressing endearment.
He had not yet dared to risk the interests of
his sovereign by a disclosure of his sex, even in the
confidence of love. He could not trust Nadége to
play so difficult a part as that of possessor of so embarrassing
a secret in the presence of the shrewd and
observing tzarine. A betrayal, too, would at once put
an end to his happiness. With the slight arm of the
fair and relying creature about his waist, and her head
pressed close against his breast, they passed the balmy
nights of the Russian summer in pacing the flowery
alleys of the imperial garden, discoursing, with but
one reserve, on every subject that floated to their lips.
It required, however, all the self-control of La Chetardie,
and all the favoring darkness of the night, to conceal
his smiles at the naive confessions of the unconscious
girl, and her wonderings at the peculiarity of her
feelings. She had thought, hitherto, that there were
affections in her nature which could only be called forth
by a lover. Yet now, the thought of caressing another
than her friend—of repeating to any human ear, least
of all to a man, those new-born vows of love—filled
her with alarm and horror. She felt that she had
given her heart irrevocably away—and to a woman!
Ah, with what delirious, though silent passion, La
Chetardie drew her to his bosom, and, with the pressure
of his lips upon hers, interrupted those sweet
confessions!

Yet the time at last drew near for the waking from
this celestial dream. The disguised diplomatist had
found his opportunity, and had successfully awakened
in Elizabeth's mind both curiosity and interest as to
the subjects of the despatches still sewed safely in his
corsets. There remained nothing for him now but to
seize a favorable opportunity, and, with the delivery
of his missives, to declare his sex to the tzarine. There
was risk to life and liberty in this, but the marquis
knew not fear, and he thought but of its consequences
to his love.

In La Chetardie's last interview with the savant who
conducted him to Russia, his male attire had been
successfully transferred from one portmanteau to the
other, and it was now in his possession, ready for the
moment of need. With his plans brought to within a
single night of the dénouement, he parted from the
tzarine, having asked the imperial permission for an
hour's private interview on the morrow, and, with gentle
force excluding Nadége from his apartment, he
dressed himself in his proper costume, and cut open
the warm envelope of his despatches. This done, he
threw his cloak over him, and, with a dark lantern in
his hand, sought Nadége in the garden. He had determined
to disclose himself to her, renew his vows of
love in his proper guise, and arrange, while he had
access and opportunity, some means for uniting their
destinies hereafter.

As he opened the door of the turret, Nadége flew
up the stair to meet him, and observing the cloak in
the faint glimmer of the stars, she playfully endeavored
to envelope herself in it. But, seizing her hands,
La Chetardie turned and glided backward, drawing
her after him toward a small pavilion in the remoter
part of the garden. Here they had never been interrupted,
the empress alone having the power to intrude
upon them, and La Chetardie felt safe in devoting this
place and time to the double disclosure of his secret
and his suppressed passion.

Persuading her with difficulty to desist from putting
her arms about him and sit down without a caress, he
retreated a few steps, and in the darkness of the pavilion,
shook down his imprisoned locks to their masculine
abandon, threw off his cloak, and drew up the
blind of his lantern. The scream of surprise, which
instantly parted from the lips of Nadége, made him
regret his imprudence in not having prepared her for
the transformation, but her second thought was mirth,
for she could believe it of course to be nothing but a
playful masquerade; and with delighted laughter she
sprang to his neck, and overwhelmed him with her
kisses—another voice, however, joining very unexpectedly
in the laughter!

The empress stood before them!

For an instant, with all his self-possession, La Chetardie
was confounded and dismayed. Siberia, the
knout, the scaffold, flitted before his eyes, and Nadége
was the sufferer! But a glance at the face of the
tzarine reassured him. She, too, took it for a girlish
masquerade!

But the empress, unfortunately, was not disposed to
have a partner in her enjoyment of the society of this
new apparition of “hose and doublet.” She ordered
Nadége to her turret, with one of those petulant commands
which her attendants understood to admit of no
delay, and while the eclipsed favorite disappeared with
the tears of unwilling submission in her soft eyes, La
Chetardie looked after her with the anguish of eternal
separation at his heart, for a presentiment crowded
irresistibly upon him that he should never see her
more!

The empress was in slippers and robe de nuit, and,
as if fate had determined that this well-kept secret
should not survive the hour, her majesty laid her arm
within that of her supposed masquerader, and led the
way to the palace. She was wakeful, and wished to
be read to sleep. And, with many a compliment to
the beauty of her favorite in male attire, and many a
playful caress, she arrived at the door of her chamber.

But the marquis could go no farther. He had hitherto
been spared the embarrassment of passing this
sacred threshold, for the passée empress had secrets
of toilet for the embellishment of her person, which
she trusted only to the eyes of an antiquated attendant.
La Chetardie had never passed beyond the boudoir

which was between the antechamber and the bed-room,
and the time had come for the disclosure of his
secret. He fell on his knees and announced himself
a man!

Fortunately they were alone. Incredulous at first,
the empress listened to his asseverations, however,
with more amusement than displeasure, and the immediate
delivery of the despatches, with the commendations
of the disguised ambassador by his royal master
to the forgiveness and kindness of the empress,
amply secured his pardon. But it was on condition
that he should resume his disguise and remain in her
service.

Alone in his tower (for Nadége had disappeared, and
he knew enough of the cruelty of Elizabeth to dread
the consequences to the poor girl of venturing on direct
inquiries as to her fate), La Chetardie after a few
weeks fell ill; and fortunate, even at this price, to
escape from the silken fetters of the enamored tzarine,
he departed under the care of the imperial physician,
for the more genial climate of France—not without
reiterated promises of return, however, and offers, in
that event, of unlimited wealth and advancement.

But, as the marquis made his way slowly toward
Vienna, a gleam of light dawned on his sadness.
The Princess Sophia Charlotte was newly affianced to
George the Third of England, and this daughter of
the house of Mecklenberg had been the playmate of
Nadége Stein, from infancy till the time when Nadége
was sent to the tzarine by the Dutchess of Mecklenberg.
Making a confidant of the kind physician who
accompanied him, La Chetardie was confirmed, by the
good man's better experience and knowledge, in the
belief that Nadége had shared the same fate of every
female of the court who had ever awakened the jealousy
of the empress. She was doubtless exiled to
Siberia; but, as she had committed no voluntary fault,
it was probably without other punishment; and, with
a playmate on the throne of England, she might be
demanded and recovered ere long, in all her freshness
and beauty. Yet the recent fate of the fair Eudoxie
Lapoukin, who, for an offence but little more distasteful
to the tzarine, had been pierced through the tongue
with hot iron, whipped with the knout, and exiled for
life to Siberia, hung like a cloud of evil augury over
his mind.

The marquis suddenly determined that he would see
the affianced princess, and plead with her for her friend,
before the splendors of a throne should make her inaccessible.
The excitement of this hope had given
him new life, and he easily persuaded his attendant, as
they entered the gates of Vienna, that he required his
attendance no farther. Alone with his own servants,
he resumed his female attire, and directed his course
to Mecklenberg-Strelitz.

The princess had maintained an intimate correspondence
with her playmate up to the time of her
betrothal, and the name of Mademoiselle de Beaumont
was passport enough. La Chetardie had sent
forward his servant, on arriving at the town, in the
neighborhood of the ducal residence, and the reply
to his missive was brought back by one of the officers
in attendance, with orders to conduct the demoiselle
to apartments in the castle. He was received with all
honor at the palace-gate by a chamberlain in waiting,
who led the way to a suite of rooms adjoining those
of the princess, where, after being left alone for a few
minutes, he was familiarly visited by the betrothed
girl, and overwhelmed, as formerly by her friend, with
most embarrassing caresses. In the next moment,
however, the door was hastily flung open, and Nadége,
like a stream of light, fled through the room, hung
upon the neck of the speechless and overjoyed marquis,
and ended with convulsions of mingled tears and
laughter. The moment that he could disengage himself
from her arms, La Chetardie requested to be left
for a moment alone. He felt the danger and impropriety
of longer maintaining his disguise. He closed
his door on the unwilling demoiselles, hastily changed
his dress, and, with his sword at his side, entered the
adjoining reception-room of the princess, where Mademoiselle
de Beaumont was impatiently awaited.

The scene which followed, the mingled confusion
and joy of Nadége, the subsequent hilarity and masquerading
at the castle, and the particulars of the
marriage of the Marquis de la Chetardie to his fair
fellow maid-of-honor, must be left to the reader's imagination.
We have room only to explain the reappearance
of Nadége at Mecklenberg.

Nadége retired to her turret at the imperative command
of the empress, sad and troubled; but waited
wakefully and anxiously for the re-entrance of her disguised
companion. In the course of an hour, however,
the sound of a sentinel's musket, set down at her
door, informed her that she was a prisoner. She knew
Elizabeth, and the Dutchess of Mecklenberg, with an
equal knowledge of the tzarine's character, had provided
her with a resource against the imperial cruelty,
should she have occasion to use it. She crept to the
battlements of the tower, and fastened a handkerchief
to the side looking over the public square.

The following morning, at daylight, Nadége was
summoned to prepare for a journey, and, in an hour,
she was led between soldiers to a carriage at the palace-gate,
and departed by the northern egress of the
city, with a guard of three mounted cossacks. In two
hours from that time, the carriage was overtaken, the
guard overpowered, and the horses' heads turned in
the direction of Moscow. After many difficulties and
dangers, during which she found herself under the
charge of a Mecklenbergian officer in the service of
the tzarine, she reached Vienna in safety, and was immediately
concealed by her friends in the neighborhood
of the palace at Mecklenberg, to remain hidden
till inquiry should be over. The arrival of Mademoiselle
de Beaumont, for the loss of whose life or liberty
she had incessantly wept with dread and apprehension,
was joyfully communicated to her by her friends; and
so the reader knows some of the passages in the early
life of the far-famed beauty in the French court in
the time of Louis XV.—the Marchioness de la Chetardie.

“BEAUTY AND THE BEAST;”
OR, HANDSOME MRS. TITTON AND HER PLAIN HUSBAND.

I have always been very fond of the society of
portrait-painters. Whether it is, that the pursuit of
a beautiful and liberal art softens their natural qualities,
or that, from the habit of conversing while engrossed
with the pencil, they like best that touch-and-go
talk which takes care of itself; or, more probably
still, whether the freedom with which they are admitted
behind the curtains of vanity and affection gives
a certain freshness and truth to their views of things
around them—certain it is, that, in all countries, their
rooms are the most agreeable of haunts, and they
themselves most enjoyable of cronies.

I had chanced in Italy to make the acquaintance of
S—, an English artist of considerable cleverness
in his profession, but more remarkable for his frank
good breeding and his abundant good nature. Four
years after, I had the pleasure of renewing my intercourse
with him in London, where he was flourishing,
quite up to his deserving, as a portrait-painter. His
rooms were hard by one of the principal thorough-fares,
and, from making an occasional visit, I grew to
frequenting them daily, often joining him at his early
breakfast, and often taking him out with me to drive
whenever we changed to tire of our twilight stroll.
While rambling in Hyde Park, one evening, I mentioned
for the twentieth time, a singularly ill-assorted
couple I had once or twice met at his room—a woman
of superb beauty attended by a very inferior-looking
and ill-dressed man. S— had, previously, with
a smile at my speculations, dismissed the subject
rather crisply; but, on this occasion, I went into some
surmises as to the probable results of such “pairing
without matching,” and he either felt called upon to
defend the lady, or made my misapprehension of her
character an excuse for telling me what he knew about
her. He began the story in the Park, and ended it
over a bottle of wine in the Haymarket—of course
with many interruptions and digressions. Let me see
if I can tie his broken threads together.

“That lady is Mrs. Fortescue Titton, and the
gentleman you so much disparage is, if you please,
the incumbrance to ten thousand a year—the money
as much at her service as the husband by whom she
gets it. Whether he could have won her had he been

I will not assert, especially to one who looks on them
as `Beauty and the Beast;' but that she loves him,
or at least prefers to him no handsomer man, I may
say I have been brought to believe, in the way of my
profession.”

“You have painted her, then?” I asked rather
eagerly, thinking I might get a sketch of her face to
take with me to another country.

“No, but I have painted him—and for her—and it
is not a case of Titania and Bottom, either. She is
quite aware he is a monster, and wanted his picture
for a reason you would never divine. But I must begin
at the beginning.

“After you left me in Italy, I was employed by the
earl of —, to copy one or two of his favorite
pictures in the Vatican, and that brought me rather
well acquainted with his son. Lord George was a gay
youth, and a very `look-and-die' style of fellow, and,
as much from admiration of his beauty as anything
else, I asked him to sit to me, on our return to London.
I painted him very fantastically in an Albanian
cap and oriental morning-gown and slippers, smoking
a narghile—the room in which he sat, by the way,
being a correct portrait of his own den, a perfect
museum of costly luxury. It was a pretty gorgeous
turn-out in the way of color, and was severely criticised,
but still a good deal noticed—for I sent it to the exhibition.

“I was one day going into Somerset-house, when
Lord George hailed me from his cab. He wished to
suggest some alteration in his picture, or to tell me
of some criticism upon it, I forget exactly what; but
we went up together. Directly before the portrait,
gazing at it with marked abstraction, stood a beautiful
woman, quite alone; and as she occupied the only
point where the light was favorable, we waited a moment
till she should pass on—Lord George, of course,
rather disposed to shrink from being recognised as the
original. The woman's interest in the picture seemed
rather to increase, however, and what with variations
of the posture of her head, and pulling at her glove
fingers, and other female indications of restlessness
and enthusiasm, I thought I was doing her no injustice
by turning to my companion with a congratulatory
smile.

“`It seems a case, by Jove!' said Lord George, trying
to look as if it was a matter of very simple occurrence;
`and she's as fine a creature as I've seen this
season! Eh, old boy? we must run her down, and
see where she burrows—and there's nobody with her,
by good luck!'

“A party entered just then, and passed between her
and the picture. She looked annoyed, I thought, but
started forward and borrowed a catalogue of a little
girl, and we could see that she turned to the last page,
on which the portrait was numbered, with, of course,
the name and address of the painter. She made a
memorandum on one of her cards, and left the house.
Lord George followed, and I too, as far as the door,
where I saw her get into a very stylishly appointed
carriage and drive away, followed closely by the cab
of my friend, whom I had declined to accompany.

“You wouldn't have given very heavy odds against
his chance, would you?” said S—, after a moment
pause.

“No, indeed!” I answered quite sincerely.

“Well, I was at work, the next morning, glazing a
picture I had just finished, when the servant brought
up the card of Mrs. Fortescue Titton. I chanced to
be alone, so the lady was shown at once into my painting
room, and lo! the incognita of Somerset-House.
The plot thickens, thought I! She sat down in my
`subject' chair, and, faith! her beauty quite dazzled
me! Her first smile—but you have seen her, so I'll
not bore you with a description.

“Mrs. Titton blushed on opening her errand to me,
first inquiring if I was the painter of `No 403' in the
exhibition, and saying some very civil things about the

picture. I mentioned that it was a portrait of Lord
George — (for his name was not in the catalogue),
and I thought she blushed still more confusedly—
but that, I think now, was fancy, or at any rate had
nothing to do with feeling for his lordship. It was
natural enough for me to be mistaken, for she was very
particular in her inquiries as to the costume, furniture,
and little belongings of the picture, and asked me
among other things, whether it was a flattered likeness;—this
last question very pointedly, too!

“She arose to go. Was I at leisure, and could I
sketch a head for her, and when?

“I appointed the next day, expecting of course that
the subject was the lady herself, and scarcely slept
with thinking of it, and starved myself at breakfast to
have a clear eye, and a hand wide awake. And at
ten she came, with her Mr. Fortescue Titton! I was
sorry to see that she had a husband, for I had indulged
myself with a vague presentiment that she was a
widow; but I begged him to take a chair, and prepared
the platform for my beautiful subject.

“`Will you take your seat?' I asked, with all my
suavity, when my palette was ready.

“`My dear,' said she, turning to her husband, and
pointing to the chair, `Mr. S— is ready for you.'

“I begged pardon for a moment, crossed over to
Verey's and bolted a beef-steak! A cup of coffee, and
a glass of Curaçoa, and a little walk round Hanover-square,
and I recovered from the shock a little. It
went very hard, I give you my word.

“I returned, and took a look, for the first time, at
Mr. Titton. You have seen him, and have some idea
of what his portrait might be, considered as a pleasure
to the artist—what it might promise, I should rather
say, for, after all, I ultimately enjoyed working at it,
quite aside from the presence of Mrs. Titton. It was
the ugliest face in the world, but full of good-nature;
and, as I looked closer into it, I saw, among its coarse
features, lines of almost feminine delicacy, and capabilities
of enthusiasm of which the man himself was
probably unconscious. Then a certain helpless style
of dress was a wet blanket to him. Rich from his
cradle, I suppose his qualities had never been needed
on the surface. His wife knew them.

“From time to time, as I worked, Mrs. Titton came
and looked over my shoulder. With a natural desire
to please her, I, here and there, softened a harsh line,
and was going on to flatter the likeness—not as successful
as I could wish, however, for it is much easier
to get a faithful likeness than to flatter without destroying
it.

“`Mr. S—,' said she, laying her hand on my
arm as I thinned away the lumpy rim of his nostril,
`I want, first, a literal copy of my husband's features.
Suppose, with this idea, you take a fresh canvass?'

“Thoroughly mystified by the whole business, I
did as she requested; and, in two sittings, made a
likeness of Titton which would have given you a face-ache.
He shrugged his shoulders at it, and seemed
very glad when the bore of sitting was over; but they
seemed to understand each other very well, or, if not,
he reserved his questions till there could be no restraint
upon the answer. He seemed a capital fellow, and I
liked him exceedingly.

“I asked if I should frame the picture and send it
home? No! I was to do neither. If I would be kind
enough not to show it, nor to mention it to any one,
and come the next day and dine with them en famille,
Mrs. Titton would feel very much obliged to me.
And this dinner was followed up by breakfasts and
lunches and suppers, and, for a fortnight, I really lived
with the Tittons—and pleasanter people to live with,
by Jove, you haven't seen in your travels, though you
are `a picked man of countries!'

“I should mention, by the way, that I was always
placed opposite Titton at table, and that he was a good
deal with me, one way and another, taking me out, as
you do, for a stroll, calling and sitting with me when
I was at work, etc. And as to Mrs. Titton—if I did
not mistrust your arriere penseé, I would enlarge a
little on my intimacy with Mrs. Titton!—But, believe
me when I tell you, that, without a ray of flirtation,
we became as cozily intimate as brother and sister.”

“And what of Lord George, all this time?” I asked.

“Oh, Lord George!—Well, Lord George of course
had no difficulty in making Mrs. Titton's acquaintance,
though they were not quite in the same circle, and he
had been presented to her, and had seen her at a party
or two, where he managed to be invited on purpose—
but of this, for a while, I heard nothing. She had not
yet seen him at her own house, and I had not chanced
to encounter him. But let me go on with my story.

“Mrs. Titton sent for me to come to her, one
morning rather early. I found her in her boudoir, in
a negligé morning-dress, and looking adorably beautiful,
and as pure as beautiful, you smiling villain! She
seemed to have something on her mind about which she
was a little embarrassed, but I knew her too well to lay
any unction to my soul. We chatted about the weather
a few moments, and she came to the point. You will
see that she was a woman of some talent, mon ami!

“`Have you looked at my husband's portrait since
you finished it?' she asked.

“`No, indeed!' I replied rather hastily—but immediately
apologized.

“`Oh, if I had not been certain you would not,'
she said with a smile, `I should have requested it, for
I wished you to forget it, as far as possible. And now
let me tell you what I want of you! You have got,
on canvass, a likeness of Fortescue as the world sees
him. Since taking it, however, you have seen him
more intimately, and—and—like his face better, do
you not?'

“`Certainly! certainly!' I exclaimed, in all sincerity.

“`Thank you! If I mistake not, then, you do not,
when thinking of him, call up to your mind the
features in your portrait, but a face formed rather of
his good qualities, as you have learned to trace them
in his expression.'

“`True,' I said, `very true!'

“`Now, then,' she continued, leaning over to me
very earnestly, `I want you to paint a new picture,
and without departing from the real likeness, which
you will have to guide you, breathe into it the expression
you have in your ideal likeness. Add, to what
the world sees, what I see, what you see, what all who
love him see, in his plain features. Idealize it,
spiritualize it—and without lessening the resemblance.
Can this be done?'

“I thought it could. I promised to do my utmost.

“`I shall call and see you as you progress in it,'
she said, `and now, if you have nothing better to do,
stay to lunch, and come out with me in the carriage.
I want a little of your foreign taste in the selection of
some pretty nothings for a gentleman's toilet.'

“We passed the morning in making what I should
consider very extravagent purchases for anybody but
a prince royal, winding up with some delicious cabinet
pictures and some gems of statuary—all suited only,
I should say, to the apartments of a fastidious luxuriast.
I was not yet at the bottom of her secret.

“I went to work upon the new picture with the
zeal always given to an artist by an appreciative and
confiding employer. She called every day and made
important suggestions, and at last I finished it to her
satisfaction and mine; and, without speaking of it as
a work of art, I may give you my opinion that Titton
will scarcely be more embellished in the other world
—that is, if it be true, as the divines tell us, that our
mortal likeness will be so far preserved, though improved
upon, that we shall be recognisable by our
friends. Still I was to paint a third picture—a cabinet

full length—and for this the other two were but studies,
and so intended by Mrs. Fortescue Titton. It was
to be an improvement upon Lord George's portrait
(which of course had given her the idea), and was to
represent her husband in a very costly, and an exceedingly
recherché morning costume—dressing-gown,
slippers, waistcoat, and neckcloth, worn with perfect
elegance, and representing a Titton with a faultless
attitude (in a fauteuil, reading), a faultless exterior,
and around him the most sumptuous appliances of
dressing-room luxury. This picture cost me a great
deal of vexation and labor, for it was emphatically a
fancy picture—poor Titton never having appeared in
that character, even `by particular desire.' I finished
it however, and again, to her satisfaction. I afterward
added some finishing touches to the other two, and
sent them home, appropriately framed according to
very minute instructions.”

“How long ago was this?” I asked.

“Three years,” replied S—, musing over his wine.

“Well—the sequel?” said I, a little impatient.

“I was thinking how I should let it break upon you,
as it took effect upon her acquaintances—for, understand,
Mrs. Titton is too much of a diplomatist to do
anything obviously dramatic in this age of ridicule.
She knows very well that any sudden `flare-up' of her
husband's consequence—any new light on his character
obviously calling for attention—would awaken
speculation and set to work the watchful anatomizers
of the body fashionable. Let me see! I will tell you
what I should have known about it, had I been only
an ordinary acquaintance—not in the secret, and not
the painter of the pictures.

“Some six months after the finishing of the last
portrait, I was at a large ball at their house. Mrs.
Titton's beauty, I should have told you, and the style
in which they lived, and very possibly a little of Lord
George's good will, had elevated them from the wealthy
and respectable level of society to the fashionable and
exclusive. All the best people went there. As I was
going in, I overtook, at the head of the stairs, a very
clever little widow, an acquaintance of mine, and she
honored me by taking my arm and keeping it for a
promenade through the rooms. We made our bow
to Mrs. Titton and strolled across the reception room,
where the most conspicuous object, dead facing us,
with a flood of light upon it, was my first veracious
portrait of Titton! As I was not known as the artist,
I indulged myself in some commonplace exclamations
of horror.

“`Do not look at that,' said the widow, `you will
distress poor Mrs. Titton. What a quiz that clever
husband of hers must be to insist on exposing such a
caricature!'

“`How insist upon it?' I asked.

“`Why, have you never seen the one in her boudoir?
Come with me!'

“We made our way through the apartments to the
little retreat lined with silk, which the morning lounge
of the fair mistress of the house. There was but one
picture, with a curtain drawn carefully across it—my
second portrait! We sat down on the luxurious
cushions, and the widow went off into a discussion of
it and the original, pronouncing it a perfect likeness,
not at all flattered, and very soon begging me to redraw
the curtain, lest we should be surprised by Mr.
Titton himself.

“`And suppose we were?' said I.

“`Why, he is such an oddity!' replied the widow
lowering her tone. `They say that in this very house
he has a suite of apartments entirely to himself, furnished
with a taste and luxury really wonderful! There
are two Mr. Tittons, my dear friend!—one a perfect
Sybarite, very elegant in his dress when he chooses
to be, excessively accomplished and fastidious, and
brilliant and fascinating to a degree!—(and in this
character they say he won that superb creature for a
wife), and the other Mr. Titton is just the slovenly
monster that everybody sees! Isn't it odd!'

“`Queer enough!' said I, affecting great astonishment;
`pray, have you ever been into these mysterious
apartments?'

“`No!—they say only his wife and himself and one
confidential servant ever pass the threshold. Mrs.
Titton don't like to talk about it—though one would
think she could scarcely object to her husband's being
thought better of. It's pride on his part—sheer pride
—and I can understand the feeling very well! He's
a very superior man, and he has made up his mind
that the world thinks him very awkward and
ugly, and he takes a pleasure in showing the world
that he don't care a rush for its opinion, and has resources
quite sufficient within himself. That's the
reason that atrocious portrait is hung up in the best
room, and this good-looking one covered up with a
curtain! I suppose this wouldn't be here if he could
have his own way, and if his wife wasn't so much in
love with him!'

“This, I assure you,” said S—, “is the impression
throughout their circle of acquaintances.
The Tittons themselves maintain a complete silence
on the subject. Mr. Fortescue Titton is considered
a very accomplished man, with a very proud and very
secret contempt for the opinions of the world—dressing
badly on purpose, silent and simple by design, and only
caring to show himself in his real character to his
beautiful wife, who is thought to be completely in love
with him, and quite excusable for it! What do you
think of the woman's diplomatic talents?”

“I think I should like to know her,” said I; “but
what says Lord George to all this?”

“I had a call from Lord George not long ago,”
replied S—, “and for the first time since our
chat at Somerset-House, the conversation turned upon
the Tittons.

“`Devilish sly of you!' said his lordship, turning
to me half angry, `why did you pretend not to know
the woman at Somerset-House? You might have
saved me lots of trouble and money, for I was a month
or two finding out what sort of people they were—
feeing the servants and getting them called on and
invited here and there—all with the idea that it was
a rich donkey with a fine toy that didn't belong to him!”

“`Well!' exclaimed I—

“`Well!—not at all well! I made a great ninny
of myself, with that satirical slyboots, old Titton,
laughing at me all the time, when you, that had
painted him in his proper character and knew what a
deep devil he was, might have saved me with but half
a hint!'

“`You have been in the lady's boudoir then!'

“`Yes, and in the gentleman's sanctum sanctorum!
Mrs. Titton sent for me about some trumpery thing
or other, and when I called, the servant showed me in
there by mistake. There was a great row in the house
about it, but I was there long enough to see what a
monstrous nice time the fellow has of it, all to himself,
and to see your picture of him in his private
character. The picture you made of me was only a
copy of that, you sly traitor! And I suppose Mrs.
Titton didn't like your stealing from hers, did she—
for, I take it that was what ailed her at the exhibition,
when you allowed me to be so humbugged!'

“I had a good laugh, but it was as much at the
quiet success of Mrs. Titton's tactics as at Lord
George's discomfiture. Of course, I could not undeceive
him. And now,” continued S—, very
good-naturedly, “just ring for a pen and ink, and I'll
write a note to Mrs. Titton, asking leave to bring you
there this evening, for it's her `night at home,' and
she's worth seeing, if my pictures, which you will see
there, are not.”

BROWN'S DAY WITH THE MIMPSONS.

We got down from an omnibus in Charing-Cross.

“Sovereign or ha'penny?” said the cad, rubbing
the coin between his thumb and finger.

“Sovereign, of course!” said B— confidently,
pocketing the change which the man had ready for
the emergency in a bit of brown paper.

It was a muggy, misty, London twilight. I was
coming up to town from Blackheath, and in the
crowded vehicle had chanced to encounter my compatriot
B— (call it Brown), who had been lionizing
the Thames tunnel. In the course of conversation,
it came out that we were both on the town for
our dinner, and as we were both guests at the Traveller's
Club, we had pulled the omnibus-string at the
nearest point, and, after the brief dialogue recorded
above, strolled together down Pall Mall.

As we sat waiting for our fish, one of us made a remark
as to the difference of feel between gold and
copper coin, and Brown, fishing in his pocket for
money to try the experiment, discovered that the
doubt of the cad was well founded, for he had unconsciously
passed a halfpenny for a sovereign.

“People are very apt to take your coin at your own
valuation!” said Brown, with a smile of some meaning,
“and when they are in the dark as to your original
coinage (as the English are with regard to Americans
abroad), it is as easy to pass for gold as for copper.
Indeed, you may pass for both in a day, as I have
lately had experience. Remind me presently to tell
you how. Here comes the fried sole, and it's troublesome
talking when there are bones to fight shy of—
the `flow of sole' to the contrary notwithstanding.”

I will take advantage of the hiatus to give the reader
a slight idea of my friend, as a preparation for his
story.

Brown was the “mirror of courtesy.” He was
also the mirror of vulgarity. And he was the mirror
of everything else. He had that facility of adaptation
to the society he was in, which made him seem
born for that society, and that only; and, without calculation
or forethought—by an unconscious instinct,
indeed—he cleverly reflected the man and manners
before him. The result was a popularity of a most
varied quality. Brown was a man of moderate fortune
and no profession. He had travelled for some
years on the continent, and had encountered all classes
of Englishmen, from peers to green-grocers, and as
he had a visit to England in prospect, he seldom parted
from the most chance acquaintance without a volunteer
of letters of introduction, exchange of addresses,
and similar tokens of having “pricked through
his castle wall.” When he did arrive in London, at
last, it was with a budget like the postman's on Valentine's
day, and he had only to deliver one letter in
a score to be put on velvet in any street or square
within the bills of mortality. Sagacious enough to
know that the gradations of English society have the
facility of a cat's back (smooth enough from the head
downward), he began with a most noble duke, and at
the date of his introduction to the reader, was on the
dinner-list of most of the patricians of May Fair.

Presuming that you see your man, dear reader, let
us come at once to the removal of the cloth.

“As I was calling myself to account, the other day,
over my breakfast,” said Brown, filling his glass and
pushing the bottle, “it occurred to me that my round
of engagements required some little variation. There's
a `toujours perdrix,' even among lords and ladies, particularly
when you belong as much to their sphere,
and are as likely to become a part of it, as the fly revolving
in aristocratic dust on the wheel of my lord's
carriage. I thought, perhaps, I had better see some
other sort of people.

“I had, under a presse papier on the table, about a
hundred letters of introduction—the condemned remainder,
after the selection, by advice, of four or five
only. I determined to cut this heap like a pack of
cards, and follow up the trump.

“`John Mimpson, Esq., House of Mimpson and
Phipps, Mark's Lane, London.'

“The gods had devoted me to the acquaintance of
Mr. (and probably Mrs.) John Mimpson. After turning
over a deal of rubbish in my mind, I remembered
that the letter had been given me five years before by
an American merchant—probably the correspondent
of the firm in Mark's Lane. It was a sealed letter,
and said in brackets on the back, `Introducing Mr.
Brown.' I had a mind to give it up and cut again,
for I could not guess on what footing I was introduced,
nor did I know what had become of the writer—nor
had I a very clear idea how long a letter of
recommendation will hold its virtue. It struck me
again that these difficulties rather gave it a zest, and
I would abide by the oracle. I dressed, and, as the
day was fine, started to stroll leisurely through the
Strand and Fleet street, and look into the shop-windows
on my way—assuring myself, at least, thus
much of diversion in my adventure.

“Somewhere about two o'clock, I left daylight behind,
and plunged into Mark's Lane. Up one side
and down the other—`Mimpson and Co.' at last, on a
small brass plate, set in a green baize door. With my
unbuttoned coat nearly wiped off my shoulder by the
strength of the pulley, I shoved through, and emerged
in a large room, with twenty or thirty clerks perched
on high stools, like monkeys in a menagerie.

“`First door right!' said the nearest man, without
raising his eyes from the desk, in reply to my inquiry
for Mr. Mimpson.

“I entered a closet, lighted by a slanting skylight,
in which sat my man.

“`Mr. John Mimpson?'

“`Mr. John Mimpson!'

“After this brief dialogue of accost, I produced my
letter, and had a second's leisure to examine my new
friend while he ran his eye over the contents. He
was a rosy, well-conditioned, tight-skinned little man,
with black hair, and looked like a pear on a chair.
(Hang the bothering rhymes!) His legs were completely
hid under the desk, so that the ascending eye
began with his equatory line, and whether he had no
shoulders or no neck, I could not well decide—but it
was a tolerably smooth plane from his seat to the top
curl of his sinciput. He was scrupulously well dressed,
and had that highly washed look which marks the
city man in London—bent on not betraying his `diggins'
by his complexion.

“I answered Mr. Mimpson's inquiries about our
mutual friend with rather a hazardous particularity,
and assured him he was quite well (I have since discovered
that he has been dead three years), and conversation
warmed between us for ten minutes, till we

were ready to part sworn friends. I rose to go, and
the merchant seemed very much perplexed.

“`To-morrow,' said he, rubbing the two great business
bumps over his eyebrows—`no—yes—that is to
say, Mrs. Mimpson—well, it shall be to-morrow!
Can you come out to Rose Lodge, and spend the day
to-morrow?'

“`With great pleasure,' said I, for I was determined
to follow my trump letter to extremities.

“`Mrs. Mimpson,' he next went on to say, as he
wrote down the geography of Rose Lodge—`Mrs.
Mimpson expects some friends to-morrow—indeed,
some of her very choice friends. If you come early,
you will see more of her than if you just save your
dinner. Bring your carpetbag, of course, and stay
over night. Lunch at two—dine at seven. I can't
be there to receive you myself, but I will prepare Mrs.
Mimpson to save you all trouble of introduction.
Hampstead road. Good morning, my dear sir.'

“So, I am in for a suburban bucolic, thought I, as I
regained daylight in the neighborhood of the Mansion
House.

“It turned out a beautiful day, sunny and warm;
and had I been sure of my navigation, and sure of my
disposition to stay all night, I should have gone out
by the Hampstead coach, and made the best of my
way, carpetbag in hand. I went into Newman's for a
postchaise, however, and on showing him the written
address, was agreeably surprised to find he knew
Rose Lodge. His boys had all been there.

“Away I went through the Regent's park, behind
the blood-posters, blue jacket and white hat, and,
somewhere about one o'clock, mounted Hampstead
Hill, and in ten minutes thence was at my destination.
The postboy was about driving in at the open gate,
but I dismounted and sent him back to the inn to
leave his horses, and then depositing my bag at the
porter's lodge, walked up the avenue. It was a much
finer place, altogether, than I expected to see.

“Mrs. Mimpson was in the garden. The dashing
footman who gave me the information, led me through
a superb drawing-room and out at a glass door upon
the lawn, and left me to make my own way to the lady's
presence.

“It was a delicious spot, and I should have been
very glad to ramble about by myself till dinner, but,
at a turn in the grand-walk, I came suddenly upon
two ladies.

“I made my bow, and begged leave to introduce
myself as `Mr. Brown.'

“With a very slight inclination of the head, and no
smile whatever, one of the ladies asked me if I had
walked from town, and begged her companion (without
introducing me to her) to show me in to lunch.
The spokester was a stout and tall woman, who had
rather an aristocratic nose, and was not handsome,
but, to give her her due, she had made a narrow
escape of it. She was dressed very showily, and evidently
had great pretensions; but, that she was not
at all glad to see Mr. Brown, was as apparent as was
at all necessary. As the other, and younger lady,
who was to accompany me, however, was very pretty,
though dressed very plainly, and had, withal, a look
in her eye which assured me she was amused with my
unwelcome apparition, I determined, as I should not
otherwise have done, to stay it out, and accepted
her convoy with submissive civility—very much inclined,
however, to be impudent to somebody, somehow.

“The lunch was on a tray in a side-room, and I
rang the bell and ordered a bottle of champague. The
servant looked surprised, but brought it, and meantime
I was getting through the weather and the other
commonplaces, and the lady saying little, was watching
me very calmly. I liked her looks, however, and
was sure she was not a Mimpson.

“`Hand this to Miss Armstrong!' said I to the footman,
pouring out a glass of champagne.

“`Miss Bellamy, you mean, sir.'

“I rose and bowed, and, with as grave a courtesy
as I could command, expressed my pleasure at my
first introduction to Miss Bellamy—through Thomas,
the footman! Miss Bellamy burst into a laugh, and
was pleased to compliment my American manners,
and in ten minutes we were a very merry pair of
friends, and she accepted my arm for a stroll through
the grounds, carefully avoiding the frigid neighborhood
of Mrs. Mimpson.

“Of course I set about picking Miss Bellamy's
brains for what information I wanted. She turned
out quite the nicest creature I had seen in England—
fresh, joyous, natural, and clever; and as I was delivered
over to her bodily, by her keeper and feeder, she
made no scruple of promenading me through the
grounds till the dressing-bell—four of the most agreeable
hours I have to record in my travels.

“By Miss Bellamy's account, my advent that day
was looked upon by Mrs. Mimpson as an enraging
calamity. Mrs. Mimpson was, herself, fourth cousin
to a Scotch lord, and the plague of her life was the
drawback to the gentility of her parties in Mimpson's
mercantile acquaintance. She had married the little
man for his money, and had thought, by living
out of town, to choose her own society, with her husband
for her only incumbrance; but Mimpson vowed
that he should be ruined in Mark's Lane, if he did
not house and dine his mercantile fraternity and their
envoys at Rose Lodge, and they had at last compromised
the matter. No Yankee clerk, or German
agent, or person of any description, defiled by trade,
was to be invited to the Lodge without a three days'
premonition to Mrs. Mimpson, and no additions were
to be made, whatever, by Mr. M., to Mrs. M's dinners,
soirées, matinees, archery parties, suppers, dejeuners,
tableaux, or private theatricals. This holy
treaty, Mrs. Mimpson presumed, was written `with a
gad of steel on a leaf of brass'—inviolable as her cousin's
coat-of-arms.

“But there was still `Ossa on Pelion.' The dinner
of that day had a diplomatic aim. Miss Mimpson
(whom I had not yet seen) was ready to `come
out,' and her mother had embarked her whole soul in
the enterprise of bringing about that debut at Almack's.
Her best card was a certain Lady S—,
who chanced to be passing a few days in the neighborhood,
and this dinner was in her honor—the company
chosen to impress her with the exclusiveness of
the Mimpsons, and the prayer for her ladyship's influence
(to procure vouchers from one of the patronesses)
was to be made, when she was `dieted to their
request.' And all had hitherto worked to a charm.
Lady S— had accepted—Ude had sent his best
cook from Crockford's—the Belgian chargé and a
Swedish attaché were coming—the day was beautiful,
and the Lodge was sitting for its picture; and on the
very morning, when every chair at the table was ticketed
and devoted, what should Mr. Mimpson do, but send
back a special messenger from the city, to say that he
had forgotten to mention to Mrs. M. at breakfast, that he
had invited Mr. Brown! Of course he had forgotten
it, though it would have been as much as his
eyes were worth to mention it in person to Mrs.
Mimpson.

“To this information, which I give you in a lump,
but which came to light in the course of rather a desultory
conversation, Miss Bellamy thought I had
some title, from the rudeness of my reception. It
was given in the shape of a very clever banter, it is
true, but she was evidently interested to set me right
with regard to Mr. Mimpson's good intentions in my
behalf, and, as far as that and her own civilities would
do it, to apologise for the inhospitality of Rose Lodge.

Very kind of the girl—for I was passing, recollect,
at a most ha'penny valuation.

“I had made some casual remark touching the absurdity
of Almack's aspirations in general, and Mrs.
Mimpson's in particular, and my fair friend, who of
course fancied an Almack's ticket as much out of Mr.
Brown's reach as the horn of the new moon, took up
the defence of Mrs. Mimpson on that point, and undertook
to dazzle my untutored imagination by a picture
of this seventh heaven—as she had heard it described—for
to herself, she freely confessed, it was not
even within the limits of dream-land. I knew this
was true of herself, and thousands of highly-educated
and charming girls in England; but still, looking at
her while she spoke, and seeing what an ornament she
would be to any ballroom in the world, I realized,
with more repugnance than I had ever felt before, the
arbitrary barriers of fashion and aristocracy. As accident
had placed me in a position to `look on the reverse
of the shield,' I determined, if possible, to let
Miss Bellamy judge of its color with the same advantage.
It is not often that a plebeian like myself
has the authority to

“We were near the open window of the library,
and I stepped in and wrote a note to Lady —
(one of the lady patronesses, and the kindest friend I
have in England), asking for three vouchers for the
next ball. I had had occasion once or twice before to
apply for similar favors, for the countrywomen of my
own, passing through London on their travels, and I
knew that her ladyship thought no more of granting
them than of returning bows in Hyde Park. I did
not name the ladies for whom the three tickets were
intended, wishing to reserve the privilege of handing
one to Miss Mimpson, should she turn out civil and
presentable. The third, of course, was to Miss Bellamy's
chaperon, whoever that might be, and the
party might be extended to a quartette by the `Monsieur
De Trop' of the hour—cela selon. Quite a dramatic
plot—wasn't it?

“I knew that Lady — was not very well, and
would be found at home by the messenger (my post-boy),
and there was time enough between soup and
coffee to go to London and back, even without the
spur in his pocket.

“The bell rang, and Miss Bellamy took herself off
to dress. I went to my carpetbag in the bachelor
quarters of the house, and through a discreet entretien
with the maid who brought me hot water, became
somewhat informed as to my fair friend's position in
the family. She was the daughter of a gentleman who
had seen better days. They lived in a retired cottage
in the neighborhood; and, as Miss Bellamy and a
younger sister were both very highly accomplished,
they were usually asked to the Lodge, whenever there
was company to be entertained with their music.

“I was early in the drawing-room, and found there
Mrs. Mimpson and a tall dragoon of a young lady I
presumed to be her daughter. She did not introduce
me. I had hardly achieved my salutary salaam when
Miss Bellamy came in opportunely, and took me off
their hands, and as they addressed no conversation to
us, we turned over music, and chatted in the corner
while the people came in. It was twilight in the reception-room,
and I hoped, by getting on the same
side of the table with Lady S— (whom I had
the honor of knowing), to escape recognizance till
we joined the ladies in the drawing-room after dinner.
As the guests arrived, they were formally introduced
to Miss Mimpson by the mother, and everybody but
myself was formally presented to Lady S—, the
exception not noticeable, of course, among thirty
people. Mr. Mimpson came late from the city, pos
sibly anxious to avoid a skirmish on the subject of his
friend Brown, and he entered the room barely in time
to hand Lady S— in to dinner.

“My tactics were ably seconded by my unconscious
ally. I placed myself in such a position at table,
that, by a little management, I kept Miss Bellamy's
head between me and Lady S—, and my name
was not so remarkable as to draw attention to me
when called on to take wine with the peccant spouse
of the Scotch lord's cousin. Meantime I was very
charmingly entertained—Miss Bellamy not having, at
all, the fear of Mrs. Mimpson before her eyes, and
apparently finding the Yankee supercargo, or cotton
clerk, or whatever he might be, quite worth trying her
hand upon. The provender was good, and the wine
was enough to verify the apocrypha—at least for the
night—`a man remembering neither sorrow nor debt'
with such glorious claret.

“As I was vis-a-vis to Miss Mimpson, and only two
plates removed from her mother, I was within reach
of some syllable or some civility, and one would have
thought that good-breeding might exact some slight
notice for the devil himself, under one's own roof by
invitation; but the large eyes of Miss Aurelia and her
mamma passed over me as if I had on the invisible
ring of Gyges. I wonder, by-the-way, whether the
ambitious youths who go to London and Paris with
samples, and come back and sport `the complete varnish
of a man' acquired in foreign society—I wonder
whether they take these rubs to be part of their polishing!

“The ladies rose and left us, and as I had no more
occasion to dodge heads, or trouble myself with humility,
I took Lady S—'s place at old Mimpson's
right hand, and was immediately recognised with great
empressement by the Belgian chargé, who had met me
`very often, in very agreeable society.' Mimpson
stared, and evidently took it for a bit of flummery or
a mistake; but he presently stared again, for the butler
came in with a coronetted note on his silver tray,
and the seal side up, and presented it to me with a
most deferential bend of his white coat. I felt the
vouchers within, and pocketed it without opening, and
we soon after rose and went to the drawing-room for
our coffee.

“Lady S— sat with her back to the door, besieged
by Mrs. Mimpson; and at the piano, beside
Miss Bellamy, who was preparing to play, stood one
of the loveliest young creatures possibly to fancy. A
pale and high-bred looking lady in widow's weeds sat
near them, and I had no difficulty in making out who
were the after-dinner additions to the party. I joined
them, and was immediately introduced by Miss Bellamy
to her mother and sister, with whom (after a
brilliant duet by the sisters) I strolled out upon the
lawn for an hour—for it was a clear night, and the
moon and soft air almost took me back to Italy. And
(perhaps by a hint from Miss Bellamy) I was allowed
to get on very expeditiously in my acquaintance with
her mother and sister.

“My new friends returned to the drawing-room,
and as the adjoining library was lighted, I went in and
filled up the blank vouchers with the names of Mrs.
Bellamy and her daughters. I listened a moment to
the conversation in the next room. The subject was
Almack's, and was discussed with great animation.
Lady S—, who seemed to me trying to escape
the trap they had baited for her, was quietly setting
forth the difficulties of procuring vouchers, and recommending
to Mrs. Mimpson not to subject herself
to the mortification of a refusal. Old Mimpson
backed up this advice with a stout approval, and this
brought Mrs. Mimpson out `horse and foot,' and she
declared that she would submit to anything, do anything,
give anything, rather than fail in this darling
object of her ambition. She would feel under eternal,

inexpressible obligations to any friend who would procure,
for herself and daughter, admission for but one
night to Almack's.

“And then came in the sweet voice of Miss Bellamy,
who `knew it was both wrong and silly, but she
would give ten years of her life to go to one of Almack's
balls, and in a long conversation she had had
with Mr. Brown on the subject that morning—'

“`Ah!' interrupted Lady S—, `if it had been
the Mr. Brown, you would have had very little trouble
about it.'

“`And who is the Mr. Brown?' asked Mrs. Mimpson.

“`The pet and protegé of the only lady patroness
I do not visit,' said Lady S—, `and unluckily,
too, the only one who thinks the vouchers great rubbish,
and gives them away without thought or scruple.'

“At that moment I entered the room.

“`Good heavens!' screamed Lady S—, `is
that his ghost? Why, Mr. Brown!' she gasped, giving
me her hand very cautiously, `do you appear
when you are talked of like—like—like—'

“`Like the devil? No! But I am here in the
body, and very much at your ladyship's service,' said
I, `for of course you are going to the duke's to-night,
and so am I. Will you take me with you, or shall
my po-chay follow where I belong—in your train?”

“`I'll take you, of course,' said her ladyship, rising,
`but first about these vouchers. You have just come,
and didn't hear our discussion. Mrs. Mimpson is extremely
anxious that her daughter should come out
at Almack's, and as I happened to say, the moment
before you entered, that you were the very person to
procure the tickets from Lady —. How very
odd that you should come in just then! But tell
us—can you?'

“A dead silence followed the question. Mrs.
Mimpson sat with her eyes on the floor, the picture
of dismay and mortification. Miss Mimpson blushed
and twisted her handkerchief, and Miss Bellamy
looked at her hostess, half amused and half distressed.

“I handed the three vouchers to Miss Bellamy,
and begged her acceptance of them, and then turning
to Lady S—, without waiting for a reply, regretted
that, not having had the pleasure of being presented
to Mrs. Mimpson, I had not felt authorized to
include her in my effort to oblige Miss Bellamy.

“And what with old Mimpson's astonishment, and
Lady S—'s immediate tact in covering, by the
bustle of departure, what she did not quite understand,
though she knew it was some awkward contre
temps or other, I found time to receive Miss Bellamy's
thanks, and get permission from the mother to
call and arrange this unexpected party, and in ten
minutes I was on my way to London with Lady
S—, amusing her almost into fits with my explanations
of the Mimpson mystery.

“Lady S— was to be still at Hampstead for a
few days, and, at my request, she called with me on
the Bellamys, and invited the girls up to town. Rose
Bellamy, the younger, is at this moment one of the
new stars of the season accordingly, and Miss Bellamy
and I carry on the war, weekly, at Almack's,
and nightly at some waxlight paradise or other, and
Lady S— has fallen in love with them both, and
treats them like daughters.

“So you see, though I passed for a ha'penny with
the Mimpsons, I turned out a sovereign to the Bellamys.

“Pass the bottle!”

MR. AND MRS. FOLLETT;
OR, THE DANGERS OF MEDDLING WITH MARRIED PEOPLE.

There are two commodities, much used by gentlemen,
neither of which will bear tinkering or tampering
with—matrimony and patent leather. Their necessities
are fair weather and untroubled wear and tear.
Ponder on the following melancholy example!

My friend Follett married a lady contrary to my
advice. I gave the advice contrary to my wont and
against my will. He would have it. The lady was a
tolerably pretty woman, on whose original destiny it
was never written that she should be a belle. How
she became one is not much matter; but nature being
thoroughly taken by surprise with her success, had
neglected to provide the counterpoise. I say it is no
great matter how she became a belle—nor is it—for if
such things were to be accounted for to the satisfaction
of the sex, the world have little time for other speculations;
but I will devote a single paragraph to the
elucidation of this one of many mysteries, for a reason
I have. Fœnam habet in cornu.

Poets are the least fastidious, and the least discriminating
of men, in their admiration of women (vide
Byron), partly because their imagination, like sunshine,
glorifies all that turns to it, and partly because
the voluptuous heart, without which they were not
poets, is both indolent and imperial, from both causes
waiting always to be sought. In some circles, bards
are rather comets than stars, and the one whose orbit
for a few days intersected that of Miss Adele Burnham,
was the exclusive marvel of the hour. Like other po
ets, the one of which I speak was concentrative in his
attentions, and he chose (why, the gods knew better
than the belles of the season) to have neither eyes nor
ears, flowers, flatteries, nor verses, for any other than
Miss Burnham. He went on his way, but the incense,
in which he had enveloped the blest Adele, lingered
like a magic atmosphere about her, and Tom Follett
and all his tribe breathed it in blind adoration. I trust
the fair reader has here nodded her head, in evidence
that this history of the belleship of Miss Burnham is
no less brief than natural and satisfactory.

When Follett came to me with the astounding information
that he intended to propose to Miss Burnham
(he had already proposed and been accepted, the
traitor)! my fancy at once took the prophetic stride so
natural on the first breaking of such news, and in the
five minutes which I took for reflection, I had travelled
far into that land of few delusions—holy matrimony.
Before me, in all the changeful variety of a magic
mirror, came and went the many phases of which that
multiform creature, woman, is susceptible. I saw her
in diamonds and satin, and in kitchen-apron and curl-papers;
in delight, and in the dumps; in supplication,
and in resistance; shod like a fairy in French shoes,
and slip-shod (as perhaps fairies are, too, in their bed-rooms
and dairies). I saw her approaching the climacteric
of age, and receding from it—a mother, a
nurse, an invalid—mum over her breakfast, chatty over
her tea—doing the honors at Tom's table, and mending

with sober diligence Tom's straps and suspenders.
The kaleidoscope of fancy exhausted its combinations.

“Tom!” said I (looking up affectionately, for he
was one of my weaknesses, was Tom, and I indulged
myself in loving him without a reason), “Miss Burnham
is in the best light where she is. If she cease
to be a belle, as of course she will, should she marry
—”

“Of course!” interrupted Tom very gravely.

“Well, in that case, she lays off the goddess, trust
me! You will like her to dress plainly —”

“Quite plain!”

“And stripped of her plumage, your bird of paradise
would be nothing but a very indifferent hen—with the
disadvantage of remembering that she had been a bird
of paradise.”

“But it was not her dress that attracted the brilliant
author of —”

Possibly not. But as the false gods of mythology
are only known by their insignia, Jupiter by his thunderbolt,
and Mercury by his talaria and caduceus, so
a woman, worshipped by accident, will find a change
of exterior nothing less than a laying aside of her divinity.
That's a didactic sentence, but you will know
what I mean, when I tell you that I myself can not see
a pair of coral ear-rings without a sickness of the
heart, though the woman who once wore them, and
who slighted me twenty years ago, sits before me in
church, without diverting a thought from the sermon.
Don't marry her, Tom!”

Six weeks after this conversation, I was at the wedding,
and the reader will please pass to the rear the
six succeeding months—short time as it seems—to
record a change in the bland sky of matrimony. It was
an ellipse in our friendship as well; for advice (contrary
to our wishes and intentions) is apt to be resented,
and I fancied, from the northerly bows I received
from Mrs. Follett, that my friend had made a merit to
her of having married contrary to my counsel. At the
end of this period Tom called on me.

Follett, I should have said, was a man of that undecided
exterior which is perfectly at the mercy of a cravat
or waistcoat. He looked “snob” or “nob,” according
to the care with which he had made his toilet.
While a bachelor, of course, he could never afford in
public a negligence or a mistake, and was invariably
an elegant man, harmonious and “pin-point” from
straps to whiskers. But alas! the security of wedded
life! When Tom entered my room, I perused him
as a walking homily. His coat, still made on the old
measure, was buttoned only at the top, the waist being
rather snug, and his waistcoat pockets loaded with the
copper which in his gayer days he always left on the
counter. His satin cravat was frayed and brownish,
with the tie slipped almost under his ear. The heel
of his right boot (he trod straight on the other foot)
almost looked him in the face. His pantaloons (the
one article of dress in which there are no gradations—
nothing, if not perfect) were bulged and strained. He
wore a frightfully new hat, no gloves, and carried a
baggy brown umbrella, which was, in itself, a most expressive
portrait of “gone to seed.” Tom entered
with his usual uppish carriage, and, through the howd'ye-dos,
and the getting into his chair, carried off the
old manner to a charm. In talking of the weather, a
moment after, his eye fell on his stumpy umbrella,
which, with an unconscious memory of an old affectation
with his cane, he was balancing on the toe of his
boot, and the married look slid over him like a mist.
Down went his head between his shoulders, and down
went the corners of his mouth—down the inflation of
his chest like a collapsed balloon; and down, in its
youth and expression it seemed to me, every muscle
of his face. He had assumed in a minute the style
and countenance of a man ten years older.

I smiled. How could I but smile!

“Then you have heard of it!” exclaimed Tom,
suddenly starting to his feet, and flushing purple to the
roots of his hair.

“Heard of what?”

My look of surprise evidently took him aback; and,
seating himself again with confused apologies, Tom
proceeded to “make a clean breast,” on a subject
which I had not anticipated.

It seemed that, far from moulting her feathers after
marriage, according to my prediction, Mrs. Follett
clearly thought that she had not yet “strutted her
hour,” and, though everything Tom could wish behind
the curtain, in society she had flaunted and flirted, not
merely with no diminution of zest from the wedding-day,
but, her husband was of opinion, with a ratio
alarmingly increasing. Her present alliance was with
a certain Count Hautenbas, the lion of the moment,
and though doubtless one in which vanity alone was
active, Tom's sense of connubial propriety was at its
last gasp. He could stand it no longer. He wished
my advice in the choice between two courses. Should
he call out the Frenchman, or should he take advantage
of the law's construction of “moral insanity,” and
shut her up in a mad-house.

My advice had been of so little avail in the first instance,
that I shrank from troubling Tom with any
more of it, and certainly should have evaded it altogether,
but for an experiment I wished to make, as
much for my own satisfaction as for the benefit of that
large class, the unhappy married.

“Your wife is out every night, I suppose, Tom?”

“Every night when she has no party at home.”

“Do you go with her always?”

“I go for her usually—but the truth is, that since
I married, parties bore me, and after seeing my wife off,
I commonly smoke and snooze, or read, or run into
Bob Thomas's and `talk horse,' till I have just time to
be in at the death.”

“And when you get there, you don't dance?”

“Not I, faith! I haven't danced since I was married!”

“But you used to be the best waltzer of the day.”

“Well, the music sometimes gets into my heels
now, but, when I remember I am married, the fit cools
off. The deuce take it! a married man shouldn't be
seen whirling round the room with a girl in his arms!”

“I presume that were you still single, you would
fancy your chance to be as good for ladies' favors as
any French count's that ever came over?”

“Ehem! why—yes!”

Tom pulled up his collar.

“And if you had access to her society all day and
all night, and the Frenchman only an hour or two in
the evening, any given lady being the object, you would
bet freely on your own head?”

“I see your drift,” said Tom, with a melancholy
smile, “but it won't do!”

“No, indeed—it is what would have done. You had
at the start a much better chance with your wife than
Count Hautenbas; but husbands and lovers are the
`hare and the tortoise' of the fable. We must resort
now to other means. Will you follow my advice, as
well as take it, should I be willing again to burn my
fingers in your affairs?”

The eagerness of Tom's protestations quite made
the amende to my mortified self-complacency, and I
entered zealousy into my little plot for his happiness.
At this moment I heartily wish I had sent him and his
affairs to the devil, and (lest I should forget it at the
close of this tale) I here caution all men, single and
double, against “meddling or making,” marring or
mending, in matrimonial matters. The alliteration
may, perhaps, impress this salutary counsel on the
mind of the reader.

I passed the remainder of the day in repairing the
damage of Tom's person. I had his whiskers curled

and trimmed even (his left whisker was an inch nearer
his nose than the right), and his teeth looked to by the
dentist. I stood by, to be sure that there was no carelessness
in his selection of patent leathers, and on his
assuring me that he was otherwise well provided, I
suffered him to go home to dress, engaging him to
dine with me at seven.

He was punctual to the hour. By Jove, I could
scarce believe it was the same man. The consciousness
of being well dressed seemed to have brightened
his eyes and lips, as it certainly changed altogether his
address and movements. He had a narrow escape of
being handsome. After all, it is only a “man of mark,”
or an Apollo, who can well afford to neglect the outer
man; and a judicious negligence, or a judicious plainness,
is probably worth the attention of both the man
of mark and the Apollo. Tom was quite another order
of creature—a butterfly that was just now a worm—
and would have been treated with more consideration
in consequence, even by those least tolerant of “the
pomps and vanities.” We dined temperately, and I
superseded the bottle by a cup of strong green tea, at
an early moment after the removal of the cloth, determined
to have Tom's wits in as full dress as his person.
Without being at all a brilliant man, he was—
the next best thing—a steady absorbent; and as most
women are more fond of giving than receiving in all
things, but particularly in conversation. I was not uneasy
as to his power of making himself agreeable. Nor
was he, faith!

The ball of the night was at the house of an old
friend of my own, and Mr. and Mrs. Follett were but
newly introduced to the circle. I had the company
very clearly in my eye, therefore, while casting about
for dramatis personœ, and fixing upon Mrs. Beverly
Fairlie, for the prominent character, I assured success,
though being very much in love with that coquettish
widow myself, I had occasion for some self-denial
in the matter. Of Mrs. Fairlie's weak points
(on which it seemed necessary that I should enlighten
Tom), I had information not to be acquired short of
summering and wintering her, and with my eye solely
directed to its effect upon Mrs. Follett, I put the clues
into my friend's hands in a long after-dinner conversation.
As he seemed impatient to open the campaign
after getting these definite and valuable instructions, I
augured well for his success, and we entered the ballroom
in high spirits.

It was quite enough to say to the mischievous widow
that another woman was to be piqued by any attentions
she might choose to pay Mr. Follett. Having said
thus much, and presented Tom, I sought out Mrs.
Follett myself, with the double purpose of breaking
up the monopoly of Mons. Hautenbas, and of directing
her attention, should it be necessary, to the suavities
between Tom and the widow.

It was a superb ball, and the music, as Tom said,
went to the heels. The thing he did well was waltzing,
and after taking a turn or two with Mrs. Fairlie,
the rustic dame ran up to Mrs. Follett with the most
innocent air imaginable, and begged the loan of her
husband for the rest of the evening! I did not half
like the look of earnest with which she entered into
the affair, indeed, and there was little need of my
taking much trouble to enlighten Mrs. Follett: for a
woman so surprised with a six months' husband I never
saw. They were so capitally matched, Tom and the
widow, in size, motion, style of waltzing, and all, that
not we only, but the whole party, were occupied with
observing and admiring them. Mrs. Follett and I (for
a secret sympathy, somehow, drew us together, as the
thing went on) kept up a broken conversation, in which
the count was even less interested than we; and after
a few ineffectual attempts to draw her into the tea-room,
the Frenchman left us in pique, and we gave
ourselves up to the observation of the couple who (we
presumed) severally belonged to us. They carried on
the war famously, to be sure! Mrs. Fairlie was a
woman who could do as she liked, because she would;
and she cared not a straw for the very pronouncé demonstration
of engrossing one man for all the quadrilles,
waltzes, and galopades, beside being with him to supper.
Once or twice I tried to find an excuse for leaving
Mrs. Follett, to put in an oar for myself; but the
little woman clung to me as if she had not the courage
to undertake another person's amusement, and, new
and sudden as the feeling must have been, she was
pale and wretched, with a jealousy more bitter probably
than mine. Tom never gave me a look after the
first waltz; and as to the widow, she played her part
with rather more zeal than we set down for her.
I passed altogether an uncomfortable night, for a
gay one, and it was a great relief to me when
Mrs. Follett asked me to send Tom for the carriage.

“Be so kind as to send a servant for it,” said Follett,
very coolly, “and say to Mrs. Follett, that I will
join her at home. I am going to sup, or rather breakfast,
with Mrs. Beverly Fairlie!”

Here was a mess!

“Shall I send the count for your shawl?” I asked,
after giving this message, and wishing to know whether
she was this side of pride in her unhappiness.

The little woman burst into tears.

“I will sit in the cloak-room till my husband is
ready,” she said; “go to him, if you please, and implore
him to come and speak to me.”

As I said before, I wished the whole plot to the
devil. We had achieved our object, it is true—and
so did the man who knocked the breath out of his
friend's body, in killing a fly on his back. Tom is
now (this was years ago) a married flirt of some celebrity,
for after coming out of the widow's hands with a
three months' education, he had quite forgot to be
troubled about Mrs. Follett; and instead of neglecting
his dress, which was his only sin when I took him
in hand, he now neglects his wife, who sees him, as
women are apt to see their husbands, through other
women's eyes. I presume they are doomed to quite
as much unhappiness as would have fallen to their lot,
had I let them alone—had Mrs. Follett ran away with
the Frenchman, and had Tom died a divorced sloven.
But when I think that, beside achieving little for them,
I was the direct means of spoiling Mrs. Beverly Fairlie
for myself, I think I may write myself down as a
warning to meddlers in matrimony.

THE COUNTESS NYSCHRIEM,
AND THE HANDSOME ARTIST.

That favored portion of the light of one summer's
morning that was destined to be the transparent bath
of the master-pieces on the walls of the Pitti, was
pouring in a languishing flood through the massive
windows of the palace. The ghosts of the painters
(who, ministering to the eye only, walk the world from
cock-crowing to sunset) were haunting invisibly the
sumptuous rooms made famous by their pictures;
and the pictures themselves, conscious of the presence
of the fountain of soul from which gushed the soul
that is in them, glowed with intoxicated mellowness
and splendor, and amazed the living students of the
gallery with effects of light and color till that moment
undiscovered.

[And now, dear reader, having paid you the compliment
of commencing my story in your vein (poetical),
let me come down to a little every-day brick-and-mortar,
and build up a fair and square common-sense
foundation.]

Graeme McDonald was a young highlander from
Rob Roy's country, come to Florence to study the
old masters. He was an athletic, wholesome, handsome
fellow, who had probably made a narrow escape
of being simply a fine animal; and, as it was, you
never would have picked him from a crowd as anything
but a hussar out of uniform, or a brigand perverted
to honest life. His peculiarity was (and this I
foresee is to be an ugly sentence), that he had peculiarities
which did not seem peculiar. He was full of
genius for his art, but the canvass which served him
him as a vent, gave him no more anxiety than his
pocket-handkerchief. He painted in the palace, or
wiped his forehead on a warm day with equally small
care, to all appearance, and he had brought his mother
and two sisters to Italy, and supported them by a most
heroic economy and industry—all the while looking as
if the “silver moon” and all the small change of the
stars would scarce serve him for a day's pocket-money.
Indeed, the more I knew of McDonald, the more I
became convinced that there was another man built
over him. The painter was inside. And if he had
free thoroughfare and use of the outer man's windows
and ivory door, he was at any rate barred from hanging
out the smallest sign or indication of being at any
time “within.” Think as hard as he would—devise,
combine, study, or glow with enthusiasm—the proprietor
of the front door exhibited the same careless
and smiling bravery of mien, behaving invariably as if
he had the whole tenement to himself, and was neither
proud of, nor interested in the doings of his more
spiritual inmate—leading you to suppose, almost,
that the latter, though billeted upon him, had not
been properly introduced. The thatch of this common
tenement was of jetty black hair, curling in most
opulent prodigality, and, altogether, it was a house
that Hadad, the fallen spirit, might have chosen, when
becoming incarnate to tempt the sister of Absalom.

Perhaps you have been in Florence, dear reader,
and know by what royal liberality artists are permitted
to bring their easels into the splendid apartments of
the palace, and copy from the priceless pictures on
the walls. At the time I have my eye upon (some
few years ago), McDonald was making a beginning
of a copy of Titian's Bella, and near him stood the
easel of a female artist who was copying from the
glorious picture of “Judith and Holofernes,” in the
same apartment. Mademoiselle Folie (so she was
called by the elderly lady who always accompanied
her) was a small and very gracefully-formed creature,
with the plainest face in which attraction could possibly
reside. She was a passionate student of her art,
pouring upon it apparently the entire fulness of her
life, and as unconsciously forgetful of her personal
impressions on those around her, as if she wore the
invisible ring of Gyges. The deference with which
she was treated by her staid companion drew some
notice upon her, however, and her progress, in the
copy she was making, occasionally gathered the artists
about her easel; and, altogether, her position among
the silent and patient company at work in the different
halls of the palace, was one of affectionate and tacit
respect. McDonald was her nearest neighbor, and
they frequently looked over each other's pictures, but,
as they were both foreigners in Florence (she of Polish
birth, as he understood), their conversation was in
French or Italian, neither of which languages were
fluently familiar to Graeme, and it was limited generally
to expressions of courtesy or brief criticism of
each other's labors.

As I said before, it was a “proof-impression” of a
celestial summer's morning, and the thermometer
stood at heavenly idleness. McDonald sat with his
maul-stick across his knees, drinking from Titian's
picture. An artist, who had lounged in from the
next room, had hung himself by the crook of his arm
over a high peg, in his comrade's easel, and every now
and then he volunteered an observation to which he
expected no particular answer.

“When I remember how little beauty I have seen
in the world,” said Ingarde (this artist), “I am inclined
to believe with Saturninus, that there is no resurrection
of bodies, and that only the spirits of the good
return into the body of the Godhead—for what is
ugliness to do in heaven!”

McDonald only said, “hm—hm!”

“Or rather,” said Ingarde again, “I should like to
fashion a creed for myself, and believe that nothing
was immortal but what was heavenly, and that the
good among men and the beautiful among women
would be the only reproductions hereafter. How will
this little plain woman look in the streets of the New
Jerusalem, for example? Yet she expects, as we all
do, to be recognisable by her friends in Heaven, and,
of course, to have the same irredeemably plain face!
(Does she understand English, by the way—for she
might not be altogether pleased with my theory!”)

“I have spoken to her very often,” said McDonald,
“and I think English is Hebrew to her—but my theory
of beauty crosses at least one corner of your argument,
my friend! I believe that the original type of
every human face is beautiful, and that every human
being could be made beautiful, without, in any essential
particular, destroying the visible identity. The likeness
preserved in the faces of a family through several
generations is modified by the bad mental qualities,
and the bad health of those who hand is down. Remove
these modifications, and, without destroying the
family likeness, you would take away all that mars the

beauty of its particular type. An individual countenance
is an integral work of God's making, and God
`saw that it was good' when he made it. Ugliness,
as you phrase it, is the damage that type of countenance
has received from the sin and suffering of life. But
the type can be restored, and will be, doubtless, in
Heaven!”

“And you think that little woman's face could be
made beautiful?”

“I know it.”

“Try it, then! Here is your copy of Titian's
`Bella,' all finished but the face. Make an apothcosis
portrait of your neighbor, and while it harmonizes
with the body of Titian's beauty, still leave it recognisable
as her portrait, and I'll give in to your theory—
believing in all other miracles, if you like, at the same
time!”

Ingarde laughed, as he went back to his own picture,
and McDonald, after sitting a few minutes lost in
revery, turned his easel so as to get a painter's view
of his female neighbor. He thought she colored
slightly as he fixed his eyes upon her; but, if so, she
apparently became very soon unconscious of his gaze,
and he was soon absorbed himself in the task to which
his friend had so mockingly challenged him.

2. II.

[Excuse me, dear reader, while with two epistles I
build a bridge over which you can cross a chasm of a
month in my story.]

McDonald's answer was as follows:—

Rather agitated than surprised seemed Mademoiselle
Folie, when, the next day, as she arranged her brushes
upon the shelf of her easel, her handsome neighbor
commenced, in the most fluent Italian he could command,
to invite her to his wedding. Very much
surprised was McDonald when she interrupted him
in English, and begged him to use his native tongue,
as madame, her attendant, would not then understand
him. He went on delightedly in his own honest
language, and explained to her his imaginative admiration,
though he felt compunctious, somewhat,
that so unreal a sentiment should bring the blood into
her cheek. She thanked him—drew the cloth from
the upper part of her own picture, and showed him an
admirable portrait of his handsome features, substituted
for the masculine head of Judith in the original from
which she copied—and promised to be at his wedding,

and to listen sharply for her murmured name in his
vow at the altar. He chanced to wear at the moment
a ring of red cornelian, and he agreed with her that
she should stand where he could see her, and, at the
moment of his putting the marriage ring upon the
bride's fingers, that she should put on this, and for
ever after wear it, as a token of having received his
spiritual vows of devotion.

The day came, and the splendid equipage of the
countess dashed into the square of Santa Maria, with
a veiled bride and a cold bridegroom, and deposited
them at the steps of the church. And they were followed
by other coroneted equipages, and gayly dressed
from each—the mother and sisters of the bridegroom
gayly dressed, among them, but looking pale
with incertitude and dread.

The veiled bride was small, but she moved gracefully
up the aisle, and met her future husband at the
altar with a low courtesy, and made a sign to the priest
to proceed with the ceremony. McDonald was color
less, but firm, and indeed showed little interest, except
by an anxious look now and then among the crowd of
spectators at the sides of the altar. He pronounced
with a steady voice, but when the ring was to be put
on, he looked around for an instant, and then suddenly,
and to the great scandal of the church, clasped his
bride with a passionate ejaculation to his bosom.
The cornelian ring was on her finger—and the Countess
Nyschriem and Mademoiselle Folie—his bride and
his fancy queen—were one.

This curious event happened in Florence some
eight years since—as all people then there will remember—and
it was prophesied of the countess that
she would have but a short lease of her handsome and
gay husband. But time does not say so. A more
constant husband than McDonald to his plain and
titled wife, and one more continuously in love, does
not travel and buy pictures, and patronize artists—
though few except yourself and I, dear reader, know
the philosophy of it!

MY ONE ADVENTURE AS A BRIGAND.

I was standing in a hostelry, at Geneva, making a
bargain with an Italian for a place in a return carriage
to Florence, when an Englishman, who had been in
the same steamer with me on Lake Leman, the day
before, came in and stood listening to the conversation.
We had been the only two passengers on board,
but had passed six hours in each other's company
without speaking. The road to an Englishman's
friendship is to have shown yourself perfectly indifferent
to his acquaintance, and, as I liked him from the
first, we were now ready to be conscious of each other's
existence.

“I beg pardon,” said he, advancing in a pause of
the vetturino's oration, “will you allow me to engage
a place with you? I am going to Florence, and, if
agreeable to you, we will take the carriage to ourselves.”

I agreed very willingly, and in two hours we were
free of the gates of Geneva, and keeping along the
edge of the lake in the cool twilight of one of the loveliest
of heaven's summer evenings. The carriage was
spaciously contrived for four; and, with the curtains
up all around, our feet on the forward seat, my companion
smoking, and conversation bubbling up to
please itself, we rolled over the smooth road, gliding
into the first chapter of our acquaintance as tranquilly
as Geoffrey Crayon and his reader into the first chapter
of anything he has written.

My companion (Mr. St. John Elmslie, as put down
in his passport) seemed to have something to think of
beside propitiating my good will, but he was considerate
and winning, from evident high breeding, and
quite open, himself, to my most scrutinizing study.
He was about thirty, and, without any definite beauty,
was a fine specimen of a man. Probably most persons
would have called him handsome. I liked him
better, probably, from the subdued melancholy with
which he brooded on his secret thought, whatever it
might be—sad men, in this world of boisterous gayety
or selfish ill-humor, interesting me always.

From that something, on which his memory fed in
quiet but constant revery, nothing aroused my companion
except the passing of a travelling carriage, going
in the other direction, on our own arrival at an inn.
I began to suspect, indeed, after a little while, that
Elmslie had some understanding with our vetturino,
for, on the approach of any vehicle of pleasure, our
horses became restiff, and, with a sudden pull-up,
stood directly across the way. Out jumped my friend
to assist in controlling the restiff animals, and, in the
five minutes during which the strangers were obliged
to wait, we generally saw their heads once or twice
thrust inquiringly from the carriage window. This
done, our own vehicle was again wheeled about, and
the travellers allowed to proceed.

We had arrived at Bologna with but one interruption
to the quiet friendliness of our intercourse. Apropos
of some vein of speculation, I had asked my companion
if he were married. He was silent for a moment, and
then, in a jocose tone of voice, which was new to me,
replied, “I believe I have a wife—somewhere in Scotland.”
But though Elmslie had determined to show
me that he was neither annoyed nor offended at my
inquisitiveness, his manner changed. He grew ceremonious.
For the remainder of that day, I felt uncomfortable,
I scarce knew why; and I silently determined
that if my friend continued so exceedingly well-bred
in his manner for another day, I should find an
excuse for leaving him at Bologna.

But we had left Bologna, and, at sunset of a warm
day, were slowly toiling up the Apennines. The inn to
which we were bound was in sight, a mile or two above
us, and, as the vetturino stopped to breathe his horses,
Elmslie jumped from the carriage and started to walk
on. I took advantage of his absence to stretch myself
over the vacated cushions, and, on our arrival at the
inn, was soundly asleep.

My friend's voice, in an unusual tone, awoke me,
and, by his face, as he looked in at the carriage window,
I saw that he was under some extraordinary excitement.
This I observed by the light of the stable-lantern—for
the hostelry, Italian fashion, occupied
the lower story of the inn, and our carriage was driven
under the archway, where the faint light from without
made but little impression on the darkness. I followed
Elmslie's beckoning finger, and climbing after him up
the stairway of stone, stood in a large refectory occupying
the whole of the second story of the building.

At the first glance I saw that there was an English
party in the house. An Italian inn of the lower order
has no provision for private parties, and few, except
English travellers, object to joining the common evening

meal. The hall was dark with the twilight, but a
large curtain was suspended across the farther extremity,
and, by the glimmer of lights, and an occasional
sound of a knife, a party was within supping in
silence.

“If you speak, speak in Italian,” whispered Elmslie,
taking me by the arm, and leading me on tiptoe to
one of the corners of the curtain.

I looked in and saw two persons seated at a table—
a bold and soldierly-looking man of fifty, and a young
lady, evidently his daughter. The beauty of the last-mentioned
person was so extraordinary that I nearly
committed the indiscretion of an exclamation in English.
She was slight, but of full and well-rounded
proportions, and she sat and moved with an eminent
grace and ladylikeness altogether captivating.
Though her face expressed a settled sadness, it was
of unworn and faultless youth and loveliness, and
while her heavily-fringed eyes would have done, in
their expression, for a Niobe, Hebe's lips were not
more ripe, nor Juno's arched more proudly. She was
a blonde, with eyes and eyelashes darker than her
hair—a kind of beauty almost peculiar to England.

The passing in of a tall footman, in a plain livery of
gray, interrupted my gaze, and Elmslie drew me away
by the arm, and led me into the road in front of the
locanda. The night had now fallen, and we strolled
up and down in the glimmer of the starlight. My
companion was evidently much disturbed, and we
made several turns after I had seen very plainly that
he was making up his mind to communicate to me the
secret.

“I have a request to make of you,” he said, at last;
“a service to exact, rather, to which there were no
hope that you would listen for a moment if I did not
first tell you a very singular story. Have a little patience
with me, and I will make it as brief as I can—
the briefer, that I have no little pain in recalling it with
the distinctness of description.”

I expressed my interest in all that concerned my
new friend, and begged him to go on.

“Hardly six years ago,” said Elmslie, pressing my
arm gently in acknowledgment of my sympathy, “I
left college and joined my regiment, for the first time,
in Scotland. By the way, I should re-introduce myself
to you as Viscount S—, of the title of which,
then, I was in prospect. My story hinges somewhat
upon the fact that, as an honorable captain, a nobleman
in expectancy, I was an object of some extraneous
interest to the ladies who did the flirting for the
garrison. God forgive me for speaking lightly on the
subject!

“A few evenings after my arrival, we had been dining
rather freely at mess, and the major announced to us
that we were invited to take tea with a linen-draper,
whose house was a popular resort of the officers of
the regiment. The man had three or four daughters,
who, as the phrase goes, `gave you a great deal for
your money,' and, for romping and frolicking, they
had good looks and spirit enough. The youngest was
really very pretty, but the eldest, to whom I was exclusively
presented by the major, as a sort of quiz on
a new-comer, was a sharp and sneering old maid, red-headed,
freckled, and somewhat lame. Not to be outdone
in frolic by my persecutor, I commenced making
love to Miss Jacky in mock heroics, and we were soon
marching up and down the room, to the infinite entertainment
of my brother officers, lavishing on each other
every possible term of endearment.

“In the midst of this, the major came up to me with
rather a serious face.

“`Whatever you do,' said he, `for God's sake don't
call the old girl your wife. The joke might be serious.'

“It was quite enough that I was desired not to do
anything in the reign of misrule then prevailing. I
immediately assumed a connubial air, to the best of
my dramatic ability, begged Miss Jacky to join me in
the frolic, and made the rounds of the room, introducing
the old girl as Mrs. Elmslie, and receiving from
her quite as many tendernesses as were bearable by
myself or the company present. I observed that the
lynx-eyed linen-draper watched this piece of fun very
closely, and my friend, the major, seemed distressed
and grave about it. But we carried it out till the
party broke up, and the next day the regiment was
ordered over to Ireland, and I thought no more, for
awhile, either of Miss Jacky or my own absurdity.

“Two years afterward, I was, at a drawing-room at
St. James's, presented, for the first time, by the name
which I bear. It was not a very agreeable event to me,
as our family fortunes were inadequate to the proper
support of the title, and on the generosity of a maternal
uncle, who had been at mortal variance with my father,
depended our hopes of restoration to prosperity. From
the mood of bitter melancholy in which I had gone
through the ceremony of an introduction, I was aroused
by the murmur in the crowd at the approach of a young
girl just presented to the king. She was following a
lady whom I slightly knew, and had evidently been
presented by her; and, before I had begun to recover
from my astonishment at her beauty, I was requested
by this lady to give her protegé an arm and follow to a
less crowded apartment of the palace.

“Ah, my friend! the exquisite beauty of Lady
Melicent—but you have seen her. She is here, and
I must fold her in my arms to-night, or perish in the
attempt.

“Pardon me!” he added, as I was about to interrupt
him with an explanation. “She has been—she
is—my wife! She loved me and married me, making
life a heaven of constant ecstacy—for I worshipped
her with every fibre of my existence.”

He paused and gave me his story brokenly, and I
waited for him to go on without questioning.

“We had lived together in absolute and unclouded
happiness for eight months, in lover-like seclusion at
her father's house, and I was looking forward to the
birth of my child with anxiety and transport, when the
death of my uncle left me heir to his immense fortune,
and I parted from my greater treasure to go and pay
the fitting respect at his burial.

“I returned, after a week's absence, with an impatience
and ardor almost intolerable, and found the door
closed against me.

“There were two letters for me at the porter's lodge
—one from Lord A—, my wife's father, informing
me that the Lady Melicent had miscarried and was
dangerously ill, and enjoining upon me as a man of
honor and delicacy, never to attempt to see her again;
and another from Scotland, claiming a fitting support
for my lawful wife, the daughter of the linen-draper.
The proofs of the marriage, duly sworn to and certified
by the witnesses of my fatal frolic, were enclosed,
and on my recovery, six weeks after, from the delirium
into which these multiplied horrors precipitated me, I
found that, by the Scotch law, the first marriage was
valid, and my ruin was irrevocable.”

“And how long since was this?” I inquired, breaking
in upon his narration for the first time.

“A year and a month—and till to-night I have not
seen her. But I must break through this dreadful
separation now—and I must speak to her, and press
her to my breast—and you will aid me?”

“To the last drop of my blood, assuredly. But
how?”

“Come to the inn! You have not supped, and we
will devise as you eat. And you must lend me your
invention, for my heart and brain seem to me going
wild.”

Two hours after, with a pair of loaded pistols in my
breast, we went to the chamber of the host, and bound

him and his wife to the posts of their beds. There
was but one man about the house, the hostler, and we
had made him intoxicated with our travelling flask of
brandy. Lord A— and his daughter were still sitting
up, and she, at her chamber window, was watching
the just risen moon, over which the clouds were
drifting very rapidly. Our business was, now, only
with them, as, in their footman, my companion had
found an attached creature, who remembered him, and
willingly agreed to offer no interruption.

After taking a pull at the brandy-flask myself (for,
in spite of my blackened face and the slouched hat of
the hostler, I required some fortification of the muscles
of my face before doing violence to an English
nobleman), I opened the door of the chamber which
must be passed to gain access to that of Lady Melicent.
It was Lord A—'s sleeping-room, and, though
the light was extinguished, I could see that he was
still up, and sitting at the window. Turning my lantern
inward, I entered the room and set it down, and,
to my relief, Lord A— soliloquized in English, that
it was the host with a hint that it was time to go to
bed. My friend was at the door, according to my arrangement,
ready to assist me should I find any difficulty;
but, from the dread of premature discovery of
the person, he was to let me manage it alone if possible.

Lord A— sat unsuspectingly in his chair, with
his head turned half way over his shoulders to see why
the officious host did not depart. I sprung suddenly
upon him, drew him backward and threw him on his
face, and, with my hand over his mouth, threatened
him with death, in my choicest Italian, if he did not
remain passive till his portmanteau had been looked
into. I thought he might submit, with the idea that
it was only a robbery, and so it proved. He allowed
me, after a short struggle, to tie his hands behind him,
and march him down to his carriage, before the muzzle
of my pistol. The hostelry was still as death, and,
shutting his carriage door upon his lordship, I mounted
guard.

The night seemed to me very long, but morning
dawned, and, with the earliest gray, the postillions
came knocking at the outer door of the locanda. My
friend went out to them, while I marched back Lord
A— to his chamber, and, by immense bribing, the
horses were all put to our carriage a half hour after,
and the outraged nobleman was left without the means
of pursuit till their return. We reached Florence in
safety, and pushed on immediately to Leghorn, where
we took the steamer for Marseilles and eluded arrest,
very much to my most agreeable surprise.

By a Providence that does not always indulge mortals
with removing those they wish in another world,
Lord S— has lately been freed from his harrowing
chain by the death of his so-called lady: and, having
re-married Lady Melicent, their happiness is renewed
and perfect. In his letter to me, announcing it, he
gives me liberty to tell the story, as the secret was divulged
to Lord A— on the day of his second nuptials.
He said nothing, however, of his lordship's
forgiveness for my rude handling of his person, and,
in ceasing to be considered a brigand, possibly I am
responsible as a gentleman.

WIGWAM versus ALMACK'S.

1. CHAPTER I.

In one of the years not long since passed to your
account and mine by the recording angel, gentle reader,
I was taking my fill of a delicious American June,
as Ducrow takes his bottle of wine, on the baek of a
beloved horse. In the expressive language of the
raftsmen on the streams of the West, I was “following”
the Chemung—a river whose wild and peculiar
loveliness is destined to be told in undying song, whenever
America can find leisure to look up her poets.
Such bathing of the feet of precipices, such kissing
of flowery slopes, such winding in and out of the bosoms
of round meadows, such frowning amid broken
rocks, and smiling through smooth valleys, you would
never believe could go in this out-of-doors world,
unvisited and uncelebrated.

Not far from the ruins of a fortification, said to have
been built by the Spaniards before the settlement of
New-England by the English, the road along the Chemung
dwindles into a mere ledge at the foot of a
precipice, the river wearing into the rock at this spot
by a black and deep eddy. At the height of your lip
above the carriage track, there gushes from the rock
a stream of the size and steady clearness of a glass
rod, and all around it in the small rocky lap which it
has worn away, there grows a bed of fragrant mint.
kept by the shade and moisture of a perpetual green,
bright as emerald. Here stops every traveller who is
not upon an errand of life or death, and while his
horse stands up to his fetlocks in the river, he parts
the dewy stems of the mint, and drinks, for once in
his life, like a fay or a poet. It is one of those exquisite
spots which paint their own picture insensibly
in the memory, even while you look on them, natural
“Daguerrotypes,” as it were; and you are surprised,
years afterward, to find yourself remembering every
leaf and stone, and the song of every bird that sung
in the pine-trees overhead while you were watching
the curve of the spring-leap. As I said before, it will
be sung and celebrated, when America sits down weary
with her first century of toil, and calls for her minstrels,
now toiling with her in the fields.

Within a mile of this spot, to which I had been
looking forward with delight for some hours. I overtook
a horseman. Before coming up with him I had
at once decided he was an Indian. His relaxed limbs
swaying to every motion of his horse with the grace
and ease of a wreath of smoke, his neck and shoulders
so cleanly shaped, and a certain watchful look about
his ears which I cannot define, but which you see in
a spirited horse—were infallible marks of the race
whom we have driven from the fair land of our independence.
He was mounted upon a small black horse
—of the breed commonly called Indian ponies, now
not very common so near the Atlantic—and rode with
a slack rein and air, I thought, rather more dispirited
than indolent.

The kind of morning I have described, is, as every
one must remember, of a sweetness so communicative
that one would think two birds could scarce meet on
the wing without exchanging a carol: and I involuntarily
raised my bridle after a minute's study of the
traveller before me, and in a brief gallop was at his
side. With the sound of my horse's feet, however,
he changed in all his characteristics to another man—
sat erect in his saddle, and assumed the earnest air of
an American who never rides but upon some errand;

and, on his giving me back my “good morning” in
the unexceptionable accent of the country, I presumed
I had mistaken my man. He was dark, but not
darker than a Spaniard, of features singularly handsome
and regular, dressed with no peculiarity except
an otter-skin cap of a silky and golden-colored fur, too
expensive and rare for any but a fanciful, as well as a
luxurious purchaser. A slight wave in the black hair
which escaped from it, and fell back from his temples,
confirmed me in the conviction that his blood was of
European origin.

We rode on together with some indifferent conversation,
till we arrived at the spring-leap I have described,
and here my companion, throwing his right
leg over the neck of his poney, jumped to the ground
very actively, and applying his lips to the spring, drank
a free draught. His horse seemed to know the spot,
and, with the reins on his neck, trotted on to a shallower
ledge in the river and stood with the water to
his knees, and his quick eye turned on his master with
an expressive look of satisfaction.

“You have been here before,” I said, tying my
less disciplined horse to the branch of an overhanging
shrub.

“Yes—often!” was his reply, with a tone so quick
and rude, however, that, but for the softening quality
of the day, I should have abandoned there all thought
of further acquaintance.

I took a small valise from the pommel of my saddle,
and while my fellow-traveller sat on the rock-side
looking moodily into the river, I drew forth a flask of
wine and a leathern cup, a cold pigeon wrapped in a
cool cabbage leaf, the bigger end of a large loaf, and
as much salt as could be tied up in the cup of a large
water-lily—a set-out of provender which owed its
daintiness to the fair hands of my hostess of the night
before.

The stranger's first resemblance to an Indian had
probably given a color to my thoughts, for, as I handed
him a cup of wine, I said, “I wish the Shawanee
chief to whose tribe this valley belongs, were here to
get a cup of my wine.”

The young man sprang to his feet with a sudden
flash through his eyes, and while he looked at me, he
seemed to stand taller than, from my previous impression
of his height, I should have thought possible.
Surprised as I was at the effect of my remark, I did
not withdraw the cup, and with a moment's searching
look into my face, he changed his attitude, begged
pardon rather confusedly, and, draining the cup, said
with a faint smile, “The Shawanee chief thanks
you!”

“Do you know the price of land in the valley?” I
asked, handing him a slice of bread with the half
pigeon upon it, and beginning to think it was best to
stick to commonplace subjects with a stranger.

“Yes!” he said, his brow clouding over again. “It
was bought from the Shawance chief you speak of for
a string of beads the acre. The tribe had their burial-place
on the Susquehannah, some twenty miles from
this, and they cared little about a strip of a valley
which, now, I would rather have for my inheritance
than the fortune of any white man in the land.”

“Throw in the landlord's daughter at the village
below,” said I, “and I would take it before any half-dozen
of the German principalities. Have you heard
the news of her inheritance?”

Another moody look and a very crisp “Yes,” put
a stop to all desire on my part to make further advances
in my companion's acquaintance. Gathering my
pigeon bones together, therefore, and putting them on
the top of a stone where they would be seen by the
first “lucky dog” that passed, flinging my emptied
water-lily on the river, and strapping up cup and flask
once more in my valise, I mounted, and with a crusty
good morning, set off at a hand-gallop down the river.

My last unsuccessful topic was, at the time I write
of, the subject of conversation all through the neighborhood
of the village toward which I was travelling.
The most old-fashioned and comfortable inn on the
Susquehannah, or Chemung, was kept at the junction
of these two noble rivers, by a certain Robert Plymton,
who had “one fair daughter and no more.” He was
a plain farmer of Connecticut, who had married the
grand-daughter of an English emigrant, and got, with
his wife, a chest of old papers, which he thought had
better be used to mend a broken pane or wrap up groceries,
but which his wife, on her death-bed, told him
“might turn out worth something.” With this slender
thread of expectation, he had kept the little chest
under his bed, thinking of it perhaps once a year, and
satisfying his daughter's inquisitive queries with a
shake of his head, and something about “her poor
mother's tantrums,” concluding usually with some
reminder to keep the parlor in order, or mind her
housekeeping. Ruth Plymton had had some sixteen
“winters' schooling,” and was known to be much
“smarter” (Anglicé, cleverer), than was quite necessary
for the fulfilment of her manifold duties. Since
twelve years of age (the period of her mother's death)
she had officiated with more and more success as barmaid
and host's daughter to the most frequented inn
of the village, till now, at eighteen, she was the only
ostensible keeper of the inn, the old man usually being
absent in the fields with his men, or embarking his
grain in an “ark,” to take advantage of the first
freshet. She was civil to all comers, but her manner
was such as to make it perfectly plain even to the
rudest raftsman and hunter, that the highest respect
they knew how to render to a woman was her due.
She was rather unpopular with the girls of the village
from what they called her pride and “keeping to herself,”
but the truth was, that the cheap editions of
romances which Ruth took instead of money for the
lodging of the itinerant book-pedlars, were more
agreeable companions to her than the girls of the village;
and the long summer forenoons, and half the
long winter nights, were little enough for the busy
young hostess, who, seated on her bed, devoured tales
of high-life which harmonized with some secret longing
in her breast—she knew not and scarce thought
of asking herself why.

I had been twice at Athens (by this classical name
is known the village I speak of), and each time had
prolonged my stay at Plymton's inn for a day longer
than my horse or my repose strictly exacted. The
scenery at the junction is magnificent, but it was
scarce that. And I cannot say that it was altogether
admiration of the host's daughter; for though I breakfasted
late for the sake of having a clean parlor while
I ate my broiled chicken, and, having been once to
Italy. Miss Plymton liked to pour out my tea and hear
me talk of St. Peter's and the Carnival, yet there was
that marked retenu and decision in her manner that
made me feel quite too much like a culprit at school,
and large and black as her eyes were, and light and
airy as were all her motions, I mixed up with my propensity
for her society, a sort of dislike. In short, I
never felt a tenderness for a woman who could “queen
it” so easily, and I went heart-whole on my journey,
though always with a high respect for Ruth Plymton,
and a pleasant remembrance of her conversation.

The story which I had heard farther up the river
was, briefly, that there had arrived at Athens an Englishman,
who had found in Miss Ruth Plymton, the
last surviving descendant of the family of her mother;
that she was the heiress to a large fortune, if the
proof of her descent were complete, and that the contents
of the little chest had been the subject of a
week's hard study by the stranger, who had departed
after a vain attempt to persuade old Plymton to accompany
him to England with his daughter. This

was the rumor, the allusion to which had been received
with such repulsive coldness by my dark companion
at the spring-leap.

America is so much of an asylum for despairing
younger sons and the proud and starving branches of
great families, that a discovery of heirs to property
among people of very inferior condition, is by no
means uncommon. It is a species of romance in real
life, however, which we never believe upon hearsay,
and I rode on to the village, expecting my usual reception
by the fair damsel of the inn. The old sign
still hung askew as I approached, and the pillars of
the old wooden “stoop” or portico, were as much off
their perpendicular as before, and true to my augury,
out stepped my fair acquaintance at the sound of my
horse's feet, and called to Reuben the ostler, and gave
me an unchanged welcome. The old man was down
at the river side, and the key of the grated bar hung
at the hostess's girdle, and with these signs of times
as they were, my belief in the marvellous tale vanished
into thin air.

“So you are not gone to England to take possession?”
I said.

Her serious “No!” unsoftened by any other remark,
put a stop to the subject again, and taking myself
to task for having been all day stumbling on
mal-apropos subjects, I asked to be shown to my room,
and spent the hour or two before dinner in watching
the chickens from the window, and wondering a great
deal as to the “whereabouts” of my friend in the
otter-skin cap.

The evening of that day was unusually warm, and
I strolled down to the bank of the Susquehannah, to
bathe. The moon was nearly full and half way to the
zenith, and between the lingering sunset and the clear
splendor of the moonlight, the dusk of the “folding
hour” was forgotten, and the night went on almost as
radiant as day. I swam across the river, delighting
myself with the gold rims of the ripples before my
breast, and was within a yard or two of the shore on
my return, when I heard a woman's voice approaching
in earnest conversation. I shot forward and drew myself
in beneath a large clump of alders, and with only
my head out of water, lay in perfect concealment.

“You are not just, Shahatan!” were the first words
I distinguished, in a voice I immediately recognised
as that of my fair hostess. “You are not just. As
far as I know myself I love you better than any one I
ever saw—but”—

As she hesitated, the deep low voice of my companion
at the spring-leap, uttered in a suppressed and
impatient guttural, “But what?” He stood still with
his back to the moon, and while the light fell full on
her face, she withdrew her arm from his and went on.

“I was going to say that I do not yet know myself
or the world sufficiently to decide that I shall always
love you. I would not be too hasty in so important a
thing, Shahatan! We have talked of it before, and
therefore I may say to you, now, that the prejudices
of my father and all my friends are against it.”

“My blood”—interrupted the young man, with a
movement of impatience.

She laid her hand on his arm. “Stay! the objection
is not mine. Your Spanish mother, besides,
shows more in your look and features than the blood
of your father. But it would still be said I married
an Indian, and though I care little for what the village
would say, yet I must be certain that I shall love you
with all my heart and till death, before I set my face
with yours against the prejudices of every white man
and woman in my native land! You have urged me
for my secret, and there it is. I feel relieved to have
unburthened my heart of it.”

“That secret is but a summer old!” said he, half
turning on his heel, and looking from her upon the
moon's path across the river.

“Shame!” she replied; “you know that long before
this news came, I talked with you constantly of
other lands, and of my irresistible desire to see the
people of great cities, and satisfy myself whether I
was like them. That curiosity, Shahatan, is, I fear,
even stronger than my love, or at least, it is more impatient;
and now that I have the opportunity fallen to
me like a star out of the sky, shall I not go? I must.
Indeed I must.”

The lover felt that all had been said, or was too
proud to answer, for they fell into the path again, side
by side, in silence, and at a slow step were soon out of
my sight and hearing. I emerged from my compulsory
hiding-place wiser than I went in, dressed and
strolled back to the village, and finding the old landlord
smoking his pipe alone under the portico, I lighted
a cigar, and sat down to pick his brains of the little
information I wanted to fill out the story.

I took my leave of Athens on the following morning,
paying my bill duly to Miss Plymton, from whom
I requested a receipt in writing, for I foresaw without
any very sagacious augury beside what the old man
told me, that it might be an amusing document by-and-by.
You shall judge by the sequel of the story,
dear reader, whether you would like it in your book
of autographs.

Not long after the adventure described in the preceding
chapter, I embarked for a ramble in Europe.
Among the newspapers which were lying about in the
cabin of the packet, was one which contained this
paragraph, extracted from a New-Orleans Gazette.
The American reader will at once remember it:—

“Extraordinary attachment to savage life.—The officers
at Fort — (one of the most distant outposts
of human habitation in the west), extended their hospitality
lately to one of the young protegés of government,
a young Shawanee chief, who has been educated
at public expense for the purpose of aiding in the
civilization of his tribe. This youth, the son of a
Shawanee chief by a Spanish mother, was put to a
preparatory school in a small village on the Susquehannah,
and subsequently was graduated at —
College with the first honors of his class. He had
become a most accomplished gentleman, was apparently
fond of society, and, except in a scarce distinguishable
tinge of copper color in his skin, retained
no trace of his savage origin. Singular to relate,
however, he disappeared suddenly from the fort, leaving
behind him the clothes in which he had arrived,
and several articles of a gentleman's toilet; and as the
sentry on duty was passed at dawn of the same day by
a mounted Indian in the usual savage dress, who gave
the pass-word in issuing from the gate, it is presumed
it was no other than the young Shahatan, and that he
has joined his tribe, who were removed some years
since beyond the Mississippi.”

The reader will agree with me that I possessed the
key to the mystery.

As no one thinks of the thread that disappears in an
intricate embroidery till it comes out again on the
surface, I was too busy in weaving my own less interesting
woof of adventure for the two years following,
to give Shahatan and his love even a passing thought.
On a summer's night in 18—, however, I found myself
on a banquette at an Almack's ball, seated beside
a friend who, since we had met last at Almack's, had
given up the white rose of girlhood for the diamonds
of the dame, timidity and blushes for self-possession
and serene sweetness, dancing for conversation, and
the promise of beautiful and admired seventeen for the
perfection of more lovely and adorable twenty-two.
She was there as chaperon to a younger sister, and it
was delightful in that whirl of giddy motion, and more
giddy thought, to sit beside a tranquil and unfevered

mind and talk with her of what was passing, without
either bewilderment or effort.

“What is it,” she said, “that constitutes aristocratic
beauty?—for it is often remarked that it is seen nowhere
in such perfection as at Almack's; yet, I have
for a half-hour looked in vain among these handsome
faces for a regular profile, or even a perfect figure. It
is not symmetry, surely, that gives a look of high
breeding—nor regularity of feature.”

“If you will take a leaf out of a traveller's book,”
I replied, “we may at least have the advantage of
a comparison. I remember recording, when travelling
in the East, that for months I had not seen an
irregular nose or forehead in a female face; and, almost
universally, the mouth and chin of the Orientals
are, as well as the upper features, of the most classic
correctness. Yet where, in civilized countries, do
women look lower-born or more degraded?”

“Then it is not in the features,” said my friend.

“No, nor in the figure, strictly,” I went on to say,
“for the French and Italian women (vide the same
book of mems), are generally remarkable for shape and
fine contour of limb, and the French are, we all know
(begging your pardon), much better dancers, and more
graceful in their movements, than all other nations.
Yet what is more rare than a `thorough-bred' looking
Frenchwoman?”

“We are coming to a conclusion very fast,” she
said, smiling. “Perhaps we shall find the great secret
in delicacy of skin, after all.”

“Not unless you will agree that Broadway in New-York
is the `prato fiarito,' of aristocratic beauty—for
nowhere on the face of the earth do you see such
complexions. Yet, my fair countrywomen stoop too
much, and are rather too dressy in their tastes to convey
very generally the impression of high birth.”

“Stay!” interrupted my companion, laying her
hand on my arm with a look of more meaning than I
quite understood; “before you commit yourself farther
on that point, look at this tall girl coming up the
floor, and tell me what you think of her, apropos to
the subject.”

“Why, that she is the very forth-shadowing of
noble parentage,” I replied, “in step, air, form—everything.
But surely the face is familiar to me.”

“It is the Miss Trevanion whom you said you had
never met. Yet she is an American, and with such a
fortune as hers, I wonder you should not have heard
of her at least.”

“Miss Trevanion! I never knew anybody of the
name, I am perfectly sure—yet that face I have seen
before, and I would stake my life I have known the
lady, and not casually either.”

My eyes were riveted to the beautiful woman who
now sailed past with a grace and stateliness that were
the subject of universal admiration, and I eagerly attempted
to catch her eye; but on the other side of
her walked one of the most agreeable flatterers of the
hour, and the crowd prevented my approaching her,
even if I had solved the mystery so far as to know in
what terms to address her. Yet it was marvellous
that I could ever have seen such beauty and forgotten
the when and where, or that such fine and unusually
lustrous eyes could ever have shone on me without
inscribing well in my memory their “whereabout”
and history.

“Well!” said my friend, “are you making out
your theory, or are you `struck home' with the first
impression, like many another dancer here to-night?”

“Pardon me! I shall find out presently, who Miss
Trevanion is—but, meantime, revenous. I will tell
you where I think lies the secret of the aristocratic
beauty of England. It is in the lofty maintien of the
head and bust—the proud carriage; if you remark, in
all these women—the head set back, the chest elevated
and expanded, and the whole port and expression,
that of pride and conscious superiority. This, mind
you, though the result of qualities in the character, is
not the work of a day, nor perhaps of a single generation.
The effect of expanding the breast and preserving
the back straight, and the posture generally
erect, is the high health and consequent beauty of
those portions of the frame; and the physical advantage,
handed down with the pride which produced it,
from mother to child, the race gradually has become
perfect in those points, and the look of pride and highbearing
is now easy, natural, and unconscious. Glance
your eye around and you will see that there is not a
defective bust, and hardly a head ill set on, in the
room. In an assembly in any other part of the world,
to find a perfect bust with a gracefully carried head, is
as difficult as here to find the exception.”

“What a proud race you make us out, to be sure,”
said my companion, rather dissentingly.

“And so you are, eminently and emphatically
proud,” I replied. “What English family does not
revolt from any proposition of marriage from a foreigner?
For an English girl to marry a Frenchman
or an Italian, a German or a Russian, Greek, Turk, or
Spaniard, is to forfeit a certain degree of respectability,
let the match be as brilliant as it may. The first
feeling on hearing of it is against the girl's sense of
delicacy. It extends to everything else. Your soldiers,
your sailors, your tradesmen, your gentlemen,
your common people, and your nobles, are all (who
ever doubted it, you are mentally asking) out of all
comparison better than the same ranks and professions
in any other country. John Bull is literally surprised
if any one doubts this—nay, he does not believe that
any one does doubt it. Yet you call the Americans
ridiculously vain because they believe their institutions
better than yours, that their ships fight as well, their
women are as fair, and their men as gentlemanly as
any in the world. The `vanity' of the French, who
believe in themselves, just as the English do, only in a
less blind entireness of self-glorification, is a common
theme of ridicule in English newspapers; and the
French and the Americans, for a twentieth part of
English intolerance and self-exaggeration, are written
down daily by the English, as the two vainest nations
on earth.”

“Stop!” said my fair listener, who was beginning
to smile at my digression from female beauty to national
pride, “let me make a distinction there. As the
English and French are quite indifferent to the opinion
of other nations on these points, and not at all
shaken in their self-admiration by foreign incredulity,
theirs may fairly be dignified by the name of pride.
But what shall I say of the Americans, who are in a
perpetual fever at the ridicule of English newspapers,
and who receive, I understand, with a general convulsion
throughout the states, the least slur in a review,
or the smallest expression of disparagement in a tory
newspaper. This is not pride, but vanity.”

“I am hit, I grant you. A home thrust that I wish
I could foil. But here comes Miss Trevanion, again,
and I must make her out, or smother of curiosity. I
leave you a victor.”

The drawing of the cord which encloses the dancers,
narrowed the path of the promenaders so effectually,
that I could easily take my stand in such a
position that Miss Trevanion could not pass without
seeing me. With my back to one of the slight pillars
of the orchestra, I stood facing her as she came
down the room; and within a foot or two of my position,
yet with several persons between us, her eye
for the first time rested on me. There was a sudden
flush, a look of embarrassed but momentary curiosity,
and the beautiful features cleared up, and I saw, with
vexatious mortification, that she had the advantage
of me, and was even pleased to remember where we
had met. She held out her hand the next moment,

but evidently understood my reserve, for, with a mischievous
compression of the lips, she leaned over, and
said in a voice intended only for my ear, “Reuben!
take the gentleman's horse!”

My sensations were very much those of the Irishman
who fell into a pit in a dark night, and catching
a straggling root in his descent, hung suspended by
incredible exertion and strength of arm till morning,
when daylight disclosed the bottom, at just one inch
below the points of his toes. So easy seemed the
solution—after it was discovered.

Miss Trevanion (ci-devant Plymton) took my arm.
Her companion was engaged to dance. Our meeting
at Almack's was certainly one of the last events either
could have expected when we parted—but Almack's
is not the place to express strong emotions. We
walked leisurely down the sides of the quadrilles to
the tea-room, and between her bows and greetings to
her acquaintances, she put me au courant of her
movements for the last two years—Miss Trevanion
being the name she had inherited with the fortune
from her mother's family, and her mother's high but
distant connexions having recognised and taken her
by the hand in England. She had come abroad with
the representative of her country, who had been at
the trouble to see her installed in her rights, and had
but lately left her on his return to America. A house
in May Fair, and a chaperon in the shape of a card-playing
and aristocratic aunt, were the other principal
points in her parenthetical narration. Her communicativeness,
of course, was very gracious, and indeed
her whole manner was softened and mellowed down,
from the sharpness and hauteur of Miss Plymton.
Prosperity had improved even her voice.

As she bent over her tea, in the ante-room, I could
not but remark how beautiful she was by the change
usually wrought by the soft moisture of the English
air, on persons from dry climates—Americans particularly.
That filling out and rounding of the features,
and renewing and freshening of the skin, becoming
and improving to all, had to her been like Juno's
bath. Then who does not know the miracles of
dress? A circlet of diamonds whose “water” was
light itself, followed the fine bend on either side backward
from her brows, supporting, at the parting of her
hair, one large emerald. And on what neck (ay—
even of age) is not a diamond necklace beautiful?
Miss Trevanion was superb.

The house in Grosvenor Place, at which I knocked
the next morning, I well remembered as one of the
most elegant and sumptuous in London. Lady L—
had ruined herself in completing and furnishing it,
and her parties “in my time” were called, by the most
apathetic blasé, truly delightful.

“I bought this house of Lady L—,” said Miss
Trevanion, as we sat down to breakfast, “with all its
furniture, pictures, books, incumbrances, and trifles,
even to the horses in the stables, and the coachman
in his wig; for I had too many things to learn, to
study furniture and appointments, and in this very
short life, time is sadly wasted in beginnings. People
are for ever getting ready to live. What think you?
Is it not true in everything?”

“Not in love, certainly.”

“Ah! very true!” And she became suddenly
thoughtful, and for some minutes sipped her coffee in
silence. I did not interrupt it, for I was thinking of
Shahatan, and our thoughts very possibly were on the
same long journey.

“You are quite right,” said I, looking round at the
exquisitely-furnished room in which we were breakfasting,
“you have bought these things at their intrinsic
value, and you have all Lady L—'s taste, trouble,
and vexation for twenty years, thrown into the bar
gain. It is a matter of a lifetime to complete a house
like this, and just as it is all done, Lady L— retires,
an old woman, and you come all the way from a
country-inn on the Susquehannah to enjoy it. What
a whimsical world we live in!”

“Yes!” she said, in a sort of soliloquizing tone,
“I do enjoy it. It is a delightful sensation to take a
long stride at once in the art of life—to have lived for
years believing that the wants you felt could only be
supplied in fairy-land, and suddenly to change your
sphere, and discover that not only these wants, but a
thousand others, more unreasonable, and more imaginary,
had been the subject of human ingenuity
and talent, till those who live in luxury have no wants—
that science and chymistry and mechanics have left
no nerve in the human system, no recess in human
sense, unquestioned of its desire, and that every desire
is supplied! What mistaken ideas most people
have of luxury! They fancy the senses of the rich
are over-pampered, that their zest of pleasure is always
dull with too much gratification, that their
health is ruined with excess, and their tempers spoiled
with ease and subserviency. It is a picture drawn by
the poets in times when money could buy nothing but
excess, and when those who were prodigal could only
be gaudy and intemperate. It was necessary to practise
upon the reverse, too; and hence all the world is
convinced of the superior happiness of the ploughman,
the absolute necessity of early rising and coarse
food to health, and the pride that must come with the
flaunting of silk and satin.”

I could not but smile at this cool upset of all the
received philosophy of the poets.

“You laugh,” she continued, “but is it not true
that in England, at this moment, luxury is the science
of keeping up the zest of the senses rather than
of pampering them—that the children of the wealthy
are the healthiest and fairest, and the sons of the aristocracy
are the most athletic and rational, as well as
the most carefully nurtured and expensive of all classes—that
the most costly dinners are the most digestible,
the most expensive wines the least injurious, the
most sumptuous houses the best ventilated and wholesome,
and the most aristocratic habits of life the most
conducive to the preservation of the constitution and
consequent long life. There will be excesses, of
course, in all spheres, but is not this true?”

“I am wondering how so gay a life as yours could
furnish such very grave reflections.”

“Pshaw! I am the very person to make them. My
aunt (who, by-the-way, never rises till four in the afternoon)
has always lived in this sublimated sphere,
and takes all these luxuries to be matters of course,
as much as I take them to be miracles. She thinks
a good cook as natural a circumstance as a fine tree,
and would be as much surprised and shocked at the
absence of wax candles, as she would at the going out
of the stars. She talks as if good dentists, good milliners,
opera-singers, perfumers, etc., were the common
supply of nature, like dew and sunshine to the
flowers. My surprise and delight amuse her, as the
child's wonder at the moon amuses the nurse.”

“Yet you call this dull unconsciousness the perfection
of civilized life.”

“I think my aunt altogether is not a bad specimen
of it, certainly. You have seen her, I think.”

“Frequently.”

“Well, you will allow that she is still a very handsome
woman. She is past fifty, and has every faculty
in perfect preservation; an erect figure, undiminished
delicacy and quickness in all her senses and
tastes, and is still an ornament to society, and an attractive
person in appearance and conversation. Contrast
her (and she is but one of a class) with the
women past fifty in the middle and lower walks of life
in America. At that age, with us, they are old

women in the commonest acceptation of the term.
Their teeth are gone or defective from neglect, their
faces are wrinkled, their backs bent, ther feet enlarged,
their voices cracked, their senses impaired, their relish
in the joys of the young entirely gone by. What
makes the difference? Costly care. The physician
has watched over her health at a guinea a visit. The
dentist has examined her teeth at twenty guineas a
year. Expensive annual visits to the seaside have renewed
her skin. The friction of the weary hands of
her maid has kept down the swelling of her feet and
preserved their delicacy of shape. Close and open
carriages at will, have given her daily exercise, either
protected from the damp, or refreshed with the fine
air of the country. A good cook has kept her digestion
untaxed, and good wines have invigorated without
poisoning her constitution.”

“This is taking very unusual care of oneself, however.”

“Not at all. My aunt gives it no more thought
than the drawing on of her glove. It is another advantage
of wealth, too, that your physician and dentist
are distinguished persons who meet you in society,
and call on you unprofessionally, see when they are
needed, and detect the approach of disease before
you are aware of it yourself. My aunt, though `naturally
delicate,' has never been ill. She was watched
in childhood with great cost and pains, and, with the
habit of common caution herself, she is taken such
care of by her physician and servants, that nothing
but some extraordinary fatality could bring disease
near her.”

“Blessed are the rich, by your showing.”

“Why, the beatitudes were not written in our times.
If long life, prolonged youth and beauty, and almost
perennial health, are blessings, certainly, now-a-days,
blessed are the rich.”

“But is there no drawback to all this? Where
people have surrounded themselves with such costly
and indispensable luxuries, are they not made selfish
by the necessity of preserving them? Would any
exigence of hospitality, for instance, induce your aunt
to give up her bed, and the comforts of her own room,
to a stranger?”

“Oh dear, no!”

“Would she eat her dinner cold for the sake of
listening to an appeal to her charity?”

“How can you fancy such a thing?”

“Would she take a wet and dirty, but perishing
beggar-woman into her chariot on her way to a dinner-party,
to save her from dying by the roadside?”

“Um—why, I fear she would be very nearsighted
till she got fairly by.”

“Yet these are charities that require no great effort
in those whose chambers are less costly, whose
stomachs are less carefully watched, and whose carriages
and dresses are of a plainer fashion.”

“Very true!”

“So far, then, `blessed are the poor!' But is not
the heart slower in all its sympathies among the rich?
Are not friends chosen and discarded, because their
friendship is convenient or the contrary? Are not
many worthy people `ineligible' acquaintances, many
near relations unwelcome visiters, because they are
out of keeping with these costly circumstances, or
involve some sacrifice of personal luxury? Are not
people, who would not preserve their circle choice
and aristocratic, obliged to inflict cruel insults on
sensitive minds, to slight, to repulse, to neglect, to
equivocate and play the unfeeling and ungrateful, at
the same time that to their superiors they must often
sacrifice dignity, and contrive, and flatter, and deceive—all
to preserve the magic charm of the life you
have painted so attractive and enviable?”

“Heigho! it's a bad world, I believe!” said Miss
Trevanion, betraying by that ready sigh, that even
while drawing the attractions of high life, she had not
been blind to this more unfavorable side of the picture.

“And, rather more important query still, for an
heiress,” I said, “does not an intimate acquaintance
with these luxurious necessities, and the habit of
thinking them indispensable, make all lovers in this
class mercenary, and their admiration, where there is
wealth, subject, at least, to scrutiny and suspicion?”

A quick flush almost crimsoned Miss Trevanion's
face, and she fixed her eyes upon me so inquisitively
as to leave me in no doubt that I had inadvertently
touched upon a delicate subject. Embarrassed by a
searching look, and not seeing how I could explain
that I meant no allusion, I said hastily, “I was thinking
of swimming across the Susquehannah by moonlight.”

“Puck is at the door, if you please, miss!” said
the butler, entering at the moment.

“Perhaps while I am putting on my riding-hat,”
said Miss Trevanion, with a laugh, “I may discover
the connexion between your last two observations. It
certainly is not very clear at present.”

I took up my hat.

“Stay—you must ride with me. You shall have
the groom's horse, and we will go without him. I
hate to be chased through the park by a flying servant—one
English fashion, at least, that I think uncomfortable.
They manage it better where I learned
to ride,” she added with a laugh.

“Yes, indeed! I do not know which they would
first starve to death in the backwoods—the master for
his insolence in requiring the servant to follow him,
or the servant for being such a slave as to obey.”

I never remember to have seen a more beautiful
animal than the highbred blood-mare on which my
ci-devant hostess of the Plymton inn rode through
the park gates, and took the serpentine path at a free
gallop. I was as well mounted myself as I had ever
been in my life, and delighted, for once, not to fret a
hundred yards behind; the ambitious animal seemed
to have wings to his feet.

“Who ever rode such a horse as this,” said my
companion, “without confessing the happiness of
riches! It is the one luxury of this new life that I
should find it misery to forego. Look at the eagerness
of his ears! See his fine limbs as he strikes forward!
What nostrils! What glossy shoulders!
What bounding lightness of action! Beautiful Puck!
I could never live without you! What a shame to
nature that there are no such horses in the wilderness!”

“I remember seeing an Indian pony,” said I, watching
her face for the effect of my observation, “which
had as many fine qualities, though of a different
kind—at least when his master was on him.”

She looked at me inquiringly.

“By-the-way, too, it was at your house on the Susquehannah,”
I added, “you must remember the
horse—a black, double-jointed—”

“Yes, yes! I know. I remember. Shall we
quicken our pace? I hear some one overtaking us,
and to be passed with such horses as ours were a
shame indeed.”

We loosed our bridles and flew away like the wind;
but a bright tear was presently tossed from her
dark eyelash, and fell glittering on the dappled shoulder
of her horse. “Her heart is Shahatan's,” thought
I, “whatever chance there may be that the gay honorable
who is at our heels may dazzle her into throwing
away her hand.”

Mounted on a magnificent hunter, whose powerful
and straightforward leaps soon told against the lavish
and high action of our more showy horses, the Hon.
Charles — (the gentleman who had engrossed the
attention of Miss Trevanion the night before at

Almack's) was soon beside my companion, and leaning
from his saddle, was taking pains to address conversation
to her in a tone not meant for my ear. As the
lady picked out her path with a marked preference
for his side of the road, I of course rode with a free
rein on the other, rather discontented, however, I
must own, to be playing Monsieur de Trop. The
Hon. Charles, I very well knew, was enjoying a temporary
relief from the most pressing of his acquaintance
by the prospect of his marrying an heiress, and
in a two years' gay life in London I had traversed his
threads too often to believe that he had a heart to be
redeemed from dissipation, or a soul to appreciate the
virtues of a high minded woman. I found myself,
besides, without wishing it, attorney for Shahatan in
the case.

Observing that I “sulked,” Miss Trevanion, in the
next round, turned her horse's head toward the Serpentine
Bridge, and we entered into Kensington Gardens.
The band was playing on the other side of the
ha-ha, and fashionable London was divided between
the equestrians on the road, and the promenaders on
the greensward. We drew up in the thickest of the
crowd, and presuming that, by Miss Trevanion's tactics,
I was to find some other acquaintance to chat
with while our horses drew breath, I spurred to a little
distance, and sat mum in my saddle with forty or
fifty horsemen between me and herself. Her other
companion had put his horse as close by the side of
Puck as possible; but there were other dancers at
Almack's who had an eye upon the heiress, and their
tête-à-tête was interrupted presently by the how-d'ye-do's
and attentions of half a dozen of the gayest men
about town. After looking black at them for a moment,
Charles — drew bridle, and backing out of
the press rather unceremoniously, rode to the side of
a lady who sat in her saddle with a mounted servant
behind her, separated from me by only the trunk of a
superb lime-tree. I was fated to see all the workings
of Miss Trevanion's destiny.

“You see what I endure for you!” he said, as a
flush came and went in his pale face.

“You are false!” was the answer. “I saw you
ride in—your eyes fastened to hers—your lips open
with watching for her words—your horse in a foam
with your agitated and nervous riding. Never call
her a giraffe, or laugh at her again, Charles! She is
handsome enough to be loved for herself, and you
love her!”

“No, by Heaven!”

The lady made a gesture of impatience and whipped
her stirrup through the folds of her riding-dress till it
was heard even above the tinkling triangle of the band.

“No!” he continued, “and you are less clever than
you think, if you interpret my excitement into love.
I am excited—most eager in my chase after this woman.
You shall know why. But for herself—good
heavens!—why, you have never heard her speak!
She is never done wondering at silver forks, never
done with ecstatics about finger-glasses and pastilles.
She is a boor—and you are silly enough to put her
beside yourself!”

The lady's frown softened, and she gave him her
whip to hold while she reimprisoned a stray ringlet.

“Keep an eye on her, while I am talking to you,”
he continued, “for I must stick to her like her shadow.
She is full of mistrust, and if I lose her by the
want of attention for a single hour, that hour will cost
me yourself, dearest, first and most important of all,
and it will cost me England or my liberty—for failing
this, I have not a chance.”

“Go! go!” said the lady, in a new and now anxious
tone, touching his horse at the same time with
the whip he had just resotred to her, “she is off!
Adieu!”

And with half a dozen attendants, Miss Trevanion
took the road at a gallop, while her contented rival
followed at a pensive amble, apparently quite content
to waste the time as she best might till dinner. The
handsome fortune-hunter watched his opportunity
and regained his place at Miss Trevanion's side, and
with an acquaintance, who was one of her self-selected
troop, I kept in the rear, chatting of the opera,
and enjoying the movement of a horse of as free and
admirable action as I had ever felt communicated,
like inspiration, through my blood.

I was resumed as sole cavalier and attendant at
Hyde Park gate.

“Do you know the Baroness —?” I asked, as
we walked our horses slowly down Grosvenor Place.

“Not personally,” she replied, “but I have heard
my aunt speak of her, and I know she is a woman of
most seductive manners, though said to be one of
very bad morals. But from what Mr. Charles —
tells me, I fancy high play is her only vice. And
meantime she is received everywhere.”

“I fancy,” said I, “that the Hon. Charles — is
good authority for the number of her vices, and begging
you, as a parting request, to make this remark
the key to your next month's observation, I have the
honor to return this fine horse to you, and make my
adieux.”

“But you will come to dinner! And, by-the-by,
you have not explained to me what you meant by
`swimming across the Susquehannah,' in the middle
of your breakfast, this morning.”

While Miss Trevanion gathered up her dress to
mount the steps, I told her the story which I have
already told the reader, of my involuntary discovery,
while lying in that moonlit river, of Shahatan's unfortunate
passion. Violently agitated by the few words
in which I conveyed it, she insisted on my entering
the house, and waiting while she recovered herself
sufficiently to talk to me on the subject. But I had
no fancy for match-making or breaking. I reiterated
my caution touching the intimacy of her fashionable
admirer with the baroness, and said a word of praise
of the noble savage who loved her.

2. CHAPTER II.

In the autumn of the year after the events outlined
in the previous chapter, I received a visit at my residence
on the Susquehannah, from a friend I had never
before seen a mile from St. James's street—a May-fair
man of fashion who took me in his way back from
Santa Fe. He stayed a few days to brush the cobwebs
from a fishing-rod and gun which he found in
inglorious retirement in the lumber-room of my cottage,
and, over our dinners, embellished with his trout
and woodcock, the relations of his adventures (compared,
as everything was, with London experience exclusively)
were as delightful to me as the tales of
Scheherezade to the calif.

“I have saved to the last,” he said, pushing me the
bottle, the evening before his departure, “a bit of romance
which I stumbled over in the prairie, and I
dare swear it will surprise you as much as it did me,
for I think you will remember having seen the heroine
at Almack's.”

“At Almack's?”

“You may well stare. I have been afraid to tell
you the story, lest you should think I drew too long
a bow. I certainly should never be believed in London.”

“Well—the story?”

“I told you of my leaving St. Louis with a trading
party for Santa Fe. Our leader was a rough chap,
big-boned, and ill put together, but honestly fond of
fight, and never content with a stranger till he had

settled the question of which was the better man. He
refused at first to take me into his party, assuring me
that his exclusive servuces and those of his company
had been engaged at a high price, by another gentleman.
By dint of drinking `juleps' with him, however,
and giving him a thorough `mill' (for though
strong as a rhinoceros, he knew nothing of `the science'),
he at last elected me to the honor of his friendship,
and took me into the party as one of his own
men.

“I bought a strong horse, and on a bright May
morning the party set forward, bag and baggage, the
leader having stolen a march upon us, however, and
gone ahead with the person who hired his guidance.
It was fine fun at first, as I have told you, to gallop
away over the prairie without fence or ditch, but I
soon tired of the slow pace and the monotony of the
scenery, and began to wonder why the deuce our
leader kept himself so carefully out of sight—for in
three days' travel I had seen him but once, and then
at our bivouac fire on the second evening. The men
knew or would tell nothing, except that he had one
man and a packhorse with him, and that the `gentleman'
and he encamped farther on. I was under promise
to perform only the part of one of the hired carriers
of the party, or I should soon have made a push to
penetrate `the gentleman's' mystery.

“I think it was on the tenth day of our travels that
the men began to talk of falling in with a tribe of Indians,
whose hunting-grounds we were close upon,
and at whose village, upon the bank of a river, they
usually got fish and buffalo-hump, and other luxuries
not picked up on the wing. We encamped about
sunset that night as usual, and after picketing my
horse, I strolled off to a round mound not far from the
fire, and sat down upon the top to see the moon rise.
The east was brightening, and the evening was delicious.

“Up came the moon, looking like one of the duke
of Devonshire's gold plates (excuse the poetry of the
comparison), and still the rosy color hung on in the
west, and turning my eyes from one to the other, I at
last perceived, over the southwestern horizon, a mist
slowly coming up, which indicated the course of a
river. It was just in our track, and the whim struck
me to saddle my horse and ride on in search of the
Indian village, which, by their description, must be on
its banks.

“The men were singing songs over their supper,
and with a flask of braudy in my pocket, I got off unobserved,
and was soon in a flourishing gallop over the
wild prairie, without guide or compass. It was a silly
freak, and might have ended in an unpleasant adventure.
Pass the bottle and have no apprehensions,
however.

“For an hour or so, I was very much elated with
my independence, and my horse too seemed delighted
to get out of the slow pace of the caravan. It was as
light as day with the wonderful clearness of the atmosphere,
and the full moon and the coolness of the
evening air made exercise very exhilarating. I rode
on, looking up occasionally to the mist, which retreated
long after I thought I should have reached the
river, till I began to feel uneasy at last, and wondered
whether I had not embarked in a very mad adventure.
As I had lost sight of our own fires, and might miss
my way in trying to retrace my steps, I determined to
push on.

“My horse was in a walk, and I was beginning to
feel very grave, when suddenly the beast pricked up
his ears and gave a hard neigh. I rose in my stirrups,
and looked round in vain for the secret of his improved
spirits, till with a second glance forward, I discovered
what seemed the faint light reflected upon the smoke
of a concealed fire. The horse took his own counsel,
and set up a sharp gallop for the spot, and a few min
utes brought me in sight of a fire half concealed by a
clump of shrubs, and a white object near it, which to
my surprise developed to a tent. Two horses picketed
near, and a man sitting by the fire with his hands
crossed before his shins, and his chin on his knees,
completed the very agreeable picture.

“`Who goes there?' shouted this chap, springing
to his rifle as he heard my horse's feet sliding through
the grass.

“I gave the name of the leader, comprehending at
once that this was the advanced guard of our party;
but though the fellow lowered his rifle, he gave me a
very scant welcome, and motioned me away from the
tent-side of the fire. There was no turning a man out
of doors in the midst of a prairie; so, without ceremony,
I tethered my horse to his stake, and getting
out my dried beef and brandy, made a second supper
with quite as good an appetite as had done honor to
the first.

“My brandy-flask opened the lips of my sulky friend
after a while, though he kept his carcass very obstinately
between me and the tent, and I learned that the
leader (his name was Rolfe, by-the-by), had gone on
to the Indian village, and that `the gentleman' had
dropped the curtain of his tent at my approach, and
was probably asleep. My word of honor to Rolfe that
I would `cut no capers' (his own phrase in administering
the obligation), kept down my excited curiosity,
and prevented me, of course, from even pumping the
man beside me, though I might have done so with a
little more of the contents of my flask.

“The moon was pretty well overhead when Rolfe
returned, and found me fast asleep by the fire. I awoke
with the trampling and neighing of horses, and, springing
to my feet, I saw an Indian dismounting, and Rolfe
and the fire-tender conversing together while picketing
their horses. The Indian had a tall feather in his cap,
and trinkets on his breast, which glittered in the moonlight;
but he was dressed otherwise like a white man,
with a hunting-frock and very loose large trowsers.
By the way, he had moccasins, too, and a wampum
belt; but he was a clean-limbed, lithe, agile-looking
devil, with an eye like a coal of fire.

“`You've broke your contract, mister!' said Rolfe,
coming up to me; `but stand by and say nothing.'

“He then went to the tent, gave an `ehem!' by
way of a knock, and entered

“`It's a fine night!' said the Indian, coming up to
the fire and touching a brand with the toe of his moccasin.

“I was so surprised at the honest English in which
he delivered himself, that I stared at him without answer.

“`Do you speak English?' he said.

“`Tolerably well,' said I, `but I beg your pardon
for being so surprised at your own accent that I forgot
to reply to you. And now I look at you more closely,
I see that you are rather Spanish than Indian.'

“`My mother's blood,' he answered rather coldly,
`but my father was an Indian, and I am a chief.'

“`Well, Rolfe,' he continued, turning the next instant
to the trader, who came toward us, `who is this
that would see Shahatan?'

“The trader pointed to the tent. The curtain was
put aside, and a smart-looking youth, in a blue cap
and cloak, stepped out and took his way off into the
prairie, motioning to the chief to follow.

“`Go along! he won't eat ye!' said Rolfe, as the
Indian hesitated, from pride or distrust, and laid his
hand on his tomahawk.

“I wish I could tell you what was said at that interview,
for my curiosity was never so strongly excited.
Rolfe seemed bent on preventing both interference and
observation, however, and in his loud and coarse voice
commenced singing and making preparations for his
supper; and, persuading me into the drinking part of

it, I listened to his stories and toasted my shins till I
was too sleepy to feel either romance or curiosity;
and leaving the moon to waste its silver on the wilderness,
and the mysterious colloquists to ramble and
finish their conference as they liked, I rolled over on
my buffalo-skin and dropped off to sleep.

“The next morning I rubbed my eyes to discover
whether all I have been telling you was not a dream,
for tent and demoiselle had evaporated, and I lay with
my feet to the smouldering fire, and all the trading
party preparing for breakfast around me. Alarmed at
my absence, they had made a start before sunrise to
overtake Rolfe, and had come up while I slept. The
leader after a while gave me a slip of paper from the
chief, saying that he should be happy to give me a
specimen of Indian hospitality at the Shawanee village,
on my return from Santa Fe—a neat hint that I
was not to intrude upon him at present.”

“Which you took?”

“Rolfe seemed to have had a hint which was probably
in some more decided shape, since he took it for
us all. The men grumbled at passing the village without
stopping for fish, but the leader was inexorable,
and we left it to the right and `made tracks,' as the
hunters say, for our destination. Two days from there
we saw a buffalo—”

“Which you demolished. You told me that story
last night. Come, get back to the Shawanees! You
called on the village at your return?”

“Yes, and an odd place it was. We came upon it
from the west, Rolfe having made a bend to the westward,
on his return back. We had been travelling all
day over a long plain, wooded in clumps, looking very
much like an immense park, and I began to think that
the trader intended to cheat me out of my visit—for
he said we should sup with the Shawanees that night,
and I did not in the least recognise the outline of the
country. We struck the bed of a small and very beautiful
river, presently, however, and after following it
through a wood for a mile, came to a sharp brow
where the river suddenly descended to a plain at least
two hundred feet lower than the table-land on which
we had been travelling. The country below looked
as if it might have been the bed of an immense lake,
and we stood on the shore of it.

“I sat on my horse geologizing in fancy about this
singular formation of land, till, hearing a shout, I
found the party had gone on, and Rolfe was hallooing
to me to follow. As I was trying to get a glimpse of
him through the trees, up rode my old acquaintance
Shahatan, with his rifle across his thigh, and gave me
a very cordial welcome. He then rode on to show me
the way. We left the river, which was foaming among
some fine rapids, and by a zig-zag side-path through
the woods, descended about half way to the plain,
where we rounded a huge rock, and stood suddenly in
the village of the Shawanees. You can not fancy any
thing so picturesque. On the left, for a quarter of a
mile, extended a natural steppe, or terrace, a hundred
yards wide, and rounding in a crescent to the south.
The river came in toward it on the right in a superb
cascade, visible from the whole of the platform, and
against the rocky wall at the back, and around on the
edge overlooking the plain, were built the wigwams
and log-huts of the tribe, in front of which lounged
men, women, and children, enjoying the cool of the
summer evening. Not far from the base of the hill
the river reappeared from the woods, and I distinguished
some fields planted with corn along its banks,
and horses and cattle grazing. What, with the pleasant
sound of the falls, and the beauty of the scene altogether,
it was to me more like the primitive Arcadia
we dream about, than anything I ever saw.

“Well, Rolfe and his party reached the village presently,
for the chief had brought me by a shorter cut,
and in a moment the whole tribe was about us, and
the trader found himself apparently among old acquaintances.
The chief sent a lad with my horse
down into the plain to be picketed where the grass was
better, and took me into a small hut, where I treated
myself to a little more of a toilet than I had been accustomed
to of late, in compliment to the unusual
prospect of supping with a lady. The hut was lined
with bark, and seemed used by the chief for the same
purpose, as there were sundry articles of dress and
other civilized refinements hanging to the bracing-poles,
and covering a rude table in the corner.

“Fancy my surprise, on coming out, to meet the
chief strolling up and down his prairie shelf with, not
one lady, but half a dozen—a respectable looking gentleman
in black (I speak of his coat), and a bevy of
nice-looking girls, with our Almack's acquaintance in
the centre—the whole party, except the chief, dressed
in a way that would pass muster in any village in England.
Shahatan wore the Indian's blanket, modified
with a large mantle of fine blue cloth, and crossed over
his handsome bare chest something after the style of
a Hieland tartan. I really never saw a better made or
more magnificent looking fellow, though I am not sure
that his easy and picturesque dress would not have improved
a plainer man.

“I remembered directly that Rolfe had said something
to me about missionaries living among the Shawanees,
and I was not surprised to hear that the gentleman
in a black coat was a reverend, and the ladies the
sisterhood of the mission. Miss Trevanion seemed
rather in haste to inform me of the presence of `the
cloth,' and in the next breath claimed my congratulations
on her marriage! She had been a chieftainess
for two months.

“We strolled up and down the grassy terrace, dividing
our attention between the effects of the sunset on
the prairie below and the preparations for our supper,
which was going on by the light of pine-knots stuck
in the clefts of the rock in the rear. A dozen Indian
girls were crossing and recrossing before the fires,
and with the bright glare upon the precipice, and the
moving figures, wigwams, &c., it was like a picture of
Salvator Rosa's. The fair chieftainess, as she glided
across occasionally to look after the people, with a step
as light as her stately figure would allow, was not the
least beautiful feature of the scene. We lost a fine
creature when we let her slip through our fingers, my
dear fellow!”

“Thereby hangs a tale, I have little doubt, and I
can give you some data for a good guess at it—but as
the `nigger song' has it—

“We had everything the wilderness could produce
—appetites included. Lying in the track of the trading-parties,
Shahatan, of course, made what additions
he liked to the Indian mode of living, and except that
our table was a huge buffalo-skin stretched upon stakes,
the supper might have been a traveller's meal among
Turks or Arabs, for all that was peculiar about it. I
should except, perhaps, that no Turk or Arab ever saw
so pretty a creature as the chief's sister, who was my
neighbor at the feast.”

“So—another romance!”

“No, indeed! For though her eyes were eloquent
enough to persuade one to forswear the world and turn
Shawanee, she had no tongue for a stranger. What
little English she had learned of the missionaries she
was too sly to use, and our flirtation was a very unsatisfactory
pantomime. I parted from her at night in
the big wigwam, without having been out of ear-shot
of the chief for a single moment; and as Rolfe was inexorable
about getting off with the daybreak the next
morning, it was the last I saw of the little fawn. But
to tell you the truth, I had forty minds between that

and St. Louis to turn about and have another look
at her.

“The big wigwam, I should tell you, was as large
as a common breakfast-room in London. It was built
of bark very ingeniously sewed together, and lined
throughout with the most costly furs, even the floor
covered with highly-dressed bear-skins. After finishing
our supper in the open air, the large curtain at the
door, which was made of the most superb gold-colored
otters, was thrown up to let in the blaze of the pine
torches stuck in the rock opposite, and, as the evening
was getting cool, we followed the chieftainess to her
savage drawing-room, and took coffee and chatted till
a late hour, lounging on the rude, fur-covered couches.
I had not much chance to talk with our old
friend, but I gathered from what little she said that
she had been disgusted with the heartlessness of London,
and preferred the wilderness with one of nature's
nobility to all the splendors of matrimony in high-life.
She said, however, that she should try to induce Shahatan
to travel abroad for a year or two, and after that,
she thought their time would be agreeably spent in
such a mixture of savage and civilized life as her fortune
and his control over the tribe would enable them
to manage.”

When my friend had concluded his story, I threw
what little light I possessed upon the undeveloped
springs of Miss Trevanion's extraordinary movements,
and we ended our philosophizings on the subject by
promising ourselves a trip to the Shawanees some day
together. Now that we are together in London, however,
and have had the benefit of Mrs. Melicent's additional
chapter, with the still later news that Shahatan
and his wife were travelling by the last accounts in the
east, we have limited our programme to meeting them
in England, and have no little curiosity to see whether
the young savage will decide like his wife in the question
of “Wigwam versus Almack's.”

MISS JONES'S SON.

One night, toward the close of the London season
—the last week in August, or thereabouts—the Deptford
omnibus set down a gentleman at one of the small
brick-block cottages on the Kent road. He was a
very quietly disposed person, with a face rather inscrutable
to a common eye, and might, or might not,
pass for what he was—a man of mark. His age was
perhaps thirty, and his manners and movements had
that cool security which can come only from conversance
with a class of society that is beyond being
laughed at. He was handsome—but when the style
of a man is well pronounced, that is an unobserved
trifle.

Perhaps the reader will step in to No. 10, Verandah
Row, without further ceremony.

The room—scarce more than a squirrel-box from
back to front—was divided by folding doors, and the
furniture was fanciful and neatly kept. The canary-bird,
in a very small cage, in the corner, seemed rather
an intruder on such small quarters. You could scarce
give a guess what style of lady was the tenant of such
miniature gentility.

The omnibus passenger sat down in one of the little
cane-bottomed and straight backed chairs, and presently
the door opened and a stout elderly woman, whose
skirts really filled up the remaining void of the little
parior, entered with a cordial exclamation, and an
affectionate embrace was exchanged between them.

“Well, my dear mother!” said the visiter, “I am
off to-morrow to Warwickshire to pass the shooting
season, and I came to wind up your household clockwork,
to go for a month—(ticking, I am sorry to say!)
What do you want? How is the tea-caddy?”

“Out of green, James, but the black will do till you
come back. La! don't talk of such matters when you
are just going to leave me. I'll step up stairs and
make you out a list of my wants presently. Tell me
—where are you going in Warwickshire? I went to
school in Warwickshire. Dear me! the lovers I had
there! Well, well! Where did you say you were
going?”

“To the marquis of Headfort—Headfort court, I
think his place is called—a post and a half from Stratford.
Were you ever there, mother?”

“I there, indeed! no, my son! But I had a lover
near Stratford—young Sir Humphrey Fencher, he
was then—old Sir Humphrey now! I'm sure he re
members me, long as it is since I saw him—and, James,
I'll give you a letter to him. Yes—I should like to
know how he looks, and what he will say to my grown-up
boy. I'll go and write it now, and I'll look over
the groceries at the same time. If you move your
chair, James, don't crush the canary-bird!”

The mention of the letter of introduction lingered
in the ear of the gentleman left in the parlor, and
smiling to himself with a look of covert humor, he
drew from his pocket a letter of which it reminded
him—the letter of introduction, on the strength of
which he was going to Warwickshire. As this and
the one which was being written up stairs, were the
two pieces of ordance destined to propel the incidents
of our story, the reader will excuse us for presenting
them as a “make ready.”

And here follows the letter of Mrs. S— to her
ancient lover, the baronet of Warwickshire:—

It was a morning astray from paradise when S—
awoke at Stratford. Ringing for his breakfast, he requested
that the famous hostess of the red horse
would grace him so far as to join him over a muffin
and a cup of coffee, and between the pauses of his
toilet, he indited a note, enclosing his mother's letter
of introduction to Sir Humphrey.

Enter dame hostess, prim and respectful, and as
breakfast proceeded, S— easily informed himself
of the geography of Tally-ho hall, and the existing
branch and foliage of the family tree. Sir Humphrey's
domestic circle consisted of a daughter and a neice
(his only son having gone with his regiment to the
Canada wars), and the hall lay half way to Headfort
court—the Fenchers his lordship's nearest neighbors,
Mrs. Boniface was inclined to think.

S— divided his morning very delightfully between
the banks of the Avon, and the be-scribbled
localities of Shakspere's birth and residence, and by
two o'clock the messenger had returned with this note
from Sir Humphrey:—

As the crack wit and diner-out of his time, S—
was as well known to the brilliant society of London
as the face of the “gold stick in waiting” at St.
James's, and, with his very common name, he was a
little likely to be recognised out of his peculiar sphere
as the noble lord, when walking in Cheapside, to be
recognised as the “stick,” so often mentioned in the
Court Journal. He had delayed his visit to Headfort
court for a day, and undertaken to deliver his mother's
letter, and look up her lang-syne lover, very much as
he would stop in the Strand to purchase her a parcel
of snuff—purely from the filial habit of always doing
her bidding, even in whims. He had very little curiosity
to see a Warwickshire Nimrod, and, till his postchaise
stopped at the lodge-gate of Tally-ho hall, it
had never entered his head to speculate upon the
ground of his introduction to Sir Humphrey, nor to
anticipate the nature of his reception. His name had
been so long to him an “open sesame,” that he had
no doubt of its potency, and least of all when he pronounced
it at an inferior gate in the barriers of society.

The dressing-bell had rang, and S— was shown
into the vacant drawing-room, where he buried himself
in the deepest chair he could find, and sat looking
at the wall with the composure of a barber's customer
waiting to be shaved. There presently entered two
young ladies, very showily dressed, who called him
Mr. “Jones,” in replying to his salutation, and im
mediately fell to promenading between the two old
mirrors at the extremities of the room, discoursing
upon topics evidently chosen to exclude the newcomer
from the conversation. With rather a feeling
that it was their loss, not his, S— recomposed
himself in the leathern chair and resumed the perusal
of the oaken ceiling. The neglect sat upon him a
little uncomfortable withal.

“How d'ye do, young man! What! you are Miss
Jones's son, eh?” was the salutation of a burly old
gentleman, who now entered and shook hands with
the great incognito. “Here, 'Bel! Fan! Mr. Jones,
My daughter and my niece, Mr. Jones!”

S— was too indignant for a moment to explain
that Miss Jones had changed her name before his
birth, and on second thought, finding that this real
character was not suspected, and that he represented
to Sir Humphrey simply the obscure son of an obscure
girl, pretty, thirty years ago, he fell quietly into the
role expected of him, and walked patiently in to dinner
with Miss Fencher, who accepted his arm for that
purpose, but forgot to take it!

It was hard to be witty as a Mr. Jones, but the habit
was strong and the opportunities were good, and
S—, warming with his first glass of sherry, struck
out some sparks that would have passed for gems of
the first water, with choicer listeners; but wit is slowly
recognised when not expected, and though now and
then the young ladies stared, and now and then the
old baronet chuckled and said “egad! very well!'
there was evidently no material rise in the value of
Mr. Jones, and he at last confined his social talents
exclusively to his wine-glass and nut-picker, feeling.
spite of himself, as stupid as he seemed.

Relieved of the burden of replying to their guess,
the young ladies now took up a subject which evidently
lay nearest their hearts—a series of dejeuners, the
first of which was to come off the following morning
at Headfort court. As if by way of caveat, in case
Mr. Jones should fancy that he could be invited to
accompany Sir Humphrey, Miss Fencher took the
trouble to explain that these were, by no means, common
country entertainments, but exclusive and select
parties, under the patronage of the beautiful and witty
Lady Imogen Bellasys, now a guest at Headfort.
Her ladyship had not only stipulated for societé choisie,
but had invited down a celebrated London wit, a great
friend of her own, to do the mottoes and keep up the
spirit of the masques and tableaux. Indeed, Miss
Fencher considered herself as more particularly the
guest and ally of Lady Imogen, never having been
permitted during her mother's life to visit Headfort
(though she did not see what the marquis's private
character had to do with his visiting list), and she expected
to be called upon to serve as a sort of maid of
honor, or in some way to assist Lady Imogen, who
had invited her very affectionately, after church, on
Sunday. She thought, perhaps, she had better wake
up Sir Humphrey while she thought of it (and while
papa was good natured, as he always was after dinner),
and exact of him a promise that the great London
Mr., what d'ye call 'im, should be invited to pass a
week at Tally-ho hall—for, of course, as mutual
allies of Lady Imogen, Miss Fencher and he would
become rather well acquainted.

To this enlightenment, of which we have given only
a brief resumér, Mr. Jones listened attentively, as he
was expected to do, and was very graciously answered,
when by way of feeling one of the remote pulses of
his celebrity, he ventured to ask for some further particulars
about the London wit aforementioned. He
learned, somewhat to his disgust, that his name was
either Brown or Simpson, some very common name,
however, but that he had a wonderful talent for writing
impromptuepigrams on people and singing them afterward
to impromptu music on the piano, and that he

was supposed to be a natural son of Talleyrand or
Lord Byron, Miss Fencher had forgotten which. He
had written something, but Miss Fencher had forgotten
what. He was very handsome—no, very plain
—indeed, Miss Fencher had forgotten which—but it
was one or the other.

At this crisis of the conversation Sir Humphrey
roused from his post-prandial snooze, and begged Mr.
Jones to pass the port and open the door for the
ladies. By the time the gloves were rescued from
under the table, the worthy baronet had drained a
bumper, and, with his descending glass, dropped his
eyes to the level of his daughter's face, where they
rested with paternal admiration. Miss Fencher was
far from ill-looking, and she well knew that her father
waxed affectionate over his wine.

“Papa!” said she, coming behind him, and looking
down his throat, as he strained his head backward,
leaving his reluctant double chin resting on his cravat.
“I have a favor to ask, my dear papa!”

“He shall go, my dear! he shall go! I have been
thinking of it—I'll arrange it, Bel, I'll arrange it! Go
your ways, chick, and send me my slippers!” gurgled
the baronet, with his usual rapid brevity, when slightly
elevated.

Miss Fencher turned quite pale.

“Pa—pa!” she exclaimed, with horror in her voice,
coming round front, “pa—pa!—good gracious! Do
you know it is the most exclusive—however, papa!
let us talk that over in the other room. What I wish
to ask is quite another matter. You know that
Mr.— Mr.—”

“The gentleman you mean is probably James
S—,” interrupted Mr. Jones.

“Thank you, sir, so it is!” continued Miss Fencher,
putting her hand upon the Baronet's mouth, who was
about to speak—“It is Mr. James S—; and
what I wish, papa, is, to have Mr. James S— invited
to pass a week with us. You know, papa, we
shall be very intimate—James S— and I—both
of us assisting Lady Imogen, you know, papa! and
—and—stay till I get some note-paper—will you,
dear papa?”

“You will have your way, chick, you will have
your way,” sighed Sir Humphrey, getting his spectacles
out of a very tight pocket on his hip. “But,
bless me, I can't write in the evening. Mr. Jones—
perhaps Mr. Jones will write the note for me—just
present my compliments to Mr. S—, and request
the honor, and all that—can you do it, Mr. Jones?”

S— rapidly indited a polite note to himself,
which he handed to Miss Fencher for her approbation,
and meantime entered the butler with the coffee.

“Stuggins!” cried Sir Humphrey—“I wish Mr.
Jones—”

“Good Heavens! papa!” exclaimed Miss Fencher,
ending the remainder of her objurgation in a whisper
in her father's ear. But the baronet was not in a
mood to be controlled.

“My love!—Bel, I say!—he shall go. You d-d-d-diddedent
see Miss Jones's letter. He's a p-p-p-pattern
of filial duty!—he gives his mother a house, and all
she wants!—he's a good son, I tell you! St-Stuggins,
come here! Pass the port, Jones, my good fellow!”

Stuggins stepped forward a pace, and presented his
white waistcoat, and Miss Fencher flounced out of the
room in a passion.

“Stuggins!” said the old man, a little more tranquilly,
since he had no fear now of being interrupted,
“I wish my friend, Mr. Jones, here, to see this cock-a-hoop
business to-morrow. It'll be a fine sight, they
tell me. I want him to see it, Stuggins! You understand
me. His mother, Miss Jones, was a pretty girl,
Stuggins! And she'll be very glad to hear that her
boy has seen such a fine show—eh, Jones? eh, Stuggins?
Well, you know what I want. The Headfort
tenants will have a place provided for them, of course
—some shrubbery, eh?—some gallery—some place
behind the musicians, where they are out of the way,
but can see—isn't it so? eh? eh?”

“Yes, Sir Humphrey—no doubt, Sir Humphrey!”
acceded Stuggins, with his ears still open to know how
the details were to be managed.

“Well—very well—and you'll take Jones with you
in the dickey—eh?—Thomas will go on the box—eh?
Will that do?—and Mr. Jones will stay with us
to-night, and perhaps you'll show him his room, now,
and talk it over, eh, Stuggins?—good night, Mr.
Jones!—good night, Jones, my good fellow!”

And Sir Humphrey, having done this act of grateful
reminiscence for his old sweetheart, managed to
find his way into the next room unaided.

S— had begun, by this time, to see “straw for
his bricks,” in the course matters were taking; and
instead of throwing a decanter after Sir Humphrey,
and knocking down the butler for calling him Mr.
Jones, he accepted Stuggins's convoy to the housekeeper's
room, and with his droll stories and funny
ways, kept the maids and footmen in convulsions of
laughter till break of day. Such a merry time had
not come off in servants' hall for many a day, and of
many a precious morsel of the high life below stairs
of Tally-ho hall did he pick the brains of the delighted
Abigails.

The ladies, busied with their toilets, had their
breakfasts in their own rooms, and Mr. Jones did not
make his appearance till after the baronet had achieved
his red herring and seltzer. The carriage came round
at twelve, and the ladies stepped in, dressed for triumph,
tumbled after by burly Sir Humphrey, who required
one side of the vehicle to himself—Mr. Jones outside,
on the dickey with Stuggins, as previously arranged.

Half way up the long avenue of Headfort court,
Stuggins relinquished the dickey to its rightful occupant,
Thomas, and, with Mr. Jones, turned off by
a side path that led to the dairy and offices—the latter
barely saving his legs, however, for the manœuvre
was performed servant fashion, while the carriage kept
its way.

Lord Headfort was a widower, and his niece, Lady
Imogen Bellasys, the wittiest and loveliest girl in
England, stood upon the lawn for the mistress of the
festivities. She had occasion for a petticoat aid-de-camp,
and she knew that Lord Headfort wished to
propitiate his Warwickshire neighbors; and as Miss
Fencher was a fine grenadier looking girl, she promoted
her to that office immediately on her arrival,
decking her for the nonce with a broad blue riband of
authority. Miss Fencher made the best use of her
powers of self congratulation, and thanked God privately
besides, that Sir Humphrey had provided an eclipse
for Mr. Jones; for with the drawback of presenting
such a superfluous acquaintance of their own to the
fastidious eyes of Lady Imogen, she felt assured that
her new honors would never have arrived to her.
She had had a hint, moreover, from her dressing-maid,
of Mr. Jones' comicalities below stairs; and
the fact that he was a person who could be funny in
a kitchen, was quite enough to confirm the aristocratic
instinct by which she had at once pronounced upon
his condition. If her papa had been gay in his youth,
there was no reason why every Miss Jones should
send her child to him to be made a gentleman of!
“Filial pattern,” indeed!

The gayeties began. The French figurante, despatched
by Lord Vaurien from the opera, made up
her tableaux from the beauties, and those who had
ugly faces, but good figures, tried their attitudes on
the archery-lawn, and those whose complexions would
stand the aggravation, tripped to the dancing tents,
and the falcon was flown, and the greyhounds were
coursed, and a few couple of Warwickshire lads tried

their backs at a wrestling fall, and the time wore on.
But to Lady Imogen's shrewd apprehension, it wore
on very heavily. There was no wit afloat. Nobody
seemed gayer than he meant to be. The bubble was
wanting to their champagne of enjoyment. Miss
Fencher's blue riband went to and fro like a pendulum,
perpetually crossing the lawn between Lady Imogen
and the footman in waiting, to inquire if a post-chaise
had arrived from London.

“I will never forgive that James S—, never!”
pettishly vowed her ladyship, as Miss Fencher came
back for the fiftieth time with no news of his arrival.

“Better feed your menagerie at once!” whispered
Lord Headfort to his niece, as he caught a glance at
her vexed face in passing.

The decision with which the order was given to
serve breakfast, seemed to hurry the very heat of the
kitchen fires, for in an incredibly short time, the hot
soups and delicate entremets of Monsieur Dupres
were on the tables, and breakfast was announced. The
band played a march, the games were abandoned, Miss
Fencher followed close upon the heels of her chef, to
secure a seat in her neighborhood, and in ten minutes
a hundred questions of precedence were settled, and
Sir Humphrey, somewhat to his surprise, and as much
to his delight, was called to the left hand of the marquis.
Tally-ho hall was in the ascendant.

During the first assault upon the soups, the band
played a delicious set of waltzes, terminating with the
clatter of changing plates. But at the same moment,
above all the ring of impinging china, arose a shout
of laughter from a party somewhere without the
pavilion, and so sustained and hearty was the peal,
that the servants stood petrified with their dishes,
and the guests sat in wondering silence. The steward
was instantly despatched to enforce order, and Lord
Headfort explained, that the tenants were feasted on
beef and ale, in the thicket beyond, though he could
scarce imagine what should amuse them so uncommonly.

“They have promised to maintain order, my lord!”
said the steward, returning, and stooping to his master's
ear, “but there is a droll gentleman among them, my
lord!”

“Then I dare swear it's better fun than this!”
mumbled his lordship for the steward's hearing, as
he looked round upon the unamused faces in his
neighborhood.

“Headfort,” cried Lady Imogen, presently, from
the other end of the table, “did you send to Stratford
for S—, or did you not? Let us know whether
there is a chance of his coming!”

“Upon my honor, Lady Imogen, my own chariot
has been at the Stratford inn, waiting for him since
morning,” was the marquis's answer. “Vaurien wrote
that he had booked him by the mail of the night before!
I'd give a thousand pounds if he were here!”

Bursts of laughter, breaking through all efforts to
suppress them, again rose from the offending quarter.

“It's a Mr. Jones, my lord,” said the steward,
speaking between the marquis and Sir Humphrey;
“he's a friend of Sir Humphrey's butler—and—if you
will excuse me, my lord—Stuggins says he is the son
of a Miss Jones, formerly an acquaintance of Sir
Humphrey's!”

Red as a turkey-cock grew the old baronet in a
moment. “I beg ten thousand pardons for having
intruded him here, my lord!” said Sir Humphrey;
“it's a poor lad that brought me a letter from his
mother, and I told Stuggins—”

But here Stuggins approached with a couple of
notes for his master, and, begging permission of the
marquis, Sir Humphrey put on his spectacles to read.
The guests at the table, meantime, were passing the
wine very slowly, and conversation more slowly still,
and, with the tranquillity that reigned in the pavilion,
the continued though half-smothered merriment of
the other party was provokingly audible.

“Can't we borrow a little fun from those merry
people?” cried Lady Imogen, throwing up her eyes
despairingly as the marquis exchanged looks with her.

“If we could persuade Sir Humphrey to introduce
his friend, Jones, to us—”

“I introduce him!” exclaimed the fuming baronet,
tearing off his spectacles in a rage, “read that before
you condescend to talk of noticing such a varlet!
Faith! I think he's the clown from a theatre, or the
waiter from a pot-house!”

The marquis read:—

The excitement of Sir Humphrey, and the amused
face of the marquis as he read, had drawn Lady Imogen
from her seat, and as he read aloud, at her request, the
urgent epistle of Mr. Jones, she clapped her hands
with delight, and insisted on having him in. Sir
Humphrey declared he should take it as an affront if
the thing was insisted on, and Miss Fencher, who had
followed to her father's chair, and heard the reading
of the note, looked the picture of surprised indignation.
“Insolent! vulgar! abominable!” was all the compliment
she ventured upon, however.

“Will you let me look at Mr. Jones's note?” said
Lady Imogen.

“Good Heavens!” she exclaimed, after glancing at
it an instant, “I was sure it must be he!”

And out ran the beautiful queen of the festivities,
and the next moment, to Sir Humphrey's amazement,
and Miss Fencher's utter dismay, she returned, dragging
in, with her own scarf around his body, and her
own wreath of roses around his head, the friend of
Stuggins—the abominable Jones! Up jumped the
marquis, and called him by name (not Jones), and
seized him by both hands, and up jumped with delighted
acclamation half a dozen other of the more
distinguished guests at table, and the merriment was
now on the other side of the thicket.

It was five or ten minutes before they were again
seated at table, S— on Lady Imogen's right hand,
but there were two vacant chairs, for Sir Humphrey
and his daughter had taken advantage of the confusion
to disappear, and the field was open, therefore, for a
full account of Mr. Jones's adventures above and below
stairs at Tally-ho hall. A better subject never fell
into the hand of that inimitable humorist, and gloriously
he made use of it.

As he concluded, amid convulsions of laughter, the
butler brought in a note addressed to James S—,
Esq., which had been given him by Stuggins early
in the day—his own autograph invitation to the hospitalities
of Tally-ho hall!

LADY RACHEL.

I once had a long conversation with a fellow-traveller
in the coupé of a French diligence. It was a
bright moonlight night, early in June—not at all the
scene or season for talking long on very dry topics—
and with a mutual abandon which must be explained
by some theory of the silent sympathies, we fell to
chatting rather confidentially on the subject of love.
He gave me some hints as to a passage in his life
which seemed to me, when he told it, a definite and
interesting story; but in recalling it to mind afterward,
I was surprised to find how little he really said,
and how much, from seeing the man and hearing his
voice, I was enabled without effort to supply. To
save roundabout, I'll tell the story in the first person,
as it was told to me, begging the reader to take my
place in the coupé and listen to a very gentlemanly
man, of very loveable voice and manners; supplying,
also, as I did, by the imagination, much more than is
told in the narration.

“I am inclined to think that we are sometimes best
loved by those whom we least suspect of being interested
in us; and while a sudden laying open of hearts
would give the lie to many a love professed, it would,
here and there, disclose a passion which, in the ordinary
course of things, would never have been betrayed.
I was once a little surprised with a circumstance
of the kind I allude to.

“I had become completely domesticated in a family
living in the neighborhood of London—I can
scarce tell you how, even if it were worth while. A
chance introduction, as a stranger in the country,
first made me acquainted with them, and we had gone
on, from one degree of friendship to another, till I
was as much at home at Lilybank as any one of the
children. It was one of those little English paradises,
rural and luxurious, where love, confidence, simplicity,
and refinement, seem natural to the atmosphere, and I
thought, when I was there, that I was probably as
near to perfect happiness as I was likely to be in the
course of my life. But I had my annoyance even
there.

“Mr. Fleming (the name is fictitious, of course)
was a man of sufficient fortune, living, without a profession,
on his means. He was avowedly of the middle
class, but his wife, a very beautiful specimen of
the young English mother, was very highly connected,
and might have moved in what society she pleased.
She chose to find her happiness at home, and leave
society to come to her by its own natural impulse and
affinity—a sensible choice, which shows you at once
the simple and rational character of the woman.
Fleming and his wife were very fond of each other,
but, at the same time, very fond of the companionship
of those who were under their roof; and between
them and their three or four lovely children, I could
have been almost contented to have been a prisoner
at Lilybank, and to have seen nobody but its charming
inmates for years together.

“I had become acquainted with the Flemings, however,
during the absence of one of the members of
the family. Without being at all aware of any new
arrival in the course of the morning, I went late to
dinner after a long and solitary ride on horseback, and
was presented to Lady Rachel —, a tall and reserved-looking
person, sitting on Fleming's right
hand. Seeing no reason to abate any of my outward
show of happiness, or to put any restraint on the natural
impulse of my attentions, I took my accustomed
seat by the sweet mistress of the house, wrapped up
my entire heart, as usual, in every word and look
that I sent toward her, and played the schoolboy that
I felt myself, uncloudedly frank and happy. Fleming
laughed and mingled in our chat occasionally, as he
was wont to do, but a glance now and then at his
stately right-hand neighbor, made me aware that I
was looked upon with some coolness, if not with a
marked disapproval. I tried the usual peace-offerings
of deference and marked courtesy, and lessened
somewhat the outward show of my happiness, but
Lady Rachel was apparently not propitiated. You
know what it is to have one link cold in the chain of
sympathy around a table.

“The next morning I announced my intention of
returning to town. I had hitherto come and gone at
my pleasure. This time the Flemings showed a determined
opposition to my departure. They seemed
aware that my enjoyment under their roof had been,
for the first time, clouded over, and they were not
willing I should leave till the accustomed sunshine
was restored. I felt that I owed them too much to
resist any persuasion of theirs against my own feelings
merely, and I remained.

“But I determined to overcome Lady Rachel's
aversion—a little from pique, I may as well confess,
but mostly for the gratification I knew it would give
to my sweet friends and entertainers. The saddle is
my favorite thinking-place. I mounted a beautiful
hunter which Fleming always put at my disposal
while I stayed with them, and went off for a long gallop.
I dismounted at an inn, some miles off, called
for black wax, and writing myself a letter, despatched
it to Lilybank. To play my part well, you will easily
conceive, it was necessary that my kind friends should
not be in the secret.

“The short road to the heart of a proud woman, I
well knew, was pity. I came to dinner that day a
changed man. It was known through the family, of
course, that a letter sealed with black had arrived for
me, during my ride, and it gave me the apology I
needed for a sudden alteration of manner. Delicacy
would prevent any one, except Mrs. Fleming, from
alluding to it, and she would reserve the inquiry till
we were alone. I had the evening before me, of
course.

“Lady Rachel, I had remarked, showed her superiority
by habitually pitching her voice a note or two
below that of the persons around her—as if the repose
of her calm mind was beyond the plummet of
their superficial gayety. I had also observed, however,
that if she succeeded in rebuking now and then
the high spirits of her friends, and lowered the general
diapason till it harmonized with her own voice,
she was more gratified than by any direct compliment
or attention. I ate my soup in silence, and while the
children, and a chance guest or two, were carrying on
some agreeable banter in a merry key, I waited for
the first opening of Lady Rachel's lips, and, when
she spoke, took her tone like an echo. Without looking
at her, I commenced a subdued and pensive description
of my morning's ride, like a man unconsciously
awakened from his revery by a sympathetic
voice, and betraying, by the tone in which he spoke,

the chord to which he responded. A newer guest
had taken my place, next to Mrs. Fleming, and I was
opposite Lady Rachel. I could feel her eyes suddenly
fixed on me as I spoke. For the first time, she
addressed a remark to me, in a pause of my description.
I raised my eyes to her with as much earnestness
and deference as I could summon into them,
and, when I had listened to her and answered her observation,
kept them fastened on her lips, as if I hoped
she would speak to me again—yet without a smile,
and with an expression that I meant should be that
of sadness, forgetful of usages, and intent only on an
eager longing for sympathy. Lady Rachel showed
her woman's heart, by an almost immediate change
of countenance and manner. She leaned slightly
over the table toward me, with her brows lifted from
her large dark eyes, and the conversation between us
became continuous and exclusive. After a little while,
my kind host, finding that he was cut off from his
other guests by the fear of interrupting us, proposed
to give me the head of the table, and I took his place
at the left hand of Lady Rachel. Her dinner was
forgotten. She introduced topics of conversation
such as she thought harmonized with my feelings,
and while I listened, with my eyes alternately cast
down or raised timidly to hers, she opened her heart
to me on the subject of death, the loss of friends, the
vanity of the world, and the charm, to herself, of sadness
and melancholy. She seemed unconscious of the
presence of others as she talked. The tears suffused
her fine eyes, and her lips quivered, and I found, to
my surprise, that she was a woman, under that mask
of haughtiness, of the keenest sensibility and feeling.
When Mrs. Fleming left the table, Lady Rachel
pressed my hand, and, instead of following into the
drawing-room, went out by the low window upon the
lawn. I had laid up some little food for reflection as
you may conceive, and I sat the next hour looking
into my wineglass, wondering at the success of my
manœuvre, but a little out of humor with my own hypocrisy,
notwithstanding.

“Mrs. Fleming's tender kindness to me when I
joined her at the tea-table, made me again regret
the sacred feelings upon which I had drawn for
my experiment. But there was no retreat. I excused
myself hastily, and went out in search of Lady
Rachel, meeting her ladyship, as I expected, slowly
pacing the dark avenues of the garden. The dimness
of the starlight relieved me from the effort of keeping
sadness in my countenance, and I easily played out
my part till midnight, listening to an outpouring of
mingled kindness and melancholy, for the waste of
which I felt some need to be forgiven.

“Another day of this, however, was all that I could
bring my mind to support. Fleming and his wife had
entirely lost sight—in sympathy with my presumed
affliction—of the object of detaining me at Lilybank,
and I took my leave, hating myself for the tender
pressure of the hand, and the sad and sympathizing
farewells which I was obliged to receive from them.
I did not dare to tell them of my unworthy ruse.
Lady Rachel parted from me as kindly as the rest,
and I had gained my point with the loss of my self-esteem.
With a prayer that, notwithstanding this deceit
and misuse, I might find pity when I should indeed
stand in need of it, I drove from the door.

“A month passed away, and I wrote, once more, to
my friends at Lilybank, that I would pass a week
with them. An occurrence, in the course of that
month, however, had thrown another mask over my
face, and I went there again with a part to play—and,
as if by a retributive Providence, it was now my need
of sympathy that I was most forced to conceal. An
affair which I saw no possibility of compromising, had
compelled me to call out a man who was well known
as a practical duelist. The particulars would not in
terest you. In accepting the challenge, my antagonist
asked a week's delay, to complete some important
business from which he could not withdraw his attention.
And that week I passed with the Flemings.

“The gayety of Lilybank was resumed with the
smile I brought back, and chat and occupation took
their natural course. Lady Rachel, though kind and
courteous, seemed to have relapsed into her reserve,
and, finding society an effort, I rode out daily alone,
seeing my friends only at dinner and in the evening.
They took it to be an indulgence of some remainder
of my former grief, and left me consequently to the
disposition of my own time.

“The last evening before the duel arrived, and I
bade my friends good-night as usual, though with
some suppressed emotion. My second, who was to
come from town and take me up at Lilybank on his
way to the ground, had written to me that, from what
he could gather, my best way was to be prepared for
the worst, and, looking upon it as very probably the
last night of my life, I determined to pass it waking,
and writing to my friends at a distance. I sat down
to it, accordingly, without undressing.

“It was toward three in the morning that I sealed
up my last letter. My bedroom was on the ground-floor,
with a long window opening into the garden;
and, as I lifted my head up from leaning over the seal,
I saw a white object standing just before the casement,
but at some little distance, and half buried in the darkness.
My mind was in a fit mood for a superstitious
feeling, and my blood crept cold for a moment; I
passed my hand across my eyes—looked again. The
figure moved slowly away.

“To direct my thoughts, I took up a book and
read. But, on looking up, the figure was there again,
and, with an irresistible impulse, I rushed out to the
garden. The figure came toward me, but, with its
first movement, I recognised the stately step of Lady
Rachel.

“Confused at having intruded on her privacy, for I
presumed that she was abroad for solitude, and with
no thought of being disturbed, I turned to retire.
She called to me, however, and, sinking upon a garden-seat,
covered her face with her hands. I stood
before her, for a moment, in embarrassed silence.

“`You keep late hours,' she said, at last, with a
tremulous voice, but rising at the same time and, with
her arm put through mine, leading me to the thickly-shaded
walk.

“`To-night I do,' I replied; `letters I could not
well defer—'

“`Listen to me!' interrupted Lady Rachel. `I
know your business for the morning—'

“I involuntarily released my arm and started back.
The chance of an interruption that would seem dishonorable
flashed across my mind.

“`Stay!' she continued; `I am the only one in the
family who knows of it, and my errand with you is
not to hinder this dreadful meeting. The circumstances
are such, that, with society as it is, you could
not avoid it with honor.'

“I pressed her arm with a feeling of gratified justification
which quite overcame, for the moment, my
curiosity as to the source of her knowledge of the
affair.

“`You must forgive me,' she said, `that I come to
you like a bird of ill omen. I can not spare the precious
moments to tell you how I came by my information
as to your design. I have walked the night
away, before your window, not daring to interrupt you
in what was probably the performance of sacred duties.
But I know your antagonist—I know his demoniac
nature, and—pardon me!—I dread the worst!'

“I still walked by her side in silence. She resumed,
though strongly agitated.

“`I have said that I justify you in an intention

which will probably cost you your life. Yet, but for
a feeling which I am about to disclose to you, I should
lose no time and spare no pains in preventing this
meeting. Under such circumstances, your honor
would be less dear to me than now, and I should be
acting as one of my sex who had but a share of interest
in resisting and striving to correct this murderous
exaction of public opinion. I would condemn
duelling in argument—avoid the duellist in society—
make any sacrifice with others to suppress it in the
abstract—but, till the feeling changes in reference to
it, I could not bring myself to sacrifice, in the honor
of the man I loved, my world of happiness for my
share only.'

“`And mean you to say—' I began, but, as the
light broke upon my mind, amazement stopped my
utterance.

“`Yes—that I love you!—that I love you!' murmured
Lady Rachel, throwing herself into my arms,
and fastening her lips to mine in a long and passionate
kiss—`that I love you, and, in this last hour of
your life, must breathe to you what I never before
breathed to mortal!'

“She sank to the ground, and, with handfuls of
dew, swept up from the grass of the lawn, I bathed
her temples, as she leaned senseless against my knee.
The moon had risen above the trees, and poured its
full radiance on her pale face and closed eyes. Her
hair loosened and fell in heavy masses over her shoulders
and bosom, and, for the first time, I realized
Lady Rachel's extraordinary beauty. Her features
were without a fault, her skin was of marble fairness
and paleness, and her abandonment to passionate feeling
had removed, for the instant, a hateful cloud of
pride and superciliousness that, at all other times, had
obscured her loveliness. With a newborn emotion
in my heart, I seized the first instant of returning
consciousness, and pressed her, with a convulsive eagerness,
to my bosom.

“The sound of wheels aroused me from this delirious
dream, and, looking up, I saw the gray of
the dawn struggling with the moonlight. I tore myself
from her arms, and the moment after was whirling
away to the appointed place of meeting.

“I was in my room, at Lilybank, dressing, at eleven
of that same day. My honor was safe, and the affair
was over, and now my whole soul was bent on this
new and unexpected vision of love. True—I was
but twenty-five, and Lady Rachel probably twenty
years older—but she loved me—she was highborn and
beautiful—and love is not so often brought to the lip
in this world, that we can cavil at the cup which holds
it. With these thoughts and feelings wrangling tumultuously
in my heated blood, I took the following
note from a servant at my door.

“`Lady Rachel — buries in entire oblivion the
last night past. Feelings over which she has full control
in ordinary circumstances, have found utterance
under the conviction that they were words to the dying.
They would never have been betrayed without
impending death, and they will never, till death be
near to one of us, find voice, or give token of existence
again. Delicacy and honor will prompt you to
visit Lilybank no more.'

“Lady Rachel kept her room till I left, and I have
never visited Lilybank, nor seen her since.”

THE PHANTOM-HEAD UPON THE TABLE.

1. CHAPTER I.
SHOWING THE HUMILIATIONS OF THE BARRIERS OF
HIGH-LIFE.

There is no aristocracy in the time o' night. It
was punctually ten o'clock, in Berkeley square. It
rained on the nobleman's roof. It rained on the beggar's
head. The lamps, for all that was visible except
themselves, might as well have been half way to the
moon, but even that was not particular to Berkeley
square.

A hack cabriolet groped in from Bruton street.

“Shall I ring any bell for you, sir?” said the cabman,
pulling aside the wet leather curtain.

“No! I'll get out anywhere! Pull up to the sidewalk!”

But the passenger's mind changed while paying his
shilling.

“On second thoughts, my good fellow, you may
knock at the large door on the right.”

The driver scrambled up the high steps and gave a
single knock—such a knock as the drivers of only the
poor and unfashionable are expected to give, in well-regulated
England.

The door was opened only to a crack, and a glittering
livery peered through. But the passenger was
close behind, and setting his foot against the door, he
drove back the suspicious menial and walked in.
Three men, powdered and emblazoned in blue and
gold, started to their feet, and came toward the apparent
intruder. He took the wet cap from his head,
deliberately flung his well-worn cloak into the arms
of the nearest man, and beckoning to another, pointed
to his overshoes. With a suppressed titter, two of
the footmen disappeared through a side-door, and the
third, mumbling something about sending up one of
the stable-boys, turned to follow them.

The new-comer's hand passed suddenly into the
footman's white cravat, and, by a powerful and sudden
throw, the man was brought to his knee.

“Oblige me by unbuckling that shoe!” said the
stranger in a tone of imperturbable coolness, setting
his foot upon the upright knee of the astonished menial.

The shoe was taken off, and the other set in its
place upon the plush-covered leg, and unbuckled, as
obediently.

“Keep them until I call you to put them on again!”
said the wearer, taking his gloves from his pockets, as
the man arose, and slowly walking up and down the
hall while he drew them leisurely on.

From the wet and muddy overshoes had been delivered
two slight and well-appointed feet, however,
shining in pliable and unexceptionable jet. With a
second look, and the foul-weather toggery laid aside,
the humbled footman saw that he had been in error,
and that, hack-cab and dirty overshoes to the contrary
notwithstanding, the economising guest of “my lord”
would appear, on the other side of the drawing-room
door, only at home on “velvet of three pile”—an elegant
of undepreciable water!

“Shall I announce you, sir?” respectfully inquired
the servant.

“If Lord Aymar has come up from the dinner table—yes!
If the ladies are alone—no!”

“Coffee has just gone in to the ladies, sir!”

“Then I'll find my own way!”

Lady Aymar was jamming the projecting diamond
of a bracelet through and through the thick white
leaf of an Egyptian kala, lost apparently in an eclipse
of revery—possibly in a swoon of slumberous digestion.
By the drawing-room light, in her negligent
posture, she looked of a ripeness of beauty not yet
sapped by one autumnal minute—plump, drowsy, and
voluptuous. She looked up as the door opened.

“Spiridion!”

“Sappho!”

“Don't be silly!—how are you, Count Pallardos?
And how like a ghost you come in, unannounced!
Suppose I had been tying my shoe, or anything?”

“Is your ladyship quite well?”

“I will take coffee and wake up to tell you! Was
I asleep when you opened the door? They were all
so dull at dinner. Ah me! stupid or agreeable, we
grow old all the same! How am I looking, Spiridion?”

“Ravishingly! Where is Lady Angelica?”

“Give me another lump of sugar! La! don't you
take coffee?”

“There are but two cups, and this was meant for
a lip of more celestial earth—has she been gone
long?”

The door opened, and the rustling dress of Lady
Angelica Aymar made music in the room. Oh, how
gloriously beautiful she was, and how changed was
Count Spiridion Pallardos by her coming in! A
minute before so inconsequent, so careless and complimentary—now
so timid, so deferential, so almost
awkward in every motion!

The name of “Greek count” has been for a long
time, in Europe, the synonym for “adventurer”—a
worse pendant to a man's name, in high life at least,
than “pirate” or “robber.” Not that a man is peculiar
who is trying to make the most out of society and
would prefer an heiress to a governess, but that it is a
disgrace to be so labelled! An adventurer is the same
as any other gentleman who is not rich, only without
a mask.

Count Pallardos was lately arrived from Constantinople,
and was recognised and received by Lord Aymar
as the son of a reduced Greek noble who had been
the dragoman to the English embassy when his lordship
was ambassador to the Porte. With a promptness
a little singular in one whose patronage was so
difficult to secure, Lord Aymar had immediately procured,
for the son of his old dependant, a small employment
as translator in the Foreign office, and with
its most limited stipend for his means, the young
count had commenced his experience of English life.
His acquaintance with the ladies of Lord Aymar's
family was two stages in advance of this, however.
Lady Aymar remembered him well as the beautiful
child of the lovely Countess Pallardos, the playfellow
of her daughter Angelica on the shore of the Bosphorus;
and on his first arrival in England, hearing
that the family of his patron was on the coast for sea-bathing,
Spiridion had prepared to report himself first
to the female portion of it. Away from society in a
retired cottage ornée upon the seashore, they had received
him with no hinderance to their appreciation or
hospitality; and he had thus been subjected, by accident,
to a month's unshared intoxication with the
beauty of the Lady Angelica. The arrival of the
young Greek had been made known to Lord Aymar
by his lady's letters, and the situation had been procured
for him; but Pallardos had seen his lordship
but once, and this was his first visit to the town establishment
of the family.

The butler came in with a petit verre of Curaçoa
for Miladi, and was not surprised, as the footmen
would have been, to see Lady Angelica on her knee,
and Count Pallardos imprisoning a japonica in the
knot a la Grecque of that head of Heaven's most
heavenly moulding. Brother and sister, Cupid and
Psyche, could not have been grouped with a more
playful familiarity.

“Spiridion!”—said Lady Aymar—“I shall call you
Spiridion till the men come up—how are you lodged,
my dear! Have you a bath in your dressing-room?”

“Pitcher and bowl of the purest crockery, my dear
lady! May I venture to draw this braid a little closer,
Angelica—to correct the line of this raven mass on
your cheek? It robs us now of a rose-leaf's breadth
at least—flat burglary, my sweet friend!”

But the Lady Angelica sprang to her feet, for a
voice was heard of some one ascending from the
dining-room. She flung herself into a dormeuse,
Spiridion twirled his two fingers at the fire, as if bodily
warmth was the uppermost necessity of the moment,
and enter Lord Aymar, followed by a great statesman,
a famous poet, one sprig of unsurpassed nobility, and
one wealthy dandy commoner.

Lord Aymar nodded to his protegé, but the gentlemen
grouped themselves, for a moment, around a silver
easel, upon which stood a Correggio, a late purchase
of which his lordship had been discoursing, and in
that minute or two the name and quality of the stranger
were communicated to the party—probably, for
they took their coffee without further consciousness
of his presence.

The statesman paired off to a corner with his host
to talk politics, the poet took the punctured flower
from the lap of Lady Aymar, and commenced mending,
with patent wax wafers, from the ormolu desk
near by, the holes in the white leaves; and the two ineffables
lingered a moment longer over their Curaçoa.

Pallardos drew a chair within conversation-reach of
Lady Angelica, and commenced an unskilful discussion
of the opera of the night before. He felt angry,
insulted, unseated from his self-possession, yet he
could not have told why. The two young men lounged
leisurely across the room, and the careless Lord Frederick
drew his chair partly between Pallardos and
Lady Angelica, while Mr. Townley Manners reclined
upon an ottoman behind her and brought his lips
within whisper-shot of her ear, and, with ease and unforced
nonsense, not audible nor intended to be audible
to the “Greek adventurer,” they inevitably engrossed
the noble beauty.

The blood of Count Spiridion ran round his heart
like a snake coiled to strike. He turned to a portfolio
of drawings for a cover to self-control and self-communing,
for he felt that he had need of summoning
his keenest and coldest judgment, his boldest and
wariest courage of conduct and endurance, to submit
to, and outnerve and overmaster, his humiliating position.
He was under a roof of which he well knew
that the pride and joy of it, the fair Lady Angelica,
the daughter of the proud earl, had given him her
heart. He well knew that he had needed reserve and
management to avoid becoming too much the favorite
of the lady mistress of that mansion; yet, in it, he had
been twice insulted grossly, cuttingly, but in both
cases unresentably—once by unpunishable menials,
of whom he could not even complain without exposing
and degrading himself, and once by the supercilious
competitors for the heart he knew was his own—
and they too, unpunishable!

At this moment, at a sign from Lady Aymar, her
lord swung open the door of a conservatory to give
the room air, and the long mirror, set in the panel,
showed to Spiridion his own pale and lowering features.
He thanked Heaven for the chance! To see
himself once more was what he bitterly needed!—to
see whether his head had shrunk between his shoulders—whether
his back was crouched—whether his
eyes and lips had lost their fearlessness and pride! He

had feared so—felt so! He almost wondered that he
did not look like a dependant and a slave! But oh,
no! The large mirror showed the grouped figures
of the drawing-room, his own the noblest among them
by nature's undeniable confession! His clear, statuary
outline of features—the finely-cut arches of his
lips—the bold, calm darkness of his passionate eyes—
his graceful and high-born mien,—all apparent enough
to his own eye when seen in the contrast of that mirrored
picture—he was not changed!—not a slave—not
metamorphosed by that hour's humiliation! He
clenched his right hand, once, till the nails were driven
through his glove into the clammy palm, and then
rose with a soft smile on his features, like the remainder
of a look of pleasure.

“I have found,” said he, in a composed and musical
tone, “I have found what we were looking for, Lady
Angelica!”

He raised the large portfolio from the print-stand,
and setting it open on his knee, directly between Lord
Frederick and Lady Angelica, cut off that nobleman's
communication with her ladyship very effectually,
while he pointed out a view of the Acropolis at Athens.
Her ladyship was still expressing her admiration of the
drawing, when Spiridion turned to the astonished gentleman
at her ear.

“Perhaps, sir,” said he, “in a lady's service, I may
venture to dispossess you of that ottoman! Will you
be kind enough to rise?”

With a stare of astonishment, the elegant Mr.
Townley Manners reluctantly complied; and Spiridion,
drawing the ottoman in front of Lady Angelica,
set the broad portfolio upon it, and seating himself at
her feet upon the outer edge, commenced a detailed
account of the antiquities of the grand capitol. The
lady listened with an amused look of mischief in her
eye, Lord Frederick walked once around her chair
humming an air very rudely, Mr. Manners attempted
in vain to call Lady Angelica to look at something
wonderful in the conservatory, and Spiridion's triumph
was complete. He laid aside the portfolio after a moment
or two, drew the ottoman back to its advantageous
position, and, self-assured and at his ease, engrossed
fully and agreeably the attention of his heart's mistress.

Half an hour elapsed. Lord Aymar took a kind
of dismission attitude before the fire, and the guests
one and all took their leave. They were all cloaking
together in the entry, when his lordship leaned over
the bannister.

“Have you your chariot, Lord Frederick?” he
asked.

“Yes—it's at the door now!”

“Lady Aymar suggests that perhaps you'll set down
Count Pallardos, on your way!”

“Why—ah, certainly, certainly!” replied Lord
Frederick, with some hesitation.

“My thanks to Lady Aymar,” said Spiridion very
quietly, “but say to her ladyship that I am provided
with overshoes and umbrella! Shall I offer your lordship
half of the latter?” added he in another key,
leaning with cool mock-earnestness toward Lord
Frederick, who only stared a reply as he passed out to
his chariot.

And marvelling who would undergo such humiliations
and such antagonism as had been his lot that
evening, for anything else than the love of a Lady
Angelica, Count Spiridion stepped forth into the rain
to grope his way to his obscure lodgings in Parliament
street.

2. CHAPTER II.
SHOWING A GENTLEMAN'S NEED OF A HORSE.

It was the hour when the sun in heaven is supposed
to be least promiscuous—the hour when the
five hundred fashionables of London West-End receive
his visit in the open air, to the entire exclusion
(it is presumed) of the remaining population of the
globe. The cabs and jarveys, the vehicles of the despised
public, rolled past the forbidden gate of Hyde
park, and the echo stationed in the arched portal announced
the coroneted carriages as they nicely nibbled
the pleased gravel in passing under. A plebeian or
two stood outside to get a look at the superior beings
whose daily list of company to dine is the news most
carefully furnished to the instructed public. The
birds (having “fine feathers”) flew over the iron railing
unchallenged by the gate-keeper. Four o'clock
went up to Heaven's gate with the souls of those who
had died since three, and with the hour's report of the
world's sins and good deeds; and at the same moment
a chariot rolled into the park, holding between its
claret panels the embellished flesh and blood of Lady
Aymar and her incomparable daughter.

A group of gay men on horseback stood at the bend
of “Rotten Row,” watching the comers-in; and within
the inner railing of the park, among the promenaders
on foot, was distinguishable the slight figure of Count
Pallardos, pacing to and fro with step somewhat irregular.
As Lady Aymar's chariot went by, he bowed
with a frank and ready smile, but the smile was quickly
banished by a flushed cheek and lowering brow, for,
from the group of mounted dandies, dashed out Lord
Frederick Beauchief, upon a horse of unparalleled
beauty, and with a short gallop took and kept his place
close at the chariot window.

Pallardos watched them till the turn of the ring took
them from his sight. The fitness of the group—the
evident suitableness of Lord Frederick's position at
that chariot window, filled him with a jealousy he could
no longer stifle. The contest was all unequal, it was
too palpable to deny. He, himself, whatever his person
or qualities, was, when on foot, in the place allotted
to him by his fortunes—not only unnoticed by the
contagious admiration of the crowd, but unable even
to obey his mistress, though beckoned by her smile to
follow her! That superb animal, the very type of
pride and beauty, arching his glossy neck and tossing
his spirited head before the eyes of Lady Angelica,
was one of those unanalyzed, undisputed vouchers for
the owner's superiority, which make wealth the devil's
gift—irresistible but by the penetrating and cold judgment
of superior beings. How should a woman, born
with the susceptible weaknesses of her sex, most impressible
by that which is most showy and beautiful—
how should she be expected to reason coldly and with
philosophic discrimination on this subject?—how separate
from Lord Frederick, the mere man, his subservient
accompaniments of wealth, attendance, homage
from others, and infatuated presumption in himself?
Nay—what presumption in Spiridion Pallardos (so
he felt, with his teeth set together in despair, as he
walked rapidly along)—to suppose that he could contend
successfully against this and a thousand such advantages
and opportunities, with only his unpriced,
unproved love to offer her, with a hand of poverty!
His heart ran drowningly over with the bitterness of
conviction!

After a few steps, Pallardos turned back with an in
stinctive though inexplicable desire to hasten the pang
of once more meeting them as they came round the
ring of the park. Coming toward him, was one of the
honorable officials of Downing street, with whom he
had been thrown in contact, a conceited and well-born
diner-out, mounted on a handsome cob, but
with his servant behind him on a blood hunter.
Mr. Dallinger was walking his horse slowly along the
fence, and, as he came opposite Pallardos, he drew
rein.

“Count!” said he, in that patronising tone which is
tossed over the head of the patronised like a swan's

neck over the worm about to be gobbled, “a—a—a—
do you know Spanish?”

“Yes. Why?”

“A—a—I've a job for you! You know Moreno,
the Spanish secretary—well, his wife—she will persist
in disguising her billet-doux in that stilted language,
and—you know what I want—suppose you come and
breakfast with me to-morrow morning?”

Pallardos was mentally crowding his contemptuous
refusal into the smallest phrase that could convey repulse
to insolence, when the high-stepping and foam-spattered
forelegs of Lady Aymar's bays appeared under
the drooping branch of the tree beyond him. The
next instant, Lord Frederick's easily-carried head
danced into sight—a smile of perfect self-satisfaction
on his face, and his magnificent horse, excited by the
constant check, prancing at his proudest. At the moment
they passed, Dallinger's groom, attempting to
restrain the impatience of the spirited hunter he was
upon, drew the curb a little too violently, and the man
was thrown. The sight of the empty saddle sent a
thought through the brain of Pallardos like a shaft.

“May I take a little of the nonsense out of that
horse for you?” said he quickly, springing over the
railing, and seizing the rein, to which the man still
held, while the frighted horse backed and reared
toward his master.

“A—a—yes, if you like!”

Pallardos sprang into the saddle, loosened the rein
and leaned forward, and with three or four powerful
bounds, the horse was at the other window of the
chariot. Away, with the bursted trammels of heart
and brain, went all thoughts of the horse's owner, and
all design, if any had flashed on his mind, of time or
place for restoring him. Bred in a half-civilized country,
where the bold hand was often paramount to law,
the Greek had no habit of mind likely to recognise in
a moment of passion even stronger barriers of propriety
than he was now violating; and, to control his
countenance and his tongue, and summon his resources
for an apparently careless and smiling contest of
attraction with his untroubled rival, was work enough
for the whole mind and memory, as well as for all the
nerve and spirit of the excited Greek. He laid his
hand on the chariot window, and thinking no more of
the horse he was subduing than the air he breathed,
broke up his powerful gallop to a pace that suited him,
and played the lover to the best of his coolness and
ability.

“We saw you walking just now, and were lamenting
that you were not on horseback,” said Lady Aymar,
“for it is a sweet evening, and we thought of
driving out for a stroll in old Sir John Chasteney's
grounds at Bayswater. Will you come, Spiridion?
Tell White to drive there!”

Lord Frederick kept his place, and with its double
escort, the equipage of the Aymars sped on its way to
Bayswater. Spiridion was the handsomer man, and
the more graceful rider, and, without forcing the difficult
part of keeping up a conversation with those
within the chariot, he soon found his uneasiness displaced
by a glow of hope and happiness; for Lady
Angelica, leaning far back in her seat, and completely
hidden from Lord Frederick, kept her eyes watchfully
and steadily upon the opposite side where rode her less
confident lover. The evening was of summer's softest
and richest glory, breezy and fragrant; and as the sun
grew golden, the party alighted at the gates of Chasteney
park—in tune for love, it must needs be, if ever
conspiring smiles in nature could compel accord in
human affections.

Ah, happy Spiridion Pallardos! The Lady Angelica
called him to disengage her dress from the step
of the carriage, and her arm was in his when he arose,
placed there as confidingly as a bride's, and with a
gentle pressure that was half love and half mischief—
for she quite comprehended that Lord Frederick's
ride to Bayswater was not for the pleasure of a twilight
stroll through Chasteney park with her mother! That
mother, fortunately, was no duenna. She had pretensions
of her own to admiration, and she was only
particular as to the quantity. Her daughter's division
with her of the homage of their male acquaintances,
was an evil she indolently submitted to, but she was
pleased in proportion as it was not obtruded upon her
notice. As Pallardos and the Lady Angelica turned
into one of the winding alleys of the grounds, Lady
Aymar bent her large eyes very fixedly upon another,
and where such beautiful eyes went before, her small
feet were very sure to follow. The twilight threw its
first blur over the embowering foliage as the parties
lost sight of each other, and, of the pair who are the
hero and heroine of this story, it can only be disclosed
that they found a heaven (embalmed, for their particular
use, in the golden dusk of that evening's twilight),
and returned to the park gate in the latest minute
before dark, sworn lovers, let come what would!
But meantime, the happy man's horse had disappeared,
as well he might have been expected to do, his
bridle having been thrown over a bush by the engrossed
Pallardos, when called upon to assist Lady
Angelica from her carriage, and milord's groom and
miladi's footman having no sovereign reasons for securing
him. Lord Frederick laughed till the count
accepted the offer of Lady Aymar to take him home,
bodkin-wise, between herself and her daughter; and for
the happiness of being close pressed to the loving side
of the Lady Angelica for one hour more, Pallardos
would willingly have lost a thousand horses—his own
or the honorable Mr. Dallinger's. And, by the way,
of Mr. Dallinger and his wrath, and his horseless
groom, Spiridion began now to have a thought or two
of an uncomfortable pertinacity of intrusion.

3. CHAPTER III.
SHOWING WHAT MAKES A HORSE-STEALER A GENTLEMAN.

It was the first day of September, and most of the
gold threads were drawn from the tangled and vari-colored
woof of London society. “The season” was
over. Two gentlemen stood in the window of Crockford's,
one a Jew barrister (kersey enough for more
russet company by birth and character, but admitted
to the society of “costly stuff” for the equivalent he
gave as a purveyor of scandal), and the other a commoner,
whose wealth and fashion gave him the privilege
of out-staying the season in town, without publishing
in the Morning Post a better reason than inclination
for so unnatural a procedure.

Count Spiridion Pallardos was seen to stroll slowly
up St. James street, on the opposite side.

“Look there, Abrams!” said Mr. Townley Manners,
“there's the Greek who was taken up at one
time by the Aymars. I thought he was transported.”

“No! he still goes to the Aymars, though he is
`in Coventry' everywhere else. Dallinger had him
arrested—for horse-stealing, wasn't it? The officer
nabbed him as he was handing Lady Angelica out of
her carriage in Berkeley square. I remember hearing
of it two months ago. What a chop-fallen blackguard
it looks!”

“Blackguard! Come, come, man!—give the devil
his due!” deprecated the more liberal commoner;
“may be it's from not having seen a gentleman for the
last week, but, hang me if I don't think that same
horse-stealer turning the corner is as crack-looking a
man as I ever saw from this window. What's o'clock!”

“Half-past four,” replied the scandal-monger, swallowing,

with a bland smile, what there was to swallow
in Manners's two-edged remark, and turning suddenly
on his heel.

Pallardos slowly took his way along Picadilly, and
was presently in Berkeley square, at the door of the
Aymars. The porter admitted him without question,
and he mounted, unannounced, to the drawing-room.
The ladies sat by the window, looking out upon the
garden.

“Is it you, Spiridion?” said Lady Aymar, “I had
hoped you would not come to-day!”

“Oh, mamma!” appealed Lady Angelica.

“Welcome all other days of the year, my dear
Pallardos—warmly welcome of course”—continued
Lady Aymar, “but—to-day—oh God! you have no
idea what the first of September is—to us—to my
husband!”

Lady Aymar covered her face with her hands, and
the tears streamed through her fingers.

“Pardon me,” said Pallardos—“pardon me, my
dear lady, but I am here by the earl's invitation, to
dine at six.”

Lady Aymar sprang from her seat in astonishment.

“By the earl's invitation, did you say? Angelica,
what can that mean? Was it by note, Count Pallardos?”

“By note,” he replied.

“I am amazed!” she said, “truly amazed! Does
he mean to have a confidant for his family secret? Is
his insanity on one point affecting his reason on all?
What shall we do, Angelica?”

“We may surely confide in Spiridion, whatever the
meaning of it, or the result”—gently murmured Lady
Angelica.

“We may—we may!” said Lady Aymar. “Prepare
him for it as you will. I pray Heaven to help me
through with this day without upsetting my own
reason. I shall meet you at dinner, Spiridion.”

With her hands twisted together in a convulsive
knot, Lady Aymar slowly and musingly passed into
the conservatory on her way to her own room, leaving
to themselves two lovers who had much to talk of
beside dwelling upon a mystery which, even to Lady
Angelica, who knew most of it, was wholly inexplicable.
Yet it was partially explained by the trembling
girl—explained as a case of monomania, and with the
brevity of a disagreeable subject, but listened to by
her lover with a different feeling—a conviction as of a
verified dream, and a vagne, inexplicable terror which
he could neither reason down nor account for. But
the lovers must be left to themselves, by the reader as
well as by Lady Aymar; and meantime, till the dinner
hour, when our story begins again, we may glance at
a note which was received, and replied to, by Lord
Aymar in the library below.

It seemed like the first day after a death, in the
house of Lord Aymar. An unaccountable hush prevailed
through the servants' offices; the gray-headed
old butler crept noiselessly about, making his preparations
for dinner, and the doors, that were opened
and shut, betrayed the careful touch of apprehension.
With penetrating and glassy clearness, the kitchen
clock, seldom heard above stairs, resounded through
the house, striking six.

In the same neglected attire which she had worn in
the morning, Lady Aymar re-entered the drawing-room.
The lids were drawn up around her large eyes
with a look of unresisting distress, and she walked
with relaxed steps, and had, altogether, an air absent
and full of dread. The interrupted lovers ceased
talking as she approached, but she did not remark the
silence, and walked, errandless, from corner to corner.

The butler announced dinner.

“May I give your ladyship an arm?” asked Pallardos.

“Oh God! is it dinner-time already!” she exclaimed
with a voice of terror. “Williams! is Lord Aymar
below?”

“In the dining-room miladi.”

She took Spiridion's arm, and they descended the
stairs. As they approached the dining-room, her arm
trembled so violently in his that he turned to her with
the fear that she was about to fall. He did not speak.
A vague dread, which was more than he had caught
from her looks—a something unaccountably heavy at
his own heart—made his voice cling to his throat.
He bowed to Lord Aymar.

His noble host stood leaning upon the mantel-piece,
pale, but seeming less stern and cold than suffering
and nerved to bear pain.

“I am glad to see you, my dear count!” he said,
giving him his hand with an affectionateness that he
had never before manifested. “Are you quite well?”
he added, scrutinizing his features closely with the
question—“for, like myself, you seem to have grown
pale upon this—September dulness.”

“I am commonly less well in this month than in
any other,” said Pallardos, “and—now I think of it—
I had forgotten that I arose this morning with a
depression of spirits as singular as it was unendurable.
I forgot it, when I received your lordship's note, in
the happiness the day was to bring me.”

The lovers exchanged looks, unremarked, apparently,
by either Lord or Lady Aymar, and the conversation
relapsed into the commonplaces of dinner-table
civility. Spiridion observed that the footmen
were excluded, the old butler alone serving them at
table; and that the shutters, of which he got a chance
glimpse between the curtains, were carefully closed.
Once or twice Pallardos roused himself with the
thought that he was ill playing the part of an agreeable
guest, and proposed some question that might
lead to discussion; but the spirits of Lady Angelica
seemed frighted to silence, and Lord and Lady Aymar

were wholly absorbed, or were at least unconscious of
their singular incommunicativeness.

Dinner dragged on slowly—Lady Aymar retarding
every remove with terrified and flurried eagerness.
Pallardos remarked that she did not eat, but she asked
to be helped again from every dish before its removal.
Her fork rattled on the plate with the trembling of her
hand, and, once or twice, an outbreak of hysterical
tears was evidently prevented by a stern word and look
from Lord Aymar.

The butler leaned over to his mistress's ear.

“No—no—no! Not yet—not yet!” she exclaimed,
in a hurried voice, “one minute more!” But the
clock at that instant struck seven, counted by that
table company in breathless silence. Pallardos felt
his heart sink, he knew not why.

Lord Aymar spoke quickly and hoarsely.

“Turn the key, Williams.”

Lady Aymar screamed and covered her face with
her hands.

“Remove the cloth!” he again ordered precipitately.

The butler's hand trembled. He fumbled with the
corner of the cloth a moment, and seemed to want
strength or courage to fulfil his office. With a sudden
effort Lord Aymar seized and threw the cloth to the
other end of the apartment.

“There!” cried he, starting to his feet, and pointing
to the bare table, “there! there!” he repeated,
seizing the hand of Lady Angelica, as she arose terrified
upon her feet. “See you nothing? Do you see
nothing?”

With a look, at her father, of blank inquiry—a look
of pity at her mother, sunk helpless upon the arm of
her chair—a look at Pallardos, who with open mouth,
and eyes starting from their sockets, stood gazing upon
the table, heedless of all present—she answered—
“Nothing—my dear father!—nothing!”

He flung her arm suddenly from his hand.

“I knew it,” said he, with angry emphasis. “Take
her, shameless woman! Take your child, and begone!”

But Pallardos laid his hand upon the earl's arm.

“My lord! my lord!” he said, in a tone of fearful
suppression of outcry, “can we not remove this
hideous object! How it glares at you!—at me!
Why does it look at me! What is it, Lord Aymar?
What brings that ghastly head here? Oh God!
oh God! I have seen it so often!”

“You?—you have seen it?” suddenly asked Lady
Aymar in a whisper. “Is there anything to see? Do
you see the same dreadful sight, Spiridion?” Her
voice rose with the last question to a scream.

Pallardos did not answer. He had forgotten the
presence of them all. He struggled a moment, gasping
and choking for self-control, and then, with a sudden
movement, clutched at the bare table. His empty
hand slowly opened. and his strength sufficed to pass
his finger across the palm. He staggered backward
with an idiotic laugh, and was received in his fall by
the trembling arms of Lady Angelica. A motion
from Lord Aymar conveyed to his faithful servant
that the phantom was vanishing! The door was flung
open and the household summoned.

“Count Pallardos has fainted from the heat of the
room,” said Lord Aymar. “Place him upon my
bed! And—Lady Aymar!—will you step into the
library—I would speak with you a moment!”

There was humility and beseechingness in the last
few words of Lord Aymar, which fell strangely on the
ear of the affrighted and guilty woman. Her mind
had been too fearfully tasked to comprehend the
meaning of that changed tone, but, with a vague
feeling of relief, she staggered through the hall, and
the door of the library closed behind her.

4. CHAPTER IV.

A letter from Lord Aymar to Lady Angelica will
put the story forward a little:—

With one more letter, perhaps, the story will be
sufficiently told.

Is the story told? I think so!

GETTING TO WINDWARD.

1. CHAPTER I.

London is an abominable place to dine. I mean,
of course, unless you are free of a club, invited out, or
pay a ridiculous price for a French dinner. The unknown
stranger, adrift on the streets, with a traveller's
notions of the worth of things to eat, is much worse
off, as to his venture for a meal, than he would be in
the worst town of the worst province of France—much
worse off than he would be in New York or New Orleans.
There is a “Very's,” it is true, and there are
one or two restaurants, so called, in the Haymarket;
but it is true, notwithstanding, that short of a two-guinea
dinner at the Clarendon, or some hotel of this
class, the next best thing is a simple pointed steak with
potatoes, at a chop-house. The admirable club-system
(admirable for club-members) has absorbed all the
intermediate degrees of eating-houses, and the traveller's
chance and solitary meal must be either absurdly
expensive, or dismally furnished and attended.

The only real liberty one ever enjoys in a metropolis
is the interval (longer or shorter, as one is more or
less a philosopher) between his arrival and the delivery
of his letters of introduction. While perfectly
unknown, dreading no rencontre of acquaintances, subject
to no care of dress, equipage, or demeanor, the
stranger feels, what he never feels afterward, a complete
abandon to what immediately surrounds him, a
complete willingness to be amused in any shape which
chance pleases to offer, and, his desponding loneliness
serving him like the dark depths of a well, he sees lights
invisible from the higher level of amusement.

Tired of my solitary meals in the parlor of a hotel
during my first week in London, I made the round of
such dining-places as I could inquire out at the West
End—of course, from the reserved habits of the country
toward strangers, making no acquaintances, and
scarce once exchanging a glance with the scores who
sat at the tables around me. Observation was my only
amusement, and I felt afterward indebted to those silent
studies of character for more acquaintance with
the under-crust of John Bull, than can be gathered
from books or closer intercourse. It is foreign to my
present purpose, however, to tell why his pride should
seem want of curiosity, and why his caution and delicacy
should show like insensibility and coldness. I
am straying from my story.

The covered promenade of the Burlington Arcade
is, on rainy days, a great allure for a small chop-house
hard by, called “The Blue Posts.” This is a snug
little tavern, with the rear of its two stories cut into a
single dining-room, where chops, steaks, ale, and punch,
may be had in unusual perfection. It is frequented
ordinarily by a class of men peculiar, I should think,
to England—taciturn, methodical in their habits, and
highly respectable in their appearance—men who seem
to have no amusements and no circle of friends, but
who come in at six and sit over their punch and the
newspapers till bed time, without speaking a syllable,
except to the waiter, and apparently turning a cold
shoulder of discouragement to any one in the room
who may be disposed to offer a passing remark. They
hang their hats daily on the same peg, daily sit at the
same table (where the chair is turned down for them
by Villiam, the short waiter), daily drink a small pitcher
of punch after their half-pint of sherry, and daily read,
from beginning to end, the Herald, Post, and Times,
with the variation of the Athenæum and Spectator, on
Saturdays and Sundays. I at first hazarded various
conjectures as to their condition in life. They were
evidently unmarried, and men of easy though limited
means—men of no great care, and no high hopes, and
in a fixed station; yet of that degree of intelligence
and firm self-respect which, in other countries (the

United States, certainly, at least), would have made
them sought for in some more social and higher sphere
than that with which they seemed content. I afterward
obtained semething of a clue to the mystery of
the “Blue Posts” society, by discovering two of the
most respectable looking of its customers in the exercise
of their daily vocations. One, a man of fine phrenological
development, rather bald, and altogether very
intellectual in his “os sublime,” I met at the rooms of
a fashionable friend, taking his measure for pantaloons.
He was the foreman of a celebrated Bond-street tailor.
The other was the head shopman of a famous haberdasher
in Regent street; and either might have passed
for Godwin the novelist, or Babbidge the calculator—
with those who had seen those great intellects only in
their imaginations. It is only in England, that men
who, like these, have read or educated themselves far
above their situations in life, would quietly submit to
the arbitrary disqualifications of their pursuits, and
agree unresistingly to the sentence of exile from the
society suited to their mental grade. But here again
I am getting away from my story.

It was the close of a London rainy day. Weary of
pacing my solitary room, I sallied out as usual, to the
Burlington Arcade (I say as usual, for in a metropolis
where it rains nine days out of ten, rainy-weather resorts
become habitual). The little shops on either
side were brightly lit, the rain pattered on the glass
roof overhead, and to one who had not a single acquaintance
in so vast a city, even the passing of the
crowd and the glittering of lights seemed a kind of
society. I began to speculate on the characters of
those who passed and repassed me in the turns of the
short gallery; and the dinner-hours coming round, and
the men gradually thinning off from the crowd, I adjourned
to the Blue Posts with very much the feeling
of a reader interrupted in the progress of a novel. One
of the faces that had most interested me was that of a
foreigner, who, with a very dejected air, leaned on the
arm of an older man, and seemed promenading to kill
time, without any hope of killing his ennui. On seating
myself at one of the small tables, I was agreeably
surprised to find the two foreigners my close neighbors,
and in the national silence of the company present,
broken only by the clatter of knives and forks, it
was impossible to avoid overhearing every word spoken
by either. After a look at me, as if to satisfy themselves
that I, too, was a John Bull, they went on with
their conversation in French, which, so long as it was
confined to topics of drink and platter, weather and
news, I did not care to interrupt. But with their
progress through a second pint of sherry, personal topics
came up, and as they seemed to be conversing with
an impression that their language was not understood,
I felt obliged to remind them that I was overhearing
unwillingly what they probably meant for a private
conversation. With a frankness which I scarcely expected,
they at once requested me to transfer my glass
to their table, and calling for a pitcher of punch, they
extended their confidence by explaining to me the
grounds of the remarks I had heard, and continuing to
converse freely on the subject. Through this means,
and a subsequent most agreeable acquaintance, I possessed
myself of the circumstances of the following
story; and having thus shown the reader (rather digressively,
I must own) how I came by it, I proceed
in the third person, trusting that my narration will not
now seem like the “coinage of the brain.”

The two gentlemen dining at the Blue Posts on the
rainy day just mentioned, were Frenchmen, and political
exiles. With the fortunes of the younger, this
story has chiefly to do. He was a man past the sentimental
age, perhaps nearer thirty-seven than thirty-five,
less handsome than distinguished in his appearance,
yet with one of those variable faces which
are handsome for single instants once in a half
hour, more or less. His companion called him Belaccueil.

“I could come down to my circumstances,” he said
to Monsieur St. Leger, his friend, “if I knew how. It
is not courage that is wanting. I would do anything
for a livelihood. But what is the first step? What
is the next step from this? This last dinner—this last
night's lodging—I am at the end of my means; and
unless I accept of charity from you, which I will not,
to-morrow must begin my descent. Where to put my
foot?”

He stopped and looked down into his glass, with the
air of a man who only expects an answer to refute its
reasoning.

“My dear Belaccueil,” said the other, after a moment's
hesitation, “you were famous in your better
days for almost universal accomplishment. Mimic,
dancer, musician, cook—what was there in our merry
carnival-time, to which you did not descend with success,
for mere amusement? Why not now for that
independence of livelihood to which you adhere so
pertinaciously?”

“You will be amused to find,” he answered, “how
well I have sounded the depths of every one of these
resources. The French theatre of London has refused
me, point-blank, all engagement, spite of the
most humiliating exhibitions of my powers of mimicry
before the stage-manager and a fifth-rate actress. I
am not musician enough for a professor, though very
well for an amateur, and have advertised in vain for
employment as a teacher of music, and—what was
your other vocation!—cook! Oh no! I have just
science enough to mend a bad dinner and spoil a good
one, though I declare to you, I would willingly don
the white cap and apron and dive for life to the basement.
No, my friend, I have even offered myself as
assistant dancing-master, and failed! Is not that
enough? If it is not, let me tell you, that I would
sweep the crossings, if my appearance would not excite
curiosity, or turn dustman, if I were strong enough
for the labor. Come down! Show me how to come
down, and see whether I am not prepared to do it.
But you do not know the difficulty of earning a penny
in London. Do you suppose, with all the influence
and accomplishments I possess, I could get the place
of this scrubby waiter who brings us our cigars? No,
indeed! His situation is a perfect castle—impregnable
to those below him. There are hundreds of poor
wretches within a mile of us who would think themselves
in paradise to get his situation. How easy it is
for the rich to say, `go and work!' and how difficult
to know how and where!”

Belaccueil looked at his friend as if he felt that he
had justified his own despair, and expected no comfort.

“Why not try matrimony?” said St. Leger. “I
can provide you the means for a six months' siege,
and you have better qualification for success than nine
tenths of the adventurers who have succeeded.”

“Why—I could do even that—for with all hope of
prosperity, I have of course given up all idea of a romantic
love. But I could not practise deceit, and
without pretending to some little fortune of my own,
the chances are small. Besides, you remember my
ill luck at Naples.”

“Ah, that was a love affair, and you were too honest.”

“Not for the girl, God bless her! She would have
married me, penniless as I was, but through the interference
of that officious and purse-proud Englishman,
her friends put me hors de combat.”

“What was his name? Was he a relative?”

“A mere chance acquaintance of their own, but he
entered at once upon the office of family adviser. He
was rich, and he had it in his power to call me an adventurer.
I did not discover his interference till some

time after, or he would perhaps have paid dearly for
his nomenclature.”

“Who did you say it was?”

“Hitchings! Mr. Plantagenet Hitchings, of Hitching
Park, Devonshire—and the one point, to which I
cling, of a gentleman's privileges, is that of calling him
to account, should I ever meet him.”

St. Leger smiled and sat thoughtfully silent for a
while. Belaccueil pulled apart the stems of a bunch
of grapes on his plate, and was silent with a very different
expression.

“You are willing,” said the former, at last, “to teach
music and dancing, for a proper compensation.”

“Parbleu! Yes!”

“And if you could unite this mode of support with
a very pretty revenge upon Mr. Plantagenet Hitchings
(with whom, by the way, I am very well acquainted),
you would not object to the two-fold thread in
your destiny?”

“They would be threads of gold, mon ami!” said
the surprised Belaccueil.

St. Leger called for pen, ink, and paper, and wrote
a letter at the Blue Posts, which the reader will follow
to its destination, as the next step in this story.

2. CHAPTER II.

A green angel (I mean an angel ignorant of the
world) would probably suppose that the feeding of
these animal bodies of ours, if not done in secret, must
at least be the one act of human life separated entirely
from the more heavenly emotions. Yet the dinner is
a meal dear to lovers; and novelists and tale-tellers
choose the moments stolen from fork and plate for the
birth and interchange of the most delicious and tender
sentiments of our existence. Miss Hitchings, while
unconsciously shocking Monsieur Sansou by tilting
her soup-plate for the last spoonful of vermicelli, was
controlling the beating of a heart full of feminine and
delicate tenderness; and as the tutor was careful never
to direct his regards to the other end of the table (for
reasons of his own), Miss Henrietta laid the unction
to her soul that such indifference to the prettiest girl
who had ever honored them as a guest, proved the
strength of her own magnet, and put her more at ease
on the subject of Monsieur Sansou's admiration. He,
indeed, was committing the common fault of men
whose manners are naturally agreeable—playing that
passive and grateful game of courtesy and attention so
easy to the object of regard, and so delightful to woman,
who is never so blest as in bestowing. Besides,
he had an object in suppressing his voice to the lowest
audible pitch, and the rich and deep tone, sunk only to
escape the ear of another, sounded, to the watchful
and desiring sense of her to whom it was addressed,
like the very key-note and harmony of affection.

At a table so surrounded with secrets, conversation
flagged, of course. Mr. Hitchings thought it very
up-hill work to entertain Miss Hervey, whose heart
and senses were completely absorbed in the riddle of
Belaccueil's disguise and presence; Mr. Hervey, the
uncle, found old Mrs. Plantagenet rather absent, for
the smitten dame had eyes for every movement of
Monsieur Sansou; and the tutor himself, with his resentment
toward his host, and his suspicions of the
love of his daughter, his reviving passion for Miss
Hervey, and his designs on Mrs. Plantagenet, had
enough to render him as silent as the latter could wish,
and as apparently insensible to the attraction of the
fair stranger.

How little we know what is in the bosoms of those
around us! How natural it is, however, to feel and
act as if we knew—to account for all that appears on
the surface by the limited acquaintance we have with
circumstances and feelings—to resent an indifference
of which we know not the cause—to approve or condemn,
without allowance for chagrin, or despair, or
love, or hope, or distress—any of the deep undercurrents
for ever at work in the depths of human bosoms.
The young man at your side at a dinner-party may
have a duel on his hands for the morning, or a disgrace
imminent in credit or honor, or a refused heart or an
accepted one, newly crushed or newly made happy;
or (more common still, and less allowed for) he may
feel the first impression of disease, or the consequences
of an indigestion; and, for his agreeableness or
disagreeableness, you try to account by something in
yourself, some feeling toward yourself—as if you and
you only could affect his spirits or give a color to his
mood of manners. The old man's thought of death,
the mother's overwhelming interest in her child, the
woman's up-spring of emotion or love, are visiters to
the soul that come unbidden and out of time, and you
can neither feast nor mourn, secure against their interruption.
It would explain many a coldness, could
we look into the heart concealed from us. We should
often pity when we hate, love when we think we can
not even forgive, admire where we curl the lip with
scorn and indignation. To judge without reserve of
any human action is a culpable temerity, of all our
sins the most unfeeling and frequent.

I will deal frankly with you, dear reader. I have
arrived at a stage of my story which, of all the stages
of story-writing, I detest the most cordially. Poets
have written about the difficulty of beginning a story
(vide Byron)—Ca ne me coute pas; others of the ending.
That I do with facility, joy, and rejoicing. But
the love pathos of a story—the place where the reader
is expected to sigh, weep, or otherwise express his
emotion—that is the point, I confess, the most difficult
to write, and the most unsatisfactory when written.
“Pourquoy, Sir Knight?” Not because it is difficult
to write love-scenes—according to the received mode—
not that it is difficult to please those (a large majority)
who never truly loved, and whose ideas, therefore, of
love and its making, are transcendentalized out of all
truth and nature—not that it would be more labor to
do this than to copy a circular, or write a love-letter
for a modest swain (this last my besetting occupation)
—but because, just over the inkstand there peers a
face, sometimes of a man of forty, past the nonsense
of life, but oftener of some friend, a woman who has
loved, and this last more particularly knows that
true love is never readable or sensible—that if its language
be truly written, it is never in polished phrase
or musical cadence—that it is silly, but for its concealed
meaning, embarrassed and blind, but for the
interpreting and wakeful heart of one listener—that
love, in short, is the god of unintelligibility, mystery,
and adorable nonsense, and, of course, that which I
have written (if readable and sensible) is out of taste
and out of sympathy, and none but fancy-lovers and
enamored brains (not hearts) will approve or believe it.

D'Israeli the younger is one of the few men of genius
who, having seen truth without a veil, dare to reveal
the vision; and he has written Henrietta Temple
—the silliest yet truest love-book of modern time.
The critics (not an amative race) have given him a
benefit of the “besom” of ridicule, but D'Israeli, far
from being the effeminate intellect they would make
him, is one of the most original and intrepid men of
genius living, and whether the theme be “wine, woman,
or war,” he writes with fearless truth, piquancy,
and grace. Books on love, however, should be read
by lovers only, and pity it is, that there is not an ink
in chemistry, invisible save to the eye kindled with amatory
fire. But “to our muttons.”

It was not leap-year, but Monsieur Belaccueil, on
the day of the dinner-party at Hitchings park, was
made aware (I will not say by proposals, for ladies make

known their inclinations in ways much less formidable)
—he was made aware, I say, that the hearts of three
of the party were within the flight of his arrow. Probably
his humble situation reversed the usual relative
position of the sexes in the minds of the dame and
damsels—and certainly there is no power woman exercises
so willingly as a usurpation of the masculine
privilege. I have stated my objection to detail the
dialogue between Miss Hitchings and her tutor at the
dinner-table. To be recorded faithfully, the clatter
of silver forks on China, the gurgle of wine, the interruptions
of the footmen with champagne and vegetables,
should all be literally interspersed—for to all the
broken sentences (so pathetic when properly punctuated—vide
Neal's novels) these were the sequels and
the accompaniments: “No, thank you!” and “If you
please,” and “May I fill your glass?”—have filled out,
to the perfect satisfaction of the lady, many an unfinished
sentence upon which depended the whole destiny
of her affections; and, as I said before, the truth
is not faithfully rendered when these interstices are
unsupplied.

It was dark when the ladies left the dinner-table,
followed by Monsieur Sansou, and, at the distance of
a few feet from the windows opening on the lawn, the
air was black and impenetrable. There were no stars
visible and no moon, but the clouds which were gathering
after a drought, seemed to hush the air with
their long expected approach, and it was one of those
soft, still, yet murky and fragrant nights when the
earth seems to breathe only—without light, sound, or
motion. What lover does not remember such a night?

Oppressed with the glaring lights and the company
of people she cared nothing about, Miss Hervey
stepped out upon the lawn, and with her face lifted as
if to draw deeper inhalations of the dew and freshness,
she strolled leisurely over the smooth carpet of grass.
At a slight turn to avoid a clump of shrubbery, she
encountered Belaccueil, who was apologizing and
about to pass her, when she called him by his name,
and passing her arm through his, led him on to the
extremity of the lawn. A wire fence arrested their
progress, and leaning against it, Miss Hervey inquired
into the cause of the disguise she had penetrated, and
softened and emboldened by the fragrant darkness,
said all that a woman might say of tenderness and encouragement.
Belaccueil's heart beat with pride and
gratified amour propre, but he confined himself to the
expression of this feeling, and leaving the subject open,
took advantage of Mrs. Plantagenet's call to Miss
Hervey from the window, to leave her and resume his
ramble through the grounds.

The supper tray had been brought in, and the party
were just taking their candles to separate, when the
tutor entered at the glass door and arrested the steps
of Mrs. Plantagenet. She set down her candle and
courtesied a good-night to the ladies (Mr. Hitchings had
gone to bed, for wine made him sleepy, and Mr. Hervey
always retired early—where he was bored), and
closing the windows, mixed a glass of negus for Monsieur
Sansou; and, herself pulling a sandwich to
pieces, deliberately, and it must be confessed, somewhat
patronisingly, invited the Frenchman to become
her lord. And after a conversation, which (la verite
avant tout) turned mainly on will and investments, the
window dame sailed blissfully to bed, and Belaccueil
wrote the following letter to his friend and adviser:—

In one of the most fashionable squares of London
lives, “in the season,” Monsieur Belaccueil, one of
the most hospitable foreigners in that great metropolis.
He is a pensive and rather melancholy-looking
man by day; but society, which he seems to seek like
an opiate to restless feeling, changes him to a gay
man, the most mirth-loving of Amphytrions. His
establishment is presided over by his wife, who, as his
society is mostly French, preserves a respectable silence,
but seems contented with her lot and proud of
her husband; while in Miss Plantagenet (ci-devant
Hitchings) his guests find his table's chief attraction—
one of the prettiest heiresses and most loveable girls in
London. How deeply Monsieur Belaccueil still rejoices
at his success in “getting to windward,” is matter of
problem. Certainly there is one chariot which passes
him in his solitary ride in the park, to which he bows
with a pang of unabating and miserable anguish. And
if the occupant of that plain chariot share at all in his
suffering, she has not the consolation to which he flies
in society—for a more secluded and lonely woman
lives not in the great solitude of London, than Constantia
Hervey.

THE WIFE BEQUEATHED AND RESUMED.

The following story was told to the writer by a lady
in France—told during supper at a ball, and of course
only partially. The interstices have been supplied in
writing it, and the main thread of the narrative may
be relied on as fact. The names are fictitious:—

A beautiful girl of seventeen, in the convent-parlor
of Saint Agatha. She is dressed as a novice, and the
light breaks off from the curve of the raven hair put
away under the close-fitting cap—breaks off almost in
sparkles. For so it may—as an artist knows. Her
eyes are like hounds in the leash—fiery and eager.
And if, in those ever-parted and forward-pressing lips
there is a possibility of languid repose, the proof of it
lies in the future. They are sleepless and dreamless,
as yet, with a thirst unnamed and irrepressible, for the
passions of life. Her name is Zelie.

But we can not make the past into the present.
Change the tense—for Zelie is dead now, or we could
not record her strange story.

There was a ring at the convent door, and presently
entered Colonel Count Montalembert, true to his appointment.
He had written to the lady-abbess to
request an interview with the daughter of his comrade,
dead on the frozen track of the retreat from
Moscow. Flahault was to him, as his right hand to
his left, and as he covered up the stiffened body with
snow, he had sworn to devote his life to that child
whose name was last on the lips closed for ever. The
Count Montalembert was past fifty, and a constant
sufferer from his wounds; and his physicians had
warned him that death was not far off. His bearing
was still noble and soldierly, however, and his frank
and clear eye had lost little of its lustre.

“I wrote to you the particulars of your father's
death, my child,” said the colonel, after the abbess
had left them alone, at his request. “I could not
dwell on it again without more emotion than is well
for me. I must be brief even with what I have to say
to his daughter—for that, too, will move me overmuch.
You are very lovely, Zelie.”

“You are very kind!” answered the novice, blushing,
and dropping her long lashes upon her cheek.

“Very lovely, I say, and must love and be beloved.
It is a woman's destiny, and your destiny more than
most women's.”

The count gazed into the deep eyes of his eager
listener, and seemed embarrassed to know how to proceed.

“Hear me through,” he said, “before you form an
opinion of my motives. And first answer me a bold
question. Have you any attachment—have you ever
seen a man you could love and marry?”

“No!” murmured the blushing novice, after a moment's
hesitation.

“But you are likely to love, soon and rashly, once
free in the world—and that is one evil against which
I will make myself your shield. And there is another
—which I am only sorry that I need your permission
and aid in averting.”

Zelie looked up inquiringly.

“Poverty—the grave of love—the palsy of the
heart—the oblivion of beauty and grace! To avert
this from you, I have a sacrifice to demand at your
hands.”

Again the count stopped in embarrassment almost
painful, and Mademoiselle Montalembert with difficulty
suppressed her impatience.

“My physicians tell me,” he resumed, in a tone
lower and calmer, “that my lease of life is wearing
rapidly to a close. A year hence lies its utmost and
inevitable limit. Could you live in the world, without
love, for one year, Zelie?”

“Monsieur!” was her surprised exclamation.

“Then listen to my proposal. I have a fortune
while I live, large enough for your most ambitious
desires. But it is left to me with conditions which
forbid my conveying it through any link save marriage,
and to my widow only for life. To give it
you, I regret deeply for your sake to say, I must wed
you. You start—do not answer me now. I leave you
to revolve this in your mind till to-morrow. Remember
that I shall not trouble you long, and that the
name of Montalembert is as noble as your own, and
that you require a year, perhaps more than a year, to
recover from your first dizzy gaze upon the world. I

shall put no restraint upon you. I have no wish but
to fulfil my duty to my dead comrade in arms, and to
die, knowing that you will well bestow your heart
when I am gone. Adieu!”

The count disappeared, and, with her clasped hands
pressed to her forehead, the novice paced the convent-parlor
until the refectory bell rang for dinner.

It was an evening of June, in the gardens of Versailles.
It was an evening of June, also, in the pest-house
of St. Lazarus, and in the cell of the condemned
felon in St. Pelagie. Time, even in his holyday dress,
visits indiscriminately—the levelling caitiff! Have the
unhappy any business with June?

But the gardens of Versailles were beginning to
illuminate, and the sky faded, with a glory more festal
than sunlight, with the radiance of a myriad of
glittering lamps, embellishing even the trees and flowers
beyond the meaning of nature. The work of the
architect and the statuary at once stood idealized, and
draped in an atmosphere of fairy-land, and the most
beautiful woman of the imperial court became more
beautiful as she stepped into the glare of the alley of
fountains. And who should that be—the fairest flower
of French nobility—but the young Countess Montalembert,
just blooming through the close of her first
year of wedlock!

The Count Montalembert stepped with her from the
shade of the orange-grove, and, without her arm, fell
behind scarce perceptibly, that he might keep his eye
filled with the grace of her motion, without seeming
to worship her before the world. With every salient
flow of that cloud-like drapery onward—with every
twinkling step of those feet of airy lightness—the dark
eyelashes beneath the soldier's brow lifted and drooped
again, as if his pulse of life and vision were alone
governed by her swan-like motion. The count had
forgotten that he was to die. The year allotted to
him by his physicians had passed, and, far from falling
gradually to his doom, his figure had straightened, and
his step grown firm, and his cheek and lip and eye had
brightened with returning health. He had drank life
from love. The superb Zelie had proved grateful and
devoted, and at the chateau of Montalembert, in
southern France, she had seemed content to live with
him, and him only, the most assiduous of nurses in
all her glorious beauty. But though this was Paradise
to the count, his reason, not his heart, told him
it was imprisonment to her, and he had now been a
month at the sumptuous court of Napoleon, an attendant
upon a wife who was the star of the time—the
beloved of all the court's gay beholders.

As the Montalemberts strolled toward the chateau,
which was now emitting floods of light from its many
windows, a young soldier, with a slight mustache just
shading his Grecian lip, joined them from a side-path,
and claimed the hand of the countess for a waltz.
The mercurial music at the same instant fled through
the air, and under an exclamation at its thrilling
sweetness, the countess concealed from her husband
an emotion which the trembling of her slight hand
betrayed instantly to her partner. With a bow of affected
gayety to the count, she quickened her pace,
and in another moment stood blushing in the dazzling
ring of waltzers, the focus herself of all eyes open to
novelty and beauty.

De Mornay, the countess's partner, was but an ensign
in the imperial guard. He had but his sword.
Not likely to be called handsome, or to be looked
upon as attractive or dangerous by any but the most
penetrating of his own sex, he had that philtre, that
inexplicable something, which at once commended
him to woman. His air was all earnest. The suppressed
devotion of life and honor breathed in his
voice. He seemed ever hiding his heart with pain—
shamed with betrayed adoration—calm by the force of
a respect that rebuked passion. He professed no gal
lantries. He professed nothing. His eyes alone, large,
steadfast, imploring, conveyed language of love. An
hour of that absorbing regard—an apparently calm,
unimpassioned hour of the intercourse common to
those newly met—sufficed to awaken in the bosom of
the countess an interest alarming to himself, and dangerous
to her content as the wife of another. Strange
she thought it, that, as the low and deferential tones
of De Mornay fell on her ear, they seemed to expel
from her heart all she had hitherto treasured—ambition
for the splendors of the court, passion for admiration,
and even her gratitude for her husband. A
hut in the forest, with De Mornay only, was the Paradise
now most present to the dreams and fancy of the
proud wife of Montalembert.

As his wife left him, the count thrust his hand into
his breast with a gesture of controlled emotion, and
turned aside, as if to seek once more the retired covert
he had left. But his steps were faltering. At the
entrance of the alley he turned again, and walking
rapidly to the chateau, entered the saloon trembling
to the measured motion of the dancers.

Waiting for an opportunity to float into the giddy
ring, De Mornay stood with his arm around the waist
of the countess. Montalembert's face flushed, but he
stepped to a column which supported the orchestra,
and looked on unobserved. Her transparent cheek
was so near to the lips of her partner, that his breath
must warm it. Her hand was pressed—ay, by the
bend of her gloved wrist, pressed hard—upon the
shoulder of De Mornay. Her bosom throbbed perceptibly
in its jewelled vest. She leaned toward him
with a slight sway of her symmetrical waist, and
away, like two smoke wreaths uniting, away in voluptuous
harmony of movement, gazing into each other's
eyes, murmuring inaudibly to the crowd—lips, cheeks,
and eyes, in passionate neighborhood—away floated
the wife and friend of Montalembert in the authorized
commerce of the gay world. Their feet chased each
other, advancing, retreating, amid the velvet folds of
her dress. Her waist was drawn close to his side in
the more exciting passages of the music. Her luxuriant
tresses floated from her temples to his. She
curved her swan-like neck backward, and, with a look
of pleasure, which was not a smile, gave herself up to
the thrilling wedlock of music and motion, her eyes
half-drooped and bathed in the eager gaze of De
Mornay's. Montalembert's face was pallid and his
eye on fire. The cold sweat stood on his forehead.
He felt wronged, though the world saw all. With his
concealed hand he clenched his breast till he drew
blood. There was a pause in the music, and with a
sudden agony at the thought of receiving his wife
again from the hands of De Mornay, Montalembert
fled on to the open air.

An hour elapsed.

“I ask a Heaven for myself, it is true, but not much
for you to give!” said a voice approaching through
the shadowy alley of the garden.

The count lay on the ground with his forehead
pressed to the marble pedestal of a statue, and he
heard, with the voice, the rustling of a female dress,
and the rattling of a sabre-chain and spurs.

“But one ringlet, sacred to me,” continued the
voice, in a tone almost feminine with its pleading earnestness;
“not given to me, no, no!—that were a
child's desire!—but mine, though still playing on this
ivory shoulder, and still lying neatly beneath that veined
temple—mine with your knowledge only, and
caressed and cared for, morn and night, with the
thought that it is mine! Oh, Zelie! there is no
wrong to Montalembert in this! Keep it from his
touch! Let him not breathe upon it! Let not the
wind blow that one ringlet toward him! And when it
kisses your cheek, and plays with the envied breeze
upon your bosom—think—think of the soul of De

Mornay, bound in it! Oh, God! why am I made
capable of love like this!”

There was no reply, and long ere Montalembert
had recovered from his amazement at these daring
words, the sound of their footsteps had died away.

Pass two years. It is enough to wait on Time in
the Present. In the Past and Future, the graybeard,
like other ministers out of place, must do without
usher and secretary.

It was a summer's noon on the Quai D'Orsay, of
Paris. The liveried lacqueys of the princely hotels
were lounging by the heavy gateways of stone, or
leaning over the massy parapet of the river. And,
true to his wont, the old soldier came with the noon,
creeping from the “Invalides,” to take his seat under
the carved lion of the Montalemberts. He had served
under the late count, and the memory of his house
was dear to the old veteran. The sabre-cut which had
disfigured his face, was received, he said, while fighting
between Montalembert and Flahault, and to see
the daughter of the one, and the gay heir of the
other's wife and fortune, he made a daily pilgrimage
to the Quai, and sat in the sun till the countess drove
out in her chariot.

By the will of the first husband of Zelie de Flahault,
the young De Mornay, to become her husband
and share her fortune, was compelled to take the
name and title of Count Montalembert, subject to the
imperial accord. Napoleon had given the rank unwillingly,
and as a mark of respect to the last will of
a brave man who had embellished the title—for the
eagle-eye of the Corsican read the soul of De Mornay
like an illuminated book, and knew the use he
would make of fortune and power.

In the quadrangle of the hotel Montalembert, there
were two carriage-landings, or two persons, and the
apartments were separated into two entirely distinct
establishments. In one suite the young count chose
to live at his pleasure, en garcon, and in the other the
mixed hospitalities of the house were given, and the
countess was there, and there only, at home. At this
moment the court was ringing with the merry laughter
of the count's convives, for he had a bachelor party
to breakfast, and the wine seemed, even at that early
hour of the day, to have taken the ascendant. The
carriages of the bacchanalians lined one side of the
court, and the modest chariot of the countess stood
alone at the door on the other; for it was near the
hour for promenade in the Champs Elysees.

It was an hour after noon when the countess descended.
She came slowly, drawing on her glove,
and the old soldier at the gate rose quickly to his feet,
and leaned forward to gaze on her. She had changed
since the death of her father's friend—the brave Montalembert,
to whom she owed her fortune. But she
was still eminently beautiful. Thought, perhaps sadness,
had dimmed to a sweet melancholy the bright
sparkle of her glance, and her mouth, no longer
fiercely spirited, was firm but gentle. Her curtains
of sable lashes moved languidly over her drooping
eye. She looked like one who was subdued in her
hopes, not in her courage, and like one who had shut
the door of her heart upon its unextinguishable fires
to let them burn on, but in secret. She was dressed
more proudly than gayly, and she wore upon her
breast one memorial of her first husband—his own
black cross that he had worn in battle, and in the few
happy days of his wedlock, and which he had sent her
from his death-bed.

At the moment the countess stepped from her
threshold, the door on the opposite side of the quadrangle
was thrown open, and, with a boisterous laugh,
the count sprang into his phaeton, calling to one of
his party to follow him. His companion shrank back
on seeing the countess, and in that moment's delay
the door of the carriage was closed and the coachman
ordered to drive on. The count's whip had waved
over his spirited horses, however, and as they stood
rearing and threatening to escape from their excited
master, his friend sprang to his side, the reins were
suddenly loosed, and with a plunge which threatened
to tear the harness from their backs, they leaped forward.
In the next moment, the horses of both vehicles
were drawn upon their haunches, half locked together
in the narrow gateway, and with a blow from the crutch
of the old veteran who rushed from the porter's lodge,
the phaeton was driven back against the wall, the pole
broken, and the count and his friend precipitated upon
the pavement. The liberated horses flew wildly
through the gate, and then followed a stillness like
that of midnight in the court—for on the pavement,
betrayed by her profusion of fair locks, loosened by
the fall, lay a woman in man's attire, the dissolute
companion of the count, in his daylight revel. Uninjured
himself, the count stood a moment, abashed
and motionless, but the old soldier, with folded arms
and the remnant of his broken crutch in his hand,
looked sternly on the scene, and as the servants started
from their stupor to raise the insensible woman,
the countess, reading her husband's impulse in his
looks, sprang from the open door of the chariot, and
interposed between him and his intended victim.
With the high-born grace of noble, the soldierly invalid
accepted her protection, and followed her to her
chariot; and, ordered to drive to the Hospital of the
Invalides, the coachman once more turned slowly to
the gateway.

The night following, at the opera. Paris was on
the qui vive of expectation, for a new prima donna
was to make her debut before the emperor.

Paris was also on the qui vive for the upshot of a
certain matter of scandal. The eclaircissement at the
hotel Montalembert had been followed, it is said, by
open war between the count and countess; and, determined
to carry out his defiance, the dissolute husband
had declared to his associates that he would
produce at the opera, in a box opposite to his wife,
the same person whose appearance she had resented,
and in the same attire. It was presumed, by the
graver courtiers who had heard this, that the actors in
this brutal scene, if it should be carried out, would be
immediately arrested by the imperial guard.

The overture commenced to a crowded house, and
before it was half played, the presence of the count
and his companion, in a conspicuous box on the left
of the circle, drew the attention of every eye. The
Montalemberts were the one subject of conversation.
The sudden disappearance of the old count, his death
in a distant province, his will relative to his widow and
De Mornay—all the particulars of that curious inheritance
of wife and fortune, by written testament—were
passed from lip to lip.

There was a pause at the close of the overture.
The house was silent, occupied partly in looking at
the audacious count and his companion, partly in
watching for the entrance of the injured countess.

A sudden light illuminated the empty box, shed
from the lobby lamps upon the curtains at the opening
of the door, and the Countess Montalembert entered,
with every eye in that vast assembly bent
anxiously upon her. But how radiantly beautiful,
and how strangely dressed! Her toilet was that of
a bride. Orange-flowers were woven into her long
raven tresses, and her robe of spotless white was folded
across her bust with the simplicity of girlhood. A
white rose-bud breathed on her bosom, and bracelets
of pearls encircled her wrists of alabaster. And her
smile, as she took her seat and looked around upon
her friends—oh! that was bridal too!—unlike any
look known lately upon her face—joyous, radiant,
blissful, as the first hour of acknowledged love. Never
had Zelie de Flahault looked so triumphantly

beautiful. The opera-glasses from every corner of the
house remained fixed upon her. A murmur arose
gradually, a murmur of admiration succeeding the
silent wonder of her first entrance; and but for the
sudden burst of music from the orchestra, heralding
the approach of the emperor, it would have risen into
a shout of spontaneous homage.

The emperor came in.

But who is there!—at the right hand of Napoleon
—smiled upon by the emperor, as the emperor seldom
smiled, decorated with the noblest orders of France—
a star on his breast?—Montalembert!

“Montalembert! Montalembert!” resounded from
a thousand voices.

Was he risen from the dead? Was this an apparition—the
indignant apparition of the first husband—
risen to rebuke the unmanly brutality of the second?
Would the countess start at the sight of him?

Look! she turns to the illuminated box of the emperor!
She smiles—with a radiant blush of joy and
happiness she smiles—she lifts that ungloved and
unjewelled hand, decorated only with a plain gold
ring, and waves it to the waved hand of Montalembert!—the
brave, true, romantic Montalembert. For,
with the quickness of French divination, the whole
story is understood by the audience. And there is
not a brain so dull as not to know, that the audacious
invalid veteran was the disguised count, watching over
the happiness of her whose destiny of love he had too
rashly undertaken to make cloudless—make cloudless
at the expense of a crushed heart, and a usurped hearth,
and a secret death and burial, if so much were necessary.

But he is a happy bridegroom now. And Adolphe
de Mornay is once more an untitled ensign—plucked
for ever from the chaste heart and bosom of the devoted
wife of Montalembert.

And Montalembert himself—whose springs of life
were fed only by love—died when that fountain of love
was broken; for his wife died in childbed one year
after his return to her, and he followed her in one day.
Never man was more loved than he. Surely never
man more deserved it.

A REVELATION OF A PREVIOUS LIFE.

The death of a lady, in a foreign land, leaves me at
liberty to narrate the circumstances which follow.

A few words of previous explanation, however.

I am inclined to believe, from conversations on the
subject with many sensible persons, that there are few
men who have not had, at different intervals in their
lives, sudden emotions, currents of thought, affections
of mind and body, which, not only were wholly disconnected
with the course of life thus interrupted, but
seemed to belong to a wholly different being.

Perhaps I shall somewhere touch the reader's experience
by describing rather minutely, and in the first
person, some sensations of this kind not unusual to
myself.

Walking in a crowded street, for example, in perfect
health, with every faculty gayly alive, I suddenly lose
the sense of neighborhood. I see—I hear—but I
feel as if I had become invisible where I stand, and
was, at the same time, present and visible elsewhere.
I know everything that passes around me, but I seem
disconnected and (magnetically speaking) unlinked
from the human beings near. If spoken to at such a
moment, I answer with difficulty. The person who
speaks seems addressing me from a world to which I
no longer belong. At the same time, I have an irresistible
inner consciousness of being present in another
scene of every-day life—where there are streets, and
houses, and people—where I am looked on without
surprise as a familiar object—where I have cares,
fears, objects to attain—a different scene altogether,
and a different life, from the scene and life of which I
was a moment before conscious. I have a dull ache
at the back of my eyes for the minute or two that this
trance lasts, and then, slowly and reluctantly, my
absent soul seems creeping back, the magnetic links
of conscious neighborhood, one by one, re-attach, and
I resume my ordinary life, but with an irrepressible
feeling of sadness.

It is in vain that I try to fix these shadows as they
recede. I have struggled a thousand times in vain to
particularize and note down what I saw in the strange
city to which I was translated. The memory glides
from my grasp with preternatural evasiveness.

In a book called “The Man of Two Lives,” similar
sensations to these are made the basis of the story.
Indeed, till I saw that book, the fear of having my
sanity suspected sealed my lips on the subject.

I have still a reserve in my confession. I have
been conscious, since boyhood, of a mental peculiarity
which I fear to name while I doubt that it is possessed
by others than myself—which I should not allude to
now, but that it forms a strange link of identity
between me and another being to be mentioned in this
story.

I may say, also, without attaching any importance
to it, except as it bears upon this same identity, that,
of those things which I have no occasion to be taught,
or which I did, as the common phrase is, by intuition,
drawing was the easiest and most passionately followed
of my boyish pursuits.

With these preliminaries, and probably some similar
experience of his own, the reader may happily form
a woof on which to embroider the following circumstances.

Travelling through Styria, some years since, I
chanced to have, for a fellow-occupant of the coupé
of a diligence, a very courteous and well-bred person, a
gentleman of Gratz. As we rolled slowly along on the
banks of the Muer, approaching his native town, he
very kindly invited me to remain with him a day or
two, offering me, as an inducement, a presentation at
the soirée of a certain lady of consequence, who was
to receive, on the night of our arrival, and at whose
house I should see some fair specimens of the beauty
of Styria.

Accepted.

It was a lovely summer's night, when we strolled
through the principal street toward our gay destination,
and as I drew upon my friend's arm to stop him
while the military band of the fortress finished a delicious
waltz (they were playing in the public square),
he pointed out to me the spacious balconies of the

countess's palace, whither we were going, crowded
with the well-dressed company, listening silently to
the same enchanting music. We entered, and after
an interchange of compliments with the hostess, I
availed myself of my friend's second introduction to
take a stand in one of the balconies beside the person I
was presented to, and under cover of her favor, to hear
out the unfinished music of the band.

As the evening darkened, the lights gleamed out
from the illuminated rooms more brightly, and most
of the guests deserted the balconies and joined the
gayer circles within. The music ceased at the beat
of the drum. My companion in the balcony was a
very quiet young lady, and, like myself, she seemed
subdued by the sweet harmonies we had listened to,
and willing to remain without the shadow of the curtain.
We were not alone there, however. A tall
lady, of very stately presence, and with the remains of
remarkable beauty, stood on the opposite side of the
balcony, and she, too, seemed to shrink from the glare
within, and cling to the dewy darkness of the summer
night.

After the cessation of the music, there was no
longer an excuse for intermittent conversation, and,
starting a subject which afforded rather freer scope, I
did my best to credit my friend's flattering introduction.
I had discoursed away for half an hour very
unreservedly, before I discovered that, with her hand
upon her side, in an attitude of repressed emotion, the
tall lady was earnestly listening to me. A third person
embarrasses even the most indifferent dialogue. The
conversation languished, and my companion rose and
took my arm for a promenade through the rooms.

Later in the evening, my friend came in search of
me to the supper-room.

“Mon ami!” he said, “a great honor has fallen out
of the sky for you. I am sent to bring you to the
beau reste of the handsomest woman of Styria—
Margaret, Baroness R—, whose chateau I pointed
out to you in the gold light of yesterday's sunset.
She wishes to know you—why I can not wholly divine—
for it is the first sign of ordinary feeling that she has
given in twenty years. But she seems agitated, and
sits alone in the countess's boudoir. Allons-y!”

As we made our way through the crowd, he hastily
sketched me an outline of the lady's history: “At
seventeen taken from a convent for a forced marriage
with the baron whose name she bears; at eighteen a
widow, and, for the first time, in love—the subject of
her passion a young artist of Vienna on his way to
Italy. The artist died at her chateau—they were to
have been married—she has ever since worn weeds
for him. And the remainder you must imagine—for
here we are!”

The baroness leaned with her elbow upon a small
table of or molu, and her position was so taken that I
seated myself necessarily in a strong light, while her
features were in shadow. Still, the light was sufficient
to show me the expression of her countenance.
She was a woman apparently about forty-five, of noble
physiognomy, and a peculiar fulness of the eyelid—
something like to which I thought I remembered to
have seen in a portrait of a young girl, many years
before. The resemblance troubled me somewhat.

“You will pardon me this freedom,” said the baroness
with forced composure, “when I tell you
that—a friend—whom I have mourned twenty-five
years—seems present to me when you speak.”

I was silent, for I knew not what to say. The baroness
shaded her eyes with her hand, and sat silent
for a few moments, gazing at me.

“You are not like him in a single feature,” she
resumed, “yet the expression of your face, strangely,
very strangely, is the same. He was darker—
slighter”—

“Of my age?” I inquired, to break my own silence.
For there was something in her voice which gave me
the sensation of a voice heard in a dream.

“Oh God! that voice! that voice!” she exclaimed
wildly, burying her face in her hands, and giving way
to a passionate burst of tears.

“Rodolph,” she resumed, recovering herself with
a strong effort, “Rodolph died with the promise on
his lips that death should not divide us. And I have
seen him! Not in dreams—not in revery—not at
times when my fancy could delude me. I have seen
him suddenly before me in the street—in Vienna—
here—at home at noonday—for minutes together,
gazing on me. It is more in latter years that I have
been visited by him; and a hope has latterly sprung
into being in my heart—I know not how—that in
person, palpable and breathing, I should again hold
converse with him—fold him living to my bosom.
Pardon me! You will think me mad!”

I might well pardon her; for, as she talked, a vague
sense of familiarity with her voice, a memory, powerful,
though indistinct, of having before dwelt on
those majestic features, an impulse of tearful passionateness
to rush to her embrace, well nigh overpowered
me. She turned to me again.

“You are an artist?” she said, inquiringly.

“No; though intended for one, I believe, by nature.”

“And you were born in the year —.”

“I was!”

With a scream she added the day of my birth, and
waiting an instant for my assent, dropped to the floor
and clung convulsively and weeping to my knees.

“Rodolph! Rodolph!” she murmured faintly, as
her long gray tresses fell over her shoulders, and her
head dropped insensible upon her breast.

Her cry had been heard, and several persons entered
the room. I rushed out of doors. I had need to be
in darkness and alone.

It was an hour after midnight when I re-entered my
hotel. A chasseur stood sentry at the door of my
apartment with a letter in his hand. He called me by
name, gave me his missive, and disappeared. It was
from the baroness, and ran thus:—

“You did not retire from me to sleep. This letter
will find you waking. And I must write, for my heart
and brain are overflowing.

“Shall I write to you as a stranger?—you whom I
have strained so often to my bosom—you whom I have
loved and still love with the utmost idolatry of mortal
passion—you who have once given me the soul that,
like a gem long lost, is found again, but in a newer
casket! Mine still—for did we not swear to love
for ever!

“But I am taking counsel of my own heart only.
You may still be unconvinced. You may think that
a few singular coincidences have driven me mad.
You may think that, though born in the same hour
that my Rodolph died, possessing the same voice, the
same countenance, the same gifts—though by irresistible
consciousness I know you to be him—my lost
lover returned in another body to life—you may still
think the evidence incomplete—you may, perhaps,
even now, be smiling in pity at my delusion. Indulge
me one moment.

“The Rodolph Isenberg whom I lost, possessed a
faculty of mind, which, if you are he, answers with the
voice of an angel to my appeal. In that soul resided,
and wherever it be, must now reside, the singular
power”

(The reader must be content with my omission of
this fragment of the letter. It contained a secret
never before clothed in language—a secret that will die
with me, unless betrayed by what indeed it may lead
to—madness! As I saw it in writing—defined accurately
and inevitably in the words of another—I felt as

if the innermost chamber of my soul was suddenly
laid open to the day—I abandoned doubt—I answered
to the name by which she called me—I believed in the
previous existence of which my whole life, no less than
these extraordinary circumstances, had furnished me
with repeated evidence. But, to resume the letter.)

Circumstances compelled me to read this letter
with but one feeling, exquisite pain! Love lasts till
death, but it is mortal! The affections, however
intense and faithful (I now know), are part of the
perishable coil, forgotten in the grave. With the
memory of this love of another life, haunting me
through my youth, and keeping its vow of visitation,
I had given the whole heart of my second youth to
another. Affianced to her, waited for by her, bound
to her by vows which death had not divided, I had but
one course to pursue. I left Gratz in an hour, never
to return.

A few days since I was walking alone in the
crowded thoroughfare of the city where I live. Suddenly
my sense of presence there fell off me. I
walked on, but my inward sight absorbed all my consciousness.
A room which was familiar to me shut
me in, and a bed hung in mourning became apparent.
In another instant a figure laid out in a winding-sheet,
and partially covered with a velvet pall, grew distinct
through the dimness, and in the low-laid head I recognised,
what a presentiment had already betrayed to
me, the features of Margaret, Baroness R—. It
will be still months before I can see the announcement
of her death. But she is dead.