In leaving Cologne for Aix-la-Chapelle you turn your back to
the river—a particular which suited my mood well enough.
The railway bore us away from the Rhine-shore at an abrupt
angle, and in my notion the noble Germanic goddess or image
seemed at this point to recede with grand theatric strides,
like a divinity of the stage backing away from her admirers
over the billowy whirlpool of her own skirts. As I dreamed we
penetrated the tunnel of Königsdorf, which is fifteen
hundred yards long, and which seemed to me sufficiently
protracted to contain the slumber of Barbarossa. The thought
gave me a useful hint, and I fell into a light sleep, while
Charles and Hohenfels pervaded the darkness merely by their
perfumes—the former with whiffs at a concealed bottle of
Farina, the latter with a pastille counterfeiting the incense
of the cathedral. In a couple of hours from the Hôtel de
Hollande we reached Aachen, as the fond natives call the burgh
so dear to Charlemagne. Deprived of that
[pg 10] magnificent mirror, the
Rhine, the pretty towns throughout this part of Germany seem
but like country belles. We should hardly have paused at Aix
but for the sake of affording a rest to Charles, who grew
worse whenever lunch-time competed with railway-time. As for
the dull little city, for us it was a wilderness, with the
blank cleanliness of the desert, except in so far as it was
informed and populated by the memory of Charlemagne.

THE THRONED CORPSE.

Here he died, and entered his tomb in the church himself had
founded. Into this sepulchre the emperor Otho III. dared to
penetrate in the year 997, impelled by a motive of vile and
varlet-like curiosity. They say the dead monarch confronted his
living visitor in the great marble chair in which he had been
seated at his own command, haughty and inflexible as in life,
the ivory sceptre in his ivory fingers, his white skull crowned
with the diadem of gold. The peeping emperor looked upon him
with awe, half afraid of the mysterious and penetrating shadows
that reached forth out of his rayless eyes. Before he left,
however, he peered about, touched the sceptre and the throne,
fingered this and that, and having, as it were, trimmed the
nails and combed the beard of the great spectre, retired with a
valet’s bow. Observing that Charlemagne had lost most of his
nose, he caused it to be replaced in gold very delicately
chiseled and enchased. The sacrilege was repeated by Frederick
Barbarossa in 1165, who went farther and forced Charlemagne to
get up from his chair before him. The corpse, in rising, fell
in pieces, which have been dispersed through Europe as relics.
We saw such of them as remain here at the Chapelle. I was
allowed, for about the equivalent of an American dollar, to
measure the Occidental emperor’s leg—they call it his
arm. And then, as a makeweight in the bargain, the venal
sacristan placed in my hands the head of Charlemagne.

I thought Hohenfels would have sunk to the ground with
disgust. He colored deeply and dragged me into the air. “I am
ashamed of every drop of German blood in my veins,” he cried.
“What are we to think of the commerce of these wretches, for
whom the very wounds of Cæsar are the lips of a
money-box?”

I had given back the skull, as Hamlet returns the skull of
Yorick to the grave-digger, and was dusting my fingers with a
handkerchief, as hundreds of Hamlets have dusted theirs. I
said, “‘Thrift, thrift, Horatio.'”

“At Kreutzberg there are twenty monks on the counter! This
morning, at St. Ursula’s, it was the eleven thousand virgins,
their skulls ranged like Dutch cheeses above our heads or in
rows around the walls, with a battery-full of them in the
neighboring apartment, like a cheesemonger’s reserved magazine.
[pg 11] Here, the very leader of
modern ideas, the creator of our form of civilization, is
shown for so many pennies to any grocer who wants to weigh
the head of a king! Profanation! Barbarians!
Philistines!”

THE SKELETON IN
ARMOR.

I turned rather hastily, while my hands were yet clammy with
the skull, thinking that this accusation of Philistinism was
aimed at me. But Hohenfels thought of nothing less than of a
personality, being in his cloudiest mood of generalization. So
I only concealed the handkerchief, while I said, as easily as I
might, “You need not accuse your German blood, for I have lived
long enough in my American’s Paradise to know that civilized
Paris is considerably worse in this particular respect, with
the addition of a certain goblin levity particularly French.
How often have I seen babies frightened by the skulls in the
dentists’ windows, with their cynical chewing action! It is
said that a child sat next a dentist’s apprentice once in an
omnibus, and was observed to turn rigid, fixed and white, but
unable to speak: he had sat on one of these skulls, and it had
bitten him. Silver-mounted skulls set as goblets, in imitation
of Byron, are to be seen at any of the china-shops rubbing
against the chaste cheeks of the old maid’s teacup. Skeletons
are sold, bleached and with gilded hinges, to the medical
students, who buy the pale horrors as openly as meerschaum
pipes. Have I not often found young Grandstone supping among
his doctors’ apprentices of the Ober restaurant after
theatre-hours, a skeleton in the corner filled with umbrellas
like a hall-rack, and crowned with the triple or quintuple
tiara of the girls’ best bonnets? Ay, Mimi Pinson’s cap has
known what it is to perch on the bony head of Death. The
juxtaposition is but an emblem. The sewing-girl, like Hood’s
shirtmaker, scarcely fears the ‘phantom of grisly bone.’ Poor
Francine! where have you taken your artisanne’s cap to,
I wonder? Are you left alone, all alone again, and thinking of
the pretty solitude you have left behind you at Carlsruhe? Who
uses those polished keys now?”

Hohenfels interrupted me, complaining that my monologue was
uninteresting and diffuse, and was interfering with the railway
time-table. But I finished it in the car: “And the railway!
What has a person of fixed and independent habits to do with
railways but to growl at them? Before I was tempted upon the
railway by that impertinent engineer at Noisy, I got up and sat
down when I liked, ate wholesome food at my own hours, and was
contented at home. Confusion to him who made me the victim of
his engineering calculations!
[pg 12] Confusion to Grandstone and
his nest of serpents at Épernay! Did they not
introduce me to Fortnoye, who has doubly destroyed my peace?
Where are the conspirators, that I may pulverize them with
my maledictions?”

BRUSSELS.

This question—which Hohenfels called peevish as he
buried himself in his book—was not answered until we had
passed Verviers, Chaudfontaine and Liège. I was aroused
from a sulky slumber in the station at Brussels by Hohenfels,
who said, in his musical scolding way, like the busy wheeze of
a clicking music-box, “You may say what you like, with your
left-handed flatteries, in regard to Fortnoye, and you may
praise Ariadnes and widows to the end of the chapter. You are
sorry at this moment not to be at Épernay to see the
destroyer of your peace married: you had rather assist at the
making of a wife than at the making of a widow.”

I was just sending Fortnoye to the gloomiest shades of
Acheron when a strong hand entered the carriage-door, helped me
handsomely down the steps, and then began warmly to shake my
own. Fortnoye!—Fortnoye in flesh and blood was before me.
While my mouth was yet filled with maledictions he began to
pour out a storm of thanks with all his own particular warmth,
expressing the most effusive gratitude for the trouble I had
taken in forsaking my route to be his wife’s bridesmaid. That
is what he called it. “She has but one other,” said Fortnoye.
At the same time I began to recognize other faces not unknown
to me, crudely illuminated by the raw colors of the
railway-lights. They all had black wedding-suits and enormous
buttonhole nosegays of orange-flowers. I picked them out, with
a particular recognition for each: ’twas the civil engineer of
Noisy; the short gentleman named Somerard; James Athanasius
Grandstone, with his saintly aureole upon him in the shape of a
Yankee wide-awake; the nameless mutes, or rather chorus, of the
champagne-crypt; in short, my nest of serpents in all its
integrity. Still entangled with my slumbers, I hesitated to
respond to the friendly hands that were everywhere thrust
centripetally toward me.

I looked blackly at Hohenfels. He was chuckling.

At Heidelberg, making the acquaintance of M. Fortnoye
contemporaneously with my departure, he had become more
enthralled than he ever confessed to this radiant
traveler—whom he called a
[pg 13] packman, but regarded as a
Mercury—and his pretty scheme of matrimony in motion.
Even now, if I can believe my eyes, he goes up to the
“vintner” and “peddler” of his objurgations, and meekly
whispers into his ear with the air of a conspirator
reporting a plot to his chief. Having engaged to produce me
at the wedding of Fortnoye, and finding me unexpectedly
recusant, he had adopted a little stratagem for bringing me
to the scene while thinking to escape from it.

“Thou too, Brutus!” I said, and gave it up. It only remained
for me to return all round, after five minutes of petrified
stupidity, the hand-grasps that had been offered from every
quarter of the compass-box.

Next morning, at an early hour, I was interrupted by a
knock, just as Charles had buttoned my gaiters and the young
man from the perruquier’s (who had stolen in with that air of
delicacy and of almost literary refinement which belongs to his
gentle profession) had lathered me. A nick he gave my chin at
the shock made my countenance all argent and gules, and the
visitor entering saw me thus emblazoned, while the barber and
Charles, “like two wild men supporters of a shield,” could only
stare at the untimely apparition.

“Do you know him, Charles?” I asked, not recognizing my
guest, and putting over my painted face a mask of wet
toweling.

“I know him intimately,” replied my jester-in-ordinary: “I
would thank Monsieur Paul just to tell me his name. Do you
remember, monsieur, a sort of beggar, with a wagon and a
stylish horse and a pretty wife, who limped a bit with his
right hand, or perhaps his left hand? Does monsieur know what I
mean? He used to come and see us at Passy; and monsieur even
had some traffic with him in a little matter of two
chickens.”

“Father Joliet!” I cried.

“Present!” shouted the personage thus designated at my
appeal to his name. I turned round, toweled, and he grasped my
hands. The unusual hour, appropriate as I supposed only to some
porter or other stipendiary visitor of my hotel, caused to
shine out with startling refulgence the morning splendors in
which Papa Joliet had arrayed himself. He wore a courtly dress,
appropriate to the most formal possible ceremony; his black
suit was glossy; his hat was glossy; his varnished pumps were
more than glossy—they were phosphorescent. Gloves only
were wanting to his honest hands.

PERRUQUIER.

Soaped, napkined and generally extinguished, I could only
stammer, “You here in Brussels? What a droll meeting!”

“Wherefore droll?” asked Joliet, with a huge surprise, which
lasted him all through his next sentence. “I come here to marry
my daughter. Everything is ready; we count on your presence at
the wedding; the lawyer has drawn up the contract; and the
breakfast is now cooking at the best restaurant in the
place.”

“Francine’s wedding, my dear Joliet!” I exclaimed. And,
going back to my apprehensions at her furtive disappearance
from Carlsruhe, and to my conjectures of some amorous mystery
between her and her Yankee traducer, Kraaniff, I added gravely,
“It is very
creditable!”

[pg 14]

“How, creditable—and droll?” repeated the honest man,
evidently much surprised at my own accumulating surprises. “Did
not you hear?”

FATHER JOLIET.

“Not the faintest word,” I said, “but I am none the less
gratified to find this affair ending, as it should, in the
presence of a lawyer. As for your wedding-invitation, my good
friend, you are a little tardy in delivering it, for it is
exactly to-day that I am obliged to attend at the marriage of
one of my friends, M. Fortnoye.”

“Ah, that is a good joke!” cried Joliet, breaking into an
explosion of laughter and clapping me pleasantly on the
shoulder—an action which caused a slight frown on the
part of Charles. “You always would have your jest, Monsieur the
American! Tease me and scare me as much as you like: I like
these hoaxes better before a wedding than after. Hold that,” he
added, extending his hand as if it were a piece of
merchandise.

I “held” it, and he went on, dwelling slowly on his words:
“If you are at Henri Fortnoye’s wedding you will be at Francine
Joliet’s also, for both of these persons are to be married at
one church.”

“Impossible!” I exclaimed, dropping the hand and stepping
back.

“What! again?” said Joliet, his manly face visibly
darkening. “Droll! and creditable! and impossible! Why
impossible?” Then he dropped his head and looked angrily at the
floor. “Ah, yes, even you,” he said, his eyes still fixed on
the boards, “believed that a French girl, trained as French
girls are trained, would flirt and expose herself to remark;
and all on account of such a man as your compatriot, the other
American! Well! well! you ought to know your countrymen
best.”

“I know of no harm,” I interposed hastily. “I should always
have thought Kraaniff hard to swallow as a mere matter of
taste. I can but recollect, Father Joliet,” I went on more
seriously, “that the last time I met you you begged me not to
talk of Francine if I would not break your heart. I have to add
to this the news brought me from Heidelberg, that this Kraaniff
was a serpent who had fascinated some young girl for an
approaching meal.—How dare you, Charles,” I cried
suddenly, recalled to the consciousness of his presence by this
souvenir of his oratory, “stand here staring? Show the young
man out directly, and pay him.”

I will not answer for Charles’s having got much farther away
than the door. Joliet continued: “But his aunt knows him now
for what he is. Kraaniff, say you? I call him Kranich, though
he had better change his baptismal record than disgrace one of
the best names in Brussels.”

THE CATECHISM.

“Frau Kranich, then, my old friend, is really his aunt?”

“Madame Kranich, whom I have
[pg 15] known in your parlor, is
really Francine’s godmother. Did you never know of all her
secret kindness? That rigid lady would commit a perjury to
deny one of her own good actions. Young Kranich has written
her a letter confessing his lies. Don’t you know? The very
same day when you were determined to fight him in a
duel—”

“Certainly, certainly,” I said, a little confused. “We will
change the subject and leave my ferocity alone. Let us
understand one another. In regard to Fortnoye’s marriage, was
there not some talk of a Madame Ashburleigh?”

“I believe you. Madame Ashburleigh is the very key of the
manoeuvre. Madame Ashburleigh—don’t you
perceive?—lost a child.”

“For that matter, she has lost four. I know the lady
confidentially, and she told me their histories and present
address. Lucia lies in Glasgow, Hannibal at Nice, and Waterloo
sleeps somewhere hereabout, as well as another nameless little
dear.”

“She is a good woman. She has collected all her proofs, and
has come hither with them voluntarily—has perhaps already
arrived. Brussels, where two of her marmots rest, is one of her
most frequent stations. That censorious Madame Kranich made a
scene, but she had to yield to conviction.”

“A censorious Madame Kranich! Is the young duelist
married?”

“What? No, no! It is Francine’s guardian I speak of. Of late
years she has become a sort of Puritan abbess, seeking the
Protestant society which abounds in Belgium, and lamenting her
husband, whom they say she used to drug with opium.”

“Then is she not Kranich’s aunt?”

“Oh yes, an aunt by marriage; but he is not her nephew: I
will die before I call him so.”

FRAU KRANICH.

“Listen,” said I, “Father Joliet. You are as full of
information as an oracle, but you are not coherent. This month
past I have been hunting down a chimaera, a hydra with a dozen
heads: each head shows me by turn the portrait of Fortnoye, or
Francine, or yourself, or Kranich, or Mrs. Ashburleigh. Ever
since Noisy I have been meandering through the folds of a
mystery. My head is turning with it. If you want to save me
from distraction, sit down in this chair and answer me a long
catechism, without saying a word but in reply to my
questions.”

“I am sure I talk as plain as a professor. Look! You
frightened me at first with your doubts and your
impossibilities. You have only to make Kranich’s aunt agree
with Francine’s guardian, and at the same time forgive
Francine’s husband for having assumed the undertaker’s bill for
Madame Ashburleigh’s baby.”

“Yes, yes, my dear Joliet, you are clearer than Euclid.” And
I administered a category of questions. Joliet, with his
fatherly joy bursting out of him in the longest of parentheses,
kept quiet in his refulgent shoes and answered as well as he
could.

“TO MY ARMS.”

Francine, he protested, had never been
[pg 16] a flirt (I have met no
Frenchmen who were ignorant of that one English word, to
which they give a new value by pronouncing it in a very
orotund manner, as flort). When she came to be ten or
twelve, Frau Kranich—until then a well-preserved
lioness with an appetite for society—ceased to give
her dolls and promised to give her an education. At the same
time, the banker’s widow left Paris, and repaired with her
charge to Brussels, where the little girl received some good
half-Jesuitical, half-English schooling, of the kind
suggested in the Brontë novels. Her diploma attained,
Francine begged to accompany her English teacher back to
London: she wished to become a meess, she said, and
be competent to teach like a new Hypatia. She had hardly
bidden her kind protectress adieu when Frau Kranich’s nephew
arrived at Brussels, exceedingly dissatisfied with his
American business in the bar-rooms of the grand duke of
Mississippi. A sordid jealousy of Mademoiselle Joliet’s
claims upon his aunt took possession of this prudent spirit.
He took up a watch-post at a university town on the Rhine.
He began to whisper vague exaggerations of her coquetries
and liveliness, which the Protestant circle that revolved
about Madame Kranich did not fail to bear in to her. This
lady admired her nephew, sure that his want of manners was
the sign of a noble frankness. She wrote to Francine,
bidding her come immediately from London. The girl not
replying, the hopeful nephew was put upon her track. He went
away. His letters from England reported that Francine was no
longer in that country, but was probably come back to
Belgium, “I know not in what suburb of Brussels our very
independent miss may this instant be hiding,” he wrote.

About the same time, in the circle of French exiles at
Brussels, a young romantique named Fortnoye was reported
as weeping and lavishing statues over the grave of an unknown
infant in the churchyard at Laaken. It was a delicious mystery.
Kind meddlers approached the sexton, who said that all he knew
of the babe’s mother was that she was a beautiful lady from
London. Kranich carried the story dutifully to his aunt, adding
his own ingenious surmise: “Can Francine have become
sufficiently Anglicised to contract secret marriages with
roving revolutionists, and scamper about the country with
ardent young Frenchmen in the style of Gretna Green?” In fact,
it was really from London that Mrs. Ashburleigh was proceeding,
for the purpose of taking care, in the Rhenish city where he
was dying, of her handsome, dissipated, worthless husband.
Taken suddenly ill at Brussels, she left her infant to the
unequaled chill of a strange, unknown cemetery, hastening
thence with tears and despair to the bedside where duty called
her.

Has my reader forgotten the dim, tear-swollen story which I
heard—not at all improved in the telling—from my
generous young friend Grandstone—how an impulsive
Frenchman had laid to rest, in flowers and evergreens, the
unnamed baby of a woman he had never seen? Jealous as I was of
Fortnoye, I never could think without tenderness of this
singular action. To make the tomb of this helpless Innocence
the young man braved the curiosity of his
comrades—despised the rumor, the obloquy, and, hardest of
all, the jests. Well has the wise dramatist decided that
Ophelia must needs be laid in Yorick’s
bed!

[pg 17]

Poor Francine, gay, frivolous, innocently vain of her little
travesty of English behavior, found her accomplishments and
graces received by her guardian’s circle with incomprehensible
coldness. Hurt and humiliated, she asked to pay a visit to her
father. The honest rustic received her with a miserable
confusion of doubt and severity, for her escapade to England
had never pleased him, and her return from her godmother’s home
wore to him the air of a repudiation. At her father’s house,
however, she was discovered by Fortnoye, who had never heard
the ingenious Kranich’s theory of his own private wedding with
Francine, and who thought to find in her the veiled unknown of
the cemetery. He saw for the first time, in the flowery home at
Noisy, that fresh ingenuous beauty, a little over-cast with
disappointment. His generous nature was touched; and, with his
talent for administration and planning, he conceived the idea
of establishing Francine in the pretty bird’s nest at
Carlsruhe, distant alike from the strongholds of her
calumniators, Belgium and France.

THE FUTURE OF
FFARINA.

Fortnoye now had an object in life. “There is a very young
person in the cemetery of Laaken who is much in need of a
chaperone,” he said. The frank proofs of his own relations with
this churchyard would not only do credit to his own reputation,
but would gratify the best friends of Mademoiselle Joliet and
at least one other lady. To attain these proofs he had to step
over the coiling, writhing bodies of a whole nest of rumors.
When he seized by the throat the especial slander that he
himself was the husband of the babe’s mother, he found written
on its crest the signature of John Kranich. He sought the aunt.
This lady gave him several interviews, the Lutheran prayer-book
for ever in her hand. “Why does the dear girl not come to me?”
she would say, weeping, but she refused to hear a word against
her precious nephew, the personification of bluff frankness. As
if to make crushing him impossible, young Kranich had now
withdrawn to America, leaving his reputation in that best
possible protection, the chivalry that is extended toward the
absent. Fortnoye was baffled. “I will ask the baby at its tomb
for its mother’s and father’s name,” he cried. In the pretty
God’s Acre he found a fresh harvest of flowers and a new statue
over the well-known grave. It was a pretty miniature of
Thorwaldsen’s Psyche, on which the proud copyist had inscribed
his name. A respectful correspondence with Mrs. Ashburleigh, to
whom he was guided by the sculptor, and who was now taking the
waters at Wildbad, soon put the whole tangled story to rights.
Fortnoye had the happiness of conducting Francine, by this time
his affianced wife, to the good Frau Kranich, who, convinced
that she had wrongly judged her, threw her arms ardently around
her recovered jewel, letting the eternal little book fly from
her hand like a projectile.

“But the most singular part of the story,” concluded Father
Joliet, “is the [pg 18] letter which Fortnoye, after
two or three quarrels, forced out of young Kranich when the
latter had returned to Europe, full of triumph and debts, to
take possession of his aunt for the rest of his life. Here
it is,” added the good man, opening a pocket-book. “The
hand-writing is drunken, but the sense is clear as
Seltzer-water. The scholars tell me in vino veritas
est, but it appears to me that truth really comes out in
the repentance and headache that follow.”

HOHENFELS’ FAILURE.

“MY DEAR AUNT” (ran the letter which Charles had seen forced
from the alligator after his unlucky game of dominoes): “You
have known me as the soul of candor. It is this happy quality
which compels me to state (for I am something of a Rousseau)
that if I ever playfully accused your pretty pet Francine of
being a flirt, I knew nothing about it. The best proof is that
she absolutely refused to join her expectations with mine,
though I am something of an Adonis. If you believed that she
and the wine-peddler had made a match, I pity your credulity
and ignorance of human nature. I am certain that neither the
peddler nor myself would touch the enterprise until you had
shown exactly what you would (pecuniarily) do. For my part, I
have acted throughout on the most exact and advanced scientific
principles. Intending to modify the spirit-trade in America,
and especially to introduce the exclusive agency of the Farina
essences, I found that the sinew particularly needed for this
leap was capital. Desiring to absorb your bounties toward
Francine, I at first proposed matrimony. This offer was made
without any enmity toward the girl, as my next move was without
affection, though it seems to be resulting to her benefit. I
became her accuser as coolly as I had been her lover. Passion
has nothing to do with the combinations of strategic genius: I
am something of a Washington. My theory of her clandestine
marriage was one of the most masterly fictions of the
age—a plot worthy of Thackeray. If I could have succeeded
in mutilating the statue in the graveyard, I might have carried
it, while you would have admired my act of iconoclasm with all
your Puritan nature. In the momentary abandonment of my plans,
owing to the machinations of my enemies, you will conceive that
I am not very rich. My college-debts and other expenses I am
obliged to leave for your kind attention. The main point of
this letter, which M. Fortnoye has persuaded me to set down as
distinctly as in my present feeble state I can, is that
Francine is a pretty little maid who has never passed by Gretna
Green. There! that is my credo, and I will subscribe to
it,

“Your loving nephew, JOHN.

“P. S. Address, with such an enclosure as your generosity
will prompt, JEAN K. FFARINA, sole representative and
cosmetical chemist in America on behalf of the Farinas of
Cologne, at New Orleans [pg 19] where I am going to beat my
adversaries like Old HIC—”

At this point the tipsy scrawl became illegible.

“This is not a very handsome apology. Did Fortnoye accept
it?” I asked, turning over the clammy and malodorous epistle.
At this inquiry the crack of the door widened and Charles
appeared, on fire with enthusiasm, and so possessed with
self-importance that he forgot the betrayal of his
indiscretion.

“I can reply to that question,” said Charles. “When M.
Fortnoye received the paper from the duelist he read it over
and said, ‘You have meant to impose on me, monsieur, with an
incomplete confession. But, in return for your imperfect
restoration of Mademoiselle Joliet’s portrait, you have
unconsciously set down such a masterpiece of yourself that I am
certain your aunt will see you as she never did before.'”

Charles, having thus added himself to our cabal without
rebuke, took a lively interest in what followed. The proud
father continued: “My son-in-law, after some business
preliminaries, wrote me a handsome letter demanding what he had
already effectively possessed himself of. I wrote to Francine,
already returned to her duties, to be a good girl and make her
husband obey her in all things.”

“That may have been,” said I, “what made Francine take to
laughing all day and all night, as I heard she did some little
time after my departure from her house. The next news of her,”
I pursued, “was that she had been spirited away by some sly old
kidnapper. I almost suspected Kranich.”

“The old kidnapper,” said Joliet, laughing heartily at the
compliment, “is the man now talking to you. I wanted to take
Francine to her godmother. I turned the key in the door at
Carlsruhe, set the geographers all upon their travels to
explore new worlds, and we have been living ever since quite
close to Madame Kranich, who treats me like an emperor.”

It was easy now to understand why the young Kranich, as soon
as he could identify me as a protector of Francine, had been
thrown off his guard and tempted to attack me with his clumsy
abuse. It was not very mysterious, even, why he had wished all
handsome girls to be drowned in the Rhine. For him a pretty
damsel was simply a rival in trade.

READING THE
CONTRACT.

Had I stopped at Wildbad with the party of orpheonists, I
should have encountered rather sooner the fatal beauties of
Mary Ashburleigh. It was to meet her that Fortnoye had paused
at that resort, considering her introduction to Frau Kranich
almost indispensable to the success of his scheme. She had no
hesitation in following the protecting angel of her lost child.
“My object in this journey is a happy marriage,” she had told
me when to my unworthy care her guardianship had been
transferred. If I timorously suspected the marriage to be her
own, whose fault was it but mine? My heart leaped up at the
successive stages of this recital, its hopes
[pg 20] confirmed by every additional
fact: the Dark Ladye’s hand was certainly free. Fortnoye, I
should surmise, was not too desirous to abandon this
magnificent companion at Schwetzingen; but the serpent, he
knew, was left behind, in company with two or three of his
and my friends: it was necessary to take the youth by the
ear, as it were, and dismiss him from the country, without
loss of time, to his future of counter-jumping. His dueling
experience may be of some use to him among the bowie-knives
of Louisiana. If his subsequent path is not strewn with
roses, let him rejoice that it is at least lubricated with
cologne-water.

INTERRUPTED REPOSE.

An hour had passed, and into my room from his own adjoining
one now ambled amicably my friend the baron. He greeted Joliet
as an old friend. Many a smoking-match had they had in my
garden at Marly. But Hohenfels this morning was in robes of
state, with shoes that shone even beside old Father Joliet’s,
and as a concession to elegance he had abandoned his cavernous
pipes in favor of cigarettes. A scroll of this description,
flavored with his Cologne pastille and very badly rolled, was
trying to exhale itself between his lips.

“What a genius for conversation you have to-day, my
Flemming! This hour I have rocked back and forth in bed, trying
to understand your observations or to cover my ears and go to
rest. Your tongue has been like the tongue of a monastery-bell
summoning all hands to penance.” But I had hardly spoken ten
consecutive words. The ears of the baron were this morning
quite muffled, I think, with the abundance of his hair, which
he had evidently been dressing with an avalanche of soap and
water, for the topknot was as harsh and tight as a felt. He had
lemon-blossoms on his lappel and lemon kids on his fists.

It was then I remembered that my bags were all in the
steamer, where I had left them when surprised by Charles’s
indisposition. My tin box would possibly yield me a
button-nosegay, but otherwise I might beat my breast, like the
wedding-guest in the Ancient Mariner, for I heard the
summons and was unable to attend in right attire. “We two must
take you out in the street and dress you,” said Hohenfels.

Although I had never been dressed in the street, I yielded.
It was a grand public holiday, and the sounds of festivity,
which had floated into my chamber with the entrance of
Hohenfels, were in full cadence outside. Everybody was pouring
out to the city-gate, or returning from thence, where, in honor
of some visit from the king of the Belgians and count and
countess of Flanders, a festival was going on in imitation or
rehearsal of the grand annual kermesse. These festivals,
retained in Belgium with a delightful fidelity to the customs
of antique Brabant, would fit the brush of Teniers better than
the pen of a mere bewildered tourist. Still, I will try,
copying principally from the reports of Charles (who contrives
to peep at everything, with an interest whose amount is in
ratio with the square of his distance from his master), to give
a few features of the scene, which he spread in detail before
the attentive Josephine during many an evening after.

COALS vs. COATS

The principal fair-ground—though the
[pg 21] occasion crammed the whole
city with revelers—was just outside the gate. It was a
veritable town in miniature, with a pattern of checker-board
streets—Columbine street, Polichinelle street, Avenue
des Parades, Place des Parades, Street of the Chanson, and
the like. There were more than five hundred booths, all
numbered—shops and restaurants. There were the Salon
Curtius, the Ménagerie Bidel, the Bal Mabille, the
Café Bataclan, the American Tavern. From one of the
little costumers’ shops, Charles—with a higher
evincement of antiquarian taste than I should have
expected—managed to bear away a pattern of wall-paper,
which I afterward conferred on Mary Ashburleigh with great
applause: it was Parisian of 1824, the epoch of Charles Dix,
and was entirely covered with giraffes in honor of that
puissant and elegant monarch. The above establishments were
near the entrance, to the right.

At the left were more attractions: another menagerie, a heap
of ostensible gold representing the five milliards paid by
France, a gallery of astonished wax soldiers representing the
Franco-Prussian war, a cook-shop with “mythologic”
confectionery. Farther on, in the Théâtre Casti,
was exposed the “renowned buffoon Peppino,” breveted by His
Majesty the “king of Egypt;” then came the Chiarini Theatre;
then the Théâtre Adrien Delille, an enchantingly
pretty structure, where receptions were given by a little
creature who should have sat under a microscope: she was “the
Princess Felicia, aged thirteen, born at Clotat, near
Marseilles, weighing three kilogrammes and measuring forty-six
centimètres—a ravishing figure, admirably
proportioned in her littleness and tout à fait
sympathique!”

The announcements were heard, it was thought by Charles, to
the very centre of the city. A low-browed animal with rasped
hair was shouting, “Messieurs and ladies, come and
see—come and see the theatre of the galleys! The only one
in the world! This is the place to view the real instruments of
torture used on the prisoners—-chains four yards long and
balls of thirty-five pounds. All authentic, gentlemen and
ladies. You will see the poisoners of Marseilles, Grosjon who
killed his father, Madame Cottin who ate her baby. Come in,
come in, gentlemen and ladies! Fifteen centimes! ‘Tis given
away! You enter and go out when you like. Come in! It is
educational: you see vice and crime depicted on the faces of
the criminals!”

THE JESTER AT THE
FEAST.

In another place a malicious Flemish Figaro explained the
analogy betwen een spinnekop and eene meisie, the
perspiration streaming over his face; and my ancient
minnesinger’s blood stirred within me at the report of the
pleasantries which were improvised by this Rabelais of the
people, and I remembered that I too was a Flemming.

The bands belonging to the different booths tried to play
each other down, forming a stupefying charivari, with tributary
processions that quite overflowed the city. The house of
“confections” yielded me no broadcloth of a cut or dimension
suitable to my figure. But my two friends chose me a hat, a
light pale-tot (my second purchase in that sort on this
eventful journey), a scented cambric handkerchief, a rosebud,
and a snowy waistcoat, in which, as in a whited sepulchre, I
concealed the decay of my toilet. These changes were judged to
be sufficient for my accoutrement. They might have done very
well, but on my way back I paused at a lace-shop window to
inspect some present for Francine. A band, with many banners
and figures in [pg 22] masquerade, swept past,
followed by a shouting crowd. My friends lost me in a
moment, and I lost my way. I turned into a street which I
was sure led to the hotel, gave it up for another, lost that
in a blind alley, and finally brought up in a steep, narrow
cañon, where I was forced to ask a direction. The
passer-by who obliged me was a man bearing a bag of
charcoal. He answered with a ready intelligence that did
honor to his heart and his sense of Progressive Geography.
But he left on my white waistcoat, alas! a charcoal sketch,
full of chiaroscuro and coloris, representing his
index-finger surrounded with a sort of cloud-effect. My
waistcoat had to be given over in favor of the elder garment
buttoned up in the all-concealing overcoat.

ST. GUDOLE,
BRUSSELS.

The ceremonies of the day, I soon found, were to consist in
an early and informal breakfast at the house of Frau Kranich;
then the civil wedding at the mayor’s office, followed by the
usual church-service, from which the Protestant godmother of
Francine begged to be excused; the day to wind up with a
general dinner at a place of resort outside the city at four
o’clock, the usual dining-hour in old Brabant.

The early breakfast gave a renewal of my friendship with
good Frau Kranich and a glimpse of the bride, with her sweet,
patient, dewy face shadowed like a honey-drop in the gauzy
calyx of her artisanne cap; for she was in the simplest of
morning dresses—something gray, with a clean white apron.
The quaint, old-fashioned house where we met was decorated with
exquisite trifles, the memorials of the mistress’s old
fashionable taste, but scattered over the tables also were
lecture programmes, hospital reports and photographs of eminent
philosophers. As I took up for a plaything a gold pen-case,
well used, which rested on a magnificent old fan, the Kranich
said, with just a reminiscence of her former vivacity, “You
find me much changed, Mr. Flemming. I used to be the
grasshopper in the fable—now I am the ant.”

“I bless any change, ma’am,” said I, “which increases your
kindness toward this charming girl.”

“Dear Mr. Flemming,” said pretty Francine, “how nice and
shabby you look! You will do admirably to stand by a poor
girl—so poor that she has hardly a bridesmaid. I hope you
are as indigent as you were at Carlsruhe.” Upon this I felt
very fatherly, and clasped her waist from behind as I kissed
her forehead.

The lawyer, a professionally bland old man, with a porous
bald head like an emu’s egg, said as he was introduced, “Ah, I
have heard of you before, monsieur. You are the man of the two
chickens.”

Joliet was so enchanted with this rare joke, laughing and
clapping all his nearer neighbors on the back, that I could not
but accept it graciously. For this exceptional day, at least, I
must bear my eternal nickname. Was not the maid now present
whose dower had been hatched by those well-omened fowls? and
was not the dower now coming to use? Hohenfels paired off with
the notary, and discussed with that parchment person the music
of Mozart, and, what [pg 23] would have been absurd and
incredible in any Anglo-Saxon country, the scribe understood
it!

Our party had to wait but ten minutes for the groom and his
men. Fortnoye, in a grand blue suit, with a wondrous dazzle of
frilling on his broad chest, looked a noble husband, but was
preoccupied and silent. His chorus supported
him—Grandstone, Somerard, my engineer and the
others—in dignified black clothes, official
boutonnières and ceremonial cravats: they greeted Frau
Kranich with awe, and bowed before the polished head of the
lawyer with the parallelism of ninepins. My little group of
fellow-travelers was almost complete. The young duelist, of
course, was not expected or wanted. The Scotch doctor, Somerard
told me, had been obliged to fly to London, where a mammoth
meeting of the homoeopathic faith was in progress.

The great feature of the breakfast came on when every crumb
of breakfast had been eaten. Charles and the maid cleared away
the table, and the notary stood up to read the marriage
contract. The reading, ordinarily a dull affair, was in this
instance vivified by curious incidents. In the first place,
Frau Kranich. amending the injustice her over-credulity had
caused, gave her protègée a
wedding-present of twenty thousand francs, accompanying the
gift with some singularly tart remarks about her nephew: this
sum was increased by the groom to sixty thousand. The second
incident was when Joliet, amid the almost incredulous surprise
of the whole table, raised the gift, by the addition of ten
thousand, to seventy thousand francs: the money was the product
of his former house and garden—that house of shreds and
patches which had cost him ten francs. When it came to affixing
the signatures, the notary appealed to Joliet for his name. He
could not sign it, being gouty and half forgetful of
pen-practice, but he responded to the question as bold as a
lion: “John Thomas Joliet, baron de Rouvière,” throwing
to the lawyer a fine bunch of papers bearing witness to the
validity of the title; after which he added, no less proudly,
“wine-merchant, wholesale and retail, at the sign of the Golden
Chickens, Noisy.”

SQUARE OF THE HÔTEL DE VILLE, BRUSSELS.

In truth, Joliet’s father had rightfully borne the title of
baron de Rouvière, but, ruined by ’48, had abandoned the
practice of signing it. Joliet resumed it for this special
occasion, having every warrant for the act, but whispered to me
that he should never so call himself in future, greatly
preferring the enumeration of his qualities on his
business-card.

Poor Francine meanwhile had looked so timid and blushed so
that Frau Kranich nodded to her permission of absence. She gave
one glance at Fortnoye, buried her face in her hands, laughed a
sweet little gurgle, and fled. When her presence was again
necessary, she reappeared, drowned in white. We went to the
mayor’s office, where she lost a pretty little surname that had
always seemed to fit her like a glove; then to the church, an
obscure one in the neighborhood of Frau Kranich’s house. But at
the door of the sacred edifice the elder lady said, with much
conciliatory grace in her manner, “I claim exemption from
[pg 24] witnessing this part of the
ceremony; and you, Mr. Flemming, must resume or discover
your Protestantism and enter the carriage with me. I must
show you a little of the city while these young birds are
pairing.”

No objection was made to this rather strange proposal. The
bride, between her father and husband, forgot that she had no
friend of her own sex to stand near her. We arranged for a
general meeting at the dinner.

In the carriage she said, “I brought you away because I am
devoured with uneasiness. Mrs. Ashburleigh wrote me that she
would certainly be here for at least the principal part of the
ceremony. I do not know what to make of it. It may be of no
use, but we will scour the city. These throngs, this noise,
make me uneasy. I fear some accident, having,” she added with a
smile, “one lone woman’s sympathy for another lone woman.”

DIVERS DIVERSIONS.

I peered through the crowds at this, right and left, with
inexpressible emotion. Perhaps this accidental sort of quest
was that which destiny had arranged for the solution of my
life-problem. To light upon Mary Ashburleigh in these festal
throngs, perhaps wanting assistance, perhaps calling upon my
name even now through her velvet lips, was a chance the mere
notion of which made my blood leap.

When Brussels gives herself over to holiday-making, she does
it in a whole-souled and self-consistent way that has plenty of
attractiveness. The houses seemed to have turned themselves
inside out to replenish the streets. People in their best
clothes, equipages, processions, bands, troops of children,
filled the avenues. Some conjecture that there might have been
a mistake about the church took us to the cathedral of St.
Gudule. Here, amid the superb spectrums of the stained windows,
we searched through the vari-colored throngs that covered the
floor, but no familiar face looked upon us. Strange to us as
the old, impassive monumental dukes of Brabant who occupy the
niches, the people made way to let us pass from the doorway
between the lofty brace of towers to the high altar, which is a
juggler’s apparatus, and has concealed machinery causing the
sacred wafer to come down seemingly of its own accord at the
moment when the priest is about to lift the Host. All was
unfamiliar and splendid, and we came away, feeling as if our
own little wedding-group would have been lost in so magnificent
a tabernacle. The Grande Place, on which lay the wedge-like
shadow of the high-towered Hôtel de Ville, was perhaps as
thronged a honeycomb of buzzing populace as when Alva looked
out upon it to see the execution of Egmont and Horn. Among all
the good-natured Netherlandish countenances that paved the
square there was none that responded to my own.

We drove vaguely through the principal streets, and then,
baffled, made our way to the faubourg in which is situated the
zoological garden, toward which a considerable portion of the
inhabitants was going even as ourselves. At the entrance our
carriage encountered that of the bride and groom, and soon the
whole party of the breakfast-table assembled by the gate, for
the great coffee-rooms at which our meal was laid were close by
the garden, and a promenade in this famous living museum was a
premeditated part of the day’s enjoyment. We entered the
grounds in character, frankly putting forward our claims as a
wedding-procession. That is the delightful French custom among
those who are brought up as Francine had been: her father would
have been heartbroken to have been denied the proud exhibition
of his joy, and Fortnoye was too great a traveler, too
cosmopolitan, to object to a little family pageant that he had
seen equaled or exceeded in publicity in most of the Catholic
[pg 25] countries on the globe.
Francine, her artisanne cap for ever lost, her gleaming dark
hair set, like a Milky Way, with a half wreath of
orange-blossoms, the silvery gauzes of her protecting veil
floating back from her forehead, strayed on at the head of
the little parade. She was wrapped in the delicious reverie
of the wedding-day. She was not yellow nor meagre, nor
uglier than herself, as so many brides contrive to be. Her
air of delicacy and tenderness was a blossom of character,
not a canker of ill-health. Her color was hardly raised,
though her head was perpetually bent. Fortnoye, holding her
on his firm arm, seemed like a man walking through
enchantments. Just behind, protecting Madame Kranich with an
action of effusive gallantry that must have been seen to be
conceived, walked the baron de Rouvière, his brave
knotted hands, for which he had not found any gloves, busily
occupied in pointing out the animated rarities that to him
seemed most worthy of selection. The hilarious hyenas, the
seals, the polar bears plunging from their lofty rocks, all
attracted his commendation; and we, who walked behind in
such order as our friendships or familiarity taught us, were
perpetually tripping upon his honest figure brought to a
halt before some object more than usually interesting.
Exclamations of delight at the bride’s beauty, politely
wrapped in whispers, arose on all sides as we penetrated the
throng: it was a proud thing to be a part of a procession so
distinguished. My good Joliet beamed with complacency, and
drove his little herd up and down and across and about till
the greater part of the garden was explored. The zoological
garden of Brussels has the beauty of not showing too
obviously the character of a prison. It is extensive,
umbrageous, and the poor captives within its borders have
enough air and space around their eyes to give them a
semblance of liberty. For the special feast-day on which we
visited it the place had been arranged with particular
adaptation to the character of the time. There were
elephant-races and rides upon the camels free to all ladies
who would make the venture. In addition to the zebras, gnus
and Shetlands, there was that species of race-horse which
never wins and never spoils a course, being of wood and
constructed to go round in a tent, and never
[pg 26] to arrive anywhere or lose
any prizes. The pelicans were in high excitement, for all
along their beautiful little river, where it winds through
bowery trees, a profusion of living fish had been emptied
and confined here and there by grated dams, so that the
awkward birds had opportunity to angle in perfect freedom
and to their hearts’ content. In the more wooded part of the
garden a mimic hunt had been arranged, and sportsmen in
correct suits of green, with curly brass horns and baying
hounds, coursed through the grounds, following a stag which,
though mangy and asthmatic, may yet have been a descendant
of the fawn that fed Genevieve of Brabant. We had re-entered
one of the grand alleys, and were receiving again the little
tribute of encomiums which the greater privacy of the groves
had pretermitted—we were parading happily along,
conscious of nothing to be ashamed of, our orange-blossoms
glistening, our veil flying, our broadcloth and
wedding-favors gleaming—when we met another group,
which, though more furtively, bore that matrimonial
character which distinguished our own.

THE MIMIC HUNT.

At the head walked Mr. Cookson & Jenkinson. He still
wore that species of shooting-costume which he had made his
uniform, but it was decked with roses, and his hands were
encased in milk-white gloves: on his hands, besides the gloves,
he had the two grammatical ladies from the Rhine steamboat in
guise of bridesmaids. Behind him walked Mary Ashburleigh. And
emerging from the skirts of Mary Ashburleigh’s dress, with the
embarrassed happiness of a middle-aged bridegroom,
was—no? yes! no, no! but yes—was Sylvester Berkley.
I will not expose what I suffered to the curiosity of
imperfectly sympathetic strangers. I did not faint, and I
believe men in genuine despair never do so. But I felt that
weakness and unmanageableness of knee which comes with strong
mental anguish, and I sank back impotent upon the baron, whose
lingering legs repudiated the pressure, so that we both
accumulated miserably upon Grandstone. My eyes closed, and I
did not hear the Dark Ladye’s salutations to Frau Kranich. But
I awoke to see with anguish a sight that drew involuntary
applause from all that careless crowd.

It was the salute of the two brides. Imagine, if you can,
two great purple pansies, flushed with all the perfumed sap of
an Eden spring-time, threaded with diamonds of myriad-faceted
dew,—imagine them leaning forward on their elastic stems
until both their soft velvet countenances cling together and
exchange mutually their caparisons of honeyed gems; then let
them sway gently back, and balance once more in their morning
splendor. Such was the effect when these two imperial creatures
approached each other and imprinted with lips and palms a
sister’s salute. Mary Ashburleigh, whom the throng recognized
as a natural empress, was arrayed this morning as brides are
seldom arrayed, but with a sense of artistic obedience to her
own sumptuous nature and personality. The royal purple of her
velvets was cut, on skirt and bodice, into one continuous
fretwork of heavy scrolls and leafage, and through the crevices
of this textile carving shone the robe she carried beneath: it
was tawny yellow, for she wore under her outward dress a
complete robe of ancient lace, whose cobweb softness was more
than — only perceived as the slashes of
her velvets made it evident. It was such dressing as queens
alone should indulge in perhaps, but Mary Ashburleigh chose for
once to do justice to her style and her magnificence.

I was leaning against a tree, stunned in the sick sunshine.
I heard, while my eyes were closed, a sort of voluminous cloudy
roll, and the Dark Ladye was beside me. She whispered quickly
and volubly in my ear, “I tried to confide in you, but I could
not get it spoken. Yet I managed to confess that my heart had
been touched. It was only this summer—at the Molkencur
over Heidelberg—he lectured about the ruins. ‘Twas
information—’twas rapture! I found at once he was the
Magician. We were quietly united at the embassy this morning.
And now he can leave that dreadful consulate and has got his
promotion, [pg 27] for he is to be
chargé here in Brussels. It is sudden, but we
were positively afraid to do it in any other way, I am such
a timid creature. When I saw the travelers’ agent on the
steamboat, I was at first struck with his manly British
bearing and his resemblance to Sylvester. Then I found he
had the matrimonial prospectus, and perceived he might be a
link. He has managed everything beautifully. I had no
idea—With his assistance you need no more mind being
married than going into a shop for a plate of pudding. You
must come up and be presented, to show you bear no
malice.”

I cannot tell how I did it, but I allowed Sylvester and the
agent to grasp my hands, one on either side. Berkley, as to his
collar, his cravat, his face and his white gloves, presented
one general surface of mat silver. He clasped me with some
affection, but his intellect had quite gone, and he said it was
a fine day.

I did not rally in the least until after my fourth glass of
champagne at the dinner. We made one party: indeed, Mrs.
Ashburleigh had brought her husband hither in that expectation.
Fortnoye vanished a minute to arrange the banquet-room; and as
his wife rushed in to find him, followed by the rest of us, he
snatched a great damask cloth from the table, and there was
such a set-out of flowers and viands as has seldom been seen in
Belgium or elsewhere. The table, instead of a cloth, was
entirely laid with; young emerald vine-leaves: our places were
marked, and at each plate was a gift for the bride, ostensibly
coming from the person who sat there, but really provided by
the forethought of Fortnoye. In front of my own cover two
pretty downy chicks were pecking in a cottage made of crystal
slats and heavily thatched with spun glass—the prettiest
birdcage in the world. On the eaves was an inscription: “The
Man of the Two Chickens.” It happened that the little keepsake
I had found for Francine consisted of wheat-ears in pearls and
gold, adapted for brooch and eardrops; so I only had to drop
them in beside the chickens and the present was appropriate and
complete.

I cannot tell of the effect as Mary Ashburleigh swept into
that splendid banqueting-room, one long pyramid of velvet
pierced with webbed interstices of light. If the largest window
of St. Ursula’s church had come down and entered the room, the
spectacle could not have been so superb. One item struck me:
the younger bride, of course, wore orange buds; but for the
Englishwoman, a beauty ripe with many summers, buds and
blossoms were inappropriate; she wore fruits: in the grand
coronal of plaits that massed itself upon her head were set,
like gems, three or four small, delicious, amber-scented
mandarin oranges. With this piece of exquisite apropos did the
infallible Mary Ashburleigh crown the edifice of her good
taste. The two brides sat opposite each other. A small watch,
which I had happened to buy at Coblenz, I managed to detach and
lay on the Dark Ladye’s plate as my offering. On a card beside
it I merely wrote, “ANOTHER TIME!”

Who knows? Perhaps Sylvester may fill and founder as the
other has done. He looks miserably bilious and frightened.

I had rather partake of a rare dinner than describe one. The
wines alone represented all the cellars of the Rhine and the
whole champagne country. Fortnoye, who gave the feast,
entertained both Sylvester’s party and his own with regal good
cheer. Think not that Henri Fortnoye was the ordinary
obfuscated, superfluous, bewildered bridegroom. On the
contrary, assuming immediately the head of his own table, he
took the responsibility of the party’s merriment, and made the
good humor flow like the wine. I know not how it was, but ere
the meal was over I found myself joining in one of his
choruses; Frau Kranich forgot her asceticism and exhumed all
her youthful air of gayety; James Athanasius Grandstone
promised the host to set his wines running in every State of
America. But the prettiest moment was when the two brides rose
and touched glasses, mutually and to the health of the company,
apropos of a little wedding-song which Fortnoye had
[pg 28] composed and was trolling at
the head our willing chorus.

HOMEWARD BOUND.

CONCLUSION.

I have arrived at Marly, and, with the ssistance of much
sarcasm from Hohenfels, am getting on with considerable spirit
at my Progressive Geography. When man’s Hope ceases temporarily
to take a merely Human aspect, may it not suffer a fresh avatar
and begin in a new and Geographical form its beneficent career?
The Dark Ladye has sunk beneath my horizon, but speculations
over the Atlantean and Lunar Mountains are still succulent and
vivifying.

CHARLES AND
JOSEPHINE.

I fled, lashed by a hundred despairs and by many symptoms of
headache and dyspepsia, from the wedding-feast at Brussels.
Charles and the baron of Hohenfels accompanied me. It was a
night-train. The spectacle of so much wedded happiness was too
much for me, too much for Hohenfels. The effect was,
contrarily, rather stimulating to Charles, who has made a match
with Josephine, and with her assistance is now listening, the
tear of sensibility in his eye, to Mendelssohn’s “Wedding
March” as executed by the village organ!

We passed Valenciennes, Somain, Donai, Arras, Amiens,
Clermont, Criel, Pontoise—the last points of merely
bodily travel that I shall ever make: here-after my itineracy
shall be entirely theoretical. We took a carriage at Pontoise,
and traversed the woods of Saint-Germain. As I neared home I
bowed right and left to amicable and smiling neighbors, who
waved me good-day [pg 29] from their doors. So did my
Newfoundland, who broke his chain and leaped upon my
shoulders, flourishing his tail—overjoyed to salute
the returning Ulysses.

ARGUS AND ULYSSES.

In the British Museum, among the Elgin Marbles, Phidias has
carved a pile of heaped-up marble waves, and out of them rise
the arms of Hyperion—the most beautiful arms in the
world. Homesick for heaven, those weary arms try to free
themselves of the clinging foam. Another minute and surely the
triumphant god will leap from his watery couch and guide with
unerring hands the coursers of the Dawn! But that reluctant
minute is eternal, and the divinity still remains incapable,
clogged and wrapped in the embrace of marble waves. Yet the
real sun every morning succeeds in equipping himself for his
journey, and arrives, glad, at his welcome bath in the western
sea.

The inference I draw is: If you want a career to be eternal
instead of transitory, hand it over to Art.

“HAND IT OVER TO
ART.”

The true moral of it all is, that we are all savage myths of
the Course of the Sun. We disappear any number of times, but we
rise and trail new clouds of glory, and our readers or our
audiences perceive that it is the same old Hyperion back again.
The youth who by the faithful hound, half buried in the snow,
is found far up on the most inaccessible peaks of imagination,
is perceived to grasp still in his hand of ice that Germanesque
and strange device—Auf Wiedersehen.

[pg 30]

FOLLOWING THE TIBER.

TWO PAPERS.—1.

NEAR THE
SOURCE OF THE TIBER.

“Ecce Tiberum!” cried the Roman legions when they first
beheld the Scottish Tay. What power of association could have
made them see in the clear and shallow stream the likeless of
their tawny Tiber, with his full-flowing waters sweeping down
to the sea? Perhaps those soldiers under whose mailed and
rugged breasts lay so tender a thought of home came from the
northerly region among the Apennines, where a little bubbling
mountain-brook is the first form in which the storied Tiber
greets the light of day. One who has made a pilgrimage from its
mouth to its source thus describes the spot: “An old man
undertook to be our guide. By the side of the little stream,
which here constitutes the first vein of the Tiber, we
penetrated the wood. It was an immense beech-forest…. The
trees were almost all great gnarled veterans who had borne the
snows of many winters: now they stood basking above their
blackened shadows in the blazing sunshine. The little stream
tumbled from ledge to ledge of splintered rock, sometimes
creeping into a hazel thicket, green with long ferns and soft
moss, and then leaping once more merrily into the sunlight.
Presently it split into numerous little rills. We followed the
longest of these. It led us to a carpet of smooth green turf
amidst an opening in the trees; and there, bubbling out of the
green sod, embroidered with white strawberry-blossoms, the
delicate blue of the crane’s bill and dwarf willow-herb, a
copious little stream arose. Here the old man paused, and
resting upon his staff, raised his age-dimmed eyes, and
pointing to the gushing water, said, ‘E questo si chiama il
Tevere a Roma!’ (‘And this is called the Tiber at Rome!’)
… We followed the stream from the spot where it issued out of
the beech-forest, over barren spurs
[pg 31] of the mountains crested with
fringes of dark pine, down to a lonely and desolate valley,
shut in by dim and misty blue peaks. Then we entered the
portals of a solemn wood, with gray trunks of trees
everywhere around us and impenetrable foliage above our
heads, the deep silence only broken by fitful songs of
birds. To this succeeded a blank district of barren shale
cleft into great gullies by many a wintry torrent. Presently
we found ourselves at an enormous height above the river, on
the ledge of a precipice which shot down almost
perpendicularly on one side to the bed of the stream…. A
little past this place we came upon a very singular and
picturesque spot. It was an elevated rock shut within a deep
dim gorge, about which the river twisted, almost running
round it. Upon this rock were built a few gloomy-looking
houses and a quaint, old-world mill. It was reached from the
hither side by a widely-spanning one-arched bridge. It was
called Val Savignone.”¹
Beyond this, at a small village called Balsciano, the hills
begin to subside into gentler slopes, which gradually merge
in the plain at the little town of Pieve San Stefano.

CAPRESE.

Thus far the infant stream has no history: its legends and
chronicles do not begin so early. But a few miles farther, on a
tiny branch called the Singerna, are the vestiges of what was
once a place of some importance—Caprese, where Michael
Angelo was born exactly four hundred years ago. His father was
for a twelvemonth governor of this place and Chiusi, five miles
off (not Lars Porsenna’s Clusium, which is to the south, but
Clusium Novum), and brought his wife with him to inhabit the
palazzo communale. During his regency the painter of the
“Last Judgment,” the sculptor of “Night and Morning,” the
architect of St. Peter’s cupola, first saw the light. Here the
history of the Tiber begins—here men first mingled blood
with its unsullied waves. On another little tributary is
Anghiara, where in 1440 a terrible battle was fought between
the Milanese troops, under command of the gallant free-lance
Piccinino, and the Floren-tines, led by Giovanni Paolo
(commonly called Giampaolo) Orsini; and a little
[pg 32] farther, on the main stream,
Città di Castello recalls the story of a long siege
which it valiantly sustained against Braccio da Montone,
surnamed Fortebraccio (Strongarm), another renowned soldier
of fortune of the fifteenth century.

LAKE THRASIMENE.

As the widening flood winds on through the beautiful plain,
a broad sheet of water on the right spreads for miles to the
foot of the mountains, whose jutting spurs form many a bay,
cove and estuary. It was in the small hours of a night of misty
moonlight that our eyes, stretched wide with the new wonder of
beholding classic ground, first caught sight of this smooth
expanse gleaming pallidly amid the dark, blurred outlines of
the landscape and trees. The monotonous noise and motion of the
train had put our fellow-travelers to sleep, and when it
gradually ceased they did not stir. There was no bustle at the
little station where we stopped; a few drowsy figures stole
silently by in the dim light, like ghosts on the spectral shore
of Acheron; the whole scene was strangely unreal, phantasmal.
“What can it be?” we asked each other under our breaths. “There
is but one thing that it can be—Lake Thrasimene.” And so
it was. Often since, both by starlight and daylight, we have
seen that watery sheet of fatal memories, but it never wore the
same shadowy yet impressive aspect as on our first
night-journey from Florence to Rome.

Not far from here one leaves the train for Perugia, seated
high on a bluff amid walls and towers. We had been told a good
deal of the terrors of the way—how so steep was the
approach that at a certain point horses give out and carriages
must be dragged up by oxen. It was with some surprise,
therefore, that we saw ordinary hotel omnibuses and carriages
waiting at the station. But we did not allow ourselves to feel
any false security: by and by we knew the tug must come. We set
off by a wide, winding road, uphill undoubtedly, but smooth and
easy: however, this was only the beginning; and as it grew
steeper and steeper, we waited in trepidation for the moment
when the heavy beasts should be hitched on to haul us up the
acclivity. We crawled up safely and slowly between orchards of
olive trees, which will grow wherever a goat can set its foot:
beneath us the great fertile vale of Umbria spread like a lake,
the encircling mountains, which had looked like a close chain
from [pg 33] below, unlinking themselves
to reveal gorges and glimpses of other valleys. Thus by
successive zigzags we mounted the broad turnpike-road, now
directly under the fortifications, now farther off, until we
saw them close above us, with the old citadel and the new
palace. And now surely the worst had come, but the carnage
turned a sharp corner, showing two more zigzags, forming a
long acute angle which carried us smoothly to the rocky
plateau on which the city stands, and we bowled in through
the old gate-way at a round trot, with the usual cracking of
whips and rattling and jingling of harness which announces
the arrival of travelers at minor places on the
Continent.

We were not comfortable at Perugia—and let no one
think to be so until there is a new hotel on a new
principle—but it is a place where one can afford to
forego creature comforts. Of all the towns on the Tiber, so
rich in heirlooms of antiquity and art, none can boast such
various wealth as this. The moment one leaves the centre of the
town, which is built on a table of rock, the narrow streets
plunge down on every side like dangerous broken flights of
stairs: they disappear under deep cavernous arches, so that if
you are below they seem to lead straight up through the
darkness to the soft blue heaven, while from above they seem to
go straight down into deep cellars, but cellars full of
slanting sunshine. And whether you look up or down, there is
always a picture in the dark frame against the bright
background—a woman in a scarlet kerchief with a
water-vessel of antique form, or a ragged brown boy leading a
ragged brown donkey, or a soldier in gay uniform striking a
light for his pipe. As soon as you leave the live part of the
town, with the few little caffès and shops, and
the esplanades whence the thrice-lovely landscape unfolds
beneath your gaze, you wander among quiet little paved
piazzas with a bit of daisied grass in their midst,
surrounded by great silent buildings, whence through some
opening you descry a street which is a ravine, and the opposite
cliff rising high above you piled close with gray houses
overhung with shrubs and creepers, and little gardens in their
crevices like weeds between the stones of a wall; or you come
out upon a secluded gallery with tall, deserted-looking
mansions on one hand—except that at some sunny window
there is always to be seen a girl’s head beside a pot of
carnations or nasturtiums—and on the other a parapet over
which you lean to see the town scrambling up the hillside,
while a great breadth of valley and hill and snow-covered
mountain stretches away below.

Then what historical associations, straggling away across
three thousand years to when Perugia was one of the thirty
cities of Etruria, and kept her independence through every
vicissitude until Augustus starved her out in 40 B.C.! Portions
of the wall, huge smooth blocks of travertine stone, are the
work of the vanished Etruscans, and fragments of several
gateways, with Roman alterations. One is perfect, imbedded in
the outer wall of the castle: it has a round-headed arch, with
six pilasters, in the intervals of which are three half-length
human figures and two horses’ heads. On the southern slope of
the hill, three miles beyond the walls, a number of Etruscan
tombs were accidentally discovered by a peasant a few years
ago. The outer entrance alone had suffered, buried under the
rubbish of two millenniums: the burial-place of the Volumnii
has been restored externally after ancient Etruscan models, but
within it has been left untouched. Descending a long flight of
stone steps, which led into the heart of the hill, we passed
through a low door formerly closed by a single slab of
travertine, too ponderous for modern hinges. At first we could
distinguish nothing in the darkness, but by the uncertain
flaring of two candles, which the guide waved about
incessantly, we saw a chamber hewn in the rock, with a roof in
imitation of beams and rafters, all of solid tufa stone. A low
stone seat against the wall on each hand and a small hanging
lamp were all the furniture of this apartment, awful in its
emptiness and mystery. On every side there were dark openings
into cells whence came gleams
[pg 34] of white, indefinite forms: a
great Gorgon’s head gazed at us from the ceiling, and from
the walls in every direction started the crested heads and
necks of sculptured serpents. We entered one by one the nine
small grotto-like compartments which surround the central
cavern: the white shapes turned out to be cinerary urns,
enclosing the ashes of the three thousand years dead
Volumnii. Urns, as we understand the word, they are not, but
large caskets, some of them alabaster, on whose lids recline
male figures draped and garlanded as for a feast: the
[pg 35] faces differ so much in
feature and expression that one can hardly doubt their being
likenesses: the figures, if erect, would be nearly two feet
in height. The sides of these little sarcophagi are covered
with bassi-rilievi, many of them finely executed: the
subjects are combats and that favorite theme the boar-hunt
of Kalydon; there was one which represented the sacrifice of
a child. The Medusa’s head, as it is thought to be, recurs
constantly, treated with extraordinary power: we were
divided among ourselves whether it was Medusa or an Erinnys
with winged head. The sphinx appears several times: there
are four on the corners of an alabaster urn in the shape of
a temple, exquisite in form and features, and exceedingly
delicate in workmanship. Bulls’ heads, with garlands
drooping between them, a well-known ornament of antique
altars, are among the decorations. But far the most
beautiful objects were the little hanging figures, which
seemed to have been lamps of a green bronze color, though we
were assured that they are terra-cotta: they are male
figures of exquisite grace and beauty, with a lightness and
airiness commonly given to Mercury; but these had large
angel pinions on the shoulders, and none on the head or
feet. There was not a scholar in the party, so we all
returned unenlightened, but profoundly interested and
impressed, and with that delightful sense of stimulated
curiosity which is worth more than all Eurekas. With the
exception of a few weapons and trinkets, which we saw at the
museum, this is all that remains of the mighty Etruscans,
save the shapes of the common red pottery which is spread
out wholesale in the open space opposite the cathedral on
market-days—the most graceful and useful which could
be devised, and which have not changed their model since
earlier days than the occupants of those tombs could
remember.

THE TIBER NEAR
PERUGIA.

The conquering Roman has left his sign-manual everywhere,
but one is so used to him in Italy that the scantier records of
later ages interest us more here. Like every other old Italian
town, Perugia had its great family, the Baglioni, who lorded it
over the place, sometimes harshly and cruelly enough, sometimes
generously and splendidly—protectors of popular rights
and patrons of art and letters. Their mediaeval history is full
of picturesque incident and dramatic catastrophe: it would make
a most romantic volume, but a thick one. At length the
Perugians, master and men, grew too turbulent, and Pope Paul
III. put them down, and sat upon them, so to speak, by building
the citadel.

But time would fail us to tell of the Baglioni, or Pope Paul
the Borghese, or Fortebraccio, the chivalric condottiere
who led the Perugians to war against their neighbors of Todi,
or even the still burning memories of the sack of Perugia by
command of the present pope. We can no longer turn our thoughts
from the treasures of art which make Perugia rich above all
cities of the Tiber, save Rome alone. We cannot tarry before
the cathedral, noble despite its incompleteness and the
unsightly alterations of later times, and full of fine
paintings and matchless wood-carving and wrought metal and
precious sculptures; nor before the Palazzo Communale, another
grand Gothic wreck, equally dignified and degraded; nor even
beside the great fountain erected six hundred years ago by
Nicolo and Giovanni da Pisa, the chiefs and founders of the
Tuscan school of sculpture; nor beneath the statue of Pope
Julius III., which Hawthorne has made known to all; for there
are a score of churches and palaces, each with its priceless
Perugino, and drawings and designs by his pupil Raphael in his
lovely “first manner,” which has so much of the Eden-like
innocence of his master; and the Academy of Fine Arts, where
one may study the Umbrian school at leisure; and last, but not
least, the Sala del Cambio, or Hall of Exchange, where Perugino
may be seen in his glory. It is not a hall of imposing size, so
that nothing interferes with the impression of the frescoes
which gaze upon you from every side as you enter. Or no; they
do not gaze upon you nor return your glance, but look sweetly
and serenely forth, as if with eyes never bent
[pg 36] on earthly things. The
right-hand wall is dedicated to the sibyls and prophets, the
left to the greatest sages and heroes of antiquity. There is
something capricious or else enigmatical in the mode of
presenting many of them—the dress, attitude and
general appearance often suggest a very different person
from the one intended—but the grace and loveliness of
some, the dignity and elevation of others, the expression of
wisdom in this face, of celestial courage in that, the calm
and purity and beauty of all, give them an indescribable
charm and potency. At the end of the room facing the door
are the “Nativity” and “Transfiguration,” the latter,
infinitely beautiful and religious, full of quiet
concentrated feeling. We were none of us critics: none of us
had got beyond the stage when the sentiment of a work of art
is what most affects our enjoyment of it; and we all
confessed how much more impressive to us was this
Transfiguration, with its three quiet spectators, than the
world-famous one at the Vatican. Although there are
masterpieces of Perugino’s in nearly every great European
collection, I cannot but think one must go to Perugia to
appreciate fully the limpid clearness, the pensive, tranquil
suavity, which reigns throughout his pictures in the
countenances, the landscape, the atmosphere.

TODI.

We found it hard to rob Perugia even of a day for a
pilgrimage to the tomb of Saint Francis at Assisi, yet could
not leave the neighborhood without making it. We took the
morning-train for the little excursion, meaning to drive back,
and crossed the Tiber for the first time on the downward
journey at Ponte San Giovanni. We got out at the station of
Santa Maria degli Angeli, so named from the immense church
built over the cell where Saint Francis lived and died and the
little chapel where he prayed. The Porzionuncula it was called,
or “little share,” being all that he deemed needful for man’s
abode on earth, and more than needful. It was hither that he
came in the heyday of youth, forsaking the house of his wealthy
father, the love of his mother, a life of pleasure with his gay
companions, and dedicated himself to poverty and preaching the
word of God. One of our party had said that she considered
Saint Francis the author of much evil, and as having done
irreparable harm to the Italian people in sanctifying dirt and
idleness. But apostles are not
[pg 37] to be judged by the abuse of
their doctrine; and although it cannot be denied that Saint
Francis encouraged beggary by forbidding his followers to
possess aught of their own, he enjoined that they should
labor with their hands for several hours daily. And to me it
seemed as if out of Palestine there could be no spot of
greater significance and sacredness to any Christian than
this, where in a sanguinary and licentious age a young man
suddenly broke all the bonds of self, and taught in his own
person humility, renunciation and brotherly love as they had
hardly been taught since his Master’s death. The sternness
of his personal self-denial is only equaled by his sweetness
toward all living things: not men alone, but animals, birds,
fishes, the frogs, the crickets, shared his love, and were
called brother and sister by him. The great and
instantaneous movement which he produced in his own time was
no short-lived blaze of fanaticism, for its results have
lasted from the twelfth century to our own; and although we
may well believe that the day is past for serving Christ by
going barefoot and living on alms, the spirit of Saint
Francis’s doctrine, charity, purity, self-abnegation, might
do as much for modern men as for those of six hundred years
ago. Believing all this, we were not sorry that our
uncompromising friend had stayed behind, and it was in a
reverent mood that we left the little stone
chamber—which shrinks to lowlier proportions by
contrast with the enormous dome above it—and turned to
climb the long hill which leads to the magnificent monument
which enthusiasm raised over him who in life had coveted so
humble a home.

CHURCH AND CONVENT OF SAINT FRANCIS, AT ASSISI.

The cliff on which Assisi stands rises abruptly on the side
toward the Tiber: long lines of triple arches, which look as if
hewn in the living stone, stretch along its face, one above
another, like galleries, the great mass of the church and
convent, with its towers and gables and spire-like cypress
trees, crowning all. It is this marriage of the building to the
rock, these lower arcades which rise halfway between the valley
and the plateau seeking the help of the solid crag to sustain
the upper ones and the vast superimposed structure, that makes
the distant sight of Assisi so striking, and almost overwhelms
you with a sense of its greatness as the winding road brings
you close below on your way up to the town. It is a triple
church. The uppermost one, begun two years after the saint’s
death, has a magnificent Gothic west front and high steps
leading from the piazza, and a rich side-portal with a still
higher flight leading from a court on a lower level. As we
entered, the early afternoon sun was streaming in through the
immense rose-window and flooding the vast nave, illumining the
blue star-studded vault of the lofty roof and the grand, simple
frescoes of Cimabue and Giotto on the walls. Thence we
descended to the second church, in whose darkness our vision
groped, half blind from the sudden change; but gradually
through the dusk we began to discern low vaults stretching
heavily across pillars which look like stunted giants, so short
are they and so tremendously thick-set, the high altar enclosed
by an elaborate grating, the little side-chapels like so many
black cells, and through the gloom a twinkle and glimmer of
gold and color and motes floating in furtive sunbeams that had
strayed in through the superb stained glass of the infrequent
windows. The [pg 38] frescoes of Giotto and his
school enrich every spandril and interspace with their
simple, serious forms—no other such place to study the
art of that early day—but a Virgin enthroned among
saints by Lo Spagna, a disciple of Perugino’s, made a pure
light in the obscurity: it had all the master’s golden
transparency, like clear shining after the rain. From this
most solemn and venerable place we went down to the lowest
church, the real sepulchre: it was darker than the one we
had left, totally dark it seemed to me, and contracted,
although—it is in the form of a Greek cross—each
arm is sixty feet: in fact, it is only a crypt of unusual
size; and although here were the saint’s bones in an urn of
bronze, we were conscious of a weakening of the impression
made by the place we had just left. No doubt it is because
the crypt is of this century, while the other two churches
are of the thirteenth.

There are other things to be seen at Assisi; and after
dining at the little Albergo del Leone, which, like every part
of the town except the churches, is remarkably clean, my
companion set out to climb up to the castle, and I wandered
back to the great church. As I sat idly on the steps a monk
accosted me, and finding that I had not seen the convent,
carried me through labyrinthine corridors and galleries, down
long flights of subterranean stone steps, one after another,
until I thought we could not be far from the centre of the
earth, when he suddenly turned aside into a vast cloister with
high arched openings and led me to one of them. Oh, the beauty,
the glory, the wonder of the sight! We were halfway down the
mountain-side, hanging between the blue heaven and the billowy
Umbrian plain, with its verdure and its azure fusing into tints
of dreamy softness as they vanished in the deep violet shadows
of thick-crowding mountains, on whose surfaces and gorges lay
changing colors of the superbest intensity. Poplars and willows
showed silvery among the tender green of other deciduous trees
in their fresh spring foliage and the deep velvet of the
immortal cypresses and the blossoming shrubs, which looked like
little puffs of pink and white cloud resting on the bosom of
the valley. A small, clear mountain-stream wound round the
headland to join the Tiber, which divides the landscape with
its bare, pebbly bed. It was almost the same view that one has
from twenty places in Perugia, but coming out upon it as from
the bowels of the earth, framed in its huge stone arch, it was
like opening a window from this world into Paradise.

Slowly and lingeringly I left the cloister, and panted up
the many steps back to the piazza to await my companion and the
carriage which was to take us back to Perugia. The former was
already there, and in a few minutes a small omnibus came
clattering down the stony street, and stopping beside us the
driver informed us that he had come for us. Our surprise and
wrath broke forth. Hours before we had bespoken a little open
carriage, and it was this heavy, jarring, jolting vehicle which
they had sent to drive us ten miles across the hills. The
driver declared, with truly Italian volubility and command of
language and gesture, that there was no other means of
conveyance to be had; that it was excellent, swift, admirable;
that it was what the signori always went from Assisi to Perugia
in; that, in fine, we had engaged it, and must take it.
My companion hesitated, but I had the advantage here, being the
one who could speak Italian; so I promptly replied that we
would not go in the omnibus under any circumstances. The whole
story was then repeated with more adjectives and superlatives,
and gestures of a form and pathos to make the fortune of a
tragic actor. I repeated my refusal. He began a third time: I
sat down on the steps, rested my head on my hand and looked at
the carvings of the portal. This drove him to frenzy: so long
as you answer an Italian he gets the better of you; entrench
yourself in silence and he is impotent. The driver’s impotence
first exploded in fury and threats: at least we should pay for
the omnibus, for his time, for his trouble; yes, pay the whole
way to Perugia and back, and his buon’ mano besides. All
the beggars who haunt the
[pg 39] sanctuary of their patron had
gathered about us, and from playing Greek chorus now began
to give us advice: “Yes, we would do well to go: the only
carriage in Assisi, and excellent, admirable!” The numbers
of these vagrants, their officiousness, their fluency, were
bewildering. “But what are we to do?” asked my anxious
companion. “Why, if it comes to the worst, walk down to the
station and take the night-train back.” He walked away
whistling, and I composed myself to a visage of stone and
turned my eyes to the sculptures once more. Suddenly the
driver stopped short: there was a minute’s pause, and then I
heard a voice in the softest accents asking for something to
buy a drink. I turned round—beside me stood the driver
hat in hand: “Yes, the signora is right, quite right: I go,
but she will give me something to get a drink?” I nearly
laughed, but, biting my lips, I said firmly, “A drink? Yes,
if it be poison.” The effect was astounding: the man uttered
an ejaculation, crossed himself, mounted his box and drove
off; the beggars shrank away, stood aloof and exchanged
awestruck whispers; only a few liquid-eyed little
ragamuffins continued to turn somersets and stand on their
heads undismayed.

Half an hour elapsed: the sun was beginning to descend, when
the sound of wheels was again heard, and a light wagon with
four places and a brisk little horse came rattling down the
street. A pleasant-looking fellow jumped down, took off his hat
and said he had come to drive us to Perugia. We jumped up
joyfully, but I asked the price. “Fifty francs”—a sum
about equivalent to fifty dollars in those regions. I smiled
and shook my head: he eagerly assured me that this included his
buon mano and the cost of the oxen which we should be
obliged to hire to drag us up some of the hills. I shook my
head again: he shrugged and turned as if to go. My unhappy
fellow-traveler started forward: “Give him whatever he asks and
let us get away.” I sat down again on the steps, saying in
Italian, as if in soliloquy, that we should have to go by the
train, after all. Then the new-comer cheerfully came back:
“Well, signora, whatever you please to give.” I named half his
price—an exorbitant sum, as I well knew—and in a
moment more we were skimming along over the hard, smooth
mountain-roads: we heard no more of those mythical beasts the
oxen, and in two hours were safe in Perugia.

THE PARADOX.

I wish that the day were over,

The week, the month and the year;

Yet life is not such a burden

That I wish the end were near.

And my birthdays come so swiftly

That I meet them grudgingly:

Would it be so were I longing

For the life that is to be?

Nay: the soul, though ever reaching

For that which is out of sight,

Yet soars with reluctant motion,

Since there is no backward flight.

CHARLOTTE F.
BATES.

[pg 40]

A NIGHT AT COCKHOOLET CASTLE.

I.

Cockhoolet was the name of the place: it was a farm of which
the Ormistons were and had been tenants for several
generations. A father, mother and five olive-branches made up
the family. A healthy, happy, united, thriving family they
were, and as such much respected. There were two sons and three
daughters, the eldest of whom was Bessie, the “Rose of
Cockhoolet,” as she was called; for that she had all the beauty
and sweetness of the rose was generally allowed, although there
were people who could not be made to see this—people who
were probably idiopts; not idiots—although they might
have a streak of idiocy in them, too, perhaps—but
idiopts, or persons who were color-blind. None of the young men
of the district were color-blind.

The clergyman of the parish in which Cockhoolet was
situated, and at whose church the Ormistons attended, was an
old man comparatively, whose sermons were old-fashioned, and
not given forth with the fire of youth: he was not one you
would have expected to be very popular, especially with the
young; yet various young men from considerable distances were
attracted to his church, and, generally speaking, they settled
themselves in pews opposite the gallery in front of which sat
Mr. Ormiston and his family. Any person who chanced to be in
the vicinity, if of discerning powers, might have been
conscious of the electricity in the air. Dull people neither
saw nor felt it.

Bessie Ormiston was not dull, but, being a modest girl, she
would rather not have been stared at; and, being a good girl,
she thought people might be better employed in church: still,
she was only a girl, and it would not be the truth to say she
was mortally offended. Did the person ever exist who was
offended at an honest compliment? If he ever did, he ought to
have been fed on sarcasm for the rest of his days.

Not only was Bessie pretty—she was also rich. A
grand-uncle had left her five thousand pounds, her brothers and
sisters getting only one thousand each. There is no use in
asking reasons for this: simply, the Rose was born with a
silver spoon in her mouth. Perhaps, indeed, the old man did not
know he had so much money, for it was as residuary legatee that
Bessie got the five thousand pounds, and it was not thought she
would get anything like that: people remarked, in the language
of the district, which was apt occasionally to be strong and
graphic rather than elegant,—people remarked that “old
Ormiston had cut up well.” Five thousand charms added to those
Bessie already possessed—not to mention that her father
was a rich man—made her most miraculously charming: like
Tibby Fowler of the Glen, whose perplexities of this kind have
been embalmed in song, she had wealth of wooers, and wealth, it
is well known, makes wit waver.

It is a saying that an Englishman’s house is his castle, but
the phrase is understood to be figurative: Mr. Ormiston’s house
was his castle without a figure. Cockhoolet Castle is very old,
at least one part of it is, having been built probably about
the year 1400. A more modern part was built in 1527, while the
most modern part of all was added in 1726: this last division
of it is used as the farm-house. The rooms have been painted
and papered in the present style of house decoration, and in
the sitting-rooms, in addition to the little old windows, the
thick walls have been pierced and a large bow-window put in
with fine effect. There are three narrow stone staircases
leading up the three divisions of the castle; there are long
passages; there are sudden short flights of steps taking you up
or down into all manner [pg 41] of cornered rooms; there is a
hall which might hold the population of the county. Keeping
up one of the spiral staircases, you come out on the roof,
round which there is a walk guarded by a low stone coping:
should you want to fling yourself over, you have ample
opportunity. There are stone sentry-boxes where you can sit
hidden from the wind and everything else, and look far and
wide over the country, and down into the garden if you can
do so without growing giddy. There is also a dungeon
tenanted by nothing more subject to suffering than potatoes
and other roots, for which it is a most favorable
receptable, the walls being so thick and the roof so low
that cold cannot get in in winter nor heat in summer: there
is only a single narrow slit in the wall for the admission
of light, but it is comforting to know that the doomed
wretches who inhabited it in past ages had at least a
temperate climate.

There is the room Queen Mary Stuart slept in when she
occasionally visited in the vicinity. The reader is perhaps not
familiar with Queen Mary’s name in connection with Cockhoolet
Castle, but there may be other facts about her of which he is
also ignorant. Does he know, for instance, that she had a
daughter by her third marriage, whom, as an infant, she
despatched to France to be reared in a nunnery, “that she may
not,” said the unhappy queen, “run the risk of having such a
lot as I have”? Does he know that John Knox was possessed by a
mad passion of love for Mary Stuart? It has always been thought
otherwise—that in point of fact he held her in contempt;
but as it is proverbial that “nippin’ and scartin’ (figurative
of course) is Scotch folks’ wooin’,” there may be truth in the
new discovery. But true or not true, it is enough to make the
bold Reformer blush standing on the top of his pillar in the
necropolis of Glasgow: perhaps he is blushing, if he
were near enough to see.

Be that as it may, there is no manner of doubt that Mary
Stuart honored Cockhoolet Castle by abiding under its roof when
it suited her to do so. Have not I, the present writer, stood
in the room she slept in—looked from the small windows
set in the ten-foot thick wall from which she looked? Have I
not gazed over the same country, up to the same skies, into the
same moon at which she gazed? Could her face be more fair than
that of the present Rose of Cockhoolet, her thoughts more
innocent, her reveries more sweet, than those of Bessie
Ormiston, who in the course of time had succeeded to the room
which had been consecrated by royal slumbers?

It is a matter of certainty that Mary Stuart planted a tree
fast by Cockhoolet Castle—she would not have been herself
if she had not done that—and a magnificent tree it is,
very old and quite big enough for its age. The queen must have
been fond of planting trees, and, considering the number she
planted, it is astonishing how she found time for so many less
innocent employments: she must have improved each shining hour,
and, poor woman! she had not too many of these.

There is a walk also, called the Lady’s Walk, leading away
from the castle up a bosky dell, where a burn amuses itself
playing at hide-and-seek, but, like a little child, betrays its
hiding-places by its voice, and comes out into the light again
and laughs at its own joke. Did the queen ever wander here? did
she ever “paidle in the burn when summer days were fine”? did
its murmur ever soothe her ear? did she ever see her fair face
in its pools, or drop bitter tears to mingle and; flow on with
its waters?

The burn has kept trotting through the dell for six thousand
years, singing its song all the time, and its speed is as good
and its voice as clear and musical as when the morning stars
sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy. Many a
wild story it could tell if its murmur could be understood; but
it is a murmur only—a murmur which crept into the ears of
Cæsar’s legions, of Queen Mary, of Bessie Ormiston, and
will creep into yours, O reader! if you like to go and explore
the Lady’s Walk, when you can interpret the murmur for
yourself, as all your predecessors no doubt did. In
[pg 42] days of old it fed the moat,
traces of which are to be seen round the castle still,
although it has long since been filled up and covered, like
the park of which it forms part, with rich natural pasture,
soft, thick and velvety. In short, Cockhoolet had everything
that a castle ought to have, and wanted nothing that a
castle ought not to want, not even a ghost.

It was not the ghost of Mary Stuart: that would have been
too shocking—a ghost without a head, or having a head and
a broad vivid ray of red encircling its neck. Such a ghost
would have made every one who saw it lose his senses.
Cockhoolet Castle had a ghost: so much was certain, but
hitherto no one had ever either seen or heard it. How, then,
was it certain? Why ask a question like that? Is it reasonable
to pin a human being down to prove a ghost? Will not
presumptive evidence do? Strange things had happened, must have
happened, at the castle: is it for a moment to be supposed that
these things had happened and all gone scot free?—in
other words, that not one of them had left a ghost? It is not
to be supposed.

II.

It was Christmas Day. Christmas Day is not solemnized and
festivalized in Scotland as it is in England; still, the
observance of it in some shape is creeping in more and more. It
was Christmas, and Mr. and Mrs. Ormiston had gone to be present
at a feast from which they were not expected to return till the
following day. There were left at home the Rose, as head of the
family for the time being; her sisters, Bell and Jessie,
supposed to be little girls still, although the supposition
made them very indignant; and her two brothers, John and
William. A guest aad two servants made up the known inhabitants
of the house.

The guest was a young man who had arrived before the heads
of the house left, and had been laughingly charged by them to
see that the children did not work mischief. He was an old
friend of the family; at least as old a friend as he was a man,
and she had been in the world a quarter of a century. We shall
call him Edwin: that name will do as well as another; indeed,
better, for he might not like his own made public. It need
hardly be said that among the rest young Edwin loved, and, like
his namesake in the ballad, he never talked of love. This might
be stupid, but the stupidity which springs from true modesty is
not to be classed with the stupidity which springs from want of
brains, even when, as is quite likely, the consequences are to
the full as disastrous. Now, how is a young lady to understand
or bring things to a bearing in a case like this? The Rose
could not go up to Edwin and tell him she was not a goddess;
neither could she say, “Although I have five thousand
pounds—and you know it, and I know that you know it, and
you know that I know that you know it—I am quite ready to
believe that you love me, and would love me if I hadn’t a
farthing:” she could not say this, but she thought it, she
worried herself thinking over it, and, being a sensible girl
with a humble opinion of herself, she came to the conclusion
that she had been altogether mistaken—that Edwin did not
care for her, at least not as she cared for him, otherwise why
should he not say so? “If,” she thought—”if I were in his
place and he in mine, neither money nor pride, nor anything
else, would keep me silent.” And the roses in her face deepened
in color as she thought of her own silly folly in allowing her
feelings to be drawn in, and she determined her folly should
cease from that hour; which determination had the effect of
bringing sharp, short speeches about Edwin’s ears tinged with
sarcasm that were meant to convey to him the conviction that
she did not care a pin about him; and they answered the purpose
admirably.

Love is a fickle game, which they

Whose stakes are deepest worst can play,

Edwin was at Cockhoolet that Christmas Day by the same
fatality that causes a moth to hover round a brilliant light;
and when her sister told Bessie that Edwin had come and was
putting his horse into the stable, she said, “Is Mr. Forrester
[pg 43] here again? He must surely be
dull at home.” But of course she received him with friendly
civility.

Edwin employed the forenoon out of doors with the boys and
two other visitors. A Mr. and Mrs. Parker arriving
unexpectedly, who were anxious to see the castle, the afternoon
was spent in going through every part of it from dungeon to
roof.

Bessie carried the keys: she was châtelaine, seneschal
and cicerone, all rolled in one.

Going up the narrow stairs, the party had to climb Indian
file: in the passages they could spread out a little, and in
some of the rooms in the uninhabited portion they had to walk
circumspectly, as if they were crossing water on
stepping-stones, for the flooring was wanting in some places,
leaving a stretch of bare rafters. Bessie tripped lightly over
them, and then turned to wait for the others. “Don’t be
frightened,” she said: “these rafters are as sound as the day
they were laid down. The flooring has not rotted: it must have
been taken up for some purpose. They did not know how to scamp
work in those days.”

“If we fall through, where shall we go?” inquired Mrs.
Parker, looking down into what seemed deep mysterious
darkness.

“Oh, not very far; but don’t fall: it won’t be pleasant,”
said Bessie: “you would alight on very hard stones.”

Mr. Forrester got on the roof first, and handed up the
ladies; and they all stood looking out over the country. It was
not a cold, bleak, snowy day, as Christmas in northern
latitudes has a right to be. The winter had been mild—one
of a series of mild winters, overturning the old traditions of
frosts and snow-storms that lasted for months, and to a great
extent stopped traffic and labor, and made traveling difficult
and wearisome. This Christmas was different. The year was dying
with calmness and dignity, and with a smile on its face, as you
might take the pale gleam of sunshine to be; and if you were a
little sad in mood you could suppose there was a wistfulness in
the smile that was spread over the still, soft face of Nature.
Cockhoolet stood high, and the country immediately round it was
flat, and much of it moorland.

If you climb to our castle’s top,

I don’t see where your eye can stop;

For when you’ve passed the corn-field country,

Where vineyards leave off flocks are packed,

And sheep-range leads to cattle-tract,

And cattle-tract to open chase,

And open chase to the very base

O’ the mountain.

Strike out the vineyards and that description will apply
very well to Cockhoolet; and in addition you ought to have seen
from its roof Edinburgh and the sea; but on this day the sea
wore a garment of mist, and had wrapped the metropolis in it
also, as it not unfrequently does. You ought to have seen more
than one range of hills too, yet except by eyes well acquainted
with them their outlines could hardly be distinguished from the
leaden gray clouds lying in bands along the horizon.

But as the party stood on the roof the clouds began to rise,
tower upon tower, against the sky, and the sun, who retires
early at this season, went behind them, when, instead of the
pale, wistful gleam he had been keeping up all day, he suddenly
threw a deep bright golden border on all the edges of the dark
misty battlements which had piled themselves like castles of
the Titans: a big rift appearing at their base, there poured
through it, filling up the space, a great belt of crimson rays
streaked with gray, as if from burning ashes falling into it,
and like the dense glow from a furnace, giving the idea that
the cloud-building was on fire, and that the flames from below,
shooting up inside the dark walls, were the cause of the
brilliant illumination that shone round every pinnacle and
coign of vantage. It was a grand and a curious sight. You could
fancy the sun looking across to the old Castle of Edinburgh
standing on its rock, and saying, “Can you do anything like
this with all the gas and paddelle you can lay your hands on?”
Precisely this idea struck Mrs. Parker, for she said, “I think
that is as good a sight as the castle the night the prince was
married.”

“That was a very good sight in its way,” said Mr. Parker,
“but we can [pg 44] hardly hope to compete with
the sun, my dear: he has all his materials within himself,
and we have to pay for them.”

“Do you know, Miss Ormiston,” said Mrs. Parker, “one of the
buildings they said had such a fine effect put me in mind of a
trunk studded with brass nails—the initials of the happy
pair in gas-jets looked like the name of the owner of the
trunk. All the time I was on the street I could not get that
notion out of my head; and I was sorry, for I am sure it cost a
great deal of money to light it up, and I really wished to
think it grand.”

“We were all in town that night,” said John
Ormiston—”papa and mamma, and the whole of us, and Mr.
Forrester, who made eight.”

“I thought it a beautiful sight,” said Bessie.

“I never enjoyed anything more in my life,” said Mr.
Forrester, who on that occasion had been Miss Ormiston’s escort
through the streets, in which they lost their party, and had
the supreme bliss of wandering together in the crowd, when Mr.
Forrester almost forgot that Miss Ormiston was a goddess with
five thousand earthly charms, and Miss Ormiston had compared
his merits as a guide and protector with those of her brothers,
and found he was much more considerate, and made her wish law,
which they were often far from doing. In point of fact, a thaw
had been very imminent, but, alas! since then a sharp frost had
set in between them, as unaccountably as frosts frequently do
set in.

“I think, now,” said Mrs. Parker, “a fine old castle like
this ought to have had a grander name: don’t you think so, Miss
Ormiston?”

“Yes, I do, and it had, originally. There was a monastery
here at one time, over in that field with the trees in the
corner of it: it was called the abbey of Cakeholy, and when the
castle was built it got the name of Cakeholy Castle, after the
abbey. The name Cakeholy, tradition says, arose from the fact
that an extraordinary saint, whose wants had been relieved at
the monastery, blessed all the bread that should ever be baked
there, and the bread ever after had a great sustaining power in
it; so that pilgrims from Edinburgh and the North, going to the
southern shrines, all passed this way to get themselves
supplied with the holy cakes. At the Reformation the abbey was
destroyed, and became a ruin haunted by owls, so that, partly
in derision and partly as suiting the altered circumstances,
the common people corrupted the name into Cockhoolet; and in
process of time it was given to the castle also, and stuck to
it. That is the history of a name which is certainly neither
romantic, nor high-sounding.”

“How interesting!” said Mrs. Parker. “If I were you, I would
go back to the old name: there is a reverence about it there is
not about the other. Only think of bands of pilgrims coming
across the moor there!”

“Yes, in their gowns and rope girdles, with wallets and
scallop-shells,” said Bessie. “It must have been a curious old
world then: one could sit here and muse by the hour on all that
has come and gone. I often bring up my work or my book here in
summer and think of it.”

“I do like old things,” said Mrs. Parker, “and old families
and old names. Our name, for instance, has no smack of age
about it, and it is so short and perky: it must have been given
to some one who had to do with parks.”

“But parks may be a very old institution,” said Bessie, “if
we looked into the thing, though not so old as Forrester: that
is an ancient name,” glancing at Edwin, who was leaning against
a sentry-box listening and watching the sun putting out the
lights in his bed-chamber; “yet not nearly so ancient as
Ormiston. I always feel it is fitting we should live in an old
castle, we are so ancient ourselves.”

“Are we?” said John: “I never knew that before.”

“Ormiston,” she said, “is perhaps as pure a Saxon word as
now exists. It was during the Roman invasion our ancestor led
an army through a dense mist against the invaders: just as he
came up with them the sun shone out and the mist. The legions
were taken by surprise, for the advancing enemy had
[pg 45] been hidden by the mist, and
they were utterly routed. The Saxon king—”

“What was his name?” asked John.

“John,” she said, “don’t seek to be wise above what is
revealed. The king called our ancestor to the front and made
him earl of Ormiston on the spot—’Gold-Mist-on;’ that is,
‘Be ever in the van;’ and a proud race were the earls of
Ormiston, and well they answered to the name. But their
fortunes waned when the modern upstart, the Norman William,
laid his greedy hands on everything for himself and his mob of
pirates, and at present we are only middle-class people, but
our blood must be the bluest of the blue.”

“Mine must be as blue,” said Edwin, “for the Forresters came
in with the trees, and the trees were early settlers.”

“But the mists were first by a very long time,” answered
Bessie.

“I don’t believe that story,” said John. “I have read about
the Cakeholy business somewhere, but you have made that
Or-Mist-on affair out of your own head: isn’t that true,
Bessie?”

“I am not bound to answer unbelievers, John.”

“Besides,” said John, “Ormiston is far; liker French than
Saxon.”

“Mr. Parker,” said Bessie, “there was an abbot John of
Cakeholy who flourished in the thirteenth century: his ghost is
said to revisit its old habitation, or rather the place where
it stood. I should like to meet it and have a talk over things;
it would be very interesting.”

“Would you not be terrified?” asked Mrs. Parker.

“If I saw what I believed to be a ghost, I should die of
terror,” said Bessie; “especially if I was alone and it was the
dead of night; but I have no faith whatever in ghosts.”

“It is getting rather chilly,” said Mrs. Parker.

“Perhaps we had better go down now, then,” Miss Ormiston
said. “Mr. Forrester, would you come out of your brown study
and let us pass?”

“Certainly. I’ll see you all safe off the battlements. I
wasn’t in a brown study: I was in a mist.”

“Then take care: people in a mist always think they are
going the right way when they are going directly wrong.”

“If I only knew the right way!” he said.

“That’s true, Mr. Forrester,” said Mrs. Parker. “If we only
knew the right way; and people tell you to be guided by
Providence, but I say I never know when it is Providence and
when it is myself;” and she threaded her way down the narrow
stairs, followed by the rest of the party.

III.

The dining-room, with its low roof, its crimson walls, dark
furniture and handsome fire (the fires at Cockhoolet were
always handsome: Bessie was the architect and superintended the
building herself; they never looked harum-scarum nor
meaningless nor thoughtless, nor as if they were not meant to
burn; they combined taste, comfort, and, as a consequence,
economy; everything tasteful and comfortable is in the long run
economical), its table-cloth, glistening like the summit of the
Alps and laden with good things, looked a place where people
even not in love with each other might, unless naturally
perverse, be very happy.

Mrs. Parker, being from town, was in raptures with every
country eatable, especially the scones, which she found were
manufactured by Miss Ormiston herself.

“And have they,” asked Mr. Parker, “the sustaining power
that the cakes made here of old had?”

“If you eat enough of them you may get to Edinburgh to-night
before you are very hungry,” said John.

“The abbey cakes were unleavened,” Bessie explained, “which
these are not, so that they are less substantial fare.”

“What do you raise them with?” asked Mrs. Parker.

“Butter, milk and carbonate of soda,” said Miss
Ormiston.

“We call Bessie a doctor of the Carbon,” said John: “she
makes very good scones, although you would hardly go from here
to Canterbury on the strength of one of
them.”

[pg 46]

“Mr. Forrester, are you dull?” asked Jessie: “you are not
saying anything.”

“I am too busy eating the holy cakes, Jessie,” said Edwin:
“your sister is a master in her art.”

“I say,” Jessie went on, “are you ever dull at home? When I
told Bessie that you had come she was surprised, and said that
you must surely be dull at home. I am sorry for you if you are:
you should come here oftener—we are never dull here.”

“Perhaps,” said Edwin, “your sister thinks I come too often,
as it is.”

Bessie was so deeply engaged pressing Mr. Parker to eat
strawberry jam, with cheeks the color of the fruit, that of
course she could not have heard what her sister had been
saying.

“Oh no, I don’t think she thinks that at all,” Jessie said:
“we never think any one can come too often. Bessie, can Mr.
Forrester come too often?”

But still Miss Ormiston was so occupied with Mr. Parker that
she did not hear.

And Mrs. Parker said, “It is a most intensely interesting
old place, this: do not people come to look at it?”

“Oh yes,” replied Bessie, “especially in summer: we
generally have several parties every week. One of the servants
takes them over the castle—grand people often, with
carriages and livery servants.”

“Do you not keep a book for them to write their names
in?”

“No, we have never done that.”

“I would do it if I were you: it would be interesting to
know who comes and how many. Why, very remarkable people may
have been here without your knowing.”

“I doubt we are not sufficiently alive to our privileges,”
Bessie said.

“It’s fine moonlight,” said the boys, who, seeing that they
and every one had ceased eating, were impatient to be out
again. “Come, Mr. Parker, we’ll show you the echo: Mr.
Forrester, come.”

“I’ll go too,” said Mrs. Parker; and they all went but the
Rose, who stayed behind for a little to direct about household
matters.

The echo was a favorite with the boys, it gave such
unlimited scope to their powers of shouting: it was the
sight they most enjoyed exhibiting to strangers. And it
was an echo that could repeat every word of a sentence with
such perfection that it was difficult to believe that it was
not a human being shouting back from the other side of the
park, where stood some houses inhabited by the farm-servants
and their families.

“Hallo, Abbot John! is that you?” shouted one of the boys,
and the other cried, “Yes, I’m taking a walk,” so quickly that
the one sentence seemed the answer to the other, and both came
back loud and distinct on the still night-air.

“Are the Ormistons ancient? It’s all fudge,” shouted
John.

“Well,” said Mr. Parker, “that’s the most perfect echo I
ever heard. I’ve no doubt the holy fathers of the Middle Ages
knew of it, and used it in some shape to keep the superstitious
people in awe.”

“It is awesome,” said his wife, “here in the moonlight, with
the old castle so near: if I were alone, positively I should
feel eerie.”

“Are you dull at home, Mr. Forrester?” was sent out from the
depths of Will’s chest, and sent back again just as Bessie came
out and joined the party.

“Boys! boys!” she said, “don’t be foolish.”

“Why, it was what you said yourself,” her sister
remarked.

“Are you ever dull?” the lad shouted again.

“Often,” answered Edwin, and “Often” came back
instantly.

“In that case, Mr. Forrester,” said Mrs. Parker, “why don’t
you get a wife? There’s no company for a young man like a good
wife. Here’s Miss Ormiston; I don’t think you could do
better.”

Think of the delicate wound of these young people being thus
openly probed in broad moonlight in the presence of so many
people! What could Mrs. Parker be thinking of? Not of her own
love-passages surely, or, if she was, they must have been of a
blunter order than those of the Rose and her lover.

“Oh no,” said Bessie in cool, indifferent
[pg 47] tones: “Mr. Forrester knows
better than that.”

“There!” said Edwin, “you see, Mrs. Parker, I have been
refused.”

“‘Faint heart never won fair lady,'” said Mrs. Parker.

The boys hallooed this sentiment to the echo, and the echo
took it up and sent it back so vigorously that even a timid man
might have been inspired. “Mary Stuart,” “Henry Darnley,”
“James Bothwell,” the lads went on calling to the echo
alternately—names which are not mere echoes even after
three hundred years, but live on by sheer force of tragic
romance. And it was possible that here, on this very spot, that
historical trio had stood and laughed and talked and amused
themselves as the young Ormistons and their visitors were
doing. What words had they used to rouse the echo? If only it
could be made to give them back now, what a wonderful echo it
would be! The world would come to listen to it. Would it tell
of the passions of love and ambition, grief and hatred, all
hurrying their victims to their doom? or was the place sacred
only to gentler memories and softer moods—the scene of
enjoyment and freedom from care for however short a time? Who
can tell?

There was a woman in the village of Cockhoolet who was
ninety-eight years old, having all her faculties not perhaps
quite so fresh as when she was nineteen, but in wonderful
preservation after having been in daily use for little short of
a century. She was one of a long-lived race: her father had
been eighty-nine when he died, and her grandfather ninety-nine.
Now, it is perfectly possible—and, as the family had been
on the spot for centuries, it is even probable—that her
great-grandfather might have dug the hole in which Mary planted
her tree, or he may have saddled the queen’s horse when she
went hunting, or stood by the roadside and lifted his bonnet as
she and her gay train swept by. Or he may have been despatched
upon royal errands through the subterranean passage which is
said to exist all the way between Cockhoolet Castle and
Edinburgh—the private telegraph of those days, when wires
in the air or under the sea by which to send messages would
have cost the inventors their lives as guilty of witchcraft.
While shaking hands with this old woman and speaking to her,
you lost sight of her and the present time and felt the air of
the sixteenth century blow in your face. Mary came up before
you in moving habit as she lived—the young Mary who
caught all hearts, not heartless herself, and laid hold of mere
straws to save herself as she drifted desperately with
circumstances; not the woman who has been painted as an actor
from first to last, as coming forth draped for effect at the
very closing scene,—not that woman, but the girlish queen
who laughed and called to the echo, and forgot the cares of a
kingdom while she could.

IV.

“They are a nice family, those Ormistons,” said Mr. Parker
to his wife as they drove to the railway-station in the
moonlight.

“Very,” said Mrs. Parker; “and Mr. Forrester is a nice lad.
I hope he and Miss Ormiston will make it out: I did my best for
them.”

“They’ll be quite able to do the best for themselves: it is
always better to let things of that kind alone.”

“I don’t know that,” said Mrs. Parker: “if a little shove is
all that is needed, it is a pity not to give it.”

“But what if your shove sends people separate? That’s not
what you intended, I fancy?”

“No fear: people are not so easily separated as all
that.”

“Well, we have had an uncommonly pleasant visit: I only wish
the heads of the house had been at home.”

Either the attachment of this pair must have been pretty
evident to ordinary capacities, or Mrs. Parker must have been
of a matchmaking turn of mind; probably the latter, for Bessie
at least was sure that no mortal guessed her secret; which was
a great comfort to her, seeing that Edwin was so indifferent.
Alas! there is no rose without a thorn, or if there is it is a
scentless, useless thing,
[pg 48] most likely incapable of
giving either pleasure or pain.

The Parkers had left early. When the young people went
in-doors again it was only seven o’clock: the girls proposed a
game at hide-and-seek, and Bessie seconded the proposal; for
you see it would have been rather a formidable business to sit
down and entertain Mr. Forrester all the evening with
conversation, rational or otherwise; and although at the moment
she was in the dignified position of lady of the castle, she
could not the less enjoy a game amazingly.

The theatre of operations was wisely restricted, because if
they had gone all over the castle they might have hidden
themselves so that the game would have been endless; therefore
they kept to the under part of the inhabited region. At length,
tiring of this, they changed their game to blindman’s buff, and
went to the kitchen to play it, there being more room and fewer
obstacles there; besides that, it was empty of tenants at the
time, the servants having gone to see some of the
neighbors.

It was a curious old kitchen, with a very low roof, and
having a fireplace in a big semicircular stone recess. Many a
boar’s head had revolved there, and many a venison pasty had
sent forth its fragrance to greet the tired hunters returning
from the chase. The fire glowed in its deep recess like the eye
of an old-world monster in a cavern, till one of the boys
seized the poker and made it flame up, throwing its blaze out
as far as it could for its walls, and making the kitchen and
the group standing in it like a picture by Rembrandt.

“Who’s to be blind man first?” cried the girls.

“Edwin: that will be the best fun,” the boys said.

“Very well, I sha’n’t be long blind,” said Edwin: “I shall
soon catch some of you. Who’ll tie the handkerchief?”

“Bessie: she always ties it. Go and kneel to her, and she’ll
tie it so that you won’t see.”

What must Mr. Forrester have felt while being blinded by the
Rose? Only, he had long been accustomed to be if not blinded,
at least dazed, by her. The boys led him into the middle of the
floor and dispersed themselves into corners. While he stood in
the attitude of listening intently, he was conscious of a very
gentle movement near him, and instantly closed his arms round
it, as he thought, and encountered empty air, while with a
shout of laughter the children cried, “Bessie was too quick for
you. There, quick! quick! Edwin!” He sprang to the corner the
voices came from, and the boys rushed along the wall to avoid
his arms spread out to catch them, when suddenly the doorbell
rang.

At the sound Edwin put up his hand to take off the
handkerchief, but the boys cried, “Don’t take it off: if it’s
any one, Bessie can speak to them in the dining-room: we don’t
need to stop our game.”

They were not aware that to Mr. Forrester the game without
Bessie was like Hamlet with the part of Hamlet left
out.

“Yes,” said Bessie, “just go on, and I’ll see who is at the
door.” As she left the kitchen she honored Mr. Forrester with a
good long look: people can feel so much at ease looking at a
blind person.

The door was chained for greater security, and Bessie did
not take off the chain: she merely opened the door as far as it
would open, but seeing no one, she opened it fully and went out
on the steps; still she saw no person, although she thought
whoever rang the bell had not had time to get out of sight.
Waiting a little without result, she went back to the
kitchen.

“Who was it?” cried the children.

“No one,” she said.

“But the bell rang,” said John.

“Of course it did,” Will corroborated.

“And somebody must have rung it,” John said.

“Some one for a trick, I suppose,” Bessie said, “although I
don’t know how he disappeared so fast.”

Without further remark the game was resumed. Edwin had
caught John, and John had caught Bessie, and when he was
putting the handkerchief round her eyes Mr. Forrester said,
“You are making [pg 49] it far too tight, John: you
are hurting your sister.”

“No fear,” said John: “none of us have soft heads here. Is
it too tight, Bessie?”

“Rather, but I can bear it: go on.”

“I’ll slacken it first,” Edwin said.

“Thank you, that will do. Now move off or I’ll catch you.”
She went very vigorously to work, and sent them all flying
round the kitchen, when the bell rang, and rang loudly,
again.

John darted to the door and flung it wide, sure that he
would see the person who rang it, whether running away or not;
but there was no one, and the whole party followed him out, and
they surveyed round and round, but all was still and quiet and
vacant, the moonlight making it impossible that any figure
should be there without being seen.

Now, if you lived in an ordinary house in an ordinary street
in an ordinary town, an incident like this would create no
surprise. It happens often: true, it is not a very new or
bright joke, still it is a joke that boys and girls enjoy, and
will continue to enjoy. But away in the country, at an old
castle, with no house within a quarter of a mile of it, the
case is very different. How was it to be accounted for?

The Ormistons came in, the girls looking scared, and the
boys laughing and saying that Mary Stuart or Darnley or
Bothwell, whose names they had made so free with shouting to
the echo, must have heard themselves called and were ringing
the bell, although not allowed to show themselves; but even as
they said it the boys would fain have whistled to keep their
courage up.

“I wish papa and mamma had been at home,” said Bell.

“Or if only the Parkers could have been persuaded to stay
all night,” suggested Jessie.

“Nonsense!” Bessie said. “Some one is playing us a trick,
but we don’t need to let it spoil our game;” and she put the
handkerchief over her eyes. “Look here, Edwin: will you tie
this? You do it better than John.”

“He doesn’t,” said John. “I believe he leaves it so that you
can see. I’ll do it. No, I won’t make it too tight.”

“Don’t you think, Jessie,” Edwin asked, “that I could
protect you, in case of danger, as well as the Parkers?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps if you were like yourself, but you’re
not like yourself.”

“He’s as dull as ditch-water,” said John.

“But,” said Jessie, taking his hand with a feeling of
security, “you’re better than nothing—a great deal better
than nothing.”

“Thank you, Jessie, thank you! A man is the better for a
little encouragement, you know;” and he looked at the Rose, but
she was blind; which made her easier looked at, to be sure, but
there was less chance of an answer, encouraging or
otherwise.

They had got up the spirit of the game again, and were going
on briskly, when they were all brought to a stand by the bell
ringing for the third time.

“Don’t stop,” cried Bessie: “go on with the game and take no
notice unless it rings again;” and as a leader who must show no
fear she chased her sisters round the kitchen, making them flee
to avoid being caught, when, as if in answer to her remark, the
bell did ring again.

This was too much. They all ran to the door, but neither
human being nor ghost was to be seen.

“I say,” said John to his brother, “you and I will go out
and watch. Edwin, you’ll stay with the girls—they are
frightened—and if the bell rings again we’ll see who does
it.”

“You have more need of Edwin than we have, John,” Bessie
said: “it will take you all to catch a ghost.”

“Come away, then,” cried John; and he posted his sentinels
at different angles, where each could have his eye on the door.
The girls shut themselves in the house, and outside and in they
awaited the result.

There was no result.

Ordinary sentinels can pace to and fro to make the moments
go more quickly, but Edwin and John and William were compelled
to stand without speech or
[pg 50] motion, as to betray their
presence would have been to defeat their purpose. At the end
of half an hour their patience was worn out, and they came
to the conclusion that whoever was playing the trick knew
that they were watching; so they went in, and hardly were
they in and the door shut when the bell rang again.

John rushed from the kitchen, whither he had gone for
something, but the others, being in the dining-room and nearer
the door, reached it before him; and again nothing was to be
seen but the still calm night, in which hung the moon with all
her accustomed unimpassioned serenity. What cared she for
ghosts? Perhaps she is only a ghost herself, else why, with all
her pale quiet ways, does she never turn round and show herself
thoroughly? No doubt she has reasons of her own, whether they
are good or not: her sex is apt to be both capricious and
persistent—two qualities which she possesses in
perfection.

The Ormistons and Edwin stood out on the broad walk before
the door, none of them feeling very comfortable, if the truth
must be told, but none of them showing their feelings except
Bell and Jessie, who openly declared that they were very much
frightened.

“Nonsense!” said Bessie. “Who is going to be frightened at a
silly trick?”

“But it may be somebody wanting to get in to do us
harm—kill us perhaps,” suggested Bell.

“People who want to get into a house for bad ends don’t ring
the front doorbell, or any bell,” said Bessie.

At this junction two figures appeared in the distance
advancing along the road to the castle—soon made out to
be the servants, so that they at least were guiltless in the
affair.

“It has not been them, you see,” cried John.

“No,” Bessie said, “and you are not to say anything about it
to them when they come: if they know anything of it, it will
soon leak out; and if they don’t tell, they will be quite
frightened: they are as easily frightened as Bell or Jessie
here.”

V.

All this time Mr. Forrester was feeling—not frightened
certainly, but—perplexed; and while he could not but
admire Miss Ormiston’s coolness and courage, he could not help
wishing that she had been just a little bit chicken-hearted: it
would have been so delightful to have to act as protector and
supporter. But there was no opening whatever for such a
position: she took the mysterious affair into her own hands and
pooh-poohed it entirely.

They were accustomed to early hours at Cockhoolet, but when
the time came for going to bed the girls declared they were too
frightened to go up stairs alone. “It would be far better,”
they both said, “for us to stay here all together in this room
till morning: we could sit up quite well.”

“Absurd!” said Bessie.

“Well, we could not sleep even if we were in bed,” they
protested.

“No fear,” said the châtelaine. “If you were to sit up
all night you would be like ghosts yourselves to-morrow
morning. Come, I’ll go with you and sit beside you till you
sleep. But wait a minute till I come back.”

When they were bidding Mr. Forrester good-night he said to
the girls, “If anything happens let me know.”

“Nothing will happen,” said Bessie: “the bell is quiet now
and the servants are sound asleep. I have just been looking at
them, and the sooner we follow their example the better.”

“What are we to do if we hear the bell ring again?” John
asked.

“Nothing. Keep below the blankets, John,” his sister said.
“It will ring a loud peal indeed if you hear it: I think a
cannon might be fired at your ear without disturbing you.”

“That’s a mistake,” said John, “I am a remarkably light
sleeper: a fly on my nose will make me turn round any
time.”

“I believe that, but it won’t waken you. Good-night;” and
she took a hand of each of her sisters and went off with all
the dignity beseeming her position as head of the family and
governor of the [pg 51] castle. Her presence being
withdrawn, Edwin felt much as you do on a March day when the
sun goes under a cloud, although he had not enjoyed the sun
either, owing to the undercurrent of east wind that
continually chilled him. He almost determined to give it up.
Of what use was it? Evidently she did not care for him, and
the words, “Mr. Forrester here again! he must surely be dull
at home,” sounded in his ears. Very east-windy they were;
still, he loved her with a great love, and he could not give
her up: he was in a mist, and could see neither to go back
nor forward.

“I say, Edwin,” said John confidentially, “what do you think
about this bell business? Of course one couldn’t speak of it
before the girls, they are frightened enough
already—Bessie too, although she pretends not. What’s
your own private opinion about it?”

“Oh, it must be a ghost,” said Edwin: “they do things of
that kind, you know—turn tables and rap and so on. I’ve
been thinking I must be an unconscious medium.”

“Well,” said John, “I, for one, don’t believe in that kind
of thing: if the spirits ever told anything worth hearing, or
did anything worth doing, it might be different; but would
Darnley or Bothwell or the abbot, or even any of the smaller
fry of monks, come back here to ring a bell? I know in their
place it’s what I wouldn’t do myself.”

“It would depend on where they are and how employed,” said
Edwin: “like some other people, they may be dull at home.”

“Ah, that’s what Bessie said that’s sticking in your throat.
Man, it’s no use minding what girls say: I never do.

“The spirits must be deplorably dull if ringing a bell is a
diversion to them.”

“They may enjoy mystifying us,” said Edwin. “Who knows but
they are listening just now, and laughing in whatever they may
have instead of sleeves?”

“I’m not frightened,” said Will, “but I don’t like subjects
of this kind at bedtime, so I wish you wouldn’t say any more
about it.”

“It seems, however, that the bell was rung by invisible
agency,” said John.

“Come, come, we’ll stop talking and go to bed,” Edwin
said.

“But, Edwin,” said Will with big eyes, out of which he could
not keep a frightened look, “do you think a spirit did it?”

“No: it is a trick, and you’ll find out who did it before
long.”

“Well,” said John, “it was a stupid trick, but cleverly
done—very cleverly done, or whoever did it would not have
escaped me.”

“I should not like to sleep alone to-night,” Will said to
his brother in confidence when they were in their own room,
“and I don’t believe you would either, although you don’t say
so. I wonder if Edwin likes it, away from every one too, in
that room with the hole in its roof? I wonder papa does not get
that hole mended?”

“He has often spoken about it,” said John, “but if I slept
in that room I should rather like the hole. It’s uncommon:
every room hasn’t a hole in its roof. If you couldn’t sleep,
for instance, you’d have only to stare at the hole, and you
would doze off before you knew.”

“Staring at it would only keep me from sleeping,” Will said:
“I should always think something was looking at me through
it.”

“What could look at you but light—moonlight or
daylight from the room above? In the dark you would the
hole.”

“Let’s sleep,” said Will; and, forgetting ghosts and bells
and all influences, the two boys were soon asleep.

It is to be hoped the girls were asleep also; indeed, there
is little doubt the younger ones were. But Bessie, with the
cares of a castle on her head, the mysteries of the evening to
perplex her, and an unfortunate love-affair going more and more
awry, how was it with her?

And Edwin, in his remote room with its hole in the roof, how
did he fare? He had gone up a stone staircase, through a long
passage and down a short flight of steps, into a room large,
somewhat low in ceiling, and, with the exception
[pg 52] of the hole, most comfortably
appointed. It felt warm, rather too warm, and he did not
replenish the fire, preferring to let it go out. The room
and the way to it were both very familiar to him, and, like
John, he enjoyed the hole: staring at it made you sleep, and
when not sleeping your fancy could play round it to any
extent. On this night the light of the moon, shining in at
the shutterless windows of the empty room above, fell across
its floor, and gleamed down through the opening.

A superstitious person with a talent for being eerie would
have had nice scope for being frightened out of his senses in a
situation like this—alone in a distant room of an old
castle where bells rang mysteriously, and with borrowed
moonlight peering down from above like a ghost looking for
ghosts. But Mr. Forrester was not superstitious—not in
the least. He feared nothing material or immaterial
except—and it was a curious exception—except Bessie
Ormiston; yet it is true he loved her, perfectly as he thought,
but there was a flaw somewhere: it was not the perfect love
that casteth out fear. The turning of a straw, however, might
make it that, but who was to turn the straw? He feared to do
it, and she would not. Notwithstanding these perturbed and
cantankerous circumstances, these two people, being young and
naturally sleepy, slept.

How long he had been sleeping Edwin did not know, when he
awoke suddenly, as if he had been startled by some noise.
However, he might have been dreaming: he did not know. The fire
was thoroughly out and black, there was no ray of light from
the roof, and the window-curtains being closely drawn, if there
was any light outside it was effectually shut out: the room was
as dark as midnight.

He rose, and finding his way to the table groped for a box
of matches that he had noticed lying there, and lighted his
lamp, when, looking at his watch, he found the hour to be
half-past three. Before going to bed again he thought he would
see what night it was. Accordingly, he opened the curtains and
shutters and gazed forth. The moon had disappeared—which
was not remarkable, as it was past her hour for
retiring—and the night was very dark and hazy. But a
remarkable object met his eye. But from an angle of the house,
and toward the corner of the field which had been the site of
the ancient monastery, there stood a column five or six feet in
height of what through the haze appeared luminous vapor. It
seemed such an altogether unaccountable thing, standing there,
that Edwin pushed the window open and rubbed his eyes to get a
better sight of it. He expected it would disappear in some way
almost immediately, but it did not: there it stood, perfectly
still and perfectly distinct, at the corner of the field, where
there was absolutely nothing to cause it. He watched it for a
considerable time, and as his eye got accustomed to peering
into the darkness, he could see there was nothing near it, and
not a sound disturbed the stillness of the night.

“That’s not a trick,” he thought: “no one would think it
worth while to play a trick, certain of being without an
audience either to see or hear it. I question even if it is the
abbot himself; or if he likes to air himself there in the
middle of a winter night, he must be too hot at home, if not
too dull.”

A filmy mantle of pale white vapor is surely a more likely
garment for a spirit to snatch up and wrap round him when about
to indulge in an earthly tour than the conventional and
traditionary white sheet: in point of fact, for the sheet he
must wait till he arrives in our world, and when he does arrive
he must of necessity help himself to it; which I, for one,
should be sorry to think any well-conditioned ghost would do;
but light, pale shadowy light, lying about everywhere for the
picking up, what so suitable as raiment for a being who has
nothing to wear?

It could not but occur to Edwin, Had the abbot come back to
his old haunt on some errand? Had he a benevolent ghostly
interest in its present inhabitants? Here was a work in which
even a spirit of mark might engage without loss of
[pg 53] dignity and with perfect
propriety. He might turn tables on the perverse
circumstances that kept two young people separate; and if
marriages are made in heaven, an angel need not despise such
a mission as making two lovers happy.

“Well” thought Edwin, “if you are Abbot John, how do you
like to see the dear old stones of your monastery built into
dykes? or would you have preferred seeing them applied to villa
purposes?” If it were the abbot, Edwin felt he would like to
have that familiar kind of intercourse with him which in our
country is known as twa-handed crack; and if it were not the
abbot, he had a wonderful curiosity to know what it
was—to have it accounted for. There it stood, apparently
as firm and sure as the first moment he had seen it; and a
cause it must have.

Accordingly, he dressed himself with the intention of
proceeding to the spot to interview the abbot and see what kind
of stuff he was made of. Mr. Forrester took the lamp in his
hand and opened the room-door softly: not that he thought any
one would hear him, but soft sounds best become the stillness
of the night. As he went down the stairs he became conscious of
a cold air playing about, as if from an open door or window. He
set his lamp on the stone sill of the passage-window, and had
his hand on the key of the outer door to unlock it, when he
heard a quick, sudden scream, apparently from the oldest part
of the building. He listened intently for a second, but there
was no repetition of it, and everything was perfectly
quiet.

“That was human,” he said to himself; and seizing his lamp
he ran along till he came to the door of the ancient keep,
which was standing open: he took the way he and the rest of the
party had gone the previous afternoon, and found the doors that
were usually kept locked all open. Going on very hurriedly, he
came to the room where the bare rafters were the only flooring,
and at the other end of it he saw something like a white heap
gleaming. He strode across instantly, and stooping with the
light in hand discovered Bessie Ormiston lying in a dead faint
just at the edge of one of the rafters: the least movement
would have sent her down on the hard pavement below. He did not
stop to think how she came to be there: setting his lamp where
it would light him across the dangerous flooring, he lifted her
up and threaded the passages and stairs in the darkness till he
laid her safe on the dining-room sofa, still unconscious.

Kneeling beside her in the darkness, he felt that her face
and hands were very cold. He did not know what to do. If she
had been any other person, he would have had his senses about
him, but, being who she was, they had scattered themselves, and
he felt dazed. The fire was not quite out, and he thought of
smashing up a chair to make it burn, but searching in the
coal-scuttle at the side, of the fireplace, he found both
sticks and coals, and heaped them on: then he lighted the lamp
that was still standing on the table. All this was the work of
a minute or two. A fainting-fit was quite beyond the range of
his experience, but he had some vague idea that in cases of the
kind water should be dashed in the face or a smelling-bottle
held to the nostrils or brandy poured down the throat; but none
of these things were at hand, and as he looked at Bessie,
hesitating what to do, he saw the color steal back to her face,
and she opened her eyes and suddenly shut them. When she opened
them again she took his presence as a matter of course, and
said, “I sometimes walk in my sleep, I know, but I am not in
the habit of fainting;” and she smiled, looking much more like
the lily than the rose.

“I hope not,” he said.

“It was the fright I got when I woke and saw where I was. I
shouldn’t have been frightened, for I knew the place as well as
I know this room, and could have found my way back in the
dark.”

“What can I get for you?—you must have something.” It
is an awkward thing when a nurse has to seek directions from a
patient.

“Nothing,” she said: “I can take nothing, and I am quite
well. I can’t think how I was so foolish as to scream, and I am
sorry for disturbing
you.”

[pg 54]

“You did not disturb me: if I had been asleep I should never
have heard you.”

“I wish you had been asleep.”

“You might have fallen through the rafters and been hurt or
perished of cold.”

“I shouldn’t have fallen through the rafters: I should have
come to myself and have walked back quite well alone; but I am
not the less obliged to you.”

“I should say not,” he said with a curl of sarcasm. “Then is
there nothing I can do for you?”

“Nothing, unless, indeed, you could get hot water for me to
wash my feet in. Sleeping as I was, I had the good sense to put
on a thick shawl, but I made my excursion barefoot: they say
walking barefoot improves one’s carriage.”

“Bessie, I never know what to make of you.”

“If you know what to make of yourself it’s a great matter:
sometimes people don’t know that,” she said, rather
wearily.

“I had better make myself scarce at present, probably?” he
said.

“I think so.”

“Then good-night. You won’t faint again?”

“No: good-night.”

He left the room and shut the door gently, but when a few
paces away some impulse moved him to go back: she might faint
again, and he would ask if he should send one of the servants
to her.

When he opened the door she was sitting with her face hidden
in her hands. At the sound of the door opening she glanced up,
and Edwin saw tears.

She turned away instantly. He went up to her and said, “I
did not mean to intrude. I forgot to ask if I should tell one
of the servants to come.”

“No, you needn’t.”

“Bessie,” he said, “you are not well, and something is
vexing you. Could you not tell me about it. I mean nothing but
kindness.”

“I know you don’t,” she said almost fiercely, “and I hate
kindness: it’s an insult.”

He stood in blank astonishment, “An insult?” he said.

“Yes, an insult; and if you were not obtuse you would see
it. But you don’t see and you don’t feel, or you would never
have tried to make any one care for you for whom you did not
care a bit. But I won’t care for you, and I don’t.”

Off her guard, she had been stung into this. She was
standing away from him, her head erect and her eyes gleaming
through tears: Mary Stuart herself could not have been more
effective.

“Care for you! not care for you!” he said in a voice he
could hardly control. “I have cared for you as I never cared
for a thing on earth: I have loved and shall love you as I have
never loved a human being.”

“How am I to believe it? Why did you not say it? Why did you
not say it without making me ashamed of myself?”

“Ashamed! Oh, Bessie, I only feared to annoy you.”

“Annoy!”

He gathered her to him and kissed her.

A castle all to themselves at four o’clock in the morning is
a piece of fortune that rarely falls to lovers, and they need
not expect it; but those great thick walls were no way taken by
surprise: they had not been confidants of this kind of thing
off and on for four or five hundred years to be taken by
surprise now. Whether after such long familiarity with the old
story they felt it any way stale, you will readily believe they
did not say.

VI.

“I’ve forgotten the abbot entirely,” said Edwin when he had
time to come to himself after the first draught of miraculous
champagne. “I was on my way to investigate his ghost when I
heard an unaccountable scream.”

“I never screamed before, and I don’t think I shall ever
scream again: I don’t know how I have been so weak
to-night.”

“Weakness always draws out kindness,” said Edwin.

“I would rather be weak than obtuse,” said Bessie.

“But it is better to be only obtuse than
[pg 55] both. I know someone who was
both.”

Well, what was I to think, and what could I do?”

“Nothing better than you did—make a declar—”

“What were you saying about the abbot’s ghost?”

“I was on my way to have an interview with it
when—”

“What was it like, and where did you find it?”

“It was like a column of light standing not far from the
house near the corner of the abbey-field.”

“And you did not think of any explanation of the
phenomenon?”

“No, I did not: it seemed more mysterious even than the
ringing of the bell.”

“To obtuse people it does.”

“I thought the abbot might be feeling without a home, and
sympathized with him, I assure you, very heartily.”

“I can tell you what it is: the servants had to rise at
three this morning to work. It is the light shining out from
the laundry-window: I’ve seen it often enough.”

“Well, it was a providential ghost for you and Edwin.”

“[illegible]” said John when they were assembled at
breakfast next morning, looking no worse for the excitement of
the previous evening, having all slept well: if the bell had
rung it had disturbed no one at all. Mr. Forrester and Bessie
had not made any one the wiser of the well-timed appearance of
the abbot’s ghost which had played such an effective part in
their previous night’s drama,—”I say,” he said looking at
Mr. Forrester and then at Bessie, “there is some understanding
between you two; you are always looking at each other, and when
you entered the room this morning you [illegible], and started
off [illegible] been caught. But I have [illegible] this
time.”

Bessie realized that her secret had become common property,
and blushed becomingly.

Mr. Forrester said, “What have you suspected, John?”

“That Bessie and you laid your heads together to make the
bell ring last night to frighten us. Remember, I’m not stupid
altogether.”

“I assure you, John, I had nothing to do with the ringing of
the bell,” Bessie said.

“Nor had I,” said Edwin.

“That’s queer, then,” said John; “but I’m sure there’s
something of some kind between you two: you’re planning
something, I know. What is it?”

“Wise people don’t reveal their plans to every one till near
the time for executing them, John,” said Edwin.

“Oh, very well,” John answered: “you can keep them to
yourselves. I dare say it’s nothing of consequence;” and having
finished his breakfast, John was off to his out-door business.
The shortest cut to his destination—and he always took
short cuts—was through the kitchen, and as he hastily
brushed along the wall toward the door he was brought up
suddenly by a loud peal of the bell, and he looked at one of
the servants, who was working at the table, as much as to say,
“Do you hear that?”

She answered his look: “Yes, I ha’en, but there’s naebody at
the door. It was yu that rang the bell: ye cam against that bag
of worsted clues for durning that I hung on the bell-wine
yesterday. When onybody happens to touch it the weight o’ ‘t
gars the bell ring; I would hae to ta’en off.”

With this simple and inglorious explanation John rushed to
the dining-room where he found Mrs. Forrester and the
châtelaine in deep Conspiracy again; and to this hour the
ghost of Cockhoolet is a matter (if you can use that word in
connection with a ghost at all) of faith and not of sight.

When Mrs. and Mrs. Ormiston returned they found that their
eldest daughter was engaged to be married, which surprised them
as little as it did the old woman but moved them a good deal
more.

[pg 56]

THE LEADEN ARROW.

A wondrous half-century was that which forms an isthmus
rather than a bridge between the Middle Ages and the times
termed Modern. Exit the Last of the Barons—enter the
printing-press. Exit Boabdil el Chico—enter Columbus and
Da Gama. The plot thickened as the cinquecenti hove in
view. The last years were the most pregnant. While the last
sigh of the Moor was dying into the murmurs of the Xenil, that
solitary shout that will ring while earth lasts went up from
the bows of the Pinta. Together came America and the sea-way to
India and—the rifle. For in 1498, when Buonarotti was at
his prime, Raphael, fifteen years old, had just taken his seat
at the paternal easel, and the scenes of the Lusiad were
in progress, “barrels were first grooved at Venice.”

Who grooved them we are not told. The name of that artist
has not survived, though we still remember his contemporary
townsman, Titian. Strictly, he is not entitled to the
immortality of an originator. That belongs to the unknown
savage who, in the miocene era probably, first gave a twist to
the feather of his arrow, thereby communicating to it a
revolving motion at right angles to the line of flight, and
making it an “arm of precision.” But pre-historic artillery we
may dismiss or leave to Milton. The blind bard omits to inform
us whether the guns used in the great pounding-match between
Lucifer and Michael were smooth-bores or rifles. The strong
presumption is that they were exclusively the former, and that
a well-served battery of Parrotts would have silenced them in
fifteen minutes. By giving him a few pieces of the kind the
poet would have further brightened the feather he sets in
Satan’s cap as the benefactor of mankind by inventing gunpowder
and shortening wars. The bow he presents to us as an old and
familiar weapon even at the date of that first and greatest of
pitched battles. Its claim, as the parent of projectile
implements, is recognized in the common etymology of arcus,
arcualia—artillery. Arblast, arquebuse, blunderbuss,
mark a humbler collateral descent in the same verbal family.
The ballista, or fifty-man-power bow, constituted the heavy,
and the individual article the light, artillery of twenty
centuries ago. Slings and javelins, being for hand-to-hand
fighting (David was near enough to hold an easy conversation
with Goliath before bringing him down), can hardly be brought
within the designation. The twang of either heavy or light was
but a thin contribution to the orchestra of battle compared to
“the diapason of the cannonade.” How much we have lost in the
absence of this element of tremendous noise from the conflicts
of ancient days! What a tool it would have been in Homer’s
hands! How trivial, to the author of the book of Job, would
have seemed the noise of the captains and the shouting! We
cannot, indeed, quite suppress the fancy that some mightier
counter-concussion must have filled the air at Thrasimene, when
“an earthquake reeled unheededly away:” Nemo pugnantium
senserit, avers Livy. But nothing is said of it. The old
heroes died in silence, like the wolf “biting hard among the
dying dogs.”

A well-known essay of a modern poet beautifully uses this
piece of the modern machinery of his craft. Dryden here makes
distance mellow the thunder of a naval fight into a musical
undertone. The great sea-fight between the duke of York and the
Dutch, fought within hearing of London, left “the town almost
empty” of its anxious citizens, whose “dreadful suspense would
not allow them to rest at home,” but drew them into the eastern
fields and suburbs, “all seeking the noise in the depth of
silence.” Dryden and three friends took a barge and descended
the river. Once clear of the crowded port above Greenwich,
“they ordered the watermen to let fall their
[pg 57] oars more gently; and then,
every one favoring his own curiosity with a strict silence,
it was not long ere they perceived the air to break about
them like the noise of distant thunder or of swallows in a
chimney; those little undulations of sound, though almost
vanishing before they reached them, yet still seeming to
retain somewhat of their first horror which they had between
the fleets. After they had attentively listened till such
time as the sound by little and little went from them,
Eugenius, lifting up his head and taking notice of it, was
the first who congratulated to the rest that happy omen of
our nation’s victory.”

This, the eloquent eolian music of distant and unseen
battle, was unheard by the ancient cities and their chroniclers
and poets. It will grow again less familiar as rifled ordnance
is introduced, with its thinner and sharper style of
expression. Waterloo appears to have been heard farther than
Sedan or Metz, although its pieces were but popguns compared
with those that spoke the requiem of the Third Napoleon. And
perhaps, if we allow for smallness in number and calibre, those
employed by Robert the Bruce at the battle of Werewater in
1327—said to be the first recorded occasion in
Europe—were more vociferous than their successors of
to-day. Few and cumbrous they must indeed have been, since
Edward III. could only bring four into the field at
Crécy; and they did far less service than the twanging
cloth-yard shaft in deciding the event of that conflict.

It was not till centuries later that the rifle perceptibly
exerted its treble voice in the multitudinous debates of the
ultima ratio. Shrill as John Randolph’s, its pipe, once
set up, was very attentively and respectfully listened to. Like
his, it spoke from the woods of America. “Stand your ground, my
brave fellows,” shouted Colonel Washington under the sycamores
of the Monongahela on the 9th of July, 1755, “and draw your
sights for the honor of old Virginia!” The colonial rifle
covered the retreat of the British queen’s-arm, if retreat such
a rout as Braddock’s could be called.

It is about the same time that we find a British writer, who
had witnessed the efficiency of the rifle as a companion
implement to the axe in pushing European settlement on this
continent, saying, “Whatever state shall thoroughly comprehend
the nature and advantages of rifle-pieces, and, having
facilitated and completed their construction, shall introduce
into its armies their general use, with a dexterity in the
management of them, will by this means acquire a superiority
which will almost equal anything that has been done at any time
by the particular excellence of any one kind of firearms, and
will perhaps fall but little short of the wonderful effects
which histories relate to have been formerly produced by the
first inventors of firearms.”

This was written in 1748, at which time the rifle was used
only by the hunters of the Alps and the hunters of the American
backwoods; the latter having doubtless derived it from the
former through German immigration. Bull’s conservatism,
however, was in the way. The lessons of Fort Duquesne, of
Saratoga and of New Orleans were successively wasted on him. He
did arm one regiment, the Ninety-fifth, with this weapon toward
the close of the last century, but for a long time it stood
alone in the royal service. Austria had previously maintained
some corps of Tyrolese Jägers. The French fought through
all the wars of their Revolution without having recourse to the
rifle, save in the campaign of 1793. It is singular that the
keen eye of Napoleon failed to detect its value, especially
when we note the use he made of light troops. The fate of
Nelson justifies the idea that a large body of good riflemen
might have changed the issue of Trafalgar.

Curiously enough, the French, who were the last to realize
the merits of the rifle, were the first to institute those
improvements which caused, within the present generation, its
universal substitution for the musket. The Gallic pioneer was
Delvigne, but his first improvements proved, as Pat might say,
no improvement at all. The inconvenience of slow
[pg 58] loading was the most obvious.
Delvigne’s remedy was to give the ball increased windage; in
other words, to diminish its diameter comparatively with
that of the bore. The ball thus went easily down to the
shoulders of the chamber containing the charge. Arrived
there, a smart rap with the ramrod moulded it to the
grooves. But it also flattened the top, and forced the
bottom partly into the chamber. Thus misshapen at birth, the
bullet was cast upon the world to an erratic and fruitless
career.

In 1828 a second Frenchman took the tube in hand. Colonel
Thouvenin abandoned the chamber, and filled up much of the
place it had occupied with a cylindrical steel pillar, or
tige, which projected from the breech-plug
longitudinally into the barrel. This formed a little anvil
whereon the bullet was to be beaten into the grooves. But the
bottom was flattened, and the powder acted only on the
periphery of the ball instead of the centre, tending thus to
give it an oblique direction.

Here Delvigne picked up the weapon for another trial. He
accomplished far the most important advance yet seen—an
advance relatively as great as Watt’s separate condenser in the
steam-engine. He retained the tige, but he changed
the spherical ball into a cylinder with a conical point, as
we now have it. In this he, in effect, reached the ultimatum of
progress as regards the general form of the projectile. He
assimilated it to Newton’s solid of least resistance. That
primeval missile, the arrow, had for unnumbered centuries
presented to the eyes of men an illustration of a simple truth
which scientific formula succeeded, scarce a couple of
centuries since, in evolving. “The bridge was built,” as the
old sapper told his commander, “before them picters” (the
engineer’s designs) “came.” The arrow-head describes, as it
whirls through the air, a solid varying from a cone only so far
as its edges vary from straight lines. This variation serves to
blend the cone with the cylinder formed by the revolution of
the arrow-head and the feather. The difference in length
between the ball and the arrow is due to the necessities of the
case. The least practicable length is best for both. The office
of the spirally-wound feather in communicating a rotary motion,
and thereby balancing, by an opposite force, the tendency of
the missile to swerve in any given direction, is fulfilled by
the spiral groove of the rifle. Of course, the ordinary smooth
musket is unfitted to the conico-cylindrical ball. Discharged
from such a barrel, there being nothing to keep the point in
the direction of its flight, it soon tumbles over, like an
arrow without a feather, and strikes wide of the mark.

Delvigne’s new gun came into use in 1840. The long
matchlocks of the Arabs had been very worrying to the French in
Algiers. It was a common pastime of the Ishmaelites to pick off
the Gauls at a distance which left Brown Bess helpless.
Protruded over an almost inaccessible crag, the former
primitive instrument would plump its ball into the ranks of the
Giaour in the dell below with a precision and an effect hardly
requited by victories in the open field or by the cave-smokings
of His Grace of Malakoff. Delvigne’s arm was accordingly
supplied to the Chasseurs d’Orléans, and in their hands
served the desired purpose. The matchlock met its match.

Under M. Delvigne’s system, however, the ball was not always
well forced into the grooves. The tige, too, made
cleaning difficult: it often got crooked, and it sometimes
broke off. A M. Tamisier did something toward removing the
former difficulty by cutting very shallow grooves on the ball
itself. The other called forth the ingenuity of the now famous
Minié, who made his first appearance in 1847-1848, and
whose name has attained the same kind of lethal immortality
with the names of Shrapnell, Congreve and Rodman. M.
Minié abandoned the tige entirely. He scooped out
the base of the ball and inserted into it an iron cup. This cup
was driven into the ball by the explosion, and forced the soft
lead into the grooves. The leading objection to the
Minié ball in this form was that the device did its work
too thoroughly. The iron was often driven so deep into the lead
as to tear off the solid point and
[pg 59] scatter the whole projectile
into two or three pieces. This mitrailleuse-like
distribution of disrupted spheres or leaden asteroids was
obviated by the abandonment of the iron cup, the powder
being left to act on the lead itself. Two or three channels
cut around the neck of the bullet helped to keep the point
in line, and aided at the same time the fastening of the
cartridge. Thus came its final metamorphosis to the buzzing
little torment that has been at intervals for the last
twenty years flying over all the continents and perplexing
the nations.

It was not till 1852 that the Enfield rifle was settled on
as the standard weapon of the British army. Machinery and
machinists were imported for its fabrication from the United
States, the appliances of our government armories being copied,
and Colonel Bruton, of the Harper’s Ferry Works, employed to
set them going. Prior to that time all firearms of public or
private manufacture, in England, had been made by hand, the
interchangeability of all the parts of any given number of guns
being an end accomplished in this country alone. The advantage
of having every corresponding detail of each piece a fac simile
of the same part in all the firelocks of an army must have been
perceived from the time when such weapons were first invented;
and nothing but the most inveterate conservatism, or the
steadiest opposition of that stamp which mobbed
threshing-machines and the spinning-jenny, could have so long
staved off its practical adoption.

Once awakened, however, England became, as she usually does,
active, innovating and experimental enough. Rifled cannon,
breech-loaders and armored ships—all the legitimate
offspring of the Venetian barrel and its American
employment—have kept her ever since in a ferment of
boards, commissions and target-firing. But these would carry us
beyond our prescribed limit into a boundless field of inquiry
and description. It would be like passing from a notice of the
tubular boiler of Stephenson’s Rocket to a discussion of the
vast railway system it begot.

The Crimean war afforded the first test, on a large scale,
in civilized warfare, of the issue between smooth and twist.
How the conoidal bullet and rifled barrel, opposed at Inkermann
to the antiquated Russian musket, tore through the dense
columns which had forced their way to the brow of the plateau,
driving the stolid Muscovites, “incapable of panic,” back into
the ravine pell-mell—how, at many periods of the siege of
Sebastopol, the rifle-pits did more to cripple the defence than
did the mortars and battering-guns—we need not recount.
These pits, and the rope mantlets wherewith they obliged the
Russians to cover their embrasures, were pronounced by Captain
(since General) George B. McClellan, in his report of the
United States Military Commission, about the only marked
novelties of the siege. Of both, mutatis mutandis, he
and his opponents made effective use in our civil war.

Nor shall we pick our perilous way among the Sniders,
Chassepots, Zündnadelgewehre, and
Zündnadelbüchsen whose various charms absorb the
military mind at this day. The debate among them is but as to
the best utilization of the old arrow-theory. The oblong
projectile, that goes singing on its winding way, is common to
them all. Slipped in at the back door or rammed home at the
front, delicately stirred up by the insinuating needle and its
titbit of fulminate or bluntly ordered off by the snappish
percussion-cap, it is the same obedient and faithful messenger,
and goes on its appointed errand in much the same style.

Under the ancient régime of the musket it required
the soldier’s weight in lead to kill him. Its point-blank range
was about sixty yards, but precision even at that short
distance it by no means possessed. At the battle of Fontenoy
the English and French Guards, drawn up in opposite lines,
conversed with each other prior to firing, like two groups of
friends across the street. “Gentlemen of the French Guards,
fire!” was the courteous invitation of the British commander.
“The French Guards never fire first,” was the reply. And not
till then did punctilio come to an end. Such
[pg 60] a colloquy in our day would
need to be carried on with forty-horse power
speaking-trumpets, or with the thunderous articulation of
that between the bellowing Alps and echoing Jura. Even
smooth-bore field-pieces, with point-blank of three hundred
and twenty yards and service range of one thousand, have to
keep their distance. It is a rare thing now for cannon to be
captured by a charge of cavalry or the bayonet. The rifle
destroys quantum suff. of their horses, and, their
support overpowered, they remain a helpless prey.

For this default of the blustering cannon in the trying of
conclusions with its quiet little cousin, the natural remedy is
to improve its interior in the same manner. This has been done,
and with marvelous effect in some respects. But the rifled
cannon, though extensively used both on sea and land, throwing
shot and shell five miles, and at close range through iron
plates a foot thick, cannot be yet styled a perfected weapon.
It may be in a very few years, thanks to the ardent anxiety, on
the part of the several peoples composing “the parliament of
man, the federation of the world,” to excel each other in the
“brain-spattering, windpipe-slitting art.” At present it is
maintained by very good American authority that for use under
some conditions, at short or moderate range, the smooth gun of
large calibre is more effective than a rifled gun throwing a
missile of the same weight. Our monitors continue to be armed
with the fifteen-inch Rodman, very recent experiments being
cited to prove its penetrating effect on iron plates greater
than that of the European rifled guns. This, of course, at very
close range.

The rifle is, in its simplest form, a more complex
instrument than the smooth-bored piece, and will always require
superior intelligence to manage it. The army which naturally
possesses this requisite in the highest degree will best handle
this decisive weapon, and be, other things equal, the strongest
army. This consideration operates in favor of our people, among
whom the rifle has always been in so much more constant and
familiar use than with those of other countries. Our broad
forests will have to be cleared and our mountain-chains, east
and west, more densely settled than Switzerland, before the
distinction of a nation of marksmen can be lost to us. So far,
there is little evidence of this change. The deer and the
wild-turkey are nearly as abundant on the Atlantic slope of the
Alleghanies as they ever were. Probably there are more of both
in Virginia than at the time of the settlement of Jamestown.
Like the quail and the bee, they are favored by a certain
advance of population and cultivation.

Another species of aborigine does not similarly thrive in
the path of the rifle. The Indian of the Plains is still
troublesome occasionally, but far less so than when blue-coats
and blunderbusses joined forces against him. The odds then were
often on his side, for many of the red men were armed with the
rifle, while the troops had but the musket and carbine. The
appearance of the breech-loading rifle in the hands of the
United States dragoons on the frontier just fifteen years ago
let in new light upon the Camanche and Apache mind. Up to that
period the badgering of a detachment of “heavies” was a
favorite pastime with these gentry. They got up their “spring
fights” with as much coolness and regularity as the early
patriarchs of Texas are related to have done, and not merely,
as in the case of the latter, in utter contempt, but directly
at the expense, of the constituted authorities. Tying a bag of
dried mule-meat and pounded corn to the peak of his saddle,
fashioning a small supply of arrows, or balls if he boasted the
spectre of a gun, coloring the inferior half of his
frontispiece a rich vermilion and the upper a delicate green,
with ramifications of lampblack coursing tastefully along the
cheek-bones and the bridge of the nose, twisting a crane’s
feather into the tail of his horse, and giving his affectionate
squaw a farewell kick, the cavalier of the prairie was ready
for a raid on the Long-knives. Making a rapid night-march or
two, he would carry the “latest intelligence from the Indian
country” to the [pg 61] border ranches of Texas or
New Mexico. Stampeding all the horses and mules that stood
or ranged convenient, and under favorable circumstances some
cattle and sheep, and “gobbling” on occasion some incautious
Cyrion or Phyllis of the Western Arcadia, the marauder made
for the mountains. By the time he had well passed the last
outpost the hue-and-cry was at his heels, followed, after an
easy-going delay, by the lumbering dragoon. The soldier,
armed with ineffectual sabre and carbine, encumbered with a
variety of traps about as useful as they, usually managed,
if not forced to put back by stress of provisions, to come
up with him in the gates of the hills. There an idle
interchange of arrow and round ball between hollow and cliff
wound up the eventful history of the chase. As a rule, no
marked chastisement was inflicted on the Indian: he realized
in peace the proceeds of his little speculation.

Now, Minié, like the Harpagon of his countryman, has
“changed all that.” The retreating heathen flies to his hills
in vain. They do not cover him, but the rifle does. Cantering
to the summit of a knoll, he waves his compliments to the
distant dragoon with a gesture of derision, more expressive
than elegant, he has acquired from the white. Turning calmly to
depart, as he sinks below the crest of the hill a sagittiform
bullet, fired at five hundred yards’ distance with all the
science and talent purchasable with thirteen dollars a month
and rations, plumps into the rump of his unhappy pony, and the
Stoic of the woods is unhorsed. Reared on horseback, and weak
in the legs from long addiction to that mode of locomotion,
this is a casus omissus in Lo’s tactics. Scant time,
however, has he for reflection. He gathers up himself and his
drapery as well as circumstances will allow, and scuttles
hurriedly off, a fluttering chaos of rags and feathers. It is
too late. Heaven is on the side of the best artillery. A few
minutes and the Philistines are upon him. Burnside’s or
Remington’s last patent again lifts up its voice, and the
triumph of civilization is complete.

The prairie Indian, unlike his congener of the woods, has as
yet been but partially able to substitute gunpowder for the
bow. The advantage he has in the protection afforded him by the
desolation of his waterless mesas and sage-covered hills
is thus in great measure neutralized. What, when he does
possess the modern firearm, he is capable of doing with it, the
achievements of the Modocs in their volcanic stronghold will
attest. But these were few, and soon went down. The extinction
of the tribes west and south of the Rio Grande and the Humboldt
cannot be many years postponed. The red rover of that region
will disappear as a combatant in the same way, and before the
same weapon, as his brother nomad of Algeria, the earliest
victim of the conoidal bullet. The spherical ball has done its
appointed part in disposing of the aborigines east of the
Mississippi, where forests covered the land and trees generally
intercepted the sight at a hundred or a hundred and fifty
yards. With the extension of Caucasian empire to the Plains
came an extension of the range of vision, which necessitated an
advance in the range of the rifle. The weapon of Sharpe figured
for the first time in the van when the woods of Missouri were
passed and the open plains of Kansas reached. There its office
was, unfortunately, the strife of white against white. The
largest possible range, the greatest possible number of shots
in a given time, were demanded in a war wherein the opposing
armies were seldom within five miles of each other, or more
than one man hurt to five hundred charges of powder burned. How
the Lenni Lenape must have opened their eyes at this
reproduction of the drama of a century ago when the whites,
English and French, were fighting each other for the possession
of the Delawares’ lands in Pennsylvania! The feeble remnant of
the compatriots of Logan had “moved on,” under pressure of a
very urgent police, a thousand miles westward to a reservation
not a great deal larger, when portioned out, than that last
reservation allotted to all men; and the pale-faces who had
hung upon his track he now saw fighting for
that.

[pg 62]

From its warlike aspect it is pleasant to turn to the
contributions of the rifle to peaceful amusement, if not
peaceful industry. Contemptuously giving the go-by to its
minutest phase in this field—the “parlor rifle,” with a
target against the chimney-piece or meandering, in feline form,
along our neighbor’s roof-tree—we go forth, with Snider
and sunrise, to the forest fastness. Our companions throng,
tall, bronzed, close-knit and sinewy, true children of the
four-grooved, from frosty Caucasus, the Hartz, the Alps, the
Dovrafjeld, the Grampians, the Himmalaya, the Adirondack, the
Alleghany, the Nevada. The chamois, the ibex, the red deer, the
Virginia deer, the wapiti, the gour, or the royal tiger may be
the game in hand. The tiger we are accustomed to associate
exclusively with the dank jungles of Lower India, but he
climbs, each summer, the great passes of Central Asia, “the
roof of the world,” and makes his way to the frontier of
Siberia, beyond 50° north.

The equipment of the mountain-rifleman is characterized by
simplicity and a strict attention to business. The nature of
the ground over which he works inexorably prescribes this. The
superfluities of the fox-hunter or the partridge-shooter with
his dog-cart cannot be his. Hatchet, pouch, knife and knapsack,
with alpenstock on occasion, about comprise his kit. He may be
attended by a hound or two, but not a pack. He wants no
yelling. He hears but

the Spirit of the Mist,

And it speaks to the Spirit of the Fell.

For little hollows and little hills Scott’s dogs, that

raved through the hollow pass amain,

Chiding the rocks that yelled again,

may have been highly effective when his mediæval
sportsmen, who carried no guns, could keep within a furlong of
them. But in the depths of the great mountains, with
point-blank range of six hundred yards and long pops of nearly
twice that, they would be preposterous. Fancy the Quorndon or
the Pytchley on the flanks of the Matterhorn!

Chamois-hunting, the sporting specialty of the Swiss and the
Tyrolese, appears to be dying out. The hunter of our day keeps
it up rather as a tradition than as a practical pursuit. He
rarely bags a “goat,” for goats are very few to bag, and those
few even more supernaturally fleet and sure of foot and keen of
nose than their less-hunted ancestors. Still, somewhere in that
upper world of lilac-white that melts into the clouds in vast
but distance-softened chasms of viscid ice and rifts of gray
gneiss, there is an object for him. In some nook or on some
crag of the square leagues of desert that swell around him a
troop of the desiderated ruminants is grazing, if grazing it
can be called where grass is none. He is very sure of that.
Even from the door of his chalet he scans the slopes in the
half hope of detecting a flock or a single goat. His father and
his grandfather before him had looked forth from the same door
on the same scene, snuffed the same “caller air,” mentally
shaped the same pretext for yielding to the same spirit of
adventure begotten of the peaks and by going forth to battle
with the solitude, and hunted patiently, sometimes with
success, oftener without, the progenitors of the same quarry.
So he prepares himself anew for the wild and perilous tramp. A
day—two or three days—may pass without the
compassing of a shot, or even hearing the whistle of the
sentinel goat as he shrills the alarm far out of range and
leads his fellows in twenty minutes to crags the hunter cannot
reach in as many hours. Death crouches in the treacherous
snow-crust beneath or the poised avalanche above. A false step
or an inch’s miscalculation of leap may make him a waif for the
lämmergeier or land him among the buried villages of the
last century. He toils on until success or starvation sends him
home. In the former case he out-generals his shy game after a
series of manoeuvres to which the deepest stratagems of our
Indians are straightforwardness personified. He gets a long
shot at a distance that would make the musket or buckshot as
useless as a sabre. The certainty may be apparent that the
animal, if hit mortally, must fall some hundreds of feet,
perhaps into an inaccessible
[pg 63] chasm. There is no help for
that. Now or never! The short rifle, assisted by a portable
rest, is called on for its best. The concentrated energy of
the whole chase is thrown into the long and carefully
calculated aim. A thin spurt of white smoke jets forth; a
sharp report echoes “from peak to peak the rattling crags
among;” half a dozen chamois whisk around the next
rock-buttress, and “one more unfortunate” tumbles from the
verge into vacancy. The labor of days is rewarded. Securing
the scanty venison if he can, the hunter is off for his
hillside burrow, advertising his approach by an exultant
jodel of extra nerve-splitting power.

In Great Britain the rifle, ancient or modern, like, indeed,
any other firearm, has yet to establish itself as a democratic
“institution.” Her forests are not forests in our sense, and
her mountain-dwellers know little of the rifle. In the duke of
Athol’s seventy-mile forest, with scarce a tree save planted
larches, the stag roams by thousands, but of course the
game-laws interpose, as they did eight hundred years ago,
between him and the (biped) hind. He is still the reserved
luxury of the Norman. So with the leagues of upland where His
Grace of Sutherland has made the Highlander give place to the
hart, the “lassie wi’ the lint-white locks” to the Cheviot
ewe—where, in short, the white Celt has been improved out
of existence as remorselessly as the red man in America, and
that in favor not of a superior race of men, but of
feræ naturæ. Into these and similar
districts, at stated seasons, sundry squads of gentlemen are
turned loose. They either “pay their shot,” as Punch has
it, in the shape of rent, or are the guests of the noble
proprietors. Their devices for circumventing the antlered
monarch of the waste are amply detailed by Scrope, Hawker,
Herbert and also by the late Edwin Landseer doing the pictorial
department with a success attributable chiefly to his
management of landscape effect, for his dogs, deer and other
animals from his Æsop’s fable-like groups to his four
duplicated lions in Trafalgar Square, belong—heretic that
we are to say it!—properly to still life, their want of
action and verve placing them beneath comparison with
the works of either one of a score of Flemish and French
painters, from Rubens and Snyders down to Bonheur and Vernet.
That his unsold pictures have brought, since his death,
something like half a million proves nothing. Time was when the
worthless canvases of West and Morland were equally
transmutable into gold.

Like other forms of British field-sports, deer-stalking is
sufficiently intricate and artificial. It is obviously the
occupation of men whose primary object is more to kill time
than to kill deer. According to print, from type and plate, the
stag, a reduced edition of the American wapiti, is, in the
heart of a little kingdom of some hundreds of souls to the
square mile, as little accustomed to the sight of man and as
hard to approach as he would be on the head-waters of the
Yellowstone. If five or six hours’ worming, ventre à
terre, up the bed of a mountain-torrent, with not even a
rowan-bush to aid concealment, succeed in bringing the
sports-man within two hundred yards of his unconscious game, it
is a good day’s performance. How, the dun deer’s hide once
perforated, the “tail” of game-keepers, beaters and volunteer
hangers-on is gathered up, the comforting toothfu’ of
usquebaugh absorbed by the toilers of the brae, the victim
“gralloched” and suspended across the inevitable gray Highland
pony that makes such a capital “first light” for the
foreground, and the line of triumphant march taken up for
hunting-box, clachan or castle, have we not been told to
repletion? The tool used on these occasions is up to the latest
requirements of modern science. Whitworth and Lancaster, thanks
to their projectile’s being wedged in so tight as to cause an
occasional misunderstanding it and the breech-plug as to which
was expected to move, have grown unpopular. The style and the
patentee vary every year or two or oftener, breech-loading and
the elongated bullet being the only persistent features.

Among the commonalty of Britain,
[pg 64] within a very few years past,
rifle-clubs and matches have been brought greatly into vogue
under government encouragement. Austria, tu infelix
this time, having served unwillingly as an experimental
target, with the most distinguished and gratifying success
to the experimenters, at Solferino and Sadowa, gave a new
impetus to the rifle movement in England, as France, a
trifle later, did to the Battle-of-Dorking school of
prophetic literature. Thus it happens that the rifle is
taking its place gradually by the side of fat Durhams,
gooseberries, lop eared rabbits and the Derby as a popular
sensation. Johnny sends over a “team,” evidently in his
judgment a whole one, to “shoot the American continent.” His
next deputation ought to be sent, after vanquishing the
“blarsted” Gothamites, to the recesses of the Alleghany, and
pitted there against the woodsman with his ancient weapon
carrying a round ball of seventy-five to the pound, five
feet long and decorated with tin sights, double trigger and
mayhap flint-lock. The adventurers would beat in the long
run, but they would go home not wholly unlearned. Should
they stay to a turkey-shoot, they would see in it the
Occidental analogue of their own public matches—more
picturesque, if not quite so prim and scientific. Strictly,
it presupposes conditions non-existent in England—a
community, for instance, first of hunters, and second of
hunters with the rifle.

This recreation, primarily belonging to localities where
large game, such as deer and wild-turkeys, is found, has spread
down to the cities, where it breaks out in a sporadic form
about Christmas. But the hills are its home—the
foot-hills, notably, of the Appalachian range, the domestic
turkey not being very common higher up, nor its wild original
(“original,” we insist, pace the Agricultural
Report ornithologist, who finds an ineffaceable distinction
in the fact that the tail-ring of the one is sometimes, and
that of the other never, white!) lower down.

We mind us of an ancient town in the Valley of Virginia,
settled nearly a century and a half ago by riflemen, sheltered
by them through a stormy infancy, and still steeped in the
traditions of the implement in question. Spitted by the
railway, the hub of many turnpikes, and surrounded by a
thickly-peopled country, it is yet near enough to the mountains
to receive from them each winter quite a delegation of their
inhabitants. Last year wild-turkeys were shot within the
corporate limits, a deer was chased within half a mile of them,
and a fine specimen of Felis Canadensis was killed in an
orchard still nearer.

Four miles west of the town the fertile limestone
carse swells into the shady hills, clad largely with
pine, that form the long glacis of the Alleghanies. These hills
are peopled principally by a hardy race not unlike the German
woodsmen, whose blood, indeed, a great many of them share, as
their surnames, though sadly thinned down into English spelling
and pronunciation, denote. They inherit, likewise, their fancy
for the rifle. Allied with the axe, which, like Talleyrand’s
supposititious frontiersman, they have not forgotten, it
supplies them materially with sport and subsistence. Their
land, where arable at all, being unproductive as a rule,
wood-chopping is their most profitable branch of farming. A
score or two of them drive into town daily, each with his
four-, three- or two-horse cargo of wood. The pile is
frequently topped off with a brace or two of ruffed grouse,
there called pheasant, or a wild-turkey, less often a deer, and
more often hares; which last multiply along the narrow
intervales in extraordinary numbers. We have seen three
sledge-loads of hares—say two thousand in all—on
the street of a winter’s day.

This sappy and sapid contribution to its comfort and luxury
the town often repays with a jug of whisky as an addendum to
the cash receipts; although it must not be inferred from this
that the hillmen are noted for a weakness in that direction.
Generally, they are as sober as they are hard-working,
independent and honest. The few who do take kindly to strong
waters are so hardened by a life of toil and exposure that the
enemy is a lifetime in bringing them down.. One little old
hook-nosed fellow was an [pg 65] every-day feature of the road
for fifteen or twenty years. In that entire period he was
rarely, if once, seen to go out sober. He drove but two
horses, which were apparently coeval with himself. Long
practice had taught them perfectly how to accommodate
themselves to their master’s failing. The saddle-horse
adapted his movements with vigilant dexterity to the rolling
and pitching aloft. On more than one occasion the woodman
was found lying in the road by the side or under the feet of
his faithful and motionless team. Poor old Jack! thou hast
“gone under,” deeper than that, at last, leaving behind thee
the savor of an honest name, slightly modified by that of
corn whisky.

The Hayfield Inn, a little hostelrie on the Northern “pike,”
is the scene of many a turkey-shoot. Between the hill and the
road, at the foot of a ravine that runs down at right angles,
room enough has been scooped out, partly by the rains and
partly by the pick, for the house, offices and microscopic yard
decorated with hollyhocks and larkspurs. Across the highway
stands a capacious barn, with open space for wagons, and
between it and the brook beyond stretches a narrow meadow,
whence a vivid imagination has extracted the name of the
caravanserai. The open space flanking the house and road is the
rifle-course, so to speak. When occupied of a mellow October
afternoon by a party of the autochthones, in their pea-jackets
of blue or hickory homespun, it presents a gay and cheery
spectacle. Festooning fence and tree around them, the Virginia
creeper, or Ampelopsis, shames vermilion against the
mass of pines that glooms skyward beyond. Other tints of
vegetable decay fringe the brook where it winds from side to
side of the long strip of grass, green from the autumnal rain.
Little reck the assembled marksmen of Nature’s
stage-decorations. One group will be mentally weighing the
turkeys, another discussing the distance—too long or too
short for the peculiar powers of this or the other individual
or his weapon. Around the rude target kneel two or three,
scoring on it each man his “centre,” above or below, to the
right or left, of the true centre, to counteract the
ascertained obliquity of his eye or his gun. Here a six-foot
Stoic, the Nestor of the glen, is very formally going through
the ceremony of loading. Another is slowly, and with the
precision of an astronomer, adjusting the tin slides which
protect his barrel from the glitter of the sun. The chatter of
a bevy of country maidens ripples from over the way. The horses
whinny under their square-skirted saddles, or stand “hard by
their chariots champing golden corn,” like the horses of
Nestor, Agamemnon, Homer and Gladstone before Dr. Schliemann’s
Troy; the yearlings in the meadow alternately gaze and graze;
the guinea-fowl now and then honors the shout over a good shot
with its harsh but well-meant rattle; the rifle speaks at
measured intervals; the prizes thin off to the remainder
gobbler; and so, with the quiet characteristic of
rifle-matches, the evening draws toward the dew. The
smoke-whitened guns are carefully swabbed with tow and prepared
for their rest as tenderly as infants. Dobbin is rescued from
the (fence) stake to hie hill-ward with his master, cantering
exultant or jogging grumly according to the result of the
“event;” and the metropolis of Petticoat Gap—for such, in
the vernacular and on the maps, is its unfortunate
designation—relapses into virtuous repose.

The implement employed at these rural reunions is rarely the
breech-loader, or even the short gun. It promises to hold its
ground for years yet, gradually yielding to the little modern
tool. The essential characteristics of this we have described
as they exist and will probably remain. Variations in the
rifling and—where muzzle-loading is abandoned—in
the appliances of the chamber will continue to be made, as they
have heretofore been made without number numberless. The
patterns now fashionable will give place to others, in their
turn to be dropped like a last year’s coat. Remington,
Winchester and the rest will retire in favor of new contrivers,
devoted, like them, to the simple task of facilitating the
flight of the leaden arrow with its grooved feather in steel or
iron. With [pg 66] them will rise and fall a
parallel series of names on a broader and more sonorous
field—the field of heavy artillery, the ponderous
Wiard being full brother to the liliputian Sharpe. Rifled
cannon certainly present problems far more complicated than
the small-arm. They can by no means be considered, as yet,
so near perfection. It is boldly maintained by many experts,
both here and in England, that the “smashing” power at
point-blank range of such smooth-bores as the Rodman 12-inch
and 15-inch is greater than that of the rifle of the same
weight. The question is so closely involved with that of
armor-plates for ships and ports, and that with buoyancy and
other naval requirements, and economy and stability on land,
that a long period must elapse ere the reaching of fixed
conclusions. Within the present generation wooden
line-of-battle ships, with sails alone, have ruled the wave.
These have given place to the steam-liners that began and
closed their brief career at Sebastopol and Bomarsund; and
the prize-belt is now borne, among the bruisers of the main,
by the mob of iron-clads, infinitely diverse of aspect and
some of them shapeless, like the geologic monsters that
weltered in the primal deep. Which of these is to triumph
ultimately and devour its misshapen kindred, or whether they
are not all to go down before the torpedo, that carries no
gun and fires no shot, is a “survival-of-the-fittest”
question to be solved by Darwins yet to come. But it is
tolerably safe to say that where the best shooting is to be
done it will continue to be done with the conico-cylindrical
missile, spirally revolving around the line of flight; that
is, with the arrow-rifle.

EDWARD C. BRUCE.

TWO MIRRORS.

My love but breathed upon the glass,

And, lo! upon the crystal sheen

A tender mist did straightway pass,

And raised its jealous veil between.

But quick, as when Aurora’s face

Is hid behind some transient shroud,

The sun strikes through with golden grace,

And she emerges from the cloud;

So from her eyes celestial light

Shines on the mirror’s cloudy plain,

And swift the envious mist takes flight,

And shows her lovely face again.

When o’er the mirror of my heart,

Wherein her image true endures,

Some misty doubt doth sudden start,

And all the sweet reflex obscures,

There beams such glow from her clear eyes

That swift the rising mists are laid;

And, fixed again, her image lies,

All lovelier for the passing shade.

F.A.
HILLARD.

[pg 67]

MALCOLM.

BY GEORGE MACDONALD, AUTHOR OF “ANNALS OF A QUIET
NEIGHBORHOOD,” “ROBERT FALCONER,” ETC.

CHAPTER LXIV.

THE LAIRD AND HIS MOTHER.

When Malcolm and Joseph set out from Duff Harbor to find the
laird, they could hardly be said to have gone in search of him:
all in their power was to seek the parts where he was
occasionally seen, in the hope of chancing upon him; and they
wandered in vain about the woods of Fife House all that week,
returning disconsolate every evening to the little inn on the
banks of the Wan Water. Sunday came and went without yielding a
trace of him; and, almost in despair, they resolved, if
unsuccessful the next day, to get assistance and organize a
search for him. Monday passed like the days that had preceded
it, and they were returning dejectedly down the left bank of
the Wan Water in the gloaming, and nearing a part where it is
hemmed in by precipitous rocks and is very narrow and deep,
crawling slow and black under the lofty arch of an ancient
bridge that spans it at one leap, when suddenly they caught
sight of a head peering at them over the parapet. They dared
not run for fear of terrifying him if it should be the laird,
and hurried quietly to the spot. But when they reached the end
of the bridge its round back was bare from end to end. On the
other side of the river the trees came close up, and pursuit
was hopeless in the gathering darkness.

“Laird, laird! they’ve ta’en awa’ Phemy, an’ we dinna ken
whaur to luik for her,” cried the poor father aloud.

Almost the same instant, and as if he had issued from the
ground, the laird stood before them. The men started back with
astonishment—soon changed into pity, for there was light
enough to see how miserable the poor fellow looked. Neither
exposure nor privation had thus weighed upon him: he was simply
dying of fear. Having greeted Joseph with embarrassment, he
kept glancing doubtfully at Malcolm, as if ready to run on his
least movement. In few words Joseph explained their
quest—with trembling voice and tears that would not be
denied enforcing the tale. Ere he had done the laird’s jaw had
fallen and further speech was impossible to him. But by
gestures sad and plain enough he indicated that he knew nothing
of her, and had supposed her safe at home with her parents. In
vain they tried to persuade him to go back with them, promising
every protection: for sole answer he shook his head
mournfully.

There came a sudden gust of wind among the branches. Joseph,
little used to trees and their ways with the wind, turned
toward the sound, and Malcolm unconsciously followed his
movement. When they turned again the laird had vanished, and
they took their way homeward in sadness.

What passed next with the laird can be but conjectured. It
came to be well enough known afterward where he had been
hiding; and had it not been dusk as they came down the
river-bank the two men might, looking up to the bridge from
below, have had it suggested to them. For in the half-spandrel
wall between the first arch and the bank they might have spied
a small window looking down on the sullen, silent gloom,
foam-flecked with past commotion, that crept languidly away
from beneath. It belonged to a little vaulted chamber in the
bridge, devised by some vanished lord as a kind of
summer-house—long neglected, but having in it yet a
mouldering table, a broken chair or two and a rough bench. A
little path led steep from the end of the parapet down to its
hidden door. It was now used only by the game-keepers for traps
and fishing-gear and odds and ends of things, and was generally
[pg 68]
supposed to be locked up. The laird had, however, found it
open, and his refuge in it had been connived at by one of the
men, who, as they heard afterward, had given him the key and
assisted him in carrying out a plan he had devised for
barricading the door. It was from this place he had so suddenly
risen at the call of Blue Peter, and to it he had as suddenly
withdrawn again—to pass in silence and loneliness through
his last purgatorial pain.²

Mrs. Stewart was sitting in her drawing-room alone: she
seldom had visitors at Kirkbyres—not that she liked being
alone, or indeed being there at all, for she would have lived
on the Continent, but that her son’s trustees, partly to
indulge their own aversion to her, taking upon them a larger
discretionary power than rightly belonged to them, kept her too
straitened, which no doubt in the recoil had its share in poor
Stephen’s misery. It was only after scraping for a whole year
that she could escape to Paris or Homburg, where she was at
home. There her sojourn was determined by her good or ill
fortune at faro.

What she meditated over her knitting by the
firelight—she had put out her candles—it would be
hard to say, perhaps unwholesome to think: there are souls to
look into which is, to our dim eyes, like gazing down from the
verge of one of the Swedenborgian pits.

But much of the evil done by human beings is as the evil of
evil beasts: they know not what they do—an excuse which,
except in regard to the past, no man can make for himself,
seeing the very making of it must testify its falsehood.

She looked up, gave a cry and started to her feet: Stephen
stood before her, halfway between her and the door. Revealed in
a flicker of flame from the fire, he vanished in the following
shade, and for a moment she stood in doubt of her seeing sense.
But when the coal flashed again there was her son, regarding
her out of great eyes that looked as if they had seen death. A
ghastly air hung about him, as if he had just come back from
Hades, but in his silent bearing there was a sanity, even
dignity, which strangely impressed her. He came forward a pace
or two, stopped, and said, “Dinna be frichtit, mem. I’m come.
Sen’ the lassie hame an’ du wi’ me as ye like. I canna haud aff
o’ me. But I think I’m deein’, an’ ye needna misguide me.”

His voice, although it trembled a little, was clear and
unimpeded, and, though weak in its modulation, manly.

Something in the woman’s heart responded. Was it motherhood
or the deeper godhead? Was it pity for the dignity housed in
the crumbling clay, or repentance for the son of her womb? Or
was it that sickness gave hope, and she could afford to be
kind?

“I don’t know what you mean, Stephen,” she said, more gently
than he had ever heard her speak.

Was it an agony of mind or of body, or was it but a
flickering of the shadows upon his face? A moment, and he gave
a half-choked shriek and fell on the floor. His mother turned
from him with disgust and rang the bell. “Send Tom here,” she
said.

An elderly, hard-featured man came.

“Stephen is in one of his fits,” she said.

The man looked about him: he could see no one in the room
but his mistress.

“There he is,” she continued, pointing to the floor. “Take
him away. Get him up to the loft and lay him in the hay.”

The man lifted his master like an unwieldy log and carried
him, convulsed, from the room.

Stephen’s mother sat down again by the fire and resumed her
knitting.

CHAPTER LXV.

THE LAIRD’S VISION.

Malcolm had just seen his master set out for his solitary
ride when one of the maids informed him that a man from
Kirkbyres wanted him. Hiding his
[pg 69] reluctance, he went with her
and found Tom, who was Mrs. Stewart’s grieve and had been
about the place all his days.

“Mr. Stephen’s come hame, sir,” he said, touching his
bonnet, a civility for which Malcolm was not grateful.

“It’s no possible,” returned Malcolm. “I saw him last
nicht.”

“He cam aboot ten o’clock, sir, an’ hed a turn o’ the fa’in’
sickness o’ the spot. He’s verra ill the noo, an’ the mistress
sent me ower to speir gien ye wad obleege her by gaein’ to see
him.”

“Has he ta’en till’s bed?” asked Malcolm.

“We pat him infill ‘t, sir. He’s ravin’ mad, an’ I’m
thinkin’ he’s no far frae his hin’er en’.”

“I’ll gang wi’ ye direckly,” said Malcolm.

In a few minutes they were riding fast along the road to
Kirkbyres, neither with much to say to the other, for Malcolm
distrusted every one about the place, and Tom was by nature
taciturn.

“What garred them sen’ for me, div ye ken?” asked Malcolm at
length when they had gone about halfway.

“He cried oot upo’ ye i’ the nicht,” answered Tom.

When they arrived Malcolm was shown into the drawing-room,
where Mrs. Stewart met him with red eyes. “Will you come and
see my poor boy?” she said.

“I wull du that, mem. Is he verra ill?”

“Very. I’m afraid he is in a bad way.”

She led him to a dark, old-fashioned chamber, rich and
gloomy. There, sunk in the down of a huge bed with carved ebony
posts, lay the laird, far too ill to be incommoded by the
luxury to which he was unaccustomed. His head kept tossing from
side to side and his eyes seemed searching in vacancy.

“Has the doctor been to see ‘im, mem?” asked Malcolm.

“Yes, but he says he can’t do anything for him.”

“Wha waits upon ‘im, mem?”

“One of the maids and myself.”

“I’ll jist bide wi’ ‘im.”

“That will be very kind of you.”

“I s’ bide wi’ ‘im till I see ‘im oot o’ this, ae w’y or
ither,”, added Malcolm, and sat down by the bedside of his poor
distrustful friend. There Mrs. Stewart left him.

The laird was wandering in the thorny thickets and slimy
marshes which, haunted by the thousand misshapen horrors of
delirium, beset the gates of life. That one so near the light
and slowly drifting into it should lie tossing in hopeless
darkness! Is it that the delirium falls, a veil of love, to
hide other and more real terrors?

His eyes would now and then meet those of Malcolm as they
gazed tenderly upon him, but the living thing that looked out
of the windows was darkened and saw him not. Occasionally a
word would fall from him, or a murmur of half-articulation
float up like the sound of a river of souls; but whether
Malcolm heard, or only seemed to hear, something like this, he
could not tell, for he could not be certain that he had not
himself shaped the words by receiving the babble into the
moulds of the laird’s customary thought and speech: “I dinna
ken whaur I cam frae—I kenna whaur I’m gaein’
till.—Eh, gien He wad but come oot an’ shaw
Himsel’!—O Lord! tak the deevil aff o’ my puir
back.—O Father o’ lichts! gar him tak the hump wi’ him. I
hae no fawvor for’t, though it’s been my constant compainion
this mony a lang.”

But in general he only moaned, and after the words thus
heard or fashioned by Malcolm lay silent and nearly still for
an hour.

All the waning afternoon Malcolm sat by his side, and
neither mother, maid nor doctor came near them.

“Dark wa’s an’ no a breath!” he murmured or seemed to murmur
again. “Nae gerse nor flooers nor bees! I hae na room for my
hump, an’ I canna lie upo’ ‘t, for that wad kill me. Wull I
ever ken whaur I cam frae? The wine’s unco guid. Gie me
a drap mair, gien ye please, Lady Horn.—I thought the
grave was a better place. I hae lain safter afore I
dee’d.—Phemy! Phemy! Rin, Phemy, rin! I s’ bide wi’ them
this time. Ye rin,
Phemy!”

[pg 70]

As it grew dark the air turned very chill, and snow began to
fall thick and fast. Malcolm laid a few sticks on the
smouldering peat-fire, but they were damp and did not catch.
All at once the laird gave a shriek, and crying out, “Mither!
mither!” fell into a fit so violent that the heavy bed shook
with his convulsions. Malcolm held his wrists and called aloud.
No one came, and, bethinking himself that none could help, he
waited in silence for what would soon follow.

The fit passed quickly, and he lay quiet. The sticks had
meantime dried, and suddenly they caught fire and blazed up.
The laird turned his face toward the flame; a smile came over
it; his eyes opened wide, and with such an expression of seeing
gazed beyond Malcolm that he turned his in the same
direction.

“Eh, the bonny man! The bonny man!” murmured the laird.

But Malcolm saw nothing, and turned again to the laird: his
jaw had fallen, and the light was fading out of his face like
the last of a sunset. He was dead.

Malcolm rang the bell, told the woman who answered it what
had taken place, and hurried from the house, glad at heart that
his friend was at rest.

He had ridden but a short distance when he was overtaken by
a boy on a fast pony, who pulled up as he neared him.

“Whaur are ye for?” asked Malcolm. “I’m gaein’ for Mistress
Cat’nach,” answered the boy.

“Gang yer w’ys than, an’ dinna haud the deid waitin’,” said
Malcolm with a shudder.

The boy cast a look of dismay behind him and galloped
off.

The snow still fell and the night was dark. Malcolm spent
nearly two hours on the way, and met the boy returning, who
told him that Mrs. Catanach was not to be found.

His road lay down the glen, past Duncan’s cottage, at whose
door he dismounted, but he did not find him. Taking the bridle
on his arm, he walked by his horse the rest of the way. It was
about nine o’clock, and the night very dark. As he neared the
house, he heard Duncan’s voice. “Malcolm, my son! Will it pe
your ownself?” it said.

“It wull that, daddy,” answered Malcolm.

The piper was sitting on a fallen tree, with the snow
settling softly upon him.

“But it’s ower cauld for ye to be sittin’ there i’ the snaw,
an’ the mirk tu,” added Malcolm.

“Ta tarkness will not be ketting to ta inside of her,”
returned the seer. “Ah, my poy! where ta light kets in, ta
tarkness will pe ketting in too. This now, your whole pody will
pe full of tarkness, as ta Piple will say, and Tuncan’s pody
tat will pe full of ta light.” Then with suddenly changed tone
he said, “Listen, Malcolm, my son! Shell pe ferry uneasy till
you’ll wass pe come home.”

“What’s the maitter noo, daddy?” returned Malcolm. “Onything
wrang aboot the hoose?”

“Something will pe wrong, yes, put she’ll not can tell
where. No, her pody will not pe full of light! For town here,
in ta curset Lowlands, ta sight has peen almost cone from her,
my son. It will now pe no more as a co creeping troo’ her, and
shell nefer see plain no more till she’ll pe come pack to her
own mountains.”

“The puir laird’s gane back to his,” said Malcolm. “I won’er
gien he kens yet, or gien he gangs speirin’ at ilk ane he meets
gien he can tell him whaur he cam frae. He’s mad nae mair, ony
gait.”

“How? Will he pe not tead? Ta poor lairt! Ta poor maad
lairt!”

“Ay, he’s deid: maybe that’s what’ll be troublin’ yer sicht,
daddy.”

“No, my son. Ta maad lairt was not ferry maad, and if he was
maad he was not paad, and it was not ta plame of him: he was
coot always, howefer.”

“He wass that, daddy.”

“But it will pe something ferry paad, and it will pe efer
troubling her speerit. When she’ll pe take ta pipes to pe
amusing herself, and will plow ‘Till an crodh a’ Dhonnaehaidh’
(‘Turn the Cows, Duncan’), out will pe come’ Cumhadh an fhir
[pg 71] mhoir’ (‘The Lament of the
Big Man’). Aal is not well, my son.”

“Weel, dinna distress yersel’, daddy. Lat come what wull
come. Foreseein’ ‘s no forefen’in’. Ye ken yersel’ at mony ‘s
the time the seer has broucht the thing on by tryin’ to haud it
aff.”

“It will be true, my son. Put it would aalways haf
come.”

“Nae doubt. Sae ye jist come in wi’ me, daddy, an’ sit doon
by the ha’ fire, an’ I’ll come to ye as sune’s I’ve been to see
‘at the maister disna want me. But ye’ll better come up wi’ me
to my room first,” he went on, “for the maister disna like to
see me in onything but the kilt.”

“And why will he not pe in ta kilts aal as now?”

“I hae been ridin’, ye ken, daddy, an’ the trews fits the
saiddle better nor the kilts.”

“She’ll not pe knowing tat. Old Allister, your
creat—her own crandfather, was ta pest horseman ta worlt
efer saw, and he’ll nefer pe hafing ta trews to his own lecks
nor ta saddle to his horse’s pack. He’ll chust make his men pe
strap on an old plaid, and he’ll be kive a chump, and away they
wass, horse and man, one peast, aal two of tem poth
together.”

Thus chatting, they went to the stable, and from the stable
to the house, where they met no one, and went straight up to
Malcolm’s room, the old man making as little of the long ascent
as Malcolm himself.

CHAPTER LXVI.

THE CRY FROM THE CHAMBER.

Brooding—if a man of his temperament may ever be said
to brood—over the sad history of his young wife and the
prospects of his daughter, the marquis rode over fields and
through gates—he never had been one to jump a fence in
cold blood—till the darkness began to fall; and the
bearings of his perplexed position came plainly before him.

First of all, Malcolm acknowledged and the date of his
mother’s death known, what would Florimel be in the eyes of the
world? Supposing the world deceived by the statement that his
mother died when he was born, where yet was the future he had
marked out for her? He had no money to leave her, and she must
be helplessly dependent on her brother.

Malcolm, on the other hand, might make a good match, or,
with the advantages he could secure him in the army, still
better in the navy, well enough push his way in the world.

Miss Horn could produce no testimony, and Mrs. Catanach had
asserted him to be the son of Mrs. Stewart. He had seen enough,
however, to make him dread certain possible results if Malcolm
were acknowledged as the laird of Kirkbyres. No: there was but
one hopeful measure, one which he had even already approached
in a tentative way—an appeal, namely, to Malcolm himself,
in which, while acknowledging his probable rights, but
representing in the strongest manner the difficulty of proving
them, he would set forth in their full dismay the consequences
to Florimel of their public recognition, and offer, upon the
pledge of his word to a certain line of conduct, to start him
in any path he chose to follow.

Having thought the thing out pretty thoroughly, as he
fancied, and resolved at the same time to feel his way toward
negotiations with Mistress Catanach, he turned and rode
home.

After a tolerable dinner he was sitting over a bottle of the
port which he prized beyond anything else his succession had
brought him, when the door of the dining-room opened suddenly
and the butler appeared, pale with terror. “My lord! my lord!”
he stammered as he closed the door behind him.

“Well? What the devil’s the matter now? Whose cow’s
dead?”

“Your lordship didn’t hear it, then?” faltered the
butler.

“You’ve been drinking, Bings,” said the marquis, lifting his
seventh glass of port.

“I didn’t say I heard it, my lord.”

“Heard what, in the name of
Beelzebub?”

[pg 72]

“The ghost, my lord.”

“The what?” shouted the marquis.

“That’s what they call it, my lord. It’s all along of having
that wizard’s chamber in the house, my lord.”

“You’re a set of fools,” said the marquis—”the whole
kit of you!”

“That’s what I say, my lord. I don’t know what to do with
them, stericking and screaming. Mrs. Courthope is trying her
best with them, but it’s my belief she’s about as bad
herself.”

The marquis finished his glass of wine, poured out and drank
another, then walked to the door. When the butler opened it a
strange sight met his eyes. All the servants in the house, men
and women, Duncan and Malcolm alone excepted, had crowded after
the butler, every one afraid of being left behind; and there
gleamed the crowd of ghastly faces in the light of the great
hall-fire. Demon stood in front, his mane bristling and his
eyes flaming. Such was the silence that the marquis heard the
low howl of the waking wind, and the snow like the patting of
soft hands against the windows. He stood for a moment, more
than half enjoying their terror, when from somewhere in the
building a far-off shriek, shrill and piercing, rang in every
ear. Some of the men drew in their breath with a gasping sob,
but most of the women screamed outright; and that set the
marquis cursing.

Duncan and Malcolm had but just entered the bed-room of the
latter when the shriek rent the air close beside, and for a
moment deafened them. So agonized, so shrill, so full of dismal
terror was it, that Malcolm stood aghast, and Duncan started to
his feet with responsive outcry. But Malcolm at once recovered
himself. “Bide here till I come back,” he whispered, and
hurried noiselessly out.

In a few minutes he returned, during which all had been
still. “Noo, daddy,” he said, “I’m gaein’ to drive in the door
o’ the neist room. There’s some deevilry at wark there. Stan’
ye i’ the door, an’ ghaist or deevil ‘at wad win by ye, grip
it, an’ haud on like Demon the dog.”

“She will so, she will so,” muttered Duncan in a strange
tone. “Ochone! that she’ll not pe hafing her turk with her!
Ochone! ochone!”

Malcolm took the key of the wizard’s chamber from his chest
and his candle from the table, which he set down in the
passage. In a moment he had unlocked the door, put his shoulder
to it and burst it open. A light was extinguished, and a
shapeless figure went gliding away through the gloom. It was no
shadow, however, for, dashing itself against a door at the
other side of the chamber, it staggered back with an
imprecation of fury and fear, pressed two hands to its head,
and, turning at bay, revealed the face of Mrs. Catanach.

In the door stood the blind piper with outstretched arms and
hands ready to clutch, the fingers curved like claws, his knees
and haunches bent, leaning forward like a rampant beast
prepared to spring. In his face was wrath, hatred, vengeance,
disgust—an enmity of all mingled kinds.

Malcolm was busied with something in the bed, and when she
turned Mrs, Catanach saw only Duncan’s white face of hatred
gleaming through the darkness. “Ye auld donnert deevil!” she
cried, with an addition too coarse to be set down, and threw
herself upon him.

The old man said never a word, but with indrawn breath
hissing through his clenched teeth clutched her, and down they
went together in the passage, the piper undermost. He had her
by the throat, it is true, but she had her fingers in his eyes,
and, kneeling on his chest, kept him down with a vigor of
hostile effort that drew the very picture of murder. It lasted
but a moment, however, for the old man, spurred by torture as
well as hate, gathered what survived of a most sinewy strength
into one huge heave, threw her back into the room, and rose
with the blood streaming from his eyes, just as the marquis
came round the near end of the passage, followed by Mrs.
Courthope, the butler, Stoat and two of the footmen. Heartily
enjoying a row, he stopped instantly, and, signing a halt to
his followers, stood listening to the
[pg 73] mud-geyser that now burst
from Mrs. Catanach’s throat.

“Ye blin’ abortion o’ Sawtan’s soo!” she cried, “didna I tak
ye to du wi’ ye as I likit? An’ that deil’s tripe ye ca’ yer
oye (grandson)—He! he! him yer gran’son!
He’s naething but ane o’ yer hatit Cawm’ells!”

“A teanga a’ diabhuil mhoir, tha thu ag dènamh breug
(O tongue of the great devil! thou art making a lie),” screamed
Duncan, speaking for the first time.

“God lay me deid i’ my sins gien he be onything but a
bastard Cawm’ell!” she asseverated with a laugh of demoniacal
scorn. “Yer dautit (petted) Ma’colm’s naething but the
dyke-side brat o’ the late Grizel Cawm’ell, ‘at the fowk tuik
for a sant ’cause she grat an’ said naething. I laid the
Cawm’ell pup i’ yer boody (scarecrow) airms wi’ my ain
han’s, upo’ the tap o’ yer curst scraighin’ bagpipes ‘at sae
aften drave the sleep frae my een. Na, ye wad nane o’ me! But I
ga’e ye a Cawm’ell bairn to yer hert for a’ that, ye auld,
hungert, weyver (spider)-leggit, worm-aten idiot!”

A torrent of Gaelic broke from Duncan, into the midst of
which rushed another from Mrs. Catanach, similar, but coarse in
vowel and harsh in consonant sounds. The marquis stepped into
the room. “What is the meaning of all this?” he said with
dignity.

The tumult of Celtic altercation ceased. The old piper drew
himself up to his full height and stood silent. Mrs. Catanach,
red as fire with exertion and wrath, turned ashy pale. The
marquis cast on her a searching and significant look.

“See here, my lord,” said Malcolm.

Candle in hand, his lordship approached the bed. At the same
moment Mrs. Catanach glided out with her usual downy step, gave
a wink as of mutual intelligence to the group at the door, and
vanished.

On Malcolm’s arm lay the head of a young girl. Her thin,
worn countenance was stained with tears and livid with
suffocation. She was recovering, but her eyes rolled stupid and
visionless.

“It’s Phemy, my lord—Blue Peter’s lassie, ‘at was
tint,” said Malcolm.

“It begins to look serious,” said the marquis.—”Mrs.
Catanach! Mrs. Courthope!”

He turned toward the door. Mrs. Courthope entered, and a
head or two peeped in after her. Duncan stood as before, drawn
up and stately, his visage working, but his body motionless as
the statue of a sentinel.

“Where is the Catanach woman gone?” cried the marquis.

“Cone!” shouted the piper. “Cone! and her huspant will be
waiting to pe killing her! Och nan ochan!”

“Her husband!” echoed the marquis.

“Ach! she’ll not can pe helping it, my lort—no more
till one will pe tead; and tat should pe ta woman, for she’ll
pe a paad woman—ta worstest woman efer was married, my
lort.”

“That’s saying a good deal,” returned the marquis.

“Not one wort more as enough, my lort,” said Duncan. “She
was only pe her next wife, put, ochone! ochone! why did she’ll
pe marry her? You would haf stapt her long aco, my lort, if
she’ll was your wife and you was knowing ta tamned fox and
padger she was pe. Ochone! and she tidn’t pe have her turk at
her hench nor her sgian in her hose.”

He shook his hands like a despairing child, then stamped and
wept in the agony of frustrated rage.

Mrs. Courthope took Phemy in her arms and carried her to her
own room, where she opened the window and let the snowy wind
blow full upon her. As soon as she came quite to herself,
Malcolm set out to bear the good tidings to her father and
mother.

Only a few nights before had Phemy been taken to the room
where they found her. She had been carried from place to place,
and had been some time, she believed, in Mrs. Catanach’s own
house. They had always kept her in the dark, and removed her at
night blindfolded. When asked if she had never cried out
before, she said she had been too frightened; and when
questioned as to what had made her do so then, she knew nothing
of it: she remembered only that a horrible creature appeared by
the bedside, [pg 74] after which all was blank. On
the floor they found a hideous death-mask, doubtless the
cause of the screams which Mrs. Catanach had sought to
stifle with the pillows and bed-clothes.

When Malcolm returned he went at once to the piper’s
cottage, where he found him in bed, utterly exhausted and as
utterly restless. “Weel, daddy,” he said, “I doobt I daurna
come near ye noo.”

“Come to her arms, my poor poy,” faltered Duncan. “She’ll pe
sorry in her sore heart for her poy. Nefer you pe minding, my
son: you couldn’t help ta Cam’ell mother, and you’ll pe her own
poy however. Ochone! it will pe a plot upon you aal your tays,
my son, and she’ll not can help you, and it’ll pe preaking her
old heart.”

“Gien God thoucht the Cam’ells worth makin’, daddy, I dinna
see ‘at I hae ony richt to compleen ‘at I cam’ o’ them.”

“She hopes you’ll pe forgifing ta plind old man, however.
She couldn’t see, or she would haf known at once petter.”

“I dinna ken what ye’re efter noo, daddy,” said Malcolm.

“That she’ll do you a creat wrong, and she’ll be ferry sorry
for it, my son.”

“What wrang did ye ever du me, daddy?”

“That she was let you crow up a Cam’ell, my poy. If she tid
put know ta paad blood was pe in you, she wouldn’t pe tone you
ta wrong as pring you up.”

“That’s a wrang no ill to forgi’e, daddy. But it’s a pity ye
didna lat me lie, for maybe syne Mistress Catanach wad hae
broucht me up hersel’, an’ I micht hae come to something.”

“Ta duvil mhor (great) would pe in your heart and
prain and poosom, my son.”

“Weel, ye see what ye hae saved me frae.”

“Yes; put ta duvil will be to pay, for she couldn’t safe you
from ta Cam’ell plood, my son. Malcolm, my poy,” he added after
a pause, and with the solemnity of a mighty hate, “ta efil
woman herself will pe a Cam’ell—ta woman Catanach will pe
a Cam’ell, and her nainsel’ she’ll not know it pefore she’ll be
in ta ped with ta worstest Cam’ell tat ever God made; and she
pecks his pardon, for she’ll not pelieve He wass making ta
Cam’ells.”

“Divna ye think God made me, daddy?” asked Malcolm.

The old man thought for a little. “Tat will tepend on who
was pe your father, my son,” he replied. “If he too will be a
Cam’ell—ochone! ochone! Put tere may pe some coot plood
co into you—more as enough to say God will pe make you,
my son. Put don’t pe asking, Malcolm—ton’t you’ll pe
asking.”

“What am I no to ask, daddy?”

“Ton’t pe asking who made you, who was ta father to you, my
poy. She would rather not pe knowing, for ta man might pe a
Cam’ell poth. And if she couldn’t pe lofing you no more, my
son, she would pe tie before her time, and her tays would pe
long in ta land under ta crass, my son.”

But the remembrance of the sweet face whose cold loveliness
he had once kissed was enough to outweigh with Malcolm all the
prejudices of Duncan’s instillation, and he was proud to take
up even her shame. To pass from Mrs. Stewart to her was to
escape from the clutches of a vampire demon to the arms of a
sweet mother-angel.

Deeply concerned for the newly-discovered misfortunes of the
old man to whom he was indebted for this world’s life at least,
he anxiously sought to soothe him; but he had far more and far
worse to torment him than Malcolm even yet knew, and with
burning cheeks and bloodshot eyes he lay tossing from side to
side, now uttering terrible curses in Gaelic and now weeping
bitterly. Malcolm took his loved pipes, and with the gentlest
notes he could draw from them tried to charm to rest the
ruffled waters of his spirit; but his efforts were all in vain,
and believing at length that he would be quieter without him,
he went to the House and to his own room.

The door of the adjoining chamber stood open, and the
long-forbidden room lay exposed to any eye. Little did Malcolm
think as he gazed around it that it was the room in which he
had first breathed [pg 75] the air of the world; in
which his mother had wept over her own false position and
his reported death; and from which he had been carried, by
Duncan’s wicked wife, down the ruinous stair and away to the
lip of the sea, to find a home in the arms of the man whom
he had just left on his lonely couch torn between the
conflicting emotions of a gracious love for him and the
frightful hate of her.

CHAPTER LXVII.

FEET OF WOOL.

The next day, Miss Horn, punctual as Fate, presented herself
at Lossie House, and was shown at once into the marquis’s
study, as it was called. When his lordship entered she took the
lead the moment the door was shut. “By this time, my lord,
ye’ll doobtless hae made up yer min’ to du what’s richt?” she
said.

“That’s what I have always wanted to do,” returned the
marquis.

“Hm!” remarked Miss Horn as plainly as inarticulately.

“In this affair,” he supplemented; adding, “It’s not always
so easy to tell what is right.”

“It’s no aye easy to luik for ‘t wi’ baith yer een,” said
Miss Horn.

“This woman Catanach—we must get her to give credible
testimony. Whatever the fact may be, we must have strong
evidence. And there comes the difficulty, that she has already
made an altogether different statement.”

“It gangs for naething, my lord. It was never made afore a
justice o’ the peace.”

“I wish you would go to her and see how she is
inclined.”

“Me gang to Bawbie Catanach!” exclaimed Miss Horn. “I wad as
sune gang an’ kittle Sawtan’s nose wi’ the p’int o’ ‘s tail.
Na, na, my lord. Gien onybody gang till her wi’ my wull, it s’
be a limb o’ the law. I s’ hae nae cognostin’ wi’ her.”

“You would have no objection, however; to my seeing her, I
presume—just to let her know that we have an inkling of
the truth?” said the marquis.

Now, all this was the merest talk, for of course Miss Horn
could not long remain in ignorance of the declaration her fury
had, the night previous, forced from Mrs. Catanach; but he
must, he thought, put her off and keep her quiet, if possible,
until he had come to an understanding with Malcolm, after which
he would no doubt have his trouble with her.

“Ye can du as yer lordship likes,” answered Miss Horn, “but
I wadna hae ‘t said o’ me ‘at I had ony dealin’s wi’ her. Wha
kens but she micht say ye tried to bribe her? There’s naething
she wad bogle at gien she thoucht it worth her while. No ‘at I
‘m feart at her. Lat her lee! I’m no sae blate but—Only
dinna lippen till a word she says, my lord.”

The marquis hesitated. “I wonder whether the real source of
my perplexity occurs to you, Miss Horn,” he said at length.
“You know I have a daughter?”

“Weel eneuch that, my lord.”

“By my second marriage.”

“Nae merridge ava’, my lord.”

“True, if I confess to the first.”

“A’ the same whether or no, my lord.”

“Then you see,” the marquis went on, refusing offence, “what
the admission of your story would make of my daughter?”

“That’s plain eneuch, my lord.”

“Now, if I have read Malcolm right he has too much regard
for his—mistress—to put her in such a false
position.”

“That is, my lord, ye wad hae yer lawfu’ son beir the
lawless name.”

“No, no: it need never come out what he is. I will provide
for him—as a gentleman, of course.”

“It canna be, my lord. Ye can du naething for him, wi’ that
face o’ his, but oot comes the trouth as to the father o’ ‘im;
an’ it wadna be lang afore the tale was ekit oot wi’ the name
o’ his mither—Mistress Catanach wad see to that, gien
’twas only to spite me—an’ I wunna hae my Grizel ca’d
what she is not for ony lord’s dauchter i’ the three
kynriks.”

“What does it matter, now she’s dead and gone?” said
the marquis, false to the dead in his love for the
living.

[pg 76]

“Deid an’ gane, my lord? What ca’ ye deid an’ gane? Maybe
the great anes o’ the yerth get sic a forlethie
(surfeit) o’ grand’ur ‘at they’re for nae mair, an’ wad
perish like the brute beast. For onything I ken, they may hae
their wuss, but for mysel’, I wad warstle to haud my sowl
waukin’ (awake) i’ the verra article o’ deith, for the
bare chance o’ seein’ my bonny Grizel again. It’s a mercy I hae
nae feelin’s,” she added, arresting her handkerchief on its way
to her eyes, and refusing to acknowledge the single tear that
ran down her cheek.

Plainly she was not like any of the women whose characters
the marquis had accepted as typical of womankind.

“Then you won’t leave the matter to her husband and son?” he
said reproachfully.

“I tellt ye, my lord, I wad du naething but what I saw to be
richt. Lat this affair oot o’ my han’s I daurna. That laad ye
micht work to onything ‘at made agane himsel’. He’s jist like
his puir mither there.”

“If Miss Campbell was his mother,” said the
marquis.

“Miss Cam’ell!” cried Miss Horn. “I’ll thank yer lordship to
ca’ her by her ain, an’ that’s Lady Lossie.”

What of the something ruinous heart of the marquis was
habitable was occupied by his daughter, and had no
accommodation at present either for his dead wife or his living
son. Once more he sat thinking in silence for a while. “I’ll
make Malcolm a post-captain in the navy and give you a thousand
pounds,” he said at length, hardly knowing that he spoke.

Miss Horn rose to her full height and stood like an angel of
rebuke before him. Not a word did she speak, only looked at him
for a moment and turned to leave the room. The marquis saw his
danger, and striding to the door stood with his back against
it.

“Think ye to scare me, my lord?” she asked with a
scornful laugh. “Gang an’ scare the stane lion-beast at yer
ha’-door. Haud oot o’ the gait an’ lat me gang.”

“Not until I know what you are going to do,” said the
marquis very seriously.

“I hae naething mair to transac’ wi’ yer lordship. You an’
me ‘s strangers, my lord.”

“Tut! tut! I was but trying you.”

“An’ gien I had ta’en the disgrace ye offert me, ye wad hae
drawn back?”

“No, certainly.”

“Ye wasna tryin’ me, then: ye was duin’ yer best to corrup’
me.”

“I’m no splitter of hairs.”

“My lord, it’s nane but the corrup’ible wad seek to
corrup’.”

The marquis gnawed a nail or two in silence. Miss Horn
dragged an easy-chair within a couple of yards of him.

“We’ll see wha tires o’ this ghem first, my lord,” she said
as she sank into its hospitable embrace.

The marquis turned to lock the door, but there was no key in
it. Neither was there any chair within reach, and he was not
fond of standing. Clearly, his enemy had the advantage.

“Hae ye h’ard o’ puir Sandy Graham—hoo they’re
misguidin’ him, my lord?” she asked with composure.

The marquis was first astounded, and then tickled by her
assurance. “No,” he answered.

“They hae turnt him oot o’ hoose an’ ha’—schuil, at
least, an’ hame,” she rejoined. “I may say they hae turnt him
oot o’ Scotlan’, for what presbytery wad hae him efter he had
been fun’ guilty o’ no thinkin’ like ither fowk? Ye maun stan’
his guid freen’, my lord.”

“He shall be Malcolm’s tutor,” answered the marquis, not to
be outdone in coolness, “and go with him to Edinburgh—or
Oxford, if he prefers it.”

“Never yerl o’ Colonsay had a better,” said Miss Horn.

“Softly, softly, ma’am,” returned the marquis. “I did not
say he should go in that style.”

“He s’ gang as my lord o’ Colonsay or he s’ no gang at
your expense, my lord,” said his antagonist.

“Really, ma’am, one would think you were my grandmother, to
hear you order my affairs for me.”

“I wuss I war, my lord: I sud gar ye hear risson upo’ baith
sides o’ yer heid, I s’ warran’.”

The marquis laughed. “Well, I can’t
[pg 77] stand here all day,” he said,
impatiently swinging one leg.

“I’m weel awaur o’ that, my lord,” answered Miss Horn,
rearranging her scanty skirt.

“How long are you going to keep me, then?”

“I wadna hae ye bide a meenute langer nor’s agreeable to
yersel’. But I‘m in nae hurry sae lang’s ye’re afore me.
Ye’re nae ill to luik at, though ye maun hae been bonnier the
day ye wan the hert o’ my Grizel.”

The marquis uttered an oath and left the door. Miss Horn
sprang to it, but there was the marquis again. “Miss Horn,” he
said, “I beg you will give me another day to think of
this.”

“Whaur’s the use? A’ the thinkin’ i’ the warl’ canna alter a
single fac’. Ye maun do richt by my laddie o’ yer ainsel’, or I
maun gar ye.”

“You would find a lawsuit heavy, Miss Horn.”

“An’ ye wad fin’ the scandal o’ ‘t ill to bide, my lord. It
wad come sair upo’ Miss—I kenna what name she has a richt
till, my lord.”

The marquis uttered a frightful imprecation, left the door,
and, sitting down, hid his face in his hands.

Miss Horn rose, but instead of securing her retreat,
approached him gently and stood by his side. “My lord,” she
said, “I canna thole to see a man in tribble. Women’s born till
‘t, an’ they tak it an’ are thankfu’; but a man never gies in
till ‘t, an’ sae it comes harder upo’ him nor upo’ them. Hear
me, my lord: gien there be a man upo’ this earth wha wad shield
a woman, that man’s Ma’colm Colonsay.”

“If only she weren’t his sister!” murmured the marquis.

“An’ jist bethink ye, my lord: wad it be onything less nor
an imposition to lat a man merry her ohn tellt him what she
was?”

“You insolent old woman!” cried the marquis, losing his
temper, discretion and manners all together. “Go and do your
worst, and be damned to you!”

So saying, he left the room, and Miss Horn found her way out
of the house in a temper quite as fierce as his—in
character, however, entirely different, inasmuch as it was
righteous.

At that very moment Malcolm was in search of his master, and
seeing the back of him disappear in the library, to which he
had gone in a half-blind rage, he followed him. “My lord!” he
said.

“What do you want?” returned his master in a rage. For some
time he had been hauling on the curb-rein, which had fretted
his temper the more, and when he let go the devil ran away with
him.

“I thoucht yer lordship wad like to see an auld stair I cam
upo’ the ither day, ‘at gangs frae the wizard’s
chaumer—”

“Go to hell with your damned tomfoolery!” said the marquis.
“If ever you mention that cursed hole again I’ll kick you out
of the house.”

Malcolm’s eyes flashed and a fierce answer rose to his lips,
but he had seen that his master was in trouble, and sympathy
supplanted rage. He turned and left the room in silence.

Lord Lossie paced up and down the library for a whole
hour—a long time for him to be in one mood. The mood
changed color pretty frequently during the hour, however, and
by degrees his wrath assuaged. But at the end of it he knew no
more what he was going to do than when he left Miss Horn in the
study. Then came the gnawing of his usual ennui and
restlessness: he must find something to do.

The thing he always thought of first was a ride, but the
only animal of horse-kind about the place which he liked was
the bay mare, and her he had lamed. He would go and see what
the rascal had come bothering about—alone, though, for he
could not endure the sight of the fisher-fellow, damn him!

In a few minutes he stood in the wizard’s chamber, and
glanced around it with a feeling of discomfort rather than
sorrow—of annoyance at the trouble of which it had been
for him both fountain and storehouse, rather than regret for
the agony and contempt which his selfishness had brought upon
the woman he loved: then spying the door in the farthest
corner, he made for it, and in a
[pg 78] moment more, his curiosity
now thoroughly roused, was slowly gyrating down the steps of
the old screw-stair.

But Malcolm had gone to his own room, and, hearing some one
in the next, half suspected who it was, and went in. Seeing the
closet-door open, he hurried to the stair, and shouted, “My
lord! my lord! or whaever ye are! tak care hoo ye gang or ye’ll
get a terrible fa’.”

Down a single yard the stair was quite dark, and he dared
not follow fast for fear of himself falling and occasioning the
accident he feared. As he descended he kept repeating his
warnings, but either his master did not hear or heeded too
little, for presently Malcolm heard a rush, a dull fall and a
groan. Hurrying as fast as he dared with the risk of falling
upon him, he found the marquis lying amongst the stones in the
ground entrance, apparently unable to move, and white with
pain. Presently, however, he got up, swore a good deal and
limped swearing into the house.

The doctor, who was sent for instantly, pronounced the
knee-cap injured, and applied leeches. Inflammation set in, and
another doctor and surgeon were sent for from Aberdeen. They
came, applied poultices, and again leeches, and enjoined the
strictest repose. The pain was severe, but to one of the
marquis’s temperament the enforced quiet was worse.

CHAPTER LXVIII.

HANDS OF IRON.

The marquis was loved by his domestics, and his accident,
with its consequences, although none more serious were
anticipated, cast a gloom over Lossie House. Far apart as was
his chamber from all the centres of domestic life, the pulses
of his suffering beat as it were through the house, and the
servants moved with hushed voice and gentle footfall.

Outside, the course of events waited upon his recovery, for
Miss Horn, was too generous not to delay proceedings while her
adversary was ill. Besides, what she most of all desired was
the marquis’s free acknowledgment of his son; and after such a
time of suffering and constrained reflection as he was now
passing through he could hardly fail, she thought, to be more
inclined to what was just and fair.

Malcolm had of course hastened to the schoolmaster with the
joy of his deliverance from Mrs. Stewart, but Mr. Graham had
not acquainted him with the discovery Miss Horn had made, or
her belief concerning his large interest therein, to which
Malcolm’s report of the wrath-born declaration of Mrs. Catanach
had now supplied the only testimony wanting, for the right of
disclosure was Miss Horn’s. To her he had carried Malcolm’s
narrative of late events, tenfold strengthening her position;
but she was anxious in her turn that the revelation concerning
his birth should come to him from his father. Hence, Malcolm
continued in ignorance of the strange dawn that had begun to
break on the darkness of his origin.

Miss Horn had told Mr. Graham what the marquis had said
about the tutorship, but the schoolmaster only shook his head
with a smile, and went on with his preparations for
departure.

The hours went by, the days lengthened into weeks, and the
marquis’s condition did not improve. He had never known
sickness and pain before, and like most of the children of this
world counted them the greatest of evils; nor was there any
sign of their having as yet begun to open his eyes to what
those who have seen them call truths—those who have never
even boded their presence count absurdities.

More and more, however, he desired the attendance of
Malcolm, who was consequently a great deal about him, serving
with a love to account for which those who knew his nature
would not have found it necessary to fall back on the instinct
of the relation between them. The marquis had soon satisfied
himself that that relation was as yet unknown to him, and was
all the better pleased with his devotion and
tenderness.

[pg 79]

The inflammation continued, increased, spread, and at length
the doctors determined to amputate. But the marquis was
absolutely horrified at the idea—shrank from it with
invincible repugnance. The moment the first dawn of
comprehension vaguely illuminated their periphrastic approaches
he blazed out in a fury, cursed them frightfully, called them
all the contemptuous names in his rather limited vocabulary,
and swore he would see them—uncomfortable first.

“We fear mortification, my lord,” said the physician
calmly.

“So do I. Keep it off,” returned the marquis.

“We fear we cannot, my lord.” It had, in fact, already
commenced.

“Let it mortify, then, and be damned,” said his
lordship.

“I trust, my lord, you will reconsider it,” said the
surgeon. “We should not have dreamed of suggesting a measure of
such severity had we not had reason to dread that the further
prosecution of gentler means would but lessen your lordship’s
chance of recovery.”

“You mean, then, that my life is in danger?”

“We fear,” said the physician, “that the amputation proposed
is the only thing that can save it.”

“What a brace of blasted bunglers you are!” cried the
marquis, and, turning away his face, lay silent.

The two men looked at each other and said nothing.

Malcolm was by, and a pang shot to his heart at the verdict.
The men retired to consult. Malcolm approached the bed. “My
lord!” he said gently.

No reply came.

“Dinna lea ‘s oor lanes, my lord—no yet,” Malcolm
persisted. “What’s to come o’ my leddy?”

The marquis gave a gasp. Still he made no reply.

“She has naebody, ye ken, my lord, ‘at ye wad like to lippen
her wi’.”

“You must take care of her when I am gone, Malcolm,”
murmured the marquis; and his voice was now gentle with sadness
and broken with misery.

“Me, my lord!” returned Malcolm. “Wha wad min’ me? An’ what
cud I du wi’ her? I cudna even hand her ohn wat her feet. Her
leddy’s maid cud du mair wi’ her, though I wad lay doon my life
for her, as I tauld ye, my lord; an’ she kens ‘t weel
eneuch.”

Silence followed. Both men were thinking.

“Gie me a richt, my lord, an’ I’ll du my best,” said
Malcolm, at length breaking the silence.

“What do you mean?” growled the marquis, whose mood had
altered.

“Gie me a legal richt, my lord, an’ see gien I dinna.”

“See what?”

“See gien I dinna luik weel efter my leddy.”

“How am I to see? I shall be dead and damned.”

“Please God, my lord, ye’ll be alive an’ weel—in a
better place, if no here to luik efter my leddy yersel’.”

“Oh, I dare say,” muttered the marquis.

“But ye’ll hearken to the doctors, my lord,” Malcolm went
on, “an’ no dee wantin’ time to consider o’ ‘t.”

“Yes, yes: to-morrow I’ll have another talk with them. We’ll
see about it. There’s time enough yet. They’re all coxcombs,
every one of them. They never give a patient the least credit
for common sense.”

“I dinna ken, my lord,” said Malcolm doubtfully.

After a few minutes’ silence, during which Malcolm thought
he had fallen asleep, the marquis resumed abruptly. “What do
you mean by giving you a legal right?” he said.

“There’s some w’y o’ makin’ ae body guairdian till anither,
sae ‘at the law ‘ll uphaud him—isna there, my lord?”

“Yes, surely. Well! Rather odd—wouldn’t it be?—a
young fisher-lad guardian to a marchioness! Eh? They say
there’s nothing new under the sun, but that sounds rather like
it, I think.”

Malcolm was overjoyed to hear him speak with something like
his old manner. He felt he could stand any amount of chaff from
him now, and so the proposition he had made in seriousness he
[pg 80] went on to defend in the hope
of giving amusement, yet with a secret wild delight in the
dream of such full devotion to the service of Lady
Florimel.

“It wad soon’ queer eneuch, my lord, nae doobt, but fowk
maunna min’ the soon’ o’ a thing gien ‘t be a’ straucht an’
fair, an’ strong eneuch to stan’. They cudna lauch me oot o’ my
richts, be they ‘at they likit—Lady Bellair or ony o’
them—na, nor jaw me oot o’ them aither.”

“They might do a good deal to render those rights of little
use,” said the marquis.

“That wad come till a trial o’ brains, my lord,” returned
Malcolm: “an’ ye dinna think I wadna hae the wit to speir
advice; an’, what’s mair, to ken whan it was guid, an’ tak it.
There’s lawyers, my lord.”

“And their expenses?”

“Ye cud lea’ sae muckle to be waured (spent) upo’ the
cairryin’ oot o’ yer lordship’s wull.”

“Who would see that you applied it properly?”

“My ain conscience, my lord, or Mr. Graham gien ye
likit.”

“And how would you live yourself?”

“Ow! lea’ ye that to me, my lord. Only dinna imagine I wad
be behauden to yer lordship. I houp I hae mair pride nor that.
Ilka poun’-not’, shillin’ an’ bawbee sud be laid oot for
her, an’ what was left hainet (saved) for
her.”

“By Jove! it’s a daring proposal!” said the marquis; and,
which seemed strange to Malcolm, not a single thread of
ridicule ran through the tone in which he made the remark.

The next day came, but brought neither strength of body nor
of mind with it. Again his professional attendants besought
him, and he heard them more quietly, but rejected their
proposition as positively as before. In a day or two he ceased
to oppose it, but would not hear of preparation. Hour glided
into hour, and days had gathered to a week, when they assailed
him with a solemn and last appeal.

“Nonsense!” answered the marquis. “My leg is getting better.
I feel no pain—in fact, nothing but a little faintness.
Your damned medicines, I haven’t a doubt.”

“You are in the greatest danger, my lord. It is all but too
late even now.”

“To-morrow, then, if it must be. To-day I could not endure
to have my hair cut, positively; and as to having my leg
off—pooh! the thing’s preposterous.”

He turned white and shuddered, for all the nonchalance of
his speech.

When to-morrow came there was not a surgeon in the land who
would have taken his leg off. He looked in their faces, and
seemed for the first time convinced of the necessity of the
measure.

“You may do as you please,” he said: “I am ready.”

“Not to-day, my lord,” replied the doctor—”your
lordship is not equal to it to-day.”

“I understand,” said the marquis, and paled frightfully and
turned his head aside.

When Mrs. Courthope suggested that Lady Florimel should be
sent for, he flew into a frightful rage, and spoke as it is to
be hoped he had never spoken to a woman before. She took it
with perfect gentleness, but could not repress a tear. The
marquis saw it, and his heart was touched. “You mustn’t mind a
dying man’s temper,” he said.

“It’s not for myself, my lord,” she answered.

“I know: you think I’m not fit to die; and, damn it! you are
right. Never one was less fit for heaven or less willing to go
to hell.”

“Wouldn’t you like to see a clergyman, my lord?” she
suggested, sobbing.

He was on the point of breaking out into a still worse
passion, but controlled himself. “A clergyman!” he cried: “I
would as soon see the undertaker. What could he do but tell me
I was going to be damned—a fact I know better than he
can? That is, if it’s not all an invention of the cloth, as, in
my soul, I believe it is. I’ve said so any time these forty
years.”

“Oh, my lord! my lord! do not fling away your last
hope.”

“You imagine me to have a chance, then? Good soul! you don’t
know any better.”

[pg 81]

“The Lord is merciful.”

The marquis laughed—that is, he tried, failed, and
grinned.

“Mr. Cairns is in the dining-room, my lord.”

“Bah! A low pettifogger, with the soul of a bullock. Don’t
let me hear the fellow’s name. I’ve been bad enough, God knows,
but I haven’t sunk to the level of his help yet. If he’s
God Almighty’s factor, and the saw holds, ‘Like master, like
man,’ well, I would rather have nothing to do with either.”

“That is, if you had the choice, my lord,” said Mrs.
Courthope, her temper yielding somewhat, though in truth his
speech was not half so irreverent as it seemed to her.

“Tell him to go to hell. No, don’t: set him down to a bottle
of port and a great sponge-cake, and you needn’t tell him to go
to heaven, for he’ll be there already. Why, Mrs. Courthope, the
fellow isn’t a gentleman. And yet all he cares for the cloth is
that he thinks it makes a gentleman of him—as if anything
in heaven, earth or hell could work that miracle!”

In the middle of the night, as Malcolm sat by his bed,
thinking him asleep, the marquis spoke suddenly. “You must go
to Aberdeen to-morrow, Malcolm,” he said.

“Verra weel, my lord.”

“And bring Mr. Glennie, the lawyer, back with you.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Go to bed, then.”

“I wad raither bide, my lord. I cudna sleep a wink for
wantin’ to be back aside ye.”

The marquis yielded, and Malcolm sat by him all the night
through. He tossed about, would doze off and murmur strangely,
then wake up and ask for brandy and water, yet be content with
the lemonade Malcolm gave him.

Next day he quarreled with every word that Mrs. Courthope
uttered, kept forgetting he had sent Malcolm away, and was
continually wanting him. His fits of pain were more severe,
alternated with drowsiness, which deepened at times to
stupor.

It was late before Malcolm returned. He went instantly to
his bedside.

“Is Mr. Glennie with you?” asked his master feebly.

“Yes, my lord.”

“Tell him to come here at once.”

When Malcolm returned with the lawyer the marquis directed
him to place a table and chair by the bedside, light four
candles, provide everything necessary for writing and go to
bed.

CHAPTER LXIX.

THE MARQUIS AND THE SCHOOLMASTER.

Before Malcolm was awake his lordship had sent for him. When
he re-entered the sick chamber Mr. Glennie had vanished, the
table had been removed, and, instead of the radiance of the
wax-lights, the cold gleam of a vapor-dimmed sun, with its
sickly blue-white reflex from the widespread snow, filled the
room. The marquis looked ghastly, but was sipping chocolate
with a spoon.

“What w’y are ye the day, my lord?” asked Malcolm.

“Nearly well,” he answered; “but those cursed carrion-crows
are set upon killing me—damn their souls!”

“We’ll hae Leddy Florimel sweirin’ awfu’ gien ye gang on
that gait, my lord,” said Malcolm.

The marquis laughed feebly.

“An’ what’s mair,” Malcolm continued, “I doobt they’re some
partic’lar aboot the turn o’ their phrases up yonner, my
lord.”

The marquis looked at him keenly. “You don’t anticipate that
inconvenience for me?” he said. “I’m pretty sure to have my
billet where they’re not so precise.”

“Dinna brak my hert, my lord,” cried Malcolm, the tears
rushing to his eyes.

“I should be sorry to hurt you, Malcalm,” rejoined the
marquis gently, almost tenderly. “I won’t go there if I can
help it—I shouldn’t like to break any more
hearts—but how the devil am I to keep out of it? Besides,
there are people up there I don’t want to meet: I have no fancy
for being made ashamed [pg 82] of myself. The fact is, I’m
not fit for such company, and I don’t believe there is any
such place. But if there be, I trust in God there isn’t any
other, or it will go badly with your poor master, Malcolm.
It doesn’t look like true—now does it? Only
such a multitude of things I thought I had done with for
ever keep coming up and grinning at me. It nearly drives me
mad, Malcolm; and I would fain die like a gentleman, with a
cool bow and a sharp face-about.”

“Wadna ye hae a word wi’ somebody ‘at kens, my lord?” said
Malcolm, scarcely able to reply.

“No,” answered the marquis fiercely. “That Cairns is a
fool.”

“He’s a’ that, an’ mair, my lord. I didna mean
him.”

“They’re all fools together.”

“Ow, na, my lord. There’s a heap o’ them no muckle better,
it may be; but there’s guid men an’ true amang them, or the
Kirk wad hae been wi’ Sodom and Gomorrah by this time. But it’s
no a minister I wad hae yer lordship confar wi’.”

“Who, then? Mrs. Courthope, eh?”

“Ow na, my lord—no Mistress Courthoup. She’s a guid
body, but she wadna believe her ain een gien onybody ca’d a
minister said contrar’ to them.”

“Who the devil do you mean, then?”

“Nae deevil, but an honest man ‘at’s been his warst enemy
sae lang ‘s I hae kent him—Maister Graham, the
schuil-maister.”

“Pooh!” said the marquis with a puff. “I’m too old to go to
school.”

“I dinna ken the man ‘at isna a bairn till him, my
lord.”

“In Greek and Latin?”

“I’ richteousness an’ trouth, my lord—in what’s been
an’ what is to be.”

“What! has he the second sight, like the piper?”

“He has the second sicht, my lord, but ane ‘at gangs
a sicht farther nor my auld daddy’s.”

“He could tell me, then, what’s going to become of me?”

“As weel ‘s ony man, my lord.”

“That’s not saying much, I fear.”

“Maybe mair nor ye think, my lord.”

“Well, take him my compliments and tell him I should like to
see him,” said the marquis after a minute’s silence.

“He’ll come direckly, my lord.”

“Of course he will,” said the marquis.

“Jist as readily, my lord, as he wad gang to ony tramp ‘at
sent for ‘im at sic a time,” returned Malcolm, who did not
relish either the remark or its tone.

“What do you mean by that? You don’t think it such a
serious affair, do you?”

“My lord, ye haena a chance.”

The marquis was dumb. He had actually begun once more to
buoy himself up with earthly hopes.

Dreading a recall of his commission, Malcolm slipped from
the room, sent Mrs. Courthope to take his place, and sped to
the schoolmaster. The moment Mr. Graham heard the marquis’s
message he rose without a word and led the way from the
cottage. Hardly a sentence passed between them as they went,
for they were on a solemn errand.

“Mr. Graham’s here, my lord,” said Malcolm.

“Where? Not in the room?” returned the marquis.

“Waitin’ at the door, my lord.”

“Bah! You needn’t have been so ready. Have you told the
sexton to get a new spade? But you may let him in; and leave
him alone with me.”

Mr. Graham walked gently up to the bedside.

“Sit down, sir,” said the marquis courteously, pleased with
the calm, self-possessed, unobtrusive bearing of the man. “They
tell me I’m dying, Mr. Graham.”

“I’m sorry it seems to trouble you, my lord.”

“What! wouldn’t it trouble you, then?”

“I don’t think so, my lord.”

“Ah! you’re one of the elect, no doubt?”

“That’s a thing I never did think about, my lord.”

“What do you think about, then?”

“About God.”

“And when you die you’ll go straight to heaven, of
course?”

“I don’t know, my lord. That’s
[pg 83] another thing I never trouble
my head about.”

“Ah! you’re like me, then. I don’t care much about
going to heaven. What do you care about?”

“The will of God. I hope your lordship will say the
same.”

“No I won’t: I want my own will.”

“Well, that is to be had, my lord.”

“How?”

“By taking his for yours as the better of the two, which it
must be every way.”

“That’s all moonshine.”

“It is light, my lord.”

“Well, I don’t mind confessing, if I am to die, I should
prefer heaven to the other place, but I trust I have no chance
of either. Do you now honestly believe there are two such
places?”

“I don’t know, my lord.”

“You don’t know? And you come here to comfort a dying
man!”

“Your lordship must first tell me what you mean by ‘two
such places.’ And as to comfort, going by my notions, I
cannot tell which you would be more or less comfortable in; and
that, I presume, would be the main point with your
lordship.”

“And what, pray, sir, would be the main point with you?”

“To get nearer to God.”

“Well, I can’t say I want to get nearer to God. It’s
little he’s ever done for me.”

“It’s a good deal he has tried to do for you, my lord.”

“Well, who interfered? Who stood in his way, then?”

“Yourself, my lord.”

“I wasn’t aware of it. When did he ever try to do anything
for me and I stood in his way?”

“When he gave you one of the loveliest of women, my lord,”
said Mr. Graham with solemn, faltering voice, “and you left her
to die in neglect and her child to be brought up by
strangers.”

The marquis gave a cry. The unexpected answer had roused the
slowly-gnawing death and made it bite deeper.

“What have you to do,” he almost screamed, “with my
affairs? It was for me to introduce what I chose of
them. You presume.”

“Pardon me, my lord: you led me to what I was bound to say.
Shall I leave you, my lord?”

The marquis made no answer. “God knows I loved her,” he said
after a while with a sigh.

“You loved her, my lord?”

“I did, by God!”

“Love a woman like that and come to this?”

“Come to this? We must all come to this, I fancy, sooner or
later. Come to what, in the name of Beelzebub?”

“That, having loved a woman like her, you are content to
lose her. In the name of God, have you no desire to see her
again?”

“It would be an awkward meeting,” said the marquis.

His was an old love, alas! He had not been capable of the
sort that defies change. It had faded from him until it seemed
one of the things that are not. Although his being had once
glowed in its light, he could now speak of a meeting as
awkward.

“Because you wronged her?” suggested the schoolmaster.

“Because they lied to me, by God!”

“Which they dared not have done had you not lied to them
first.”

“Sir!” shouted the marquis, with all the voice he had
left.—”O God, have mercy! I cannot punish the
scoundrel.”

“The scoundrel is the man who lies, my lord.”

“Were I anywhere else—”

“There would be no good in telling you the truth, my lord.
You showed her to the world as a woman over whom you had
prevailed, and not as the honest wife she was. What kind
of a lie was that, my lord? Not a white one, surely?”

“You are a damned coward to speak so to a man who cannot
even turn on his side to curse you for a base hound. You would
not dare it but that you know I cannot defend myself.”

“You are right, my lord: your conduct is indefensible.”

“By Heaven! if I could but get this cursed leg under me, I
would throw you out of the window.”

“I shall go by the door, my lord.
[pg 84] While you hold by your sins,
your sins will hold by you. If you should want me again I
shall be at your lordship’s command.”

He rose and left the room, but had not reached his cottage
before Malcolm overtook him with a second message from his
master. He turned at once, saying only, “I expected it.”

“Mr. Graham,” said the marquis, looking ghastly, “you must
have patience with a dying man. I was very rude to you, but I
was in horrible pain.”

“Don’t mention it, my lord. It would be a poor friendship
that gave way for a rough word.”

“How can you call yourself my friend?”

“I should be your friend, my lord, if it were only for your
wife’s sake. She died loving you. I want to send you to her, my
lord. You will allow that, as a gentleman, you at least owe her
an apology.”

“By Jove, you are right, sir! Then you really and positively
believe in the place they call heaven?”

“My lord, I believe that those who open their hearts to the
truth shall see the light on their friends’ faces again, and be
able to set right what was wrong between them.”

“It’s a week too late to talk of setting right.”

“Go and tell her you are sorry, my lord—that will be
enough for her.”

“Ah! but there’s more than her concerned.”

“You are right, my lord. There is another—One who
cannot be satisfied that the fairest works of his hands, or
rather the loveliest children of his heart, should be treated
as you have treated women.”

“But the Deity you talk of—”

“I beg your pardon, my lord: I talked of no deity. I talked
of a living Love that gave us birth and calls us his children.
Your deity I know nothing of.”

“Call Him what you please: He won’t be put off so
easily.”

“He won’t be put off, one jot or one tittle. He will forgive
anything, but He will pass nothing. Will your wife forgive
you?”

“She will, when I explain.”

“Then why should you think the forgiveness of God, which
created her forgiveness, should be less?”

Whether the marquis could grasp the reasoning may be
doubtful.

“Do you really suppose God cares whether a man comes to good
or ill?”

“If He did not, He could not be good Himself.”

“Then you don’t think a good God would care to punish poor
wretches like us?”

“Your lordship has not been in the habit of regarding
himself as a poor wretch. And, remember, you can’t call a child
a poor wretch without insulting the father of it.”

“That’s quite another thing.”

“But on the wrong side for your argument, seeing the
relation between God and the poorest creature is infinitely
closer than that between any father and his child.”

“Then He can’t be so hard on him as the parsons say.”

“He will give him absolute justice, which is the only good
thing. He will spare nothing to bring his children back to
Himself, their sole well-being. What would you do, my lord, if
you saw your son strike a woman?”

“Knock him down and horsewhip him.”

It was Mr. Graham who broke the silence that followed: “Are
you satisfied with yourself, my lord?”

“No, by God!”

“You would like to be better?”

“I would.”

“Then you are of the same mind with God.”

“Yes, but I’m not a fool. It won’t do to say I should like
to be. I must be it, and that’s not so easy. It’s damned hard
to be good. I would have a fight for it, but there’s no time.
How is a poor devil to get out of such an infernal scrape?”

“Keep the commandments.”

“That’s it, of course; but there’s no time, I tell
you—no time; at least, so those cursed doctors will keep
telling me.”

“If there were but time to draw
[pg 85] another breath, there would
be time to begin.”

“How am I to begin? Which am I to begin with?”

“There is one commandment which includes all the rest.”

“Which is that?”

“To believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.”

“That’s cant.”

“After thirty years’ trial of it, it is to me the essence of
wisdom. It has given me a peace which makes life or death all
but indifferent to me, though I would choose the latter.”

“What am I to believe about Him, then?”

“You are to believe in Him, not about Him.”

“I don’t understand.”

“He is our Lord and Master, Elder Brother, King, Saviour,
the divine Man, the human God: to believe in Him is to give
ourselves up to Him in obedience—to search out his will
and do it.”

“But there’s no time, I tell you again,” the marquis almost
shrieked.

“And I tell you there is all eternity to do it in. Take Him
for your master, and He will demand nothing of you which you
are not able to perform. This is the open door to bliss. With
your last breath you can cry to Him, and He will hear you as He
heard the thief on the cross, who cried to Him dying beside
him: ‘Lord, remember me when Thou comest into Thy
kingdom.’—’To-day shalt thou be with me in paradise.’ It
makes my heart swell to think of it, my lord. No
cross-questioning of the poor fellow, no preaching to him. He
just took him with Him where He was going, to make a man of
him.”

“Well, you know something of my history: what would you have
me do now?—at once, I mean. What would the Person you are
speaking of have me do?”

“That is not for me to say, my lord.”

“You could give me a hint.”

“No. God is telling you Himself. For me to presume to tell
you would be to interfere with Him. What He would have a man do
He lets him know in his mind.”

“But what if I had not made up my mind before the last
came?”

“Then I fear He would say to you, ‘Depart from me, thou
worker of iniquity.'”

“That would be hard when another minute might have done
it.”

“If another minute would have done it, you would have had
it.”

A paroxysm of pain followed, during which Mr. Graham
silently left him.

CHAPTER LXX.

END OR BEGINNING?

When the fit was over and he found Mr. Graham was gone, he
asked Malcolm, who had resumed his watch, how long it would
take Lady Florimel to come from Edinburgh.

“Mr. Crathie left wi’ fower horses frae the Lossie Airms
last nicht, my lord,” said Malcolm; “but the ro’ds are ill, an’
she winna be here afore some time the morn.”

The marquis stared aghast: they had sent for her without his
orders. “What shall I do?” he murmured. “If once I look
in her eyes, I shall be damned.—Malcolm!”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Is there a lawyer in Portlossie?”

“Yes, my lord: there’s auld Maister Carmichael.”

“He won’t do: he was my brother’s rascal. Is there no one
besides?”

“No in Portlossie, my lord. There can be nane nearer than
Duff Harbor, I doobt.”

“Take the chariot and bring him here directly. Tell them to
put four horses to: Stokes can ride one.”

“I’ll ride the ither, my lord.”

“You’ll do nothing of the kind: you’re not used to the
pole.”

“I can tak the leader, my lord.”

“I tell you you’re to do nothing of the kind,” cried the
marquis angrily. “You’re to ride inside, and bring
Mr.—what’s his name?—back with you.”

“Soutar, my lord, gien ye please.”

“Be off, then. Don’t wait to feed. The brutes have been
eating all day, and [pg 86] they can eat all night. You
must have him here in an hour.”

In an hour and a quarter Miss Horn’s friend stood by the
marquis’s bedside, Malcolm was dismissed, but was presently
summoned again to receive more orders.

Fresh horses were put to the chariot, and he had to set out
once more—this time to fetch a justice of the peace, a
neighbor laird. The distance was greater than to Duff Harbor;
the roads were worse; the north wind, rising as they went, blew
against them as they returned, increasing to a violent gale;
and it was late before they reached Lossie House.

When Malcolm entered he found the marquis alone.

“Is Morrison here at last?” he cried, in a feeble, irritated
voice.

“Yes, my lord.”

“What the devil kept you so long? The bay mare would have
carried me there and back in an hour and a half.”

“The roads war verra heavy, my lord. An’ jist hear till the
win’.”

The marquis listened a moment, and a frightened expression
grew over his thin, pale, anxious face. “You don’t know what
depends on it,” he said, “or you would have driven better.
Where is Mr. Soutar?”

“I dinna ken, my lord. I’m only jist come, an’ I’ve seen
naebody.”

“Go and tell Mrs. Courthope I want Soutar. You’ll find her
crying somewhere—the old chicken!—because I swore
at her. What harm could that do the old goose?”

“It’ll be mair for love o’ yer lordship than fricht at the
sweirin’, my lord.”

“You think so? Why should she care? Go and tell her
I’m sorry. But really she ought to be used to me by this time.
Tell her to send Soutar directly.”

Mr. Soutar was not to be found, the fact being that he had
gone to see Miss Horn. The marquis flew into an awful rage, and
began to curse and swear frightfully.

“My lord! my lord!” said Malcolm, “for God’s sake, dinna
gang on that gait. He canna like to hear that kin’ o’ speech;
an’ frae ane o’ his ain’ tu!”

The marquis stopped, aghast at his presumption and choking
with rage, but Malcolm’s eyes filled with tears, and, instead
of breaking out again, his master turned his head away and was
silent.

Mr. Soutar came.

“Fetch Morrison,” said the marquis, “and go to bed.”

The wind howled terribly as Malcolm ascended the stairs and
half felt his way, for he had no candle, through the long
passages leading to his room. As he entered the last a huge
vague form came down upon him like a deeper darkness through
the dark. Instinctively he stepped aside. It passed
noiselessly, with a long stride, and not even a rustle of its
garments—at least Malcolm heard nothing but the roar of
the wind. He turned and followed it. On and on it went, down
the stair, through a corridor, down the great stone turnpike
stair, and through passage after passage. When it came into the
more frequented and half-lighted thoroughfares of the house it
showed as a large figure in a long cloak, indistinct in
outline.

It turned a corner close by the marquis’s room. But when
Malcolm, close at its heels, turned also, he saw nothing but a
vacant lobby, the doors around which were all shut. One after
another he quickly opened them, all except the marquis’s, but
nothing was to be seen. The conclusion was that it had entered
the marquis’s room. He must not disturb the conclave in the
sick chamber with what might be but “a false creation
proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain,” and turned back to
his own room, where he threw himself on his bed and fell
asleep.

About twelve Mrs. Courthope called him: his master was
worse, and wanted to see him.

The midnight was dark and still, for the wind had ceased.
But a hush and a cloud seemed gathering in the stillness and
darkness, and with them came the sense of a solemn celebration,
as if the gloom were canopy as well as pall—black, but
bordered and hearted with purple and gold; and the terrible
stillness seemed to tremble as with the
[pg 87] inaudible tones of a great
organ at the close or commencement of some mighty
symphony.

With beating heart he walked softly toward the room where,
as on an altar, lay the vanishing form of his master, like the
fuel in whose dying flame was offered the late and ill-nurtured
sacrifice of his spirit.

As he went through the last corridor leading thither, Mrs.
Catanach, type and embodiment of the horrors that haunt the
dignity of death, came walking toward him like one at home, her
great round body lighty upborne on her soft foot. It was no
time to challenge her presence, and yielding her the half of
the narrow way he passed without a greeting. She dropped him a
courtesy with an up-look and again a veiling of her wicked
eyes.

The marquis would not have the doctors come near him, and
when Malcolm entered there was no one in the room but Mrs.
Courthope. The shadow had crept far along the dial. His face
had grown ghastly, the skin had sunk to the bones, and his eyes
stood out as if from much staring into the dark. They rested
very mournfully on Malcolm for a few moments, and then closed
softly.

“Is she come yet?” he murmured, opening them wide with
sudden stare.

“No, my lord.”

The lids fell again, softly, slowly.

“Be good to her, Malcolm,” he murmured.

“I wull, my lord,” said Malcolm solemnly.

Then the eyes opened and looked at him: something grew in
them, a light as of love, and drew up after it a tear; but the
lips said nothing. The eyelids fell again, and in a minute more
Malcolm knew by his breathing that he slept.

The slow night waned. He woke sometimes, but soon dozed off
again. The two watched by him till the dawn. It brought a still
gray morning, without a breath of wind and warm for the season.
The marquis appeared a little revived, but was hardly able to
speak. Mostly by signs he made Malcolm understand that he
wanted Mr. Graham, but that some one else must go for him. Mrs.
Courthope went.

As soon as she was out of the room he lifted his hand with
effort, laid feeble hold on Malcolm’s jacket, and, drawing him
down, kissed him on the forehead. Malcolm burst into tears and
sank weeping by the bedside.

Mr. Graham, entering a little after, and seeing Malcolm on
his knees, knelt also and broke into a prayer.

“O blessed Father!” he said, “who knowest this thing, so
strange to us, which we call death, breathe more life into the
heart of Thy dying son, that in the power of life he may front
death. O Lord Christ! who diedst Thyself, and in Thyself
knowest it all, heal this man in his sore need—heal him
with strength to die.”

A faint Amen came from the marquis.

“Thou didst send him into the world: help him out of it. O
God! we belong to Thee utterly. We dying men are Thy children,
O living Father! Thou art such a father that Thou takest our
sins from us and throwest them behind Thy back. Thou cleansest
our souls as Thy Son did wash our feet. We hold our hearts up
to Thee: make them what they must be, O Love! O Life of men! O
Heart of hearts! Give Thy dying child courage and hope and
peace—the peace of Him who overcame all the terrors of
humanity, even death itself, and liveth for evermore, sitting
at Thy right hand, our God-brother, blessed to all ages.
Amen.”

“Amen!” murmured the marquis, and, slowly lifting his hand
from the coverlid, he laid it on the head of Malcolm, who did
not know it was the hand of his father blessing him ere he
died.

“Be good to her,” said the marquis once more.

But Malcolm could not answer for weeping, and the marquis
was not satisfied. Gathering all his force, he said again, “Be
good to her.”

“I wull, I wull,” burst from Malcolm in sobs; and he wailed
aloud.

The day wore on, and the afternoon came. Still Lady Florimel
had not arrived, and still the marquis
lingered.

[pg 88]

As the gloom of the twilight was deepening into the early
darkness of the winter night he opened wide his eyes, and was
evidently listening. Malcolm could hear nothing, but the light
in his master’s face grew and the strain of his listening
diminished. At length Malcolm became aware of the sound of
wheels, which came rapidly nearer, till at last the carriage
swung up to the hall-door. A moment, and Lady Florimel was
flitting across the room.

“Papa! papa!” she cried, and, throwing her arm over him,
laid her cheek to his.

The marquis could not return her embrace: he could only
receive her into the depths of his shining, tearful eyes.

“Flory!” he murmured, “I’m going away. I’m going—I’ve
got—to make an—apology. Malcolm, be
good—”

The sentence remained unfinished. The light paled from his
countenance: he had to carry it with him. He was dead.

Lady Florimel gave a loud cry. Mrs. Courthope ran to her
assistance. “My lady’s in a dead faint,” she whispered, and
left the room to get help.

Malcolm lifted Lady Florimel in his great arms and bore her
tenderly to her own apartment. There he left her to the care of
her women and returned to the chamber of death.

Meantime, Mr. Graham and Mr. Soutar had come. When Malcolm
re-entered the schoolmaster took him kindly by the arm and
said, “Malcolm, there can be neither place nor moment fitter
for the solemn communication I am commissioned to make to you:
I have, as in the presence of your dead father, to inform you
that you are now marquis of Lossie; and God forbid you should
be less worthy as marquis than you have been as fisherman!”

Malcolm stood stupefied. For a while he seemed to himself to
be turning over in his mind something he had heard read from a
book, with a nebulous notion of being somehow concerned in it.
The thought of his father cleared his brain. He ran to the dead
body, kissed its lips as he had once kissed the forehead of
another, and falling on his knees wept, he knew not for what.
Presently, however, he recovered himself, rose, and, rejoining
the two men, said, “Gentlemen, hoo mony kens this turn o’
things?”

“None but Mr. Morrison, Mrs. Catanach and ourselves—so
far as I know,” answered Mr. Soutar.

“And Miss Horn,” added Mr. Graham, “She first brought out
the truth of it, and ought to be the first to know of your
recognition by your father.”

“I s’ tell her mysel’,” returned Malcolm. “But, gentlemen, I
beg o’ ye, till I ken what I’m aboot an’ gie ye leave, dinna
open yer moo’ to leevin’ cratur’ aboot this. There’s time
eneuch for the warl’ to ken ‘t.”

“Your lordship commands me,” said Mr. Soutar.

“Yes, Malcolm, until you give me leave,” said Mr.
Graham.

“Whaur’s Mr. Morrison?” asked Malcolm.

“He is still in the house,” said Mr. Soutar.

“Gang till him, sir, an’ gar him promise, on the word o’ a
gentleman, to haud his tongue. I canna bide to hae’t blaret a’
gait an’ a’ at ance. For Mistress Catanach, I s’ deal wi’ her
mysel’.”

The door opened, and, in all the conscious dignity conferred
by the immunities and prerogatives of her calling, Mrs.
Catanach walked into the room.

“A word wi’ ye, Mistress Catanach,” said Malcolm.

“Certainly, my lord,” answered the howdy with mingled
presumption and respect, and followed him to the dining-room.
“Weel, my lord—” she began, before he had turned from
shutting the door behind them, in the tone and with the
air—or rather airs—of having conferred a
great benefit, and expecting its recognition.

“Mistress Catanach,” interrupted Malcolm, turning and facing
her, “gien I be un’er ony obligation to you, it’s frae anither
tongue I maun hear’t. But I hae an offer to mak ye: Sae lang as
it disna coom oot ‘at I’m onything better nor a fisherman born,
ye s’ hae yer twinty poun’ i’ the year, peyed ye quarterly.
[pg 89] But the moment fowk says wha
I am ye touch na a poun’-not’ mair, an’ I coont mysel’ free
to pursue onything I can pruv agane ye.”

Mrs. Catanach attempted a laugh of scorn, but her face was
gray as putty and its muscles declined response.

“Ay or no?” said Malcolm. “I winna gar ye
sweir, for I wad lippen to yer aith no a hair.”

“Ay, my lord,” said the howdy, reassuming at least outward
composure, and with it her natural brass, for as she spoke she
held out her open palm.

“Na, na,” said Malcolm, “nae forhan’ payments. Three months
o’ tongue-haudin’, an’ there’s yer five poun’; an’ Maister
Soutar o’ Duff Harbor ‘ill pay ‘t intill yer ain han’. But
brack troth wi’ me, an’ ye s’ hear o’ ‘t; for gien ye war hangt
the warl’ wad be a’ the cleaner. Noo quit the hoose, an’ never
lat me see ye aboot the place again. But afore ye gang I gie ye
fair warnin’ ‘at I mean to win at a’ yer byganes.”

The blood of red wrath was seething in Mrs. Catanach’s face:
she drew herself up and stood flaming before him, on the verge
of explosion.

“Gang frae the hoose,” said Malcolm, “or I’ll set the muckle
hun’ to shaw ye the gait.”

Her face turned the color of ashes, and with hanging cheeks
and scared but not the less wicked eyes she hurried from the
room. Malcolm watched her out of the house, then, following her
into the town, brought Miss Horn back with him to aid in the
last earthly services, and hastened to Duncan’s cottage.

But, to his amazement and distress, it was forsaken and the
hearth cold. In his attendance on his father he had not seen
the piper—he could not remember for how many days; and on
inquiry he found that, although he had not been missed, no one
could recall having seen him later than three or four days
agone. The last he could hear of him was that about a week
before a boy had spied him sitting on a rock in the Baillies’
Barn with his pipes in his lap. Searching the cottage, he found
that his broadsword and dirk, with all his poor finery, were
gone.

That same night Mrs. Catanach also disappeared.

A week after, what was left of Lord Lossie was buried.
Malcolm followed the hearse with the household. Miss Horn
walked immediately behind him, on the arm of the schoolmaster.
It was a great funeral, with a short road, for the body was
laid in the church—close to the wall, just under the
crusader with the Norman canopy.

Lady Florimel wept incessantly for three days; on the fourth
she looked out on the sea and thought it very dreary; on the
fifth she found a certain gratification in hearing herself
called the marchioness; on the sixth she tried on her mourning
and was pleased; on the seventh she went with the funeral and
wept again; on the eighth came Lady Bellair, who on the ninth
carried her away.

To Malcolm she had not spoken once.

Mr. Graham left Portlossie.

Miss Horn took to her bed for a week.

Mr. Crathie removed his office to the House itself, took
upon him the function of steward as well as factor, had the
state-rooms dismantled, and was master of the place.

Malcolm helped Stoat with the horses and did odd jobs for
Mr. Crathie. From his likeness to the old marquis, as he was
still called, the factor had a favor for him, firmly believing
the said marquis to be his father and Mrs. Stewart his mother;
and hence it came that he allowed him a key to the library.

The story of Malcom’s plans and what came of them requires
another book.

[pg 90]

THE STAGE IN ITALY.

The Italians are undoubtedly the most theatre-loving people
in the world. With them the play-house takes the place to a
great extent of drawing-room and evening lounge. Almost every
Italian family of any social position possesses a box at one of
the principal theatres, where visits are received and many a
scene from the School for Scandal is enacted whilst the
fair gossip-mongers flirt and sip ices. In winter the opera is
the standard amusement of the fashionable world, while the
favorite resort in summer is the diurno or open air
theatre, which is in the form of an amphitheatre, the stage
with its accessories facing an unroofed enclosure, with the
seats arranged in tiers one above another, and fenced off by an
iron balustrade from a terrace which serves the purpose of a
gallery. A vast covered corridor is nearly always to be found
adjacent to the diurno, beneath which the audience can
take refuge in case of a shower, walk between the acts and
indulge in bebite—cooling drinks, such as sherbets
and beer. The abbonamento (or subscription) to a diurno
costs from three to ten dollars for the season of thirty or
forty representations. When a dramatic company is about to
visit a city the manager first secures his abbonati, for
according to their number he is able to regulate his expenses,
as he counts little on chance spectators, and is sure to have
almost always to play before the same audience.

The lyric stage in Italy takes precedence of the dramatic,
and in the large cities, Milan, Venice, Genoa, Florence, Rome
and Naples, the production of a new opera is considered a
national event, forming for many days previous to its
production the chief topic of conversation in salons and
caffès. No such enthusiasm is manifested in
regard to the first representation of a new play; and although
the house may be crowded and the author called before the
curtain, he may deem himself happy if his drama is played four
times during the season; whereas a popular opera will be given
night after night for two months. An opera, if it has any
merit, may be the means of carrying the fame of Italian genius
to the farthest limits of the earth, but it is a chance if the
comedy which pleases at Venice will be appreciated in the least
degree at Rome or Naples, such are the variations in manners
and customs, especially amongst the lower orders, between one
Italian province and another. Hence, opera is greatly fostered
and protected. There are a dozen musical conservatori,
public and private, in each of the principal cities, for the
training of singers, and prizes are accorded to them out of
funds especially set apart for the purpose by the government,
which also grants large annual subsidies to the leading lyric
theatres, such as the Scala at Milan, the San Carlo at Naples,
the Fenice at Venice, the Pergola at Florence, the Carlo Felice
at Genoa, the Communale at Bologna, and the Apollo at Rome. The
dramatic stage has none of these aids, the various companies
have to pay their own expenses, and, whatever may be the merits
of the artists who compose them, they scarcely ever obtain any
special recognition from the government. Although the smallest
Italian city possesses its theatre, and some of the
capitals—Milan and Naples, for instance—at least a
dozen, there is no training-school for the stage in any part of
the country. Nor is there such an institution as the English
Dramatic College, where decayed artists can retire when their
day of glory is past and they have become poor and lonely. Each
city has one theatre, the largest and most magnificent,
reserved exclusively for operatic performances, and where the
unmusical drama is scarcely ever tolerated. I once saw Ristori
act in Metastasio’s Dido at the Scala for the benefit of
the wounded [pg 91] during the war for Italian
independence; but this was the only occasion in fifty years
on which an actress had declaimed in that enormous edifice,
and nothing but patriotic charity would have excused such an
infringement of time-honored etiquette. When, therefore, the
Italian opera-houses close for the season, they are never
reopened for the accommodation of wandering “stars.” The
consequence of this is, that the drama is banished to the
inferior theatres, and whilst thousands of francs are spent
on the scenery of a new opera or ballet, the poor player has
to content himself with an indifferent stage and wretched
decorations. In short, to quote an observation made to me
recently by Signor Salvini, “Theatrical affairs are just the
opposite in Italy to what they are in America. In Italy the
opera-bill is never changed more than three times in as many
months: in America it varies almost every evening. In Italy
the play-bill is renewed nightly, while in this country and
in England a drama, if good, may have a run of over a
hundred representations.” Nothing surprised Salvini more
during his stay in the United States than the splendor of
the mise en scène of some of the New York
plays, but he accounted for it easily enough. The managers
of most of the New York, Paris and London theatres do not
hesitate to lavish large sums of money upon their
decorations and scenery, because should the piece fail for
which they were painted they can be used in some other. The
Italian theatres are nearly always the property either of
some nobleman or of a company of speculators, whose
principal object is to make as much money out of them, and
spend as little upon them, as possible. They are rented out
for a month or so to one or other of the many troupes of
actors which are constantly wandering about the country, and
which bring their own scenery and dresses with them,
generally of the cheapest and most tawdry description.

A Tuscan proverb says, “Figlio d’attore, attore”
(“The son of an actor is always an actor”); and this in Italy
is pretty sure to be the case. The three greatest living
actors, Salvini, Rossi and Majeroni, belong to families which
have long been popular on the stage, and so do the actresses
Ristori and Sedowsky. Signora Ristori made her début as
an infant in the cradle, and was for years a member of a troupe
the leading lady of which was her late mother, Signora
Maddalena Ristori, a woman of great talent and merit, whose
death at an advanced age has recently occasioned her celebrated
daughter poignant grief. There still exists in Italy a Venetian
troupe of comedians whose ancestors were the first interpreters
of the comedies of Goldoni, and several of them claim descent
from players who enacted the tragedies and comedies of serious
classical literature before the courts of Lucrezia Borgia and
Leonora d’Este. In glancing over an Italian play-bill one is
invariably struck by the fact that many of the artists bear the
same name, and are evidently connected by ties of consanguinity
or of marriage. In the Ristori troupe, for instance, there are
several actors calling themselves by the same name as that
great artist, and who are doubtless of her family. The Salvini
company embraces, besides the two brothers Tommaso and
Alessandro, several Piamontis, two or three Piccininis and two
Colonellos. I once knew in Italy a manager named Spada who
directed a little troupe of buffo actors consisting of his
grandfather and grandmother, father and mother, three or four
uncles and aunts, two brothers, and one or two sisters, in
addition to himself, his wife and children. Such facts are in
part accounted for by the social status—or rather want of
status—of the profession. Down to within a very recent
period ecclesiastical censures weighed heavily upon all actors,
and Christian burial was denied them unless during their final
illness they had formally declared their intention to abandon
the stage in case of recovery. So severe a condemnation on the
part of the clergy naturally produced a strong prejudice
against those who connected themselves in any way with the
stage; and it is only recently that in Italy, a land where
social changes are slow, the
[pg 92] doors of her somewhat formal
society have been opened to admit even persons so
distinguished in every sense of the word as are Ristori,
Piamonti, Salvini and Rossi. The social unfriendliness of
the audiences—who can applaud so enthusiastically that
a stranger witnessing for the first time their noisy
demonstrations would easily believe every man and woman in
the theatre ready to die for the sake of the admired
artist—is doubtless the cause of the patriarchal
system observable in the formation of Italian dramatic
companies. The members thereof prefer adopting their
fathers’ profession rather than enter another where they
would be constantly mortified by being pointed at as the
children of actors.

A little research into the history of the stage in Italy
will enlighten the reader as to the true cause both of the
harsh condemnation of the Church and of the prejudice of
society against this great profession. The plays of the old
Romans were proverbially loose both in their plots and
dialogues, and Juvenal has spoken of the actors of his time
with the bitterest contempt. During the Middle Ages the members
of the various religious confraternities monopolized the stage
with their sacred dramas and mysteries, and the “profane
stage,” as an Italian writer calls it, was so degraded that
more than once both the Church and State had to use their
influence to put down performances which were too infamous to
be here described. When the Renaissance came the drama was
reinstated in the position it occupied during the days of Roman
civilization, but the plays of this period were merely
imitations of the Latin comedies; and if we may judge by the
most celebrated of them which still exists—the
Mandragora of Macchiavelli, for example—far
exceeded their models in obscenity. When Benedict XIV. ascended
the pontifical throne he established a severe censorship, and
inaugurated the harsh system to which I have already alluded,
with the effect of banishing immoral productions from the
stage, though without improving its intellectual tone. In the
eighteenth century Goldoni appeared and gave to the world his
graceful comedies, which were followed by the lyric dramas of
Metastasio and the lofty tragedies of Alfieri. Since then there
has been a succession of able dramatists—Monti, Gozzi,
Manzoni, Pellico, Ippolito d’Asti, etc.; and as the class of
plays acted was elevated, so the character of the performers
was also improved. From being dissolute they became generally
respectable; and at present it may be safely asserted that a
better-conducted, more frugal or industrious class of men and
woman can scarcely be found than are the Italian players. That
class of actresses with whom their profession is only a means
of displaying their beauty and splendid but often ill-gotten
robes and jewelry, is little known in Italy, Such persons would
be scarcely tolerated either by their comrades or by the
public. Indeed, although within the past few years, owing to
the unsettled state of affairs, a great many plays of
questionable morality have been acted, especially in Rome,
still the tone of the performances usually witnessed in an
Italian theatre is greatly above the average of what even
Americans applaud; and a French play has to go through more
careful pruning for the Italian stage than for ours.

The Italian actors have always been in the habit of forming
themselves into troupes, or, as they call them,
compagnie, placed under the direction of one person, who
is both manager and principal performer. They divide these
troupes according to the various kinds of acting; thus, there
are companies of tragic, melodramatic and comic actors, but it
is very rare to find a combination of tragedy and comedy in the
same entertainment. There are at present about eighty different
troupes of actors in Italy, including those devoted to the
marionnette and dialect performances. The principal are the
“Salvini,” “Ristori,” “Majeroni,” “Sedowsky,” and “Rossi” for
tragedy, the “Bellotti Bon” for high comedy, and the “De
Mestri” for farce and vaudeville. The “Ristori,” “Salvini” and
“Rossi” troupes have been the round of the world.
[pg 93] The “Bellotti Bon” has, I
believe, never quitted Italy. It is a remarkable combination
of well-trained actors, devoted exclusively to the
representation of modern society plays and dramas, mostly
translated or adapted from the French. Bellotti-Bon, the
director, is not excelled in his own line even on the stage
of the Théâtre Français. His company is
rich, and its scenery and dresses are tasteful. The late
Signora Cazzola, formerly the leading lady of this troupe,
was perhaps the best high-comedy and dramatic actress Italy
has produced. Signer Salvini informed me that Alexandre
Dumas fils told him he preferred this lady’s
interpretation of the rôle of Marguerite
Gauthier (Camille) in La Dame aux Camélias to
that of Madame Doche, who created the part. She produced a
great effect when the dying Camille looks at herself in the
glass for the first time after her long illness. Instead of
screaming or fainting, as is usual with most actresses who
undertake the character, Signora Cazzola stood for a long
time gazing intently at the havoc disease had wrought upon
her lovely countenance. Then, with a deep sigh and an
expression of intense agony, she turned the mirror with its
back toward her, implying that she could never again endure
the pain of seeing herself reflected upon its truth-telling
surface. On the toilette-table was a vase full of
camellias—those beautiful but scentless flowers which
were emblematic of her brilliant but artificial life. Taking
one of these in her hand, she plucked it to pieces leaf by
leaf, and when the last petal fell to the ground went
quietly back to her bed, there hopelessly to await the
coming on of death. Her parting with Armand was very
pathetic, and her death, although harrowing and true to
Nature, was not revolting, its horrors being moderated by
artistic good sense and delicacy. This great artiste died
young, worn out by the strong emotions she not only
represented, but actually felt.

Signora Cazzola, together with Virginia Marini and Isolina
Piamonti, was a pupil of Signor Salvini. Virginia Marini is
well considered in Italy, and used to be the leading lady in
the Salvini troupe. She now directs a company of her own, and
has been succeeded in her former position by the estimable
Signora Piamonti, whom Salvini declares to be one of the most
versatile artistes he has ever known, equally good in the
highest tragedy or the liveliest farce. Her Dalilla in
Samson was much admired in America, but her rendering of
the rôle of Francesca di Rimini in the tragedy of
that name is perhaps her greatest performance.

Signora Sedowsky is undoubtedly the greatest tragic actress
of Italy. She is perhaps less stately and grand than Ristori,
but in fire and depth of feeling she greatly surpasses this
eminent tragédienne. Her Phèdre is pronounced by
excellent judges equal to that of Rachel. Signora Sedowsky was
born at Naples, and is the proprietress of three large theatres
in that city. She is the wife of a wealthy nobleman.
Notwithstanding her rank, she still keeps on the stage, but is
received with honor in the first society. She has never acted
out of Italy, and very rarely beyond the walls of Naples.

The superlative merits of Signora Ristori are so well known
in America that the mere mention of her name is sure to recall
some of the most delightful evenings ever spent by many of my
readers. Her genius and beauty, her majesty and glorious method
of declamation, have won her a foremost rank in her profession,
and her virtues and nobility of conduct the esteem of all who
have ever known her. There are indeed few women more estimable
than Adelaide Ristori, Marchioness Capranica del Grillo. It may
be a matter of surprise to some who are not aware of the fact
when I tell them that in Italy Ristori is more famous in comedy
than in tragedy. She is inimitable in such parts as the hostess
in Goldoni’s clever comedy of La Locandiera.

Of all Italian actors, Gustavo Modena was the most renowned.
He is to the stage of his native land what Garrick was to that
of England, and his conception of the various parts in classic
drama, [pg 94] his “points,” and even his
dress, have become traditional, and are almost invariably
retained by his followers. I never saw him act, but I once
heard him recite in a private salon his famous
rôle of Saul in Alfieri’s tragedy of that name.
In person he was tall and largely built, His countenance was
not prepossessing, and, like Michael Angelo, he had a broken
nose. His eye could assume a terrific aspect, and his voice
was rich, powerful and varied in its tone. At times it
rolled like thunder, while at other moments it was as soft
and tender as the sweetest notes of a flute. Signor Modena
died some years ago. He was the master of Salvini, and to
him that illustrious actor does not hesitate to attribute
much of his fame.

Rossi, the only living rival of Salvini, is still a young
man, and doubtless has great talents. I think him even more
impetuous and ardent than Salvini, but he is less intellectual,
and his elocution is decidedly inferior.

Majeroni is an actor of the same school, but he is becoming
old, and has a tendency to rant.

Tommaso Salvini, our late visitor, is of Milanese parentage,
and was born in the Lombard capital on January 1, 1830. His
father, as I have already said, was an able actor, and his
mother a popular actress named Guglielmina Zocchi. When quite a
boy he showed a rare talent for acting, and performed in
certain plays given during the Easter holidays in the school
where he was educated, with such rare ability that his father
determined to devote him to the stage. For this purpose he
placed him under the tuition of the great Modena, who conceived
much affection for him. The training received thus early from
such able hands soon bore fruits, and before he was thirteen
Salvini had already won a kind of renown in juvenile
characters. At fifteen he lost both his parents, and the
bereavement so preyed upon his spirits that he was obliged to
abandon his career for two years, and returned once more under
the tuition of Modena. When he again emerged from retirement he
joined the Ristori troupe, and shared with that great actress
many a triumph. In 1849, Salvini entered the army of Italian
independence, and fought valiantly for the defence of his
country, receiving in recognition of his services several
medals of honor. Peace being proclaimed, he again appeared upon
the stage in a company directed by Signer Cesare Dondini. He
played in the Edipo of Nicolini—a tragedy written
expressly for him—and achieved a great success. Next he
appeared in Alfieri’s Saul, and then all Italy declared
that Modena’s mantle had fallen on worthy shoulders. His fame
was now prodigious, and wherever he went he was received with
boundless enthusiasm. He visited Paris, where he played
Orasmane, Orestes, Saul and Othello. On his return to Florence
he was hospitably entertained by the marquis of Normanby, then
English ambassador to the court of Tuscany, and this
enlightened nobleman strongly encouraged him to extend his
repertory of Shakespearian characters. In 1865 occurred the
sixth centenary of Dante’s birthday, and the four greatest
Italian actors were invited to perform in Silvio Pellico’s
tragedy of Francesca di Rimini, which is founded on an
episode in the Divina Commedia. The cast originally
stood on the play-bills thus: Francesca, Signora Ristori;
Lancelotto, Signor Rossi; Paulo, Signor Salvini; and Guido,
Signor Majeroni. It happened, however, that Rossi, who was
unaccustomed to play the part of Lancelotto, felt timid at
appearing in a character so little suited to him. Hearing this,
Signor Salvini, with exquisite politeness and good-nature,
volunteered to take the insignificant part, relinquishing the
grand rôle of Paulo to his junior in the
profession. He created by the force of his genius an impression
in the minor part which is still vivid in the minds of all who
witnessed the performance. The government of Florence, grateful
for his urbanity, presented him with a statuette of Dante, and
King Victor Emmanuel rewarded him with the title of knight of
the Order of the Saints Maurice and Lazarus. Later he received
from the same monarch a diamond ring, with the rank of officer
in the Order of the Crown
[pg 95] of Italy. In 1868, Signer
Salvini visited Madrid, where his acting of the death of
Conrad in La Morte Civile produced such an impression
that the easily-excited Madrilese rushed upon the stage to
ascertain whether the death was actual or fictitious. The
queen, Isabella II., conferred upon the great actor many
marks of favor, and so shortly afterward did King Louis of
Portugal, who frequently entertained him at the royal palace
of Lisbon.

Signor Salvini’s recent visit to America I need scarcely
mention: its triumphs are still fresh in the memory of the
public, and the only drawback to its complete success was the
unhappy fact that the eminent artist did not appeal to his
audiences in their own language.

I know of nothing more remarkable than the difference which
exists between the Salvini of the stage and the Salvini of
private life, the one so imposing, impetuous and fiery, the
other so gentle, urbane, and even retiring. He is a gentleman
possessing the manners of the good old school—courtly and
somewhat ceremonious, reminding one of those Italian nobles of
the sixteenth century of whom we lead in the novels of Giraldo
Cinthio and Fiorentino—uomini illustri, e di civil
costumi. His greeting is cordial and his conversation
delightful, full of anecdote and marked with enthusiasm for his
art. When I first became acquainted with him I was of opinion
that his interpretation of Hamlet was based only upon the
translated text, but in the course of a very long conversation
on the subject I discovered that he was well acquainted
(through literal translations) not only with the text, but also
with the notes and comments of our leading critics. In speaking
of the part in which he is altogether unrivaled he said, “I am
of opinion that Shakespeare intended Othello to be a Moor of
Barbary or some other part of Northern Africa, of whom there
were many in Italy during the sixteenth century. I have met
several, and think I imitate their ways and manners pretty
well. You are aware, however, that the historical Othello was
not a black at all. He was a white man, and a Venetian general
named Mora. His history resembles that of Shakespeare’s hero in
many particulars. Giraldo Cinthio, probably for better effect,
made out of the name Mora, moro, a blackamoor; and
Shakespeare, unacquainted with the true story, followed this
old novelist’s lead; and it was well he did so, for have we not
in consequence the most perfect delineation of the
peculiarities of Moorish temperament ever conceived?” The
costumes worn by Salvini in this play are copied from those
depicted in certain Venetian pictures of the fifteenth century
in which several Moorish officers appear. It took him many
years to master this rôle, and he assured me he
could not play it more than three times in succession without
experiencing terrible fatigue. “It is a matter of wonder to
me,” he observed, “that English actors can play a great
character like this so many nights in succession; and, above
all, that they retain self-possession whilst the fidgety noise
of scene-shifting is going on behind them. To avoid this, I
have been obliged to cut Othello into six acts, and to
make many changes in Hamlet.” The intensity of feeling
with which he throws himself into the part he is representing
was especially evident on the occasion of his playing Saul.
After the performance I was invited to go behind the scenes to
speak with him, and was surprised as well as pained to find him
utterly exhausted. I could not help saying, “How can you exert
yourself thus to please so few people?” There were scarcely
four hundred persons assembled to see this sublime performance.
He answered with honest simplicity, “They have paid their
money, and are entitled to the best I can do for them; besides
that, when I am on the stage I forget the world and all that is
in it, and live the character I represent.” “You will,” said I,
“make a grand Lear.” “Yes,” he replied, “I think I shall be
able to make something out of the old king. I have been reading
the tragedy for some time, but it will still take me two years
to study it thoroughly.”

Salvini related to me several anecdotes which show how quick
he is to master [pg 96] any difficulties accident
throws in his way. “Once I bought,” he said, “a play of a
poor young writer which I thought I could make something of;
but when we came to rehearse it for the last time before
representation, it seemed to me utterly flat and
unprofitable. The piece was called La Suonatrice
d’Arpa (‘The Harp-Girl’). The actors all said the last
act was so stupid that we should make a fiasco. I at
last hit upon an idea. We had, however, only a few hours to
execute it in. I changed the story: instead of the play
ending happily, I made the father kill his daughter
accidentally, and then die of grief. All the dialogue had to
be improvised by the leading actress and myself. I played
the father, and Signora Piamonti the daughter. Such was the
success of our invention that the piece was played eight
nights in succession, and a rival actor, hearing of the
triumph achieved by The Harp-Girl, bought from the
author for a handsome sum the privilege of acting it in
certain districts which were not included in my purchase of
the drama. Not being aware of the alterations we had made,
and performing it according to the letter of the text, he
made un fiasco solenne—a dead failure.”

After the first performance of Zaïre I took the
liberty of observing to Salvini that a superb piece of
“business” which marks his acting in the last act was not to be
found in the text. “Oh,” he replied, “I will tell you the
origin of it. I was playing at Naples, and one night, when I
threw the body of my murdered wife upon the ottoman in the last
act, my burnouse fell off and fixed itself to my waist like a
tail. I saw at once that if I was not careful I should provoke
laughter, and instantly imagined that I would pretend to
believe the clinging drapery was the wounded Zaïre
grasping me behind. I appeared to dread even to look round,
lest I should encounter her pallid face. I hesitated, I
trembled, and when with a supreme effort I at last grasped the
burnouse and cast it from me, I still lacked the courage to
ascertain what it really was, and stood shivering before the
white heap it made upon the floor. Finally, just as I thought
public curiosity to know what I was going to do began to grow
weary, I stooped down and seizing the white mantle dashed it
from me with contempt, showing by the gesture that I had
discovered what it was, and felt anger that such a trifle
should thus alarm a bold man who had committed murder.” This
pantomime obtained for Salvini at the New York Academy of Music
one of his greatest ovations.

When asked why he did not learn English, “Ah!” he replied,
“I am too old; and even if I mastered it, I could not control
my knowledge of it. When excited I should be lapsing into
Italian, which would be very absurd. You asked me the other day
why I do not play Orestes. I should make a queer young Greek
with an Apollo-like figure now-a-days! The time was when I
looked the part and acted it well, and then I liked to play it.
I must leave it, with many other good things, to younger men.”
Speaking about dramatic elocution, he said, “The best method is
obtained by close observation of Nature, and above all by
earnestness. If you can impress people with the conviction that
you feel what you say, they will pardon many shortcomings. And,
above all, study, study, study! All the genius in the world
will not help you along with any art unless you become a hard
student. It has taken me years to master a single part.”

Salvini’s visit to America has been fruitful of a double
good. He has shown forth the splendor of Italian genius, even
revealing to us new marvels in that mine of wealth, the works
of the greatest Bard of the English-speaking race; and he has
gone back to Italy to tell her people of things he has seen in
the New World which his great compatriot discovered—as
wonderful in their way as any related by Othello to Desdemona’s
willing ear.

R.
DAVEY.

[pg 97]

THREE FEATHERS.

BY WILLIAM BLACK, AUTHOR OF “A PRINCESS OF THULE.”

CHAPTER XX.

TINTAGEL’S WALLS.

What was the matter with Harry Trelyon? His mother could not
make out; and there never had been much confidence between
them, so that she did not care to ask. But she watched, and she
saw that he had, for the time at least, forsaken his accustomed
haunts and ways and become gloomy, silent and self-possessed.
Dick was left neglected in the stables: you no longer heard his
rapid clatter along the highway, with the not over-melodious
voice of his master singing “The Men of Merry, Merry England”
or “The Young Chevalier.” The long and slender fishing-rod
remained on the pegs in the hall, although you could hear the
flop of the small burn-trout of an evening when the flies were
thick over the stream. The dogs were deprived of their
accustomed runs; the horses had to be taken out for exercise by
the groom; and the various and innumerable animals about the
place missed their doses of alternate petting and teasing, all
because Master Harry had chosen to shut himself up in his
study.

The mother of the young man very soon discovered that her
son was not devoting his hours of seclusion in that
extraordinary museum of natural history to making trout-flies,
stuffing birds and arranging pinned butterflies in cases, as
was his custom. These were not the occupations which now kept
Master Harry up half the night. When she went in of a morning,
before he was up, she found that he had been covering whole
sheets of paper with careful copying out of passages taken at
random from the volumes beside him. A Latin grammar was
ordinarily on the table—a book which the young gentleman
had brought back from school free from thumb-marks.
Occasionally a fencing-foil lay among these evidences of study,
while the small aquaria, the cases of stuffed animals with
fancy backgrounds and the numerous bird-cages had been thrust
aside to give fair elbow-room.

“Perhaps,” said Mrs. Trelyon to herself with much
satisfaction—”perhaps, after all, that good little girl
has given him a hint about Parliament, and he is preparing
himself.”

A few days of this seclusion, however, began to make the
mother anxious; and so one morning she went into his room. He
hastily turned over the sheet of paper on which he had been
writing: then he looked up, not too well pleased.

“Harry, why do you stay in-doors on such a beautiful
morning? It is quite like summer.”

“Yes, I know,” he said. “I suppose we shall soon have a
batch of parsons here: summer always brings them. They come out
with the hot weather—like butterflies.”

Mrs. Trelyon was shocked and disappointed: she thought Wenna
Rosewarne had cured him of his insane dislike to
clergymen—indeed, for many a day gone by he had kept
respectfully silent on the subject.

“But we shall not ask them to come if you’d rather not,” she
said, wishing to do all she could to encourage the reformation
of his ways. “I think Mr. Barnes promised to visit us early in
May, but he is only one.”

“And one is worse than a dozen. When there’s a lot you can
leave ’em to fight it out among themselves. But one!—to
have one stalking about an empty house, like a ghost dipped in
ink! Why can’t you ask anybody but clergymen, mother? There are
whole lots of people would like to run down from London for a
fortnight before getting into the thick of the season: there’s
the Pomeroy girls as good as offered to come.”

“But they can’t come by themselves,” Mrs. Trelyon said with
a feeble protest.

“Oh yes, they can: they’re ugly enough
[pg 98] to be safe anywhere. And why
don’t you get Juliott up? She’ll be glad to get away from
that old curmudgeon for a week. And you ought to ask the
Trewhellas, father and daughter, to dinner: that old fellow
is not half a bad sort of fellow, although he’s a
clergyman.”

“Harry,” said his mother, interrupting him, “I’ll fill the
house if that will please you; and you shall ask just
whomsoever you please.”

“All right,” said he: “the place wants waking up.”

“And then,” said the mother, wishing to be still more
gracious, “you might ask Miss Rosewarne to dine with us: she
might come well enough, although Mr. Roscorla is not here.”

A sort of gloom fell over the young man’s face again: “I
can’t ask her—you may if you like.”

Mrs. Trelyon stared: “What is the matter, Harry? Have you
and she quarreled? Why, I was going to ask you, if you were
down in the village to-day, to say that I should like to see
her.”

“And how could I take such a message?” the young man said,
rather warmly, “I don’t see why the girl should be ordered up
to see you as if you were conferring a favor on her by joining
in this scheme. She’s very hard-worked; you have got plenty of
time; you ought to call on her and study her convenience,
instead of making her trot all the way up here whenever you
want to talk to her.”

The pale and gentle woman flushed a little, but she was
anxious not to give way to petulance just then: “Well, you are
quite right, Harry: it was thoughtless of me. I should like to
go down and see her this morning; but I have sent Jakes over to
the blacksmith’s, and I am afraid of that new lad.”

“Oh, I will drive you down to the inn. I suppose among them
they can put the horses to the wagonette,” the young man said,
not very graciously: and then Mrs. Trelyon went off to get
ready.

It was a beautiful, fresh morning, the far-off line of the
sea still and blue, the sunlight lighting up the wonderful
masses of primroses along the tall banks, the air sweet with
the resinous odor of the gorse. Mrs. Trelyon looked with a
gentle and childlike pleasure on all these things, and was
fairly inclined to be very friendly with the young gentleman
beside her. But he was more than ordinarily silent and morose.
Mrs. Trelyon knew she had done nothing to offend him, and
thought it hard she should be punished for the sins of anybody
else.

He spoke scarcely a word to her as the carriage rolled along
the silent highways. He drove rapidly and carelessly down the
steep thoroughfare of Eglosilyan, although there were plenty of
loose stones about. Then he pulled sharply up in front of the
inn, and George Rosewarne appeared.

“Mr. Rosewarne, let me introduce you to my mother. She wants
to see Miss Wenna for a few moments, if she is not
engaged.”

Mr. Rosewarne took off his cap, assisted Mrs. Trelyon to
alight, and then showed her the way into the house.

“Won’t you come in, Harry?” his mother said.

“No.”

A man had come out to the horses’ heads.

“You leave ’em alone,” said the young gentleman: “I sha’n’t
get down.”

Mabyn came out, her bright young face full of pleasure.

“How do you do, Mabyn?” he said coldly, and without offering
to shake hands.

“Won’t you come in for a minute?” she said, rather
surprised.

“No, thank you. Don’t you stay out in the cold: you’ve got
nothing round your neck.”

Mabyn went away without saying a word, but thinking that the
coolness of the air was much less apparent than that of his
manner and speech.

Being at length left to himself, he turned his attention to
the horses before him, and eventually, to pass the time, took
out his pocket-handkerchief and began to polish the silver on
the handle of the whip. He was disturbed in this peaceful
occupation by a very timid voice, which said, “Mr. Trelyon.” He
[pg 99] turned round and found that
Wenna’s wistful face was looking up to him, with a look in
it partly of friendly gladness and partly of anxiety and
entreaty. “Mr. Trelyon,” she said, with her eyes cast down,
“I think you are offended with me. I am very sorry: I beg
your forgiveness.”

The reins were fastened up in a minute, and he was down in
the road beside her. “Now look here, Wenna,” he said. “What
could you mean by treating me so unfairly? I don’t mean in
being vexed with me, but in shunting me off, as it were,
instead of having it out at once. I don’t think it was
fair.”

“I am very sorry,” she said. “I think I was very wrong, but
you don’t know what a girl feels about such things. Will you
come into the inn?”

“And leave my horses? No,” he said, good-naturedly. “But as
soon as I get that fellow out, I will; so you go in at once,
and I’ll follow you directly. And mind, Wenna, don’t you be so
silly again, or you and I may have a real quarrel; and I know
that would break your heart.”

The old pleased smile lit up her face again as she turned
and went in-doors: he meanwhile proceeded to summon a hostler
by shouting his name at the pitch of his voice.

The small party of women assembled in the parlor were a
trifle embarrassed: it was the first time that the great lady
of the neighborhood had honored the inn with a visit. She
herself was merely quiet, gentle and pleased, but Mrs.
Rosewarne, with her fine eyes and her sensitive face all lit up
and quickened by, the novel excitement, was all anxiety to
amuse and interest and propitiate her distinguished guest.
Mabyn, too, was rather shy and embarrassed: she said things
hastily, and then seemed afraid of her interference. Wenna was
scarcely at her ease, because she saw that her mother and
sister were not; and she was very anxious, moreover, that these
two should think well of Mrs. Trelyon and be disposed to like
her.

The sudden appearance of a man with a man’s rough ways and
loud voice seemed to shake these feminine elements better
together, and to clear the air of timid apprehensions and
cautions. Harry Trelyon came into the room with quite a marked
freshness and good-nature on his face. His mother was
surprised: what had completely changed his manner in a couple
of minutes?

“How are you, Mrs. Rosewarne?” he cried in his off-hand
fashion. “You oughtn’t to be in-doors on such a morning, or we
shall never get you well, you know; and the doctor will be
sending you to Penzance or Devonport for a change. Well, Mabyn,
have you convinced anybody yet that your farm-laborers with
their twelve shillings a week are better off than the
slate-workers with their eighteen? You’d better take your
sister’s opinion on that point, and don’t squabble with me.
Mother, what’s the use of sitting here? You bring Miss Wenna
with you into the wagonette, and talk to her there about all
your business-affairs, and I’ll take you for a drive. Come
along. And of course I want somebody with me: will you come,
Mrs. Rosewarne, or will Mabyn? You can’t?—then Mabyn
must. Go along, Mabyn, and put your best hat on, and make
yourself uncommonly smart, and you shall be allowed to sit next
the driver—that’s me.”

And indeed he bundled the whole of them about until they
were seated in the wagonette just as he had indicated; and away
they went from the inn-door.

“And you think you are coming back in half an hour?” he said
to his companion, who was much pleased and very proud to occupy
such a place. “Oh no, you’re not. You’re a young and simple
thing, Mabyn. These two behind us will go on talking now for
any time about yards of calico and crochet-needles and twopenny
subscriptions, while you and I, don’t you see, are quietly
driving them over to Tintagel—”

“Oh, Mr. Trelyon!” said Mabyn.

“You keep quiet. That isn’t the half of what’s going to
befall you. I shall put up the horses at the inn, and I shall
take you all down to the beach for a scramble to improve your
appetite; and at the said inn you shall have luncheon with me,
if you’re all very good and
[pg 100] behave yourselves. Then we
shall drive back just when we particularly please. Do you
like the picture?”

“It is delightful: oh, I am sure Wenna will enjoy it,” Mabyn
said. “But don’t you think, Mr. Trelyon, that you might ask her
to sit here? One sees better here than sitting sideways in a
wagonette.”

“They have their business-affairs to settle.”

“Yes,” said Mabyn petulantly, “that is what every one says:
nobody expects Wenna ever to have a moment’s enjoyment to
herself. Oh, here is old Uncle Cornish—he’s a great
friend of Wenna’s: he will be dreadfully hurt if she passes him
without saying a word.”

“Then we shall pull up and address Uncle Cornish. I believe
he used to be the most thieving old ruffian of a poacher in
this county.”

There was a hale old man of seventy or so seated on a low
wall in front of one of the gardens, his face shaded from the
sunlight by a broad hat, his lean gray hands employed in
buckling up the leathern leggings that encased his spare
calves. He got up when the horses stopped, and looked in rather
a dazed fashion at the carriage.

“How do you do this morning, Mr. Cornish?” Wenna said.

“Why, now, to be sure!” the old man said, as if reproaching
his own imperfect vision. “‘Tis a fine marnin’, Miss Wenna, and
yü be agwoin’ for a drive.”

“And how is your daughter-in-law, Mr. Cornish? Has she sold
the pig yet?”

“Naw, she hasn’t sold the peg. If yü be agwoin’
thrü Trevalga, Miss Wenna, just yü stop and have a
look at that peg: yü’ll be ‘mazed to see en. ‘Tis many a
year agone sence there has been such a peg by me. And perhaps
yü’d take the laste bit o’ refrashment, Miss Wenna, as
yü go by: Jane would get yü a coop o’ tay to
once.”

“Thank you, Mr. Cornish, I’ll look in and see the pig some
other time: to-day we sha’n’t be going as far as Trevalga.”

“Oh, won’t you?” said Master Harry in a low voice as he
drove on. “You’ll be in Trevalga before you know where you
are.”

Which was literally the case. Wenna was so much engaged in
her talk with Mrs. Trelyon that she did not notice how far away
they were getting from Eglosilyan; but Mabyn and her companion
knew. They were now on the high uplands by the coast, driving
between the beautiful banks, which were starred with primroses
and stitchwort and red dead-nettle and a dozen other bright and
tender-hued firstlings of the year. The sun was warm on the
hedges and the fields, but a cool breeze blew about these lofty
heights, and stirred Mabyn’s splendid masses of hair as they
drove rapidly along. Far over on their right, beyond the
majestic wall of cliff, lay the great blue plain of the sea;
and there stood the bold brown masses of the Sisters Rocks,
with a circle of white foam round their base. As they looked
down into the south the white light was so fierce that they
could but faintly discern objects through it; but here and
there they caught a glimpse of a square church-tower or of a
few rude cottages clustered on the high plain, and these seemed
to be of a transparent gray in the blinding glare of the
sun.

Then suddenly in front of them they found a deep chasm, with
the white road leading down through its cool shadows. There was
the channel of a stream, with the rocks looking purple amid the
gray bushes; and here were rich meadows, with cattle standing
deep in the grass and the daisies; and over there, on the other
side, a strip of forest, with the sunlight shining along one
side of the tall and dark-green pines. As they drove down into
this place, which is called the Rocky Valley, a magpie rose
from one of the fields and flew up into the firs.

“That is sorrow,” said Mabyn.

Another one rose and flew up to the same spot.

“And that is joy,” she said, with her face brightening.

“Oh, but I saw another as we came to the brow of the hill,
and that means a marriage,” her companion remarked to
her.

[pg 101]

“Oh no,” she said quite eagerly, “I am sure there was no
third one: I am certain there were only two. I am quite
positive we only saw two.”

“But why should you be so anxious?” Trelyon said, “You know
you ought to be looking forward to a marriage, and that is
always a happy thing. Are you envious, Mabyn?”

The girl was silent for a moment or two. Then she said, with
a sudden bitterness in her tone, “Isn’t it a fearful thing to
have to be civil to people whom you hate? Isn’t it, when they
come and establish a claim on you through some one you care
for? You look at them—yes, you can look at them—and
you’ve got to see them kiss some one that you love; and you
wonder she doesn’t rush away for a bit of caustic and cauterize
the place, as you do when a mad dog bites you.”

“Mabyn,” said the young man beside her, “you are a most
unchristian sort of person this morning. Who is it you hate in
such a fashion? Will you take the reins while I walk up the
hill?”

Mabyn’s little burst of passion still burned in her cheeks
and gave a proud and angry look to her mouth, but she took the
reins all the same, and her companion leapt to the ground. The
banks on each side of the road going up this hill were tall and
steep: here and there great masses of wild flowers were
scattered among the grass and the gorse. From time to time he
stopped to pick up a handful, until, when they had got up to
the high and level country again, he had brought together a
very pretty bouquet of wild blossoms. When he got into his seat
and took the reins again he carelessly gave the bouquet to
Mabyn.

“Oh, how pretty!” she said; and then she turned round:
“Wenna, are you very much engaged? Look at the pretty bouquet
Mr. Trelyon has gathered for you.”

Wenna’s quiet face flushed with pleasure when she took the
flowers, and Mrs. Trelyon looked pleased and said they were
very pretty. She evidently thought that her son was greatly
improved in his manners when he condescended to gather flowers
to present to a girl. Nay, was he not at this moment devoting a
whole forenoon of his precious time to the unaccustomed task of
taking ladies for a drive? Mrs. Trelyon regarded Wenna with a
friendly look, and began to take a greater liking than ever to
that sensitive and expressive face and to the quiet and earnest
eyes.

“But, Mr. Trelyon,” said Wenna, looking round, “hadn’t we
better turn? We shall be at Trevenna directly.”

“Yes, you are quite right,” said Master Harry: “you will be
at Trevenna directly, and you are likely to be there for some
time. For Mabyn and I have resolved to have luncheon there, and
we are going down to Tintagel, and we shall most likely climb
to King Arthur’s Castle. Have you any objections?”

Wenna had none. The drive through the cool and bright day
had braced up her spirits. She was glad to know that everything
looked promising about this scheme of hers. So she willingly
surrendered herself to the holiday, and in due time they drove
into the odd and remote little village and pulled up in front
of the inn.

So soon as the hostler had come to the horses’ heads the
young gentleman who had been driving jumped down and assisted
his three companions to alight: then he led the way into the
inn. In the doorway stood a stranger, probably a commercial
traveler, who, with his hands in his pockets, his legs apart
and a cigar in his mouth, had been visiting those three ladies
with a very hearty stare as they got out of the carriage.
Moreover, when they came to the doorway he did not budge an
inch nor did he take his cigar from his mouth; and so, as it
had never been Mr. Trelyon’s fashion to sidle past any one,
that young gentleman made straight for the middle of the
passage, keeping his shoulders very square. The consequence was
a collision. The imperturbable person with his hands in his
pockets was sent staggering against the wall, while his cigar
dropped on the stone. “What the devil—!” he was beginning
to say, when Trelyon got the three women past him and into the
small parlor. Then he went back: “Did you
[pg 102] wish to speak to me, sir?
No, you didn’t: I perceive you are a prudent person. Next
time ladies pass you, you’d better take your cigar out of
your mouth or somebody’ll destroy that two-pennyworth of
tobacco for you. Good-morning.”

Then he returned to the little parlor, to which a waitress
had been summoned: “Now, Jinny, pull yourself together and
let’s have something nice for luncheon—in an hour’s time,
sharp. You will, won’t you? And how about that Sillery with the
blue star—not the stuff with the gold head that some
abandoned ruffian in Plymouth brews in his back garden. Well,
can’t you speak?”

“Yes, sir,” said the bewildered maid.

“That’s a good thing—a very good thing,” said he,
putting the shawls together on a sofa. “Don’t you forget how to
speak until you get married. And don’t let anybody come into
this room. And you can let my man have his dinner and a pint of
beer. Oh, I forgot: I’m my own man this morning, so you needn’t
go asking for him. Now, will you remember all these
things?”

“Yes, sir; but what would you like for luncheon?”

“My good girl, we should like a thousand things such as
Tintagel never saw, but what you’ve got to do is to give us the
nicest things you’ve got: do you see? I leave it entirely in
your hands. Come along, young people.”

And so he bundled his charges out again into the main street
of the village; and somehow it happened that Mabyn addressed a
timid remark to Mrs. Trelyon, and that Mrs. Trelyon, in
answering it, stopped for a moment; so that Master Harry was
sent to Wenna’s side, and these two led the way down the wide
thoroughfare. There were few people visible in the
old-fashioned place: here and there an aged crone came out to
the door of one of the rude stone cottages to look at the
strangers. Overhead the sky was veiled over with a thin fleece
of white cloud, but the light was intense for all that, and
indeed the colors of the objects around seemed all the more
clear and marked.

“Well, Miss Wenna,” said the young man gayly, “how long are
we to remain good friends? What is the next fault you will have
to find with me? Or have you discovered something wrong
already?”

“Oh no,” she said with a quiet smile, “I am very good
friends with you this morning. You have pleased your mother
very much by bringing her for this drive.”

“Oh, nonsense!” he said. “She might have as many drives as
she chose; but presently you’ll find a lot of those parsons
back at the house, and she’ll take to her white gowns again,
and the playing of the organ all the day long, and all that
sham stuff. I tell you what it is: she never seems alive, she
never seems to take any interest in anything, unless you’re
with her. Now, you will see how the novelty of this
luncheon-party in an inn will amuse her; but do you think she
would care for it if she and I were here alone?”

“Perhaps you never tried?” Miss Wenna said gently.

“Perhaps I knew she wouldn’t come. However, don’t let’s have
a fight, Wenna: I mean to be very civil to you to-day—I
do, really.”

“I am so much obliged to you,” she said meekly. “But pray
don’t give yourself unnecessary trouble.”

“Oh,” said he, “I’d always be civil to you if you would
treat me decently. But you say far more rude things than I
do—in that soft way, you know, that looks as if it were
all silk and honey. I do think you’ve awfully little
consideration for human failings. If one goes wrong in the
least thing, even in one’s spelling, you say something that
sounds as pleasant as possible, and all the same it transfixes
one just as you stick a pin through a beetle. You are very
hard, you are—mean with those who would like to be
friends with you. When it’s mere strangers and cottagers and
people of that sort, who don’t care a brass farthing about you,
then I believe you’re all gentleness and kindness; but to your
real friends the edge of a saw is smooth compared to you.”

“Am I so very harsh to my friends?” the young lady said in a
resigned way.

[pg 103]

“Oh, well,” he said, with some compunction, “I don’t quite
say that, but you could be much more pleasant if you liked, and
a little more charitable to their faults. You know there are
some who would give a great deal to win your approval; and
perhaps when you find fault they are so disappointed that they
think your words are sharper than you mean; and sometimes they
think you might give them credit for trying to please you, at
least.”

“And who are these persons?” Wenna said, with another smile
stealing over her face.

“Oh,” said he rather shamefacedly, “there’s no need to
explain anything to you: you always see it before one need put
it in words.”

Well, perhaps it was in his manner or in the tone of his
voice that there was something which seemed at this moment to
touch her deeply, for she half turned and looked up at his face
with her honest and earnest eyes, and said to him kindly, “Yes,
I do know without you telling me; and it makes me happy to hear
you talk so; and if I am unjust to you, you must not think it
intentional. And I shall try not to be so in the future.”

Mrs. Trelyon was regarding with a kindly look the two young
people walking on in front of her. Whatever pleased her son
pleased her, and she was glad to see him enjoy himself in so
light-hearted a fashion. These two were chatting to each other
in the friendliest manner: sometimes they stopped to pick up
wild flowers: they were as two children together under the fair
and light summer skies.

They went down and along a narrow valley, until they
suddenly stood in front of the sea, the green waters of which
were breaking in upon a small and lonely creek. What strange
light was this that fell from the white skies above, rendering
all the objects around them sharp its outline and intense in
color? The beach before them seemed of a pale lilac, where the
green waves broke in a semicircle of white. On their right some
masses of ruddy rock jutted out into the cold sea, and there
were huge black caverns into which the waves dashed and roared.
On their left and far above them towered a great and isolated
rock, its precipitous sides scored here and there with twisted
lines of red and yellow quartz; and on the summit of this bold
headland, amid the dark green of the sea-grass, they could see
the dusky ruins—the crumbling walls and doorways and
battlements—of the castle that is named in all the
stories of King Arthur and his knights. The bridge across to
the mainland has, in the course of centuries, fallen away, but
there, on the other side of the wide chasm, were the ruins of
the other portions of the castle, scarcely to be distinguished
in parts from the grass-grown rocks. How long ago was it since
Sir Tristram rode out here to the end of the world, to find the
beautiful Isoulde awaiting him—she whom he had brought
from Ireland as an unwilling bride to the old king Mark? And
what of the joyous company of knights and ladies who once held
high sport in the courtyard there? Trelyon, looking shyly at
his companion, could see that her eyes seemed centuries away
from him. She was quite unconscious of his covertly staring at
her, for she was absently looking at the high and bare
precipices, the deserted slopes of dark sea-grass and the
lonely and crumbling ruins. She was wondering whether the
ghosts of those vanished people ever came back to this lonely
headland, where they would find the world scarcely altered
since they had left it. Did they come at night, when the land
was dark, and when there was a light over the sea only coming
from the stars? If one were to come at night alone, and to sit
down here by the shore, might not one see strange things far
overhead or hear some sound other than the falling of the
waves?

“Miss Wenna,” he said—and she started
suddenly—”are you bold enough to climb with me up to the
castle? I know my mother would rather stay here.”

She went with him mechanically. She followed him up the rude
steps cut in the steep slopes of slate, holding his hand where
that was possible, but her head was so full of dreams that she
answered [pg 104] him when he spoke only with
a vague yes or no. When they descended again they found that
Mabyn had taken Mrs. Trelyon down to the beach, and had
inveigled her into entering a huge cavern, or rather a
natural tunnel, that went right through underneath the
promontory on which the castle is built. They were in a sort
of green-hued twilight, a scent of seaweed filling the damp
air, and their voices raising an echo in the great hall of
rock.

“I hope the climbing has not made you giddy,” Mrs. Trelyon
said in her kind way to Wenna, noticing that she was very
silent and distrait.

“Oh no,” Mabyn said promptly. “She has been seeing ghosts.
We always know when Wenna has been seeing ghosts: she remains
so for hours.”

And, indeed, at this time she was rather more reserved than
usual all during their walk back to luncheon and while they
were in the inn; and yet she was obviously very happy, and
sometimes even amused by the childlike pleasure which Mrs.
Trelyon seemed to obtain from these unwonted experiences.

“Come, now, mother,” Master Harry said, “what are you going
to do for me when I come of age next month? Fill the house with
guests—yes, you promised that—with not more than
one parson to the dozen? And when they’re all feasting and
gabbling, and missing the targets with their arrows, you’ll
slip quietly away, and I’ll drive you and Miss Wenna over here,
and you’ll go and get your feet wet again in that cavern, and
you’ll come up here again and have an elegant luncheon, just
like this. Won’t that do?”

“I don’t quite know about the elegance of the luncheon, but
I’m sure our little excursion has been very pleasant. Don’t you
think so, Miss Rosewarne?” Mrs. Trelyon said.

“Indeed I do,” said Wenna, with her big, earnest eyes coming
back from their trance.

“And here is another thing,” remarked young Trelyon.
“There’s a picture I’ve seen of the heir coming of
age—he’s a horrid, self-sufficient young cad, but never
mind—and it seems to be a day of general jollification.
Can’t I give a present to somebody? Well, I’m going to give it
to a young lady who never cares for anything but what she can
give away again to somebody else; and it is—well, it
is—Why don’t you guess, Mabyn?”

“I don’t know what you mean to give Wenna,” said Mabyn
naturally.

“Why, you silly! I mean to give her a dozen
sewing-machines—a baker’s dozen—thirteen. There!
Oh, I heard you as you came along. It was all, ‘Three
sewing-machines will cost so much, and four sewing-machines
will cost so much, and five sewing-machines will cost so much.
And a penny a week from so many subscribers will be so much,
and twopence a week from so many will be so much;’ and all this
as if my mother could tell you how much twice two was. My
arithmetic ain’t very brilliant, but as for hers—And
these you shall have, Miss Wenna—one baker’s dozen of
sewing-machines, as per order, duly delivered, carriage
free—empty casks and bottles to be returned.”

“That is very kind of you, Mr. Trelyon,” Wenna
said—and all the dreams had gone straight out of her head
so soon as this was mentioned—”but we can’t possibly
accept them. You know our scheme is to make the sewing club
quite self-supporting—no charity.”

“Oh, what stuff!” the young gentleman cried. “You know you
will give all your labor and supervision for nothing: isn’t
that charity? And you know you will let off all sorts of people
owing you subscriptions the moment some blessed baby falls ill.
And you know you won’t charge interest on all the outlay. But
if you insist on paying me back for my sewing-machines out of
the overwhelming profits at the end of next year, then I’ll
take the money. I’m not proud.”

“Then we will take six sewing-machines from you, if you
please, Mr. Trelyon, on those conditions,” said Wenna gravely.
And Master Harry—with a look toward Mabyn which was just
about as good as a wink—consented.

As they drove quietly back again to Eglosilyan, Mabyn had
taken her former [pg 105] place by the driver, and
found him uncommonly thoughtful. He answered her questions,
but that was all; and it was so unusual to find Harry
Trelyon in this mood that she said to him, “Mr. Trelyon,
have you been seeing ghosts, too?”

He turned to her and said, “I was thinking about something.
Look here, Mabyn: did you ever know any one, or do you know any
one, whose face is a sort of barometer to you? Suppose that you
see her look pale and tired or sad in any way, then down go
your spirits, and you almost wish you had never been born. When
you see her face brighten up and get full of healthy color, you
feel glad enough to burst out singing or go mad: anyhow, you
know that everything’s all right. What the weather is, what
people may say about you, whatever else may happen to you,
that’s nothing: all you want to see is just that one person’s
face look perfectly bright and perfectly happy, and nothing can
touch you then. Did you ever know anybody like that?” he added
rather abruptly.

“Oh yes,” said Mabyn, in a low voice: “that is when you are
in love with some one. And there is only one face in all the
world that I look to for all these things, there is only one
person I know who tells you openly and simply in her face all
that affects her, and that is our Wenna. I suppose you have
noticed that, Mr. Trelyon?”

But he did not make any answer.

CHAPTER XXI.

CONFESSION.

The lad lay dreaming in the warm meadows by the side of a
small and rapid brook, the clear waters of which plashed and
bubbled in the sunlight as they hurried past the brown stones.
His fishing-rod lay beside him, hidden in the long grass and
the daisies. The sun was hot in the valley—shining on a
wall of gray rock behind him, and throwing purple shadows over
the clefts; shining on the dark bushes beside the stream and on
the lush green of the meadows; shining on the trees beyond, in
the shadow of which some dark red cattle were standing. Then
away on the other side of the valley rose gently-sloping woods,
gray and green in the haze of the heat, and over these again
was the pale blue sky with scarcely a cloud in it. It was a hot
day to be found in spring-time, but the waters of the brook
seemed cool and pleasant as they gurgled by, and occasionally a
breath of wind blew over from the woods. For the rest, he lay
so still on this fine, indolent, dreamy morning that the birds
around seemed to take no note of his presence, and one of the
large woodpeckers, with his scarlet head and green body
brilliant in the sun, flew close by him and disappeared into
the bushes opposite like a sudden gleam of color shot by a
diamond.

“Next month,” he was thinking to himself as he lay with his
hands behind his head, not caring to shade his handsome and
well-tanned face from the warm sun—”next month I shall be
twenty-one, and most folks will consider me a man. Anyhow, I
don’t know the man whom I wouldn’t fight or run or ride or
shoot against for any wager he liked. But of all the people who
know anything about me, just that one whose opinion I care for
will not consider me a man at all, but only a boy. And that
without saying anything. You can tell, somehow, by a mere look,
what her feelings are; and you know that what she thinks is
true. Of course it’s true—I am only a boy. What’s the
good of me to anybody? I could look after a farm—that is,
I could look after other people doing their work—but I
couldn’t do any work myself. And that seems to me what she is
always looking at: ‘What’s the good of you, what are you doing,
what are you busy about?’ It’s all very well for her to be
busy, for she can do a hundred thousand things, and she is
always at them. What can I do?”

Then his wandering day-dreamings took another turn: “It was
an odd thing for Mabyn to say—’That is when you are in
love with some one.’ But those girls take everything for
love. They don’t know how you can admire, almost
[pg 106] to worshiping, the goodness
of a woman, and how you are anxious that she should be well
and happy, and how you would do anything in the world to
please her, without fancying straight away that you are in
love with her, and want to marry her and drive about in the
same carriage with her. I shall be quite as fond of Wenna
Rosewarne when she is married, although I shall hate that
little brute with his rum and his treacle. The cheek of him,
in asking her to marry him, is astonishing. He is the most
hideous little beast that could have been picked out to
marry any woman, but I suppose he has appealed to her
compassion, and then she’ll do anything. But if there was
anybody else in love with her, if she cared the least bit
about anybody else, wouldn’t I go straight to her and insist
on her shunting that fellow aside? What claim has he on any
other feeling of hers but her compassion? Why, if that
fellow were to come and try to frighten her, and if I were
in the affair, and if she appealed to me even by a look,
then there would be short work with something or
somebody.”

He got up hastily, with something of a gloomy and angry look
on his face. He did not notice that he had startled all the
birds around from out of the bushes. He picked up his rod and
line in a morose fashion, not seeming to care about adding to
the half dozen small and red-speckled trout he had in his
basket.

While he was thus irresolutely standing he caught sight of a
girl’s figure coming rapidly along the valley under the shadow
of some ash trees growing by the stream. It was Wenna Rosewarne
herself, and she seemed to be hurrying toward him. She was
carrying some black object in her arms.

“Oh, Mr. Trelyon,” she said, “what am I to do with this
little dog? I saw him kicking in the road and foaming at the
mouth; and then he got up and ran, and I caught him—”

Before she had time to say anything more the young man made
a sudden dive at the dog, caught hold of him and turned and
heaved him into the stream. He fell into a little pool of clear
brown water: he spluttered and paddled there for a second, then
he got his footing and scrambled across the stones up to the
opposite bank, where he began shaking the water from his coat
among the long grass.

“Oh, how could you be so disgracefully cruel?” she said,
with her face full of indignation.

“And how could you be so imprudent?”‘ he said quite as
vehemently. “Why, whose is the dog?”

“I don’t know.”

“And you catch up some mongrel little cur in the middle of
the highway—He might have been mad.”

“I knew he wasn’t mad,” she said: “it was only a fit; and
how could you be so cruel as to throw him into the river?”

“Oh,” said the young man, coolly, “a clash of cold water is
the best thing for a dog that has a fit. Besides, I don’t care
what he had or what I did with him, so long as you are safe.
Your little finger is of more consequence than the necks of all
the curs in the country.”

“Oh, it is mean of you to say that,” she retorted warmly.
“You have no pity for those wretched little things that are at
every one’s mercy. If it were a handsome and beautiful dog,
now, you would care for that, or if it were a dog that was
skilled in getting game for you, you would care for that.”

“Yes, certainly,” he said: “these are dogs that have
something to recommend them.”

“Yes, and every one is good to them: they are not in need of
your favor. But you don’t think of the wretched little brutes
that have nothing to recommend them, that only live on
sufferance, that every one kicks and despises and starves.”

“Well,” said he with some compunction, “look there! That new
friend of yours—he’s no great beauty, you must
confess—is all right now. The bath has cured him. As soon
as he’s done licking his paws he’ll be off home, wherever that
may be. But I’ve always noticed that about you, Wenna: you’re
always on the side of things that are ugly and
[pg 107] helpless and useless in the
world; and you’re not very just to those who don’t agree
with you. For after all, you know, one wants time to acquire
that notion of yours—that it is only weak and
ill-favored creatures that are worthy of the least
consideration.”

“Yes,” she said rather sadly, “you want time to learn
that.”

He looked at her. Did she mean that her sympathy with those
who were weak and ill-favored arose from some strange
consciousness that she herself was both? His cheeks began to
burn red. He had often heard her hint something like that, and
yet he had never dared to reason with her or show her what he
thought of her. Should he do so now?

“Wenna,” he said, blushing hotly, “I can’t make you out
sometimes. You speak as if no one cared for you. Now, if I were
to tell you—”

“Oh, I am not so ungrateful,” she said hastily. “I know that
two or three do; and—and, Mr. Trelyon, do you think you
could coax that little dog over the stream again? You see he
has come back again—he can’t find his way home.”

Mr. Trelyon called to the dog: it came down to the river’s
side, and whined and shivered on the brink.

“Do you care a brass farthing about the little beast?” he
said to Wenna.

“I must put him on his way home,” she answered.

Thereupon the young man went straight through the stream to
the other side, jumping the deeper portions of the channel: he
caught up the dog and brought it back to her; and when she was
very angry with him for this mad performance, he merely kicked
some of the water out of his trousers and laughed.

Then a smile broke over her face also. “Is that an example
of what people would do for me?” she said shyly. “Mr. Trelyon,
you must keep walking through the warm grass till your feet are
dry; or will you come along to the inn, and I shall get you
some shoes and stockings? Pray do, and at once. I am rather in
a hurry.”

“I’ll go along with you, anyway,” he said, “and put this
little brute into the highway. But why are you in a hurry?”

“Because,” said Wenna, as they set out to walk down the
valley—”because my mother and I are going to Penzance the
day after to-morrow, and I have a lot of things to get
ready.”

“To Penzance?” said he with a sudden falling of the
face.

“Yes. She has been dreadfully out of sorts lately, and she
has sunk into a kind of despondent state. The doctor says she
must have a change—a holiday, really—to take her
away from the cares of the house—”

“Why, Wenna, it’s you who want the holiday—it’s you
who have the cares of the house,” Trelyon said warmly.

“And so I have persuaded her to go to Penzance for a week or
two, and I go with her to look after her. Mr. Trelyon, would
you be kind enough to keep Rock for me until we come back? I am
afraid of the servants neglecting him.”

“You needn’t be afraid of that: he’s not one of the
ill-favored—every one will attend to him,” said Trelyon;
and then he added, after a minute or two of silence, “The fact
is, I think I shall be at Penzance also while you are there. My
cousin Juliott is coming here in about a fortnight to celebrate
the important event of my coming of age, and I promised to go
for her. I might as well go now.”

She said nothing.

“I might as well go any time,” he said rather impatiently.
“I haven’t got anything to do. Do you know, before you came
along just now, I was thinking what a very useful person you
were in the world, and what a very useless person I
was—about as useless as this little cur. I think somebody
should take me up and heave me into a river. And I was
wondering, too”—here he became a little more embarrassed
and slow of speech—”I was wondering what you would say
if I spoke to you, and gave you a hint that
sometimes—that sometimes one might wish to cut this lazy
life if one only knew how, and whether so very busy a person as
yourself mightn’t—don’t you see?—give one some
notion—some sort of hint, in fact—”

“Oh, but then, Mr. Trelyon,” she said quite cheerfully, “you
would think it very [pg 108] strange if I asked you to
take any interest in the things that keep me busy. That is
not a man’s work. I wouldn’t accept you as a pupil.”

He burst out laughing. “Why,” said he, “do you think I
offered to mend stockings and set sums on slates and coddle
babies?”

“As for setting sums on slates,” she remarked with a quiet
impertinence, “the working of them out might be of use to
you.”

“Yes, and a serious trouble too,” he said candidly. “No,
no—that cottage business ain’t in my line. I like to have
a joke with the old folks or a romp with the kids, but I can’t
go in for cutting out pinafores. I shall leave my mother to do
my share of that for me; and hasn’t she come out strong lately,
eh? It’s quite a new amusement for her, and it’s driven a deal
of that organ-grinding and stuff out of her head; and I’ve a
notion some o’ those parsons—”

He stopped short, remembering who his companion was; and at
this moment they came to a gate which opened out on the
highway, through which the small cur was passed to find his way
home.

“Now, Miss Wenna,” said the young man—”By the way, you
see how I remember to address you respectfully ever since you
got sulky with me about it the other day?”

“I am sure I did not get sulky with you, and especially
about that,” she remarked with much composure. “I suppose you
are not aware that you have dropped the ‘Miss’ several times
this morning already?”

“Did I, really? Well, then, I’m awfully sorry; but then you
are so good-natured you tempt one to forget; and my mother she
always calls you Wenna Rosewarne now in speaking to me, as if
you were a little school-girl, instead of being the chief
support and pillar of all the public affairs of Eglosilyan. And
now, Miss Wenna, I sha’n’t go down the road with you, because
my damp boots and garments would gather the dust; but perhaps
you wouldn’t mind stopping two seconds here, and I’m going to
go a cracker and ask you a question: What should a fellow in my
position try to do? You see, I haven’t had the least training
for any one of the professions, even if I had any sort of
capacity—”

“But why should you wish to have a profession?” she said
simply. “You have more money than is good for you already.”

“Then you don’t think it ignominious,” he said, with his
face lighting up considerably, “to fish in summer and shoot in
autumn and hunt in winter, and make that the only business of
one’s life?”

“I should if it were the only business, but it needn’t be,
and you don’t make it so. My father speaks very highly of the
way you look after your property; and he knows what attending
to an estate is. And then you have so many opportunities of
being kind and useful to the people about you that you might do
more good that way than by working night and day at a
profession. Then you owe much to yourself, because if every one
began with himself, and educated himself, and became satisfied
and happy with doing his best, there would be no bad conduct
and wretchedness to call for interference. I don’t see why you
should be ashamed of shooting and hunting and all that, and
doing them as well as anybody else, or far better, as I hear
people say. I don’t think a man is bound to have ambition and
try to become famous: you might be of much greater use in the
world, even in such a little place as Eglosilyan, than if you
were in Parliament. I did say to Mrs. Trelyon that I should
like to see you in Parliament, because one has a natural pride
in any person one admires and likes very much, and one
wishes—”

He saw the quick look of fear that sprang to her
eyes—not a sudden appearance of shy embarrassment, but of
absolute fear—and he was almost as startled by her
blunder as she herself was. He hastily came to her rescue. He
thanked her in a few rapid and formal words for her patience
and advice; and, as he saw she was trying to turn away and hide
the mortification visible on her face, he shook hands with her
and let her go.

[pg 109]

Then he turned. He had been startled, it is true, and
grieved to see the pain her chance words had caused her. But
now a great glow of delight rose up within him, and he could
have called aloud to the blue skies and the silent woods
because of the joy that filled his heart. They were but chance
words, of course. They were uttered with no deliberate
intention: on the contrary, her quick look of pain showed how
bitterly she regretted the blunder. Moreover, he congratulated
himself on his rapid piece of acting, and assured himself that
she would believe that he had not noticed that admission of
hers. They were idle words: she would forget them. The
incident, so far as she was concerned, was gone.

But not so far as he was concerned. For now he knew that the
person whom, above all other persons in the world, he was most
desirous to please, whose respect and esteem he was most
anxious to obtain, had not only condoned much of his idleness
out of the abundant charity of her heart, but had further, and
by chance, revealed to him that she gave him some little share
of that affection which she seemed to shed generously and
indiscriminately on so many folks and things around her. He,
too, was now in the charmed circle. He walked with a new pride
through the warm, green meadows, his rod over his shoulder: he
whistled as he went, or he sang snatches of “The Rose of
Allandale.” He met two small boys out bird’s-nesting: he gave
them a shilling apiece, and then inconsistently informed them
that if he caught them then or at any other time with a bird’s
nest in their hands he would cuff their ears. Then he walked
hastily home, put by his fishing-rod, and shut himself up in
his study with half a dozen of those learned volumes which he
had brought back unsoiled from school.

CHAPTER XXII.

ON WINGS OF HOPE.

When Trelyon arrived late one evening at Penzance he was
surprised to find his uncle’s coachman awaiting him at the
station: “What’s the matter, Tobias? Is the old gentleman going
to die? You don’t mean to say you are here for me?”

“Yaäs, zor, I be,” said the little old man with no
great courtesy.

“Then he is going to die if he sends out his horse at this
time o’ night. Look here, Tobias: I’ll put my portmanteau
inside and come on the box to have a talk with you—you’re
such a jolly old card, you know—and you’ll tell me all
that’s happened since I last enjoyed my uncle’s bountiful
hospitality.”

This the young man did: and then the brown-faced, wiry and
surly little person, having started his horse, proceeded to
tell his story in a series of grumbling and disconnected
sentences. He was not nearly so taciturn as he looked: “The
maäster he went sün to bed to-night: ’twere Miss
Juliott sent me to the station, without tellin’ en. He’s
gettin’ worse and worse, that’s sure: if yü be for giving
me half a crown, like, or any one that comes to the house, he
finds it out and stops it out o’ my wages: yes, he does, zor,
the old fule!”

“Tobias, be a little more respectful to my uncle, if you
please.”

“Why, zor, yü knaw en well enough,” said the man in the
same surly fashion. “And I’ll tell yü this, Maäster
Harry, if yü be after dinner with en, and he has a bottle
o’ poort wine that he puts on the mantelpiece, and he says to
yü to let that aloän, vor ’tis a medicine-zart o’
wine, don’t yü heed en, but have that wine. ‘Tis the real
old poort wine, zor, that yür vather gied en—the
dahmned old pagan!”

The young man burst out laughing, instead of reprimanding
Tobias, who maintained his sulky impassiveness of face.

“Why, zor, I be gardener now, too: yaäs I be, to save
the wages. And he’s gone clean mazed about that
garden—yaäs, I think. Would yü believe this,
Maäster Harry, that he killed every one o’ the blessed
strawberries last year with a lot o’ wrack from the bache,
because he said it wüd be as good for them as for the
‘sparagus?”

[pg 110]

“Well, but the old chap finds amusement in pottering about
the garden—” said Master Harry.

“The old fule!” repeated Tobias, in an under tone.

“And the theory is sound about the seaweed and the
strawberries; just as his old notion of getting a green rose by
pouring sulphate of copper in at the roots.”

“Yaäs, that were another pretty thing, Maäster
Harry, and he had the tin labels all printed out in French, and
he waited and waited, and there bain’t a fairly güde rose
left in the garden. And his violet glass for the cucumbers: he
burned en up to once, although ’twere fine to hear’n talk about
the sunlight and the rays and such nonsenses. He be a strange
mahn, zor, and a dahmned close’n with his penny-pieces,
Christian and all as he calls his-sen. There’s Miss Juliott,
zor, she’s go-in’ to get married, I suppose; and when she goes
no one ‘ll dare spake to ‘n. Be yü going to stop long this
time, Maäster Harry?”

“Not at the Hollies, Tobias. I shall go down to the Queen’s
to-morrow: I’ve got rooms there.”

“So much the better—so much the better,” said the
frank but inhospitable retainer; and presently the jogtrot old
animal between the shafts was pulled up in front of a certain
square old-fashioned building of gray stone which was prettily
surrounded with trees. They had arrived at the Rev. Mr.
Penaluna’s house, and there was a young lady standing in the
light of the hall, she having opened the door very softly as
she heard the carriage drive up.

“So here you are, Harry; and you’ll stay with us the whole
fortnight, won’t you? Come in to the dining-room—I have
some supper ready for you. Papa’s gone to bed, and he desired
me to give you his excuses, and he hopes you’ll make yourself
quite at home, as you always do, Harry.”

He did make himself quite at home, for, having kissed his
cousin and flung his topcoat down in the hall, he went into the
dining-room and took possession of an easy-chair.

“Sha’n’t have any supper, Jue, thank you. You won’t mind my
lighting a cigar—somebody’s been smoking here already.
And what’s the least poisonous claret you’ve got?”

“Well, I declare!” she said, but she got him the wine all
the same, and watched him light his cigar: then she took the
easy-chair opposite.

“Tell us about your young man, Jue,” he said. “Girls always
like to talk about that.”

“Do they?” she said. “Not to boys.”

“I shall be twenty-one in a fortnight. I am thinking of
getting married.”

“So I hear,” she remarked quietly.

Now he had been talking nonsense at random, mostly intent on
getting his cigar well lit, but this little observation rather
startled him. “What have you heard?” he said abruptly.

“Oh, nothing—the ordinary stupid gossip,” she said,
though she was watching him rather closely. “Are you going to
stay with us for the next fortnight?”

“No, I have got rooms at the Queen’s.”

“I thought so. One might have expected you, however, to stay
with your relations when you came to Penzance.”

“Oh, that’s all gammon, Jue,” he said: “you know very well
your father doesn’t care to have any one stay with
you—it’s too much bother. You’ll have quite enough of me
while I am in Penzance.”

“Shall we have anything of you?” she said with apparent
indifference. “I understood that Miss Rosewarne and her mamma
had already come here.”

“And what if they have?” he said with unnecessary
fierceness.

“Well, Harry,” she said, “you needn’t get unto a temper
about it, but people will talk, you know; and they say that
your attentions to that young lady are rather marked,
considering that she is engaged to be married; and you have
induced your mother to make a pet of her. Shall I go on?”

“No, you needn’t,” he said with a strong effort to overcome
his anger. “You’re quite right—people do talk, but they
wouldn’t talk so much if other people didn’t carry tales. Why,
it isn’t like you, Jue! I thought you were another
[pg 111] sort. And about this girl,
of all girls in the world!”

He got up and began walking about the room, and talking with
considerable vehemence, but no more in anger. He would tell her
what cause there was for this silly gossip. He would tell her
who this girl was who had been lightly mentioned. And in his
blunt, frank, matter-of-fact way, which did not quite conceal
his emotion, he revealed to his cousin all that he thought of
Wenna Rosewarne, and what he hoped for her in the future, and
what their present relations were, and then plainly asked her
if she could condemn him.

Miss Juliott was touched: “Sit down, Harry: I have wanted to
talk to you, and I don’t mean to heed any gossip. Sit down,
please—you frighten me by walking up and down like that.
Now, I’m going to talk common sense to you, for I should like
to be your friend; and your mother is so easily led away by any
sort of sentiment that she isn’t likely to have seen with my
eyes. Suppose that this Miss Rosewarne—”

“No, hold hard a bit, Jue,” he said imperatively. “You may
talk till the millennium, but just keep off her, I warn
you.”

“Will you hear me out, you silly boy? Suppose that Miss
Rosewarne is everything that you believe her to be. I’m going
to grant that, because I’m going to ask you a question. You
can’t have such an opinion of any girl, and be constantly in
her society, and go following her about like this, without
falling in love with her. Now, in that case would you propose
to marry her?”

“I marry her!” he said, his face becoming suddenly pale for
a moment. “Jue, you are mad! I am not fit to marry a girl like
that. You don’t know her. Why—”

“Let all that alone, Harry: when a man is in love with a
woman he always thinks he’s good enough for her; and whether he
does or not he tries to get her for a wife. Don’t let us
discuss your comparative merits: one might even put in a word
for you. But suppose you drifted into being in love with
her—and I consider that quite probable—and suppose
you forgot, as I know you would forget, the difference in your
social position, how would you like to go and ask her to break
her promise to the gentleman to whom she is engaged?”

Master Harry laughed aloud in a somewhat nervous fashion:
“Him? Look here, Jue: leave me out of it—I haven’t the
cheek to talk of myself in that connection—but if there
was a decent sort of fellow whom that girl really took a liking
to, do you think he would let that elderly and elegant swell
out in Jamaica stand in his way? He would be no such fool, I
can tell you. He would consider the girl first of all. He would
say to himself, ‘I mean to make this girl happy; if any one
interferes, let him look out!’ Why, Jue, you don’t suppose any
man would be frightened by that sort of thing?”

Miss Juliott did not seem quite convinced by this burst of
scornful oratory. She continued quietly, “You forget something,
Harry. Your heroic young man might find it easy to do something
wild—to fight with that gentleman in the West Indies, or
murder him, or anything like that, just as you see in a
story—but perhaps Miss Rosewarne might have something to
say.”

“I meant if she cared for him,” Trelyon said, looking
down.

“Granting that also, do you think it likely your hot-headed
gentleman would be able to get a young lady to disgrace herself
by breaking her plighted word and deceiving a man who went away
trusting in her? You say she has a very tender
conscience—that she is so anxious to consult every one’s
happiness before her own, and all that. Probably it is true. I
say nothing against her. But to bring the matter back to
yourself—for I believe you’re hot-headed enough to do
anything—what would you think of her if you or anybody
else persuaded her to do such a treacherous thing?”

“She is not capable of treachery,” he said somewhat stiffly.
“If you’ve got no more cheerful things to talk about, you’d
better go to bed, Jue. I shall finish my cigar by
myself.”

[pg 112]

“Very well, then, Harry. You know your room. Will you put
out the lamp when you have lit your candle?”

So she went, and the young man was left alone in no very
enviable frame of mind. He sat and smoked while the clock on
the mantelpiece swung its gilded boy and struck the hours and
half hours with unheeded regularity. He lit a second cigar, and
a third; he forgot the wine. It seemed to him that he was
looking on all the roads of life that lay before him, and they
were lit up by as strange and new a light as that which was
beginning to shine over the world outside. New fancies seemed
to awake with the new dawn. For himself to ask Wenna Rosewarne
to be his wife! Could he but win the tender and shy regard of
her eyes he would fall at her feet and bathe them with his
tears. And if this wonderful thing were possible—if she
could put her hand in his and trust to him for safety in all
the coming years they might live together—what man of
woman born would dare to interfere? There was a blue light
coming in through the shutters. He went to the window: the
topmost leaves of the trees were quivering in the cold air far
up there in the clearing skies, where the stars were fading out
one by one, and he could hear the sound of the sea on the
distant beach, and he knew that across the gray plain of waters
the dawn was breaking, and that over the sleeping world another
day was rising that seemed to him the first day of a new and
tremulous life, full of joy and courage and hope.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

ON THE VIA SAN BASILIO.

In Rome, 1851; a cold, dreary day in December—one of
those days in which a man’s ambition seems to desert him
entirely, leaving only its grinning skeleton to mock him.
Depressing as was the weather to a man who had cheerfulness as
a companion by which to repel its blustering attacks, and raise
his mind above the despondency it was calculated to produce,
how much more so to one whose hope had gone out as a flickering
lamp in a sudden gust of wind, and the sharp steel of whose
ambition had turned to pierce his own heart!

Such a man, on the day mentioned, was walking along the Via
San Basilio. He was small in stature, poorly clad, and so thin,
and even cadaverous, that the casual observer might have been
under apprehension lest a gust of wind a little stronger than
the average might blow him entirely away; yet his air and
manner were proud and haughty, and what little evidences of
feeling peered through the signs of dissipation too apparent on
his naturally attractive face were those of genuine refinement.
He was accompanied by a cicerone, or servant, as
villainous-looking a fellow as one often meets, even in Italy,
where an evil expression is so often seen stamped on handsome
features.

Along the Via San Basilio the two men walked until they
stood opposite the door of No. 51. Sacred ground this, and
historical as well. Art had her votaries here, as the tourist
of to-day will find she still has, at whose shrines pilgrims
from afar and from near worshiped, and grew better and stronger
for their ministrations. Crawford, then at the acme of his
fame, had his constantly-thronged studio in the immediate
vicinity, while those at No. 51 embraced, among others, that of
Tenerani, the famous Italian sculptor, whose work is always in
such fine dramatic taste, although he never sacrifices his love
and deep feeling of reverence for Nature, combining that with
the most delightful charms of Greek art. Among this
[pg 113] artist’s most noted works
will be remembered his “Descent from the Cross,” which
tourists visiting the Torlonia chapel in the Lateran never
gaze upon without a thrill. The house was owned and also
occupied by Bienaimé, a French sculptor who afterward
became famous.

In the immediate vicinity stands the famous Palazzo
Barberini, begun by Urban VIII. (Maffeo Barberini), who sat in
the pontifical chair from 1623 to 1644, and finished by Bernini
in 1640. This palace contains many paintings of historical
interest by Raphael, Titian, Guido, Claude and others. The one
by the first-mentioned artist is a Fornarina, and bears the
autograph of the painter on the armlet. But the picture that
attracts the most attention here is one of world-wide
reputation, copies, engravings and photographs of which are
everywhere to be met with—Guido’s Beatrice Cenci. A great
divergence of opinion, as is well known, exists in regard to
the portrait. It bears the pillar and crown of the Colonnas, to
which family it probably belonged. According to the family
tradition, it was taken on the night before her execution.
Other accounts state that it was painted by Guido from memory
after he had seen her on the scaffold. Judging from the
position in which the poor girl’s head is represented, one
would more readily give credence to the latter story, and think
the artist’s memory had preserved her look and position as she
turned her head for a last look at the brutal, bellowing crowd
behind.

In the piazza of the palace is a very beautiful fountain,
utilized by one of the oldest Roman statues, representing a
faun blowing water from a conch-shell.

But we must return to the Via San Basilio, and the two
wayfarers we left standing in front of No. 51. After gazing a
moment at the number to assure themselves that they were right,
they entered, and knocked at the first door, which was opened
by the occupant of the apartment. He was an artist and a man of
very marked characteristics. Seven years later Hawthorne wrote
as follows of him: “He is a plain, homely Yankee, quite
unpolished by his many years’ residence in Italy. He talks
ungrammatically; walks with a strange, awkward gait and
stooping shoulders; is altogether unpicturesque, but wins one’s
confidence by his very lack of grace. It is not often that we
see an artist so entirely free from affectation in his aspect
and deportment. His pictures were views of Swiss and Italian
scenery, and were most beautiful and true. One of them, a
moonlight picture, was really magical—the moon shining so
brightly that it seemed to throw a light even beyond the limits
of the picture; and yet his sunrises and sunsets, and noontides
too, were nowise inferior to this, although their excellence
required somewhat longer study to be fully appreciated.”

After this introduction by our sweet and quaint romancer,
the reader will hardly need be told that the two strangers
stood in the presence of America’s now illustrious artist,
George L. Brown. But one seeing him then, as he stood almost
scowling at the two strangers, would hardly have idealized him
into the artist whose pencil has done so much of late years to
give American art a distinctive name through his poetical
delineations of the rare, sun-tinted atmosphere that hovers
over Italian landscapes. However, our apology for him must be
that the day was raw and blustering, and that he had no sooner
caught sight of the men through his window, as they
hesitatingly entered the door, than his suspicions were
aroused.

The Italian acted as spokesman, and inquired if there were
any rooms to let in the building. Brown, thinking this the
easiest way of ridding himself of the visitors, went in search
of the landlord, who came, and after a moment’s conversation
the whole party entered the studio, much to its owner’s
displeasure.

The cicerone did most of the talking, though now and then
the other made a remark or two in broken Italian. But this was
only for the first few moments. He soon became oblivious of all
save art, of which one could see at a glance he was
passionately fond. One of Mr. Brown’s pictures—a large
one he was then engaged on—particularly attracted
[pg 114] his attention. He drew
closer and closer to the canvas, examining it with a
minuteness that showed the connoisseur, and finally
remarked: “It is very fine in color, sir, and the atmosphere
is delicious. Why have I not heard of you before?” examining
the corner of the canvas for the artist’s name, but speaking
in a tone and with an air that gave Brown the impression he
was indulging in the random flattery so current in studios.
So, ignoring the question, he asked with a slight shrug of
the shoulders, “Are you an artist?”

“I paint a little,” was the reply, with an air of modesty
which Brown mistook for the bashful half-assertion of some
daubing amateur.

Just then the cicerone came forward and announced that the
bargain was completed and the room ready for occupancy.

“I shall be happy—no, happy is not a good word
for me—I shall be glad to see you in my studio when I
have moved in, and perhaps you may see some things to please
you.”

So saying, the stranger departed, leaving Brown not a whit
better impressed with him than at first.

The next morning the two called again, when the gentleman
made an examination of the room selected the day before, having
met Mr. Brown in the hall-way and invited him in. On entering,
the new occupant took from his pocket a piece of chalk and a
compass and made a number of circles and figures on the floor
to determine when the sun would shine in the room. Brown
watched him with a certain degree of curiosity and amusement,
and finally, concluding he was half crazy, returned to his own
studio.

The next day the cicerone called alone to see about some
repairs, when Brown hailed him: “Buono giorno. Che è
questo?” (“Good-day. Who is that?”)

“Non sapete?” (“Don’t you know?”), was the Italian’s
response. “Why, that is the celebrated Brullof.”

Brown started as though shot. First there flashed through
his brain the remembrance of how cavalierly he had treated the
distinguished artist, and then a quick panorama of his recent
history, which had been the gossip of studios and art-circles
for some time back. “I must go to him,” he said, “and apologize
for not treating him with more deference.”

“Non, signore,” was the cicerone’s response. “Never
mind: let it rest. He is a man of the world, and pays little
heed to such things. Besides, he is so overwhelmed with his
private griefs that he has probably noticed no slight.”

However, when the great Russian artist took possession of
his studio his American brother of the pencil made his apology,
and received this response; “Don’t waste words on so trivial a
matter. Do I not court the contempt of a world that I despise
to my heart’s core? Say no more about it. Run in and see me
when agreeable; and if you have no better callers than such a
plaything of fate as I, maybe you will not refuse me occasional
admittance.”

The Russian artist now shunned notoriety as he had formerly
courted it. Little is known of his history beyond mere rumor,
and that only in artistic circles. He was born at St.
Petersburg in 1799 or 1800, and gave himself to the study of
art at an early age, becoming an especial proficient in color
and composition. One of his most widely-known works is “The
Last Days of Pompeii,” which created great enthusiasm a quarter
of a century ago. This, however, was painted during his career
of dissipation, and its vivid coloring seemed to have been
drawn from a soul morbid with secret woes and craving a
nepenthe which never came.

The young artist was petted and idolized by the wealth and
nobility of St. Petersburg, where he married a beautiful woman,
and became court-painter to the czar Nicholas about the year
1830. For some years no couple lived more happily, and no
artist swayed a greater multitude of fashion and wealth than
he; but scandal began to whisper that the czar was as fond of
the handsome, brilliant wife of the young court-painter as the
cultivated people of St. Petersburg were of the husband’s
marvelously colored works; and when at last the fact became
[pg 115] known to Brullof that the
monarch who had honored him through an intelligent
appreciation of art had dishonored him through a guilty
passion for his wife, he left St. Petersburg, swore never
again to set foot on Russian soil or be recognized as a
Russian subject, and, plunging headlong into a wild career
of dissipation, was thenceforth a wanderer up and down the
continent of Europe.

It was when this career had borne its inevitable fruit, and
he was but a mere wreck of the polished gentleman of a few
years previous, that Brullof came to the Via San Basilio,
where, as soon as the fact became known, visitors began to
call. Among the first were the Russian ambassador and suite,
who were driven up in a splendid carriage, with liveried
attendants; but after the burly Italian had announced to his
master who was in waiting, the door was closed, and with no
message in return the representatives of the mightiest empire
on the globe were left to withdraw with the best grace they
could muster for the occasion. Similar scenes were repeated
often during the entire Roman season. He saw but few of his
callers—Russians, never.

The Russian and the American artists became quite intimate
during the few months they were thrown together, and Mr. Brown
has acknowledged that he owes much of the success of his later
efforts to hints received from the self-exiled, dying
Russian.

“Mr. Brown,” he said on one occasion, while examining the
picture on the artist’s easel, “no one since Claude has painted
atmosphere as you do. But you must follow Calamé’s
example, and make drawing more of a study. Draw from Nature,
and do it faithfully, and with your atmosphere I will back you
against the world. That is bad,” pointing to the huge limb of a
tree in the foreground: “it bulges both ways, you see. Now,
Nature is never so. Look at my arm,” speaking with increased
animation, and suddenly throwing off his coat and rolling up
his shirt-sleeve. “When you see a convexity, you will see
concavity opposite. Just so in Nature, especially in the trunks
and limbs of trees.”

This criticism made such an impression on Brown that it
decided him to go into more laborious work, and was the
foundation of his habit of getting up at daybreak and going out
to sketch rocks, trees and cattle, until he stands where he now
does as a draughtsman.

The painting which Brullof had first admired, and which had
induced him to compare Brown to Claude in atmospheric effects,
was a view of the Pontine Marshes, painted for Crawford the
sculptor, and now in possession, of his widow, Mrs. Terry, at
Rome.

During this entire season the penuriousness exhibited by
Brullof is one of the hardest phases of his character to
explain. Though he was worth at least half a million of
dollars, his meals were generally of the scantiest kind,
purchased by the Italian cicerone, and cooked and eaten in his
room. Yet a kindness would touch the hidden springs of his
generosity as the staff of Moses did the rock of Horeb.

Toward the close of the Roman season, Brullof, growing more
and more moody, and becoming still more of a recluse, painted
his last picture, which showed how diseased and morbid his mind
had become. He called it “The End of All Things,” and made it
sensational to the verge of that flexible characteristic. It
represented popes and emperors tumbling headlong into a
terrible abyss, while the world’s benefactors were ascending in
a sort of theatrical transformation-scene. A representation of
Christ holding a cross aloft was given, and winged angels were
hovering here and there, much in the same manner as
coryphées and lesser auxiliaries of the ballet. A
capital portrait of George Washington was painted in the mass
of rubbish, perhaps as a compliment to Brown. In
contradistinction to the portrait of Washington were seen
prominently those of the czar Nicholas and the emperor
Napoleon; the former put in on account of the artist’s own
private wrong, and the latter because at that time, just after
the coup d’ètat, he was the execration of the
liberty-loving world.

In the spring the Russian artist gave up
[pg 116] his studio, and went down
to some baths possessing a local reputation situated on the
road to Florence, where he died very suddenly. Much mystery
overhangs his last days, and absolutely no knowledge exists
as to what became of his vast property. His cicerone robbed
him of his gold watch and all his personal effects and
disappeared. His remains lie buried in the Protestant
burying-ground outside the walls of Rome, near the Porto di
Sebastiano. His tomb is near that of Shelley and Keats, and
the monument erected to his memory is very simple, his head
being sculptured upon it in alto relievo, and on the
opposite side an artist’s palette and brushes.

EARL MARBLE.

A CHRISTMAS HYMN.

The air was still o’er Bethlehem’s plain,

As if the great Night held its
breath,

When Life Eternal came to reign

Over a world of Death.

The pagan at his midnight board

Let fall his brimming cup of gold:

He felt the presence of his Lord

Before His birth was told.

The temples trembled to their base,

The idols shuddered as in pain:

A priesthood in its power of place

Knelt to its gods in vain.

All Nature felt a thrill divine

When burst that meteor on the night,

Which, pointing to the Saviour’s shrine,

Proclaimed the new-born light—

Light to the shepherds! and the star

Gilded their silent midnight
fold—

Light to the Wise Men from afar,

Bearing their gifts of gold—

Light to a realm of Sin and Grief—

Light to a world in all its
needs—

The Light of life—a new belief

Rising o’er fallen creeds—

Light on a tangled path of thorns,

Though leading to a martyr’s
throne—

Light to guide till Christ returns

In glory to His own.

There still it shines, while far abroad

The Christmas choir sings now, as
then,

“Glory, glory unto God!

Peace and good-will to men!”

ROME, Christmas, 1871.

T. BUCHANAN
READ.

[pg 117]

THE PARSEES.

Hanging in my study is a noteworthy portrait, generally the
first object observed by those who enter. It is an exquisite
painting on glass, the work of Làng Quà, the best
artist China has produced in our day, and it delineates the
form and features of a singularly handsome young man. But it is
the quaint Parsee garb that first attracts attention; and the
weird romance that attaches to the history of the
Fire-worshipers gives this work of art its real value, rather
than its lines of beauty or the celebrity of the painter’s
name. This delicately-featured portrait may depict the
countenance of Musaljee Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy, the first-born son
and heir of the late Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy, baronet, of
Bombay, India. That he really sat for this portrait I cannot,
however, positively assert, since I obtained the painting from
an English officer, who bought it of the artist, but had
“forgotten the strange, outlandish name of the Indian nabob,”
as he said. It is certainly the portrait of a
Parsee—true to the life in features and garb, and
it bears a striking resemblance to the young Musaljee when
about eighteen years of age. He was not then a personage of any
great celebrity, though the worthy son of a most remarkable
sire, the latter long known and honored in Europe for his
liberal and enlightened charities, and especially for his
munificent donations, that saved the lives of thousands of
British subjects, during the terrible famines that occurred in
India between the years 1840 and 1846. It was in grateful
recognition of this noble philanthropy that Queen Victoria
conferred upon him the honor of a baronetcy, sending out a
nobleman to act as her proxy in the presentation of a sword
which had been handled by more than one British monarch. Sir
Jamsetjee was the first East Indian who ever received a title
from a European sovereign. During the terrible famines alluded
to he not only distributed daily from his own palace a
plentiful supply of food to all who came, but he made also
large donations of provisions to the English governor of Bombay
for the supply of his starving troops. When, subsequently,
pestilence followed in the footsteps of famine, this
true-hearted philanthropist, overstepping all prejudices of
creed and clan, built and endowed at his own expense a free
hospital for the sick of all nations and religions. Temporary
bamboo cottages at first received the sick till there was time
for the erection of the present elegant structure, which is
built in the Gothic style, and is capable of accommodating some
six or eight hundred patients, besides nurses and attendants.
The physicians have been from the beginning of the enterprise
all English, as are many of the nurses, and the supplies in
every department are the very best the country can furnish.
Since the death of the noble founder, the son, who inherits his
name and title, has continued to foster with loving devotion
the institution which stands as a lasting monument of the fame
and virtues of his illustrious sire. The conception of such a
charity tells not only of a generous heart, but of far-reaching
intelligence, while the energy and perseverance of both father
and son in carrying on, year after year, so vast a system of
benefactions, challenge our warmest admiration.

The name of the late Sir Jamsetjee stood for more than a
score of years at the very head of the list of merchant-princes
and ship-owners in Bombay, where he was born, and where his
ancestors for many generations resided. He came of an old and
wealthy family, who trace their genealogy back to the Parsee
exodus of the eighth century; and it is said that the “sacred
fire” has never once during all that time burned out upon their
altar. Sir Jamsetjee himself, though probably faithful in the
observance of the actual requirements of his
[pg 118] creed, was assuredly less
strict than the majority, and being a man of large
intellect, cultivated mind and great independence of
character, he did not hesitate to borrow from other nations
any customs, institutions or inventions that might tend to
the improvement of his own people. His stately mansion was
built and furnished in European style; his children, even
his daughters, were carefully educated in foreign as well as
native lore; and his own associations were with refined and
cultivated people, without any regard to their nation or
creed. It was while visiting at his house, in familiar
intercourse with his family, and with other Parsees of
similar position, that I gleaned many items of interest
concerning the history and practices of the Fire-worshipers.
Other facts were added from time to time during several
years of frequent association with these singular people, in
whose glorious though unsuccessful struggles for home and
liberty it is impossible not to feel an interest.

As a race, the Parsees are intelligent, active and
energetic. With business capacities far above the average, they
are usually successful in amassing wealth, while they are
extremely benevolent in dispensing their gains for both public
and private charities. For private benefactions they have,
however, little call among themselves, since a Parsee pauper
would be an unheard-of anomaly. Their style of living is
princely but peculiar. In the reception-rooms of the
wealthy—and most of the Parsees in the city of Bombay are
wealthy—one finds a rather quaint mingling of Oriental
luxury and European elegance—brightly-tinted Persian
carpets placed in Eastern fashion over divans strewn with
embroidered cushions and jewel-studded pillows, among which
recline, with genuine Oriental indolence, some of the members
of the family; while in another part of the same room half a
dozen more may be grouped about a table of marble and rosewood,
occupying velvet chairs that have traveled unmistakably from
London or Paris. French mirrors and Italian statuettes may have
for their vis-à-vis the exquisite mosaics, the
massive gold vases and the costly bijouterie of the Orient,
strewn so profusely around as to startle unaccustomed eyes; and
a genuine Meissonier will be just as likely to be placed side
by side with a Persian houri as anywhere else. The Parsees
drive the finest Arab steeds, but on their equipages there is a
more lavish display of ornament than we should deem quite in
accordance with good taste. The same is true in regard to
personal decoration. They wear immense quantities of costly
jewelry, and nearly all their garments are of silk, generally
richly embroidered in gold, and often with the addition of
precious stones. Even little children wear only silk, infants
from the very first being wrapped in long, loose robes of plain
white silk that are gradually displaced by others more
elaborate and costly; while the toilette of a Parsee lady in
full evening-dress is often of the value of a hundred thousand
rupees (or forty-five thousand dollars). The female costume
consists of silk or cotton skirts gathered full round the
waist, and long, loose robes of silk, lace or muslin, all more
or less decorated according to the wealth of the wearer. The
dress of the men is composed of trousers and shirts of white or
colored silk and long caftans of muslin, with the addition of a
fanciful little scarf fringed at the ends, and worn jauntily
across one shoulder and under the other arm. Their caps are
made of pasteboard covered with gay-colored silk, embroidered
and studded with precious stones or pearls. The form of a
Parsee’s shirt is a matter of vital importance, both in regard
to respectability and religion. It must have five seams,
neither more nor less, and be made to lap on the breast exactly
in a certain way. Both sexes wear around the body a double
string, which they loosen when at prayer, and which a Parsee is
never, under any circumstances, permitted to dispense with. No
engagement or business transaction is legally binding if by any
chance this talismanic cord was left off by either party when
the contract was made. The cord is first placed on children
when they have completed their
[pg 119] ninth year, and this serves
to mark the most important epoch of their lives. Before the
investiture the eating of food with Christians or heathen
does not defile the juvenile Parsee, and girls may even go
about in public with their fathers; but after the bestowal
of the sacred cord the girls must be kept in seclusion and
the boys eat only with their own people.

Only the most liberal Parsees will permit those of other
creeds to eat under the same roof with themselves, and even
these never eat at the table with their guests. The table is
first covered for the visitors, and they are waited on with the
utmost assiduity, often by the members of the family in
addition to the servants. When the guests leave the board not
only is the cloth changed, but the table itself is washed
before being recovered: salts, castors and other similar
articles are all emptied and washed, and the table newly laid
in every particular. Small flat cakes are distributed round the
board to do service as plates, and the various dishes arranged
in the centre within reach of all. The family then wash hands
and faces and the father says a short prayer, after which all
take their seats and the meal begins. Neither knives nor forks
are used, but the meat is torn from the bones with the fingers
only, and with the left hand each one dips, from time to time,
bread, meat or vegetables into the broth or gravy as he wishes,
and then tosses it into his mouth, without allowing his fingers
to touch his lips. This requires some dexterity, and children
are not permitted at the family board till they have learned
thus to acquit themselves. If, however, the fingers of any one,
child or adult, should chance to come in contact with the lips,
though ever so slightly, he is required to leave the table
instantly and perform his ablutions over again, or else to take
the dish from which he was eating to himself, and touch no
other during the meal. In drinking they exercise the same
caution, adroitly throwing the liquid into the mouth or throat
without touching the lips with the cup or glass. The left hand
is the one with which food is always taken; and the reason
assigned is, that the right, having of necessity to perform
most labor, is more frequently brought in contact with things
unclean.

I once made a voyage with an American lady and gentleman in
a Bombay ship that was owned and commanded by a wealthy Parsee
merchant, though the real sailing-master and mate were
Englishmen. Our party ate at one table, and the Parsee nabob
had his own in solitary state. I was then quite a youthful
wife, and, as my husband was not of the party, the Parsee
supposed me unmarried, and overwhelmed me with the most gallant
attentions, among which were frequent invitations to our party
to dine in his cabin. But, though he would stand at my side all
the time I was eating, fill my cup or glass with his own hands,
and urge me to partake of certain dishes that were favorites of
his own, nothing could induce him to eat or drink in our
presence, even after we had left the table. And I learned
afterward that the costly service of rare china, silver and
glass from which we had eaten and drunk at his table, though
carefully laid aside, was never again used by the owner. One
evening, as we sat on the upper deck inhaling the balmy air, he
invited me to smoke. Of course I declined, and when he insisted
I told him that it was contrary to the customs of good society
in our country for ladies to use tobacco in any form. He
laughed heartily, and said, “Did you suppose I would ask a lady
to pollute her fragrant breath and dewy lips with so foul a
thing as vile tobacco? Taste and see.” He brought his splendid
hookah, which I found filled with the “fragrant spices of
Araby” perfumed with attar of roses, while a long slender tube
rested in a vessel of rose-water at my feet; and the fumes were
certainly as agreeable as harmless. But this, my first
experiment in smoking, cost my Parsee friend three hundred
dollars, the estimated value of his gold-mounted hookah, with
its complicated array of tubes and vessels of the same precious
metal, none of which he durst ever use
again.

[pg 120]

As we sat chatting together in the bright moonlight our ears
were suddenly greeted by the sound of sweet music—wild,
unearthly melody that seemed to rise from the very depths of
the ocean just below our feet. At first it was only a soft
trill or a subdued hum, as of a single voice: then followed
what seemed a full chorus of voices of enchanting sweetness.
Presently the melody died away in the distance, only, however,
to burst forth anew after a brief interval. All the time we
were being regaled with the music we could see nothing to
enlighten us as to its source, and were inclined to pronounce
it a trick played by our fun-loving sailing-master. He,
however, denied all agency in the matter, but counseled us to
“keep a close look-out on the lee bow” if we wanted to see a
mermaid. We had noticed a sort of thrilling motion on the lower
deck, not unlike the sensation produced by the charge of an
electro-galvanic battery; and this, the Parsee captain gravely
assured us, was the mermaids’ dance, and their efforts to drag
down our ship. “But I’ll catch one of them yet—see if I
don’t,” he said energetically as he caught up something from
the deck and ran forward, and was presently, with two of the
Lascars, leaning over the bow. Half an hour afterward he
returned, and with a merry laugh laid in my lap two little
brown fish, informing me that they were singing-fish, and that
the music we had heard had been produced by shoals of these
tiny vocalists then clinging to the bottom of our ship. Our
Parsee friend told me that the Arabs and Persians always speak
of the singing-fish as “tiny women of the sea;” but he had
never heard our version of their long hair, and their twining
it about hapless sailors to drag them down to their coral
caverns beneath the ocean’s wave. He showed me how to preserve
the fish by drying in the sun after repeated anointings with an
aromatic oil, which he gave me for the purpose; and I have
still in my cabinet these two specimens as a reminder of the
incident.

The manner in which the Parsees dispose of their dead seems
to us too shocking to be tolerated by a people so gentle and
refined. But they have grown familiar with a custom that,
generation after generation, has been observed by their race
till it has ceased to be repugnant. They call it “consigning
the dead to the element of air.” For this purpose they have
roofless enclosures, the walls of which are twenty-five or
thirty feet high, and within are three biers—one each for
men, women and children. Upon these the bodies of the dead are
laid, and fastened down with chains or iron bands. Presently
birds of prey, so numerous within the tropics and always
waiting to devour, pounce upon the corpse and quickly tear the
flesh from the bones, while the skeleton remains intact. This
is afterward deposited in a pit dug within the same enclosure,
and which remains open till completely filled up with bones;
after which another is dug, and when the enclosure can
conveniently contain no more pits a new one is selected and
prepared. None but priests and bearers of the dead may enter,
or even look into, these walled cemeteries. The priests, by
virtue of their holy office, are preserved from defilement, but
the bearers are men set apart for this express purpose, and
they are considered so unclean that they may not enter under
the roof of any other Parsee or salute him on the street. If in
passing a bearer do but touch one’s clothes accidentally, he is
subject to a heavy fine, while he who has been thus
contaminated must bathe his entire person and burn every
article of raiment he wore at the time of his defilement.

I was anxious to visit one of their temples, but this, Sir
Jamsetjee assured me, was impossible, as none but the initiated
are allowed even to approach the entrance, still less to get a
glimpse of what is passing within. He, however, volunteered the
information that, so far as the sanctuary itself was concerned,
there was little to be seen, only naked walls, bare floors, and
an altar upon which burns the sacred fire brought with the
Parsees from Persia, and which, he said, had never been
extinguished since it was kindled by Zoroaster from the sun
four thousand years ago. Of the form of service I could
[pg 121] not induce the baronet to
speak, but I learned afterward from my ship-friend that the
altar is enclosed by gratings, within which none but the
priest may enter. He goes in every day to tend “the eternal
fire,” when he must remain for the space of an hour,
repeating certain invocations, with a bundle of rods in his
hand to repel any unclean spirits that should venture to
approach the sacred fire. Meanwhile, the assembled
multitudes prostrate themselves without and offer up their
silent adoration. “Yet, after all,” musingly said the
Parsee, “the universe is the throne of the invisible God, of
whom fire is but the emblem, and we worship Him most
acceptably with our eyes fixed on the east when the sun
rides forth at morning in his celestial chariot of fire.”
This form of worship those curious in such matters may see
on any bright morning at Bombay, where whole crowds of
Parsee men, women and children rush out at sunrise to greet
the king of day and offer up their morning oblations. I was
not surprised at the avowed preference of my Parsee friends
for out-door worship, since it is well known that the
ancient Persians not only permitted few temples to be
erected to their gods, and held in abhorrence all painted
and graven images, but they laid it to the charge of the
Greeks, as a daring impiety, that “they shut up their gods
in shrines and temples, like puppets in a cabinet, when all
created things were open to them and the wide world was
their dwelling-place.” It was probably religious zeal, even
more than revenge against the Greeks, that induced the
burning of the temple at Athens by Xerxes, led on, as he may
have been, by the fanatical zeal of the Magi who accompanied
him.

Plutarch speaks of the Persians, in common with the
Chaldeans and Egyptians, as worshipers of the sun under the
name of Mithra, whom they regarded as standing between Ormuzd,
“the author of good,” and Ahriman, “the author of evil,”
occupied alternately in aiding the former and subduing the
latter. So do the Parsees of our own day regard him; and their
only hope for the ultimate triumph of Ormuzd is in constant
sacrifices and prayers and propitiatory offerings to the sun as
the fire that is to burn out and utterly consume all evil from
our earth. Fire is to the Parsees now, as it has ever been, the
holiest of all holy things, carried about by princes and great
men for safety; by warriors, as that which is to give them the
victory over their foes; and by all, as their sole and
ever-present deity. Sir Jamsetjee assured me that the
intelligent Parsees regard the sun and fire as only the
symbols that are to remind them of the God they worship. But
there can be no doubt that the mass of the Parsees literally
worship the sun and the “sacred fire;” and hence arise the
utter repugnance many of them have to celebrating their
religious rites within closed walls, and the decided preference
ever shown for out-door worship. I have often heard them say
that the Fire-god shows his aversion to confinement by drooping
when he is shut up, and growing vigorous just in proportion as
free scope is given him. The sun appears everywhere on the
shields and armor of the ancient Persians, as on some of the
old-time monuments that have come down to us; while
occasionally Mithra is depicted as a youthful hero, with high
Persian cap, his knee on a prostrate bull, into whose heart he
seems plunging a dagger—symbolically, “the power of evil”
in complete subjection to the victorious sun, and about to be
for ever annihilated.

Zoroaster (called by the Persians Zerduscht) was not,
the Parsees say, the founder of their sect, but only the
reviser and perfecter of the system as it now exists among
them. Living in the reign of Darius Hystaspes, he was the
contemporary, probably an associate, of the prophet Daniel.
Before the advent of this reformer the Magi acknowledged two
great First Causes—i.e., the light and the darkness, the
former the author of all good, the latter of every evil, moral
and physical—and these they believed were at perpetual
war with each other. Zoroaster taught, as he may have learned
from Daniel, that there was One
[pg 122] greater still, who created
both the light and the darkness, making both to subserve His
own will. He also inculcated the duty of building temples
for the preservation of the sacred fire from storm and
tempest, when “by sudden extinction of the light the powers
of darkness do gain often a signal victory.” The Parsees
hold in supreme veneration the name of Zoroaster as the most
noted of all their Magi for wisdom and virtue. They believe
that the sacred fire was lighted by him miraculously from
the sun—that it has burned steadily ever since, and
can never go out till it has consumed all evil from the
earth and the good has become universally triumphant. They
claim also that from the reforms wrought by Zoroaster there
was never the slightest change in any of their observances
until about twelve centuries ago, when Persia was overrun
and conquered by the Mohammedan Arabs. But not the fiercest
persecution could induce the Fire-worshipers to change their
religion for that of the Koran. Preferring liberty and their
altars in a foreign land to the alternative of apostasy or
persecution at home, the aboriginal Persian inhabitants fled
to other lands, settling immense colonies in Surat and
Bombay, where their descendants form in our day a large and
valuable element of the population. Their integrity,
industry and enterprise are proverbial all over the East;
and while they live strictly apart from all other races, the
Parsees are never wanting in sympathy and help for those who
need them. Dwelling amid nations who are almost universally
destitute of veracity, the Parsees are eminently truthful;
surrounded by polygamists and sensualists, they maintain
habits of purity and virtue; and accustomed to every-day
association with those who make a boast of cheating, my
memory fails to recall the case of a single Fire-worshiper
who was not strictly upright and honorable in his
dealings.

Commencing with the worship of the sun, and of fire as his
emblem, the Parsee grew into a sort of reverence for the
elements of air, earth and water. The air must not be
contaminated by foul odors, and of necessity no filth could be
tolerated anywhere in house, street or suburb; and to this
reverence for the purity of the atmosphere may be traced the
absolute cleanliness for which Fire-worshipers are everywhere
noted. As the earth must receive no defilement, the Parsees
would deem it sacrilege to deposit therein their dead for
corruption and decay; and hence have doubtless originated their
strange rites of sepulture, as they believe that the body is
thus more readily and rapidly reduced to its original elements.
Streams of water, even the tiniest rivulets, are deemed too
holy to be desecrated by washing or spitting in them, and still
less would they make the water the receptacle of offal of any
sort. To each of these elements, as well as to the fire, the
Parsees still make oblations on their high-days. It is true
that their ceremonies now are less imposing than those
described by Xenophon, when a thousand head of cattle were
immolated at a single festival, four beautiful bulls presented
to Jupiter, or the sky, and a magnificent chariot, drawn by
white horses crowned with flowers and wearing a golden yoke,
was offered to the sun; while the king in his chariot was
escorted by princes and great nobles, two thousand spearmen
marching on either side, and three hundred sceptre-bearers,
armed with javelins and mounted on splendidly-caparisoned
horses, bringing up the rear. But those jubilant days have
passed: the Fire-worshipers are in exile, and have no king to
lead them, either in battle against their foes or in triumphal
processions in honor of their gods. Yet is Parseeism not dead,
nor even on the decrease. Sacrifices, numerous and costly, are
still piled upon their altars, the finest cattle are dedicated
to their gods, the flesh being cut up and roasted for the
people, while the Magi cast the caul and a portion of the fat
into the fire as emblematic of the souls of the victims being
imbibed by the gods, while the grosser portions are
rejected.

The sacrifices and those who offer them are always crowned
with flowers, but the pontifical robes of the Magi, though of
pure white silk, are severely
[pg 123] plain in style and utterly
devoid of ornament. In their lives the Magi claim to
practice a rigid asceticism, making the earth their bed and
subsisting wholly on fruit, vegetables and bread, besides
submitting to frequent painful penances from fasting,
scourging and the endurance of fatiguing exercises. “Wine,
women and flesh” they are commanded to eschew as “special
abominations to those who aspire to minister before the
gods.” The most remarkable feast of the ancient Parsees was
one called by them the “sack-feast.” On the appointed day a
condemned malefactor was clothed in royal robes, seated on a
kingly throne and the sceptre of regal power placed in his
hand. Princes and people bowed the knee in mock homage
before this king of a day, and he was suffered to glut his
appetite with all manner of sensual delights till the sun
went down, and then he was cruelly beaten with rods, and
forthwith executed. (Were the crown and sceptre, the purple
robe and mock reverence, that were the antecedents of the
Redeemer’s crucifixion, a reproduction of this barbarous
custom?) The modern Parsees, though recognizing this feast
as a legitimate part of their worship, say that they have
not observed it since their flight from Persia in the eighth
century, because since then, being under a foreign yoke,
they have had no jurisdiction over human life, and durst not
sacrifice even those who chanced to be in their power. This
may be one reason for the renunciation of this barbarous
practice of the olden time, but there has been wonderful
progress in civilization during the last twelve hundred
years; and certain it is that scenes of cruelty that suited
the ferocious tastes of the eighth century could not
possibly be repeated in the nineteenth.

FANNIE ROPER FEUDGE.

OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.

A SWEDISH PROVINCIAL THEATRE.

It is not so magnificent as the Scala and San Carlo, and
still, after seeing both those famous theatres, I must confess
I preferred that of Carlstad to either. It is small and
different in form from the generality: it reminded me, in fact,
of a hall in a certain New England town where I used to go to
the panorama as a child. There was a gallery like that in which
the men and boys sat who tramped the loudest and kissed their
hands, to the confusion of their neighbors, when the lights
were turned down to enhance the effect of the burning of
Moscow; only, at my panorama the gallery was unfashionable on
account of the noisy male element, whereas at Carlstad it was
the dress-circle. We—a party of Americans, the only
foreigners in the house that night—occupied
orchestra-stalls, as I presume the two or three front benches
in the parquet may be called. There was a white cape in our
vicinity, as well as one in the balcony; so our seats were
probably as fashionable as those in the first and only circle;
but behind us, stretching out to the doors and in under the
gallery, was a dense mass unrelieved by opera-cloaks of any
description; and that was the region of the
unpretending—-of those who came simply to enjoy, to see
and not to be seen.

As we spent a good part of a day at Carlstad, I should,
perhaps, relate something more of the place than merely how we
went to the theatre there; but that delightful evening effaced
all other impressions, and after the interval that has since
elapsed Fleur de Thé and our commissioner are the
only things that have retained somewhat of their original
savor.

The railway from Stockholm to Christiania ceased at Carlstad
on Lake [pg 124] Wener, which gave us a
day’s drive to Arvika to strike the track again; and while
we stood consulting where we were to get carriages, and
whether we should go directly on, there came up a
flourishing specimen of the genus valet de place, who
took possession of us and laid out a plan that he had
apparently prepared over night for our especial benefit. It
is a way those persons have, and one that gives them a
tremendous advantage over travelers weakened by a long
journey, that they act as if they were there by appointment
to meet you, or as if you had telegraphed precisely what you
wished to do, and they were merely carrying out your
intentions. “You want to go to the Black Eagle Hotel: I take
you there. You would like to dine: you can have dinner at
the hotel, or I shall show you a nice restaurant.” We had
not expected to find a member of the great European
brotherhood just there in a little town in the heart of
Sweden, and, taken unawares, fell an easy prey. However,
they do not invariably succeed in that way: sometimes, if
their officiousness is excessive, their English very
exasperating and the traveler a little fractious as well as
tired, they get the tables turned on them. A lady just
arrived at Genoa, when halfway to the hotel with one of
these persuasive personages snatched her bag out of his hand
and walked into the rival albergo because he said with an
aggravating accent, “I sall get you a ticket for de
steam-er.” “No you sha’n’t, either: I have got it myself,”
she said; and so they parted company, to his infinite
amazement. My friend—it was a friend of
mine—turned back, on second thoughts, to offer the man
something for having carried her belongings, but he put on
offended dignity and declared that he didn’t want her money.
She was rather sorry afterward that he didn’t do violence to
his feelings and take it; and so, no doubt, was he.

Our Carlstad commissioner beguiled the length of the way to
the inn, at which we were a little inclined to grumble, by
pointing out everything of note in our walk through the town.
We had been reading up in the train, and knew that Carlstad was
the capital of a district, had five thousand inhabitants, and
was nearly destroyed by fire in 1865; but he, a son of the
place, and seeing in his mind’s eye its rising glory when the
railroad should be completed, did not let us off with that. We
had to look and admire just where he told us. “Wide streets,”
he would say in his finely-chopped English. “Houses all very
high—new since the fire. See here! there’s the
telegraph-office.”

At which, to answer in the style he understood best, we must
have responded, “Oh, I say! Well. Very good! All right!”

“You shall go to the theatre if you want to,” he remarked at
last, in that sweet, protecting way peculiar to his class from
the habitual confounding of can, shall and will,
and that put us into good humor directly. To go to the theatre
would be just the thing.

“Oh yes, everybody goes,” he said. It was a Danish
company—very good actors—very pretty piece; but we
rather expected to care more for the everybody than
either the piece or the actors; and so it proved.

We went early, and established ourselves in the
orchestra-stalls, as already stated, while our guardian
accepted an unpretending seat for himself, where he remained in
readiness to tow us home after the performance. And then the
spectators began to come in, and positively some of the very
people who used to be at the panorama. I know there was a lady
in front of me, in Mechanic Hall, who wore her hair in just
such a little knot—pug is, I think, the classic
name for that coiffure—and her dress cut as low in the
throat and adorned with precisely such a self-embroidered
collar as the lady rejoiced in who occupied the seat before me
at the theatre. That she was one of the fashionables of
Carlstad could be seen in the lofty pose of that pug, and in
the curious structure of ribbon and lace that sat astride of it
and hung down at each side. Her husband, a small, rather
dried-up gentleman, had the look of a town oracle who was
oppressed at home, and her daughter
[pg 125] was one of the prettiest
girls in the house. The overgrown boy, the son and heir, was
not pretty: he sat beside his sister and kept nudging her. I
could not exactly understand what he said in Swedish, but I
know it must have been of this nature: “There’s Jim Davis
over there. Look, sister, look!”

Sister only glanced at him with a reproving air of “Don’t
push me so,” and then gazed steadfastly in the other direction;
but she was not left long in peace. Tom’s elbow began again in
a minute: “He’s looking right at you, all the time. You’d
better turn round and bow to him.” And the color would creep up
in her cheeks, do all she could to prevent it, so that she had
to lean across mamma and say something to her father, just so
as not to bow to Mr. Davis, which would have been such a simple
thing to do, after all.

Everybody who came in nodded and spoke to everybody else,
and then shook hands across the seats; and we felt quite out of
our element under the inquiring but superior glances that fell
to our lot. It was all very well for us to make our little
observations and smile at each other on the sly: we had the
consciousness all the while of not belonging to the first
society in Carlstad, and of being viewed as intruders in that
select circle.

We had been studying one family party after another as the
seats filled around us, for the audience collected by families,
when, with a little rustle and stir attending her progress, and
a whispering behind her as she advanced, the Bride appeared,
for she had arrived from Stockholm by our train. It was the
first time any one had seen her since she started on the
wedding-tour, and the bows and smiles she dealt out on every
side were not to be numbered. Our pretty girl got
one—they were school-friends—and the horrid boy
another, which he barely answered with a solemn nod of his
head, being as shy of her, apparently, in her blue silk and
white cape, as his sister was of Mr. Davis. It was really a
very pretty dress of the Bride’s, and one that made our
traveling costumes look uncommonly shabby: it was taken up
behind in the approved style, and only needed a bustle to have
been truly effective. Doubtless she had seen plenty of those
articles in Stockholm, only her husband said, “I hope, dear,
you will never put on one of those horrid things;” and she told
him certainly not if he did not like them; but I think she
found afterward she needed one for that blue dress, and sent
for it at the first opportunity. The young husband was not got
up for show, knowing very well that no one would mind him, but
he looked beamingly happy; and if he was not in a dress-coat
with a flower in his buttonhole, like the
habitués of the Comédie Française
or the Italiens, he understood how they use an opera-glass
there. The glass was a new acquisition that he had brought home
with him, and after practicing with it at the Royal Theatre in
the capital, he was fully prepared to stand up between the
acts, with his arm behind him in a negligently graceful
attitude, and study the balcony. His acquaintances there must
have found it rather embarrassing, for it was not a usual thing
in Carlstad to look at one’s friends through an opera-glass: he
was the only person who did it, and they probably all talked
about it when they went home.

We were so occupied with our surroundings that we hardly
thought of the piece, though it was given with considerable
spirit, if I remember rightly. The sailors were fine, jolly
tars, and the Chinese ladies and gentlemen toddled about in
flowered dressing-gowns and talked with their thumbs, as it
would appear the inhabitants of the Celestial Empire usually
do; but the house did not allow itself to be betrayed into
unseemly enthusiasm. There was an involuntary laugh now and
then, and once somebody said bravo, but as a general
thing a discreet reticence prevailed, and the actors might have
gone through the piece on their heads in an extravagant desire
to elicit signs of approval: they would only have received a
cool little round of applause when the curtain fell.

We, at all events, had no hesitation in telling the
commissioner that we had enjoyed ourselves immensely; and so,
[pg 126] it appeared, had he. He was
even bold enough to call it a very fine company, and as we
walked back to the hotel at half-past nine in broad
daylight, he told us what they were going to play the next
evening, possibly in the hope that we should stay for it and
he should get another seat. That was out of the question,
however, sorry as we were to disappoint him. He had to tuck
us into the carriage the following day, and let us drive
away and leave him bereft of his charges. “You shall have a
good ride,” were his parting words, kind and fatherly as he
was to the last; and so we had. But we found no one again to
care for us so tenderly as our old friend, nor did any one
take us to the theatre throughout the remainder of the
journey. G.H.

VENETIAN CAFFÈS.

It is years since so lovely an autumn as that of 1874 has
been seen in Europe: people say not since the last great comet
year, and they credit the erratic visitor of last summer with
the exceptional beauty of the weather. As in the case of other
marked comet years, the vintages of which still bring
extraordinary prices, Italy has had exceptionally fine harvests
of all kinds this year. The grain has been abundant, the
vintage has been superb, the olives have escaped the danger of
unseasonable frosts, and the still more important crop of
foreigners seems to be pretty well assured. The charming
weather in October and November made the interesting blossoms
sprout plentifully; and boat-loads and train-loads came in with
an abundance promising an unusually fine winter for la bella
Italia. Venice, indeed, may be said to have pretty well
housed her crop in this kind already. It has been a magnificent
one, and the Queen of the Adriatic admits that due homage has
been done to her. The forestieri season sets in earlier
in her case than in her sister cities. The real “Carnival de
Venice” is in August, September and October now-a-days, let the
calendar say what it may. Some flaunting of gaudy-colored
calico, some dancing on the Piazza of St. Mark, there may be on
the eve of Lent in obedience to old usages, but the dancing
that really glads the Italian heart is the dancing for which
the forestiere pays the piper, and the true Lenten time
is that when his beneficent presence is wanting.

Venice, then, has already brought her Carnival to a
conclusion; and it has been a splendid one. English, Americans,
Germans, all came in shoals—all thronged the galleries,
the churches and the palaces in the morning, sauntered or
bathed on the outer shore of the Lido in the afternoon, and met
at Florian’s in the evening. “What is Florian’s?” will be asked
by those who have never been at Venice—by some such, at
least. For probably the fame of the celebrated
caffè may have traveled across the Atlantic, just
as many who have never crossed it westward are no strangers to
the name of Delmonico. Florian’s, however, in any case,
deserves a word of recognition. It is the principal, largest
and most fashionable caffè on the Piazza di San Marco.
But the singular and curious specialty of the place is that it
has never been closed—no, not for five minutes—day
or night, for a period of more than a hundred and thirty years!
Probably it is the only human habitation of any sort on the
face of the globe of which that could be said.

But the caffè in itself is in many respects a
specialty of Venetian life, and has been so since the days of
Goldoni. The readers of his comedies, so abundantly rich in
local coloring, will not have failed to observe that the
caffè plays a larger part in the life of Venice than is
the case in any other city. Probably no Venetian passes a
single day without visiting once at least, if not oftener, his
accustomed caffè. Men of business write their letters
and arrange their meetings there. Men of pleasure know that
they shall find their peers there. Mere loafers take their
seats there, and gaze at the stream of life, as it flows past
them, for hours together. And, most marked specialty of all,
Venice is the only city in Italy where the native female
aristocracy frequents the caffè. Indeed, I know no place
in all the Peninsula where so large an amount of Italian beauty
may be seen [pg 127] as among the fashionable
crowd at Florian’s on a brilliant midsummer moonlight
night.

Venice is of all the cities in the world the one which those
who have never seen it know best. The peculiarities of it are
so marked and so unlike anything else in the world, and the
graphic representations of every part of the city are so
numerous and so admirably accurate, that every traveler finds
it to be exactly what he was prepared to see, and can hardly
fancy that he sees the Queen of the Adriatic for the first
time. I may therefore assume, perhaps, that my readers are
acquainted with the appearance of that most matchless of city
spaces, the Piazza di San Marco. They will readily call to mind
the long series of arcades that form the two long sides of the
parallellogram which has the gorgeous front of St. Mark’s
church occupying the entirety of one of the shorter sides.
Well, about halfway up the length of the piazza six of the
arches on the right hand of one facing St. Mark’s church are
occupied by the celebrated caffè. The six never-closed
rooms, corresponding each with one of the arches of the arcade,
are very small, and would not suffice to accommodate a
twentieth part of the throng which finds itself at Florian’s
quite as a matter of course every fine summer’s night. But
nobody thinks of entering these smartly-furnished little
cabinets save for breakfast or during the hours of the day.
Some take their evening ice or coffee on the seats under the
arcade, either immediately in front of the cabinets or around
the pillars which support the arches, and thus have an
opportunity of observing the never-ceasing and ever-varying
stream of life that flows by them under the arcade. But the
vast majority of the crowd place themselves on chairs arranged
around little tables set out on the flags of the piazza. A
hundred or so of these little tables are placed in long rows
extending far out into the piazza, and far on either side
beyond the extent of the six arches which are occupied by the
caffè itself. A London or New York policeman would have
his very soul revolted, and conclude that there must be
something very rotten indeed in the state of a city in which
the public way could be thus encumbered and no cry of “move on”
ever heard. Assuredly, it is public ground which Florian, in
the person of his nineteenth-century representative, thus
occupies with his tables and chairs. Probably, if a Venetian
were asked by what right he does so, the question would seem to
him much as if one asked by what right the tide covers the
shallows of the lagoon. It always has been so. It is in the
natural order of things. And how could Venice live without
Florian’s?

But it is not Florian’s alone which is thus a trespasser on
the domain of the public. The other less celebrated
caffès do the same thing. One immediately opposite to
Florian’s, on the other side of the
piazza—Quadri’s—has almost as large a spread of
chairs and tables as Florian himself. But it is a curious
instance of the permanence of habits at Venice, that though at
Quadri’s the articles supplied are quite as good, and the
prices exactly the same, the fashionable world never deserts
Florian’s. The only difference between the two establishments,
except this one of their customers, that is perceptible to the
naked eye, is that at Quadri’s beer is served, while Florian
ignores the existence of that plebeian beverage, which
assuredly was never heard of in Venice in the days when he
began his career and formed his habitudes.

I am tempted to endeavor to give the reader some picture of
the scene on the piazza on a night when (as is the case almost
every other evening) a military band is playing in the middle
of the open space, and the cosmopolitan crowd is assembled in
force—to describe the wonderful surroundings of the
scene, the charm of the quietude broken by no sound of hoof or
of wheel, the soft and tempered light, the gay clatter, athwart
which comes every fifteen minutes the solemn mellow tone of the
great clock of St. Mark with importunate warning that another
pleasant quarter of an hour has drifted away down the stream of
time. It is a scene that tempts the pen. But the well-dressed
portion of mankind [pg 128] is very similar in all
countries and under all circumstances, and perhaps my
readers may be more interested in a few traits of the
popular life of Venice, which the magnificent Piazza of St.
Mark is not the best place for studying, for some of the
most characteristic phases of it are absolutely banished
thence. The strolling musician or singer, who may be heard
every night in other parts of the city, never plies his
trade on the piazza. Mendicancy, which is more rife at
Venice, I am sorry to say, than in any other Italian city,
except perhaps Naples, is not tolerated on the piazza.

But if we wish for a good specimen of the truly popular life
of Venice, it will not be necessary to wander far from the
great centre of the piazza. Coming down the Piazzetta, or
Little Piazza, which opens out of the great square at one end,
and abuts on the open lagoon opposite the island of St. George
at the other, and turning round the corner of the ducal palace,
we cross the bridge over the canal, which above our heads is
bridged by the “Bridge of Sighs,” with its “palace and a prison
on each hand,” as Byron sings, and find ourselves on the “Riva
dei Schiavoni”—the quay at which the Slavonic vessels
arrived, and arrive still. The quay is a very broad one, by far
the broadest in Venice, paved with flagstones, and teeming with
every characteristic form of Venetian life from early morning
till late into the night. There are two or three hotels
frequented by foreigners on the Riva, for the situation facing
the open lagoon is an exceptionally good one; and there are
three or four caffès at which the cosmopolitan and not
too aristocratic visitor may get an excellent cup of coffee
(for the Venetians, thanks to their long connection with the
East, know what coffee is, and will not take chiccory or other
such detestable substitutes in lieu of it) for the modest
charge of thirteen centimes—just over two cents—and
study as he drinks it the moving and ever-amusing scenes
enacted before his eyes. His neighbor perhaps will be an old
gentleman, the very type of the old “pantaloon” whose mask was
in the old comedy supposed to be the impersonation of Venice.
There are the long, slender and rather delicately-cut features
terminating in a long, narrow and somewhat protruding chin; the
high cheek-bones, the lank and sombre cheeks, the high nose,
the dark bright eye under its bushy brow. He is very thin, very
seedy, and evidently very poor. But he salutes you, as
you take your seat beside him, with the air of an ex-member of
“The Ten;” his ancient hat and napless coat are carefully
brushed; his outrageously high shirt-collar and voluminous
unstarched neckcloth, after the fashion of a former generation,
though as yellow as saffron, are clean; and his poor old boots
as irreproachable as blacking—which can do much, but,
alas! not all things—can make them. His expenditure of a
penny will entitle him not only to a cup of coffee, as
aforesaid, but also to a glass of fresh water, which has been
turned to an opaline color by the shaking into it of a few
drops of something which the waiter drops from a bottle with
some contrivance at its mouth, the effect of which is to cause
only a drop or two of the liquor, whatever it may be, to come
out at each shake. Our old friend is also entitled, in virtue
of his expenditure, to occupy the chair he sits on for as many
hours as he shall see fit to remain in it. And after the
coffee, which must be drunk while hot, has been despatched, the
sippings of the opaline mixture aforesaid may be protracted
indefinitely while he enjoys the cool evening-breezes from the
lagoon, the perfection of dolce far niente, and the
amusement the life of the Riva never fails to afford him. An
itinerant vender of little models of gondolas and bracelets and
toys made out of shells comes by, seeking a customer among the
folk assembled at the caffè. He does not address
Pantaloon, for of course he knows that there is nothing to be
done in that line with him. But spying with a hawk’s glance a
forestiere among the crowd, he strolls up to him,
holding up one of his gimcrack bracelets daintily—and he
thinks temptingly, poor fellow!—between his finger and
thumb. “Un franco! Un sol franco! è una beleza per una
contesa!” (“One franc! [pg 129] only one franc! It would be
beautiful on the arm of a countess!”) he murmurs in his soft
lisping Venetian, which abolishes all double consonants, and
supplies their place by prolonging the soft liquid sound of
the preceding vowel. One franc! It is wonderful how the
thing, worthless as it is, can be made even by the most
starving fingers for such a price. Yet after dangling his
toy for a minute, and gazing, oh, so wistfully! the while
out of his big haggard eyes, he says, “Seventy-five
centimes! half a franc!” and still lingers ere he turns away
with a sigh, a weary movement of his emaciated figure and a
longing look on his poor hollow face that make one feel that
the drama we are witnessing is not all comedy. But it is all
supremely interesting to our neighbor, Si’or Pantaleone. He
has been keenly watching the attempted deal, and no doubt
wished that his countryman might succeed. But there was no
element of tragedy in the matter for him, a condition of
semi-starvation is too much an ordinary, every-day and
normal spectacle. He looked on more as a retired merchant
might look on at the progress of a bargain for the delivery
of a shipload of grain. Presently, a middle-aged woman and a
girl of some fourteen years station themselves in front of
the audience seated outside the caffè. The elder
woman has a guitar, and the girl a violin and some sheets of
music in her hand. The woman has her wonderful wealth of
black hair grandly dressed and as shining as oil can make
it. She has large gilt earrings in her ears, a heavy coral
necklace, and a gaudy-colored shawl in good condition.
Whatever might be beneath and below this is in dark
shadow—”et sic melius situm.” She is not starved,
however, for, as she prepares to finger her guitar, she
shows a well-nourished and not ill-formed arm. The young
girl has one of those pale, delicate, oval faces so common
in Venice: she also has a good shawl—an amber-colored
one—which so sets off the olive-colored complexion of
her face as to make her a perfect picture. This couple do
not in any degree assume an attitude of appealing ad
misericordiam. They pose themselves en artistes.
The girl sets about arranging her music in a business-like
way, and then they play the well-known air of “La Stella
Confidente,” the little violinist really playing remarkably
well. Then the elder woman comes round with a little tin
saucer for our contributions. No slightest word or look of
disappointment or displeasure follows the refusal of those
who give nothing. The saucer is presented to each in turn. I
supposed that the application to Si’or Pantaleone was an
empty form. But no. That retired gentleman could still find
wherewithal to patronize the fine arts, and dropped a
centime—the fifth part of a cent—into the dish
with the air of a prince bestowing the grand cross of the
Golden Fleece. Then comes a dealer in ready-made trousers,
which Pantaloon examines curiously and cheapens. Then a body
of men singing part-songs, not badly, but to some
disadvantage, as they utterly ignore the braying of half a
dozen trumpets which are coming along the Riva in advance of
a body of soldiers returning to some neighboring barracks.
Then there are fruit-sellers and fish-sellers and
hot-chestnut dealers, and, most vociferous of all, the
cryers of “Acqua! acqua! acqua fresca!” There, making its
way among the numerous small vessels from Dalmatia, Greece,
etc. moored to the quay of the Schiavoni, comes a boat from
the Peninsular and Oriental steamer, which arrived this
morning from Alexandria, with four or five Orientals on
board. They come on shore, and proceed to saunter along the
Riva toward the Grand Piazza, while their dark faces and
brightly-colored garments add an element to the motley scene
which is perfectly in keeping with old Venetian
reminiscences.

T.A.T.

A NEW MEXICAN CHRISTMAS EVE.

It is Christmas Eve in Albuquerque. Blazing fagots of
mesquite-roots placed on the surrounding adobe walls illuminate
the old church on the plaza. There is a grand baile at
the fonda, to which we and our “family are most respectfully
invited.” The sounds of music
[pg 130] already invite us to the
ball-room. We enter. The floor is full; a hundred couples
are gliding through the graceful “Spanish dance,” or “slow
waltz,” as it is termed here. Not a few blue-and-gold United
States uniforms are to be seen in the throng. A
full-uniformed major-general of volunteers adds the
éclat of his epaulettes to the occasion. The ranchos
have poured in their señoras and señoritas,
and three rows of the dark-eyed creatures sit ranged around
the room.

The Mexican women look their best in a ball-room. Their
black eyes, black hair and white teeth glisten in the light;
they are dressed in the gayest of gay colors; ponderous
ornaments of gold, strongly relieved by their dusk complexions,
shed around them a rich barbaric lustre. Not that they eschew
adventitious means to blanch their sun-shadowed tints. For days
some of the señoras and señoritas have worn a
mask of a white clayey mixture to give them an ephemeral
whiteness for this occasion. Those who could procure nothing
else have worn a pasty vizard kneaded of common clay, to effect
in some degree a like result by protecting their faces from the
sun and wind. Should you visit New Mexico, and as you ride
along slowly in the heat of midday meet a señorita who
gazes at you with a pair of jet black eyes through a hideous,
ghastly mask of mud or mortar, do not be frightened from your
accustomed propriety. The señorita is preparing her
toilette de bal.

The New Mexican women cannot be considered pretty, generally
speaking. In artistic symmetry of feature, in purity of
complexion, they are not to be compared with our countrywomen.
These can bear the searching light of day, when delicacy of
detail can be distinguished and appreciated. Those look their
best in the artificial light of the ball-room. There the
blue-black hair, the brilliant black eyes, the well-traced
eyebrows, the magnificently white and regular teeth, the
richly-developed forms, produce a general effect before which
our blond and delicate beauties seem pale and fades. But
the Mexican’s coarser skin—her teint
basané—is too plainly visible in the light of
the sun: you should see her only by the lamps. It is doubtless
rather from an instinct of coquetry than from any other feeling
that in the day-time the Mexican women shroud their dusky
traits in the folds of their rebosas, leaving only one
pilot eye to look upon the outer world.

No introductions are necessary at the public bailes. Saunter
around the room, inspect the show of expectant partners, and
when you see one who suits your fancy ask her to dance, without
more ado. If she be not engaged she will at once accept your
proffered arm. She will not say anything. Ten to one she will
not breathe a syllable during your evolutions. Conversation is
not the forte of the señoritas. But she will smile and
smile, and you will have no reason to complain of her waltzing.
The Mexican caballero, when he seeks a partner, will not
put himself out so far as to have any words about it. He merely
beckons the chosen one, as the sultan might throw the
handkerchief, and she comes to him at once.

Each dance concluded, you lead your partner to a sort of bar
where refreshments are furnished, and ask her whether she will
take vino or dulces—wine or candies? She
will take dulces—”Gracias, señor!” This is
de rigueur. You pay for them of course, and conduct her
to her seat. She pours the dulces into the awaiting
pocket-handkerchiefs of the old people, her comadres,
and of her younger brothers and sisters.

In a little room adjoining the ball-room, with door
invitingly open, is the shrine of monte. The revelry of
the ball-room is unheeded by the preoccupied votaries of the
changeful deity as they sit around the green table watching the
dealer as he turns the cards, and nervously fingering their
little piles of red or white “chips.” We have no business and
no pleasure here. Let us merely look in and pass on.

Waltzes, “round” and “slow,” are the pièces de
résistance of a Mexican baile: quadrilles are not
relished by the [pg 131] dusky danseuses. There are
some New Mexican dances which do not lack prettiness. Of
these, the Cuna is the most popular. It commences with a
see-saw movement suggestive of its name—cuna- or
cradle-dance. For the rest, the waltz enters much into its
composition.

The orchestra generally consists of one or more violins and
a guitar or two. The New Mexican guitar is strung conversely:
the base-string is where we put the treble, and vice
versâ. The strings are generally struck with the
thumb-nail or with a piece of horn or wood like the ancient
plectrum. This produces a harsh metallic sound, without
any rotundity. Few New Mexican fiddlers or guitar-players are
capable of playing in any time except dancing time, and the
character of the baile, funeral and sacred music is the same.
The only distinction is the addition of a continuous
tremolo to the latter two, which produces the same
unpleasant effect on the nerves as a comic song chanted by the
shaky, cracked, piping and quavering voice of senility. As the
fiddles invariably play their parts in funerals as well as on
festive processions, it requires some familiarity with the
customs of the country to distinguish one from the other. The
music to-night is much better than the ordinary baile music. A
native harpist adds the music of his many strings; and not bad
music either, though he does not know a quaver from a
semibreve, and his harp is of his own manufacture. The
sameness, however, caused by playing always and everything in
the same key is perceptible. But dancing critics are not
disposed to be very severe.

The enjoyment of the evening is at high pressure. The
dancers are swinging, surging, spinning through the Spanish
dance. Everybody who can find a partner and a place on the
floor—there are many who cannot find the latter—is
dancing. It is a gay, a brilliant scene. All is going as
merrily as a whole chime of marriage-bells when a deep and
solemn peal from the church close by breaks in over the music,
the laughter and the dancing. It is midnight! It is the
Noche Buena, and the bell summons the faithful to the
midnight mass. The effect is electric. The last twirl of the
waltz is suspended, half executed. The dancers stop as suddenly
as if they were puppets moved and stilled by the cunning of
some wire-pulling hand. A general rush is made for the church:
in a moment the ball-room is empty. The church is filled as
instantaneously, and the wildly gay dancers of a moment ago are
now kneeling, hushed and down-bent, in devotional
attitudes.

The scene is impressive: the bright ball-toilettes
contrasted in a “dim religious light,” the sudden change of
place and mood, from gay to grave, from ball-room to sanctuary,
strikes a stranger’s eye with thrilling effect. At the
conclusion of the service the dancers return to the ball-room,
to change from grave to gay, and dance ad libitum till
daylight.

J.T.

ENGLISH BIBLE TRANSLATIONS.

The first complete translation of the Bible into our
language was made about the year 1380 by John de Wycliffe, or
Wickliffe. There are several manuscript copies of it in the
Bodleian and other European libraries. This great work unlocked
the Scriptures to the multitude, or, as one of his antagonists,
bewailing such an enterprise, worded it, “the gospel pearl was
cast abroad and trodden under foot.” Long before the appearance
of this translation various versions of portions of the Bible
had appeared, specimens of which, of every century from the
reign of Alfred to Chaucer’s time, are preserved in the British
Museum and elsewhere. Sir Thomas More says: “The Holy Byble was
longe before Wycliffis daies by virtuose and well-learned men
translated into the English tongue, and by good and godly
people with devotion and soberness well and reverently read.”
This statement is further corroborated by Foxe, the
martyrologist, who remarks: “If histories be well examined, we
shall find both before and after the Conquest, as well before
John Wickliffe was borne as since, the whole body of the
Scriptures by sundry men translated into this our country
tongue.” Wycliffe’s Bible was first printed at
[pg 132] Oxford in 1850, previous to
which the New Testament appeared in 1721 and was reprinted
in 1810.

In 1526, William Tyndale completed and published in English
his translation of the New Testament. He also translated and
printed the Pentateuch and the book of Jonah, and was preparing
them for publication when he was put to death in Flanders,
being strangled and burnt for heresy. Tyndale’s translation,
with his latest revisions (1534), was republished in the
English Hexapla in 1841. A copy of his translation of the
Pentateuch which had belonged to Bishop Heber was sold in 1854
for $795. Four years later another copy sold for within twenty
dollars of that amount.

The first English translation of the entire Bible was made
by Miles Coverdale, who afterward became bishop of Exeter, and
was printed in folio in the year 1535. In 1538 a second edition
of Coverdale’s Bible was printed at Paris, but the Inquisition
interfered and committed the whole edition of twenty-five
hundred copies to the flames. No perfect copy of Coverdale’s
version is known to exist, but one lacking the original
title-page and first leaf was sold in 1854 for $1725. Another,
at the Perkins’ sale, in June, 1873, brought $2000.

Two years after the appearance of the first edition of
Coverdale’s Bible, John Rogers, the first martyr in Queen
Mary’s reign, published his version of the Scriptures. He made
some emendations, but the text is chiefly that of Tyndale and
Coverdale. It was printed by Grafton and Whitchurch in 1537,
and the title runs: “The Byble, which is all the holy
Scripture: in which are contayned the Olde and Newe Testament
truely and purely translated into Englysh by Thomas Matthew.”
For safety, Rogers assumed the name of Matthew, whence it is
known as Matthew’s Bible. Seven hundred and fifty dollars have
been paid for a copy.

The third version of the Bible, known as Taverner’s, was
published in 1539. Richard Taverner was a learned man who
published many translations during the sixteenth century. Horne
says of his translation, “This is neither a bare revisal of
Cranmer’s Bible nor a new version, but a kind of intermediate
work, being a correction of what is called ‘Matthew’s
Bible.'”

The first edition of Cranmer’s Bible, the printing of which
was begun in Paris in 1538 and completed in London in
1540—the Inquisition having interposed by imprisoning the
printers and burning the greater part of the
impression—is excessively rare. Cranmer’s Bible—or
the Great Bible, as it was called—is Tyndale’s,
Coverdale’s and Rogers’s translations most carefully revised
throughout. This was the first sound and authorized English
version; and as soon as it was perfected a proclamation was
issued ordering it to be provided for every parish church,
under a penalty of forty shillings a month. A second edition of
Cranmer’s Bible appeared in 1560, a copy of which brought, at a
recent sale in England, the sum of $610.

The Genevan version of the Bible was made by several English
exiles at Geneva in Queen Mary’s reign—viz., Cole,
Coverdale, Gilby, Knox, Sampson, Whittingham and
Woodman—and was first printed in 1560. It went through
fifty editions in the course of thirty years. This translation
was very popular with the Puritan party. In this version the
first division into verses was made. It is commonly known as
the “Breeches Bible,” from the peculiar rendering of Genesis
iii. 7—” breeches of fig-leaves.” To the Geneva Bible we
owe the beautiful phraseology of the admired passage in
Jeremiah viii. 22. Coverdale, Matthew and Taverner render it,
“For there is no more treacle at Gilead?” Cranmer, “Is there no
treason at Gilead?” The Genevan first gave the poetic
rendering, “Is there no balm in Gilead?”

In the year 1568 another translation appeared, which is
indiscriminately known as “Matthew Parker’s Bible,” the
“Bishops’ Bible” and the “Great English Bible.” This version
was undertaken and carried on under the inspection of Matthew
Parker, second Protestant archbishop of Canterbury. Of the
fifteen [pg 133] translators, six were
bishops, hence this edition is often called the Bishops’
Bible, though it is sometimes designated the Great English
Bible, from its being a huge folio volume. In 1569 it was
published in octavo form. There is a well-preserved copy of
the first edition of Matthew Parker’s Bible in the
possession of a gentleman residing in New York City. This
was the authorized version of the Scriptures for forty
years, when it was superseded by our present English
Bible.

The English Roman Catholic College at Rheims issued in the
year 1582 a translation of the New Testament, known as the
“Rhemish New Testament.” It was condemned by the queen of
England, and copies imported into that country were seized and
destroyed. In 1609 the first volume of the Old Testament, and
in the following year the second volume, were published at
Douay, hence ever since known as the Douay Bible. Some years
since Cardinal Wiseman remarked that the names Rhemish and
Douay, as applied to the current editions, are absolute
misnomers. The publishers of the edition chiefly used in this
country state that it is translated from the Latin Vulgate,
“being the edition published by the English College at Rheims
A.D. 1582, and at Douay in 1609, as revised and corrected in
1750, according to the Clementine edition of the Scriptures, by
the Rt. Rev. Richard Challoner, bishop of Debra, with his
annotations for clearing up the principal difficulties of Holy
Writ.”

Theodore Beza translated the New Testament out of the Greek
into the Latin. This was first published in England in 1574,
and afterward frequently. In 1576 it was “Engelished” by
Leonard Tomson, under-secretary to Sir Francis Walsingham, and
was afterward frequently annexed to the Genevan Old Testament.
The following is a copy of the title-page of the New Testament,
verbatim et literatim: “The New Testament of our Lord
Jesus Christ, translated out of Greeke by Theod Beza: with
brief summaries and expositions upon the hard places by the
said authour, Ioach Amer and P Loseler Vallerius.
Engelished by L Tomson. Together with the Annotations of Fr
Junius upon the Revelation of S. John. Imprinted at London
by the Deputies of Christopher Barker, Printer to the Queene’s
Most Excellent Majestie—1599.” The volume opens with a
primitive version of the Psalms in verse, then follow the Old
Testament, the Apocrypha and the New Testament, as in Bibles of
the present day.

The version of the Scriptures now in use among Protestants
was translated by the authority of King James I., and published
in 1611. Fifty-four learned men were appointed to accomplish
the work of revision, but from death or other causes seven of
the number failed to enter upon it. The remaining forty-seven
were ranged under six divisions, different portions of the
Bible being assigned to each division. They entered upon their
task in 1607, and after three years of diligent labor the work
was completed. This version was generally adopted, and the
former translations soon fell into disuse. The authors of King
James’s version of the Bible included the most learned divines
of the day; one of whom was master of Latin, Greek, Hebrew,
Chaldee, Syriac and fifteen modern languages.

Among other rare and highly-coveted editions of the Bible is
one printed in England in the seventeenth century, in which the
important word not was omitted in the seventh
commandment, from which circumstance it has ever since been
known as “The Adulterer’s Bible.” Another edition, known as the
Pearl Bible, appeared about the same time, filled with errata,
a single specimen of which will suffice: “Know ye not the
ungodly shall inherit the kingdom of God?” Bibles were
once printed which affirmed that “all Scripture was profitable
for destruction;” while still another edition of the
sacred volume is known as the “Vinegar Bible,” from the erratum
in the title to the twentieth chapter of St. Luke, in which
“Parable of the Vineyard” is printed “Parable of the
Vinegar.”

J.G.W.

[pg 134]

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

Life and Labours of Mr. Brassey, 1805-1870. By Sir Arthur
Helps, K.C.B. Boston: Roberts Brothers.

The “captains of industry,” who constitute in our day so
distinct and notable a class of worthies, are doubtless as well
entitled to have their achievements recorded and their fame
sounded throughout the lands as were the doughty men of war who
of old were deemed the only fitting heroes of chronicle and
epic. Few of them, however, can hope to have their deeds
commemorated by a “veray parfit, gentle knight”—of the
quill, not of the sword, albeit the letters which he writes
after his name would once have indicated the possession of
military rank and distinction. Sir Arthur Helps is not a man of
few words or of a very stern or passionate temperament. It is
the graces of chivalry, not its fiery ardor, that he cultivates
and reflects, and though “arms and the man” have often been his
theme, the soft and delicate strain was ever more suggestive of
the pastoral pipe than of the bardic lyre. Essayist, historian,
biographer, novelist, he is always intent to smooth away the
asperities of his subject, and, like some stately grandame
enthroned in high-backed chair, he remembers that his simple
auditors are to be not merely entertained by the matter of his
discourse, but impressed by the suave tones and high-bred
prolixity of the speaker. With a dignified courtesy unknown in
these latter times—when biographers and historians do not
scruple to take liberties with their heroes to the extent even
of designating them by nicknames—the subject of the
present memoir is introduced to us as Mr. Brassey, a
form not only adopted on the title-page, but preserved in the
body of the work, where we read that “Mr. Brassey was born
November 7, 1805,” that “Mr. Brassey, at twelve years of age,
went to a school at Chester,” and that, being afterward
articled to a surveyor, “Mr. Brassey was permitted by his
master” to assist in making certain surveys. It is only from a
side whisper to the American public, which is honored with a
preface all to itself, that we are permitted to learn that the
great contractor owned to the Christian name of Thomas. Besides
the two prefaces there is a dedication to the queen, an
introduction telling how Sir Arthur Helps made the acquaintance
of Mr. Brassey and what impressions he received from the
interview, and a preliminary chapter containing a brief outline
of Mr. Brassey’s character as “a man of business;” so that we
get at the substance of the book by a process like that which
in a well-conducted household precedes the carving and
distribution of a Christmas cake, any eagerness we might feel
to “put in a thumb and pull out a plum” being kept in check by
a proper amount of ceremony and tissue-paper.

Plums, however, there are, though not perhaps in full
proportion to the frosted coating, or of just the kind that are
best agglutinated by the biographical dough. Of anecdote or
gossip, glimpses of “life and manners” or personal details,
there is nothing. Nor can we justly take exception to this. On
the contrary, it gives a unity to the subject by excluding
whatever had no relation to the enterprises with which Mr.
Brassey’s name is connected, and which absorbed his time and
thoughts to a degree that can have left him but little
opportunity for intercourse with mankind except in a business
capacity. It is these enterprises—not in their entirety
or with reference to the objects with which they were designed,
but as evidences and illustrations of the working force, mental
and physical, demanded for their execution—that form the
real subject of the book, the matter of which has been chiefly
furnished by the various agents entrusted with the immediate
supervision of the labor and outlay of the capital employed.
The details thus brought together afford perhaps a more vivid
idea of the industrial energy and activity of the nineteenth
century, and of the resources they have called into play, than
could have been obtained from a survey of any other field in
which the like qualities have been displayed. It was chiefly
with railway enterprises, and this almost from their inception,
and to an extent far beyond the rivalry of any other
constructor, that Mr. Brassey was engaged; and the railway
system, not only by its own immense demands on capital, labor
and inventive skill, but still more by the stimulus and aid it
has given to industrial enterprises of every kind, must be
regarded [pg 135] as the main lever of a
material progress that has outstripped the conceptions and
possibilities of all previous ages. With the development of
a system so different in its nature from the great
undertakings of any former period came the need of the
contractor, entrusted with the direction and laden with the
full responsibility of works which no government “boards” or
similar machinery would have been competent to carry through
under the conditions imposed by the novel circumstances of
the movement and the exacting spirit by which it was
impelled. To attain the foremost place in the new career
thus created demanded, obviously, no ordinary
powers—special knowledge of various kinds, equal
facility in mastering details and grasping a general plan,
tact in the choice and management of subordinates, courage
and promptness in encountering unforeseen obstacles and
disasters, and skill and clearheadedness in the general
control of enormous and intricate financial interests. To
these qualities must be added in the present case what is
not so invariably associated with the names of succesful
contractors—a faithfulness and integrity which merited
and received the fullest confidence. Whether working at a
gain or at a loss, Mr. Brassey was ever resolute to execute
his engagements to the letter, and he declined to make
demands for extra compensation when his contracts proved
unprofitable, though it was customary with him to make good
the losses of his sub-contractors. He amassed a colossal
fortune, not through excessive gains, but by a small
profit—”as nearly as possible three per
cent.”—which accrued to him from all his enterprises
taken as a whole, and the accumulations consequent on an
inexpensive mode of life.

The railways constructed by Mr. Brassey, generally in
partnership with some other contractor, between the years 1834
and 1870, comprised between six and seven thousand miles in all
parts of the globe, including Australia and in almost every
civilized country except Russia and the United States. “There
were periods in his career during which he and his partners
were giving employment to 80,000 persons, upon works requiring
£ 17,000,000 of capital for their completion.” Yet a
large part of his time and of the time of his agents was spent
in the investigation of schemes which he either decided not to
undertake or for which he tendered unsuccessfully. It was
necessary at times to transport materials, a large staff of
employés and an army of laborers from one country to
another. In some cases works were prosecuted in regions
occupied or threatened by hostile armies, in others under all
the embarrassments and gloom of a great financial revulsion. In
countries where commercial transactions were usually very
limited the great difficulty was to obtain coin for the payment
of wages, while in others there was the danger of the supply of
labor failing through the enticements of superabundant capital
or the more dazzling temptations of gold-digging. It is
needless to mention the usual accidents and impediments to
which all such undertakings are liable, and which the skill and
ingenuity of the modern engineer never fail to overcome; but it
is certainly not a little remarkable, when the multiplicity of
Mr. Brassey’s contracts is remembered, as well as the early
period from which they date, to find that they were invariably
completed within the specified time.

Personal Reminiscences of Barham, Harness and Hodder.
(Bric-à-Brac Series, edited by Richard Henry Stoddard.)
New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co.

Why we should love so dearly a fresh anecdote of a literary
celebrity, a new quip by Talleyrand, a new stutter of Lamb’s, a
new impertinence of Sheridan’s, may be not hard to understand,
but it is rather hard to defend, any regard being paid to our
dignity. The best stories about that particular line of authors
who have possessed bonhomie and become classic for it
are long since told. What remains is the dregs. Yet the other
day we found ourselves smiling with real delight over a new
“bit” of Cowper. It was merely that his barber, being late with
the poet’s wig, said, “Twill soon be here, it is upon the
road;” and that Cowper had smiled, with a “Very well, William,”
or a “Very fair, Thomas.” The mot, like most of the
stories that crop up now, was not good; it did not exhibit the
author of “John Gilpin” in a brilliant light; it was not even
uttered by the poet—he had merely smiled at it; yet it
had the effect of rekindling the vapid embers about the dear
old hearthstone of Olney, and the shy, gentle creatures that
used to disport there among the hares when nobody was looking
became for a moment more real from the citation. Now, the
question is, What is the superiority of a new piece of gossip
like this, which involves
[pg 136] no witticism and confers no
wisdom, over the next bit of history that will be exchanged
between the heroines of the alley-gate? When Mrs. Jones
tells Mrs. Baker that Mrs. Briggs has delivered a daughter,
and that Mr. Briggs said he had rather she had given him a
wooden leg, the epigram is quite as good as a
Bric-à-Brac anecdote, the people are quite as
worthy as Cowper’s barber, and the effect upon the history
of letters quite as close and important. With this demurrer,
we will apply ourselves for a moment to Mr. Stoddard’s last
collection, which of course we relish as much as anybody. We
could wish that, after discharging his very well-executed
duty of writing the preface, he could find some further time
for elucidating the text. The present book being about three
people, whose memoirs are taken from three volumes, it is
confusing to the reader to find on a page headed “Rogers” or
“Scott” a foot-note about what “my father” said or what “my
friend” remembered, without anything to point out that the
authority is other than Mr. Stoddard’s father or friend.
Other peculiarities, too, suggest that the pretty little
volume is clipped instead of edited: on page 134 we find
that “William, who had lived many years with Hook, grew rich
and saucy. The latter used to assert of him that for the
first three years he was as good a servant as ever came into
a house; for the next two a kind and considerate friend; and
afterward an abominably bad master.” And on page 240, that
when Rogers was condoled with about the death of an
old servant, he exclaimed, “Well, I don’t know that I feel
his loss so much, after all. For the first seven
years he was an obliging servant; for the second
seven years an agreeable companion; but for the last
seven years he was a tyrannical master.” This duality of
epigrams seems to show a discrepancy somewhere; or are we to
believe that the wits of the Regency used to drive their
jokes as hired hacks, like the livery carriages employed by
faded dowagers in Hampton Court? The rest of the little book
is perhaps free from duplicates. It is a good one to turn
over for an hour in the cars, which is perhaps all it claims
to be. The anecdotes are good old familiar anecdotes, but it
is pleasant to have them strung on a thread. We are reminded
that the original Bride of Lammermoor was a Miss Dalrymple;
that the “laughing Tom” of Thackeray’s “Ballad of
Bouillabaise” was Thomas Frazer, Paris correspondent of the
Morning Chronicle; that the dramatist of Nicholas
Nickleby, so savagely assaulted by Dickens in the course
of the work, was a Mr. Moncrief, who would never have
prepared the story for the stage if Dickens had intimated
his objection.

Books Received.

The American Educational Annual: A Reference Book for all
matters pertaining to Education. Vol. I., 1875. New York: J.W.
Schermerhorn & Co.

The Song-Fountain: A Vocal Music-book. By Wm. Tillinghast
& D.P. Horton. New York: J.W. Schermerhorn & Co.

My. Sister Jennie: A Novel. By George Sand. Translated by
T.S. Crocker. Boston: Roberts Brothers.

Democracy and Monarchy in France. By Charles Kendall Adams.
New York: Henry Holt & Co.

Egypt and Iceland in the year 1874. By Bayard Taylor. New
York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons.

Elements of Geometry. By W.H.H. Phillips, Ph. D. New York:
J.W. Schermerhorn & Co.

The Old Woman who Lived in a Shoe. By Amanda M. Duglas.
Boston: William F. Gill & Co.

The Lily and the Cross: A Tale of Acadia. By Prof. James De
Mille. Boston: Lee & Shepard.

Alleged Discrepancies of the Bible. By John W. Haley, M.A.
Andover: Warren F. Draper.

History of the United States. By George Bancroft. Vol. X.
Boston: Little, Brown & Co.

Roddy’s Romance. By Helen Kendrick Johnson. New York: G.P.
Putnam’s Sons.

My Life on the Plains. By Gen. G.A. Custer, U.S.A. New York:
Sheldon & Co.

American Wild-Fowl Shooting. By Joseph W. Long. New York:
J.B. Ford & Co.

Hazel-Blossoms. By John Greenleaf Whittier. Boston: James R.
Osgood & Co.

Losing to Win: A Novel. By Theodore Davies. New York:
Sheldon & Co.

Linley Rochford: A Novel. By Justin McCarthy. New York:
Sheldon & Co.

A First Book in German. By Dr. Emil Otto. New York: Henry
Holt & Co.

What of the Churches and Clergy? Springfield, Mass: D.E.
Fisk & Co.

Footnote 1:
(return)
The Pilgrimage of the Tiber, by Wm. Davies.

Footnote 2:
(return)
Com’ io fui dentro, in un bogliente vetro
Gittato mi sarei per rinfrescarmi,
Tant’ era ivi lo’ncendio senza metro.
Del Purgatorio, xxvii. 49.

LIPPINCOTT’S MAGAZINE

OF

POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE.

January, 1875. Vol. XV. No. 85.

PHILADELPHIA: J. B. LIPPINCOTT AND CO.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE NEW HYPERION.

FROM PARIS TO MARLY BY WAY OF THE RHINE.

XIX.—TYING UP THE CLEWS.

CONCLUSION.

FOLLOWING THE TIBER.

TWO PAPERS.—1.

THE PARADOX.

A NIGHT AT COCKHOOLET CASTLE.

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

THE LEADEN ARROW.

TWO MIRRORS.

MALCOLM.

BY GEORGE MACDONALD, AUTHOR OF “ANNALS OF A QUIET NEIGHBORHOOD,” “ROBERT FALCONER,” ETC.

CHAPTER LXIV.

THE LAIRD AND HIS MOTHER.

CHAPTER LXV.

THE LAIRD’S VISION.

CHAPTER LXVI.

THE CRY FROM THE CHAMBER.

CHAPTER LXVII.

FEET OF WOOL.

CHAPTER LXVIII.

HANDS OF IRON.

CHAPTER LXIX.

THE MARQUIS AND THE SCHOOLMASTER.

CHAPTER LXX.

END OR BEGINNING?

THE STAGE IN ITALY.

THREE FEATHERS.

BY WILLIAM BLACK, AUTHOR OF “A PRINCESS OF THULE.”

CHAPTER XX.

TINTAGEL’S WALLS.

CHAPTER XXI.

CONFESSION.

CHAPTER XXII.

ON WINGS OF HOPE.

ON THE VIA SAN BASILIO.

A CHRISTMAS HYMN.

THE PARSEES.

OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.

A SWEDISH PROVINCIAL THEATRE.

VENETIAN CAFFÈS.

A NEW MEXICAN CHRISTMAS EVE.

ENGLISH BIBLE TRANSLATIONS.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

Books Received.

January, 1875.
Vol. XV. No. 85.

PHILADELPHIA:
J. B. LIPPINCOTT AND CO.

BY GEORGE MACDONALD, AUTHOR OF “ANNALS OF A QUIET
NEIGHBORHOOD,” “ROBERT FALCONER,” ETC.