University of Virginia Library

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.