Chatto & Windus. Piccadilly ROWLAND of exotic oils, beauty, or restc corded by Testi authorities. 3 r ROWLAND the Teeth, preve It is a patent ir Ask any Che> Manuscript, Archives, and Rare book Library EMORY UNIVERSITY SEVEN PRIZE MEDALS AWARDED. COQDALL'S HOUSEHOLD SPECIALITIES. A Single Trial solicited from those who have not yet tried these Splendid Preparations. GOODALL'S YORKSHIRE RELISH. THE MOST DELICIOUS SAUCE IN THE WORLD. This cheap and excellent Sauce makes the plainest viands palatable, and the daintiest dishes more delicious. To Chops, Steaks, Fish, &c., it is incomparable. Sold by Grocers, Oil- men, Chemists, &c., in Bottles at 6d., is., and 2s. each. Prepared by Goodall, Backhouse & Co., Leeds. GOODALL'S BAKING POWDER. THE BEST IN THE WORLD. Indispensable to every household, and a boon to all house- wives. Makes delicious Puddings without eggs, Pastry without butter, and beautiful light Bread without yeast. Sold by Grocers, Oilmen, Chemists, &c., in id. Packets, 6d., is., 2s., and 5^. Tins. Prepared by Goodall, Backhouse, and Co., Leeds. GOODALL'S QUININE WINE. The Best, Cheapest, and most Agreeable Tonic yet introduced. The best remedy known for Indigestion, Loss of Appetite, General Debility, &c., &c. Restores delicate individuals to health and vigour. Sold by Chemists, Grocers, &c., at i.r., ij. i\d., 2s., and 2s. 3d. each Bottle. Prepared by Goodall, Backhouse & Co., Leeds. GOODALL'S CUSTARD POWDER. For making Delicious Custards without '. and at Half the Price. i time, Unequalled for the purposes intended. Will give the ut- most satisfaction if the instructions given are implicitly followed. The proprietors entertain the greatest confidence in the article, and can recommend it to housekeepers generally as a useful agent in the preparation of a good Custard. Give it a Trial. Sold in Boxes, 6d. and is. each, by Grocers, Chemists, Italian Warehousemen, &c. prepared by GOODALL, BACKHOUSE & CO., White Horse StrLEEDS. LAMPLOUGH'S EFFERVESCING PYRETIC SALINE Proved to be the best preventive of Smallpox and Fevers, It is the most agreeable, vitalizing, and refreshing of all Salines, gives instant relief in Headache, Sea or Bilious Sickness, and quickly cures the worst forms of Eruptions or Skin Complaints. _ The various dis- eases arising from Constipation, Climatic Influences, the Liver or Blood Impurities, Inoculation, the re- suits of breathing air infected with Fevers, Measles, or Small-pox, are cured and prevented by its use. Taken as a Morning or Evening Draught it is most agreeable, invigorating, and cooling ; it removes Bilious Affections, Heartburn and Acid Eructations in a marvellous manner. " It will cure the worst form of Ordinary or Sick Headache in Ten Minutes." Dr. Prout characterises its discovery as "unfolding germs of immense benefit to mankind." The late Dr. Turley states in a letter that in the worst cases of " Scarlec and Typhus Fevers, he found it in his experience and family to act as a specific, no other medicine being required." Important to Travellers, English Ministers, British Consuls, and Europeans seek' ing to reside in safety in Tropical and Foreign Climates.—Her Majesty's Representa- tive, the Governor of Sierra Leone, in a letter of request for an additional supply of the Pyretic Saline, states:—" It is of great value, and I shall rejoice to hear it is in the hands of all Europeans visiting the Tropics." Sickness, Headache and Nausea, are in most cases immediately relieved by taking a teaspoonful in a tumbler of cold water. This can be repeated once or twice in two hours, if needful. • Sea Voyages.—It is a very valuable accompaniment, and should on no account be omitted ; it instantly allays the sickness. For Bilious Constitutions, giving rise to vitiated Secretions, Indigestion, and Erup- tions on the Skin, a teaspoonful should be taken daily with dinner, in a tumbler of water, and the same quantity on going to bed. In Measles, Scarlet, Typhus, fungle, or Gastric Fevers, and Eruptive DiseasesI it should be given in teaspoonful doses every four hours, in a glass half full of water, or with an increased quantity of water if the patient suffers from thirst. If accompanied with sore throat or enlarged glands, well rub into the part strong hartshorn and oil until redness is produced.—"The late Dr. Turley, of Worcester, stated he found this Saline a specific in these diseases, no other medicine being required. Persons at a distance from medical aid would do well to have such simple remedies by them."—Illustrated News of the World. This Saline has been found successful in every instance in which it has been used. Heartburn and Inward Fever.—One teaspoonful should be taken in half a glass of water, and repeated if needful. P A TTTTON Olher Salines being placed before the public, merely with the words vaIU J.XUJ.M ■ 0f my label transposed, which do not contain any of the health-restor- ing elements of Lamplough's Pyretic Saline, it is of the utmost importance that my Name and Trade Mark on a buff-coloured Wrapper should accompany each bottle, on which dependence alone can be placed. Sold by aU Chemists, in Patent glass-stoppered Bottles, 2/6, 4/6, 11/- and 21/- each. LAMPLOUGH'S CONCENTRATED LIME JUICE SYRUP. From the Fresh Fruit, as imported for the Hospitals ; a perfect luxury ; forms, with the addition of Pyretic Saline, a most delicious and invigorating beverage, particularly for Total Abstainers, the Delicate, and Invalids; of special service in Scrofula, Fevers and Kkeumatism, and a low or altered condition of the system. Most Chemists sell the above with the Pyretic Saline. In Patent glass-stoppered Bottles; at a/- and 4/6 each. Have them in your Houses to secure these advantages. Notice my Trade Mark and Name. H. LAMPLOUGH, 113, HOLBORN HILL, LONDON, E.Q. CHANDOS. CHEAP EDITIONS OF POPULAR NOVELS. Uniform with the present volume, j Ready-Money Mortiboy. By Walter liesant and James Rice. The Golden Butterfly. By W. Besant and J. ltice. With Harp and Crown. By W. Besant and J. Bice. This Son of Vulcan. By W. Besant and J. Rice. My Little Girl. By Besant and Rice. The Case of Mr. Lucraft. By W. Besant and J. Rice. An Heiress of Red Dog. By Bret Harte. Surly Tim. By F..E. Burnett. Antonina. By Wilkie Collins. Basil. By Wilkie Collins. Hide and Seek: or, The Mystery of Mary Grice. By Wilkie Collins. The Dead Secret. By Wilkie Collins. Q aeen of Hearts. By Wilkie Collins. My Miscellanies. By Wilkie Collins. The Woman in White, By Wilkie Collins. The Moonstone. By Wilkie Collins. Man and Wife. By Wilkie Collins. Poor Miss Pinch. By Wilkie Collins. Miss or Mrs ? By Wilkie Collins. The New Magdalen. By Wilkie Collins. The Frozen Deep. By Wilkie Collins. The Law and the Lady. By Wilkie Collins. The Two Destinies. By Wilkie Collins, Felicia. By M. Bethatn-Edwards. Boxy. By Edward Eggleston. Filthy Lucre. By Albany de Fonblanque. Olympia. By R. E. Franciilon. Dick Temple. By James Greenwood. Under the Greenwood Tree. By 'l'homas Hardy. Fated to be Free. By Jean Ingclow. The Queen of Connaught. By Harriett Jay. ' but he had his own rooms in town, in a quiet street near the clubs. He liked to retain a distinct personality. Besides, people came to see him here who could never have shown themselves before the porter of the great leader of fashion; men with bulldog heads and close-cut hair, known as "sporting gents;" men with the glance of a ferret and the jewellery of Burlington Arcade, utterly and un- A Prime Minister at Home. 2 7 mistakably "horsy;" men who always had " a lovely thing close by in the mews,—go in your 'and, and only thirty sovs.," to sell, but who traded in many things besides toy terriers; men very soberly dressed, hard-featured, hard-headed members of trades- unions; men with long floating beards, the look of Burschen, and "artist" written on them for those who ran to read, without the paint-splashes on their coats; men with clean-shaven faces or white pointed beards, but, shaven or hirsute, Israelites to the bone : all these varieties, and many more came to see Trevenna, who could never have gone into the hall of the fastidious and patrician Chandos. On the surface, Trevenna had but one set of Mends, his aristo- cratic acquaintances of the clubs and the Clarendon dinners; sub rosa, this bright Bohemian was thoroughly versed in every phase and, indeed, every sink of London life and of human nature. It was "his way" to know everybody,—it might be of use some day; he went now—in the same spirit of restless activity and indomitable perseverance which had made him as a boy ask the meaning of every machine and the tricks of every trade that he passed—to the probing of every problem and the cementing of every brick in life. The multitudes whom he know were countless; the histories he had fathomed were unrecordable. Men were the pawns, knights, bishops, and castles of Trevenna's chess, and he set himself to win the game with them, never neglecting the smallest, for a pawn sometimes gives checkmate. Trevenna sat now at breakfast early in the morning,—half-past eight, indeed,—though he had not been in bed until four. He slept the sound, sweet, peaceful sleep of a child, and very little of that profound repose sufficed for him. His rooms were scrupulously neat, but bare of everything approaching art or decoration; Chandos could not have lived a day in them, if he had been a poor man; condemned to them, he would have hung an engraving here, or a cast from the antique there, that would have gone some way to redeem them in their useful ugliness. Trevenna was utterly indif- ferent to that ugliness; as far as his eyes went, he would have been as happy in a garret as in a palace. His breakfast was only coffee and a chop; he exercised the strictest economy in his life. It was not, to be sure, very painful to him ; for he had the run of all the wealthiest houses in England, and wa s welcomed to every table. Still, it was significant of the man that, well as he liked all gourmets' delicacies, he never by any chance squandered money on them, and if he had to go without them from year's end to year's end, never would have done. Naturally he was very self-indulgent, but he had schooled himself into consider- able control. The coffee was something rough, the chop was something tough, —English cookery pure; but Trevenna, who would know to a T what was wanting in the flavour of a white sauce at the best club in Pall Mall, and who could appreciate every finest shade in the most masterly art of the Park Lane chef, took both chop and coffee with- out a murmur. In the first place, he had the good appetite of a 28 Chancier- thoroughly healthy and vigorous constitution; in the_ second, he would compensate himself by the daintiest and most delicious of noon dejeuners at Chandos' house. While he ate and drank he was looking at some memoranda, and talking to a man before him,—a man who stood before him as an inferior before his employer; a tall man, lean, venerable, saturnine, with iron-grey hair that floated on his shoulders like a patriarch, and down his chest in a waving beard,—a man in his sixtieth year, with his shoulders a little bowed, and his hands lightly clasped m front of him. This was Ignatius Mathias, of the firm of Tindall & Co., which firm was well known Citywards, in a little, dark, crooked, stifling lane, where their dusky, sullen-looking, rickety door was only too familiar to men in the Guards, men in Middle Temple, men in the Commons, and men in nothing at all but a fashionable reputation and a cloud of debts. Tindall & Co. dealt in damaged paper chiefly; they bought up most of the awkward things that floated in the market, and, it was said, were making a great deal of money. This was but guess-work, however, for the little grimy den of an office told no secrets, however many it guarded; and who was Tindall, and who were Co., was a thing never known; the only person ever seen, ever found there as responsible, was Ignatius Mathias, a Castilian Jew, and most people considered that he was the Firm; they never were surer on this point than when he shook his head gravely and said he " could but act on his instructions; his principal had been very positive : his principal could not wait." But, be this as it might, Ignatius Mathias was no common Jew lender; he never sought to palm off a miserable home-smoked Bembrandt, a cracked violin christened a Straduaiius, or a case of wretched marsala called madeira, on a customer. Tindall & Co. had none of these tricks; they simply did business, and if they did it in a very severe manner, if when they had sucked their orange dry they threw the peel away, something cruelly, into the mud, they still only did business thoroughly legitimately, thoroughly strictly. Their customers might curse them with terrible bitter- ness, as the head and root of their destruction, but they could never legally complain of them. " Sit down, Mathias; sit down, and pour yourself out a cup of coffee," said Trevenna. " I'll run my eyes through these papers; and when you have drunk your coffee, be able to account me the receipts of the month. I know what they should be; we'll see what they are." "You will find them correct, sir," said Mathias, meekly; " and I need no coffee, I thank you." Neither did he take the proffered seat; he remained standing, his dark brooding eyes dwelling on the parchment-bound receipt- book open before him. The papers supplied the sauce which was wanting to Trevenna's underdone mutton; as he glanced through them, his humorous lips laughed silently every now and then, and his light-blue, cloud- less, dauntless eyes sparkled with a suppressed amusement. These A Prime Minister at Home. 29 paperb, and their like, brought him as keen a pleasure and excita- tion as other men find in a fox-hunt or a deer-drive ; it was tha rhase, and without the fatigue of dashing over bullfinches or watching in sloppy weather for the quarry; it was a lattae into which all the game was driven ready to hand,—through and through under the fire of the guns. The beaters had all the trouble; the marksman all the sport. "Chittenden:—dined with him at the Star and Garter last Thursday: we'll soon stop those dinners, my boy. Bertie Braba- zon:—oh! he's going to be married to the Bosefleck heiress: better let him alone. Grey Grceme:—who would have thought of his being in Queer Street ? Jemmy Haughton:—little fellow,—bar- rister,—got a bishop for an uncle,—bishop will bleed,—won't see him screwed; Church hates scandals,—especially when it's in lawn sleeves. Talbot O'Moore—Wareley—Belminster Yery good,— very good," murmured Trevenna over details of paper floating about town, that those whom it otherwise concerned would have rather characterised, on the contrary, as very bad. He meditated a little while over the memoranda,—amused meditation that washed down the flavourless coarseness of his breakfast; then he thrust his breakfast-cup awry, pocketed the lists, and went steadily to business. Not that he looked grave, dull, or absorbed even in that; he was simply bright, intelligent, and alert, as he was in a ducal smoking-room, but Ignatius Mathias knew that those saga- cious, sparkling glances would have discovered the minutest flaw in his finance, and that the man who listened so lightly, with a briar-wood pipe between his lips, and his _ elbows resting on the mantel-piece, would have been down on him like lightning at the slightest attempt to blind or to cheat one who was keener oven than that keen Israelite. "All right," said Trevenna, as, having come to the completion of his monthly accounts, the Portuguese closed his book and waited for instructions. Trevenna never wasted words over business, rapidly as he chatted over dinner-tables and in club-rooms; and Ignatius and he understood each other. " You take care to keep Tindall & Co. dark, eh ? " "Every care, sir." " Encourage them to think you Tindall & Co. by the charming and expressive character of your denial, your inflexible austerity, your constant references to your principal. The more you refer to him, you know, the more they'll be sure that he doesn't exist. Everybody takes it for granted that a Jew lies." There was a cheerful, easy serenity in the tone, as though utter-1 ing the pleasantest compliment possible, that made them sound al? the more cutting, all the more heartless; yet they were spoken with such happy indifference. The Jew's dark and hollow cheek flushed slightly : he bent his head. "I observe all your commands, sir." " Of course you do," said Trevenna, carelessly. "The first you disobey will set the police after Young Hopeful. Tell him it's no 30 C?7iurid*)S.' use to hide: I know he's at that miserable little Black Purest village now. lie may just as well come and wnlk about London, lie can't escape me. When I want him, I shall put my hand on him if he buries himself under a Brazilian forest; you know that. A change came over the unmoyable, impassive form of the Cas- tiiian,—a change that shook him suddenly from head to foot, as a reed trembles in the wind. "What little blood there was in his dark, worn face forsook it; a look of hunted and terrible anguish came into his eyes. With the long-suffering patience of his race, no out- burst of passion or of entreaty escaped mm; but his lips were dry as bones as he murmured faintly, "Sir, sir, be merciful! I serve faithfully; I will give my body night and day to redeem the lad's sin." Trevenna laughed lightly. " That's the compact. Keep it, and I don't touch the boy," ho said curtly. " You are very good, sir." " You may go now," said Trevenna, with a nod. " You know what to do in all cases; and don't forget to put the screw on to Potheringay at once. The next time come a little earlier,—seven or so; if I'm in bed, I'll see you. It's rather dangerous when people are about; your visits might get blown on. All my people—the dainty gentlemen—are never up till noonday, it's true ; but their servants might be about. At all events, ' safe bind, safe find.' They might wonder what I borrowed money of you for; it would hurt my cha- racter." He laughed gaily and merrily over the words; they tickled his fancy. The Jew bowed reverentially to him, gathered up his papers, and left the room. " The best organisations are sure to have a flaw," thought Tre- venna, leaning there still with his elbows on the mantel-piece, smoking meditatively. "Now, there is that Jew; marvellous clever fellow, shrewd, got head enough to be a finance-minister; grind a man as well as anybody can; take you in most neatly; a magnificent machine altogether for cheating, and hard as a flint; and yet that Jew's such a fool over his worthless young rascal of a son that you can turn him round your finger through it. There he's as soft as an idiot and as blind as a bat. Incomprehensible that a man can let such trash creep into him ! It's very odd, men have so many weaknesses; I don't think I've got one." He had one; but, like most men, he did not imagine it was weakness, and in truth it was not a very tender one, though it was very dominant "Not at home to all the dukes in the world, my dear, til] twelve," said he, as the maid-servant of his lodgings (he kept no man-servant of any kind, except a miniature tiger to hang on behind his tilbury) cleared away the breakfast-service. That done, Trevenna sat down to a table strewn with blue-books, books on political economy, books on population and taxation, books on government, books English, Prench, German, and American, aU tending to the same direction of study. A Frime Minister at Home. 31 He certainly did not need to ponder over the statistics of nations to conduct his affairs with Ignatius Mathias, however intricate they were, and he had received every benefit that a first-rate educa- tion can confer. But he was one of those wise men who remember that the longest and most learned life, spent aright, never ceases to learn till its last breath is drawn; and, moreover, far away in limitless perspective in Trevenna's ambitions lay an arena where the victory is not to the strong, nor the race to the swift, but to the ablest tactician in such rare instances as it departs from the hercdi- tary winners,—an arena where adventurers are excluded as utterly as men of the foreign states, though they were princes, were ex- eluded from the games of Elis. So for three hours and a half that idle, gossiping flaneur, that town-jester whom the town called Chandos' Chicot, plunged himself deep into political subtleties, and the science of statecraft, and the close logic of finance, bringing to their problems a head which grew only clearer the tougher tho problem it clenched, the deeper the ground it explored. Hard study was as thorough a revelry to Trevenna as plunging into the cool, living water is to a great swimmer. Like the swimmer, his heart beat joyously as he dived only to rise again the fresher and the bolder. Like the swimmer, his soul rose triumphant as he felt and he measured his strength. Twelve struck. He, who was as punctual as if he were made by clockwork, got up, changed his dress in ten minutes, and rang for his tilbury to be brought round. " I will indemnify myself for my ascetic chop in Park Lane, but I will see how the wind is blowing for Sir Galahad at the Corner first," thought Trevenna; and thither he went. The mid-day betting was eager, for it was within a month of the Ascot week. "The gentlemen" were barely out yet; but the book-makers were mustered in full force, from the small specu- lators, who usually did a little quiet business only in trotting- matches and quiet handicaps, to the great gamblers of the ring, who took noblemen's odds in thousands, and netted as much in lucky hits as those other great gamblers of the 'Change and the Bourse whom a world that frowns on the Heath smiles on so benignly when they are successful. All the vast genus, flashy, slangy, sharp as needles, with a language of their own, a literature of their own, a world of their own, whom marquises and earls are eagerly familiar with in the levelling atmosphere of the Lawn and the Downs, and give a distant frigid nod to, at the uttermost, if they pass them in Piccadilly, were there; and amidst them, in the terrific babel of raised voices, Trevenna pushed his way,—as he pushed it everywhere. Sir Galahad was higher than ever in public favour. All the shrewdest men were afraid to touch him. The Clarencieux stables had been famous since the Eegency. Trevenna bet but very little usually, he was known to have but little money to risk; but men were eager to have his opinion of the favourite. None had such opportunities of telling to a nicety the points, powers, stay, and " >Chandos, pace of the Clarencieux horse in its prime. He gaye the opinion frankly enough. Sir Galahad "was the finest horse of the year, and to his mind would all but walk over the course. The opinion went for a great deal, especially from one who was a master of stable- science, but who was no betting man himself. He had laid heavy bets in Chandos' name, backing the favourite for considerable sums so long as any could be found rash enough to take them. There was one little, spare, red-wigged, foxy, quiet man who offered bets on a chestnut—Diadem, an outsider, unknown and unnoticed, generally looked on by the touts as fiddle-headed and weedy. The colt had trained in an obscure stable northward, and was a " colt" only to his breeders and owners in familiar parlance, having been known as a Plater in northern autumn-meetings, though having earned no sort of renown anywhere. When Trevenna left Tattersall's, this little leg, a wom-out, shat- tered creature, who had ruined himself over one St. Leger and collapsed under it, was walking slowly out in the sun, having backed nothing except this ill-conditioned colt. Trevenna paused a second by him: "Drop Diadem's name, or they'll be smelling a rat," he mur- mured. " Take the field against the favourite with any fools you like, as widely as you can." " Wonderfully dark we have kept that chestnut. He's so ugly ! that's the treasure of him; and we've trained him so close, and roped him so cleverly, that the sharpest tout that ever lay in a ditch all night to catch a morning gallop doesn't guess what that precious awkward-looking brute can do," thought Trevenna, as he got into his tilbury. And he went to eat a second breakfast with Chandos. CHAPTEE IV. the queen" of lilies. Lady Valencia St. Albans stood beside one of the palms in the conservatory of her sister Lady Chesterton's house. It was the day of the Drawing-Eoom; she waited for her sister, with her white train carelessly caught over one arm, and a shower of lace and silk filling to the ground and trailing there in a perfumy billowy cloud. She was a_ picture perfect as the eye could ask or the heart could conceive in the glowing colours of the blossoms round; and a painter would have given her to his canvas as the Ordella or the Evadne of Eletcher's dramas in all their sweet and delicate grace, or, if passion could pass over those luminous, thoughtful eyes, as Vittoria Corrombona in her royal and imperious beauty. Passion had never troubled their stillness as yet. Some touch of calamity had indeed cast a shadow on her; the pressure of im- providence and of impoverishment had sent her father to the Eoman air that sbe had breathed so long, and his decease had left her, for The Queen of Lilies. 33 an earl's daughter, almost penniless, while his title and estates had passed away to a distant heir male. Her poverty was bitter, terribly bitter, to the Queen of Lilies, daughter of the once splendid house of Ivors. She was little better than dependent on the gene- rosity of her brother-in-law, Lord Chesterton, and the nature in her was born for the magnificence of dominion, the consciousness of inalienable power. She stood now under the curled, hanging loaves of the palms, their pale Eastern green contrasting, as though she had been posed there by a painter's skill, with the exquisite colouring of her own beauty, and the snowy, trailing robes that fell about her. Of that beauty she was too proud to be vain; she was simply conscious of it as an empress is conscious of the extent of the sway of her sceptre. " We're rather early," said her sister, a brusque, abrupt, showy woman. " Who sent you those flowers ? Clydesmore ? Admirable person, very admirable; great pity he's such a bore. How well you look, Valencia! On ne pouvait mieux. Chandos will be at the palace, you know, this morning." " Are you sure P" "Perfectly. He is everywhere. It is the most difficult thing to secure his presence at any time. He is so fastidious, too ! He has sent me a most courtly note, however. I wrote to say you had just arrived from Eome, and that I would bring you with me to his ball to-night; and there is his answer. It is an immense deal from him!" Lady Valencia took the white, scented paper her sister tossed to her, and a faint, gratified flush passed over the pure fairness of her face; her lips parted with a slight smile. She had heard so much of the writer—of his fame, of his conquests, of his homage to beauty, of his omnipotence in fashion. " He is very rich, is he not ?" "Bich!" said Lady Chesterton. "A thousand men are rich; money's made so fast in these days. Chandos is very much more than only rich. He could make us all eat acorns and drink cider, if he chose to set the fashion of it. He rules the ton entirely, and lives far more en roi than some royalties we know." "Yes; I heard that in Borne. Men spoke of being 'friends with Chandos,' as they might speak of being invited to the court." " Chandos gives much greater fashion than the palace ever confers. Bores and parvenus go there, but they never visit him" responded Lady Chesterton, with an impressive accentuation almost thrilling. "Nothing will ever make him marry, you know. He would hold it in absolute horror. The Princess Marie of Albe is terribly in love with him—almost dying, they say; very beautiful creature, she is too, and would bring a magnificent dower." The Lily Queen smiled slightly, her thoughtful, half-haughty smile. She knew, as though they were uttered aloud, the motives of her sister's little detour into this little sketch of sentiment. "With so much distinction, he could be raised to the peerage any day, of course ?" she inquired, half absently, drawing to her D d+ the deep purple bells of an Oriental plant. She declined to pursue the more poetic track, yet she looked a poem herself. " Raised!" echoed her sister. " My dear, he would call it any- thing but raised The Chandos were Marquises of Clarencieux, you remember, until the title was attaindered in the Forty-Rive. Philip Chandos, the premier, could have had it restored at any time, of course; but he invariably declined. Ernest Chandos is like his father; he would not accept a peerage." " Not a new one. But he might revive his own." " He might, of course; nothing would be refused to him; they would be glad to have him in the Lords. But he has often replied that, like his father, he declines it. He has some peculiar notions, you know; there has been some oath or other taken in the family, I believe, about it—great nonsense, of course—utter Quixotism. But men of genius are Quixotic: it never does to contradict them. They are like that mare of mine, Million: give them their head, and they will be sweet-tempered enough—take you over some very queer places sometimes, to be sure, but still tolerably even goers; but once give them a check, they rear and throw you directly. I never disagree with authors, any more than with maniacs." With which expression of her compassionate consideration for genius, Lady Chesterton, who was very well known across the grass-countries and with the buckhounds, shook out her violet velvets and black Spanish laces, well content with the warning she had adroitly conveyed to her sister never to disagree with the eminent leader of society, whom women idolised as they idolised Jermyn and Grammont in the splendid days of Hampton Court. The Queen of Lilies did not answer; she stood silent, looking still at the note she held, as though the paper could tell her of its writer, while her other hand ruthlessly drew the purple bells of the flower down in a shower at her feet. " Is he so much spoilt, then P Can he not bear contradiction P " she said at length. My dear, he has never tried it," retorted her sister, with some petulance. "Bear it! of course he would bear it: he is the first gentleman in Europe: but the woman who teased him with it would never see him again. He is so used to being followed, he would not know what it was to be oj>posed. He is the most grace- ful, the most brilliant, the most generous person in the world: at the same time he is the most diiiicult to please. Guess, yourself, whether a man whose ideal is Lucrece is very likely to be easily enslaved. But it is time to go." And having cast that arrow to hit her sister's vanity or pique her pride, as it might happen, Lady Chesterton floated out of the drawing-rooms, followed by the Lily Queen, who laid the note down with a lingering farewell glance as she swept away. She had heard much of its writer some years past in Rome, although they had never met; and she had seen his eyes give her an eloquent mute homage the night before—eyes that it was said looked on no woman without awakening love. 1 he Queen of Lilies. 35 "How beautiful his face is!" she thought, recalling the night just passed, and that momentary glance of one long famous°to her by reputation. " Lord Clarencieux—Marquis of Clarencieux: —it is a fine title." "Going to the Drawing-Roomp" said Treyenna, entering one of the morning-rooms in Park Lane to take his meditated second breakfast. Cliandos was taking his first, the chamber scented and chaded, and cooled with rose-water, and his attendants, Georgian and Circassian girls he had bought in the East and appointed to his household. The world had been a little scandalised at those lovely slaves; but Chandos had soon converted his friends to his own views regarding them. "Why have men to wait on you," he had argued, " when you can have women—soft of foot, soft of voice, and charming to look at? To take your chocolate from James or Adolphe is no gratification at all; to take it from Leila or Zelma is a great one." And his pretty Easterns were certainly irresistible living proofs of the force of his arguments. They were fluttering about him now with silver trays of coffee, sweetmeats, liqueurs, and fruit, dressed in their Oriental costume, and serving him with most loving obedience. A Erench duke and two or three Guardsmen were breakfasting with him, playing a lansquenet at noon, from which they had just risen. Men were very fond of coming to take a cup of chocolate from those charming young odalisques. " Curds at noon, Chandos P" cried Trevenna, as he sauntered in the room, regardless alike of the presence of fashionable men who looked coldly on him, and of the charms of the Turkish attendants. " Eie ! fie! The only legitimate gaming before dinner is the sane- tioned and sanctified swindling done upon 'Change." "Businessis holier than pleasure, I suppose," laughed Chandos. "Business ruins a host of others; pleasure only ruins yourself: of course the world legitimates the first. How are you to-day P Yes, I am going to the Drawing-Room; I am going to see the Queen of Lilies. I will endure the crush and ennui of St. James's for her. Take something to eat, Trevennq, ?" "All too light and too late for me. I'm a John Bull," said Trevenna, taking a glass of cura9oa, nevertheless, with some Strasbourg pate. "Have you heard the last news of Lady Caral- lynne ?" " No. Gone off with poor Bodon ? " "Precisely. Went off with him from Lillingstone House last night. Never missed till just now. Carallynne's started in pursuit, swearing to shoot poor Bo dead. Dare say he will, too: ' bon sang ne peut mentir;' it must break the criminal law rather than break its word." " Hard upon Bo," murmured Cosmo Grenvil of the Coldstreams. " She made such fast running on him, and a fellow can't always say no." " Well, the mischief's her mother's fault; she made her marry a man she hated," said Chandos, drawing one of the bright braids 36 Chandos. of the Circassian near him through his hand. "Poor Car! he is quite d Vantique: that sort of revenge has gone out with hair- powder, highwaymen, patches, and cock-fighting." "Beauty of a commercial age: we can turn damaged honou and broken carriage-panels into money, nowadays, ' said ire- Venn a. " Carallynne's rococo. Liberty all, say I. If w"e rulis away with a penniless hussar, why the deuce am 1 to ma -e a fuss about it ? I think I should be the gainer far and away. _ "Noblesse oblige," said Grenvil, softly. "Car don t like his name stained; Old-World prejudice; great bosh, ot oourse, ^and Mr. Trevenna can't understand the weakness—very naturally. " Mr. Trevenna doesn't understand it, Lord Cosmo. Why stand- ing up to have an ounce of lead shot into you across a handkerchief should be considered to atone to you for another man's having the amusement of making love to your property, is beyond my prac- tical comprehension. If I were a bellicose fellow, now, I should call you out for that pretty speech." " I only go out with my equals," yawned the handsome Guards- man, indolently turning to resume his flirtation in Turkish with a Georgian. "Where do you ever find them—for insolence P" said Trevenna, tranquilly. " Clearly hit, Cos," laughed Chandos, to arrest whatever sharper words might have ensued. " So Lady Car has gone off at last! I declare, Trevenna, you are the most industrious chiffonnier for col- lecting naughty stories that ever existed. You must come across some very dirty tatters sometimes. I do believe you know every- thing half an hour before it happens." "Scandals are like dandelion-seeds," said Trevenna, with the brevity of an Ecclesiasticus. "A breath scatters them to the four winds of heaven; but they are arrow-headed, and stick, where they fall, and bring forth and multiply fourfold." '' And scandals and dandelions are both only weeds that are relished by nothing but donkeys." "You know nothing at all about either. You don't want scandal for your pastime, nor taraxacum for your liver; but when you are septuagenarian, dyspeptic, and bored, you'll be glad of the assistance of both." "My dear fellow, what unimaginable horrors you suggest! Whenever I feel the days of darkness coming, I shall gently retire from existence in a warm bath, or breathe in chloroform from a bouquet of heliotrope. The world is a very pleasant club; but, if once it get dull, take your name off the books. Nothing easier; and your friends won't dine the worse." "Bather the better, if your suicide is piquant. Something to censure, flavours your curry better than all the cayenne. We never enjoy our entre-mets so thoroughly as when we murmur-over it, ' Very sad! terribly wrong!' Apropos of censure, even the Hyper critic won't censure you : there are three columns of superb laudation to Lucrece." w Never read critiques, my dear Trevenna,^ The Queen of Lilies. 37 ' Such is our pride, our folly, or our cru, That only those who cannot write, review !' I am sorry to hear they praise me. I fear, after all, then, I must write very badly. Reviewers puff bad books, as ladies praise plain women." " To show their own superiority: very likely. However, whether you please it or not, Jim Jocelyn is so lavish of his milk and honey that the Hyper critic will have to atone for his weakness by chopping up novels in vinegar all the rest of the season. I am sure he will expect to dine with you at Richmond." " Indeed!_ Then he may continue to—expect it. I neither buy a Boswell with a bouillabaisse, nor play Maecenas by giving a mate- lote. Praise hired with a pate ! what a droll state of literature! " "Not at all. Everything's bought and sold, from the dust of the cinder-heaps to the favour of Heaven—which last little trifle is bid for with all sorts of things, from a piece of plate for the rector, to a new church for St. Paul, it being considered that the Creator of the Universe is peculiarly gratified by small pepper-pots in silver, and big pepper-pots in stucco, as propitiatory and dedicatory offerings. Pooh ! everybody's bribed. The only blunder ever made is in the bribe not being suited to the recipient." "You have suffered from that ? " Trevenna, the imperturbable, laughed as Grenvil dealt him that hit d la Talleyrand, murmuring the question in his silkiest, sleepiest tone. The Guardsman was a dead foe to the Adventurer. " I wish I had, Lord Cosmo. I should like to be bribed right and left. It would show I was a ' man of position.' When the world slips douceurs into your pocket, things are going very well with you. I can't fancy a more conclusive proof of your success than a host of bribers trying to buy you. But, to be sure, the aristocratic prejudice is in favour of owing money, not of making it." Which hit the ball back again to his adversary, Cos Grenvil being in debt for everything, from the thousands with which he had paid his Spring Meeting losses to the fifty-guinea dressing- box he had bought for a pretty rosiere the day before, as he brought her over from Paris. "Let that fellow alone, Cos," laughed Chandos, to avert the stormy element which seemed to threaten the serenity of his breakfast-party. " Trevenna will beat us all with his tongue, if we tempt him to try conclusions. He should be a Chancellor of the Exchequer or a cheap John; I am not quite clear which as yet." "Identically the same things!" cried Trevenna. "The only difference is the scale they are on; one talks from the bench, and the other from the benches; one cheapens tins, and the other cheapens taxes; one has a salve for an incurable disease, and the other a salve for the national debt; one rounds his periods to put off a watch that won't go, and the other to cover a deficit that won't close; but they radically drive the same trade, and both ave successful if the spavined mare trots out looking sound, and 38 (Jhandos. the people pay up. ' Look what I save you,' cry Cheap John and Chancellor; and while they shout their economics, they pocket their shillings. Ah, if I were sure I could bamboozle a village, 1 should know I was qualified to make up a Budget." "And my belief is you could do either_ or both,' laugnea Chandos, as he rose with a farewell caress of his hand to the bright braids of gazelle-eyed Leila. " Are you all going F To be sure . —the Drawing-Boom, I had forgotten it: we shall be late as it is. Ati revoir, then, till we meet in a crush. _ Nothing would take me to that hottest, dullest, drowsiest, frowsiest, and least courtly of courts if it were not for our lovely—what is her name F Queen of the Lilies." And Chandos, who glittered at the Tuileries and at Vienna as magnificently as Villiers ever had done before him, and who had a court of his own to which no courts could give splendour, went to dress for St. James's as his guests left the chamber, pausing a moment himself beside Trevenna. "Are you comingF" "IP No! Mr. John Trevenna is not an elegant name for a court-list. It would look very bourgeois and bare beside the patrician stateliness of Chandos of Clarencieux." For a moment he spoke almost with a snarl, the genuine, bright serenity of his mirthful good temper failing for an instant. Sur- prised, Chandos laid his hand on his shoulder and looked at him. " Nonsense ! what is the matter with your name F It is a very good one, and I would bet much that you will one day make it a known one. Why should you not attend at the palace to-day F I presented you years ago." "Yes, you did, mon prince,'" laughed Trevenna, whose ill- humour could not last longer than twenty seconds. " You took me out of prison, and you introduced me to court:—what an antithesis! No! I don't want to come. I always feel so dread- fully like a butler in silk stockings and tights; and I don't care about creeping in at the tail of a Hst in the morning papers. It's not elevating to your vanity to bring up the rear, like the spiders in a child's procession of Noah's Ark animals." "Poor fellow! He has brains- enough to be premier, and he is nothing but a penniless man-on-the-town," thought Chandos, as he entered the dressing-room and put himself in the hands of his body-servants to dress for the court. "A better temper never breathed, but it sometimes galls him, I dare say, not to occupy a higher place. I have been too selfish about him : giving him money and giving him dinners is not enough to deal fairly by him: he ought to be put forward. I will try and get him into the House. I could have a pocket-borough for him from some of them; and he could be trusted to make his own way there. His style would suit St. Stephen's; he would always be pungent, and never be metaphorical; he is too good a scholar to offend theii taste, and too shrewd a tactician to alarm them with genius." And revolving plans for the welfare and advancement of his fidus Achates, Chandos dressed and went down to his carriage The Queen of Lilies. 39 Trevenna looked out of one of the windows, and watciiea the gay elegance of the equipage as it swept away. "Go to the palace, my brilliant courtier," he said to himself, while his teeth set like the teeth of a bulldog, strong, fine, white teeth, that clenched close. " Men as graceful and as glittering even as you went by the dozens to Versailles in their lace and their diamonds, to end their days behind the bars of La Force or on the red throne of the guillotine. My dainty gentlemen, my gallant aristocrats, my gilded butterflies ! ' Rira bien qui rira le dernier.' Do you think I amuse you all now not to use you all by-and-by ? We're not at the end of the comedy yet. I am your Triboulet, your Chicot, whose wit must never tire and whose blood must never boil; but I may outwit you yet under the cap and bells. ' La vengeance est boiteuse ; elle vient d pas lents; mais—elk yient !' And what a comfort that is !" This was the solitary weakness in his virile and energetic nature —a nature otherwise strong as bronze and unyielding as granite— this envy, intense to passion, morbid to womanishness, vivid to exaggeration of all these symbols, appanages, and privileges of rank. Chiefly, of course, he envied them for that of which they were the insignia and the producer; but, beyond this, he envied them themselves, envied every trifle of their distinction with as acute and as feminine a jealousy as ever rankled in a woman's heart for the baubles and the flatteries she cannot attain. It was a weakness, and one curiously and deeply graven into his tern- perament, in all other respects so bright, so shrewd, so practical, and so dauntless. As he turned from the casement, the retriever, Beau Sire, stand- ing near, fixed his brown eyes on him and growled a fierce, short growl of defiance. Trevenna looked at him and laughed. "Curse you, dog! You needn't be jealous of me, Beau Sire1 I don't love your master." Nevertheless, Trevenna rang the bell, and ordered some of the best clarets of Beau Sire's master to be brought for his own drink- mg, and took his luncheon in solitude. He offered Beau Sire the dog's favourite bonne bouche, the liver-wing of a pheasant; but Beau Sire showed his teeth, and refused to touch it, with a superb canine scorn. " You've more discrimination than your master, 0 you Lavater among retrievers! You know his foes : he doesn't," laughed Tre- venna, while he finished his luncheon with the finer appreciatiou of Dubosc's talent, and of the oily perfections of the hock and the mareschino, because of his previous asceticism over a mutton-chop. "You are safe for the Cup, Ernest?" said his Grace of Castle- maine, as they encountered each other in the press of the reception- room at the palace. The duke was a very old man, but he was. as superb a gentleman as any in Europe, a gallant soldier, a splendid noble still, with his lion-like mane of silken silver hair and his blue and flashing eyes, as he stood now in his Field-Marshal's, uniform, with the Garter ribbon crossing his chest, and etarr md 4.0 urianaos. orders innumerable on his heart, above the scars of breast-Wounds gained at Yittoria and in many a cavalry-charge in Spain. '' Safe ? Oh, yes. There is nothing in any of the establishments to be looked at beside Galahad," answered Chandos, between whom and the duke there was always a sincere and cordial affec- tion. They were alike in many things. _ "No : at least it must be kept very dark if there be. By the way, there was a man—a thorough scamp, but a very good judge of a horse—offering very widely at Tattersall's to-day on a chestnut, Diadem. I know the fellow : he got into difficulties years ago, at the time of the White Duchess scandal: she was carted out stiff as a stake on the St. Leger morning, and it was always suspected he poisoned her; but he would know what he was about, and he offered long odds on the chestnut." "Diadem?" repeated Chandos, whose eyes were glancing over the many-coloured sea about him of feathers, jewels, floating trains, military orders, and heavy epaulets, to seek out the Queen of the Lilies. " Diadem ? You mean an outsider, entered by a York- shire man ? My dear duke, he is the most wretched animal, I hear. Trevenna tells me he could not win in a Consolation scramble." "Humph! may-be. You never scarcely go to the Corner yourself? " " Very rarely. I like to keep up the honour of the Clarencieux establishment; but of all abominations the slang of the stable is the most tedious. Trevenna manages all that for me, you know." "Yes, I know. Clever fellow, very clever; but I never liked him. Nothing but an adventurer." " For shame, duke ! You should not use that word. It is the last resource of mediocrity when it can find nothing worse to cast against excellence." "Believe in people, my dear Chandos; believe in them ! You will find it so profitable !" murmured his Grace, as the press of the crowd swept them asunder. From the Guardsmen, who, to their own discomfiture, had formed the escort, and were drawn up with their troop outside to catch but fugitive glimpses of fair faces as the carriages passed, |o the ministers in ihe Throne-room, whose thoughts were usually loo prosaically bent on questions of supply or votes of want of confidence to turn much to these vanities, there was one predomi- nant and heightened expectation—the sight of the Queen of the Lilies. Kumour had long floated from Eome of her extraordinary loveliness; poets had sung it, sculptors immortalised it, and artists adored it there. Chandos now waited for it impatiently where he stood among the circle of princes, peers, and statesmen about the throne. His loves had been countless, always successful, never embittered, intensely impassioned while they lasted, swiftly awakened, and often as rapidly inconstant. The very facility with which his vows were heard made them as easily broken : he loved passionately, but he loved so many! The eyes that he had last looked on were always the stars that guided him. A woman The Queen of Lilies. 41 Trirotd v«sy likely have told him that he had never really loved: he would havo told her that he had loved a thousand times. And h© would have been more right than she. Love is no more eternal than the roses, but, like the roses, it renews with every summer sun in as fair a fragrance as it bloomed before. Women only rebel against this truth because their season of the roses—their youth—is so short. At last the delicate white robes swept by him; thrown out from the maze of gorgeous colour, of gleaming gold, of diamonds and sapphires, of purples fit for Titian, of rubies fit for Rubens, of azure, of scarlet, of amber, filling the chamber, like a cameo from the deep hues of an illuminated background, the Athenian-like fairness of her face glanced once more on his sight: she was close to him as she swept towards the throne. " She is fit, herself, for the throne of the Caesars," he thought, as he followed the slow soft movements of her imperial grace. Once again their eyes met, she saw him where he stood among the royal and titled groups about the dais, and a slight flush rose over her brow—a flush that, if it betrayed her, was hidden as she bowed her proud young head before her sovereign, yet not hidden so soon but that he caught it. "Passionless! They must wrong her; they have not known how to stir her heart," he thought, as he followed her with his glance still as she passed onward and out of the Throne-room. Her remembrance haunted him in the palace: for the first time he thrust such a remembrance away. "Bagatelle!" he thought, as he threw himself back among his carriage-cushions and drove to Plora de l'Orme's. " Let me keep to beauty that I can win at no cost but a set of emeralds or a toy-villa: the payment for hera would be far too dear. Heloise was right." "Brilliant affair ! More like a fete a la Regence than anything else. How the money goes! The cost of one of those nights would buy me a seat in the House," thought Trevenna that evening, as he passed up the staircase of Park Lane. The dinners and suppers of the Bichmond villa, in all them gaiety and extravagance, were not more famous with Anonyma and her sisterhood, than the entertainments to the aristocratic worlds with which Chandos, in Paris and Naples, revived all the splendour of both Regencies, and outshone in his own houses the gatherings of imperial courts, were celebrated in that creme de la creme which alone were summoned to them. The fetes■ that he gave abroad he gave in England, startling society with their novelty and their magnificence. Chandos showed that the Art of Pleasure was not dead. To-night all that was highest in both the French and English aristocracies came to a costume-ball that was also at pleasure a masked-ball, and professedly in imitation of the YegHone of Florentine carnivals. Trevenna paused a moment near the entrance of the reception- rooms, where he could see both the constantly increasing throng that ascended the stairs and the long perspective of the chambers 42 u/ianaos. beyond, tnat ended In the dark palm-groups, the masses of tropic flowers, and the columns and sheets of glancing water foaming in the light of the winter-garden in the distance. Masked himself, and dressed simply in a dark violet domino, he looked down through the pageant of colour, fused into one rich glow by the lustre that streamed from a hundred chandeliers, from a thousand points of illumination, till his eyes found and rested on Chandos, who, with the famed Clarencieux diamonds glittering at every point of his costume, as Edward the Fourth, stood far off in an inner drawing-room, receiving his guests as they arrived. "Ah, my White Eose! " said Trevenna to himself, "how the women love you, and how the world loves you, and how lightly you wear your crown! Edward himself had not brighter gold in his hair, nor fairer loves to his fancy. Well, you have some Plantagenet blood, they say, in that sangre azul of your gentleman's veins, and the Plantagenets were always dazzling and—doomed." With which historical reminiscence drifting through his thoughts, Trevenna drew himself a little back, farther into the shelter of an alcove filled with broad-leaved Mexican plants, and studied the scene at his leisure. There was a certain savage envy and a certain luscious satisfaction mingled together in the contemplation. " The fools that go to see comedies, and read novels and satires, while they can look on at Life!" thought Trevenna, who was never weary of watching that mingling of comedy and melodrama, though his genius was rather the loquacious than the meditative. "I can't picture greater fun than to have been a weather-wise philosopher who knew what "Vesuvius was going to do, told nobody anything, but took a stroll through Pompeii on the last day, while his skiff waited for him in the bay. Fancy seeing the misers clutch their gold, while he knew they'd offer it all for bare life in an hour; the lovers swear to love for eternity, while he knew their lips would be cold before night; the bakers put the loaves in the oven, while he knew nobody would ever take them out; the epicures order their prandium, while he knew their mouths would be chokefull of ashes ; the throngs pour into the circus, laughing and eager, while he knew they poured into their grave; the city gay in the sunshine, while he knew that the lava-flood would swamp it all before sunset. That would have been a comedy worth seeing. "Well, I can fancy it a little. My graceful Pom- peian, who know nothing but the rose-wreaths of Aglae and Astarte, how will you like the stones and the dust in your teeth ? " And Trevenna, pausing a moment to enjoy to its fullest the classical tableau he had called up in his mind's eye, and looking still at the friend whom he had alternately apostrophised as Plan- tagenet and Pompeian, left his alcove and his reverie to mingle with the titled crowd in his dark domino and his close Venetian mask, casting an epigram here, a scandal there, a suspicion in this place, a slander in that, blowing away a reputation as lightly as thistle-down, and sowing a seed of disunion between two lives that loved, with dexterous whispers under his disguise that could never be traced, and as amused a malice in the employment as any Siamese The Queen of Lilies. 43 monkey when he swings himself by his tail from bough to bough to provoke the crocodiles to exasperation. True, as monkey may get eaten for his fun, so Trevenna might get found out for his pastime; but,_ to both monkey and man, the minimum of danger with the maximum of mischief made a temptation that was irre- eistible. Trevenna had been the most mischievous boy that ever tormented tom-cats; he was now the most mischievous wit that ever tormented mankind. He was a moral man; he had no vices; he had only one weak- ness—he hated humanity. " How extravagant you are, Ernest! " said the Duke of Castle maine. " Do you think these people love you any the better for All you throw away on them, eh P " " Love me ? Well, the fairer section do, I hope." The Duke gave another little growl to himself' as he brushed a moth off his broad blue ribbon. "Ah! women were always the ruin of your race and of mine: you have the weakness from both sides, Ernest. There was your father " "Who was a deucedly proud man, wasn't he, dukeP" asked Trevenna, with scant ceremony, as he came up by Castlemaine's side, without his mask now, and having glided into a blue domino, that his gunpowder-whispers might not be traced to him. The Duke looked down on him from the tower of his height, scarce bent more than when he was a Colonel of cavalry at Salamanca. "Proud? Perhaps so, sir. Adventurers thought him so. He put down impudence wherever he met with it. It is a pity he is not alive now." "To put me downP I understand, duke," laughed Trevenna, impervious to satire, and impenetrable even to a cut direct, who caught every bullet sent against him, gaily and courageously, and played with it unharmed as a conjurer will. (What magic has the conjurer ? None; but he has one trick more than the world that he baffles.) " Ah! I can't let myself be put down ; I'm like a cork or an outrigger; all my safety lies in my buoyancy. I have no ballast; I must float as I can. Storms sink ships of the line, and spare straws." "Yes, sir, rubbish floats generally, I believe," said his Grace, grimly, turning his back on him as he took out his snuff-box, enamelled by Pettitot and given him by Charles Dix. Trevenna bowed as low as though the silver-haired Sabreur had paid him a compliment and had not turned his back on him. " I accept your Grace's prophecy. Eubbish floats; I shall float. And when I am at the top of the wave, won't every one call my dirtiest pebbles fine pearls ? " " I think he will float," murmured the Duke, passing outward through the rooms to the noiseless, shut-off, luxurious chamber dedicated to cards, which had an altar in Chandos' house, as if they were its Penates. " Sort of man to do well anywhere ; be a privileged wit in a palace, and chief demagogue in a revolution; 44 ^Chumlus, be merry in a bagne, and give a pat answer if he were tried for his life; hold his own in a cabinet, and thrive in the bush. A clever fellow, an audacious fellow, a most marvellous, impudent fellow." " An insufferable fellow ! I wish Chandos would not give him the run of the house, and the run of the town, as he does," said my Lord of Morehainpton, wending his way also to the card-rooms. " The man has no idea of his place." # , "I think he has only too good a one: he imagines it to be everywhere. But the fellow will do well. He plays so admirable a game at whist; leads trumps in the bold French manner, which has a great deal to be said for it; has an astonishing recuperative power; if one play will not serve, changes his attack and defence with amazing address, and does more with a wretched hand than half the players in the clubs do with a good one. A man who can play whist like that could command a kingdom; he has learnt to be ready for every position and for every emergency. Still, with you, I don't like him," said his Grace, entering the card-room to devote himself to his favourite science at guinea points, where, despite his inherent aversion to Trevenna, he would have been willing to have that inimitable master of the rubber for a partner. The Duke was quite right, that a man who has trained his intel- lect to perfection in whist has trained it to be capable of achieving anything that the world could offer. A campaign does not need more combination; a cabinet does not require more address; an astronomer-royal does not solve finer problems; a continental diplomatist does not prove greater tact. Trevenna had laid out the time he spent over its green table even more profitably for the ripening and refining of his intelligence than in the hours he gave to his blue-books; and the Duke's eulogy was but just. His rooms were nearly full, but Chandos still glanced every now r.nd then impatiently towards the entrance-doors that opened in the distance to the staircase. Eyes that might well claim to be load-stars wooed him through coquettish "Venetian masks, and faces too fair for that envious disguise met his gaze wherever it turned. On his ear at that moment was the silvery ring of La Vivarol's gay raillery, and at his side was that bright exile of the Tuileries, fluttering her sapphire-studded wings as a Fille des Feux. Still ever and again his eyes turned towards the entrance as he moved among his guests, and suddenly a new look glanced into (hem. She who held him captive at that moment saw that look, and knew it well. She had seen it lighten for her in the forests of Oompiegne when the summer moon had streamed down through the leaves on a royal hunting-party sweeping through the glades to the mellow music of hunting-horns, and they had lingered behind while the bridles dropped on their horses' necks, and only the wooing of soft words broke the silence as the hoofs sank noise- lessly in the deep thyme-tangled grasses. She knew the look of old, and followed it. It rested on the Queen of Lilies. If that poetic loveliness had been fair in the morning light, it The Queen of Lilies. 45 was f&i fairer now. By a delicate flattery to her host the Lily Queen had chosen as her impersonation the role of his own Lucrece,. a Byzantine Greek; and her dress, half Eastern, glowed with the brightness of Oriental hues, while the snow-white barracan floated round her like a cloud, and Byzantine jewels gleamed upon her bosom and her hair—jewels that had seen the Court of the Com- meni and the sack of Dandolo—jewels that had once, perhaps, been on the proud, false brow of the Imperial Irene. La Yiyarol looked, and did not underrate one in whom sho foresaw her rival. "Ah, there is your living Lucrece! It must be charming to sketch characters and find them come to life." Chandos lost the ironic and malicious contempt with which jealousy subtilely tipped the tone of the words, as, leaving the Countess to the homage of the maskers about her, he did for the Queen of Lilies what he had not done for any other—passed out of the inner drawing-room, where he received his guests, and advanced to meet the impersonation of his Lucrece. That moment was fatal to him—that moment in which she came on his sight as startling as though magic had summoned the living shape of his own fancies and breathed the breath of existence into the thoughts of his poem. He could never now see her as she was; he would see in her his own ideal, not asking whether she only resembled it as the jeweller's lily with petals of pearl and leaves of emerald, which gleams equally bright in every hand, resembles the forest-lily with its perfume and purity, growing fair and free under the sunshine of heaven, which dies under one ungentle and alien touch. The lilies may be alike, leaf for leaf, beauty for beauty, but the fragrance is breathed but from one. "Necromancers of old summoned the dead; you have done more, Lady Valencia, you have caught and incarnated an idler's dream. How can he ever thank you ? " he said, later on, as he led her into the winter-garden, where the light was subdued after the glitter of the salons, and the hum of the ball with the strains of the music were only half heard, and through the arching aisles of palm and exotics his Circassian attendants noiselessly flitted like so many bright-hued birds. She smiled, while a new lustre came into the thoughtful splen- dour of her eyes. Her heart was moved—or her pride. " I must rather thank you that you do not rebuke me for being too rash. I assure you that I feared my own temerity." "What fear could you have, save out of pity for others? My fairest fancies of Lucrece are embodied now—perhaps only too well. Wkat made you divine so entirely the woman I dreamt of ? She only floated dimly even through my thoughts, until I saw her to-night." "Hush! That is the language of compliment. I have heard how delicately and how dangerously you will flatter." "Indeed, no: you have heard wrongly. I never flatter. But there are some—you are one of them—to whom the simplest 4 6 Chandos. words of truth must needs sound the words of an exaggerated homage." AH love in Chandos had been quickly roused, rather from the senses and the fancy than the heart, and roused for those to whom there was a royal road, pursued at no heavier penalty than some slight entanglement. That this royal road could not avail with the Queen of Lilies chilled her charm, yet heightened it, as it lay like a light but unyielding rein, checking the admiration- she roused in him, yet not checking it so much but that she enchained his attention while she remained in*his rooms, while the bright eyes of his neglected Fille des Feux, kept dangerous account of the lese-majeste. La Yivarol fluttered her golden wings, and waltzed as though they really bore her, bird-like, through the air, and flirted with her most glittering coquetries; but she noted every glance that was given to another, and treasured the trifles of each slight infidelity. If a Yiardort, a court-coquette, a woman of the world, an aristocrat, could be guilty of so much weakness, she had loved Chandos—loved the brilliance of the eyes that looked into hers under the purple vine-shadows—loved the melody of the voice that had lingered on her ear in the orange-alleys of Fontainebleau —loved him if only because so many loved him in vain. And far more than her heart was involved in his allegiance; a thing far dearer to her, far closer and more precious to all women—her vanity. If any one had talked to the pretty, worldly, pampered, and little-scrupulous Countess of fidelity, she would have satirised him mercilessly for such provinciality, and would have asked him where he had lived that he thought the vows of the soft religion eternal. She was infidelity itself, and held to the right divine of caprice; talk of "for ever," and she would yawn with ennui; appeal to her reason, and she would cordially assent to the truth that " nous sommes bien aises que l'on devienne infidele pour nous degager de notre fidelite." But, alas for the consistency of fair philosophers! Madame applied her theories to all lovers except her own, and, while she was eloquent on the ridicule and the weariness of constancy, held inconstancy to herself as the darkest of treason. La Yivarol, whose breviary was Bochefoucauld, and whose pre- cursor was Montespan, philosophised inimitably on the rights of inconstancy, but was none the less prepared to avenge and to resent with all the force of a Corsican vendetta any homage that should dare wander from her. And to-night she was openly, visibly, unmistakably neglected. The gleam of those antique Byzantine jewels was the light that he followed. In this new loveliness, so rich in its colouring, so proud in its cast, yet delicate as the fairest thought of a sculptor when rendered into the purity of the marble, he saw the portraiture of an ideal, half idly, half passionately cast into words in the work he called Lucrece, that had been chiefly written in hot, dreamy days in the syringa and basilica-scented air of his summer palace i ne f^fueen of Lilies. 45 on the Bosphorus, and had caught in it* all the voluptuous colour, all the mystical enchantment, all the splendida vitia of glow and of fancy, that still belong to the mere name of the East. She was go longer the beauty of the season to him; she was the incarnation pf his own most golden and most treasured fancies. Side by side in his temperament with the nature of the voluptuary was the heart of the poet. She appealed to, and tempted, both. Since the days of his first loves, felt and whispered under Oriental stars to antelope-eyed Georgians, none had had so vivid a charm as this soft yet imperial beauty, who came to him in the guise of his heroine. And he let the world see it, "If Madame live twenty years, Chandos, she will never forgive you to-night," whispered Trevenna, in passing, as his host ascended the staircase, having escorted the Lady Valencia to her carriage, while a crowd of glittering costumes and maskers followed her footsteps,—a ceremonial he never showed except to those of blood royal. " Forgive me ! What have I done ? " "What! 0 most innocent Lovelace, what serene sublimity of ignorance! You have piqued a jealous woman, trbs-cher; and he who does that might as well have sat down upon a barrel of gunpowder: it is much the less fatal combustible of the two." " Nonsense ! We are none of us jealous now: everybody is too languid and too well bred." Chandos laughed, and passed on into the throng of his courtly maskers to seek the golden wings and falcon eyes of his liege lady, and make his peace with her, as far as it could be made without offending her more deeply by showing her a suspicion that the peace had ever been broken. Trevenna looked after him, watching the flash of the jewels on his dress, and the careless grace of his movements as he passed through the groups of his drawing-rooms; and Trevenna's eyes wandered downward through the blaze of light, and the wilderness of clustered flowers, along the whole line of the marble stairs with their broad scarlet carpeting into the depths of the hall, where at the farthest end, with the lustre from two giant candelabra full upon it, was the statue of the great minister, Philip Chandos. His glance wandered from the living man, with the living flash of the rose-diamonds about him like so many points of sunlight, to rest upon the cold, haughty serenity of power that was spoken in the attitude of the marble limbs and the traits of the marble features in that likeness of the dead. And he smiled a little. "Beaux seigneurs," he said, softly and low to himself, "there may be games at which you will not win. Ah, my great Chandos, how you stand there in your marble pride as if you could lord it over us all still! and a stone-mason's hammer could knock you to pieces now ! Sic transit gloria rnuvdi. Your darling Ernest is a brilliant man; you have your wish; bixt we may sing the old see-saw over him too, before very long. And what will the world care for him then ? " 48 "Chandos.- With which inquiry, mutely addressed in self-communion to the statue where it stood in the flood of light and maze of exotics in the great hall below, Trevenna went down-stairs and out to his night-cab as the spring morning broke in its earliest hours. He looked back as he waited a second in the portico for the cab to make its way up to him. The music came on his ear from, the distant ball-room, and as he glanced backward at the hall and staircase, with its bronzes, marbles, malachites, jasper, gold and silver candelabra, and clusters of blossom and of broad-leaved Southern shrubs, while the scarlet of the laced liveries gleamed through the boughs and made it like one of the palace-antechamber scenes of Paul Veronese's canvas, the statue rose white, calm, regal in its attitude of command, haughty as had been the life of which it was the mute and breathless symbol. " Curse you! " he muttered in his teeth, while the laugh passed off his face and the mirth out of his eyes. " Curse you living, and curse you dead ! I will be paid, like Skylock, with a pound of flesh cut from the heart,—from the heart of your brilliant darling. And your power cannot play the part of Portia and stop me: for you are dead, mon ministre ! " And with that valediction to the dwelling across whose threshold he was ever welcomed and to whose board he was ever bidden, Trevenna passed down the steps and drove away in the grey of the morning. CHAPTER V. "the many years oe pain that taught me art." When his guests had left, and all the costumes that had glit- tered through his salons had dispersed, some half-dozen men, his most especial friends, remained, and in a cabinet die peinture, hung chiefly with French pictures of the eighteenth century, while the Circassians brought them wines and liqueurs, sat down to Trente et Quarante, half of them taking the bank and half the table. It was a customary termination of Chandos' parties, and was at least an admirable stimulant for sweeping away too lingering memories of beauty that might have appeared there. The Chandos of Clarencieux had always been famed for their love of play, from the days that they shook the dice with Charles the Second, or threw a main before supper at Choisy with Louis and Richelieu and Soubise. But his love of cards, however great it might be, had not cost their present representative so much as another trait in his nature, i.e. that he loved men and trusted them with an absolute and undoubting faith. The Trente et Quarante in the little picture-cabinet was too beguil- ing to be quickly left; the gold changed hands like lightning, not gomg less quickly for the iced hock and the claret and seltzer that washed it down, and the gay passages with the pretty Easterns that interrupted it. It was past six in the morning when the Due " The Many Years of Pain. 49 xJ Orvale broke up the bank and gave the signal for departure, he with Chandos haying been the chief losers. The latter cared only for the gay excitement of hazard; when the game was over, whether it had been favourable to him or not, he cared not one straw. Generous to great excess, he never heeded the loss of money, as, it is true, he had never learned the value of it. As he went through the corridors to his own chamber, after his guests had at last left him, to ttake a few hours' sleep in the opening day, the deep, rich, melancholy roll of organ-notes, hushed by closed doors, but pealing the Tantum Ergo, caught his ear in the silence. Music had been a passion with him from his infancy; wealth had enabled him to indulge the passion to the full, and its strains drew him towards it now. "Lulli is beginning a new day while we are going to bed," he thought, as he turned down a short passage and opened the door that shut in the melody. The daylight in the chamber looked strangely white and pure and subdued after the glare of the myriad gas and wax lights ; and his form, with the rich silks, laces, and velvets of the Edward-the-Eourth dress, and the sparkle of the Clarencieux diamonds, looked as strange upon the threshold of this quiet and antique room,—a room almost like an oratory in the midst of the luxurious palatial Park Lane house, with its splendour, its crowds, its dissipations, and its unending gaieties. The apart- ment was long, lighted by two windows, through which the just-arisen sun poured in, and the antique shape of the walnut- wood furniture, the ebony music and reading-desks, and the carved ivory Christ above a table in a recess, gave it the look of a religious retreat, especially as at the farther end stood an organ, with its gilded tubes glistening against the dark walnut of its case, while from its chords there swelled the harmony of the great Sacramental Hymn. The musician was a man of five or six-and-twenty, whose head had the spiritual beauty of Shelley's; the features fair and delicate to attenuation; the eyes large, dark, and lustrous; the .mouth very perfect, both in form and expression; the whole face of singular patience and singular exaltation. His lower limbs were ail-but useless, they were slightly paralysed and_ much crippled, and his shoulders were bowed with a marked but in no way repul- sive deformity. Music grand as Beethoven ever dreamed or Pasta ever sang woke from his genius into life. _ But in the ways of the world Guido Lulli was unlearned as a child; for the labours of earth he was as helpless as any bird whose wings are broken. Men would have called him a half-witted fool; in the days of Alcuin or of Hildebrand he would have been held a saint; simply, he was but a cripple and an enthusiast, whom nature had cruelly maltreated, but whom genius had divinely recompensed. At the opening of the door he turned, and a radiation of pleasure broke like sunlight over his face, while into his eyes came the lorious look of love and of fidelity that beams for us in the clear rown noble eyes of a dog. He strove to rise,—to him a matter of so slow and painful an E " ulianaos. effort. Before he could do bo, Chandos crossed the room lightly and swiftly, and laid his hands on the musician's shoulders with a kind and almost caressing gesture. "Ah, Lulli! you are awake and employ ed before I hove yet been in bed. You shame me here with your flood of sunlight. No ! do not rise; do not leave off; go on with the Taut inn Er