"HusH! THAT is THE LANGUAGE OF COMPLIMENTS. "-Page 58, Vol. III.
 
 C H A N D O S. 
 
 RANDOLPH GORDON. 
 
 SLANDER AND SILLERY. 
 BLUE AND YELLOW. 
 BELLES AND BLACKCOCK. 
 
 A LINE IN THE "DAILY." 
 
 BY 
 
 OUIDA.' 
 
 VOL. III. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 P. F. COLLIER, PUBLISHER. 
 
 1889.
 
 Stack 
 Anne: 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 - ifgi 
 
 PROEM. 
 Two Vows 5 
 
 BOOK THE FIRST. 
 
 CHAP. I. Pythias, or Mephistopheles ? 10 
 
 II. " La Comte et sa Queue " 16 
 
 III. A Prime Minister at Home 36 
 
 IV. The Queen of Lilies 42 
 
 V. Po6sie du Beau Sexe 62 
 
 VI." The Many Years of Pain that Taught me Art " 62 
 
 VII. Latet Anguis in Herba 73 
 
 III. A Jester who Hated both Prince and Palace 86 
 
 BOOK THE SECOND. 
 
 I. Under the Waters of Nile 96 
 
 II. The Dark Diadem 105 
 
 1 1 1. Butterflies on the Pin 113 
 
 IV. " Straight was a Path of Gold for him " 119 
 
 V. Clarencieux 122 
 
 VI. The Poem among the Violets 140 
 
 VII. The Poem as Women read it 146 
 
 VIII. In the Rose Garden 148 
 
 IX. The Watcher for the Fall of Ilion 159 
 
 BOOK THE THIRD. 
 
 I." Spes et Fortuna Valete " 169 
 
 II." Tout est Perdu, fors 1'Honneur" 182 
 
 III. The Love of Woman 197 
 
 IV. The Last Night among the Purples 202 
 
 V. The Death of the Titan 208 
 
 VI. " And the Spoilers came down" 214 
 
 VII. The Few who were Faithful 222 
 
 VIII. The Crowd in the Cour des Princes 234 
 
 BOOK THE FOURTH. 
 
 I. " Facilis descensus Averni " 250 
 
 II. " Where all Life dies, Death lives " 258 
 
 III. In the Net of the Retiarius 270 
 
 IV. " Sin shall not have Dominion over You " 284 
 
 BOOK THE FIFTH. 
 
 I. In Exile 291 
 
 II. In Triumph 295 
 
 BOOK THE SIXTH. 
 
 I. " Primavera ! Gioventu dell' Anno ! " 299 
 
 1 1. Castalia 302 
 
 III. "Gioventu ! Primavera della Vita !" 312 
 
 IV. " Seigneur ! ayez Pitie " 319 
 
 BOOK THE SEVENTH. 
 
 I. "Do well unto Thyself, and Men will speak good of Thee " 332 
 
 II. The Throne of the Exile 341 
 
 III. " He who endures conquers" , 353 
 
 IV. " Oui a Offens6 ne Pardonne Jamais " ^64 
 
 V. " Ne Chercher qu'un Regard, qu'une Fleur qu'un Soleil " 368 
 
 VI. " Nihil Humani a me Ahenum Puto" 379 
 
 V 1 1 " Pale Comme un Beau Soir d' Automne " 397 
 
 V1IL " Record one Lost Soul more" 411 
 
 VOL. Hi. (3)
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 BOOK THE EIGHTH. 
 
 I. The Claimant of the Porphyry Chamber 4*3 
 
 II. " Magister de Vivis Lapidibus" 43 
 
 III. "To tell of Spring-tide Past 437 
 
 IV "To Thine Own Self be True" 442 
 
 V. The Codes of Arthur 452 
 
 VI. Et tu, Brute ! f* 
 
 VI I. Liberia 473 
 
 VII I. Lex Talionis 494 
 
 IX." King over Himself " 55 
 
 RANDOLPH GORDON. 
 PART THE FIRST. 
 
 I. Our Corps, and who Composed it : ' "i ^ 2 4 
 
 II. How Sunshine, Pearl, and Rosebud shot at Bull's-eyes and hit other Marks. .. 531 
 
 PART THE SECOND. 
 III. How a Silver Bugle sounded Different Notes, and Randolph lost a Pony-race. 537 
 
 PART THE THIRD. 
 
 IV. How Randolph and I Sinned and Confessed it, and how We got Pardon 
 
 .and Penance 547 
 
 V. How Spiritualistic Agency was Brought in for Material Purposes 554 
 
 SLANDER AND SILLERY. 
 
 I. The Lion of the Chaussee d' Antin 565 
 
 II. Nina Gordon 570 
 
 III. Le Lion Amoureux" , 576 
 
 IV. Mischief 582 
 
 V. More Mischief and an End 589 
 
 BLUE AND YELLOW. 
 
 I. Fitz Goes down by the Express, and Makes an Acquaintance En Route 601 
 
 II. Beau Begins one Canvass and Fitz another 608 
 
 IlI..-r-Gupid Gives Beau more Trouble than all the Blues 613 
 
 IV. The Radkal Candidate beats the Popular Preacher out of the Field 620 
 
 V. Fitz wins one Election and loses another 626 
 
 BELLES AND BLACKCOCK. 
 
 I. Over the Hills and Far Away 638 
 
 II. We Bag Blackcock and Mark Belles 643 
 
 III. The Little Diamond in the Desert 651 
 
 IV. The Gpwan of the Moors Grows more Attractive than the Game 661 
 
 V. The Light on the Moors shines again for Dyneley 668 
 
 A LINE IN THE "DAILY." ...._ 675
 
 C H A N D O S, 
 
 PROEM. 
 
 TWO VOWS. 
 
 IT was the sultry close of a midsummer night in the heart of London. 
 
 In all the narrow streets about Westminster, and stretching downward to 
 the dens of the City or the banks of the river, there were the roar of traffic and 
 the glare of midnight; the throngs were jostling each other, the unscreened 
 gas-jets of the itinerant stalls were flaring yellow in the stillness of the air, the 
 screaming of ballad-singers pierced shrilly above the incessant noise of wheels, 
 the shouting of coster-mongers, butchers, oyster-venders, and fried-fish-sellers 
 added its uproar to the pandemonium, and the steam and stench of hot drinks 
 and of rotting vegetables blent with the heaviness of smoke borne down by the 
 heat and the tempestuous oppression of the night. Above, the sky was dark, 
 and little illumined by the crescent of a young and golden moon; but across 
 the darkness now and then, across the narrow strip that piled roofs and towering 
 spires and crushed-up walls alone gave sight of, a falling star shot swiftly down 
 the clouds, in fleeting memento and reminder of all the glorious world of 
 forest and of lake, of rushing river and of deep fern-glade, of leafy shelter 
 lying cool in mountain-shadows, and of sea-waves breaking upon wet brown 
 rocks, which lay beyond, and were forgotten here in the stress of trade, in the 
 strife of crowds, in the cramped toil of poverty, and in the wealth of mingled 
 nations. Few in town that night looked up at the shooting star as it flashed its 
 fiery passage above the dull, leaden, noxious, gas-lit streets; none, indeed, 
 except perhaps here and there a young dreamer, with threadbare coat and mad 
 but sweet ambitions for all that was impossible, or some woman, young, 
 haggard, painted, half drunk, whose aching eyes were caught by it, and whose 
 sodden memory went wearily back to a long-buried childhood, when the stars 
 were out over the moorland of a cottage home, and childish wonder had 
 watched them rise over the black edge of ricks through the little lozenge of the 
 lattice, and sleep had come under their light, happily, innocently, haunted by 
 
 (5)
 
 6 O UIDAS WORKS. 
 
 no terrors, to the clear music of a mother's spinning-song. Save these, none 
 thought of the star as it dropped down above the jagged wilderness of roofs: 
 the crowd was looking elsewhere, to the lighted entrance of the Lower House. 
 The ministers who sat in the Commons were about to leave, after a night of 
 unusual national interest. 
 
 The multitude had gathered thickly, swollen by every passer-by who, drawn 
 into the vortex, had hung on the outskirts of the concourse, and stopped in turn 
 to pause and stare, and hear the gossip of St. Stephen's. There had been, as it 
 was known, a powerful and heated debate, a political crisis of decisive eminence, 
 of some peril, moreover, to the country, from a rash war policy which had 
 been urged upon the existing ministry, which must, it had been feared, have 
 resigned to escape stooping to measures forced on it by the opposition; the 
 false position had been avoided by the genius of one man alone; the government 
 had stood firm, and had vanquished its foes, through the mighty ability of its 
 chief statesman, one who, more fortunate than Pitt in the brilliant success of 
 his measures at home and abroad, was often called, like Pitt, the Great 
 Commoner. 
 
 Yet it was a title, perhaps, that scarcely suited him; for he was patrician to 
 the core, patrician in pride, in name, in blood, and in caste, though he dis- 
 dained all coronets. You could not have lowered him; also, you could not 
 have ennobled him. He was simply and intrinsically a great man. At the 
 same time, he was the haughtiest of aristocrats, too haughty, by all the Bour- 
 bon and Plantagenet blood of his line, ever to stoop to the patent of a present,, 
 earldom or a marquisate of the new creation. 
 
 The crowds pressed closest and densest as one by one of his colleagues ap- 
 peared, passing to their carriages; and his name ran breathlessly down the 
 people's ranks: they trusted him, they honored him, they were proud of him, as 
 this country, so naturally and strongly conservative in its instincts, however radi- 
 cal it be in its reasonings, is proud of its aristocratic leaders. They were ready to 
 cheer him to the echo the moment he appeared; specially ready to-night, 
 for he had achieved a signal victory, and the populace always cense success. 
 At last he came, a tall and handsome man, very fair, and of splendid bear- 
 ing, about fifty years of age, and with a physiognomy that showed both the 
 habit and the power of command. He was satiated to weariness with public 
 homage; but he acknowledged the greetings of the people as they rang on the 
 night air with kindly, if negligent, courtesy, the courtesy of a grand seigneur. 
 At his side was a boy, his only son, a mere child of some seven years. In- 
 dulged in his every inclination, he had been taken to the House that evening 
 by a good-natured peer, to a seat under the clock, and had for the first time 
 heard his father speak, heard, with his eyes glittering, and his cheeks flushed, 
 and his heart beating, in a passionate triumph and an enthusiastic love much
 
 CHANDOS. 7 
 
 beyond his years; with a silent vow, moreover, in his childish thoughts, to go and 
 do likewise in his manhood. 
 
 " That boy will be a great man, if if he dosen't have too much genius," 
 the old peer who sat beside him had said to himself, watching his kindling eyes 
 and his breathless lips, and knowing, like a world-wise old man of business as 
 he was, that the fate of Prometheus is the same in all ages, and that it is medioc- 
 rity which pays. 
 
 The boy had a singular; it had been a great characteristic of the great min- 
 ister's race through all centuries; woman's tenderness and fashionable fancies 
 were shown in the elegance of his dress, with its velvets and laces and delicate 
 hues; and the gold of his hair, falling over his shoulders in long, clustering 
 curls, glittered in the lamp-light as, at his father's recognition of the crowd, he 
 lifted his cap with its eagle's feather and bowed to them too, a child's bright, 
 gratified amusement blent with the proud, courtly grace of his father's manner, 
 already hereditary in him. 
 
 The hearts of the people warmed to him for his beauty and for his child- 
 hood, the hearts of the women especially, and they gave him another and yet 
 heartier cheer. He bowed like a young prince, to the right and to the left, and 
 looked up in the grave statesman's face with a happy, joyous laugh; yet still in 
 his eyes, as they glanced over the throngs, there was the look dreamy, brill- 
 iant, half wistful, half eager which was beyond his age, and which had made 
 the old peer fear for him that gift of the gods which the world does not love, 
 because most unwisely, most suicidally it fears it. 
 
 Amongst the crowd, wedged in with the thousands pressing there about the 
 carriages waiting for the members, stood a woman: she was in mourning-clothes, 
 that hung sombrely and heavily about her, and a dark veil obscured her feat- 
 ures. By something in her attitude, something in her form, it would have 
 been guessed that she had been handsome, not very long since, either, but that 
 now there was more in her that was harsh, and perhaps coarse, than there was 
 of any other trait. Her features could not be seen, her eyes alone shone through 
 the folds of her veil, and were fixed on the famous politician as he came out 
 from the entrance of the Commons, and on the young boy by his side. Her 
 own hand was on the shoulder of a child but a few years older, very strongly 
 built, short, and muscularly made, with features of a thoroughly English type, 
 that which is vulgarly called the Saxon ; his skin was very tanned, his linen torn 
 and untidy, his hands brown as berries and broad as a young lion's paws, and 
 his eyes, blue, keen, with an infinite mass of humor in them, looked steadily 
 out from under the straw hat drawn over them ; they too were fastened on the 
 bright hair and the delicate dress of the little aristocrat, with some such look as ? 
 when a child, Manon Phlippon gave the gay and glittering groups of Versailles 
 and the young queen whom she lived to drag to the scaffold.
 
 8 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 The women's hand weighed more heavily on his shoulder, and she stooped 
 her head till her lips touched his cheek, with a hoarse whisper, 
 
 " There is your enemy ! " 
 
 The boy nodded silently, and a look passed over his face, over the sturdy 
 defiance of his mouth and the honest mischief of his eyes, very bitter, very 
 merciless, worse in one so young than the fiercest outburst of evanescent rage. 
 
 Life was but just opening in him ; but already he had learned man's first 
 instinct, to hate. 
 
 Where they stood, on the edge of the pressing throng, that had left but a 
 narrow lane for a passage of the ministers, the little patrician was close to the 
 boy who stared at him with so dogged a jealousy and detestation in his glance ; and 
 his own large eyes, with a wondering surprise in their brilliance, rested a mo- 
 ment on the only face that, in a world to him of luxury and love, had ever 
 looked darkly on him. He paused, the naturally generous and tender temper 
 in him leading him, unconsciously, rather to pity and to reconciliation than to 
 offence: he had never seen this stranger before, but his instinct was to woo him 
 out of his angry solitude. He touched him, with a bright and loving smile, 
 giving what he had to give. 
 
 "You look vexed and tired: take these ! " 
 
 He put into his hand a packet of French bonbons that he had been given in 
 the Ladies Gallery, and followed his father, with a glad, rapid bound, into the 
 carriage, by whose steps they were. The servants shut the door with a clash, 
 the wheels rolled away with a loud clatter, swelling the thunder of the busy 
 midnight streets. The boy in the throng stood silent, looking at the dainty, 
 costly, enamelled Paris packet of crystallized sweetmeats and fruits. Then, 
 without a word, he flung it savagely on the ground, and stamped it out under 
 his heel, making the painted, silvered paper, and the luscious bonbons, a bat- 
 tered, trampled mass, down in the mud of the pavement. 
 
 There was a world of eloquence in the gesture. Rich bonbons rarely 
 touched his lips, and he was child enough to love them well; but he threw 
 them out on the trottoir now, as though they had been so much sand. 
 
 As his carriage rolled through the streets in the late night, the great states- 
 man passed his hand lightly over the fair locks of his son. The child had much of 
 his own nature, of his own intellect, and he saw in his young heir the future 
 security for the continuance of the brilliance and power of his race. 
 
 " You will make the nation honor you for yourself one day, Ernest ? " he 
 said, gently, as his hand lay on the soft, glittering hair. 
 
 There were tears in the child's eyes, and a brave and noble promise and 
 comprehension in his face, as he looked up at his father. 
 
 If I live I will ! " 
 
 As they were propelled onward by the pressure of the moving crowd, the
 
 CHAN DOS. 9 
 
 woman and her son went slowly along the heated streets, with the gas-glare of 
 some fish or meat-shops thrown on them, as they passed, in yellow, flaring 
 illumination. They were not poor, though on foot thus, and though the lad's 
 dress was torn and soiled through his own inveterate activity and endless mis- 
 chief. No pressure of any want was on them: yet his glance followed the 
 carriage, darted under the awnings before the mansions, and penetrated wher- 
 ever riches or rank struck him, with the hungry, impatient, longing look of a 
 starving Rousseau or Gilbert, hounded to socialism for the lack of a sou, a 
 look very strange and premature on a face so young and naturally so mirthful 
 and good-humored. 
 
 His mother watched him, and leaned her hand again on his shoulder. 
 
 " You will have your revenge one day." 
 
 " Won't I!" 
 
 The schoolboy answer was ground out with a meaning intensity, as he set 
 his teeth like a young bulldog. 
 
 Each had promised to gain a very different aristeia. When they came to 
 the combat, with whom would rest the victory ?
 
 10 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 BOOK THE FIRST. 
 
 Yo tocar6 cantando 
 
 El musico instrumento sonoroso, 
 Tu el glorio gozando 
 
 Danza, y festSja a Dios que es poderoso, 
 O gozemos de esta gloria 
 Por que la humana es transitoria ! 
 
 Ode of the Flower. IXTILXOCHITL. 
 
 Plutus, the god of gold 
 
 Is but his steward 
 
 . . . no gift to him 
 But breeds the giver a return exceeding 
 All use of quittance. 
 
 SHAKSPEARE. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 PYTHIAS, OR MEPHISTOPHELES ? 
 
 IT was the height of the London season. Town filled. Death had made 
 gaps in the crowd; but new-comers filled up the rents, and the lost were un- 
 missed. Brows, that the last year had been stainless as snow, had been 
 smirched with slander or stained with shame; but the opals crowning them 
 belied their ancient fame, and did not pale. Light hearts had grown heavy, 
 proud heads had been bent, fair cheeks had learned to cover care with pearl- 
 powder, words had been spoken that a lifetime could not recall, links had been 
 broken that an eternity would not unite, seeds of sin and sorrow had been sown 
 never again to be uprooted, in the brief months that lay between " last season " 
 and this phoenix of the new; but the fashionable world met again with smiling 
 lips, and the bland complaisance, and unutterable ennui, and charming mutual 
 compliment to go through all the old routine with well-trained faces, befitting 
 the arena. 
 
 It was April. The last carriages had rolled out by the Corner, the last hacks 
 paced out of the Ride, the last sunlight was fading; epicures were reflecting on 
 their club dinners, beauties were studying the contents of their jewel-boxes, the 
 one enjoying a matelote, the other a conquest, in dreamy anticipation; chan- 
 deliers were being lit for political receptions, where it would be a three-hours 
 campaign to crush up the stairs; and members waiting to go in on Supply were
 
 CHAN DOS. 11 
 
 improving their minds by discussing a new dancer's ankles, and the extraordi- 
 nary scratching of Lord of the Isles for the Guineas. The West, in a word, 
 was beginning its Business, which is Pleasure; while the East laid aside its 
 Pleasure, which is Business; and it was near eight o'clock on a spring night in 
 London. 
 
 Half a hundred entertainments waited for his selection; all the loveliest 
 women, of mondes proper and improper, were calculating their chances of 
 securing his preference; every sort of intellectual or material pleasure waited 
 for him as utterly as they ever waited for Sulla when the rose-wreaths were on 
 his hair and Quintius Roscius ready with his ripest wit; and for him as truly as 
 for Sulla, " Felix " might have described him as the darling of the gods: yet, 
 alone in his house in Park Lane, a man lay in idleness and ease, indolently 
 smoking a narghile from a great silver basin of rose-water. A stray sunbeam 
 lingered here and there on some delicate bit of statuary, or jewelled tazze, or 
 Cellini cup, in a chamber luxurious enough for an imperial bride's, with its 
 hangings of violet velvet, its ceiling painted after Greuze, its walls hung with 
 rich Old Masters and Petits Maitres, and its niches screening some group of 
 Coysevox, Coustou, or Canova. It was, however, only the " study," the pet 
 retreat of its owner, a collector and a connoisseur, who lay now on his sofa, 
 near a table strewn with Elzevirs, Paris novels, MSS., croquis, before-letter 
 proofs, and dainty female notes. The fading sunlight fell across his face as 
 his head rested on his left arm. A painter would have drawn him as Alcibia- 
 des, or, more poetically still, would have idealized him into the Phoebus Lyke- 
 genes, the light-born, the Sun-god, of Hellas, so singularly great was his 
 personal beauty. A physiognomist would have said, " Here is a voluptuary, 
 here is a profound thinker, here is a poet, here is one who may be leader and 
 chief among men if he will," but would have added, " Here is one who may, 
 fifty to one, sink too softly into his bed of rose-leaves ever to care to rise in 
 full strength out of it." Artists were chiefly attracted by the power, men by 
 the brilliance, and women by the gentleness, of this dazzling beauty: for the 
 latter, indeed, a subtler spell yet lay in the deep-blue, poetic, eloquent eyes, 
 which ever gave such tender homage, such dangerous prayer, to their own love- 
 liness. The brow was magnificent, meditative enough for Plato's; the rich 
 and gold-hued hair, bright as any Helen's; the gaze of the eyes in rest, thought- 
 ful as might be that of a Marcus Aurelius; the mouth, insouciant and epicurean 
 as the lips of a Catullus. The contradictions in the features were the anoma- 
 lies in the character. For the rest, his stature was much above the ordinary 
 height; his attitude showed both the strength and grace of his limbs; his age 
 was a year or so over thirty, and his revery now was of the lightest and laziest: 
 he had not a single care on him. 
 
 There was a double door to his room; he was never disturbed there, either
 
 12 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 by servants or friends, on any sort of pretext; his house was as free to all as a 
 caravanserai, but to this chamber only all the world was interdicted. Yet the 
 first handle turned, the second turned, the portiere was tossed aside with a 
 jerk, and the audacious new-comer entered. A gallant retriever lying by the 
 couch showed fight and growled. Yet the guest was one he saw every day, al- 
 most every hour, the ami de la maison, the masterly comptroller of the 
 household. 
 
 " My dear Ernest ! you alone at this time of the day ? What a miracle ! 
 I have actually dared to invade your sanctum, your holy of holies ; deuced 
 pleasant place, too. What is it you do here ? Paint your prettiest picture, 
 chip your prettiest statuette, make love to your prettiest mistress, write your 
 novels, study occult sciences, meditate on the Dialectics, seek the Philosopher's 
 stone, search for the Venetian color-secret, have suppers a la Re'genee to which 
 you deny even your bosom friends ? or what is it ? On my honor I am very 
 curious ! " 
 
 " Tell me some news, Trevenna," said his host, with an amused smile, in a 
 voice low, clear, lingering and melodious as music, contrasting forcibly with the 
 sharp, ringing, metallic tones of his visitor. " How came you to come in here ? 
 You know " 
 
 " I know; but I had a curiosity and a good opportunity: what mortal, or 
 what morals, ever resisted such a combination ? I am weaker than a woman. 
 No principle, not a shred. Am I responsible for that ? No; organization and 
 education. How dark you are here ! May I ring for -lights ? " 
 
 " Do you want light to talk by ? " laughed his friend, stretching his hand to 
 a bell-handle. " Your tongue generally runs on oiled wheels, Trevenna." 
 
 " Of course it does. It's my trade to talk; I rattle my tongue as a nigger 
 singer rattles his bones; I must chat as an organ-grinder grinds. I'm asked 
 out to dine to talk. If I grew a bore, every creature would drop me; and if I 
 grew too dull to get up a scandal, I should be very sure never to get a dinner. 
 My tongue's my merchandise ! " 
 
 With which statement of his social status, John Trevenna jerked himself 
 out of his chair, and, while the groom of the chamber lighted the chandelier, 
 strolled round the apartment. He was a man of six or eight-and-thirty, short, 
 a little stout, but wonderfully supple, quick, and agile, a master of all the 
 science of the gymnasium; his face was plain and irregular in feature, but 
 bright, frank, full of good humor almost to joviality, and of keen, alert, cul- 
 tured intelligence, prepossessing through its blunt and honest candor, its merry 
 smile showing the strong white teeth, its bonhomie, and its look of acute in- 
 domitable cleverness, a cleverness which is no more genius than an English 
 farce is wit, but which, sharper than intellect alone, more audacious than talent 
 alone, will trick the world, and throw its foes, and thrive in all it does, while
 
 CHANDOS. 13 
 
 genius gets stoned or starves. He loitered round the room, with his eye-glass up, 
 glancing here, there, and everywhere, as though he were an embryo auctioneer, 
 and he stopped at last before a Daphne flying from Apollo and just caught by 
 him, shrouded in rose colored curtains. 
 
 " Nice little girl, this ? Rather enticing; made her look alive with that 
 rose-light; tantalizing to know it's nothing but marble; sweetly pretty, certainly." 
 
 " Sweetly pretty ? Good heavens, my dear fellow, hold your tongue ! One 
 would think you a cockney adoring the moon, or a lady's maid a new fashion. 
 That Daphne's the most perfect thing Coustou ever did." 
 
 " Don't know anything about them ! Never see a bit of difference in them 
 from the plaster casts you buy for a shilling. Won't break quite so soon, to 
 be sure. She is pretty, nice and round, and all that; but I don't care a straw 
 about art. Never could." 
 
 " And you are proud of your paganism ? Well, you are not the first per- 
 son who has boasted of his heresy for the sheer sake of appearing singular." 
 
 " To be sure ! I understand Wilkes: let me be the ugliest man in Europe, 
 rather than remain in mediocrity among the medium plain faces. There's not 
 a hair's difference between notoriety and fame. Be celebrated for something, 
 and, if you can't jump into a pit like Curtius, pop yourself into a volcano like 
 Empedocles: the foolery's immortalized just as well as a heroism; the world 
 talks of you, that's all you want. If I couldn't be Alexander, I'd be Diogenes; 
 if I weren't a great hero, I'd be a most ingenius murderer. There's no radi- 
 cal difference between the two ! But, I say, do you ever remember what a 
 fearful amount you throw away on these dolly things ? " pursued Trevenna, in- 
 terrupting himself to strike his cane on the Daphne. 
 
 " The only things worth the money I spend ! My dear Trevenna, I thank 
 you much for your interest, but I can dispense with your counsels." 
 
 The answer was very gentle, but there was the slight languor of hauteur 
 natural to a man accustomed to deference. 
 
 Trevenna laughed good-temperedly; he had never been seen out of humor. 
 
 " Pardon ! I'm a brusque fellow, and say what comes uppermost; wiser if 
 I kept it sometimes. If you do live en prince, who wouldn't that could ? I 
 don't believe in renunciation. He is a shrewd fellow who, forced on absti- 
 nence, vows he likes it and says he does it for digestion ; but I love the good 
 things of life and say so, though I can't afford them. I should sell my soul 
 for turtle soup ! By the way, monseigneur, before we eat your soup there's a 
 little business " 
 
 " Business ? In the evening ! Do you wish to give me dyspepsia before 
 dinner?" 
 
 "No; but I want to digest mine by feeling I've done my duty. There's 
 something we want you to sign; Legrew does, at the least "
 
 14 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 " On my honpr, Trevenna," cried his host, with a gay, careless laugh, " you 
 are abominable ! How often have I told you that I trust you implicitly, you 
 are fit for Chancellor of the Exchequer, and that I never will be worried by 
 any nonsense of the kind ? " 
 
 " But, caro mio," pleaded Trevenna, coaxingly, " we can't do without your 
 signature. What's co be done ? We can't give leases, and draw checks, and 
 get bonds und mortgages, without your handwriting." 
 
 The last words caught the indolent listener's inattentive ear. He looked 
 up surprised. 
 
 " Bonds ? Mortgages ? What can I possibly have to do with them ? " 
 
 " Money's are lent out on mortgages; I only used the word a"s example," 
 explained his prime minister, a little rapidly. " We trouble you as little as we 
 can; only want your name now. Remember, the Guineas let you in heavily 
 this time; one can't transfer those large sums without your authorization. 
 Just let me read you over this paper: it's merely " 
 
 " Spare me ! spare me ! " cried the lord of this dainty art- palace, to whom 
 the ominous crackle of the parchment was worse than the singing of a rattle- 
 snake. " Smindyrids felt tired if he saw a man at work in the fields: what 
 would he have felt if he had seen a modern law document ? " 
 
 " Just sign, and you won't see it any more," pleaded Trevenna, who knew 
 the facile points of a character he had long made his special study, and knew 
 that, to be saved farther expostulation, his chief would comply. 
 
 He did so, raising himself with slow, graceful indolence from his cushions, 
 and resigning the mouth-piece of his hookah reluctantly. The acquiescence 
 was very weak, very pliant, yielding to softness. Yet a physiognomist would 
 have said that, with the powerful arch of the brows and the Julian mold of 
 the chin, weakness could not naturally belong to this man's disposition, if too 
 consummate a fastidiousness and too absolute a love of pleasure were inherent 
 in it. The compliance was most insouciant; the willingness to sign, in igno- 
 rance of what he signed, a trustful carelessness that was almost womanish. But 
 life had fostered this side of his character, and had done nothing to coun- 
 teract it. 
 
 " Stay ! you haven't heard what it is," put in Trevenna, while he rattled off, 
 with clear, quick precision that showed him a master of precis and would have 
 qualified him to explain a budget in St. Stephen's, a resume of what he stated 
 the contents of the document to be; a very harmless document, according to 
 him, merely reverting to the management of the immense properties of which 
 his friend was the possessor. His hearer idly listened two minutes, then let 
 his thoughts drift away to the chiaroscuro of a Ghirlandajo opposite, and to 
 speculation whether Reynolds was quite correct in his estimate of the invariable 
 amount of shadow employed by the old masters.
 
 CHANDOS. 15 
 
 Trevenna's exposition, lucid, brief, and as little tiresome as legalities can be 
 made, ended, he took the pen without more opposition or reflection, and dashed 
 his name down in bold, clear letters, 
 
 " ERNEST CHANDOS." 
 
 Trevenna watched him as he wrote, watched, as though they were all seen 
 for the first time, the delicate firmness of the writing, a firmness so singularly 
 at variance with the pliability with which persuasion had vanquished him with- 
 out a blow, the hand which traced them, white, long, elegant as a woman's, 
 and the single rose-diamond which fastened the wristband of the arm that lay 
 idly resting on the table. Rings there were none on either hand. Chandos, 
 the leader of fashion, had banished them as relics of barbarism. 
 
 He pushed the paper to Trevenna with the ink still wet on the signature. 
 " There ! and remember henceforward, my very good fellow, never to trouble 
 me with all this nonsense again. I might as well manage my own affairs from 
 first to last, if my men of business must come to me about every trifle. I 
 would not trust the lawyers without looking after them (though if a lawyer means 
 to cheat you he will, let you have as many eyes as Argus); but with you to give 
 them a check they can't go wrong. By the way, Trevenna, were you not 
 touched on the Heath yourself ? " 
 
 " Well, Lord of the Isle let us all in, more or less," said Trevenna, crump- 
 ling up his papers; "but, you know, poor hedgers like me can't ever risk more 
 than a tenner or so." 
 
 " Still, your inimitable book-making failed you at the Guineas ? I was 
 afraid so. Draw on me as you need: you have blank checks of mine; fill one 
 up as you like." 
 
 " No, no ! oh, hang it, monseigneur ! You put one out of countenance." 
 
 " Impossible -miracle, Trevenna !" laughed Chandos, looking on him with 
 kindly eyes. " How' can any little matter like that ever repay all the time and 
 talent you are good enough to waste in my service ? Besides, between old 
 friends there is never a question of obligation. Nine o'clock. We must go to 
 dinner. I promised Claire Rahel not to miss her supper. She is enchanting ! 
 She has the sourire de la Re'gence and the wit of Sophie Arnauld." 
 
 " And the smiles cost you an India of diamonds, and the wit is paid a cash- 
 mere each mot ! If Monde deigned to recognize Demi-Monde, how would the 
 countess admire being outrivalled by the actress ? " 
 
 " The countess is like Crispin, rivale de soi-meme alone. All pretty women 
 and all dull men are vain ! The belles and the bores always worship at their 
 own shrines," laughed Chandos, as his groom of the chambers announced the 
 arrival in the drawing-rooms of other guests from the Guards, and the Laga- 
 tions, to one of those " little dinners " which were the most coveted and ex- 
 clusive entertainments in London.
 
 16 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 "We must go, I suppose; Prince Charles might wait, but the turbot must 
 not," he said, with a yawn, he was accustomed to have the world wait on and 
 wait for him, as he held back the portiere, and signed to John Trevenna to 
 pass out before him, down the lighted corridor, with its exotics, statues, and 
 bronzes glancing under the radiance from the candelabra. He would have 
 kept a serene highness attending his pleasure; but he gave iheflas with as much 
 courtesy as to a monarch to that very needed man-about-town, his dependent, 
 hanger-on, and fidus Achates, John Trevenna. 
 
 " What a clever fellow he is ! I must bring him into the house; his talents 
 would tell well there: they are frittered away in club-windows," he thought, as 
 he went down the corridors to his reception-rooms. To ask whether this fidus 
 Achates were a Pythias or a Mephistopheles would have been a doubt that 
 could never have crossed either the chivalry or the friendship of Chandos. 
 
 He would have thought such a question, even in thought, a blot on good 
 faith, a treachery to the bond of bread and salt. His trust in Trevenna was as 
 great as his services to him had been. If the world, that now idolized, had 
 turned and crucified him, he would have been secure that this man would never 
 have denied him. 
 
 And, thinking how he could serve his friend farther, Chandos went down to 
 his dinner, to courses prepared by a cordon bleu ; to wines of comet years 
 and imperial growth; to wit that was planned to please him as utterly as ever 
 jesters strove to amuse their king; and, later on, to women's beauty, and the 
 charms of softest pleasure, and the glitter of every revelry that could beguile 
 the senses and enchant away the hours of a man who, brilliant as a Guise, lavish 
 as a Bolingbroke, splendid as a Buckingham, was sought in proportion to 
 his fashion and his fame, the world turning after him like heliotropes after 
 the sun. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 " LA COMETE ET SA QUEUE." 
 
 " Did you see Chandos' trap in the ring to-day ? Four-in-hand grays, set of 
 outriders, cream-and-silver liveries, prettiest thing ever seen in the park," said 
 Winters of the First Guards. 
 
 " Chandos has given six thousand for Wild Geranium, best bit of blood 
 out of Danesbury; safe to win at the Ducal," said the Marquis of Bawood. 
 
 "Chandos has bought the Titians at Due de Vallere's sale ; the nation ought 
 to have bidden for them," said the Earl of Rougemont.
 
 CHANDOS. IT 
 
 "Nation's much better off ; he' s given them to the country," said Stentor, a 
 very great art-critic. 
 
 " You don't mean it ? said the Duke of Argentine. " That man would give 
 his head away." 
 
 " And if the Cabinet bid for it they might keep in office," said George Lorn, 
 who was a cynical dandy. 
 
 "Flora has been faithful three months: Chandos is a sorcerer !" yawned Sir 
 Phipps Lacy, talking of a beautiful sovereign of the equivocal world. 
 
 " Chandos has a bottomless purse, my dear Sir Phipps ; there's the key to 
 Flora's new constancy," said John Trevenna. 
 
 " You have read ' Lucrece,' of course ? There is no writer in Europe like 
 Chandos, such wit, such pathos, such power. I had the early sheets before it 
 was published," said the Duchess of Belamour, proud of her privilege. 
 
 " ' Lucrece,' is the most marvellous thing since ' Pelham.' " 
 
 " The most poetic since Byron ! " 
 
 " Oh, it is a poem in prose ! " 
 
 "And yet such exquisite satire ! " 
 
 " Alfred de Musset never probed human nature so deeply ! " 
 
 " Shelley never attained more perfect art. " 
 
 " Certainly not ! you know it is in the sixth edition already ? " 
 
 " Of course ! every one is reading it. " 
 
 So the talk ran around at a garden-party near Richmond, among the guests 
 of a Bourbon prince, and for once the proverb was wrong, and the absent was 
 found by his friends in the right, with a universal vote of adoration. When the 
 sun is at his noon, and they are basking in his light, the whole floral world turn 
 after him in idolatry ; if he ever set, perhaps they hang their heads, and hug 
 the night-damp, and nod together in condemnation of the spots that dimmed 
 their fallen god's beauty ; they have never spoken of them before, but they 
 have all seen them ; and then the judicious flowers will sigh a vote of cen- 
 sure. 
 
 He of whom the world chattered now was the darling of Fortune ; his sins 
 and stains, if he had any, were buried in oblivion, or only cited tenderly, almost 
 admiringly, as a women puts her diamonds on black velvet that their brilliance 
 may be enhanced by the contrast. It must be granted, too, that all the sins he 
 had were the soft sins ; but let him have done what he would, his world would 
 have christened it " such interesting eccentricity ! " For to women he was the 
 most handsome man of his day, and to men he was the leader of fashion and 
 the donor of the best dinners in Europe. Friendship is never sealed so firmly 
 as with the green wax of a pure claret, and our Patroclus is sacred to us after 
 sharing his salt and his bread, at least if it flavor clear soup and be. pain la mode; 
 black brpth and black bread might not have such sanctifying properties.
 
 18 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 " How late you are ! " cried the Countess de la Vivarol, making room for 
 him beside her in a summer concert-room, as the idol of the hour appeared at 
 last for half an hour in the prince's grounds. Madame de la Vivarol was the 
 most bewitching of Parisiennes, and the loveliest of court beauties, with a form 
 as exquisite as Pauline Bonaparte's, and hazel eyes of the divinest mischief and 
 languor. A fairer thing than this fairest of fashionable empresses was never 
 seen at Longchamps on a great race-day, or in the Salle des Marechaux at a 
 reception; yet, such is the ingratitude or inconsistency of nature, Chandos 
 looked less at her than at a strange face some distance from him, although he 
 had for the last two years been no more rivalled near the charming countess 
 than if she had worn a silver label or a silver collar round her neck to denote 
 his proprietorship, like his retriever Beau Sire, or his pet deer down at Claren- 
 cieux. Madame noted the lese-majeste: she was not a woman to forgive it, and 
 still less a woman to complain of it. 
 
 " They are talking about ' Lucrece ' Ernest. They worship it," she said, 
 dropping her lovely, mellow, laughing, starlike eyes upon him. They had 
 fallen on him with effect, twenty months before, in the soft moonlight on a cer- 
 tain balcony at Compiegne. 
 
 He laughed. He cared little what the world said of him; he had ruled it 
 too long to be its slave. 
 
 " Indeed ! And do they read it ? " 
 
 " Yes. They do read you" laughed madame, too, " though they would 
 swear to you on hearsay just so warmly. All the world idolizes the book." 
 
 " Ah ! I would prefer half a dozen who could criticise it." 
 
 " Tais-toi. How ungrateful you are ! " 
 
 " Because my head does not get turned ? That was Sulla's worst crime to 
 mankind. They say ' Lucrece ' is a masterpiece because it is in its fifth edition, 
 and they expect me to be intoxicated with such discerning applause," said 
 Chandos, with his melodious, amused laugh, clear and gay as a woman's. Fame 
 had come to him so young, he had gained the world's incense with so little 
 effort, that he held both in a certain nonchalant mockery. 
 
 " To be sure ! when men go mad if they get one grain of applause, it is very 
 discourteous of you to keep cool when you get a hundred. What a reflection 
 it is upon them ! Where are you looking, Ernest ? " 
 
 " Where can I be looking ? " he said, with a smile, as he turned his eyes full 
 upon her. It would not have done to confess to the countess that he was 
 scarcely heeding her words because of a face rarer to him had caught his gaze 
 in the fashionable crowd. 
 
 The countess gave a little skeptical meaning arch of her delicate eyebrows. 
 " She is very beautiful, mon ami, but her beauty will not do for you." 
 
 " Why ? "
 
 CHANDOS. 19 
 
 There was a little eagerness in the tone, and an unconscious self-betrayal 
 that she had penetrated his thoughts. 
 
 " Because the passage to it will be terrible," said Madame de la Vivarol, 
 with a shiver of her perfumed laces. Her teeth were set in rage under the soft, 
 laughing, rose-hued lips, but she could play her pretty, careless vaudeville 
 without a sign of jealousy. 
 
 " Terrible ! you pique my curiosity. I have no fondness, though, for 
 tempests in my love-affairs. 
 
 En I'amour si rien n'est amer, 
 Qu'on est sot de ne pas aimer ! 
 Si tout Test au degr6 supreme, 
 Quand est sot alors que 1'on aime ! 
 
 Terrible, too ? In what way ? " 
 
 "Par la porte du manage," said La Vivarol, with a silvery laugh. 
 
 Chandos laughed too, as he leaned over her chair. 
 
 " Terrible indeed, then. It were too much to pay for a Helen ! You have 
 disenchanted me at once: so tell me now who she is." 
 
 " Not I ! I am not a master of the ceremonies." There was a certain dark, 
 angry flash under the curl of her silky lashes that he knew very well. 
 
 " I am a little out of your favor to-day, Heloise ? " said Chandos, amusedly. 
 The passing storm of a mistress's jealousy was the darkest passage his cloud- 
 less and insouciant life had encountered. "I know my crime: I was not at 
 your reception last night." 
 
 "Weren't you?" asked La Vivarol, with the most perfect air of indifferent 
 surprise. " I could not tell who was and who was not. How I detest your 
 English crushes ! " 
 
 " Nevertheless, that was my sin," laughed Chandos. " What excuse can I 
 make ? If I tell you I was writing a sonnet in your name, you would tell me 
 we solace ourselves more materially and unfaithfully. If I said I feared my 
 thousand rivals, you would not be likely to believe that any more. There is 
 nothing for it but the truth." 
 
 " Well, tell it, then." 
 
 " Ma belle, the truth will be that I was at Alvarina's de"but in Rigoletto, and 
 supped afterwards with her and Rahel." 
 
 " Alvarina ! that gaunt, brown Roman ? and you call yourself fastidious, 
 Ernest ? " cried Madame la Comtesse. 
 
 " A gaunt, brown Roman, Alvarina ! The handsomest singer that ever 
 crossed the Alps ! So much for feminine prejudice," thought Chandos; but he 
 knew the sex too well to utter his thoughts aloud, or he would not have been 
 forgiven so bewitchingly as he was, while he lingered to listen to a cantata,
 
 20 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 exchanged words with a hundred different people, who vied with each other to 
 catch a syllable from the leader and darling of the hour, disentangled himself 
 from Madame de la Vivarol, the Duchess of Argentine, and a score of titled 
 beauties, who cared for no other at their side as they cared for him, and made 
 his way at last to where his drag stood at the gates in the bright light of a May 
 evening at seven o'clock. 
 
 " Pygmalion was nothing to you, Chandos," said Trevenna, swinging him- 
 self up the perch of the drag as a schoolboy up a tree, while the other men on 
 it were owners of some of the highest coronets in Europe. There was this that 
 was excellent and manly in this penniless man -upon -town; he never truckled to 
 rank; peer or day-laborer alike heard his mind. " He put heart into a statue; 
 youve put it into a woman of the world, much the more difficult feat. Madame 
 la Comtesse is positively jealous. I do believe she divines we are going to have 
 Demi-Monde to dinner ! " 
 
 Chandos laughed as he started off his leaders, thorough-bred roans, wild, 
 young, and fresh. Those fair, delicate hands of his could hold in the most riot- 
 ous team. 
 
 " Not she ! she would not do me so much honor. But every woman has a 
 heart, even the worst woman, though to be sure, we forget it sometimes, till 
 we've broken them." 
 
 " Broken them ? Poetic author of ' Lucrece ' ! Hearts never break, 
 except as a good stroke of business, as sculptors knock a limb off a statue to 
 make believe it's an antique. Every Musette we neglect vows her desertion is 
 her death, but she soon sings Resurgam again, to the tune of the Cancan at the 
 opera-ball." 
 
 " So much the happier for them, for we give them no De Profundis ! 
 There are exceptions to the Musette rule, though. I remember " 
 
 " Don't trouble yourself with remembrance, Ernest. She soon supplied 
 your place, take my word for it." 
 
 " My good fellow, no: she died." 
 
 " Not out of love for you ! She had aneurism, or disease of the heart, or 
 sat in a draught and caught cold, or ate too many cherries after dinner ! There 
 was a substantial basis for your picturesque hypothesis, I'll wager." 
 
 " Graceless dog ! Have you never had a doubled-down page in your life ? " 
 
 " I don't keep a diary; not even a mental one ! Reminiscence is utterly 
 unpractical and unphilosophical : agreeable, it dissatisfies you with the present ; dis- 
 agreeable, it dissatisfies you with the past. I say, they are taking five to three 
 on your chestnut at the Corner. I don't see what can beat you at Ascot. 
 There's a good deal whispered about Lotus Lily: she's kept dark." 
 
 " They always train closely at Whitworth, but rarely bring out anything 
 good. Sir Galahad beats the whole Ascot field for pace, and blood and power.
 
 CHAN DOS. 21 
 
 You are quite safe, Chandos," said His Grace of Ardennes, a gay, vivacious 
 young fellow, well known to the Turf, however. 
 
 " Queen of the Fairies is the only thing that could have a chance with 
 Galahad," put in the Due de Luilhieres: " she has good breed in her by double 
 strains; fine shoulders " 
 
 " Leggy ! " objected Trevenna, contemptuously, flatly contradicting a peer 
 of France. " Not well ribbed-up; weedy altogether. Chieftain was her sire, 
 and he never did anything notable except to break a blood-vessel on the 
 Beacon Course. The touts know what they're about, and they're all for the 
 Clarencieux horse." 
 
 " Galahad will win if he be allowed," said Chandos. " I wish I could ride 
 him myself; he would walk over the course. Ah ! there is Flora on the 
 balcony; they are before us." 
 
 " I wish they weren't here at all ! " cried Trevenna. " You should never 
 have women to dinner; they shouldn't come till the olives. You can't appre- 
 ciate the delicate nuances of a flavor if you are obliged to^turn a compliment 
 while you're eating it; and you never can tell whether a thing is done to a 
 second, if, as you discuss it, you are pondering on the handsome flesh-tints of 
 a living picture beside "y u - The presence of a woman disturbs that cool, 
 critical acumen, that serene, divine beatitude, that should attend your dinner." 
 
 " Blasphemer ! " cried Chandos. " As if one touch of some soft lips were 
 not worth all Brillat-Savarin's science, what flavor would wine have if women's 
 eyes didn't laugh over it ! You King of Epicures ! you'd adore a Vitellius, I 
 believe, and hang Pausanias for his Spartan broth the day after Mycale ! " 
 
 " Certainly. A man who could capture Xerxes's cooks and not dine off 
 their art deserved nothing less than the gallows; and Vitellius was a very sen- 
 sible fellow; when he knew he must die he took care to finish his wine first. 
 Hero versus Gourmet. Why not ? Careme benefited France much more last- 
 ingly than Turenne; and Ude's done the world far more good than Napoleon. 
 I'd rather have been the man who first found out that you must stuff a turkey 
 with truffles than have won Austerlitz, any day. Your hero gets misjudged, 
 blackguarded, whitewashed, over-rated, under-rated, just as the fit's hot or cold 
 to him; but the man who once invents a perfect sauce is secure for all eternity. 
 His work speaks for itself, and its judges are his apostles, who never name 
 him without benediction. Besides, fancy the satisfaction, to a cosmopolitan, 
 amiable creature like myself, of knowing I'd prepared a delight for generations 
 unborn ! " 
 
 " Sublime apotheosis of gastromony ! " laughed Chandos, as he threw the 
 ribbons to his groom before the doors of a summer villa at Richmond belong- 
 ing to him, where most of these Bohemian dinners and suppers & la RJgence 
 were given; a charming place, half covered in flowering trees and pyramids
 
 22 QUID AS WOJRKS. 
 
 of May blossom; with glimpses of wood and water from its windows, and with 
 the daintiest and cosiest banqueting-room in the world, hung with scarlet silk, 
 drawn back here and there to show some beautiful female picture by Titian, 
 Greuze, Regnault, or La Tour, large enough to hold twenty people, but small 
 enough to feel d huis clos like a cabinet; with the air scented by dreamy in- 
 censes, and dishes and wines under the mellowed light that would have en- 
 tranced even Lucullus had he been throned there on his ivory chair. Of this 
 villa, and this banqueting-room, rumor ran high, accediting it revelries as wild as 
 Medmenham or as Bussy-Rabutin's " Abbey " of Roissy. They who told most 
 precisely what positively took place there where, of course, always those who 
 had never been through its doors ! And the world loved to take their stories 
 with spice, and whisper unimaginable naughtiness of this pleasant bonbonniere of 
 a villa buried away in its acacias and guelder roses and flowering chestnuts, 
 where laughter rang out on to the young summer dawns, and beauty in neglige 
 outshone all the jewelled beauty of courts. 
 
 " The art of life is to enjoy!" cried Chandos, that night, lifting up to 
 crown the sentiment a deep glass of glowing red Roussillon. 
 
 " Toast worthy of Lucullus and Ovid ! and you are a master of the science," 
 said John Trevenna, who was perhaps the only one who saw quite clearly 
 through that intoxicating atmosphere of pastilles, and perfumes, and wines, 
 and crushed flowers, and bruised fruits, and glancing tresses, and languid eyes, 
 and lips fit for the hymns of a Catullus. 
 
 " He is the darling of the gods ! " cried Flora de 1'Orme, that magnificent 
 Arlesienne, with her melting, Greek-like glance, and her cheek like a peach in 
 the sun, while she leaned over him and twisted, Catullus-like, in the bright 
 masses of his long, golden hair, a wreath of crimson roses washed in purple 
 Burgundy. 
 
 Chandos shook the wine from the rose-crown as he bent and kissed that 
 glowing Southern loveliness, and laughed under his diadem of flowers. The 
 roses themselves were not brighter or more luxurious than the hours of life 
 were to him. 
 
 He enjoyed ! Oh, golden sum of this world's sweet content ! Supreme 
 truth of Faust; when he should 
 
 to the passing moment say 
 Stay ! thou art so fair ! 
 
 then alone the philosopher knew that he could claim to have tasted happiness. 
 When once we look back or look forward, then has the trail of the serpent been 
 over our Eden. To enjoy, we must live in the instant we grasp. 
 
 It is so easy for the preacher, when he has entered the days of darkness, to 
 tell us to find no flavor in the golden fruit, no music in the song of the
 
 CHAN DOS. 23 
 
 charmer, no spell in eyes that look love, no delirium in the soft dreams of the 
 lotus, so easy, when these things are dead and barren for himself, to say they 
 are forbidden ! But men must be far more, or far less, than mortals ere they 
 can blind their eyes and dull their senses and forswear their natures and obey 
 the dreariness of the commandment; and there is little need to force the sack- 
 cloth and the serge upon us. The roses wither long before the wassail is over, 
 and there is no magic that will make them bloom again, .for there is none that 
 renews us youth. The Helots had their one short, joyous festival in their 
 long year of labor; life may leave us ours. It will be surely to us, long before 
 its close, a harder tyrant and a more remorseless taskmaster then ever was the 
 Lacedemonian to his bond-slaves, bidding us make bricks without straw, 
 breaking the bowed back, and leaving us as our sole chance of freedom the 
 hour when we shall turn our faces to the wall and die. 
 
 Once, some twenty years or more before, down at the stately pile at Claren- 
 cieux, in the heart of the Devon woods, where red deer couched, and the black 
 eagle soared in the light of summer days above the haughty, ivy-mantled 
 towers, Philip Chandos, the great minister, had paused a moment where his 
 young son leant out of one of the painted oriel casements of the library, hang- 
 ing with a child's faith and love over the eternal story of Arthur. The boy's 
 arms were folded on the vellum pages, his head was drooped slightly forward 
 in dreamy thought, and on his face came the look that there is in the portrait 
 of Milton in his early years. 
 
 His father touched him on the shoulder. 
 
 " Where are your thoughts, Ernest ? " 
 
 The child started a little. 
 
 " I was thinking what I shall be when I am a man." 
 
 " Indeed ? And what will you be ? " 
 
 " First, Chandos of Clarencieux ! " 
 
 He could not have spoken with air more royal if he had said, " Augustus 
 Imperator ! " 
 
 " But besides ? " 
 
 " Besides ? " his voice fell lower, and grew swift and warmer, a little tremu- 
 lous in its enthusiasm. " Why, I will be a poet and a statesman. I will have 
 palaces like the Arabian Nights, and gather the people in them and make them 
 happy. I will defend all the guiltless and protect all the weak, like King 
 Arthur. I will rule men but by love, not fear; and I will make my name 
 great, so great that when I die they will only write ' Chandos ' on my grave, 
 and the name will tell the world its own tale ! " 
 
 They were strange words; and, where he leaned against the oriel, the light 
 from the setting autumn sun fell full on his face, deepening there the lofty 
 and spiritual exaltation of thoughts too far above his years. His father looked
 
 24 QUID AS WORKS.' 
 
 at him, and something that was almost a sigh passed the haughty lips of the 
 great minister. The sigh was for the future of those heroic and pure am- 
 bitions, for the world which would break them as surely as the pressure of the 
 iron roller crushes out the flowers of spring. And he could not utter to the 
 child, in the proud gladness of his young faith, the warning that rose to his 
 own lips: "Keep those dreams for other worlds, for they will never find 
 fruition here." 
 
 Yet, for the boy to whom these dreams came, untaught and instinctive, in all 
 their superb impossibility, their divine unreality, his father could not but hope 
 himself a future and an ambition still loftier than his own. 
 
 " The darling of the gods ! " said Flora de 1'Orme, to-night as she wound the 
 crown of scarlet roses in her lover's hair; and she had said very truly. Fortune 
 and the world never combined to flatter any man more than they combined to 
 shower all gifts and graces on Ernest Chandos. When he had been but a child 
 in his laces and velvets, princes had tossed him bonbons and royal women 
 caressed his loveliness. Tutors, parasites, servants, indulged all his fancies, 
 and never controlled or contradicted him. At Eton, nicknamed the Dau- 
 phin, hebore all before him, was noted for his champagne breakfasts, and 
 had a duke for his devoted fag. At seventeen he was his own master. 
 His father died grandly as Chatham, falling back, without a sigh or 
 struggle, after one of the finest speeches of his life, in the full career 
 of his magnificent and fearless leadership. The boy's grief was intense, 
 both passionate and enduring, for he had worshipped his father and his 
 father's fame. By his own wish he went abroad: he would not hear of a col- 
 lege. His only guardian was his grandfather by the distaff-side, the Duke of 
 Castlemaine, an old soldier and statesman of the Regency time: his mother had 
 died years before. The duke let him do precisely as he chose, which was to 
 remain abroad four years, chiefly in the East, where life, whether waiting for 
 the lion's or the leopard's step through the sultry hush of an Oriental night, or 
 learning soft love-lore from the dark eyes of a Georgian under the shadows of a 
 palm-grove, enchanted and enchained one who, whatever after-years might make 
 him, was in his youth only a poet, and a lover of all fair things, specially of 
 the fairness of women. Life seemed to conspire to idolize him and to ruin him: 
 after a boyhood of limitless indulgence, limitless tenderness, and limitless 
 enjoyment, with 'his father's name the greatest in the state, he passed to the 
 enervating, poetic, picturesque sensuousness of life in the Eastern nations, where 
 every breath was a perfume, every day was a poem, and every lovely face was a 
 captive's, to be bought at pleasure. He returned, to become the idol of a 
 fashionable world. His beauty, his wit, his genius, that showed itself, half 
 capriciously, half indolently, in glittering jeux d' esprit, his generosity that scat- 
 tered wealth to whoever asked, the brilliance of his splendid promise, the mag-
 
 CHAN DOS. 25 
 
 nificence of his entertainments, these became the themes of the most exclusive 
 and most seductive of worlds; and while men cited him to the echo, with 
 women he had only to love and he won. He was the comet of his horizon, and 
 fashion streamed after him. 
 
 Some romances, and some poems, were traced to him, dazzling, vivid 
 bagatelles, full of glowing, if sometimes extravagant, fancy, and of that easy 
 grace which is only heaven-born in authors or in artists. They were raved of 
 in Paris and London; he found himself twice famous, by literature and by 
 fashion; and his invitation was far more courted than one to Windsor or the 
 Tuileries: those only conferred rank, his gave a far higher and subtler dis- 
 tinction, fashion. 
 
 For the rest his fortune was large, his estates of Clarencieux were as noble 
 as any in England, and he had a house in Park Lane, an hotel in the Champs 
 Elysees, a toy villa at Richmond, and a summer-palace on the Bosphorus; and, 
 costly as were both his pleasures and his art-tastes, even these did not cost him 
 so much as a liberality that none ever applied to in vain, a liberality that 
 was the only thing in his life he strove to conceal, and that aided 
 men of talent to a fair field, or lifted them from the slough of narrowed 
 fortunes, by a hand that often was unseen by them, that always gave, 
 when compelled to give openly with a charm that banished all humiliation from 
 the gift. 
 
 Thus was Chandos now. 
 
 How far had he borne out his childish promise of the night in Westminster ? 
 He could not have told himself. He was the most dazzling leader, the 
 most refined voluptuary, the most splendid patron, the most courted man, of 
 his times; and the soft ease, the lavished wealth, the unclouded success of his 
 present, he asked and heeded no more. He was at the height of brilliant 
 renown, and not even a doubled rose-leaf broke his rest. 
 
 " Who ever said that we cannot love two at once ? It is the easiest thing in the 
 world to love half a dozen; to love but one were to show a shocking lack of ap- 
 preciation of nature's fairest gifts. Constancy is the worst possible compliment 
 a blockhead can pay to the beau sexe," thought Chandos, the next morning, as 
 he breakfasted, glancing through a pile of scented delicate notes, cream, rose, 
 pale tendre, and snow-white, perfumed with various fragrance, but all breathing 
 one tone. Women had done their uttermost to force him into vanity from his 
 childhood, when queens had petted him. Women always coax their favorites 
 into ruin if they can. His temper chanced to be such that they had entirely 
 failed. Of his personal beauty Chandos never thought more than he thought 
 of the breath he drew. 
 
 It was twelve o'clock as he took his chocolate in his dressing-room, a 
 chamber fit for a young princess, with its azure hangings, its Russian cabinets,
 
 26 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 and its innumerable flowers. Perfumes and female beauty were his two special 
 weaknesses, as they were Mahomet's. He was a man of pleasure, be it remem- 
 bered, with the heart 'of a poet and the eyes of a painter, a combination to 
 make every temptation tenfold more tempting. 
 
 " Cool you look here ! " cried a resonant, lively, clear voice, telling as a 
 trumphet-call, as that privileged person John Trevenna pushed lightly past a 
 valet and made his way into the chamber. 
 
 " My dear fellow ! Delighted to see you. Come to breakfast ? " 
 
 " Breakfast ? Had it hours ago, and done no end of business since. We 
 poor devils, you know, are obliged to walk about the streets in the noonday; 
 it's only you grands seigneurs who can lie in the shade doing nothing. Peaches, 
 grapes, chocolate, and claret for your breakfast ! How French you are ! The 
 public wouldn't think you a safe member of society if they knew you didn't 
 take the orthodox British under-done chop and slice of bacon virtually undis- 
 tinguishable from shoe-leather. I wonder what you would do if you were a 
 poor man, Ernest ? " 
 
 Chandos laughed and gave a shudder. " Do ! glide away in a dose of 
 morphia. Poor ! I can't fancy it, even." 
 
 Trevenna smiled as he tossed himself into the softest lounging-chair. He 
 had known what poverty was, known it in its ugliest, its blackest, its barest, 
 and had learned to hate it with a loathing, unutterable, and thoroughly justi- 
 fied; for poverty is the grimmest foe the world holds, a serpent that stifles talent, 
 ere talent can rise, that blasts genius ere genius can be heard, that sows hot 
 hate by a cold hearth, and that turns the germ of good into the giant of evil. 
 
 " Trevenna," went on Chandos, taking one of his hot-house peaches, 
 " who was that new beauty at the Due's yesterday ? I never saw anything 
 lovelier." 
 
 " There are twenty new beauties this season, in their own estimation, at 
 least ! Be a little more explicit, please." 
 
 " She was with the Chesterton. Really beautiful; beautiful as that Gior- 
 gione. There were plenty of men about her. I should have asked who she 
 was, and have been presented to her, but I had no time to stay, even for her. 
 
 " With the Chesterton ? Why, Ivors's daughter, of course." 
 
 " Ivors ! Died last year, didn't he ? of losing the Guineas, they said, to 
 the French colt. Why haven't I seen her before ? " 
 
 " Because she has been in Rome. She's the thing of the year is my Lady 
 Valencia. They're raving of her in the F. O. this morning, and they have 
 passed her into notice in the Guards; there'll be nothing to make running like 
 her this season. You'll see her at the Drawing-Room to-morrow," said Tre- 
 venna. He was a walking court-newsman and fashionable directory, being able 
 to tell you at a second's notice who was at the bottom of the St. Leger scandal
 
 CHANDOS. 27 
 
 about the powder in Etoile's drinking-water, what divorces were in train, what 
 amatory passages great ladies confided to their Bramah-locked dairies, and 
 whose loose paper was flying about most awkwardly among the Jews. " I no- 
 ticed you looked at her yesterday," he pursued: " so did the countess. She's 
 fearfully jealous of you ! Take care you don't get a note perfumed a la Brin- 
 villers. I wonder what on earth she would do if you were ever to marry ? " 
 
 " Shrug her pretty shoulders, pity my wife, and console me, to be sure. 
 But I shall never try her. Twenty years hence, perhaps, if I have nothing 
 better to do, and ever see the woman of my ideal " 
 
 " That impossible she, 
 Wherever she be, 
 In meerchaum dreams of fantasie ! " 
 
 paraphrased Trevenna. " What a queer idea, to be longing for ideal women 
 when there are all the living ones at your service ! That is preferring the 
 shadow to the substance. What can you want that Flora and all the rest have 
 
 not ? " 
 
 
 
 Chandos laughed, nestling in among the cushions of his sofa at full length. 
 " My dear Trevenna, it would be talking in Arabic to you to tell you. Indeed, 
 you'd understand the Sanscrit much quicker, you most material of men." 
 
 " Certainly I am material ! A material man dines well and digests well. 
 A visionary man enjoys his banquet of the soul, and has a deuced deal of 
 neuralgia after it. Which were best ? Lucullus's cherry-trees, or Lucullus's 
 conquests ? The victories are no good to anybody now. Asia and Europe 
 have been mapped out again twenty times; but cherry brandy will last as long 
 as the world lasts. Conquerors supplant each other like mushrooms, but 
 cherry tarts are perennial and eternal as long as generations are born to go to 
 school. Material ? Of course I am. Which enjoyed life best, your grand 
 summum bonum ? Dante, or Falstaff ? Milton, or Sir John Suckling ? " 
 
 " And which does posterity revere ? " 
 
 " Posterity be shot ! If I pick the bones of ortolans in comfort while I am 
 alive, what does it matter to me how people pick my bones after I'm gone ? 
 A dish of truffles or a terrapin to tickle my palate is a deal more to my taste 
 than a wreath of immortelles hung on my grave. I detest posterity; every 
 king hates his heir; but I dearly love a good dinner. If I could choose what 
 should become of my bones, I'd have myself made into gelatine; gelatine's 
 such a rascally cheat, and assists at such capital banquets, it's the most ap- 
 propriate final destiny for any human being that was ever devised. But what's 
 the good of my talking to you ? We look at life through different glasses." 
 
 "Rather!"
 
 og QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 " A disdainful enough dissyllable. Well, we shall see which is best content 
 of us two, after all, I, the animal man, or you, the artistic. You've tremen- 
 dous odds in your favor. I shall deserve great honor if I make any head 
 against you." 
 
 A shadow passed slightly over the face of Chandos; he had the variable and 
 impressionable temperament of a poetic nature, a deep thoughtfulness, even to 
 melancholy, mingled in contrast with the gayest and most nonchalant epicu- 
 reanism. 
 
 " Content ? at the end ? How is it to be secured ? ^Emilianus led a noble 
 and glorious life, to fall by an assassin's dagger. Ovid led the gayest and 
 the brightest life, to go out to the frozen misery of Pannonia. Africanus was 
 a hero, to be accused of stealing the public money. Petronius was an epicu- 
 rean, to die by a lingering torture." 
 
 His voice was musing, and there was a touch of sadness in it. Trevenna 
 laughed as he took a cigar from a case standing near, lighted it, and rose. 
 
 "Hang Petronius ! It could have been no fun to torment him ; the fellow 
 died so game, wouldn't wince once ! As for the end of the farce we play in, 
 
 'Tis not in mortals to deserve success ; 
 
 But you'll do more, Sempronius : you'll command it ! 
 
 I like that mis-quotation. Only ' deserve ' success, and I should like to know 
 who'll give you your deserts ! But I must go. There are no end of poor devils 
 waiting outside, working authors and working jewellers, mute, inglorious Mil- 
 tons, and glorious, talkative tailors, dealers with cracked antiques, and poets 
 with cracked novelties, sculptors with their bronzes, and young Chattertons 
 
 with their brass 1 beg pardon, I forgot ! one mustn't laugh at genius, even 
 
 in a shabby coat, here." 
 
 " No ; Le Sage had no coat on in his attic when he refused the millionnaire's 
 bribe. ' Tout compte fait, je suis plus riche que vous, et je refuse ! ' ' 
 
 " And you think that sublime ? to tell the truth and starve ! Faugh ! I'd 
 have taken their check, and written a ten times more stinging Turcaret after- 
 wards ! But, on my word, Chandos, your ante-rooms are as thronged as any 
 Chesterfield's or Halifax's of a hundred years ago." 
 
 " Nonsense ! There is no patronage nowadays. A man makes himself." 
 
 " Pardon me, his bank-balance makes him ! if it's heavy enough, it will 
 cover all sins, intellectual, moral, and grammatical, and float him high as 
 heaven. So you are keeping that young Montrose at Oriel ? " 
 
 " How could you find that out ? He is a boy of great promise; the Univer- 
 sity will give him a fair start." 
 
 " At your expense ! Spending your money in keeping penniless lads at col- 
 lege ? Isn't there such a thing as Quixotic generosity, Chandos ? "
 
 CHAN DOS. 29 
 
 " Isn't there such a thing as officious interference, Trevenna ? " 
 
 The rebuke was very gentle. Trevenna took it with the best of good 
 humor. 
 
 " A delicate reproof, monseigneur ! Well, what are your commands to-day ? 
 I know what to do about securing those genre picture; and I'm now going to the 
 Corner to see what the mid-day betting is for us; and I sent the cabochon 
 emeralds to Mademoiselle Flora, and grudged her them heartily; and I have 
 seen to the enlarging of the smoking-room of the Anadyomene. Anything 
 else?" 
 
 " My dear fellow, no; I think not, I thank you. Unless they tell me there 
 
 are some good things in Delia Robbia at the Vere collection; you might look 
 at them, if you don't mind the trouble; buy, if they are really perfect. And 
 bring me word round, if you can learn, what houses this daughter of Ivors will 
 show at to-night. I never saw a lovelier face; but there is a quality above 
 beauty that probably she has not. Rahel is not absolutely handsome; but that 
 woman has such sorcery in her that you could not be ten minutes with her 
 without being in love." 
 
 With which tribute to the great actress's power, Chandos, a connoisseur in 
 female charms, from those of a Greek grape-girl to those of a Tuileries prin- 
 cess, from the grace of a Bayadere to the glamour of a Rosiere, resumed his 
 pursuit of glancing through the innumerable little amorous notes that accom- 
 panied his breakfast, while Trevenna sauntered out, pausing a moment to put 
 in his head at the door: 
 
 " I lamed my horse over that wretched heap of stones in_Bolton Row. May 
 I use one of your horses ? " 
 
 " My dear fellow, what a question ! My stables are yours, of course." 
 
 And John Trevenna went out on his morning's work. He called himself a 
 business-man; but what his business was, beyond being prime minister, master 
 of the horse, and chancellor of the exchequer to Chandos, and knowing all the 
 news before anybody else whispered it, wasjwhat was never altogether ascertained. 
 Be his business what it might, in amusement Trevenna brought his own welcome 
 to every one; and he entertained Society so well that Society was always ready 
 to entertain him. 
 
 Society, that smooth and sparkling sea, is excessively difficult to navigate; 
 its surf looks no more than champagne foam, but a thousand quicksands and 
 shoals lie beneath; there are breakers ahead for more than half the dainty 
 pleasure-boats that skim their hour upon it; and the foundered lie by millions, 
 forgotten, five fathoms deep below. The only safe ballast upon it is gold dust; 
 and if stress of weather come on you it will swallow you without remorse. 
 Trevenna had none of this ballast; he had come out to sea in as ticklish a 
 cockle-shell as might be; he might go down any moment, and he carried no
 
 30 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 commission, being a sort of nameless, unchartered rover: yet float he did, 
 securely. 
 
 Twelve years before, one hot night at Baden, a penniless young Englishman 
 had lost more than he had in his purse, had, indeed in the world; the bank 
 arrested him; his prospect for life was to languish in German prisons, the prey 
 of the debts he could not liquidate and none else would pay for him. For he 
 was alone in life, and had, for all he knew, not a solitary friend upon the face 
 of the earth. A boy of twenty, throwing his gold about to the enchantress 
 of Play, heard the story, paid the debts, and freed the debtor. The boy 
 was Chandos, the young master of Clarencieux. It was the last dilemma into 
 which astute John Trevenna ever let life betray him; and it was his first step 
 toward social success. His boy-benefactor was not content with letting his good 
 services begin and end at the prison of the duchy: he made the prisoner his guest 
 then and there, in the sumptious magnificence of the life he was leading among 
 emperors and princes, peeresses and Aspasias, in that pleasant whirl of extrav- 
 agance called the Baden season. He was infinitely amused, too, with a compan- 
 ion sufficiently near his own age to enter into all his pleasures, and who was the 
 first person he had ever met who told him the truth with frank good nature and 
 never annoyed him by flattery. From that day, through Chandos, John 
 Trevenna was welcomed in the World ; and the World soon kept him in it as a 
 sort of Town Triboulet. 
 
 He was a privileged person: every one knows how immense a carte blanche 
 is given by those words. Chandos was the fashion ; he pleased himself by 
 doing all good services to Trevenna that circumstances would allow of ; and 
 the world petted Trevenna because Chandos befriended him. He lived so 
 very near the rose that much of the tender dews so lavishly poured down on 
 the king flower fell of necessity upon him. He was often rude, always brusque, 
 sans f aeon, sometimes even a little coarse; but he was so_frank, so impertur- 
 bably good-humored, told stories so admirably, and had such a thorough spice 
 of true wit, that he was as good with wine as anchovies or olives, and men had 
 him with their wines accordingly. Was a chateau dull on the shores of Monaco 
 or Baiae, or a country-house in the recesses; was there a dearth of news in a 
 hot club-room at the fag-end of a season; was the conversation dragging 
 wearily over an aristocratic dinner-table; or was a duke half dead of ennui in 
 the midst of a great gathering, the bright, laughing face of John Trevenna, 
 with the white teeth glancing in a merry, honest smile, always fresh, never 
 faded, never bored, but always looking, because always feeling, as if life were 
 the pleasantest comedy that could be played, was the signal of instant relief and 
 of instant amusement. The legions of blue-devils flew before his approach, 
 and no ennui could withstand the tonic of his caustic humor and his incessant 
 mirth
 
 CHAN DOS. 31 
 
 Even His Grace of Castlemaine, haughtiest of Garter knights, most hard to 
 please of all Regency wits, even that splendid old man, who had set his face 
 against this stray member of society, could not altogether withstand him. 
 
 " Chandos' homme d'affaires ? An interloper, sir, an adventurer, and I de- 
 test adventurers: tell you a first-rate story, make you a first-rate mot, but 
 always have a second king in their sleeve for your ecarte ! Society's a soil 
 you can't weed too vigorously. Still, a humorous fellow, I must confess; a 
 clever fellow, very." 
 
 So John Trevenna had laughed his way into the world, and, laughing, held 
 his own there. No one ever heard the story of the Baden debts from Chandos, 
 but Trevenna openly confessed himself a poor man; he never teased people 
 with reminding them of it, but stated the fact once for all without disguise. 
 He made a little money on the turf, and doubled that little now and then by 
 ingenius traffic here and there in the commercial gambling that the world 
 sanctifies; but nobody knew this. He was simply a man-upon-town. He lived 
 very inexpensively, dining out every night of his life; he had no vices; he was 
 an epicure, but that taste he only indulged at other people's tables; and he 
 had no weakness for women; if you had offered him a beautiful mistress or 
 a dozen of Imperial Tokay, he would without hesitation have taken the 
 Tokay. 
 
 As regarded his intellect, he had talent enough to be anything, from a 
 jockey to an ambassador, from a head cook to a premier. 
 
 " The Queen of Lilies will be at the Des Vaux to-night, Chandos," said he, 
 that evening, in the green drawing-room at Park Lane, where some dozen 
 guests having dined with him, including S.A.R. the Due de Neuilly, and 
 H.S.H. the Prince Carl of Steinberg, Chandos was now playing baccarat, half 
 a hundred engagements being thrown over, as chanced inevitably with him 
 every night in the season. Trevenna himself was not playing: he never 
 touched cards at any game except whist, which he had studied as what it is 
 a science. He stood on the hearth-rug, looking on, taking now and then a 
 glass of Moselle or Maraschino from a console near. 
 
 " What a charming name, The Queen of Lilies ! Who is she ? " asked his 
 host, having already forgotten trie commission he gave. 
 
 "The Queen of Lilies? Ah, she is exquisite! you have not seen her, of 
 course, Ernest ? " asked the French prince. " The Laureate gave her the title." 
 
 "In a sonnet, made instantly public by being marked Private. If you 
 want a piece of news to fly over Europe like lightning, whisper it as a secret 
 that would infallibly destroy you if it ever got wind," put in Trevenna, who 
 among princes and peers never could keep his tongue still. 
 
 " But who is she ? A new dancer, I hope. We have nothing good in the 
 coulisses."
 
 32 GUI DA'S WORKS. 
 
 " A dancer ? No ! She is Ivors' daughter." 
 
 " Ah ! I remember, I saw her yesterday. The Queen of Lilies, do you call 
 her? The name is an idyl ! " 
 
 "Ah ! " said his Grace of Crowndiamonds, with a cross between an oath and 
 a regret. " She is a great deal too handsome ! " 
 
 " Too handsome ? How charming a blemish ! They generally sin the 
 other way, my dear Crown." 
 
 "Too handsome; for she is ice ! " 
 
 " Never find fault with women, old fellow ! We may all of us think that 
 each of those dainty treasures has a flaw somewhere; but we should never hint 
 a doubt of them, any more than of their Dresden." 
 
 " Though the best Dresden is only soiled earth, just painted and glazed ! " 
 broke in Trevenna, taking out his watch. " You told me to learn where she 
 went. At nine she dined with the French Ambassador; at twelve she was at 
 Livingstone House; at one she was at Lady BellingharrTs; and now, fifty-five 
 minutes past one, she is at the Countess des Vaux's." 
 
 " Do you findbut everything, Monsieur Trevenna ? " laughed the French due. 
 
 Trevenna looked at him with a certain saucy triumph in his bold Saxon-blue 
 eyes, blue as forget-me-nots, and keen as a knife. 
 
 "Yes, monseigneur, if I wish." 
 
 The answer was quiet, and, wonderful for him, without a jest; but the prince 
 turned and gave him a more earnest look than he had ever bestowed on this 
 flaneur, this rodeur of the English clubs. 
 
 " He will be successful man, a great man, ten to one, when our brilliant 
 Chandos, who has the genius of a Goethe, will have died of dissipation or have 
 killed himself for some mistress's infidelity," thought the duke, a keen man of 
 the world, while his eyes glanced from the sagacious, indomitable, fresh-colored 
 face of Trevenna to the delicate, proud dazzling beauty of Chandos, with the 
 light in his deep-blue eyes and the laughter on his insouciant lips. 
 
 " We should all of us have been in those places, if your baccarat had not 
 beguiled us, Chandos," said the Comte de la Joie; "but social entertainments 
 are a crying cruelty." 
 
 " And a great mistake. Society is ruined by the rdture, which has nothing 
 to recommend its entertainments but its cooking, and has made the cooking 
 the measure of the entertainments. St. Fond's verdict of English banquets re- 
 mains true to the letter: ' Us se saoulerent grandement et se divertirent moult 
 tristement ! ' ' 
 
 " Oh, we all know what you are, Chandos," cried Trevenna. " You'd ex- 
 change your own cook though he is priceless were it only for his soups to 
 be able to eat a dried date with Plato, and would give up White's for the 
 Scipionic circle of the Mermaid evenings ! "
 
 CHANDOS. 33 
 
 " Perhaps. Though I admit you are a more practical philosopher than any 
 in Academus, and are as good a companion as Lucilius or Ben Johnson." 
 
 " I hope I am," said Trevenna, complacently. " I bet you the philosophers 
 flavored their dates, as we do our olives, by discussing the Lalage's ankles and 
 the Agora gossip. Scipio talked fine, we know; Lucilius laughed at him for it, 
 and fine talkers are always bores; and as for the Mermaid Raleigh whispered 
 wicked things about the maids of honor, and Shakspeare wondered what old 
 Combe would leave him in his will, and Ben joked him about the Crown Inn 
 widow over mulled posset. The Immortals were as mortal as we are, every 
 whit." 
 
 With which Trevenna washed down their mortality by a glass of golden 
 water. 
 
 " Shall we all go to Lady des Vaux's and criticize this Lily Queen, Chan- 
 dos ? " asked the Due de Neuilly. " She will not be believed in till you have 
 given her the cordon of your approbation. 
 
 Prince Carl was willing, the baccarat was deserted, and they went to the 
 crowded rooms of the Countess des Vaux, one of those great leaders of the 
 political world, who pass their existence in the supreme belief that cabinets 
 would fall and the constitution perish if it were not for their boudoir conferences, 
 which secure Providence to their party and hold Europe together over a cup of 
 souchong. 
 
 " There she is ! " said Neuilly, on the staircase, that was still thronged. 
 
 Chandos looked through the long vista of light through the opened doors, 
 and saw a loveliness as fair as the lilies after which they had named her. 
 
 She was beautiful as a young deer, this young English patrician, and had 
 something of a stag's lofty grace. Her eyes were a dark, deep brown, large, 
 thoughtful, proud, swept by lashes a shade darker still; her lips were sweet as 
 half-opened roses: her hair, the same hue as her eyes, was drawn back in soft, 
 floating masses from a brow like a Greek antique; she was very tall, and her 
 form was simply perfect. It was in its fullest loveliness, too, for she had been 
 some years in Rome, and successive deaths in her family had kept her long in 
 almost comparative seclusion. 
 
 "You said she was cold ! Such beauty as that can never be passionless," 
 said Chandos. 
 
 As though his voice had reached her through the long distance that severed 
 them, she turned her head at that moment, and their eyes met. 
 
 Corals, pink and delicate, rivet continents together; ivy tendrils, that a child 
 may break, hold Norman walls with bonds of iron; a little ring, a toy of gold, a 
 jeweller's bagatelle, forges chains heavier than the galley-slave's: so a women's 
 look may fetter a lifetime. 
 
 " Passionless ! with those eyes ? Impossible ! " said Chandos. 
 
 VOL. III. 2
 
 34 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 "Oh, she will have two passions," said Crowndiamonds, dryly, "two very 
 strong passions, vanity and ambition ! " 
 
 " For shame ! " laughed Chandos. " Never be cynical upon women, Crown. 
 It is breaking butterflies upon the wheel, and shooting humming-birds with 
 field-pieces. Well, let the Lily Queen's sins be what they may, she is lovely 
 enough to make us forgive them." 
 
 " Prfes des femmes que sommes-nous ? 
 Des pantins qu'on ballotte ! " 
 
 laughed the Due de Neuilly " Madame de la Vivaro sees you, Ernest, and 
 already looks jealous." 
 
 " I hope not, mon prince. I would almost as soon see a lady ugly as jeal- 
 ous. When she once begins to murmur ' forever,' she has given the first chill 
 to one's love," answered Chandos, with his low, melodious laugh, that had not 
 a trace of care in it. " You know I always thought, like Goethe, the proof of 
 the tenderest heart is to love often ! " 
 
 And he, in whose path loves were scattered as many as the hours, wooing 
 him to that inconstancy which is, after all, the salt of life, " en amour cen'est 
 que les commencements qui soient charmants; je ne m'etonne pas qu'on trouve 
 du plaisir a recommencer si souvent," as the Prince de Ligne has it, made 
 his way at last into the rooms with the French and English dukes, to be 
 detained right and left, and make his further way with difficulty into his host- 
 ess's presence. 
 
 There was empressment wherever Chandos moved; he was the idol of this 
 ultra-fashionable and ultra-exclusive world. They followed all his socials laws, 
 and courted all his words. 
 
 When he was at all free, and sought to look for the Queen of Lilies, he 
 found that she had left the rooms. 
 
 " I shall see her at the Drawing-Room," thought Chandos, whom too many 
 were ever ready to console, for him ever to be left to regret an absent loveli- 
 ness. Nevertheless, two or three times that night, in the midst of fashionable 
 crowds, in the soft smiles of other beauties, or in the incensed, gas-lit air of 
 Claire Rahel's late supper, in the hours that followed, there rose before him, 
 unbidden, that proud, stag-like head of those luminous, meditative eyes of the 
 Lily Queen: they rose before the glitter of La Vivarol's, they rose beyond the 
 lustre of Rahel's. Men of his temperament, the temperament of Goethe, are 
 incessantly accused of inconstancy, because the list of their loves is long. On 
 the contrary, they are the most constant to their own ideal, which they un- 
 ceasingly persue in every form which has its outward semblance. What their 
 dreams long for is not there, in that beautiful shadow that looked so like
 
 CHANDOS. 35 
 
 it, but which was but a transparency, only bright through borrowed light; 
 then they cease to love till again they persue a shadow; and fools call them 
 libertines. 
 
 That night, or rather in the dawn, Heloise, Countess de la Vivarol, looked 
 at her own face in the mirror while her attendants were taking the sapphires 
 and oynxes from her hair. It was well worth looking at, with its mignonne 
 mouth, its glancing falcon radiance of regard, its indescribable witchery of 
 coquetry, and its rich delicate tints, independent, as yet, even of pearl-powder. 
 "Belle comme unange, et mesquine comme un diablotin," her mother had used to 
 say of her in childhood; and the description still held good. Her mother was 
 the Princesse Lucille Viardort, who had married an Englishman, a rich baronet; 
 her father none was ever so bold as to name, the baronet himself put in no 
 claim for her; he lived apart from his wife, who was a handsome, sunny, good- 
 tempered creature, as happy in the midst of the slander to which she gave rise 
 as a sea-anemone in a rock-pool. It was her normal element: the Viardort, 
 that restless and dominant race who had played at bowls with nothing less than 
 all the rolling diadems of Europe, always had scandalized the world ever since 
 they burst, meteor-like, upon it. All the Viardort love sovereignty, and get it 
 though none are born to it. Heloise, who at sixteen married the enormous 
 wealth of the Count Granier de la Vivarol, was not behind her race. She 
 plunged eagerly, up to her lovely throat, in European intrigues, so eagerly 
 that she was now banished from France. Her lord did not follow her, there 
 lives not the man who could prefer a wife to Paris, but allowed her richly, so 
 richly, indeed, that she never called him anything worse than " ce petit drole " 
 when speaking of him in connection with her money-matters. With any other 
 affairs he never came under discussion. 
 
 Before her banishment from Paris, Chandos, at the same time with herself, 
 had been among the First Circle of autumn guests at Compiegne. In the 
 torchlight cure'es, in the moon-lit terraces, in the palace theatricals, in the forest 
 hunts, she had fascinated him, he had attracted her. M. le Comte was a 
 thoroughly well-bred man, who knew the destinies of husbands, abhorred a 
 scene, and neither sought a duel nor a divorce: besides, he was not at the 
 court. Their love passages went silvery smooth, and were quite a page out of 
 Boccaccio. Now Madame was disposed to be jealous, and Chandos was a little 
 disposed to be tired. Studies after Boccaccio often ended thus, in bathos. 
 
 To-night she looked at her face in her mirror, and her tiny white teeth 
 clenched like a little lion-dog's. Perhaps the love she had taught mercilessly 
 so often had revenged itself here on its teacher; perhaps it was but pique that 
 made her as tenacious to keep the sway she had held over the handsomest man 
 of his age; be the spring love, vanity, passion, or envy, what it would, her eyes
 
 36 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 glittered with a dangerous gleam under her curling lashes, and she muttered, 
 
 between her set teeth, 
 
 " If he ever love another, if it be twenty years hence " 
 
 The menace was not the less registered in her heart, because left unfinished 
 
 on her lips; even if the twenty years passed before she had to carry it out, the 
 
 fair countess was not a woman to forget it, or to falter in it. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 A PRIME MINISTER AT HOME. 
 
 OVER and over again John Trevenna had been pressed to take up residence 
 in the stately suites of the Park-Lane house; but this he had always refused. He 
 dined there, lunched there, ordered what he chose there, and stayed for months 
 each year at Clarencieux; 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 unmistakably "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 beside toy terriers; men very soberly dressed, 
 hard-featured, hard-headed members of trades-unions; men with long floating 
 beards, the look of Biirschen, 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 friends, his aristocratic 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 knew 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.
 
 CHANDOS. 37 
 
 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 peace- 
 ful sleep of a child, and very little of that profound repose sufficed for him. 
 His rooms were scrupulously neat, but bare of every thing 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 indifferent 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 was 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 considerable 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 
 flavor 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 without a murmur. In the first place, he had the good appetite of 
 a thoroughly healthy and vigorous constitution; in the second, he would com- 
 pensate himself by the daintiest and most delicious of noon dtjefiners 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 em- 
 ployer; a tall man, lean, venerable, saturnine, with iron-gray 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 hand lightly clasped 
 in 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
 
 38 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 and said he " could but act on his instructions; his principal had been very posi- 
 tive; 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 Rembrandt, a cracked vio- 
 lin christened a Straduarius, 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 did business thoroughly legitimately, thoroughly strictly. Their customers 
 might curse them with terrible bitterness, as the head and root of their de- 
 struction, but they could never legally complain of them. 
 
 "Sit down, Mathias; sit down, and pour yourself out a cup of coffee," said 
 Trevenna, who was always pleasant and cordial to everybody, and gained the 
 suffrages of all the lower classes to a man. " I'll run my eyes through these 
 papers;, and when you have drunk your ooffee, be able to account me the re- 
 ceipts 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, cloudless, dauntless eyes sparkled with a sup- 
 pressed amusement. These papers, and their like, brought him as keen a 
 pleasure and excitation as other men find in a fox-hunt or a deer-drive; it was 
 the chase, and without, as Trevenna would have said, the fatigue of dashing 
 over bullfinches or watching in sloppy weather for the quarry; it was a battue 
 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 Brabazon : oh ! he's going to be 
 married to the Rosefleck heiress: better let him alone. Grey Graeme: who 
 would have thought of his being in Queer Street? Jemmy Haughton: little 
 fellow, barrister, got a bishop for an uncle, bishop will bleed, won't see 
 him screwed; Church hates scandals, specially when it's in lawn sleeves. 
 Talbot O'Moore Wareley Belminster Very good, very good," mur- 
 mured Trevenna over details of paper floating about town, that those whom it 
 otherwise concerned would have rather characterized, on the contrary, as very 
 bad. He meditated a little while over the memoranda, amused meditation 
 that washed down the flavorless coarseness of his breakfast; then he thrust his
 
 CHAN DOS. 39 
 
 breakfast cup away, pocketed the lists, and went steadily to business. Not that 
 he looked grave, dull, or absorbed even in that; he was simply bright, intelli- 
 gent, and alert, as he was in a ducal smoking-room; but Ignatius Mathias knew 
 that those sagacious, sparkling glances would have discovered the minutest flaw 
 in his finance, and that the man who listened so lightly, with a brier-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 even 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 chattered over din- 
 ner-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 impres- 
 sive character of 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 dosen't exist. Everybody takes it for granted that a Jew lies." 
 
 There was a cheerful, easy serenity in the tone, as though uttering the 
 pleasantest compliment possible, that made them sound all 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 use to hide: I know 
 he's at that miserable little Black Forest villiage now. He may just as well 
 come and walk about London. He 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 unmovable, impassive form of the Castilian, a 
 change that shook him suddenly from head to foot, as a reed trembles in the 
 wind. What little blood there were 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 outburst of passion or of entreaty escaped him; 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 as he blew a cloud of smoke from the little brier- 
 wood pipe; but his glance rested meaningly on the Jew's, looking him 
 through. 
 
 " That's the compact. Keep it, and I don't touch the boy," he said curtly. 
 " You are very good, sir."
 
 40 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 There was no hypocrisy here; acute, parsimonious, keen to cunning, saga- 
 cious to unscrupulousness as Ignatius Mathias might be in commercial trans- 
 actions, here he was grateful and gentle, with a humility that made him 
 the bond slave of this drawing-room wit, this club amuse, this man about- 
 town, and a terrible supplicating fear mingled with the breathless thankfulness 
 with which he looked at a benefactor whom most men would have been tempted 
 to hold a taskmaster. 
 
 " You may go now, Mathias," said Trevenna, with a nod. " You know 
 what to do in all cases; and don't forget to put the screw on to Fotheringay 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 noon-day, 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 
 character." 
 
 He laughed gayly 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 organizations are sure to have a flaw,' thought Trevenna, 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 as 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, till 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-ser- 
 vice. 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, French, German, and American, all tending to the same direc- 
 tion of study. 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 education 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
 
 CHAN DOS. 41 
 
 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 hereditary winners, an arena where adven- 
 turers are excluded as utterly as men of the foreign states, though they were 
 princes, were excluded from the games of Elis. So for three hours and a half 
 Trevenna, 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 the 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 clock-work, got up, changed 
 his dress in ten minutes, and rang for his tilbury to be brought round. It 
 came, as elegant a thing as ever went round the park at six on a June day, 
 with a chestnut mare in it, pure bred, who would do twelve miles in five-and- 
 forty minutes, if needed. Both the tilbury and the chestnut mare had been 
 given him by Chandos, who knew that a man may live in what den he pleases, 
 but that he must drive a good thing or be dropped by the mondes to-morrow. 
 " 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 midday 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 speculators, who usually did a little quiet business 
 only in trotting-matches and quiet handicaps, to the great gamblers of the ring, 
 who took nobleman'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 genius, 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 favor. All the shrewdest men 
 were afraid to touch him. The Clarencieux stables had been famous since the 
 Regency. 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 favorite. None
 
 42 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 had such opportunities of telling to the nicety the points, powers, stay, and pace 
 of the Clarencieux horse in its prime. He gave the opinion frankly enough. 
 Sir Galahad was the finest horse of the year, and to his mind would ail-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 favorite for considerable 
 sums so long as any could be found rash enough to take them. 
 
 There was one little, spare, red-wigged, fogy, 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 nothern autumn-meetings, though 
 having earned no sort of renown anywhere. 
 
 When Trevenna left Tattersall's, this little leg, a worn-out shattered 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. Take the field against 
 the favorite with any fools you like, as widely as you can." 
 
 The words so rapidly uttered that to passers Trevenna seemed to have 
 merely stopped a second to strike a fusee, without noticing the little, broken- 
 down leg. 
 
 " Wonderfully dark we have kept that chestnut. Not a soul has ever sus- 
 pected the colt. 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. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE QUEEN OF LILIES. 
 
 LADY VALENTIA ST. ALBANS stood beside one of the palms in the conser- 
 vatory of her sister Lady Chesterton's house. It was the day of the Drawing- 
 Room; she waited for her sister, with her white train carelessly caught over 
 one arm, and a shower of lace and silk falling to the ground and trailing there 
 in a perfumy billowy cloud. She was a picture perfect as the eye could ask or 
 the heart conceive in the glowing colors of the blossoms round; and a painter
 
 CHAN DOS. 43 
 
 would have given her to his canvas as the Ordella or the Evadne of Fletcher'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 its shadow on her; the pressure of improvidence and im- 
 poverishment had sent her father to the Roman air that she had breathed so 
 long, and his decease had left her, for 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 generosity 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 leaves of the palms, their pale 
 green contrasting, as though she had been posed there by a painter's skill, with 
 the exquisite coloring 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 con- 
 scious of it as an empress is conscious of the extent of the sway of her sceptre. 
 
 " WVre rather early," said her sister, a baroness, as she entered the con- 
 servatory, a handsome brunette some years her senior, and very unlike her; 
 a brusque, abrupt, showy woman; ambitious and disappointed, keenly dis- 
 appointed because a distant cousin had stepped between the Ivors earldom and 
 her own young son. " Who sent you those flowers ? Clydesmore ? Admir- 
 able person, very admirable; great pity he's such a bore. How well you 
 look, Valencia ! On ne pouvait mienx. Chandos will be at the palace, you 
 know, this morning." 
 
 " Are you sure ? " 
 
 There was a glance of interest from the Lily Queen's deep, serene eyes. 
 
 " 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 
 curtly note, however. I wrote to say you had just arrived from Rome, 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 ? " she said, while her gaze still rested on the 
 superscription of his name. 
 
 " Rich ! " 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
 
 44 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 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 Rome. 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 the deep purple bells of 
 an Oriental plant. She declined to persue the more poetic track, yet she looked 
 a poem herself. 
 
 "Raised!" echoed her sister. "My dear, he would call it anything but 
 raised. The Chandos were Marquises of Clarencieux, you remember, until the 
 title was attaindered in the Forty-Five. 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 contra- 
 dict 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 on 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 adroity conveying to her sister never to disagree with 
 the eminent leader of society, whom women idolized as they idolized Jermyn 
 and Grammont in the splendid days of Hampton Court. 
 
 The Queen of Lilies did not answer; she stood silent, looking still at the
 
 CHAN DOS. 45 
 
 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 ? Can he not bear contradiction?" 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 draw him to her again. He is 
 so used to being followed, he would not know what it was to be opposed. He 
 is the most graceful, the most brilliant the most generous person in the world: 
 at the same time, he is the most difficult to please. Guess, yourself, whether 
 a man whose ideal is Lucrhe 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 at it 
 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. 
 
 " 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- Room ? " said Trevenna, entering one of the morn- 
 ing-rooms in Park Lane to take his meditated second breakfast. Chandos was 
 talking his first, the chamber scented and shaded, 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 scandalized 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 own Oriental costume, and serving him with the most loving 
 obedience. A French duke and two or three Guardsman 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. 
 
 " Cards at noon, Chandos ? " cried Trevenna, as he sauntered in the room, 
 regardless alike of the presence of fashionable men who looked coldly on him,
 
 46 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 and of the charms of the Turkish attendants. " Fie ! fie ! The only legiti- 
 mate gaming before dinner is the sanctioned and sanctified swindling done upon 
 'Change." 
 
 " Business is holier than pleasure, I suppose," laughed Chandos. " Business 
 ruins a host of others; pleasure only ruins yourself: of course the world legiti- 
 mates the first. How are you to-day ? 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, Trevenna ? " 
 
 " All too light and too late for me. I'm a John Bull," said Trevenna, taking 
 a glass of curapoa, nevertheless, with some Strasbourg pate. " Have you heard 
 the last news of Lady Carallynne ? " 
 
 " 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. Daresay 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 of the Circassian near 
 him through his hand. " Poor Car ! he is quite a V antique: that sort of 
 revenge has gone out with hair-powder, highwaymen, patches, and cock- 
 fighting." 
 
 " Beauty of a commercial age: we can turn damaged honor and broken 
 carriage-panels into money, nowadays," said Trevenna. " Carallynne's rococo. 
 Liberty all, say I. If my wife runs away with a penniless hussar, why the deuce 
 am I to make a fuss about it ? I think I should be the gainer far and away." 
 
 "Noblesse oblige" said Grenvil, softly with a glance up from under his 
 lashes, that were silky and curly as La Vivarol's. "Car don't like his name 
 stained; Old-World prejudice; great bosh, of course, and Mr. Trevenna can't 
 understand the weakness, very naturally." 
 
 The softness of the thrust gave it the keener stab. For a moment the light 
 leaped into Trevenna's bright eyes with a passionate glitter, but it was instan- 
 taneously suppressed. He recovered his gay good humor. 
 
 " Mr. Trevenna dosen't understand it, Lord Cosmo. Why standing 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 practical 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 guardsman, indo- 
 lently turning to resume his flirtation in Turkish with a Georgian.
 
 CHANDOS. 47 
 
 " Where do you ever find them for insolence ? " 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 collecting naughty stories that ever 
 existed. You must come across some very dirty tatters sometimes. I do 
 believe you know everything 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 four- 
 fold." 
 
 " 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, dys- 
 peptic, 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." 
 
 " Rather the better, if your suicide is piquant. Something to censure, 
 flavors 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 ! ' Apro- 
 pos of censure, even the Hypercritic won't censure you: there are three columns 
 of superb laudation to Lucrece." 
 
 " Never read critiques, my dear Trevenna. 
 
 ' 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 Joselyn is so lavish of his milk and honey that the Hypercritic 
 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 matelote. Praise hired with 
 a pate ! what a droll state of literature ! " 
 
 " Not at all. Everything's bough and sold, from the dust of the cinder- 
 heaps to the favor 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
 
 48 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 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 a la 
 Talleyrand, murmuring the question in his silkiest, sleepiest tone. The Guards- 
 man 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 doucers into your 
 pocket, things are going 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 favor 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 are successful if 
 the spavined mare trots out looking sound, and 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, I should know I was qualified to make up a Budget." 
 
 " And my belief is you could do either or both," laughed Chandos, as he 
 rose with a farewell caress of his hand to the bright braids of gazelle-eyed Leila. 
 "Are you all going? To be sure ! the Drawing-Room, I had forgotten it: 
 we shall be late as it is. Au revoir, then, till we meet in a crush. Nothing 
 would take me to that hottest, dullest, drowsiest, frowiest, and least courtly of 
 courts if it were not for our lovely what is her name ? 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 splendor, went to dress for St. James's as his guests left 
 the chamber, pausing a moment himself beside Trevenna. 
 
 " Are you coming ? "
 
 CHANDOS. 49 
 
 " I ? 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. Surprised, Chandos laid his 
 hand on his shoulder and looked at him. 
 
 " Nonsense ! what is the matter with your name ? 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 ? I presented you years ago." 
 
 " Yes, you did, mon prince," laughed Trevenna, whose ill humor could not 
 last longer than twenty seconds. " You took me out of prison, and you intro- 
 duced me to court: what an antithesis ! No ! I don't want to come. I always 
 feel so dreadfully like a butler in silk stockings and tights; and I don't care 
 about creeping in at the tail of a list in the morning papers. It's not elevating 
 to your vanity to bring up the rear, like the spiders in a childs procession of 
 Noah's Ark animals." 
 
 Chandos laughed. 
 
 "Well, as you like; amuse yourself with my pretty Easterns, then, though, 
 on my word, Trevenna, you never seem to know whether a woman's handsome 
 or not." 
 
 "No ! I never cared much about women." 
 
 Chandos lifted his eyebrows in unutterable pity and amazement. 
 
 u What you lose ! Good heavens ! that a man can live so dead to all the 
 salt of this life ! Adieu for an hour or two, then: I shall be very late." 
 
 " Poor fellow ! He has brains enough to be premier, and he is nothing but 
 a penniless man-on-the-town," he thought, as he entered his 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 daresay, 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 meta- 
 phorical; he is too good .a scholar to offend their 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, with its cream-and-silver 
 liveries, its four grays ridden by jockeys, and its fracas of fretting horses and 
 of dashing outriders. Trevenna looked out of one of the windows, profanely 
 regardless of the beauty of the Circassians that had been left in legacy to him, 
 and watched the gay elegance of the equipage as it swept away.
 
 50 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 " 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 Ver- 
 sailles 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; elk vient a pas tents j mat's 
 elle itient ! ' And what a comfort that is ! " 
 
 He stood looking out still as the carriage swept out of sight, the dust scat- 
 tered in a cloud behind it as the outriders dashed after it like a king's guard. 
 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 producers, 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 temperament, in all other respects so bright, so shrewd, 
 so practical, and so dauntless. 
 
 As he'turned from the casement, the retriever, Beau Sire, standing 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 Sire: /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 drinking, and took his luncheon 
 in solitude off some of the masterpieces of that culinary chef, M. Dubosc. He 
 offered Beau Sire the dog's favorite 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, O you Lavater among re- 
 trievers ! You know his foes: he doesn't," laughed Trevenna, while he finished 
 his luncheon with the fine appreciation of Dubosc's talent, and of the oily per- 
 fections of the hock and the maraschino, because of his previous asceticism 
 over a mutton-chop. 
 
 " You are safe for the Cup, Ernest ? " said his Grace of Castlemaine, as they
 
 CHANDOS. 51 
 
 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 uni- 
 form, with the Garter ribbon crossing his chest, and stars and orders innumer- 
 able on his heart, above the scars of breast-wounds gained at Vittoria and in 
 many a cavalry-charge in Spain. 
 
 " Safe ? Oh, yes. There is nothing in any of the establishments to be 
 looked at besides Galahad," answered Chandos, between whom and the duke 
 there was always a sincere and cordial affection. 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 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 that 
 he poisoned her; but he would know what he was about, and he offered long 
 odds on this chestnut." 
 
 " Diadem ? " repeated Chandos, whose eyes were glancing over the many- 
 colored sea about him, of feathers, jewels, floating trains, military orders, and 
 heavy epaulets, to seek out the Queen of Lilies. " Diadem ? You mean an 
 outsider, entered by a Yorkshire man? My dear duke, he is the most 
 wretched animal, 1 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 honor of the Clarencieux establish- 
 ment; 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. Noth- 
 ing but an adventurer." 
 
 Chandos laughed, as he moved to pierce his way towards the young Duchess 
 of Fitz-Eden, a beautiful brunette, with whom, rightly or wrongly, society had 
 entangled his name in a very tender friendship. 
 
 " For shame, duke ! You should not use that word. It is the last resource 
 of mediecrity 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, and Chandos, joining the young duchess, while bows, smiles, and 
 morning greetings recognized him on all sides from the courtly mob, passed 
 on with her into the presence-chamber. 
 
 From the Guardsmen, who to their own discomfiture, had formed the escort,
 
 52 O UIDA'S WORKS. 
 
 and were drawn up with their troop outside to catch but fugitive glimpses of fair 
 faces as the carriages passed, to the ministers in the Throne-room, whose 
 thoughts were usually too prosaically bent on questions of supply or votes of 
 want of confidence to turn much to these vanities, there was one predominant 
 and heightened expectation, the sight of the Queen of Lilies. Rumor had long 
 floated from Rome of her extraordinary loveliness; poets had sung it, sculptors 
 immortalized it, and artists adore it there. The golden Southern sun had ripened 
 it to its richest there, and it came now to adorn the court. It drifted across the 
 thoughts of Chandos, to the detriment of much of the beauty that was about 
 him, and he waited for it impatiently were he stood among the circle of princes, 
 peers, and statesman 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 would very likely have told him that he had never 
 really loved: he would have told her that he had loved a thousand times. And 
 he 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 frag- 
 rance as it bloomed before. 
 
 Women only rebel against this truth because their season of the roses 
 their youth is so short. 
 
 One after one they passed before him, the beauties of the year; none 
 attracted him very much. He had been so fully sated by all that was most 
 dazzling and seductive in feminine loveliness for so many years, that, while still 
 impressionable, he was, as they called him, fastidious. He looked almost 
 eagerly for the presentation of the Queen of Lilies. 
 
 At last the delicate white robes swept by him; thrown out from the maze of 
 gorgeous color, 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 dias 
 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
 
 CHANDOS. 53 
 
 onward and out of the Throne-room; and through the rest of the gorgeous and 
 tedious ceremony Chandos let his thoughts dwell on those deep, gazelle eyes 
 and those soft silent lips, musing how easy and how beguiling a task it would 
 be to teach the one the " looks that burn " and woo from the other their first 
 and lingering caress. 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 FLora de 
 rOrme'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 hers would be far too dear. Heloise 
 was right." 
 
 Chandos was a man for whom too varied amusements waited, and by whom 
 too rich and intoxicating a life was hourly led, for one woman to be able in 
 absence to retain her hold on him. The world, like a kaleidoscope, was always 
 turning its most seductive pictures towards him. How was it possible that his 
 gaze could linger long and faithfully on one ? 
 
 " 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 Richmond villa in all their gayety and ex- 
 travagance, 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 splendor 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 costume-ball that 
 was also at pleasure a masked-ball, and professedly in imitation of the Veglione 
 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 beyond, that 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 dis- 
 tance. Masked himself, and dressed simply in a dark violet domino, he looked 
 down through the pageant of color, fused into one rich glow by the lustre that 
 st : . i.aied 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 Rose ! " said Trevenna to himself, " How the women love
 
 54 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 you, and how the world loves you, and how lightly you wear your crown ! Ed- 
 ward 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, his eyes re- 
 curring every now and then with persistent contemplation to the distant form 
 of his friend and host, where the diamonds of Clarencieux, that had glittered 
 at many a Stuart and Bourbon gathering, sparkled with every movement of 
 Chandos as he bowed to a prince, greeted an ambassador, or smiled on a beauty. 
 There was a certain savage envy and a certain luscious satisfaction mingled to- 
 gether in the contemplation. 
 
 " The fools that go to see Moliere, 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 loqua- 
 cious 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 
 their 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 choke full 
 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. 7'hat would have been a 
 comedy worth seeing. Well, T can fancy it a little. My graceful Pompeian, 
 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 tab- 
 leau he had called up in his mind's eye, and looking still at the friend whom he 
 had alternately apostrophized as Plantagenet and Pompeian, left his alcove and 
 his revery 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 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
 
 CHANDOS. 55 
 
 pastime; but, to both monkey and man, the minimum of danger with the 
 maximum of mischief made a temptation that was irresistible. 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 weakness, he hated 
 humanity. 
 
 " How extravagant you are, Ernest ! " said the Duke of Castlemaine, who 
 had made his appearance for twenty minutes with his daughter-in-law, the Mar- 
 chioness of Deloraine^ a beautiful Austrian blonde of two-and-twenty years, the 
 hostess, to a certain extent, of Chandos' great parties. " Do you think these 
 people love you any the better for all you throw away on them, eh ? " 
 
 " Love me ? Well, the fairer section do, I hope," laughed Chandos, linger- 
 ing a moment. 
 
 The Duke gave another little growl to himself as he brushed a moth off his 
 broad blue ribbon. He too had had ajeunesse orageuse, and had made Europe 
 ring with the brilliance of his extravagances; but Warburne Abbey now was 
 heavily laden with mortgage in consequence, and its noble v owner sometimes 
 wished that he had played a little less au roi dfyouille. 
 
 "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, duke?-" 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 down ? I understand, duke," laughed Trevenna, impervious to 
 satire, and impenetrable even to a cut direct, who caught every bullet sent 
 against him, gayly 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, turn- 
 ing 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. Rubbish floats; I shall float. And when 
 I am at the top of the wave, won't everyone call my dirtiest pebbles fine pearls ?"
 
 56 GUI DA'S WORKS. 
 
 " 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 though they were its Penates. " Sort of 
 man to do well anywhere; be a privileged wit in a palace, and chief demagogue 
 in a revolution; 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 Morehampton, 
 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 of 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 favorite science at 
 guinea points, where, despite his" inherent aversion to Trevenna, he would 
 have been willing to have had that inimitable master of the rubber for a partner. 
 
 The duke was quite right, that a man who has trained his intellect to per- 
 fection 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 prob- 
 lems; 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 and 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, and bewitching in her 
 coquette's charms as any portrait aux Amours of Mignard. Still ever and 
 again his eyes turned towards the entrance as he moved among his guests, 
 and suddenly a new look glanced into them: they were too eloquent to women 
 not to be unconsciously and, for him, dangerously expressive. She who held 
 him captive at that moment saw that look, and knew it well. She had seen it
 
 CHAN DOS. 57 
 
 lighten for her in the forests of Compiegne 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 noiselessly 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 was far 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 Comneni and 
 the sack of Dandolo, jewels that had once, perhaps, been on the proud, false 
 brow of the Imperial Irene. 
 
 Involuntarily Chandos moved slightly forward; involuntarily there ran, even 
 through that courtly and impassive crowd, an irrepressible, low murmur of ad- 
 miration. La Vivarol looked, and did not underrate one in whom she foresaw 
 her rival. 
 
 She arched her pencilled, piquant eyebrows. 
 
 " Ah, there is your living Lucrece ! It must be charming to sketch char- 
 acters 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 would never now see her as she was; he would see in her only 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, re- 
 sembles 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
 
 58 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 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 splendor of her 
 eyes, and a soft, wild warmth on her cheek. 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. What made you di- 
 vine so entirely the woman I dreamt of ? She only floated dimly even through 
 my thoughts, until I saw her to-night." 
 
 She looked at him almost deprecatingly, and that look on her proud and 
 sovereign loveliness had a greater charm than on women more capable of en- 
 treaty, less used to a victorious and unquestioned power. 
 
 " Hush ! That is the language of compliment. I have heard how deli- 
 cately 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 words of truth must needs 
 sound the words of an exaggerated homage." 
 
 He spoke with the caressing gentleness of his habitual manner with women, 
 while his eyes dwelt on her with a softer eloquence still. He spoke, moreover, 
 in fullest sincerity. As he looked down on her in the shadowed and silvery 
 light, while the pale green foliage and the burning hues of the tropical plants 
 were around her and above her in their maze of hue and perfume, he might 
 have been, in the dead Byzantine years, beside the sorceress beauty that 
 Justinian crowned, or that bloomed with the Eastern roses in the soft isles of 
 Propontis. 
 
 So far, it was well for him that he was not alone with her, though this was 
 but the first night that she had been presented to him. All 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, and 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 Vivarol fluttered her golden wings, and waltzed as though they really 
 bore her, bird-like, through the air, and flirted with her most glittering coquet- 
 ries, and smiled on him with her most bewitching mutine mouth; but she noted
 
 CHANDOS. 59 
 
 every glance that was given to another, and treasured the trifles of each slight 
 infidelity. 
 
 If a Viardort, 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 mel- 
 ody of the voice that had lingered on her ear in the orange-alleys of Fontaine- 
 bleau, 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 satirized him mercilessly for such provin- 
 ciality, 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 "forever," and she would yawn with ennui; appeal to 
 her reason, and she would cordially assent to the truth that " nous sommes 
 bien aises que Ton devienne infidele, pour nous degager de notre fidelite." 
 But, alas for the consistency of fair philosophers ! Madame applied her theo- 
 ries 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. 
 
 A woman of the world never, by any hazard, is so imprudent as to show 
 herself piqued: such gaucherie as thus to show her cards and declare herself in- 
 capable of winning the game were utterly impossible to her. La Vivarol never 
 for a moment so betrayed herself : on the contrary, she praised her rival with 
 as easy a grace as she would have praised a Velasquez, whenever she spoke of 
 her. Nevertheless, not one glance that her lover bestowed, not one waltz that 
 he gave, not one moment that he was held captive to Lady Valencia, escaped 
 her. She had drawn him away dearest triumph of womanhood ! from her 
 sworn friend, the Duchess of Fitz-Eden, and had found her conquest exquis- 
 itely sweetened by the heart-burning she caused to that lovely idiot. She had 
 held him enchained longer than any other ever had done; her yoke had been so 
 skilfully woven of silk bonds that it had lasted longer than any unbroken. Of 
 such rivals as Flora de 1'Orme she had been secretly, though she never deigned 
 to confess herself, jealous; of a rival in her own sphere she was intolerant. 
 
 She had never been given one in the eighteen months that had passed by 
 since the conte d 1 amour a la Boccaccio had commenced in the gay autumn 
 days of Compiegne; and La Vivarol, whose breviary was Rochefoucauld and 
 whose precursor was Montespan, philosophized inimitably on the rights of in- 
 constancy, 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. As far as the 
 courtesies and duties of a host allowed him, the Queen of Lilies usurped the
 
 60 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 attention and admiration of Chandos almost entirely. The gleam of those an- 
 tique Byzantine jewels was the light that he followed. In this new loveliness, 
 so rich in its coloring, 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 idyl, 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 on the Bosphorus, and had caught in 
 it all the voluptuous color, all the mystical enchantment, all the splendida ritia 
 of glow and of fancy, that still belong to the mere name of the East. She was 
 no longer the beauty of the season to him; she was the incarnation of 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; what was far more dangerous, he let the Countess 
 de la Vivarol. 
 
 " 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 ! O most innocent Lovelace, what serene sublimity of -ignorance ! 
 You have piqued a jealous woman, tres-cher; and he who does that might 
 have as well 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. How handsome Lady Ballasysse looks to-night! widowhood 
 must be the best cosmetic imaginable." 
 
 " All women thrive on it. Women take a husband as balloons take their 
 ballast, because they can't rise without it. But the moment the heavy weight's 
 dropped overboard, puff ! how lightly woman and balloon go up in the air ! " 
 
 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
 
 CHAN DOS. Cl 
 
 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 traits of the marble features in that likeness of the dead. 
 
 And he smiled a little. 
 
 " Beaux seigneurs, 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 
 iniindi. Your darling Ernest is a brilliant man; you have your wish; but we 
 may sing the old see-saw over him too, before very long. And what will the 
 world care for him then ? " 
 
 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, who never danced, and had tormented people under his change of 
 domino enough to amuse him {having left many in the throes of an agonizing 
 suspense as to who could have known their most hidded pet sins, and others in 
 the paralyzed torture of doubt as to whether their most terribly cherished family 
 histories would not make popular fun next week in the Charivari or in Punch}, 
 went downstairs 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 through the long line of waiting carriages and glittering 
 night-lamps and fretting horses and shouting footmen. 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 can- 
 delabra, and clusters of blossoms 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. It caught Trevenna's eyes 
 again. 
 
 " 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 Shylock, 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
 
 62 
 
 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 ever welcomed and to whose board he was ever bidden, Tervenna passed down 
 the steps and drove away in the gray of the morning. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 POESIE DU BEAU SEXE. 
 
 "You did very well for the first night, my dear," said Lady Chesterton, 
 muffling herself more comfortably in her eider-down, as her carriage rolled 
 through the silent streets in the raw of the dawn. "Certainly he admires you: 
 that is very plain." 
 
 The Queen of Lilies, leaning back, answered nothing. There was a slight 
 flush on her shell-like cheek, and the lashes were drooped over her dreamy, 
 thoughtful, Velasquez eyes, that had so many poems slumbering in their liquid 
 depths. She was in a soft, happy revery, a little grave, aud yet proudly trium- 
 phant, by the shadow of the smile that lingered about her lips. 
 
 At last she spoke. 
 
 " Those were the Clarencieux diamonds he wore, were they not ? I think 
 they must be the finest in Europe." 
 
 Oh, poetry of a woman's soul ! 
 
 And this is what men lose their heads for, and swear while the delirium lasts, 
 is divine. 
 
 Fratres mei, believe me, the chorus-singer whom you establish in her little 
 bijou villa, and who, though before she came under your protetcion she thought 
 it the height of good fortune to be sure of bread and cheese, now will touch 
 nothing meaner than champagne and chicken, does not weigh you more entirely 
 by what you are worth to her than will nine-tenths of the delicate high-born 
 ladies to buy whom you must barter your freedom. 
 
 There is no sort of difference in their speculations for remunerative sur- 
 render: there is only a difference in their price. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 "THE MANY YEARS OF PAIN THAT TAUGHT ME ART." 
 
 WHEN his guests had left, and all the costumes that had glittered through 
 his salons had dispersed, some half-dozen men, his most especial friends, re- 
 mained, among them Cos Grenvil and the Due de Neuilly, with his cousin,
 
 CHANDOS. 63 
 
 Prince Philippe d'Orvale, and in a cabinet de 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. 
 
 " Ah that we had a Crockford's ! They have left us no choice but to play 
 in our own houses or to go among Greeks and blackguards; as if they could 
 suppress our gaming any more than they can suppress our breathing, or had 
 any more right to interfere with it ! " cried Chandos, as an almond-eyed girl 
 from the Deccan poured him out some iced hock. 
 
 " You give us a very good substitute for Crockford's, though, mon cher 
 Ernest," said D'Orvale. " I am disposed to regret nothing when I am once 
 within this little painted chamber, except, perhaps, that your Hebes are a little 
 bit too distracting." 
 
 " I think your Highness is not given to regretting any detriment from that 
 sort of cause any more than I am," laughed Chandos, while he sat down to the 
 table and staked his gold with the lavishness that was in his blood from men 
 who had played through long forenoons at Whitehall with Rochester -and 
 Jermyn. 
 
 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 him so much as another 
 trait in his nature, /. e. that he loved men and trusted them with an absolute 
 and undoubting faith. This was the most costly of all his extravagances. 
 
 The Trente et Quarante in the little picture-cabinet was too beguiling to be 
 quickly left; the gold changed hands like lightning, not going less quickly for 
 the iced hock and the claret and seltzer that washed it down, and the gay pass- 
 ages with the pretty Easterns that interrupted it. It was past six in the morning 
 when D'Orvale broke up the bank and gave the signal for departure, he with 
 Chandos having been the chief losers. The latter cared only for the gay excite- 
 ment of hazard; when the game was over, whether it had been favorable 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. 
 
 Ever since he could remember, money, in as much abundance as he wanted 
 it, was his to throw away by handfuls, if it gave him any pleasure; and all that 
 money could bring was his at a word, without seeking it. Such an atmos- 
 phere from his childhood up was not one to supply a nature, by instinct, 
 lavish as the winds and careless to a fault, with any thought of care for, or of 
 caution in, expenditure.
 
 64 
 
 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 As he went through the corridors to his own chamber, after his guests had 
 at last left him, to take 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-Fourth 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 splendor, its crowds, its dissipations, and its 
 unending gayeties. The apartment 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 reglious retreat, especially as at 
 the farther end stood an organ, with its glided 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 paralyzed and much crippled, 
 and his shoulders were bowed with a marked but in noway repulsive 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 labors 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 
 iunlight over his face, while into his eyes came the glorious look of love and of 
 
 hty that beams for us in the clear brown noble eyes of a dog. 
 
 He strove to rise, to him a matter of so slow and painful an effort 
 
 e could do so, Chandos crossed the room lightly and swiftly, and 
 
 s hands on the musician's shoulders with a kind and almost caressing 
 
 gesture.
 
 CHAN DOS. C5 
 
 "Ah, Lulli ! you are awake and employed before I have 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 Tantum Ergo while I listen. It is a grand hymn to 
 the day. 
 
 Lulli looked at him still with that loving, reverent, grateful look of a dog's 
 deathless fidelity. 
 
 " Monseigneur, the sound of your voice to me is like the sound of water to 
 the thirsty in a desert place," he said, simply, in sweet, soft, Southern French, 
 giving, in earnest veneration to his host and master, the title that Trevenna 
 often gave in jest. 
 
 Chandos smiled on him, a sunlit, generous smile, gentle as a woman's. 
 
 " And so is your music to me: so there is no debt on either side. Go on." 
 
 " My life is one long debt to you. God will pay it to you: I never can." 
 
 The words were heartfelt, and his eyes, looking upward, still uttered them 
 with still more eloquence. Contrast more forcible than these, as they were now 
 together, could scarcely have been found in the width of the world. The at- 
 tenuated and enfeebled cripple, with his useless limbs, his bowed shoulders, 
 and his life worn with physical suffering that bound him like a captive and 
 robbed him of all the power and the joy of existence, beside the splendid grace 
 of the man who stood above him, in a strength too perfect for dissipation to 
 leave the slightest trace of weariness upon it, and with a beauty dazzling as a 
 woman's, fresh from every pleasure of the sight or sense, and full of all the 
 proudest ambitions, the richest enjoyments, and the most careless insouciance 
 of a superb manhood and a cloudless fortune. A contrast more startling nor, 
 for one, more bitter could not have been placed side by side. But there was 
 no envy here. The loyal gratitude of Lulli had no jealous taint upon it that 
 could have made him, even for one moment, see anything save gladness and 
 gentleness in the gracious presence of the man to whom he owed more than 
 existence. He could no more have felt envy to his benefactor than he could 
 have taken up a knife and stabbed him. 
 
 Six years before, travelling through southern Spain, an accident to his 
 carriage had detained Chandos at a wayside inn in the very heart of the Vega. 
 Whiling away the tedium of such detention by sketching an old Moorish bridge 
 that spanned a torrent, high in the air, he heard some music that fixed his at- 
 tention, the music of a violin played with exquisite pathos. He inquired for 
 the musician. A handsome gitana, with, a basket of melons on her head, gladly 
 answered his inquiries. The violinist was a youth dying, as she thought, in a 
 chalet near. He was alone, very poor, and a stranger. The words were suffi- 
 cient to arrest Chandos: he sought out the chalet and found the musician, lying 
 on a straw pallet, and dying, as the girl had said, rather from hunger than any 
 other illness, but with his large burning eyes fixed on the sun that was setting 
 
 VOL. III. 3
 
 66 
 
 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 beyond the screen of tangled vine-leaves that hung over the hut-door, and his 
 hands still drawing from the chords, in wild and mournful strains, the music 
 for which life alone lingered in him. He was a mere lad of twenty years, and 
 was a cripple. Chandos only saw to rescue him. Food, hope, and the sound 
 of a voice that spoke gently and pityingly to him, fused fresh existence into the 
 dying boy: he lived, and his life from that moment was sheltered by the man 
 who had found him perishing on the Spanish hills. 
 
 Guido Lulli had lived in Chandos' household, now in town, now at Claren- 
 cieux, never treated as a dependant, but surrounded by all that could alleviate 
 or make him forget his calamity, out of the worldly his own choice as utterly 
 as though he were in a monastery, spending his days and nights over his organ 
 and his music-score, and never having harder task than to organize the music 
 of those concerts and operas in the private theatre at Clarencieux for which his 
 natron's entertainments were noted. 
 
 Guido Lulli's was far from the only life that Chandos, the pleasure-seeker 
 and the voluptuary, had redeemed, defended, and saved. 
 
 Obedient to his wish, the melody of the Catholic chant rolled through the 
 stillness of the early morning, succeeding strangely to the wit, the laughter, 
 the revelry, and the hazard of a few moments previous. It was precisely such 
 a succession of contrasts of which his life was made up, and which gave it its 
 vivid and unfading color; closely interwoven and ever trenching one upon 
 another, the meditative charm of art and of thought succeeded with him to the 
 pleasures of the world. He would pass from all the intoxication and indul- 
 gence of an Alcibiades to all the thoughtful solitude of an Augustine; and it 
 was this change, so complete and so perpetually variable, which, while it was 
 produced by the mutability of his temperament, made in a large degree the 
 utter absence in his life of all knowledge of satiety, all touch of weariness. 
 
 He listened now, leaning his arm on the sill of the open window that looked 
 out upon the gardens below, fresh, even in town, with the breath of the spring 
 on their limes and acacias, and the waking song of the nest-birds greeting the 
 day. The rolling notes of the organ pealed out in all their solemnity, the 
 cathedral rhythm swelling out upon the silence of the dawn, that had been 
 heard by him so often in the splendor of St. Peter's at Easter-time, in the hush 
 of Notre Dame at midnight mass, and in the stillness of Benedictine and 
 Cistercian chapels in the chestnut-woods of Tuscany and the lonely mountain- 
 sides of hill-locked Austrian lakes. A thousand memories of foreign air were 
 in the deep-drawn and melodious chords; a thousand echoes of the dead 
 glories of mediaeval Rome rose with the 
 
 Tantum ergo Sacra mentum 
 Veneremur cernui.
 
 CHANDOS. 67 
 
 A helpless and fragile cripple in the world, no stronger than a reed, and 
 ignorant of all things save his art, once before his organ, once in the moment 
 of his inspiration, Guido Lulli had the grandeur of a master, the force and the 
 omnipotence of a king. In his realm he reigned supreme, and Chandos not 
 seldom left his titled associates and his careless pleasures to come and listen to 
 these melodies in his protege's still, monastical chamber, as he heard them 
 now. 
 
 He leaned against the embrasure, looking out into the tangled mass of 
 leaves beneath, and letting his thoughts float dreamily down the stream of 
 sound, blent with the lustre of the smiling eyes and the gleam of the imperial 
 beauty that had newly caught his memory and his fancy. Entangled with the 
 imaginations of his own Byzantine poem, she haunted him with that early care- 
 less whisper, soft, idle, and painless, of love in its first moments, love that is 
 but a mere momentary, passionate impulse and may never ripen to more. The 
 lull of early morning, the measure of the music passing onward without pause 
 into the masses of Mozart and Mendelssohn, fell gently and mellowly on him 
 after the crowded hours of the past night and day. As the chords thrilled 
 through the silence of the breaking day, joining the clear notes of the awaken- 
 ing birds beneath amidst the leaves, his thoughts wandered away, dreamy and 
 disconnected, ranging over the cloudless years of a successful life, in which all 
 the memories were painted as with an Elizabethan pencil, without shadow. In 
 them he had never known one gray touch of disappointment, far less still one 
 dark taint of calamity; in them woman's lips had never betrayed him, nor man's 
 hand been raised against him. Fortune had favored and the world had loved 
 him. No regret lay on him, and no unfulfilled desire left its trial. There was 
 nothing in his career he wished undone; there were no memories in it that it 
 would have been pain to open; there were no pages of it that were not bright 
 with soft, rich, living color. He had passed through life having escaped 
 singularly all the shadows that lie on it for most men; and he had, far more 
 than most, what may be termed the faculty for happiness, a gift, in any tem- 
 perament, whose wisdom and whose beauty the world too little recognizes. 
 
 His thoughts floating on with the melodious chords that swelled in wave on 
 wave of sound through the quiet of the morning, drifted back by some unfol- 
 lowed chain of association to the remembrance of the hot autumn sunset at 
 Clarencieux, when, as a child, he had dreamt his chivalric fancies over the 
 story of Arthur, and had told his father what his future should be. 
 
 " Have I kept my word ? " he mused, as he leaned his arms on the em- 
 brasure of the window, while the early light fell on the gold and the jewels of 
 his Plantagenet masquerade-dress. 
 
 The lofty, idealic, impossible dreams, so glorious in their impracticability, 
 so fair in their sublime folly, in which boyhood had aspired to a soilless fame
 
 68 
 
 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 and an heroic sovereignty such as this earth has never seen and never can see, 
 recurred to him with something that was almost, for the moment, a passing 
 sadness, the same sadness which, in the words of Jean Paul, lies in music, 
 " because it speaks to us of things that in all our life we find not, and never 
 
 shall find." 
 
 "Have I kept my word?" he thought. "I rule the world of pleasure; but 
 I meant then a wider world than that. They follow me because I lead the 
 fashion; because I amuse them better than any other: because they gain some 
 distinction by cutting their coats and wearing their wrist-bands like mine; but 
 that is not the fame either he or I meant in those years. They talk of me; they 
 imitate me; they obey me; they quote me; they adore my works, and they 
 court my approbation. But am I very much more,*after all, than a mere 
 idler ? " 
 
 The genius latent in him, which in his present life only found careless ex- 
 pression in glittering bagatelles and poems, half Lucretian, half Catullan, stirred 
 in him now with that restlessness for higher goals, that refusal to be satisfied 
 with actual and present achievement, which characterize genius in all its forms, 
 that unceasing and irrepressible " striving towards the light " which persued 
 Goethe throughout life and was upon his lips in death. Dissatisfaction in no 
 shape ever touched Chandos; his years were too cloudless, and too full of 
 fairest flavor, for discontent ever to be known in them. It was but rarely, now 
 and then, when, in the pauses of his pleasures and his fame, the remembrance 
 of his childhood's grand, visionary, impalpable ambitions came back to him, 
 that the thought swept across him of having insufficiently realized them, of 
 having been in some sort untrue to them, of losing in a dazzling celebrity the 
 loftier purity of those early and impossible dreams. 
 
 It was not wholly true, nor wholly just towards himself. Egotism had little 
 place in his life: full though it was of a Greek-like softness and Greek-like 
 idolatry of beauty and of pleasure, of an Epicureanism that shunned all pain 
 and abhorred all roughness and all harshness, the calamities of others were 
 widely succored by him, and the bead-roll was long of those who owed him the 
 most generous gifts that man can owe to man. He enjoyed, but he never for- 
 got that others suffered. He loved the ease, the beauty, and the serenity of 
 existence; but he also did his uttermost that others should know them too. 
 
 I enjoy" he thought now, as he leaned out into the morning sunshine. 
 
 the supreme wisdom of life, and the best gift of the gods is to know it ! 
 
 The Greeks were right, and in this age men remember it too little. Old Guy 
 
 Patm was a million times wiser than all the Frondeurs, sitting under the sum- 
 
 Jhade of his Cormeille cherry-trees, with Lucretius and Lucilius and 
 
 Antonmus, while his friends killed each other with fret and fume. Bonaparte 
 
 I have conquered Cairo, Milan, and Paris in less than two years, and
 
 CHANDOS. 69 
 
 yet if I died to-morrow I should only get half a page in any biographical dic- 
 tionary; ' but to get a line, or even only to get an obituary notice and oblivion, 
 men toil a life away and consume their years in thankless, grinding, ceaseless, 
 labor. The benighted opticism of vanity !. ' The succession of the nations is 
 but as a torch-race.' What is it to feed the flame of one of the torches for a 
 passing second, a spark that flares and dies ? The Greek ideal ol Dionysus, 
 with the ivy on his brow and the Thyrsus in his hand, bringing joy wherever 
 he moved, while the wine flowed and nature bloomed wherever the god's foot 
 fell, is the ideal of the really happy life, the life that knows how to enjoy." 
 
 The thoughts drifted through his mind lightly, dreamily, as the swell of the 
 organ-notes poured on. It was true, he enjoyed, and his temper, like the tem- 
 per of the Greeks, asked only this of life. 
 
 Chandos was not only famous, not only gifted, not only stepped to the lips 
 in delicate and sensuous delight; he was much more than all these: he was 
 happy. 
 
 How many lives can say that ? 
 
 The music paused suddenly, dropping down in its gorgeous festival of 
 sound as a lark suddenly drops to the grass in the midst of its flood of song. 
 Chandos turned as it ceased, and broke his idle thread of musing revery, while 
 he laid his hand gently on the musician's shoulder. 
 
 " Dear Lulli, while one hears your music, one is in Avillion. You make 
 me dream of the old serene and sacred ueipara yai^. Tell me, have you every- 
 thing you wish ? Is there nothing that can bring you more pleasure ? " 
 
 Guido Lulli shook his head, lifting up his lustrous Southern, antelope eyes 
 the eyes of Provence with the fidelity and gratitude that were rivalled in 
 him by his art alone. 
 
 " I should be little worthy all I owe to you, if I could find one want 
 unsatisfied." 
 
 " Owe ! You owe me nothing. Who would give me such music as you can 
 give ? It is not everyone who is fortunate enough to have a Mozart in his 
 house. I wish I could serve you better in the search that is nearest your heart. 
 We have done all we could, Guido." 
 
 His voice was very gentle, and had a certain hesitation. He approached a 
 subject that had a bitterness both of grief and of shame to his listener; and 
 Chandos, carelessly disdainful "of a prince's wishes, was careful of the slightest 
 jar that could wound the sensitiveness of the man who was dependent on 
 him. 
 
 Lulli's head sank, and a dark shadow passed over his face, a flush of 
 shame and of anger, as heavy and as passionate as could arise in a tempera- 
 ment so visionary and tender to feminine softness, mingled, too, with a sorrow 
 far deeper than wrath can reach.
 
 70 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 "It is enough,' he said, simply, his ^ words hushed, low, and bitter in his 
 throat " We are certain of her shame." 
 
 Not certain " said Chandos, compassionately, while his hand still lay lightly 
 on the musician's shoulder. "Where there is a doubt there is always hope; 
 and judgment should never be passed till everything is known. 
 harsh to he*, even in thought." 
 
 " Harsh ? Am I harsh ? " 
 
 Lulli's head drooped till it rested on his hands, while in the accent of 
 words there was a grief beyond all words, and a self-reproach piteous in its 
 
 contrition. 
 
 Not in your heart ever, I know," said Chandos, with that almost caressing 
 tenderness of pity which always came upon him for this childlike and unworldly 
 visionary, who felt so passionately yet could only act so feebly. 
 
 " Not to her, not to her, no ! " murmured the Provencal, while his face 
 was still sunk on his hands; "but to him. Not even to know his name; 
 not even to know where he harbors; not to tell where she is, that when she is 
 deserted and wretched she might be saved from lower depths still ! " 
 
 A terrible pain shook and stifled his voice, and Chandos was silent. The 
 musician's sorrow was one to which no consolation could be offered and no 
 hope suggested. 
 
 "I have had all done to trace her that is possible," he said, at last; "b'ut 
 two years have passed, and there seems no chance of ever succeeding; all clue 
 appears lost. Do you think she may have gone by another name at the time 
 that her lover, whoever he may be, first saw her ? " 
 
 " It is possible, monseigneur; I cannot tell," said Lulli, slowly, with a pathos 
 of weariness more touching than all complaint and lament. " Be it as it 
 will, she is dead to me; but but if we could know him, helpless cripple as I 
 am, I would find strength enough to avenge my wrong and hers." 
 
 He raised himself as he said it, his slight, bent form quivering and instinct 
 with sudden force, his pale and hollow cheek flushed, his eyes kindling. It was 
 like electric vitality flashing for one brief moment into a dead man's limbs. 
 
 Chandos looked at him with a profound pity. To him, a man of the world, 
 a courtier, a lover of pleasure, the untutored, chivalrous simplicity of this idealist 
 roused infinite compassion. He saw brought home to Guido Lulli, as a terrible 
 and heart-burning anguish, those amours which' in his own world and his own 
 life were but the caprice and amusement of idle hours, the subject of a gay, in- 
 different jest. He had never before reflected how much these careless toys 
 may chance to cost in their recoil to others. 
 
 He leaned his hand with a warmer pressure on the musician's shoulder. 
 "I wish I could aid you more, Guido; but there is nothing that I know of 
 that has been left untried. Strive to forget both; neither is worth enough to
 
 CHANDOS. 71 
 
 give you pain. You believe at least that I have had every effort used for you, 
 although it has been in vain ! " 
 
 Lulli looked at him with a slight smile, a smile that passed over the suffer- 
 ing and the momentary passion on his face like an irradiation of light. It was 
 so full of sublime and entire faith. 
 
 "Believe you, monseigneur? Yes, as I believe in God." 
 
 It was the simple truth, and paid back to Chandos his own love for men, 
 and faith in them, in his own coin. He was touched by the naif words. 
 
 " I thank you. I am your debtor, then, Lulli," he said gently. " I must 
 leave you now, or I shall have no sleep before the day is fairly up; but I will 
 see you again some time during the morning. If you think of anything that 
 has not been done, or might be done again, with any hope to find Valeria, tell 
 me, and I will give directions for it. Adieu ! " 
 
 He left the chamber, the flash of his diamonds and the imperial blue of his 
 dress glancing bright in the beams of the young day. Lulli turned his head, 
 and followed him with the wistful gaze that seemed to come from so far a dis- 
 tance, followed him as the eyes of a dog follow the shadow of its master. 
 
 " So generous, so pitiful, so gentle, so noble ! If I could only live to repay 
 him ! " he murmured, half aloud as the door closed upon the kingly grace and 
 splendid manhood of his savior and his solitary friend. Vast as was the con- 
 trast, hopelessly wide as was the disparity, between them, there was not one 
 pang of jealousy in the loyal heart of the crippled musician. 
 
 Then, with the last echo of his patron's step, his head dropped again, and 
 the listless, lifeless passiveness, the weary and suffering indifference, which 
 always lay so heavily upon him, save at such times when his affections or his 
 art struck new vitality through him, returned once more, while his fingers lay 
 motionless upon the ivory keys. Although happy (as far as happiness could be 
 in common with his shattered and stricken life) in the artistic seclusion in which 
 he was allowed to dwell, and in the unbroken pursuit of his art which Chandos 
 enabled him to enjoy, there was one sorrow on him weightier than any of his 
 personal afflictions. 
 
 The only thing that had ever loved him was a child, several years younger 
 than himself, his cousin, orphaned and penniless like himself, a bright, caress- 
 ing child, to keep whom in some poor shape of comfort in their old home 
 of Aries Lulli had beggared his own poverty till sending to her every coin that 
 he possessed he had been near his grave from sheer famine when Chandos 
 had found him among the hills of the Vega. For some time he had never 
 mentioned the name of Valeria to his patron, from the shrinking and sensitive 
 delicacy of his nature, which dreaded to press another supplicant and depend- 
 ent on his patron's charity. All he could give (and Chandos' provision for him 
 made that now not inconsiderable, indeed, what seemed a mine of wealth to
 
 72 
 
 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 the simplicity of the Provencal) he sent to Aries for Valeria Lulli, who was 
 lodged with an old canoness of the city, and began to be noted, as she grew 
 older, as the most perfect contralto in the girls' choir in all Southern France. 
 See her he could not; a sense of duty to the man by whom he had been re- 
 deemed from death, and the infirmities of his own health, which that nigh ap- 
 proach of death had more utterly enfeebled, prevented him from returning to 
 Provence. But he heard of her; he heard from her; he knew that she was 
 drawing near womanhood in safe shelter, and a happy, if obscure, home, through 
 him; and it sufficed for him. His affection for her was the tender solicitude of 
 a brother, shut out from any tinge of a warmer emotion, both through his own 
 sense of how utterly banned from him by his calamity was all thought of 
 woman's love, and through his own memory of Valeria, which was but of a fair 
 and loving child. 
 
 Two years before this morning in which Chandos had listened to the Tantum 
 Ergo, a heavy blow fell on the musician, smiting down all the fond, vague 
 thoughts with which he had associated Valeria's dawning womanhood -with the 
 dawning success of his own ambition in his art. A long silence had passed by, 
 bringing no tidings of her, when his anxiety grew uncontrollable and knew 
 itself powerless; he passionately repented of the silence he had preserved on 
 her name to his only friend. He inquired tidings of the canoness, but received 
 none. Chandos was away, yachting in the Mediterranean, and spending the late 
 summer and the autumn in the East; the winter also he spent in Paris. When, 
 with the spring, Lulli saw him once more, he told him then of Valeria, and en- 
 treated his aid to learn the cause of the silence that had fallen between him and 
 Aries. Chandos gave it willingly; he sent his own courier abroad to inquire 
 for the young choral singer. All answer with which he returned was that the 
 canoness had died in the course of that summer, that Valeria Lulli had disap- 
 peared from the city, and that neither priest nor layman could tell more, save 
 that it was the general supposition she had fled with a handsome milord Anglais, 
 who had visited the cathedral, heard her singing, learned her residence, and 
 visited her often during the summer months. He too had left Aries without 
 anyone remembering his name or knowing where he had gone. The gossips of 
 the still solemn old Roman city, had noted him often with Valeria at vesper- 
 time, and underneath the vine-hung, gray stone coping of her casement in the 
 canoness's little tourelle. And Valeria had grown up into all the rich traditional 
 beauty of the magnificent women of Aries. 
 
 So the history ran, brief, but telling a world. To Guido Lulli there was 
 
 room neither for doubt nor hope; it was plain as the daylight to him, and 
 
 eeded not another line added to it. It cut him to the heart. Shame for the 
 
 lonor of his name, which, though sunk into poverty, claimed descent from him 
 
 whose divine strains once floated down the rose-aisles of Versailles; passionate
 
 CHANDOS, 73 
 
 bitterness against the unknown stranger who had robbed him; grief for the loss 
 and dishonor of the one whom he had cherished from her childhood, all these 
 were terrible to him; but they were scarcely so cruel as the sting of ingratitude 
 from a life that he alone had supported, and for which he had endured, through 
 many years, deprivations uncounted and solicitude unwearying. He said but 
 little, but the iron went down deep into his gentle suffering nature, and left a 
 wound there that was never closed. 
 
 No more had ever be learned of the fate of Valeria; it sank into silence, 
 and all the efforts exerted by his patron's wealth and by the ingenuity of his 
 hirelings failed to bring one light on the surface of the darkness that covered 
 her lost life. As Lulli had said, she was dead to him. But the pain she had 
 dealt was living, and would live long. Natures like Lulli's suffer silently, but 
 suffer greatly; and now, when the monastical silence closed in again around 
 him as the sound of Chandos' steps died off the morning stillness, and the 
 early' rays only strayed on the ivory whiteness of the carved Passion above the 
 little shrine of his antique chamber, he sat there, listless and lost in thought, 
 his head sunk, his hands resting immovable upon the keys with which he could 
 give out fit music for the gods, the sadness on him which ever oppressed him 
 when he came back from his own best-beloved world of melodious sound into 
 the coarse, harsh, weary world of fact and of existence. 
 
 He thought of the bright Southern child whose desolate life he had succored, 
 as he had used to see her, with the sunlight on her hair while she gathered bow- 
 ing crowns of summer lilies, and feathery wealth of seeding grasses, among the 
 giant ruins of the Roman Amphitheatre, where the Gaul and the Frank, the 
 Latin and the Greek, lay mouldering in the community of death, while the 
 arrowy Rhone flashed its azure in the light, and the purple grapes grew mellow 
 in the golden languor of a Southern noon. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 LATET ANGUIS IN HERBA. 
 
 " LOTS of news ! " said Trevenna, crushing up a pile of journals as he sat 
 at breakfast in Park Lane, his second breakfast, of course, for which he com- 
 monly dropped in as Chandos was taking his first. He managed all his friend's 
 concerns, both monetary and household, both in town, in Paris, and at Claren- 
 cieux, and had always something or other on which to confer with his patron at 
 the only hour in the day at which Chandos was ever likely to be found disen- 
 gaged; some stud from which to suggest a purchase: some new pictures com-
 
 74 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 ing to the hammer of which to bring a catalogue; some signature to a check or 
 a deed to require; or some expensive temptation to suggest to one who, as he 
 well knew, had never been taught providence and never been accustomed to 
 resist either pleasure or inclination. This last was a Mephistophelian occupa- 
 tion to which Trevenna was specially suited. He tempted delightfully, always 
 putting in just so much of bantering dissuasion to enchance the charm, 
 and spur on the tempted, as would furnish the truffles to the game, till the 
 trufft he held out became irresistible. 
 
 " Lots of news ! " he cried, now washing the quantity down with a draught 
 of Yquem. " Queer thing a paper is; sort of prosaic phcenix, eh ? Kings die, 
 ministers die, editors go to pot, its staff drops under the sod, governments 
 smash, nations swamp, actors change; but on goes the paper, coming out im- 
 perturbably every morning. Nothing disturbs it; deaths enrich it; wars en- 
 large it; if a royal head goes into the grave, it politely prints itself with a black 
 border by way of gratifying his soul, and sells itself to extreme advantage with 
 a neat dovetailing of ' Le roi est mort,' and ' Vive le roi.' Queer thing, a 
 paper ! " 
 
 "A melancholy thing in that light," said Chandos, as he drank his choco- 
 late. " To think of the swarm of striving life pressed into a single copy of the 
 Times is as mournful as Xerxes' crowds under Mount Ida, though certainly not 
 so poetic." 
 
 " Mournful ? Don't see it," responded Trevenna, who never did see any 
 thing mournful in life, except the miserable mistake by which he had not been 
 born a millionaire. " It's rather amusing to see all pother and bother, and 
 know that they'll all be dead, every man of 'em, fifty years hence; because one 
 always has an unuttered conviction that some miracle will happen by which one 
 won't die oneself. How thoroughly right Lucretius is ! it is so pleasant to see 
 other men in a storm while one's high and dry beyond reach of a drop; and to 
 watch them all rushing and scuttling through life in the Times columns is 
 uncommonly like watching them rush through a tempest. You know they'll all 
 of them get splashed to the skin, and not one in ten thousand reach their goal." 
 
 Chandos laughed. 
 
 " But when you are in the tempest, my friend, I fancy you would be very 
 glad of a little more sympathy than you give, and would be very grateful for an 
 umbrella?" 
 
 " Oh, the devil take sympathy ! Give me success." 
 " The selection is not new ! But in defeat- 
 
 in suc- 
 
 defeat ? let it go ten leagues further to the deuce ! Sympathy h. _- 
 
 genuine; people would scramble for the bonbons I dropped- but 
 
 sympathy , ;fea t was never any thing better yet than a sneer delicately
 
 CHANDOS 75 
 
 " Poor humanity ! You will allow nothing good to come out of Nazareth; 
 a sweeping verdict, when by Nazareth you mean mankind. Well, I would rather 
 give twenty rogues credit for being honest men, than wrong one honest man 
 by thinking him a rogue. To think evil unjustly is to create evil; to think too 
 well of a man may end in making him what you have called him." 
 
 Trevenna smiled, his arch, humorous smile, that danced in the mirth of 
 his eyes, and twinkled so joyously and mischievously about the corners of his 
 mouth. 
 
 "If it be your preference to think too well of men, trescher, you can 
 hardly miss gratifying it. Rogues grow thick as blackberries. Only when 
 Turcaret, whom you think the mirror of honor, makes you bankrupt, and 
 Gingillino, whom you believe the soul of probity, makes off with your plate, and 
 Tartuffe, whom you have deemed a saint of the first water, forges a little bill 
 on your name, blame nobody but your own delightful and expensive optimism; 
 that's all ! Don't you know you think too well of me?" 
 
 There was a shade of earnestness and, for the instant, of regret in his bold, 
 bright eyes, as they fastened themselves on Chandos' ; there was, for the 
 moment, one faint impulse of compunction arid of conscience in his heart. He 
 knew that the man before him trusted him so utterly, so loyally; he knew that 
 the witness of the world to sink and shame him would only have made the hand 
 of Ernest Chandos close firmer on his own. That hand was stretched out now 
 in a gesture of generous, frank grace, of true and 'gallant friendship. The 
 action was very rare .with Chandos, and spoke with a great eloquence. 
 
 " You know I have no fear of that. Our friendship is of too old a date." 
 
 Trevenna hesitated a moment, one slight, impalpable second of time, not 
 to be counted, not to be noted; then his hand closed on that held out to him. 
 
 The momentary better thought had gone from him. When he took the 
 hand of Chandos thus, few criminials had ever fallen lower than he. Were 
 Catholic fancies true, and " guardian angels with us as we walk," his guardian 
 spirit would have left Trevenna then forever. 
 
 " Well," he said, with his mirthful and ringing laugh, like his voice, clear 
 and resonant as a clarion, " you found me in no irreproachable place, mon prince, 
 at any rate: so yo.u can't complain if I turn out a scamp. A debtor's prison 
 wasn't precisely the place for the lord of Clarencieux to choose an ally." 
 
 " Many a ' lord of Clarencieux,' has gamed away his wit and his health, 
 which was your only sin then, my dear fellow. I am not afraid of the con- 
 sequences. So many people who speak well of themselves are worth nothing, 
 that by inverse ratio, Trevenna, you, who speak so ill of yourself, must be worth 
 a great deal. You look at some things from too low a standing-point, to my 
 fancy, to be sure; but you see as high as your stature will let you, I suppose." 
 
 " Of course. Literally and metaphorically, you're a very tall man, and I'm
 
 76 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 a very short; and, literally and metaphorically, if you see stars I don't, I see 
 puddles you don't; if you watch for planets I forget, I watch for quicksands 
 you forget. ' My stature will be the more useful of the two in the end. 
 Apropos of quicksands, the first architect of them in the country was magnifi- 
 cent on the Cat Tax, last night." 
 
 " Who ? Milverton ? " 
 
 " Yes, Milverton ! As if you'd forgotten who was exchequer ! If he were 
 a handsome coryphfr, now, you'd be eager to hear every syllable about the 
 debut. The speech was superb ! To hear him ! he drew the line so admirably 
 between the necessary and humble mouser, helpmate of the housewife, and the 
 pampered idle Angora, fed on panada and kept from caprice; he touched so 
 inimitably on the cat in Egypt and Cyprus, tracing the steps by which a deity 
 had become a drudge, and the once-sacred life been set to preserve the pantries 
 from mice; he threw so choice a sop to the Exeter Hall party by alluding to its 
 fall as a meet judgment on a heathen deity, and richly merited by a creature 
 that was mentioned in Herodotus and not in the Bible; he sprinkled the whole 
 so classically with Greek quotations that it greatly imposed the House, and 
 greatly posed it, its members having derived hazy Attic notions from Greek 
 cribs at the 'Varsities and Grote on rainy afternoons in the country. By Jove 
 the whole thing was masterly ! The Budget will pass both chambers." 
 
 Chandos laughed as he ate the mellowest of peaches. 
 
 "And that you call p'ublic life ? a slavery to send straws down the wind, and 
 twist cables of sand ! The other evening I drove Milverton to Claire Rahel's. 
 Just at her door a hansom tore after us, his Whip dashed up; the House was 
 about to divide; Milverton must go down directly. And he went ! There is 
 an existence to spend ! Fancy the empty platitudes of the benches, instead of 
 the bright mots at Rahel's; the empty froth of place-men patriots, instead of the 
 tasteful foam of sparkling Moselle ! " 
 
 " Fie, fie, Chandos ! You shouldn't satirize St. Stephen's out of filial re- 
 spect." 
 
 " The St. Stephen's of my father's days was a very different affair. They 
 are not politicians now, they are only place-men; they don't dictate to the Press, 
 the Press dictates to them; they don't care how the country is lowered, they 
 nly care to keep in office. When there is a European simoon blowing through 
 the House, I may come and look on: so long as they brew storms in the 
 saucer, I have no inclination for the tea-party. Would you like public life, 
 Trevenna ? " 
 
 What's the good of my lining any thing? I'm a Pariah of the pave, 
 
 the clubs; I can only float myself in dinner-stories and gossip." 
 1 Gossip ! You inherit the souls of Pepys and Grimm. That such a clever 
 fellow as you can "
 
 CHANDOS. 77 
 
 " Precisely because I am a clever fellow do I collect what everybody loves, 
 except raffineurs like yourself. I am never so welcome as when I take about 
 a charmingly chosen bundle of characters to be crushed and reputations to be 
 cracked. To slander his neighbor is indirectly to flatter your listener; of course, 
 slander is welcome. Every one likes to hear something bad of somebody else; 
 it enhances his comfort when he is comfortable, and makes him think ' some- 
 body's worse off than I am ' when he isn't." 
 
 Chandos laughed. 
 
 " I wonder if there were ever such a combination of Theophrastus's bitter- 
 ness and Plautus's good humor in any living being before you, Trevenna ? 
 You judge humanity like Rochefoucauld, and laugh with it like Falstaff ; and 
 you tell men they are all rascals, as merrily as if you said they were all angels." 
 
 " A great deal more merrily, I suspect. One can get a good deal of merri- 
 ment out of rogues; there is no better company under the sun; but angels 
 would be uncommonly heavy work. Sin's the best salt." 
 
 " Mr. Paul Leslie is waiting, sir," said the groom of the chambers, ap- 
 proaching his master. " He says that he comes by appointment, or " 
 
 " Quite right; I will see him in the library," said Chandos, as he rose, hav- 
 ing finished his breakfast, and heard all the various things with which his prime 
 minister had come charged. 
 
 " Paul Leslie ? That's a new name; I don't know it," said Trevenna, who 
 made a point of knowing every one who came to his host, no matter how 
 insignificant. 
 
 "Very likely. He never gives dinners, and could not lend you a sou." 
 
 There was a certain careless, disdainful irony in the words, half unconscious 
 to Chandos himself. He had all the manner of the vieille cour, all its stately 
 grace, and all its delicate disdain; and, cordial as was his regard for Trevenna, 
 and sincere as was his belief that the bluntness and professed egotism of the 
 man covered a thousand good qualities and proclaimed a candor bright and 
 open as the day, he was not, he could not be, blind to the fact that Trevenna 
 never sought or heeded any living soul except those who could benefit him. 
 
 " I understand," laughed Trevenna; with a riding-whip about his shoulders 
 he would still have laughed good-naturedly. " One of your proteges, of course; 
 some Giotto who was drawing sheep when the Clarencieux Cimabue saw him; 
 some starving Chatterton who has plucked up heart and grace to write and ask 
 the author of Lucrhe to give him the magna nominis umbra. Tell him to turn 
 navvy or corn-chandler, Chandos, before he worships the Muses without having 
 five thousand a year to support those dissipated ladies upon; and twenty years 
 hence he'll thank you while he eats his fat bacon with a relish in the pot-house, 
 or weighs out his pottles of barley in sensible contentment." 
 
 "You are a thorough Englishman, Trevenna; you would make a poet an
 
 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 exciseman, and expect him to be serenely grateful for the patronage ! Pray, 
 how many of those whcf honor the Muses,' as you call them, had five thou- 
 sand a year, or had even their daily bread when they started, for that matter? 
 I must give this boy his audience, so I may not see you till we meet in the park 
 or the clubs. You dine with me to-night ? There are a triad of serene high- 
 nesses coming, and German royalty is terribly oppressive society." 
 
 Oh, I will be here, monseigneur; I obey orders. You want me at your 
 dinners as Valois wanted Triboulet, eh ? The jester is welcomed for the non- 
 sense he talks, and may be more familiar than, guests of higher degree." 
 
 Chandos turned as he was leaving the room, struck by a certain tone in the 
 words, all light and good-humored as they were; and he leaned his hand on 
 John Trevenna's shoulder with the selfsame gesture he had used to the musician 
 
 Lulli. 
 
 " Triboulet ? What are you thinking of ? Men of your talent bring their 
 own welcome, and are far more creditor than debtor to society. Surely, 
 Trevenna, you never misdoubt the sincerity of my friendship ? " 
 
 The other looked up with his bright bonhomie. 
 
 " You are a Sir Calidore of courtesy. No; I am as sure of the quality of 
 your friendship as I am of the quality of your claret. I can't say more; and, 
 as the world bows down before you, the distinction of it is very gratifying. 
 Besides, you have the best chef in town ; and I dearly love a friend that gives 
 good dinners." 
 
 Chandos laughed. Trevenna always amused him; the utter absence of 
 flattery refreshed him, and he knew the world too well not to know that sincerity 
 and warmth of feeling were full as likely to lie under the frankly-confessed 
 egotism as under the suaver protestations of other men. Yet the answer chilled 
 him ever so slightly, jarred on him ever so faintly. A temperament that is 
 never earnest is at times well-nigh as wearisome as a temperament that is never 
 gay; there comes a time when, if you can never touch to any depth, the cease- 
 less froth and brightness of the surface will create a certain sense of impatience, 
 a certain sense of want. He felt this for the moment with Trevenna. Tre- 
 venna would never be serious; he never gave anything deeper than his merry 
 and good-humored banter. 
 
 " No wonder the women are so fond of the caresses of those mains blanches; 
 they are as white and soft and as delicate as a girl's curse him ! " thought 
 Trevenna, while his eyes glanced from Chandos' hand, as it fell from his 
 shoulder, and on to his own, which was broad, strong, and coarse, both in shape 
 and in fibre, though tenacious in hold and characteristic in form. The hand 
 of Chandos was the hand of the aristocrat and of the artist molded in one; 
 Trevenna's that of the working-man, of the agile gymnast, of the hardy moun- 
 tain-climber.
 
 CHANDOS. 79 
 
 The thought was petty and passionate as any woman's the envy puerile and 
 angered to a feminine and childish littleness. But this was Trevenna's one 
 weakness, this jealousy of all these differences of caste and of breeding, as his 
 sonnets were Richelieu's, as his paintings were Goethe's, as his deformed limb 
 was Byron's. 
 
 The warm friendship offered him and proved to him was forgotten in the 
 smart of a small, wounded vanity. A straw misplaced will make us enemies; a 
 millstone of benefits hung about his neck may fail to anchor down by us a single 
 friend. We may lavish what we will, kindly thought, loyal service, untiring 
 aid, and generous deed, and they are all but as oil to the burning, as fuel, to 
 the flame, when spent upon those who are jealous of us. 
 
 Despite, however, his hearty curse upon his host, Trevenna went on with his 
 breakfast complacently, while Chandos left him to give audience (and some- 
 thing more) to the young artist, a clever boy without a sou, with the talent of 
 a Scheffer and the poverty of a Chatterton, whom he was about to enable to 
 study in peace in Rome. Trevenna was a sagacious man, a practical man, and 
 did not allow his own personal enmities, or the slight circumstance of his having 
 mentally damned the man whose hospitality he enjoyed, to interfere with his 
 appreciation of hi-s lobster-cutlets, liqueurs, pates, and amontillado. 
 
 In truth, to eat and drink like Lucullus and Sancho Panza merged in one, 
 at the expense of Chandos, had a certain relish for Trevenna that gave the meals 
 a better flavor than all Dubosc's sauces could have achieved. Trevenna was 
 only the choicest of gourmets at table, but he was the most insatiable of gour- 
 mands in enmity. 
 
 Then, when he had fairly finished a breakfast that would have done honor 
 to the inventions of a Ude, he went out to the clubs, it was two o'clock in the 
 day, to keep up his reputation as a popular talker, with a variety of charming, 
 damaging stories, and inimitable specimens of inventive ingenuity, such as 
 made him welcome at all the best tables, and well received even in the smoking 
 sanctum of the Guards' club. Trevenna had not dined at his own expense for 
 ten years; he knew so well how to amuse society. His manufactures were 
 matchless: they were the most adroit and lasting slanders of all, slanders that 
 had a foundation of truth. 
 
 " What's up, Charlie ? You look rather blue," said that easiest and most 
 familiar of " diners-out," whom no presence could awe and no coolness could 
 ice, as he sauntered now down Pall Mall with a young dandy of the Foreign 
 Office, who had played so much chicken-hazard, and planned so many Crown 
 and Sceptre and Star and Garter fetes in the mornings which he devoted to the 
 State, that he had come to considerable grief over " floating paper." 
 
 Charlie nodded silently, pulling his amber moustaches. He was rather a 
 handsome, gallant young fellow; England shows his style by the dozens any
 
 80 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 day in the season,-a good style, too, when it comes out to the test in Cana- 
 dian winters, Crimean camps, and mountain-India campaigns 
 
 Tiskt eh? Dal won't bleed?" asked Trevenna, with a good-natured, 
 almost affectionate interest. -Dal "was Lord Dallerstone, Charlie's elder 
 
 brother. T . . 
 
 "Bleed? No. He's up a tree himself," murmured the victim. 
 
 confounded Tindall & Co. people; they've got bills of mine, bought them in, 
 and they put the screw on no end." 
 
 " Tindall & Co.? Ah ? Hard people, a'n't they ? " 
 
 " Devils ! " murmured Charlie, still in the sleepiest of tones. " It's that vile 
 old Jew Mathias, you know; he's the firm, no doubt of it, though he keeps it so 
 
 dark. ' Pay or ' That's all they say; and I've no more idea where to get 
 
 any money than that pug." 
 
 " Bought your paper up ? that is awkward work," said Trevenna, musingly. 
 " I hardly see what you can do. I know the Tindall people are very sharp, 
 old Hebrew beggar is, as you say, at least. How much breathing-time do they 
 give you ? " 
 
 " Only till Thursday." 
 
 Charlie turned a little pale as he said it, and gnawed the yellow silk of his 
 moustaches with a terrible anxiety at his heart. The gay young fellow, the 
 fashionable butterfly of the F. O., knew little more of business than a child un- 
 born; he only knew that somehow or other, thanks to tailors, coryphtes, wine, 
 and whitebait, he had gone the pace too hard, and was now all down hill with 
 the " traces broke." 
 
 " Humph ! only forty-eight hours; close shave ! " said Trevenna. " Of 
 course you can't do anything, if you're not able to get the money. They've the 
 law on their side." 
 
 Charlie looked at him a little wistfully. Men always confided in Trevenna, 
 not certainly because he was simpatico, rather because, in the first place, he 
 was always good-natured and ready to give them his shrewd, clear, practical 
 counsels, and, again, because the quick resources of his adroit wits and the 
 prompt energy of his temperament inspired them with instinctive confidence 
 and hope. 
 
 " Cant you think of anything? You're such a clever fellow, Trevenna ! " 
 asked the embryo diplomatist, whose personal diplomacy was at 'its wits' end. 
 
 " Thanks for the compliment, bon garfon, but I'm not clever enough to make 
 money out of nothing. How people would rush to my laboratory, if I were ! 
 I should cut out all the pet preachers with the women. I really haven't an idea 
 what advice to give you. I'd see these Tindall rascals with pleasure for you; 
 but I don't suppose that would do any good." 
 
 " Try ! there's a good fellow ! " said the boy, with more eagerness than he
 
 CHANDOS, 81 
 
 had ever thrown into his sleepy, silky voice in all the days of his dandyism. 
 " Oh, by George, Trevenna, what a brick you'd be ! they'd listen to you, you 
 know, ten to one " 
 
 Trevenna shook his head. 
 
 " I'm afraid not. A Jew hears no reason that doesn't satisfy his pocket. 
 Still, I'll try what I can do; I'll ask them to let you have longer time, at any 
 rate. Perhaps they'll be persuaded to renew the bills. Anyway, I'm more up 
 to City tricks than you are, Charlie. Let's see: what's their place of business ? 
 I remember, that wretched, dirty place in Piffler's Court, isn't it. I'll go down 
 there to-morrow morning." 
 
 Charlie's languid eyes brightened with delighted hope, and he thanked his 
 friend over and over again with all that cordial but embarrassed eagerness 
 which characterizes Young England when it is warmly touched and does not 
 like to make a fool of itself. Charlie's heart was a very kind and a very honest 
 one, under the shell of dandy apathy, and it held Trevenna from that moment 
 in the closest gratitude. 
 
 " Such a brick of a fellow, to go bothering himself into that beastly City 
 after my affairs ! " he thought, as he turned into Pratt's for a game of billiards, 
 while Trevenna sauntered on down the shady side of the street. 
 
 "It's as well to oblige him; we should get nothing by putting the screw on 
 him; he is only worth the tobacco-pots and art -trash he's heaped together in his 
 rooms, and that chestnut back that he's never paid for. It's as well to oblige 
 him. Dal will kill himself sooner or later at the rate he goes, and the next 
 brother's an invalid; Charlie's sure to have the title, I fancy, some day or other," 
 thought Trevenna, as he went along, encountering acquaintances at every yard, 
 and receiving a dozen invitations to luncheon in as many feet of the trottoir. 
 This was Trevenna's special statesmanship, to cast his nets so forward that 
 they took in not only the present but the future. He sought the society and 
 the friendship of young men: who knew what use they might not be some day ? 
 
 Men thought him " a pushing fellow, but then so deucedly amusing," and 
 liked him. He was almost everywhere welcome to them; for he was not only 
 a popular wit and a gossiper, but he was a surpassing whist and a capital billiard- 
 player, an excellent shot, a splendid salmon-fisher, and as unerring a judge of 
 all matters " horsy" as ever pronounced on a set of Rawcliffe yearlings and 
 picked out the winner from the cracks at Danetury. They thought him 
 "nobody," and looked on him as only Chandos' protege and homme d'affaires, 
 but they liked him. Women alone never favored him, and held him invariably 
 at an icy distance, partly, of course, from the fact that women never smile upon 
 a man who has nothing. Ladies are your only thorough Optimates. You like 
 a man if he be a good shot, a good rider, a good talker, they must first know 
 " all about him;" you laugh if the wit be ben trovato, they must learn, before
 
 82 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 they smile, if the speaker be worth applauding; you will listen if the brain be 
 well filled, they must know that the purse is so also. Women therefore gave 
 no sort of attention to Trevenna, but only spoke of him as a little man, 
 odious little man, so brusque; he keeps a cab, and lives no one knows how; 
 hangs on to great men, and rich men, like Chandos." 
 
 Besides, Trevenna offended ladies in other ways. If not a great disciple of 
 truth in proprid persona, he scattered a good many truths about in the world, 
 though he lied with an enchanting readiness and tact when occasion needed. 
 He nevertheless satirized hypocrisy and humbug with a genuine relish in the 
 work; his natural candor relieved itself in the flagellations he gave humanity. 
 He had a rich Hudibrastic vein in him, and he was not the less sincere in his 
 ironies on the world's many masks because his sagacity led him to borrow them 
 to serve his own ends. Now, Truth, is a rough, honest, helter-skelter terrier, 
 that none like to see brought into their drawing-rooms, throwing over all their 
 dainty little ornaments, upsetting their choicest Dresden that nobody guessed 
 was cracked till it fell with the mended side uppermost, and keeping every one 
 in incessant tremor lest the next snap should be at their braids or their boots, 
 of which neither the varnish nor the luxuriance will stand rough usage. Tre- 
 venna took this unmuzzled brute about with him into precincts where there 
 were delicacies a touch would soil,- frailties a brush would crack, and smooth 
 carpets of brilliant bloom and velvet gloss that, scratched up, showed the bare 
 boards underneath and let in the stench of rats rotting below. Of course he 
 and the terrier too were detested by ladies. Such a gaucherie would have been 
 almost unbearable in a duke ! They would have had difficulty to control the 
 grimace into a smile had the coarse and cruel pastime been a prince's: for a 
 penniless man-about-town it was scarcely likely they would open their boudoir- 
 doors to such a master and to such an animal. Women abominated him, and 
 Trevenna was too shrewd to underrate the danger of his enemies. He knew 
 that women make nine-tenths of all the mischief of this world, and that their 
 delicate hands demolish the character and the success of any one whom they 
 dislike; but to have given himself to conciliate them would have been a task 
 of such infinite weariness to him that he let things go as they would, and set 
 himself to achieve what he purposed without reference to them. He was quite 
 sure that if success shone on him the fair sex would smile too, and would soon 
 find out that he was the most "delightful original in the world ! " 
 
 " Chandos," said Trevenna, an hour or two later, taking his friend and 
 patron aside for a second in one of the windows in White's. He was not a 
 member there; even Chandos' influence could not as yet exclude three or four 
 inevitable black balls to his name; but he dropped in now and then on the score 
 f needing to see his friend. Men could do under the shadow of Chandos' 
 name or wish what they never could have done otherwise. I want to tell you
 
 CHANDOS. 83 
 
 something. That young brother of Dallerstone's has come to grief, fallen in 
 Jew's hands, got up a tree altogether. Dal can't help htm; he's as bad him- 
 self; and they'll be down upon Charlie on Thursday." 
 
 " Poor boy ! Cannot we stop that ? " 
 
 Chandos was watching the carriage-beauties roll past, and was not heeding 
 very much; but his natural impulse was to help anybody. 
 
 ''Well, you could, of course; but it is asking a great deal of you. I have 
 promised him to see Tindall's people." 
 
 " Who are they ? " 
 
 "Jew firm in the City; hold a good many of your aristocratic friends in 
 their teeth, too. But I was going to say I can't do anything for him unless I 
 take them some security that they will have their money. Now, if I could use 
 your name, though there is no reason in life why you should give it " 
 
 " My name ? Oh, I will serve him, certainly, if he be in difficulties. He 
 is a nice young fellow, Charlie. What is it you want done ? " 
 
 " Merely your name to get the bills renewed. They'll trust that. They 
 wouldn't take any more of Master Charlie's signatures, or of his dandy young 
 F. O. friends of straw; but if you back him up I daresay I can get him a 
 reprieve." 
 
 " Oh, yes; I will do that. But I suppose his debts are not very great ? he 
 is such a lad. Would it not be better to buy his paper out of these Hebrew's 
 hands ? " 
 
 " Mercy on us, monseigneur ! " cried Trevenna. " If you don't talk as 
 coolly of buying up any unknown quantity of bills as of buying a cigar-case ! 
 No : there is no necessity for doing anything of the kind. If you will just 
 give your name to renew the acceptances, it will serve him admirably. Mind, 
 this is entirely my idea; he doesn't dream of it; but I know you are always so 
 willing to aid any one." 
 
 " I shall be most happy to do him any good, poor young fellow ! You 
 can have my signature when you like, though I think I might as well buy the 
 bills at once; for most likely i will end in my paying the money," laughed 
 Chandos, as he dropped his eyeglass and turned to shake hands with the Duke 
 of Crowndiamonds. Trevenna's eyes smiled with self-contented amusement 
 as he stood a moment watching the roll of the carriages down St. James's 
 Street. 
 
 " That was a very good thought," he mused to himself. " I shall oblige 
 Charlie, what an angel he will think me ! and we shall get another of the 
 Prince of Clarencieux's signatures into Tindall & Co.'s hands. Ah ! there is 
 nothing like combination and management." 
 
 " How does that man live, Ernest? " asked Cos Grenvil, as Trevenna drove 
 from the doors of White's in his very dashing little tilbury.
 
 84 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 " Live, my dear fellow ? I don't know. What do you mean ? " 
 
 " How does he get the money to keep that trap ? The mare's worth five 
 hundred guineas. He always vows he hasn't a sou." 
 
 " A man must drive something," said Chandos, who knew that the mare 
 had come out of his own stables. " Trevenna always dines out, you know; 
 and rooms in a .quiet street cost nothing." 
 
 " Where was it you first met him ? " 
 
 " I ? At Baden, years and years ago." 
 
 "Ah?" yawned Grenvil: "plenty of scoundrels to be picked up there." 
 
 Chandos laughed. 
 
 "Thanks for the information, Cos. You are prejudiced against Trevenna. 
 Don't believe all the nonsense he talks against himself : there is not a better 
 fellow living." 
 
 " ' On aime mieux dire du mal de soi-meme que de n'en point parler,' " 
 murmured Grenvil. "I fancy that's your prime minister's reason for black- 
 guarding himself so candidly, /don't like him ! Who is he, by the way?" 
 
 " I am sure I can scarcely tell you. I believe his father was a consul, and 
 died abroad somewhere; so he told me, at the least. I never asked any more. 
 I know he is an infinitely clever fellow, a thorough scholar too, though he 
 never shows off his scholarship. Ah, there is the Lennox ! How splendidly 
 that woman wears ! she must be thirty, but she is lovely as she was ten years 
 ago." 
 
 " Beatrix ? Yes. Berkeley considers himself plus fin que tous les autres; 
 but even he says he's never thoroughly sure of being quite up to Tricksy 
 Lennox." 
 
 "What a compliment she will deem it ! She is dangerous, I suppose; her 
 ecart is costly, but then her eyes are so lovely ! I always liked Mrs. Len- 
 nox; she is really perfect style, and, besides " 
 
 Chandos did not conclude his sentence as to his regard for the subject of 
 it, but looked after her a moment. A lovely woman, as he had said, with hazel 
 eyes and hair and a half-disdainful, half-melancholy glance from under her 
 drooping lids, who was driving a team of cream Circassian ponies. " L' Empire, 
 c'est moi" was written in every line of her proud, classic features, Queen of 
 the Free Lances as she was, daring and unscrupulous Bohemian as the world 
 notoriously declared her. 
 
 Trevenna, farther down St. James's Street, arm-in-arm with a young M.P., 
 who, having little brains of his own, was very glad to glean a few of the witty 
 sayings and the sagacious notions of the man-about-town, saw Beatrix Lennox 
 too, as her four creams dashed along like fiery little fanciful animals as they 
 were. 
 
 "Confound that woman!" said the astute diplomatist to himself ; but he
 
 CHANDOS. 85 
 
 took off his hat to her with his merriest, brightest, and most pleasant smile. 
 " Rather a superfluous bit of ceremonious homage to Tricksy Lennox, eh ? " he 
 said to the young member, as he put his white hat on again. 
 
 Women had a just prevoyance, after all, in their dislike to Trevenna. No- 
 body on earth could more irretrievably blot and blast their reputations with a 
 laugh. 
 
 " This note came for you, sir, during the morning," said Alexis, his head 
 valet, as Chandos went into his chamber to dress for dinner at the French 
 Embassy. 
 
 " Who brought it ? " 
 
 " I really don't know who, sir; a commissionnaire. He could not tell who 
 the servant was that gave it him, but said he was to beg me to see it personally 
 shown you," said Alexis, to whom the commissionnaire had brought a consider- 
 able douceur to induce him to perform this office, all the letters that were sent 
 to Chandos in unknown hands passing to his secretary. 
 
 He took it as he went into his dressing-room, and glanced at it indifferently. 
 Like all well-known men, he received so many communications from strangers 
 that he never looked at any letters save those he especially cared to open. We 
 are all more or less martyrs to letters, and get a salutary dread of them as years 
 roll onward. But this little note was so delicate, so perfumy, so pretty, and 
 looked so like a love-missive, that Chandos for once broke both his rule and its 
 seal. Little of Love repaid him; the note was, of most unfeminine brevity, 
 though of thoroughly feminine mystery. 
 
 "CHANDOS: 
 
 " Believe in evil for once in your life if you can. The man you took out of 
 a debtor's prison hates you, if ever there were hate in this, world. Under his 
 bright good humor there lies a purpose very fatal to you. What purpose ? I 
 cannot tell you. Watch, and you may unmask it. All I entreat of you is, be 
 on your guard; and do not let your own heedless generosity, you own loyal and 
 gallant faith, betray you into the hands of a traitor. Give no trust, give no 
 friendship, to Trevenna: ' latet anguis in herba.' 
 
 " Your most sincere well-wisher." 
 
 Chandos read the note, then crushed it up and flung it from him. 
 
 A certain chilliness had passed over him at the words that attacked in the 
 dark the man whom he had so long trusted and befriended. Belief in it, even 
 for a second, had not power to touch him. An anonymous note of course 
 brought its own condemnation with it; but suspicion in any shape was so utterly 
 alien and abhorrent to him that its mere suggestion repelled him. Suspicion, 
 to frank and generous tempers, is a cowardice, a treachery, a vile and creeping
 
 86 
 
 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 thing that dares not brave the daylight. The attack, the innuendo, the unau- 
 thenticated charge, only rallied him nearer him whom they impugned, not from 
 obstinacy or from waywardness, his nature was too gentle to have a touch of 
 
 either, but simply from the chivalry in his temperament that drew him to 
 
 those who were slandered, and the loyalty in his friendship that clung closer to 
 his friend when in need. 
 
 " Poor Trevenna ! Some lady's vengeance, I suppose. If she were not too 
 clever for any such folly, and too generous for any such slander, I should say 
 the writing was Beatrix Lennox's: it is very like, though disguised," he thought, 
 as he glanced at the note where it lay among the azure silk and laces of his 
 bed, where it had fallen. 
 
 It left a transient pain, impatience, and depression on him for ten minutes 
 after its reception. To have read the mere suggestion of perfidy in the man 
 he trusted made Chandos fell himself a traitor; and to his careless, insouciant, 
 serenity-loving temper, any jar of a harsher world, any breath of doubt or of 
 treachery, was as repellant to his mind as the east wind was to his senses. 
 
 He took his bath, of whose perfumes he was as fond as a Greek, dressed, 
 aud went to dinner at the French Embassy, and thence to the succession of en- 
 tertainments and pleasures that awaited him, closing the night at four o'clock 
 in the morning over the gay sonper a huis clos of that new Adrienne Lecouvreur, 
 Claire Rahel; and throughout the night he did not think once of the little note 
 that lay hidden among the silk folds of the curtains, crumpled and forgotten, 
 vain and useless, as most warnings are, and as, certainly, anonymous warnings 
 deserve to be, however good their intention. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 A JESTER WHO HATED BOTH PRINCE AND PALACE. 
 
 " LADY CHESTERTON, is vowing Cherubino is divine. What queer divinity ! 
 
 What would Michael Angelo have said to an archangel in a tail-coat, a lace 
 
 cravat, and a pair of white kid gloves, holding a roll of music, and looking a 
 
 between a brigand, a waiter, and a parson ? " said Trevenna to the Com- 
 
 ;e de la Vivarol. Madame de la Vivarol was the only woman who in any 
 
 ray countenanced and liked Trevenna, the only one of the grandes dames, of 
 
 isive leaders of ton, who ever deigned to notice his existence; and she 
 
 \ by his impudence, his sang-froid, and his oddity, and paid him only 
 
 s much attention as Montespan and other great ladies of Versailles paid
 
 CHANDOS. 87 
 
 their Barbary monkey or their little negro dwarf, according the pet liberties be- 
 cause of its strangeness and its insignificance. 
 
 " Droll life, a public singer's," went on Trevenna, who could not keep his 
 tongue quiet even through a morning concert, and who, moreover, hated music 
 heartily, and could not have told "Mosein Egitto" from "Yankee Doodle." 
 "Subsists on his clavicle, and keeps his bank-balance in his thorax; knows his 
 funds will go down if he hatches up a sore throat, and loses all his capital if he 
 catches a cough; lunches off cutlets and claret to come and sing 'The moon 
 rides high,' in broad daylight; and cries <Io son ricco e tu sei bella,' while he's 
 wondering how he shall pay his debts, and thinking what an ugly woman the 
 singer with him in the duo is. Ah, by-the-by, madame, apropos of plain 
 women, the Marchesa di Santiago has given some superb malachite candelabra 
 as a votive offermg to Moorfields, for the same reason, they do say, as the 
 Princess de Soubise gave gold lamps to Bossuet, ' pour le pouvoir de pecher a 
 1'ame tranquille.' " 
 
 "Chut! I detest scandal," smiled Madame de la Vivarol; "and license 
 has its limits, M. Trevenna. Madame di Santiago is my most particular friend." 
 
 " Exactly; of your enemy, madame, I know a detrimental story would not 
 be half so piquant ! To hear ill of our foes is the salt of life, but to hear ill of 
 our friends is the sauce blanche itself," responded Trevenna the Impertur- 
 bable. 
 
 The countess laughed, and gave him a dainty blow with her satin pro- 
 gramme. 
 
 " Most impudent of men ! When will you learn the first lesson of society, 
 and decently and discreetly apprendre & vous effacert " 
 
 " A m'effacer ? The advice Lady Harriet Vandeleur gave Cecil. Very 
 good for mediocre people, I dare say; but it wouldn't suit me. There are some 
 people, you know, that won't iron down for the hardest rollers. M'effacert No! 
 I'd rather any day be an ill-bred originality than a well-bred nonentity." 
 
 " Then you succeed perfectly in being what you wish ! Don't you know, 
 monsier, that to set yourself against conventionalities is like talking too loud ? 
 an impertinence and an under-breeding that society resents by exclusion ? " 
 
 " Yes, I know it. But a duke may bawl, and nobody shuts out him; a 
 prince might hop on one leg, and everybody would begin to hop too. Now, 
 what the ducal lungs and the princely legs might do with impunity, I declare 
 I've a right to do, if I like." 
 
 "&asse. f " said madame; "no one can declare his rights till he can do 
 much more, and purchase them. Have a million, and we may perhaps give 
 you a little license to be unlike other persons; without the million it is an ill- 
 bred gaucherie." 
 
 " Ah, I know ! Only a nobleman may be original ; a poor penniless wretch
 
 88 
 
 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 upon town must be humbly and insignificantly commonplace. What a pity for 
 the success of the aristocratic monopolists that nature puts clever fellows and 
 fools just in the reverse order ! But then nature's a shocking socialist." 
 
 " And so are you." 
 
 Trevenna laughed. 
 
 " Hush, madame. Pray don't destroy me with such a whisper." 
 
 " And be silent yourself," said Madame la Comtesse. " You are the most 
 incorrigible chatterer out of a monkey-house; and one cannot silence you with 
 a few nuts to crack, for the only thing you relish is mischief. Chut ! I want 
 to hear the concerto." 
 
 " Apprendre A m'effacer" meditated Trevenna. " Life has wanted to teach 
 me that lesson ever since I opened my eyes to it. 'Fall in with the ruck; 
 never think of winning the race; never dare to start for the gold cups or enter 
 yourself for the aristocratic stakes: plod on between the cart-shafts; toil over 
 the beaten tracks; let them beat you, and gall you, and tear your mouth with 
 the curb, and never turn against them; but, though you hate your existence 
 with all your might and main, bless the Lord for your creation, preservation, 
 and salvation.' That was the lesson they tried to teach me. I said I'd be shot 
 if I'd learn it; all the teachers and law-givers couldn't force it down my throat. 
 I am a rank outsider; nobody knows my stable or my trainer, my sire or my 
 dam; nobody would bet a tenner on my chances. N'importe ! a rank out- 
 sider has carried the Derby away from the favorite before now." 
 
 With which consolatory metaphor of the turf, Trevenna leaned back to 
 Lady Chesterton with as familiar a sans fa$on as though he were the Duke of 
 Crowndiamonds. 
 
 "Pretty landscape, that Hobbema ? Nothing but a hovel among birch 
 trees. Why on earth is a tumble down cottage so much prettier on canvas 
 than a marble mansion ? One likes crooked lines better than straight ones, I 
 suppose, in art and out of it. Humanity has a natural weakness for the 
 zigzag." 
 
 Lady Chesterton made him a distant bow, and a stare of such unutterable 
 insolence as only a great lady can command. 
 
 " That insufferable person ! Such an odious ton de garnison ! I cannot 
 think how Chandos can countenance him," said her ladyship, without deigning 
 to murmur any lower than usual, to the Marchioness of Sangroyal beside her. 
 
 The concert at which Trevenna was solacing himself for the martyrdom of 
 
 melody by watching with his bright eyes for waifs and strays, for hints and 
 
 grounds of future scandalous and entertaining historiettes, was one of the 
 
 musical mornings for which the house in Park Lane was famous; concerts of 
 
 loicest, under the organization of Guido Lulli, most delicate, most mas- 
 
 :rly of musical geniuses, with the repertoire as full of artistic light and shade
 
 CHAN DOS. 89 
 
 as any Titian, and the performance, by the first singers of Europe, just 
 sufficiently, and only sufficiently, long to charm without ever detaining the 
 ear. These concerts were invariably in the picture-galleries, so that while the 
 glories of Gluck and Handel and Rossini and Meyerbeer floated on the air, the 
 companion-art was always before the eyes of the audience, while beyond, aisle 
 upon aisle of color and blossom opened from the conservatories. The softest 
 of south winds blew gently in now from the paradise of floweis glowing there: 
 the sunlight fell into some deep-hued Giorgione, some historical gathering of 
 Veronese, or some fair martyr-head of Delaroche; the dilettanti murmured 
 praise of a fugue in D or a violin obligate; the gold-corniced, purple-hung 
 shadowy gallery was filled with a maze of bright hues and perfumy laces and 
 the fair faces of women; and Chandos, lying back in his fauteuil near an open 
 window, listened dreamily to the harmonies of Beethoven, and let his eyes 
 dwell on the Queen of Lilies. 
 
 In the high-pressure whirl and incessant amusement of his life, it was diffi- 
 cult for any one impression to be made so indelibly upon him that it could not 
 be chased away and surpassed by fifty others as fascinating; but, as far as he 
 could be haunted by one exclusive thought, that thought, since the night of his 
 ball, had been the young Lily Queen. 
 
 " In many mortal forms I rashly sought 
 The shadow of that idol of my thought!" 
 
 he mused to himself, with a smile. " Have I found it at last, I wonder ? 
 Surely." 
 
 He did not think that to seek it here might be to the full as rash, and to the 
 full as vain, as any other phantom-search that had before beguiled him." Who 
 ever does think so in the first sweetness of the aerial vision ? 
 
 The moment when he had seen her as Lucrece had been fatal to him; he had 
 from that moment lost the power of judging or of reading her with truth and 
 calmness ; for from that moment she had become the mortal form of his ideal 
 among women. The shell was so perfect, he never doubted that the pearl 
 within was as fair. 
 
 His glance met hers now as he sat beside her just within the shade of one of 
 the purple curtains, where she was framed in a setting of South American flowers, 
 with one faint tint of the sunlight straying, rose-hued and mellow, across them 
 and her. 
 
 The softness of a beautiful warmth passed over her face as she met his 
 glance, wavering, delicate, the flush of unconcious love and half-startled 
 pleasure; he did not ask if it were but from the rays of the sun, or if it were 
 from the rays of the sun brighter and more precious to us than the sun of the 
 heavens, that God of Light we call Gratified Vanity.
 
 90 OU IDA'S WORKS. 
 
 He bent to her with an almost caressing homage, though he only spoke 
 commonplace words. 
 
 " I had the whole selection classical music to-day, Lady Valencia. I re- 
 membered you had said Mendessohn was your favorite master." 
 
 She smiled, a sweet, glad smile, full of pleased surprise. 
 
 "You remembered my idle words?" 
 
 "No words can be idle to me that you have spoken." 
 
 No one heard the answer as the serene, sublime harmonies of the great 
 Israelite floated through the air, and he leaned forward towards her chair, think- 
 ing how like to one another were the pure music that thrilled his ear and the 
 proud yet soft loveliness that charmed his heart. It was his way to say gentle 
 things to all women, and to mean them indeed while he uttered them; but here 
 he meant them more deeply than in the mere gallantries of a courtly society. 
 
 She looked at him almost shyly under the shadow of her long eyelashes. 
 The touch of shyness that was on her with him lent a subtler, sweeter beguile- 
 ment to the young patrician, so tranquil in her power commonly, so haughty 
 in her delicate disdain to all others who ever sought her. 
 
 "You will make me bold enough," she said with a smile, " to venture to ask 
 you a favor that I have hopelessly been meditating for the last half-hour." 
 
 " It is granted unasked. And now ? " 
 
 " And now how strange you will think it ! " 
 
 " Have no fear of that. If I can please you in any thing, I shall be honored 
 enough. Your wish is ?" 
 
 " Well," she answered, with a low laugh that scarcely disturbed, or was told 
 from, the music, it was so like it in sweetness, " I want you to show me the 
 room "where Lucrhe was written. You do not let the world in there, they tell 
 me; but I fancy you will not refuse me my entreaty to enter the sacred 
 precincts." 
 
 " Who could refuse you any thing ? " he asked her, in turn. " Where I 
 wrote Lucrece was chiefly in the East; but I will gladly let you honor my 
 sanctum, though the thoughts that have been sufficient for methere will scarcely 
 be so any longer when once you have left the memory of your presence to 
 haunt it." 
 
 They spoke no more, as the richest melody of the selection rolled in all its 
 
 randeur down the air, bearing with it all the life and soul of the Provencal 
 
 ician. To those who were gathered here save to Chandos, indeed, who 
 
 lever heard a perfect rhythm of harmony but that he glided on its chords 
 
 >ugh dreamy, Shelley fancies the music was but a pastime of the hour, a 
 
 onable distraction to amuse a languid moment, a cover to flirtation; but to 
 
 it was the very breath of existence. Shrinking from every strange glance 
 
 d voice, and shunning all publicity as he did at all other times, he was now-
 
 CHAN DOS. 91 
 
 now that he was absorbed in his art as sublimely unconcious of the gaze or 
 presence of that aristocratic and indifferent crowd as though they were peasant- 
 children listening to his notes. He was as insensible to them as though they 
 had no existence. What were they to him, those cold dilettanti, those airy 
 coquettes, those critical dandies, those beautiful idiots, who talked art-jargon 
 without a throb of art within their souls ? Nothing. They had no part nor 
 share with him. He lived in the world he created, he lived in the heaven of 
 melody that was around him; and any other world was forgotten. And in that 
 oblivion the man grew grand, the timid, suffering, helpless cripple became a 
 king in his own right, a sovereign in his own domain, an empire that lay far 
 away from the fret and fume of men, far away from the unworthiness of life. 
 His head was proudly borne; his haggard cheek was bright with the youth that, 
 save in dreams, he had never known; his eyes were alit with the blaze of the 
 South and the light of the conqueror; and those among the guests who thought 
 to notice this lame creature with the heart of a Beethoven would put up their 
 glasses and give him a curious look as though he were a medium or piece of 
 china, and say to each other, to forget it the next moment, 
 
 " That poor mad cripple ! quite a genius ! Odd fancy of Chandos to keep 
 him, but certainly he conducts wonderfully well." 
 
 Ah me ! Socrates was poisoned, and Gracchus and Drusus slaughtered, and 
 Hildebrand driven to die in exile, and Dante banished, and Shakspeare un- 
 k'nown by his generation, and Spenser killed for lack of bread, and Cervantes 
 left to rot in a debt-prison, and Keats assassinated with neglect, and we are 
 none the wiser. We know what is among us no better for it all. 
 
 " And all at once they leave you, and you know them; 
 We are so fool'd, so cheated." 
 
 Yes: so fooled because we are blind in our own conceit and gather no col- 
 lyrium from the past. 
 
 " What a beautiful place ! " cried the Queen of Lilies, as she entered, at 
 the close of the concert, that room which simply a desire to be able to com- 
 mand perfect solitude, if he desired it, had made him deny to all guests, and 
 even to all servants unsummoned, a natural wish enough, which had, as is 
 usual, excited a myriad of vague and utterly, irreconcilable, contradictory 
 rumors as to its uses. Even Lady Valencia was a little disappointed to find 
 that there was no mystery whatever in this closed Eleusinian temple, but 
 merely that grace and refinement of beauty and of artistic color which Chandos, 
 without effeminacy, demanded as the summum bonum of life, and insisted on, 
 like the Greeks; in the shape and habit of every commonest household thing. 
 
 "Too beautiful to dedicate to solitude," she said, as he led her in with 
 words of complimentary welcome. " How connoisseurs would envy all the
 
 92 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 Coustons and Canovas, all the pictures and bronzes, buried in this single room! 
 Why, your very choicest art-treasures are hidden here ? " 
 
 He smiled. 
 
 " I believe they are. But the envy of the virtuosi would not enhance their 
 
 beauty or my pleasure in it." 
 
 " No ? " She did not understand him. To her a diamond was no more 
 worth than a stone, unless it were seen and coveted of others. " This room is 
 like a vision of Vathek. No wonder they call you a sybarite ! " 
 He laughed. 
 
 " Do they call me so ? And yet I would have rather lived on a date in Per- 
 icles' Athens than have been king in Sybaris. Ah ! I told you it was cruel 
 kindness to come here, Lady Valencia; my Daphne will have no smile, and my 
 Danae no bloom, any longer. My art-idols will have no charm beside one 
 memory." 
 
 He looked down on her with a glance that made his words no empty flattery, 
 as they stood beside a writing-cabinet that had belonged to Tullia d'Arragona. 
 She laid her hand on the manuscripts and papers that strewed it, and laughed, 
 half gayly, half mournfully, as she touched them. 
 
 " But those papers contain what no woman will rival. An author always has 
 one sovereign that no one can dethrone, in his own dreams." 
 
 She must have known that it would have been hard for even a poet's im- 
 agining to conjure any fancy more fair than her own reality, where she stood 
 leaning slightly down over the ebony-and-gold cabinet of Strozzi's mistress, 
 alone with the art which had no other story to tell than the love it embodied, 
 no other thought to create than the eternal history of human passion, -alone 
 with the golden lingering light of the sunset playing about her feet and shining 
 in the deep-brown lustre of her glance. 
 
 He stooped towards her, made captive without reflection, without heed. 
 " But doubly happy the author who finds his fairest dream made real ! The 
 sovereign of the fancy must yield her sceptre when her very smile is found in 
 the living sovereign of the heart." 
 It was almost a love-declaration. 
 
 At that moment, through the open doorway floated Madame de la Vivarol, 
 her pretty chimes of laughter softly ringing on the ear, her trailing, silken skirts 
 followed by Cos Grenvil and the Duke of Crowndiamonds. 
 
 "Ah, monsieur! so you have thrown this sacred and mystical chamber 
 open at last to profane feet ? How charming it is ! like a piece of descrip- 
 tion out of Monte-Christo ! " she cried, with charming carelessness, as she flut- 
 tered, butterfly-like, about the room, criticizing a tazza, glancing at a manu- 
 script, admiring a miniature, trying an ivory pistol, commenting on a statuette. 
 " So this is your solitude ! " she went on, remorselessly (while none but he
 
 CHANDOS. 93 
 
 caught one swift glance that meant, " You desert me ? aliens ! you shall re- 
 gret it ! "). " Really, mon ami, it is more agreeable than most men's enter- 
 tainments. We shall know now how pleasant your retreat is when you are oc- 
 cupied in solitude with your paperasses and your palette ! " 
 
 " Ah, madame, " said Chandos, laughingly, though he knew very well what 
 was concealed under that airy challenge, " fair memories will be left to my 
 room, but its spell and its peace will be broken forever. As I was saying to 
 Lady Valencia, I can never summon shapes to paper or canvas now that its 
 loneliness will be haunted with such recollections." 
 
 " Mon ami," said La Vivarol, with the prettiest mocking grace in the world, 
 " are you so very constant to the absent ? " 
 
 And while she floated hither and thither, fluttering over a Vita Nuova, rich 
 in Attavante miniatures, lifting her eyeglass at a little Wouverman, murmuring, 
 " Que c'est joli ! que c'est joli ! " before a grand scene of David, and slightly 
 shrugging her shoulders at a bewitching Greuze, because it was a different 
 style of beauty from her own, none could have dreamed that madame had a 
 trace of pique on her. Yet, as they left for their carriages a few moments 
 later, it would have been hard to say which had the most bitter pang against 
 her rival treasured in silence, the fair Lily Queen, who had lost the one mo- 
 ment when warm words had so nearly been won on his lips, or the French count- 
 ess, who had found another given the entrance to that writing-room to 
 which admittance had been so often, and so steadily though gayly, denied 
 her. 
 
 As for Chandos, he consoled himself easily with the happy insouciance of 
 his nature, and went down to dine at his " bonbonniere " at Richmond. Among 
 his party were Beatrix Lennox, a clever woman and a brilliant, a woman with 
 the talent of Chevreuse and the fascination of a L'Enclos; a woman whose wit 
 was never weary, and whose voice charmed like the sound of a flute through a 
 still, aromatic, tropical night; a woman in whose splendid eyes there came now 
 and then, when she ceased to speak, a look of unutterable pain, a look that 
 passed very quickly, too quickly to be ever seen by those around her. 
 
 Chandos, amused by those nearest to him, who laid themselves out to so 
 amuse him with all the brightness of their ready esprit, all the gayety of their 
 airy laughter, all the infectious mirth of their vivacious chansons, was too well 
 distracted to notice or perceive that Trevenna studiously, though with all his 
 customary tact, prevented any opportunity occurring for Mrs. Lennox to ap- 
 proach her host or be able to address him in any way apart. He did not notice, 
 either, though she was a favorite with him, that the haughty, resistless, victori- 
 ous lionne, usually so disdainful and so despotic in her imperious grace, allow- 
 ed Trevenna to use an almost insolent off-hand brusquerie to her unreproved, 
 and once or twice took the cue of her words from him, and obeyed his glance
 
 94 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 as a proud forest-born deer tamed by captivity might obey the hand of its 
 keeper, compulsorily but rebelliously. 
 
 Chandos had the too ready trustfulness of a woman; but he had nothing 
 of that subtle power at the perception of trifles, and the clairvoyant divination 
 of their meaning, which atone to women for the risks of their over-faith. 
 
 The world amused him so well, what need had he to probe beneath its sur- 
 face or ask its complex springs ? That work was Trevenna's business, and to 
 Trevenna's taste. As a boy, that alert humorist had never seen a conjuror's 
 legerdemain but to buy the trick of it, a piece of machinery but to investigate 
 its principle, a stage but to go behind the scenes, a watch but to break it in try- 
 ing to find out its manufacture; he did the same now with human life. All its 
 weaknesses, all its crimes, all its secrets, all its intricacies and conspiracies and 
 veiled motives and plausible pretexts, it was his delight to pierce and learn and 
 uncover and hold in abject subjection. To walk as it were in the underground 
 sewers of the moral nature, and to watch all the wheels within wheels of the 
 world's rotation, was an exquisite amusement to Trevenna. Nor did he ever 
 get cynical with it. He thought very badly of humanity, to be sure; but it 
 tickled his fancy that men should be such rascals as he thought them; it never 
 for an instant made him sour at it. He was, as Chandos had said, an odd mix- 
 ture of Theophrastic bitterness and Plautus-like good humor. He never con- 
 demned anything; he only found everything out. He had not the slightest ob- 
 jection that men should be scoundrels; on the whole, it was more conven- 
 ient that they should be so; all he cared was that he should be up to their 
 moves. 
 
 Nor was it a brief or a light labor by which he became so. A marvellously 
 
 unerring memory, an acumen of the finest intelligence, a universality that could 
 
 adapt itself pliably to all forms, a penetration that never erred, a logic that could 
 
 never be betrayed into the ignoratio elemhi, and, above all, a light, off-hand. 
 
 perfect tact that could successfully cover all these from view, were the severe 
 
 acquirements that were necessities for his success; and by a perseverance as 
 
 intense as ever scholar brought to his science, or warrior to his struggle, he had 
 
 gained them in such proportion at least as any man can ever hope to attain 
 
 them all. There was strong stuff, there was great stuff, in the man who could 
 
 put himself voluntarily through such a course of training as Trevenna had now 
 
 pursued through long years, to the world's view of him an adventurer, an idler, 
 
 a diner-out, a hanger-on to men of rank and riches, in real truth a man whom 
 
 t one trifle of the passing hour escaped, by whom the slightest thread that 
 
 be useful in the future was never neglected, and who, after pleasures and 
 
 affronts m turn that would have alternately enervated and heart-sickened any 
 
 rther less sturdily in earnest than himself, could come back to his cheap lod- 
 
 :o plunge into intellectual labor and to grind political knowledge as ardu-
 
 CHAN DOS. gr> 
 
 ously and as steadily as though he were a lad studying for his Greats at a 
 university. 
 
 The qualities he brought to his career were admirable beyond all average 
 of ordinary power; the purpose of his career was more questionable. He would 
 have said, and so far with fair justice, that it was, at any rate, the same which 
 sent Alexander into the heart of the East, which placed Mahomet at the head 
 of the wondrous legions of El-Islam, which sent William of Orange to the throne 
 of Great Britain and the young Corsican to the dais and diadem of Louis Qua- 
 torze, the motive of self-aggrandizement. And, in truth, there was in this 
 good-humored, impudent, imperturbable, brusque, amusing man-about-town, 
 who jested to get a dinner and put up with slights to purchase a day's shooting, 
 the same element of indomitability as there was in Caesar, the same power of 
 concentration as there was in Columbus, and the same strength of self-training 
 as there was in Julian. Only his Rome was the House of Commons, his Terra 
 Nuova was the table-land where adventurers were denied to mount, and his 
 deities were Money, Success, and Vengeance, gods, it must be confessed, in 
 all ages fair to men as Venus Pandemos, and more potent with them than all 
 the creeds from Cybele's to Chrysostom's.
 
 9tj QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 BOOK THE SECOND. 
 
 O ye gods ! what a number 
 Of men eat Timon, and he sees them not ! 
 
 SHAKSPEARE. 
 
 O Jealousy ! thou most unnatural offspring 
 
 Of a too tender parent, that in excess 
 
 Qf fondness feeds thee, like the pelican, 
 
 But with her purest blood; and in return 
 
 Thou tear'st the bosom whence thy nurture flows. 
 
 FROUDE. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 UNDER THE WATERS OF NILE. 
 
 IT was night in the low, crooked, dirty, unsavory court in which stood the 
 little rickety door, with its yellow panes of opaque glass, that was lettered Tin- 
 dall & Co. An unpretentious place, untempting, dusty, and boasting in no way 
 of itself, its shop or counting-house (for it was a cross between the two) sug- 
 gestive of no particular trade, but chiefly filled with a few old pictures, a few 
 old blackened bronzes, a piece or two of quaint armor, a violin dit de Stradu- 
 arius, a little china, and much lumber. These things, however, remained there 
 week after week; it was not in them that Tindall & Co. dealt, and they were too 
 straightforward, too affluent people to care to palm these broken antiquities and 
 mock virih off upon their clients; that was not their way of doing business at 
 all. The brown pictures, the cracked china, the old pair of Modenese carvings, 
 the helmet, or the fiddle, were only trifles on the surface, immaterial garnish- 
 ings to answer the curious eyes of the multitude when those eyes, in passing, 
 peered in and wondered what was traded in behind the opaque panes of glass. 
 Underneath them, as the crocodile sits hidden with the sullen, reddish waters 
 and the broad, fan-like leaves of the Nile above his scaly head and opened jaws, 
 so might be said to sit Tindall & Co., eating all manner of strange things that 
 dropped between their fangs, youth and age, broad estates and ancient halls, 
 wooded acres and gallant names, boyhood with the gold on its hair, and man-
 
 CHAN DOS. 97 
 
 hood with the shot of the suicide through its heart, eating them all, and mashing 
 them together impartially, and churning them all down without distinction into 
 one vast, even, impotent, shapeless mass of ruin. 
 
 This was what Tindall & Co. did under the flowing mud-hued Nile-tide of 
 London life, and then lay basking, alligator-like, waiting for more. This is 
 what Tindall & Co., and such-like spawn of Nile, can do under the beneficent 
 laws which, by restricting usury with a penalty, compel despair to pay double 
 for the straw it grasps at, laws which forget that, despite them all, the supply 
 will always continue to meet the demand, and that their only issue is to make 
 the one who supplies insist on treble payment as indemnity for the risk he runs 
 through them. Ah ! wise, calm voice of Political Economy, will it ever be 
 heard ? will its true justice ever outweigh the gushing impulses of cruel senti- 
 ment ? will it ever be known that its immutable impartiality is as truly gentle 
 as the world at present calls it hard ? When it shall be, the crocodiles will be 
 crushed in turn, and crocodile-tears flow no more; but the millennium is very 
 far away. 
 
 The premises of Tindall & Co. were cut up into various small rooms; privacy 
 was an essential of their pursuits. It would warn away the antelope that steals 
 down to the treacherous edge to slake its thirst within fatal distance of the 
 alligator's jaws, if it were to see signs of the bones and skin of a lately devoured 
 brother lying near. They were all dingy, dull, smoke-dried little chambers, 
 with a musty, repellant odor that involuntarily brought remembrance of the 
 Morgue. In one of them to-night, the poorest of the lot, which bore traces of 
 constant occupation in its poor furniture, was the old Castilian Jew, standing in 
 the tawny light of a hand-lamp burning near him, whose yellow gleam flickered 
 over his long black garments, his snow-white patriarchal beard, and his cap, 
 like the round cap of a Rubens picture, of worn dark velvet, scarce darker than 
 his olive brow, with the straight line of the eyebrows, and the piercing eyes, 
 whose lustre even age could not dim. Before him, in the shadow, was a young 
 boy, a boy at most of seventeen or eighteen years, beautiful as a Murillo head, 
 with the rich red lips, the black, long, tender eyes, the falling silken locks of a 
 Spanish picture, and the appealing softness of an extreme youth blent in him 
 with the fixed misery of a shameful grief. There were heavy tears on his 
 dropped lashes, and his lips were slightly apart like those of one who is worn 
 out and faint with pain. Between the two stood Trevenna, with his bright, 
 open, pleasant face and its shrewd blue English eyes, dressed for the evening, 
 with the lamplight falling on the polish of his Paris boots and the laced ends of 
 his neck-tie, as he leaned in comfortable indifference, like one who is master 
 of the house and master of the situation, against the wooden ledge of the painted 
 mantel-piece. 
 
 " Much more sensible to come back, little Benjamin," he said, with a shrug 
 
 VOL. III.-4
 
 IIS 
 
 OUIDAS WORKS. 
 
 of his shoulders. "Never try dodging with me; it isn't the least bit of use. 
 Only riles me, as the Yankees say, and can't serve you in the slightest. Bless 
 your heart, my little felon, do you suppose if you were to hide yourself in the 
 African sands, or bury yourself in the Arctic ice, / shouldn't ferret you out when 
 
 I wanted you." 
 
 His laughing, merry eyes flashed a single glance into the lad's drooped face; 
 and the boy shuddered and trembled, and turned pale as though he were an 
 accused between the irons, wrenched with another turn of the rack. 
 
 " Not the smallest use in dodging," pursued Trevenna, as good-naturedly 
 and agreeably as though he offered him a glass of sherry. " Shows great inex- 
 perience to try it. World's made up of flies and spiders ; you're a fly, and all 
 the world's a net for you; glide through one web, another'll catch you. Listen; 
 you'd better understand it once for all. Do what you like with yourself, go 
 where you like, burn yourself up in the tropics, bury yourself down in the 
 mines, grow old, marry, grow gray, get children, make money; but don't think 
 to escape me. When I want you, or when you forfeit leniency, I shall have 
 you. Just think ! twenty years hence perhaps you may be fancying the thing 
 blown over, you may be living in luxury, even ! who knows ? yonder there 
 among your precious Spanish vines; you may be in love and have some soft 
 Andalusian for your wife; you may have friends who think you a mirror of 
 probity, brats who will own your name, all sorts of stakes in life, all sorts of 
 ties to it; and just then, if I want you Presto ! I shall be down upon you. So 
 never ieel sure, that's all; and never try dodging." 
 
 He watched the boy as he spoke, winding up all these fancies, so foreign 
 to his natural speech, that he might turn with each one of them another grind 
 of the rack to the soft and helpless nature before him. It amused him to see 
 the agony they caused. The boy shrank farther and farther, like a hunted, 
 stricken creature, trembling and paralyzed, his eyes fascinated on his tormentor 
 as though by a spell. The old man stood mute and motionless, but an anguish 
 greater even than the youth's was on him in his silence; and, as his eyes turned 
 with piteous entreaty, his dry lips murmured unconsciously, 
 
 " Sir, sir ! as you are merciful ! he is so young." 
 
 " Precisely because he is so young, my good Ignatius, must we have him 
 know that, live as long as he may, he'll never be free," retorted Trevenna, 
 pleasantly. " He has a long life before him, and he might get fancying that 
 all this would wear out; but it won't. Paper isn't sand, and that little docu- 
 ment of his will always stand." 
 
 The boy, Agostino, as he was called, the only living thing of the old man's 
 
 blood and name, looked up with a low, gasping cry. This merciless seizure of 
 
 1 his future, this damning denial of all earthly hope, this chain that wound 
 
 about all years to come ere yet they had dawned on him, this despairing eter-
 
 CHANDOS. 99 
 
 nity of bondage, were greater than he could bear. He threw up his arms with 
 a passionate moan, and flung himself at Trevenna's feet, his bright brow bent 
 down on the dust, his hands clasping the hem of his tyrant's coat. 
 
 " Kill me ! O God of Israel ! kill me at one blow. I cannot live like this." 
 
 Trevenna moved his foot a little, as though he pushed away a whining 
 spaniel, and laughed as he looked down on him. 
 
 " Cher Agostino, you would make a capital actor. I think I'll put you on 
 the stage; you'd be a first-rate Jtomeo, or Ion." 
 
 The kick, the laugh, the words, in the moment of his intense torture, stung 
 and lashed the submissive spirit of the Israelite race, and the terror-stricken 
 bondage of the boy, into a passionate life that broke all bonds. He sprang to 
 his feet, standing there where the tawny circle of the oil-light fell, like a young 
 David, his rich lips quivering, his curls flung back, his cheek with its glowing 
 Murillo tint deepened to a scarlet fire. 
 
 " What have I done ? " he cried, aloud, while his voice rang piteously 
 through the chamber. " What have I done, to be tortured like this ? Not a 
 tithe of what is done here every day, every hour ! If I A? a thief, where is the 
 wonder ? Is there not robbery round me from noon to night ? Is not every 
 breath of air in this accursed den charged with some lie, some theft, some 
 black iniquity ? Hundreds come here in their ruin; is one ever spared ? Is 
 not a trade in men's necessities driven here from year's end to year's end ? Is 
 not poverty betrayed, and ignorance tempted, and honor bought and sold here 
 every week ? How could I learn honesty where all is fraud and sin ? how 
 could I keep stainless, where everything is corruption ? If I am a thief and a 
 felon, what are you ? " 
 
 The bold words poured out in anguish, their English speech tinged and 
 mellowed with the Castilian accent. Suffering had made him desperate; he 
 writhed and turned and struck his bondmaster. The old man heard him, 
 trembling and aghast; his brown face blanched, his teeth shook; he looked up 
 at Trevenna with a piteous supplication. 
 
 " Oh, sir ! oh, my master, forgive him ! He is but a child, and he knows 
 not what he says " 
 
 " He will know what he has to pay for it. Out of my way, you young 
 hound." 
 
 The answer was not even angered, not even jarred from his customary 
 bantering bonhomie; but at the glance of the keen blue eye that accompanied 
 it, all the sudden fire, all the momentary rebellion, of the boy died out; he felt 
 his own utter powerlessness against the master he contended with; he cowered 
 like a beaten dog, dropped his head on his breast, and burst into a passion of 
 tears. 
 
 " Shut up that," said Trevenna, carelessly, while, as much unmoved as
 
 100 OUIDA'S WORKS. 
 
 thoueh the young Jew's fiery words had never scathed his ear he took out 
 ^mf^rsTm hi. inner coat-pocket and tossed them to Ignatius Mathias 
 "Here took alive. Take these; and don't do anything to little Dallerstone yet 
 a while If he come here mind he doesn't know anything about those signa- 
 tures; iet him understand that, quite as a matter of kindness I looked in to see 
 if you could be induced to take the screw off him; let him think that I d in- 
 finite trouble to get you to do any thing of the kind; and leave him to fee that 
 you'll very likely be down on him, and that his only safety s m me. Look 
 sharp; you understand ? " 
 
 The Hebrew bent his head, holding the papers in his withered hands; they 
 were the bills of young Charlie Dallerstone, freshly renewed on Chandos' 
 
 acceptation. 
 
 "One thing more," went on Trevenna, looking afhis watch; for he was go- 
 ing to dine in Park Lane, and it was nearly nine. I find Sir Philip looks 
 booked to make a very sure thing at the Ducal. His French horse is sure to 
 win, and he may strike a vein of luck again. Catch him while he's down; call 
 in his ' sliff ' to-morrow. He must sell up; he can't help himself. As for Lady 
 Vantyre, one doesn't deal with women usually; but she's been going it very 
 fast in Venezuelan bonds and California scrip. She wants some ready, and 
 she's quite safe; she'll come into no end of money by-and-by. I buy and sell 
 for her in the City, so I know to a T what she's worth. That's all, I think. 
 You may come to me the day after to-morrow, if you've anything to say. 
 Good-bye, young one; and just remember, if you don't want to see the hulks, 
 don't dodge ! " 
 
 With which valediction, Trevenna sauntered out of the room, drawing on 
 his gloves, to get into his night-cab and drive to one of those charming dinners 
 of princes, peers, wits, authors, and artists, all chosen for some social gift of 
 brilliance, for which the house of Chandos was celebrated. 
 
 " What an angel Charlie will think me ! " thought Trevenna, with a laugh, as 
 his dashing cab clattered his way from Tindall & Co.'s, where he had stopped 
 openly and left his thoroughbred high stepper to dance impatiently before 
 the door in full view of any passer-by. He only went on Charlie's business. 
 
 Those whom he had left in the little, close, and ill-illumined chamber were 
 silent many moments. That laughing, frank, clever face of their tyrant had 
 left a shadow there dark as night. The two forms were in strange contrast 
 with the meagre commonplace of their surroundings, two figures of Giorgione 
 and of Rubens painted in upon the drab-hued dusty panels of the miserable 
 City office-room. The youth Agostino sat motionless, his head bowed down 
 upon his arms. The old man watched him, his eyes, with all the yearning 
 tenderness of a woman in them, filling with the slow, salt tears of age. He was 
 a hard man, a cunning man may-be, a man chilled by a long life of opprobrium,
 
 CHANDOS. 101 
 
 of struggle, of persecution, of pain; but he was soft in his heart as a mother to 
 that beautiful lad, the last flower of a doomed and died-out house. He loved 
 him with a great love, this only living son of his young, dead wife, this 
 Benoni, who had come to him, as it seemed, with all the perfume and the 
 poetry of his lost Spain shed on his vivid beauty and seeming to revive in his 
 happy grace. 
 
 Therefore in his sin he had clung to him, in his shame he had no reproach 
 to deal him; and through him, for him, by him, the grand old Israelite became 
 weak as water, facile as a reed, in the hands of an inexorable taskmaster, 
 who was as exacting as an Egyptian of old. 
 
 He laid his hand on the boy's bowed head and moved the thick curls tenderly. 
 
 " You were too rash, my Agostino; it is not for the helpless to incense the 
 strong. I trembled as I heard. My child, my child, your sole hope is in his 
 sparing you." 
 
 Agostino lifted his head, the tears heavy on his lids, his lips swollen and 
 parted. 
 
 " Forgive me, father. I was mad ! And I only said the truth to him, 
 though the God of Truth is my witness that I had no thought to wound you, or 
 to mean you, by my words. If what I see here is evil, what I learn from you is 
 good, so lofty that it should outweigh it a thousand-fold. My guilt is my 
 own; I meant no reproach to you." 
 
 " I know, I know," said the old man, wearily. " But you angered him, my 
 child ; I saw it by his eye, and and we are in his power. He has been good 
 to us, good to us. We are bound to bear the stripes that he may deal." 
 
 It was said patiently, firmly, and in sincerity. Trevenna had bought his 
 invaluable tool by a few arts which were on the surface benevolent and lenient, 
 and were in literal fact far-sighted plans to purchase a fine instrument at a 
 small price. But the perception of this, even where it dawned on him, did not 
 avail to shake the old Israelite's sense of grateful bondage; nor would it have 
 done so even had it not been accompanied with the auxiliaries of necessity and 
 fear which through Agostino he was moved by as well. 
 
 " Good ! " the youth's eyes flashed, and his mouth quivered. " I would to 
 Heaven, but for the shame on you, that he would give me up to justice, and 
 send me out to any fate, rather than force me to live in this yoke an hour 
 longer. It kills me ! it kills me ! Under his eye I have no will ; under his 
 law my very breath seems his. What is it to be spared, to be dogged by such 
 a doom as he told out to me ? a never-ending dread ! " 
 
 The old man shuddered, and on his face there deepened that terrible, haunted 
 look of fear for one dearer than himself, which had gleamed out from the light 
 of his sunken eyes throughout Trevenna's presence. 
 
 " Agostino, the life of a convict for you f The irons on your young limbs,
 
 1(r . QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 the brutal work for your delicate strength, the captivity, the travail, the shame, 
 the misery " 
 
 His voice failed him; he could not think of the near approach of such a 
 doom for the only thing left to him on earth without his anguish mastering 
 him. Agostino trembled and shrunk back, crouching, bowed, and prostrate, in 
 the same paralysis of horror which had subdued him when Trevenna had spoken. 
 He could not have faced his fate. There was on the Spanish splendor of his 
 boyish loveliness a wavering, womanish weakness, a cowardice, the result not 
 of selfishness, but of changing and painful sensitiveness; it was this instability, 
 this cowardice, which had drawn him into a crime wholly at variance with the 
 candid tenderness of his regard, and which made him, through his fear, ductile 
 as wax to mold even into the very thing he loathed. He might say that he 
 longed for justice in the stead of being spared by one -who played with him in 
 his suffering as a cat with a bird; but he would have clung to exemption at all 
 cost had he been put really to the test, and accepted life on any terms to escape 
 the horror and the ignominy of public retribution. 
 
 The old Israelite looked down on him, and, as he saw that pitiful, tremulous 
 abasement before the mere conjured vision of a felon's life, lifted his withered 
 hands upward in a grand, unconscious gesture of imprecation and of prayer. 
 
 " May the God of Israel forsake me in my last extremity, if I ever forsake 
 him by whom you have been spared your doom ! " 
 
 The vow was uttered in all the dignity and in all the simplicity of truth. 
 No matter what his taskmaster might be to others, no matter how cruel the 
 tasks he set, no matter how hard the lashes he gave, no matter how weary the 
 labor he imposed, to Ignatius Mathias he was sacred; he had spared Agostino. 
 
 In that moment of his oath of fidelity, the Castilian Jew, the white-haired 
 usurer, the world-worn toiler in many cities, the despised and reviled Hebrew, 
 reached a moral height of which John Trevenna never had a glimpse. 
 
 He paused a while, gazing down upon the boy. For many weeks they had 
 been parted, for the first time in their lives, and severed in the tortures of sus- 
 pense; and the sight of him, even in their present anguish, even in the bitter- 
 ness of the guilt which had stained this opening life with its blot, was sweet as 
 water in a dry land to the sear and aching heart of the old man. With his own 
 hands he brought him wine and bread, and bade him eat, breaking through all 
 torn and ceremonies of his people, and tending him with womanlike 
 leness. It was thus that he had made Agostino dependent and fragile as a 
 irl, and powerless to guide himself through the rough winds and subtle temp- 
 )f the world. Amidst the deprivation and misery that had fallen to the 
 the Israelite, the child who had the eyes of his lost darling had never 
 1 warmth and light, and the sight of flowers, and the song of birds, and 
 som of summer fruits. Starving on a morsel of dried fish himself, he
 
 CHANDOS. 103 
 
 had bought the purple grapes of their own sierras for Agostino. And there was 
 something caressing, vivid, engaging, appealing in the boy which had repaid 
 this fully in affection, even whilst he had gone farthest from straight paths. 
 
 He drank the Montepulciano wine that was brought him now, and with it youth 
 and hope recovered their unstrung powers, and the dread despair that had 
 pressed on him in Trevenna's presence relaxed. Eat he could not; but as he 
 leaned there, resting his Murillo head upon his arm and absently gazing at the 
 red flicker of the lamp-flame in the wine, something of light flashed over his 
 face; he raised his head with an eager gesture. 
 
 " Father, I have a thought ! Listen. Last year, when I was in the Vega, I 
 met an Englishman; it was in the autumn morning, and I was lying, doing 
 nothing, among the grass as he rode by. He rode slowly, and I saw him well. 
 I never saw a face like his; to look at it was like hearing music. He caught 
 my eyes, and stopped his horse, and asked the way towards Granada; he had 
 fallen on a by-path through the vines. I could scarcely answer him for looking 
 at his face; it was so beautiful. He noticed it, perhaps, for he asked me what 
 I thought of, that I was so absent; and I told him truly, ' I was thinking you 
 look like David, a poet-king.' He laughed, and said none ever paid him a 
 more graceful flattery; but it was not flattery: I was thinking so. Then he 
 smiled, and looked more closely at me. ' You are of the pure Sephardim race, 
 are you not ? ' he asked me, and I wondered how he knew; for he was not one 
 of us, but an azure-eyed, golden-haired Gentile. I never saw him again in 
 Spain ; but this year I saw a gentleman coming down the steps of one of the 
 great mansions to go to his carriage in the gaslight and I knew him again; he 
 was in court dress, and I asked who he was of the people. They said he was 
 very famous, very generous, very high in all distinctions, and that none ever 
 asked him a kindness in vain. He is great, you can tell that by his glance; 
 he is gentle, you can tell that by his smile. I know his worst foe might trust to 
 his honor and trust to his pity. I will go to him and tell him all, and see if he 
 can free me. He knows him, for he was with him that night." 
 
 " And his name, the crowds told you ? " 
 
 " Is Chandos." 
 
 The old Hebrew, who had listened, half beguiled as by a poetic tale, started, 
 his hands clenched on the papers that had been left with him; a change of 
 alarm and of eagerness flashed over the dark olive of his inscrutable face; his 
 voice rose harsh and imperative in his anxiety, while a pang of shame and of 
 disquietude shook its tone. 
 
 " You dream like a child, Agostino ! Chandos ! yes, he knows him, and by 
 that very reason you must never approach him. You have no choice but 
 obedience; you are in his power, and his first law is silence on all that connects 
 him with us. Break it by a whisper, and he will spare you not one moment
 
 104 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 more. Besides, this Chandos, this fine gentleman, this delicate aristocrat, 
 he would shut his doors to a beggared Jew ! " 
 
 " He would not," murmured the boy, in a soft whisper. 
 
 " No matter whether he would or no ! Go near him, and the worst fate you 
 dread will teach you the cost of disobedience. Ah, Agostino, listen. Be 
 patient, be docile; bear the yoke yet awhile, and I will buy your safety with 
 my labor; I will earn your liberation with my service. Only be patient, and 
 you shall not suffer." 
 
 The first words had been spoken with the stern authority of the Mosaic 
 code; the latter closed in the yearning tenderness of his infinite devotion to 
 his only son. 
 
 Agostino bowed his head in silence; it was not in him to resist; it was 
 greatly in him to fear. His head sank down upon his arms once more in the 
 abandonment of a dejection the more bitter and more prostrated because the 
 gleam of a youth's romantic hope had flickered over it and had died out; he thought 
 still that the stranger, who had seemed to him like the poet-king of his own 
 Israel when the crown was first set on his proud, sunlit, unworn brow, could 
 raise him from his despair and loose his fetters. The yellow lamp burned 
 sullenly on, its thin smoke curled up in the leaden noisome air of the pent city 
 alley; the night passed on, and the boy still sat listless and heart-broken there, 
 while Ignatius Mathias, bent above his desk, passed back to the world of hard 
 acumen, of merciless exaction, of unerring requisition, of grinding tribute: 
 with those exact figures, with those names so fair in the world's account, so 
 fouled in his, with those passages which wrote out the ruin of those in whom 
 the world saw no flaw, the evil entered into his soul, and the higher nature 
 perished. He labored to free his darling; what cared he how many living 
 hearts might have the life-blood pressed out of them under the weights he was 
 employed to pile, so that with that crimson wine his taskmaster was pleased 
 and satiated ? 
 
 " // faut manger ou ttre mang/." The world is divided into spiders and 
 flies; Trevenna had chosen to join the former order, and his webs were woven 
 far and finely. 
 
 And the church clocks of the empty city tolled dully through the misty 
 night the quarters and hours one by one; and as the lad Agostino sat dream- 
 ing of that autumn morning in the Vega, with the hot light on the bronze 
 leaves and purple clusters of the vines, and the joyous song of a muleteer 
 echoing from the distance, while the Moorish ruins of mosque and castle rose 
 clear against the cloudless skies, the grand, bent form of the old Israelite, 
 once majestic as any prophet's of Palestine, stooped over the crumpled papers 
 that bore the signature, 
 
 " ERNEST CHANDOS."
 
 CHANDOS. 105 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE DARK DIADEM. 
 
 ASCOT week came, and at the cottage which Chandos usually took for the 
 races a bijou of a cottage that was used in the hunting-season as a hunting- 
 box for its proximity to the queen's stag-hounds Trevenna, with five or six 
 others, spent the pleasantest days in the calendar. The gayest and most 
 fashionable racing-time in the world, with its crowds of dainty beauties and its 
 aristocratic throngs, was nowhere more fully enjoyed than at that pretty Ascot 
 lodge, with its merry breakfasts before the drags came round, and its witty 
 dinners after the day was over. Dubosc, the great chef ot Park Lane, went 
 thither daily in his little brown brougham to superintend the meals of his master 
 and his guests and throw in that finishing artistic touch which made them un- 
 surpassable. The party was perfectly chosen, and perfectly attuned to each 
 other: there were two peers, great on the turf, but great as wits as well; there 
 was a French duke, amusing as Grammont; there was an author as racy as 
 Theodore Hook, a famous French artist, brightest of bright satirists, an Italian 
 prince, the best-natured and gayest-hearted of men, and there was John Trevenna, 
 who, though people might call him impudent, audacious, pushing, and even a 
 little coarse, was nevertheless to society especially this sort of society what 
 a comet-year is to claret, and a truffle-harvest to gourmets. The party was 
 charming, with its leaven of gay Bohemianism mingled with its fashionable 
 atmosphere; and it amused Chandos admirably, as he was used to be amused 
 by life. From the time he was three years old, when princesses had played 
 ball with him and ambassadresses bribed him with bonbons to give them a kiss, 
 he had been accustomed to live among those who beguiled his time for him 
 without effort; and the world seemed naturally to group itself round him in 
 changing tableaux that never left him a dull moment. He had no need to 
 exert himself to seek pleasure; pleasure came unbidden in every varying form 
 to him, seductive and protean as a coquette. 
 
 Chandos loved horses, rode them superbly, and had all the lore of the des- 
 ert; but the slang and the society of the turf he abhorred. He hated the roar 
 of a ring, the uproar of a betting-room, the jargon of a trainer, the intrigues of 
 the flat. But the Clarencieux establishment had long before his time been 
 famous for good things ; his grandfather the duke too, had won the Derby the 
 same year that he was given the Garter, and was prouder in his heart of the first 
 Blue Ribbon than of the last; his own horses had carried off all the best stakes 
 in various years at Newmarket, Doncaster, Epsom, and Goodwood, and he al- 
 ways backed his favorites freely and with great spirit; nothing was ever entered
 
 10G 
 
 OU1DAS WORKS. 
 
 by him that the blackest little rogue on the flat could ever suspect might not be 
 " meant." Therefore, if his horses lost, of course he lost considerably, though 
 this, owing to the superiority of the strains and the excellence of his trainer, 
 had'very rarely occurred: nor'was it likely to occur at Ascot, for far and away 
 at the head of the field stood, almost untouched by any rival for the Cup, his 
 famous four-year-old Sir Galahad. 
 
 It caused him no uneasiness that in certain quarters there was a disposition 
 to offer against the favorite, and that this was done with a regularity and a 
 caution which might have suggested the fact of a commission being out to lay 
 against him. He noticed it, indeed, but with that carelessness which made him 
 too facilely persuaded, and was content to believe the explanation Trevenna 
 offered him, that a rumor had got abroad of Sir Galahad having a touch of cough. 
 " Very good thing for us, too," said Trevenna, shrugging his shoulders. 
 " Galahad's right as a trivet; and if we can heighten the whisper to influenza, 
 
 and take all the odds against him, there'll be a pot of money to show " 
 
 He stopped; he perceived that for once his acumen had been faulty, and 
 had overreached itself; he saw that he had tried a dangerous path with a man 
 who, in all other ways, was so pliant to his hand through the weaknesses of in- 
 souciance and of indolence. Chandos turned to him with a look on his face 
 that he had never seen there. " Roguery makes a poor jest," he said coldly. 
 " If anyone win a shilling by the rumor, knowing its falsity, he may take his 
 name off my visiting-list. I will see that the horse is given his next morning 
 gallop over the Heath as publicly as possible, so that it may be known he is in 
 perfect condition." 
 
 And he did so. Trevenna the Astute had made a false step for the sole 
 time in their intercourse, and thought to himself, " Chivalry on the flat ! If it 
 ever come into fashion, we may sow wheat on the Beacon Course and grow 
 tares by Tattenham Corner. Mercy ! what a fool he is, with all his talents ! " 
 He did seem a very great fool to Trevenna; but then, as Trevenna reflected, 
 there was not much wonder in that, after all, for the man was a poet, in his 
 view, as in Lady Chesterton's, synonymous with saying he was a lunatic. 
 
 " Looks well, Ernest," said the Duke of Castlemaine, where he stood, among 
 other members of the Jockey Club, eying Sir Galahad as he came on the Heath 
 on the morning of the Cup-day. 
 
 " He can't be more fit," answered Chandos, with his race-glass up; " and I 
 don't see what there is to beat him." 
 
 " Nothing," said John Trevenna, who was always pleasantly positive to men 
 about their own successes. There is not a more agreeable social quality. " I 
 think the field's hardly strong enough to do him full credit; there is scarce a 
 good thing in it. Lotus-Lily's pretty, no doubt, very taking-looking, and her 
 arms and knees are good; but she won't stay."
 
 CHAN DOS. 107 
 
 With which Trevenna, after his general trenchant fashion, clenched the 
 matter, his authoritativeness being usually forgiven for its exceeding accuracy: 
 he was never found wrong. But it highly displeased the grand old duke, the 
 longest-lived and highest-born of all the dons of the Jockey Club, to have this 
 audacious dictator dealing out his opinions unbidden at his elbow. He hated 
 the fellow, and hated to see him there, so much, indeed, that he would have 
 found means to turn him out of the stand, had he not been brought thither by 
 and through his grandson. He pointed with his glass to a long, low, rakish- 
 looking chestnut that, with hood and quarter-piece on, was being walked quietly 
 and unnoticed about, forgotten among the ruck, while Sir Galahad, Lotus-Lily, 
 and the rest of the cracks drew the eyes and awoke the admiration of the 
 Heath. 
 
 " You are false to your order, sir," he said, grimly. " There's the horse 
 you should back, if you were true to your form, a < rank outsider,' entered 
 under an alias, came from nobody-knows-where, and foisted into running for a 
 cup while he should be standing in a cab. You should have sympathy, sir ? " 
 
 The satire was significant enough without the fiery glance that the duke's 
 Plantagenet eyes, blue as those tradition gives to Edward of York, flashed on 
 him. The haughty old noble traced descent from the House of York. 
 
 Trevenna could have hurled a curse at his white hairs, with the snarl of a 
 furious dog, so bitterly the arrow rankled, so keenly he felt that this man alone 
 read him as he was. But he had trained himself better; he laughed without a 
 sign of temper. 
 
 " An awkward brute ! I don't fancy him. Who likes their own orders, 
 duke ? You find yours so dull sometimes that you come to the brains of No- 
 bodies to amuse you ! " 
 
 " Fellow can always hit you back again," thought his Grace, " and never 
 shows when he's struck. But that overdone good humor means mischief: if a 
 man smiles under an affront, he may be above, but he's much more likely to 
 be beneath, resenting it. Now, I'd have respected the fellow if he had showed 
 fight in hard earnest; but he laughs at too much not to mean to take his measure 
 out for it some day." 
 
 And the duke adjusted his Voigtlander, and took a long look at the cracks 
 as the saddling-bell rang, and Sir Galahad passed him with his flanks shining 
 like satin, his knee-action beautiful, and his calm reposeful glance proudly 
 eying the throngs that hung on his steps. 
 
 Chandos looked at the favorite as a man must always look at the nearly- 
 certain winner of a great stake when that winner comes out of his own estab- 
 lishment and has been bred from the famous strains that have made the celebrity 
 and the success of the stable for a century. The passion of the turf was impos- 
 sible to him, and to concentrate his life on the winning or losing of money
 
 108 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 would have been as grotesque to his fancy as to centre it on eating or drinking; 
 his nature and his tastes led him to so many forms of enjoyment, to so many 
 shapes of attraction, that the gaming-pleasures and lusts of the " flat " had but 
 little hold on him. On the other hand, however, as strong an interest centred 
 for him in the running of his horses, of whom he was both naturally proud 
 and passionately fond. In the ten years gone by since his majority, he had 
 won the Derby twice, and most other cups and stakes of note some time or 
 other. The "Chandos strains" were very celebrated; and he watched the 
 winning of his colors with little, if any, thought of the sums hazarded on them, 
 but with a loving pleasure in the triumphs of the gallant beasts that had known 
 his voice and his touch from the first days of their colt- or filly-hood, when they 
 had gambolled by their dam's side under the broad-spreading branches of the 
 oaks and elms at Clarencieux. 
 
 He did not set himself the value on Sir Galahad that he did on a young 
 colt that was looked on by his trainer as a certainty for the next Guineas and 
 Derby; but the horse was a brilliant winner, and it was next to an impossibility 
 that anything could beat him on the Ascot course, unless indeed it were Lotus- 
 Lily, a mare of considerable promise and performance, but who was not 
 thought to have the stay in her requisite for the running. The saddling-bell 
 rang, the telegram-board "was hoisted up, the start was given; the field swept 
 out like a fan, disentangling one from another, a confused mass, for a moment, 
 of bright and various hues. Then from the press there launched forward, with 
 the well-known, light, stretching stride that covered distance so marvellously, 
 the Clarencieux favorite, shaking himself clear of all the running, and leading 
 at a canter, which, unextended and easy as it was, left even Lotus-Lily and 
 Queen of the Faires behind by two lengths. All eyes on the course and the 
 stands were fastened on the match between the cracks. Scarce any one noted 
 among the ruck one chestnut outsider, ugly, awkward, but with great girth of 
 barrel and a power of action, which, ridden with singularly fine judgment by a 
 Yorkshire jock of little-known and merely local reputation, was quietly singling 
 out from the rest, and warily waiting on, the two favorites, so warily that 
 imperceptibly yet surely he quickened his pace, passed Queen of the Fairies, 
 and gained upon Lotus-Lily till he struggled with her neck by neck. So little 
 known was he, so dark had he been kept, that as he ran even with the mare, 
 two lengths behind the Clarencieux crack, half the multitude upon the Heath 
 knew neither his name nor owner, and the fashionable gatherings on the stands 
 looked at their cards bewildered as to whom this outsider belonged to, with his 
 feather-weight in the unrecognized gray-and-yellow with purple hoops, that 
 was even with the aristocratic scarlet-and-white of Lotus-Lily's jockey, and 
 barely now a length and a half behind the famous blue-and-gold of Chandos' 
 popular colors.
 
 CHAN DOS. 109 
 
 Fleet as the lightning the three swept on, no other near them even by a bad 
 third, their jocks becoming but mere specks of color, whose course was watched 
 with breathless, strained anxiety: extended now to the uttermost of his splendid 
 pace, Sir Galahad, conscious for the first time of a rival not to be disdained, 
 and perhaps scarcely to be beaten, ran like the wind, the Diadem chestnut 
 gaining on him at every yard, the mare behind by hopeless lengths. Chandos 
 leaned forward, and his breath came and went quickly. The duke, as through 
 his glass he watched the race, that had now become a match, with the eager 
 interest of the chief of a great House whose name had been famous on the turf 
 since the days of Eclipse and Flying Dutchman, shifted his Voigtlander uneasily 
 as he muttered in the depths of his snow-white beard, 
 
 " The dark one wins, by God ! " 
 
 The dark one did win. Nearer and nearer, faster and faster, the ungainly 
 and massive limbs of the Yorkshire horse brought him alongside the graceful 
 and perfect shape of the Ascot favorite; and from the vast crowds upon the 
 purple heather of the Heath the shouts echoed the old duke's words, " The 
 outsider wins ! " " The outsider has it ! " A moment, and they ran neck to 
 neck; the gallant crack of the Clarencieux stable, with all the mettle in him 
 roused to fire, strove for a second manfully with this unknown and unexpected 
 foe; then, with a single forward spring, like magic, the outsider outstripped him 
 by a head, and ran in at the distance, winner of the Ascot cup. 
 
 " A very clever horse," said Chandos, calmly, as he dropped his race-glass. 
 
 " D n you ! " thought one who stood next him. " There is no fun in beat- 
 ing you; you never will show when you're down." 
 
 " Owned by some very clever rascals," said the duke, as he shut up his 
 lorgnon with a clash, while his eyes filled with the hot fiery wrath that in his 
 youth had been swift and terrible as a tempest. " The chestnut has been kept 
 dark as night. Whoever is at the bottom of it has too much science in him to 
 have much honesty left. Mr. Trevenna, why did you not take my advice and 
 back your own order ? The outsider wins, you see ! " 
 
 John Trevenna laughed, such a merry, good-natured laugh that it was 
 infectious. 
 
 " But I did not believe in him, sir; nor do I now. I shall hope you will 
 have inquiries made; for there must be something very dark here. Galahad 
 looked well riden, and if well ridden, there was nothing, I should have thought, 
 on the turf could have beaten him." 
 
 "This is no case for the Jockey Club; you know that, sir, as well as I do," 
 said his Grace, sharply, with peremptory hauteur. " The chestnut's won fairly, 
 so far as the running goes; the roguery has been beforehand." 
 
 Trevenna shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 " It must have taken a deuced deal of roguery to have kept such a flier as
 
 110 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 that ugly brute dark all the three years of his life. Chandos, how cool you 
 are ! If I owned Sir Galahad, I should tear that Diadem's jock out of saddle." 
 
 Chandos lifted his eyebrows. 
 
 "My bay is beaten; there is no more to be said. The best thing to do is to 
 forget it as soon as possible. I will go and talk to the ladies: they always gild 
 the bitter pills of one's adversities." 
 
 And he who had never known the single pang of a real adversity, and who 
 now felt but the wish to escape as speedily as possible from the sting of a mo- 
 mentarily keen and painful disappointment, went, accordingly, out of the stand, 
 and through the circle of his sympathizers, to the carriages of his fairer friends. 
 
 " Oh, how grieved you must be ! that beautiful horse ! " murmu; ed the 
 Queen of Lilies, in the sweetest music of her gentle voice. 
 
 Chandos smiled, a little gravely and sadly for him. " I am grieved for 
 those who lose their money through my mistaken confidence in my own stable. 
 I cannot understand now how anything could beat Sir Galahad." 
 
 "And you must have lost heavily yourself ?" she persued. 
 
 He laughed, his gay and careless mellow laughter. " Oh, that only serves 
 me right. I never make a calamity of money. To talk of fairer things, at 
 what houses shall we meet to-morrow night ? You go, of course, to Lady 
 Glencaster's ? " 
 
 " Ernest, do you know I have a strong belief that your friend is a most 
 ttwsummate scoundrel ? " said the Duke of Castlemaine, with emphasis, as 
 he took him aside a moment before dinner in the drawing-room of the Ascot 
 cottage 
 
 Chandos looked at him in excessive surprise. " My dear duke," he an- 
 swered, gently, " that is not the way I can hear any friend spoken of, even by 
 you." 
 
 " Pshaw ! " said his Grace, with his fiery wrath lighting again those leonine 
 eyes that had flashed over the ranks of Soult's and Junot's armies as he led his 
 dragoons down on to the serried square. " I suppose, if I see your friends 
 forging your name, then I am to be delicate to warn you ? You are as blind 
 s a woman, Ernest. I will stake you ten thousand to nothing that that fellow 
 Trevenna is at the bottom of this affair with the dark horse." 
 
 Trevenna ! " echoed Chandos, in amazement, yet amusedly. " My dear 
 sir, Trevenna never bets the worth of a fiver. What should he gain by doing 
 
 knowing of such a thing ? He has all the confidence of my trainer. If he 
 
 to make money on the turf, he would have made it scores of times ere 
 
 i my cracks. Besides, think what a horrible imputation ! " 
 
 ' His shoulders are broad enough to bear it," said the duke, grimly; they 
 
 have borne worse before now, I daresay. Where did you pick the fellow up ? " 
 
 nm abroad." Chandos would no more have told how they met at
 
 CHAN DOS. Ill 
 
 Rouge et Noir, and how he rescued the young English traveller from a debtors' 
 prison, than he would have counted the glasses of wine Trevenna drank at his 
 table. 
 
 " Humph ! without introduction ? " 
 
 " Well, one makes many acquaintances so on the continent." He smiled 
 as he thought that their only introduction had been through the Baden bank 
 and Baden prison. 
 
 "Certainly; but we don't often bring them home with us," rejoined his 
 Grace, with a still grim significance. " What account did you have from him 
 of himself ? " 
 
 " Really, I have forgotten; I was only a boy, eighteen or nineteen, I 
 think." 
 
 The duke tapped his Louis Quatorze snuff-box with an omnious dissatis- 
 faction. 
 
 " You are a very clever man, Ernest; but you are too easily fooled, if you 
 will pardon my saying so. You can believe it or disbelieve it, as you please; 
 but I am as certain as that I stand on this hearth-rug that the fellow you de- 
 fend knows more than he ought about the history and running of that d d 
 Yorkshire chestnut." 
 
 With which the old Nestor of the Jockey Club took his Bolongaro in a 
 grand and silent wrath, unappeased, as Chandos smiled still, and answered him, 
 unconvinced, 
 
 " It is your over-kindness for me, my dear duke, that makes you so unus- 
 ually suspicious. I wish I were as satisfied of every one's good will to me as I 
 am of poor Trevenna's. Good heavens ! I would as soon believe that my 
 butler plans to poison me in my champagne, and that my valet means to as- 
 sassinate me as I dress for dinner ! " 
 
 He laughed lightly as he spoke, and turned to his other guests, who just 
 then entered the drawing-room, among them Trevenna himself. 
 
 The dinner was of the choicest. Dubosc, with a touch of kindly feeling that 
 this great master was never without (lively and sympathetic Parisian that he 
 was), having heard of the turf disappointments of an employer who seldom 
 failed to appreciate his genius, tendered consolation in delicate thoughtfulness, 
 by a sudden and marvellous inspiration of artistic invention, producing results 
 with a turbot such as Europe had never heard or conceived, and to which he 
 positively attended with his own hands throughout the criticale moments of 
 preparation, watched breathlessly by his satellites and subordinates, Chandos 
 and his guests were connoisseurs, on whom such an tprouvette positive, to use 
 Brillat-Savarin's term, could not be tried but with fullest success. Chandos 
 sent a mesage of appreciation to the great chef himself; and Dubosc was con- 
 scious that the employer who could have remembered a horse's running ill,
 
 n ., QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 while he was consoled with such a triumph as the new turbot au Clarencieux, 
 would have been a man whose soul was dead indeed. 
 
 He/fit it ? " asked the master of the kitchen of the stately fellow-function- 
 ary in black, with the silver chain of office round his neck, who brought him the 
 message of recognition. You think he felt it ! There is so much in soul ! " 
 
 " I am sure he felt it," replied the other, solemnly. " He has always proper 
 feeling on those matters." 
 
 "Yes," sighed Dubosc, "but he has not the devotion that one could wish; 
 a fine taste, but careless. He thinks too much of pictures and statues, and all 
 those trifles, to bring his mind rightly to the great science." 
 
 There is something in that," assented Silver-Chain, regretfully. " To see 
 it really felt, you should have seen that little vuglar creature, that Trevenna, 
 taste it. There was an fyrouvette !" 
 
 " Ah," sighed Dubosc, still, " but it is sad when the good taste goes out of 
 the great orders ! He felt it, did he? That man will have a career !" 
 
 Dubosc's e'prouvette did not fail to restore the life and wit to the party 
 which it had in some degree lost by the losing of Galahad; for all had laid 
 more or less heavy sums on the favorite. Gayety and bon mots resumed their 
 customary reign; the Italian prince and the French artist were most brilliant 
 on the stimulus of the matchless turbot and the no less matchless wines. 
 Chandos always lent himself quickly with the easiest will to be consoled; and 
 the hours sparkled along on swift feet and to pleasant cadence, despite the dis- 
 aster of the Cup-day. Trevenna was in the highest spirits, which he checked 
 slightly when he caught the azure flash of the duke's eyes, but not enough to 
 prevent his being the salt and savor of the dinner-party, as was his custom every- 
 where. They lingered long over their pine-apples and peaches, their Lafitte 
 and Joharmisberger; and after coffee they played whist in the pretty little Ascot 
 drawing-room till the sun looked in through the grape-tendrils and vine-leaves 
 about the casements; and by the dawn Chandos had forgot his first contre- 
 temps, his first annoyance, as though it had never been. 
 
 In the sunny summer morning, as Trevenna sauntered into his bedroom (he 
 had no valet, as has been said, and employed servants scarcely at all), he tossed 
 thirty sovereigns, he had won from his host at whist, down on his dressing-table, 
 and, throwing himself into his arm-chair, indulged in a genuine hearty peal of 
 laughter, that rang out through the open window towards the quiet solitary 
 heather-purpled expanse of the Heath. 
 
 " Sold the whole turf, by Jove ! " he murmured; " and forty thousand netted 
 by commission, as I live, if there's a farthing ! What a day's work ! Trevenna, 
 bon enfant, really you are a clever fellow." 
 
 He admired himself with a cordial, almost wondering, admiration that was 
 very different from vanity, and more like the self-content, and self-applause
 
 CHANDOS. 113 
 
 with which a man who has been up every col and peak in the Alpine range re- 
 gards the names of his hazardous and successful feats burnt in on the shaft of 
 his Alpenstock. He laughed again, at himself, when he lay back in the cosy 
 depths of his chair, with his hands plunged into his trousers-pockets, and gen- 
 uine self-satisfaction brightly set on every line of his face. There is an ex- 
 hilaration to the heart of the successful engineer who sees every morass drained, 
 every ravine bridged, every girder made strong, every obstacle overcome, by 
 his own indomitable energy, and watches the viaduct of his own rearing and 
 planning span the mighty distance that seemed at first to laugh his puny efforts 
 to conquer it to scorn. This was the exhilaration Trevenna felt now. That he 
 was reaching his success by dark, by crooked, by unscrupulous ways, took noth- 
 ing from his enjoyment. They were to him what the morass, the ravine, and 
 the quicksands are to the engineer. Had his road been straight and smooth, 
 where would have been this joyous excitement in his own victories, this tri- 
 umphant zest in his own engineering science ? 
 
 As he took off his dress-coat, undid his neck-tie, and lighted a cigar, he 
 pulled the curtain aside and leaned out of the window into the soft summer- 
 dawn air. Not that he cared a whit for the heliotrope and mignonette odors 
 rising from the garden beneath, for the dews on the blossoming lindens, for the 
 sunrise on the bloom of the heather; those things were to Chandos' taste, not 
 to his; but he liked to look at the quiet deserted Heath, where the dark Diadem 
 had borne off the cup from the favorite. It had put forty thousand in his 
 pocket, or rather, in those far-away American and Indian markets where the 
 penniless man-about-town put every penny even that he won at whist or loo, in 
 sure and secret speculations; but it had a still sweeter pleasure than lay in the 
 money for him. 
 
 " So the outsider beat the Clarencieux crack ! " he thought, with a smile. 
 " A prophecy ! Duke, 1 won't quarrel with you, I'll back my order to win." 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 BUTTERFLIES ON THE PIN. 
 
 " ERNEST, are you going to marry ? " asked his Grace, dryly, in the bay- 
 window of White's. 
 
 Chandos looked up in amazement. 
 
 " Marry ? Heaven forbid ! " 
 
 " Then don't go after that beautiful daughter of Ivors. She will marry you 
 in a month or two more, if you do, whether you wish it or not."
 
 1U QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 Chandos moved restlessly; he did not like the introduction of painful topics, 
 and marriage was a very painful one in his view. 
 
 " If you do marry," pursued the duke, remorselessly, " take the Princess 
 Louise; she is lovelier than anything else the sun shines on, and has the only 
 rank from which a woman can love you without a suspicion of interested 
 motives." 
 
 " My dear duke, I am totally innocent of the faintest intentions to marry 
 
 anybody ! " 
 
 Nevertheless, the subject was not acceptable to him, and he looked a little 
 absently out into St. James's Street with a certain shade of uncertainty and of 
 restlessness on him; whereas the moment previous he had been watching the 
 women in their carriages through his eyeglass, with the idlest and easiest lan- 
 guor of a warm day towards the close of the season. 
 
 " Marry ? No; not for a universe," mused Chandos. A few hours after- 
 wards he entered his house in Park Lane, to make his toilette for a dinner at 
 Buckingham Palace, and turned with a sudden thought to his maitre d'hotel, as 
 he passed him in the hall. " Telegraph to Ryde, Wentwood, for them to have 
 the yacht ready; and tell Alexis to prepare to start with me to-morrow morning. 
 I shall go to the East." 
 
 His yacht was always kept in sailing-order, and his servants were accus- 
 tomed to travel into Asia Minor or to Mexico at a moment's notice. Chandos 
 was used to say, very justly, that the chief privilege of money was that it made 
 you quit of the obligation to meditate a thing five minutes before you did it. 
 Looking long at anything, whether travel or what not, always brushes the bloom 
 off it. He liked to wake in the morning and, if the fancy took him, be away 
 without a second's consideration to the glow of the new Western world or the 
 patriarchal poetry of the East; and so well were his wishes always provided for 
 that he went to sleep in one place and unclosed his eyes in another, almost as 
 though he possessed the magic floating carpet of Prince Hassan. 
 
 The next morning the Aphordite steamed out of Ryde harbor on the way to 
 
 Italy, the Levant, and Constantinople, while its owner lay under an awning, with 
 
 -R;U lumps of ice in his golden cool Rhine wine, and the handsome eyes of 
 
 <lora de I'Orme flashing laughter downward on him while she leaned above, 
 
 mning his hair with an Indian feather-screen. The duke's words had acted 
 
 e a spell; but in his abrupt departure there was one person he had not for- 
 
 en. On his dressing-table lay a note to Trevenna, bidding him to make 
 
 se of his moors in Inverness-shire with the Twelfth as he pleased, or, if he 
 
 t, give the Scottish shootings to any friend he preferred, and take 
 
 my guests he liked clown to Clarencieux for the magnificent preserves of that 
 
 ancient place. 
 
 These reversions and donations of windfalls and of pleasant places to lend
 
 CHAN DOS. 115 
 
 or to invite to were fast making Trevenna very popular among that large class 
 of men-on-the-town dandies, do-nothings, authors, artists, and club-loungers 
 who have a certain reputation that floats them in the world, but no certainty 
 of entree to the good houses, and no means to purchase for themselves the 
 pleasures of the moors and coverts. It began to get him courted among them; 
 and he was a very genial host, royally lavish with Chandos' wines, most good- 
 naturedly ready with offers of hospitality to Chandos' empty houses, so much 
 so that men almost forgot, while they stayed with him, that wines and houses 
 were not both his own. 
 
 " Gone to the East ! By Jove, I'll go and find the Chesterton," thought 
 Trevenna, with all the relish of a schoolboy for sowing mischief, as he read the 
 note and heard of his patron's departure. He was a little sorry Chandos had 
 gone; he never liked losing him from under his eyes; but he was fully consoled 
 by the prospect of reigning as viceroy at Clarencieux and of seeing the morti- 
 fication of the two daughters of Ivors. They were as poor as rats; they could 
 never do him any good. Trevenna felt at liberty to tease them just as he liked. 
 A restriction was too often put on his merry malicious mousing by a prudential 
 recollection of the social status of his mice, and of the use they might be to him 
 in nibbling a way for him into patrician pantries. Here the mice were very 
 poor: so he tracked Lady Chesterton and her sister to a garden-party, and ate 
 his pine-apple in most admirably feigned carelessness and unconsciousness close 
 to the two ladies under a Lebanon cedar. He knew the consternation he should 
 scatter through society by his news. 
 
 " I don't see Mr. Chandos here this morning," said Lady Chesterton, turning 
 to him with a bland smile, condescending to be civil because she was curious. 
 She was also a little uneasy; otherwise, be sure, she would never have had 
 recourse to that " vulgar little toady," as her ladyship designated the acute 
 outsider. 
 
 " No, he isn't here," assented Trevenna, indifferently. He had now put 
 this handsome empress butterfly on the point of his pin, and went leisurely 
 about it. 
 
 " He is well, I hope ? " she pursued. 
 
 Trevenna shrugged his shoulders. " Nev^r was ill in his life, that I know 
 of; perfect constitution." 
 
 "What a rude insufferable bear ! " thought the unhappy butterfly; but she 
 was still more uneasy than ever, and had no recourse so good as the bear: so 
 she resumed her inquiries. " Do you know where he is to-day ? I have some- 
 thing to tell him about Rose Berri china." 
 
 "Your ladyship must send it by post, then." And Trevenna laughed to 
 himself as he saw the first irrepressible writhe of his victim on the pin, 
 
 " By post ! Has he left town ? "
 
 116 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 Trevenna looked at his watch. 
 
 By this time he is midway across to L'Orient. He has taken his yacht to 
 go down south and eastward." 
 
 " So early ! " Trained and icy woman of the world though she was, she 
 could not repress the pallor that blanched her lip, the anxiety that loomed in 
 her handsome eyes. The Queen of Lilies stood near. Hearing also, she was 
 silent and very pale. 
 
 " Well, Ascot was late," answered Trevenna, cheerfully. " He generally 
 does stay for Goodwood, to be sure; but, you see, he has had so many 
 London seasons, and there's such hard running made on him, I think he gets 
 sick of it. 
 
 This thrust the pins in cruelly, indeed, through the delicate wings of the 
 brilliant butterflies. " That coarse horror ! " thought Lady Chesterton, with a 
 shiver of disgusted wrath; but her heart was very heavy, and she had to conceal 
 her chagrin as best she might with all the gay garden-groups fluttering around 
 her and viewing her impaled. " Will he be away long ? " she asked of her 
 tormentor. 
 
 " Oh, dear, yes," said Trevenna, carelessly. " Gone to his summer-palace 
 on the Bosphorus; takes the Morea and the Levant on the way. Poetic man, 
 you know ! likes that sort of thing; loves Greece; enjoys Corfu. I hate 'em 
 both. Snakes and old stones in the one; rocks, rags, and bad ragouts in the 
 other. ' Ruins and scenery,' they tell you. I like stucco and pantomime 
 scenes. Besides, they always fry so villanously in those hot places; glad to 
 get away from the fire, perhaps. When anybody talks of the Acropolis and the 
 Alhambra, I always smell oil and garlic and feel myself starving in memory on 
 a melon. 
 
 He glanced at his butterflies as he chattered, and saw that the pin was enter- 
 ing their souls like iron. He thrust it down a little deeper as Lady Chesterton 
 asked, with a voice that, despite herself, could not be careless, 
 " Mr. Chandos will be long before he returns, then, I suppose ? " 
 " Won't come back till next spring," assented Trevenna. " He'll winter in 
 Paris; always does, as you know. Delicious hotel that is of his, by the way, in 
 the Champs Elysees. Clarencieux isn't likely to see anything of him." 
 
 Which was the unkindest cut of all, seeing that Trevenna knew very well 
 that the baroness had persuaded her husband to take a little estate near Claren- 
 cieux for two years' shooting, on purpose that the Queen of Lilies might conquer 
 in the country if she failed in the town. The husband had grumbled because 
 he could ill afford it. He was terribly poor; but he had been persuaded into it 
 by the assurance from his wife of Chandos' admiration of his. fair sister-in-law; 
 and now Chandos was not going to Clarencieux ! 
 
 " I've paid you off, my lady," thought Trevenna, finishing his ice. You've
 
 CHAN DOS. 117 
 
 found what it is to call me ' a vulgar little wretch who lives nobody-knows 
 where.' " 
 
 Not that Trevenna had any particular dislike to these two women, beyond 
 his general dislike to all and any members of the aristocratic order; but as the 
 boy feels no dislike to the cockchafer he spins on a string, but finds amusement 
 in its pain, and therefore sticks a crooked pin through its poor humming body 
 and puts it to pain accordingly, so Trevenna felt and did with all humanity. 
 
 Gilles de Retz enjoyed the physical convulsions of his victims; Trevenna, 
 as became a more humoristic temper and a more refined age, enjoyed seeing the 
 mental contortions of his. 
 
 And yet the fellow had his good points, some very good points indeed. 
 He had indomitable energy, perseverance, industry, patience, self-denial, the 
 greatest virtues in the Carlylese school, which defies Work. Perhaps it would 
 have been well if both Trevenna and that School had alike considered more 
 the worth and meaning of the purpose, before they gave an apotheosis to the 
 fact, of labor. 
 
 The Lily Queen and her sister drove homeward in perfect silence from the 
 garden-party, where society was lamenting with its softest sighs the loss of its 
 idol and leader, a loss that was much more a blow to the season than if the 
 court had gone into seclusion: the true Royalty of society is Fashion. There 
 was a dead silence between them till they reached the pretty little violet-and- 
 gold boudoir on the top of the staircase that was specially dedicated to the use 
 of Lady Valencia. Then the baroness unclasped her diamond aigrette, and 
 flung off her Chantilly laces with an impetuous, passionate bitterness in the 
 action, and looked a world of scorn out of her black eyes on to her fair sister. 
 
 " I told you so, Valencia ! I knew you would never win him." 
 
 The Queen of Lilies answered nothing, but stood there in her still and 
 matchless grace, a slight flush of proud restrained pain only passing over her 
 face. 
 
 " I told you I knew it was utterly useless," went on Lady Chesterton with 
 woman's favorite reproach, " Jc f avals Men dit." " Courted, sought, flattered, 
 worshipped as he is, do you suppose he would surrender his liberty and marry ? 
 Ridiculous ! I told you the Princess Louise d'Alve is actually dying of love 
 for him; they would give him to her to-morrow. She is as beautiful as you are, 
 though you think nobody can be; and Chandos cares for her no more than he 
 cares for that tabouret at your feet. No more he does for you. No more he 
 ever did for anybody, unless it were that infamous little French countess who 
 has nothing in the world but her eyes and her figure. I told you you could 
 never touch him ! "
 
 lls O UIDAS WORKS. 
 
 Still the Queen of Lilies said nothing. With a haughty but admirable self- 
 command, she held her peace under the lash of her sister's words. Great ladies 
 do not always take their high breeding home with them to the privacy of their 
 own boudoirs; and the baroness, though daughter to the Marquis of Ivors was 
 poor, disappointed, and bitterly at feud with all creation, because she had not 
 been born a man to hold the Ivors title. 
 
 "And there is that place near Clarencieux hired for nothing ! " her ladyship 
 bewailed, with tears of mortification in her eyes. " I am sure I hate the coun- 
 try. I would fifty times rather have gone to Baden or somewhere abroad; and 
 we shall be obliged to go and live there. Chess won't let the money be wasted; 
 he made such a fuss about ever taking it. We might meet Chandos at Paris, of 
 course, if we were like anybody else; but we haven't income enough to live in 
 any style there, and go to the Tuileries and all that, as you must do if you're in 
 Paris at all. We shall be moped down at that wretched place in the country all 
 winter for nothing. I am positive you might have made him say something 
 serious, the night before last, at the court ball. He certainly admired you, 
 admired you very greatly! " 
 
 The baroness stopped, for lack of breath, reckless that her last charge 
 against her sister totally nullified her first statements, no one ever stays to be 
 consistent in anger, and paused in fiery wrath and scorn, swaying her parasol 
 to and fro in impatient bitterness. 
 
 The Lily Queen lifted her drooped lids. 
 
 "I regret you should be put to any inconvenience through me," she 
 said, coldly. "You will allow that / never suggested we should go near 
 Clarencieux. I never approved of the appearance it would inevitably 
 bear." 
 
 " That is all the gratitude I receive ! " cried her sister, with considerable 
 passion, the greater because she was conscious that her own manoeuvres for the 
 brilliant owner of Clarencieux had gone beyond what her sister deemed delicate 
 or wise. " I suppose you will say that it was I who suggested you should wear 
 the Lucrece dress at his fancy ball." 
 
 " As it was," said the Lady Valencia, calmly. 
 
 " Indeed! Oh, very well! " cried her sister, with the laugh that with women 
 denotes the last climax of passion. <l Die unmarried and penniless, Valencia, 
 if you choose; it is no matter to me! Only remember you have not fifty pounds 
 a year of your own, and my milliner's bills come already to more than my hus- 
 band will pay without recourse to his Jews; I shall add yours to them no more 
 after this." 
 
 With that last shaft home the peeress flashed from the room in a storm of 
 fluttering lace and fiery wrath. The Queen of Lilies stood silent and motion- 
 less some moments more, then she went almost mechanically to the door, closed
 
 CHANDOS. 119 
 
 it, slipped its bolt, and, sinking down on one of the couches, dropped her proud 
 head on her hands and sobbed as bitter tears as any woman ever shed. 
 
 The last evening light streamed through the painted panes of her exotic- 
 shrouded window, and, straying along the bright path of the little, dainty, gor- 
 geously-colored boudoir, fell across her fair brow and delicate hands, with their 
 antique rings gleaming on their whiteness, which were clasped in pain till the 
 glittering points of the stones cut the skin. 
 
 Was it love or vanity that was thus cruelly wounded? Was it the broken 
 ambition for which she wept, or the broken hope of a softer desire? Was it the 
 heart that was lost, the voice that was silent, the eloquent eyes that looked on 
 hers no more, that were so bitterly lamented ? or was it the leadership of the 
 fashion, the stately magnificence of Clarencieux, the prize that all her sex 
 sought and coveted, the attained Marquisate of the Chandos which with any 
 moment might be restored, that were the object of that mortified and humil- 
 iated grief ? 
 
 Who shall say ? 
 
 Some loves, certes, there was in it. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 " STRAIGHT WAS A PATH OF GOLD FOR HIM." 
 
 IF the Lily Queen hoped for remembrance from her lost lover, she hoped 
 for a wellnigh hopeless thing. 
 
 The kaleidoscope of Chandos' life changed so incessantly that it was rarely 
 indeed any picture that had been whirled past him retained the slightest claim 
 on his memory. He was always seeing one that seemed better than the last. 
 Partly this was traceable to his own temperament, but chiefly it was due to the 
 avidity with which all his world catered for him. Now, as the yacht swept on 
 her gay way, there could be nothing more charming than that voyage through 
 " isles of eternal summer " and through seas laughing in an endless sunlight. 
 Pausing when he would, Italian cities on the fair sea-coast gave him amuse- 
 ment under their aisles of orange-boughs, blending fruit and blossom till golden 
 globes and snowy flowers swayed together against the warm, bright brows of 
 their rich Titian women. Becalmed on a sunny, silent noon, he could lie 
 stretched at ease under the deck-tent, with all the perfumes of chestnut-woods 
 and myrtle-slopes, and citron-gardens wafted to him across the water, while ice- 
 cold wines sparkled ready to his hand, and light laughter or melodious music 
 whiled the hours away. Landing at his fancy, he would indolently watch the
 
 120 OU IDA'S WORKS. 
 
 little gray aziola fly among the ivy-covered stones of the great Pan's broken 
 altars, or the fire-flies gleam and glisten above a contadina's hair while she 
 gathered in her harvest of the yellow gold of gourds. Sailing at night through 
 silent, star-lit leagues of sea, he would think a poet's thoughts in a charmed 
 solitude, while the phosphor-light glistened under silvery vintage-moons, and 
 the ceaseless swell of waves murmujed through the night. Or, when lighter 
 fancies took him, under the shade of leaning walnut-trees and red rocks 
 crowned with Greek or Roman ruins, where, the vessel moored in some nestl- 
 ing bay, he wound the starry cyclamen in women's silken hair, and listened to 
 their liquid voices laughing out soft Anacreonic songs over grape-clusters that 
 might have brought back upon the soil the gay, elastic feet of banished Dion- 
 ysus. He was not sated, he was not wearied ; he was what thousands pass from 
 their cradles to their graves without truly being for an hour: he was happy. 
 Oh, golden science ! too little thought of, too quickly abjured by men. That 
 glorious power of enjoyment, we trample it under foot as we press through the 
 world, as the herds seeking herbage trample the violets unheeded. 
 
 The summer months passed swift with Chandos; by leisurely loitering, 
 the yacht at length wound her pleasant way down to the Bosphorus, and 
 dropped anchor there opposite his summer-palace above Stamboul, a fairy- 
 place, with its minarets rising above a wilderness of cactus and pomegranate, 
 of roses and myrtle, with the boughs of lemon- and orange- and fig-trees topping 
 the marble garden-walls, and the showers of lofty fountains flung cool and 
 fresh under the deep shadow of cedar and cypress. Here, with a French troop 
 of actors for the bijou theatre he had some years before annexed to the palace, 
 with a score or so of friends from Florence, Rome, and Naples, brilliant, 
 indolent Italians, the very people for the place, with sport, when he cared for 
 it, in the wild deer and other large game of the interior, with as complete a 
 solitude when he wished, and as utter an absence of every memory of the world 
 beyond, as though he were a Hafix or Firdousi amidst the Eastern roses of a 
 virgin earth, here the autumn months passed by, and all the indolent repose 
 and vivid color he loved ^blended in his life were mingled to a marvel. 
 
 The very inconsistencies of his character made the charm of his existence; 
 through them, turn by turn, he enjoyed the pleasures of all men, of all minds, 
 and of all temperaments. He who walks straight along the beaten road, turn- 
 ing neither to the right nor left, nor loitering by the way, will reach soonest his 
 destination; but he enjoys the beauty of the earth best, who, having no fixed 
 foal, no pressing end, leaves the highway for every fair nook and leafy resting- 
 place that allures him, and lingers musing here and hastens laughing there, 
 insistency is excellent, and may be very noble; but the Greeks did not 
 T when they called the wisest man the man who was versatile." There is no 
 such charm as " many-sidedness."
 
 CHANDOS. 121 
 
 Chandos loved the East; he had lived much there, either at his summer- 
 palace, or deeper in the heart of it towards Damascus; he liked, of a summer 
 morning, to float down the soft, gray Bosphorus water among the fragrant 
 water-weeds, with the silver scales and prismatic hues of the gliding fish shining 
 through green swathes of sea-grass or drooped boughs of hanging gardens; he 
 liked in the stillness of starry nights, when the first call to prayer echoed up 
 from the valley below as the faint gleam of dawn pierced the distance, to 
 sit alone upon the flat palace-roof and let his lonely thoughts " wander through 
 eternity," as thus upon the house-top under the Asian stars, yonder afar in 
 Palestine, the great poet-kings had thought, gazing on their Syrian skies, and 
 on the hushed, dark, sleeping Syrian world, and musing on that vanitas vanitatum 
 which has pursued all lives from theirs to ours. He loved the East, and he 
 stayed there till the first hiss of the winter storms was curling the Marmoran 
 waves and the first white blinding mists were rushing over the sea. Then he 
 left that summer paradise, where more yet than anywhere he felt " how good is 
 man's life, the mere living," and travelled quickly across the continent to 
 Paris, and wintered there in all the utmost brilliance of its ceaseless gayeties. 
 
 He was one of the idols of Paris; its fashionable world welcomed him as 
 one of its highest leaders, its artistic world as one of its truest friends, its liter- 
 ary world as one of its choicest chiefs, its feminine world as one of its proudest 
 conquests. He was never more at home than in Paris, and Paris, from the 
 Tuileries to the atelier, always delighted to honor him, always flocked to his 
 fetes as the most magnificent since those of Soubise and Lauraguais, quoted 
 his bon mots, followed his fashions, painted him, sculptured him, courted him, 
 made him its sovereign, and found the wit of Rivarol, the beauty of Richelieu, 
 and the grace of Avaux, revived in this " bel Anglais aux cheveux dores." 
 
 In this sparkling whirpool of his Paris winter thought had little entrance, 
 remembrance little chance; every hour had its own amusement, every moment its 
 own seduction; ennui could not approach, "sad satiety " could not be known. 
 Yet, despite it all, now and then upon him, in the glittering follies of court mas- 
 querade or the soft shadows of some patrician coquette's boudoir, as in the 
 star-lit silence of Turkish nights and under the Asiatic gloom of Lebanon 
 cedars, a certain impatient depression, a certain vague passionate restlessness, 
 came on him, new to his life, and bitter there. 
 
 It came thus, because for the first he could not forget at his will, because 
 for the first time a passion he repulsed pursued him.
 
 , - - . , O UIDA ' S WORKS. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 CLARENCIEUX. 
 
 THE rare red deer herded in the great forests, and the herons plumed their 
 silver wings in the waters, down at Clarencieux. Kestrels wheeled in the sunny 
 skies, and the proud gerfalcon came there. The soft owls flitted among the 
 broken arches of the ruined Lady's Chapel; and teal and mallard crowded in 
 the deep brown pools that lay so still and cool beneath the roofing of the leaves. 
 It was a paradise for all living things of river, earth, and air; and it was beau- 
 tiful enough for an Eden where it sloped down to the seas on the southwest 
 coast, in a climate so tempered that the tall fuchsia-hedges grew wild as honey- 
 suckle and the myrtles blossomed as though it were Sorrento. Covering 
 leagues of country, stretching over miles of tawny beach, of red-ribbed rock, of 
 glorious deer-forest, and of heath all golden with the gorse, Clarencieux was 
 the great possession of a great house; and its castle bore the marks of Crom- 
 well's petronels, gained when the Cavalier-lord of the Stuart times, Evelyn 
 Chandos, Marquis of Clarencieux, had held it after Marston Moor till the 
 Ironsides swore in their teeth that Satan fought there in guise of that 
 "Chandos with the golden hair," the "beautiful Belial," as they called him, 
 when, with his long light locks floating, and his velvet and lace as gay as for a 
 court-ball, he charged out on them in such fiery fashion that he, with his troop 
 of eighty (all that fire and sword had left him), drove six hundred steel-clad 
 besiegers pell-mell, like sheep to the slaughter, down through his mighty woods 
 and headlong to the sea. Raised in the days when the mediaeval nobles were 
 
 Building Royallie 
 Their mansions curiouslie 
 With turrets and with towers, 
 With halls and with bowres, 
 Hanging about their walles 
 Clothes of gold and palles, 
 Arras of rich arraye, 
 Fresh as flowers of Maye, 
 
 Clarencieux, with its tall antique louver, its massive battlemented towers, its 
 fretted pinnacles, its superb range of Gothic windows, its foliaged tracery, so 
 marvellously delicate on such massive stonework, stood in all magnificence 
 still, the master-work of centuries. 
 
 Between it and the great marble pile adjoining, of the newly-made Earl of 
 Clydesmore, stretched a wide impassable gulf of difference never to be bridged. 
 Lilliesford had cost more than a million in erection, and Europe had 
 been ransacked to adorn it; but the difference betwixt the two was as intense
 
 CHAN DOS. 123 
 
 as that betwixt the bronze Perseus of Benvenuto and the ormolu statuette of a 
 Pall Mall goldsmith, between old Rhenish glowing in an antique Venetian 
 goblet and new Cliquot hissing in a mousseline glass between paint and pearls 
 and silken skirts gathered with gracious grace about a noble-born court-beauty 
 and tinsel flung with heavy hand and tawdry taste around a stage-queen uneasy 
 in her robe and in her crown. 
 
 Lilliesford was very gorgeous; but Clarencieux alone was grand. 
 
 The setting sun was reddening all the antique painted panes of its innu- 
 merable lancet-windows; the deer were leaving their couches in the ferns to 
 begin their nightly wanderings; the last light was shed on the bold curve of 
 the coast-rocks and the sea that stretched beyond; beneath the trees in the 
 dense forest night was already come, as the carriage swept through the miles 
 of avenue and Chandos came back from the East to his home. Though, in the 
 wayward love of change which would make us weary to wander from eternal 
 bliss itself if we enjoyed it with our present natures, he lived much abroad, 
 now here and now there, he loved Clarencieux with a great and enduring love, 
 a love that mignt have almost been termed passionate, so constant was it, 
 and so bound up with every gray stone and hoary tree. With him, though 
 hatred of pain made him sometimes seem heartless, and love of pleasure and 
 carelessness of temper made him habitually nonchalant, the feelings were still 
 strong, and were not sacrificed either to the intellect or the senses. He could 
 feel, as he could enjoy, vividly; and the most vivid sentiment in his heart 
 was the attachment to his birthplace, to his great hereditary possessions, not 
 for their worth, their splendor or their envied superiority, but from a fond and 
 almost filial tenderness for all the venerable beauty of the noble place, for the 
 sound of its sea, for the width of its woodland, for the smile of its sun- 
 light, for the memories of its past. 
 
 He leaned forward as the carriage drove swiftly through the great vales of 
 oak and beach and elm, and looked at it in the glow of the cloudless springtime 
 sunset. Before him, in the distance, rose the front of the royal pile, all golden 
 where the sun-rays glistened and lit its glass to flame, all dark where the ivy 
 climbed to the height of the battlemented towers, and the rolling woods of the 
 inland forests stretched upward on the hillsides beyond, an endless stretch of 
 dewy April leaf. " It is almost ungrateful ever to leave it," he thought. " There 
 is nothing nobler abroad. I will live here more for the future." And a vague, 
 irrepressible melancholy, wholly unlike his temperament, stole on him, despite 
 himself, as he looked at the home of his race, fair as it was in the sunset 
 warmth, sure as it was in his possession. The thought crossed him how, ere 
 long, at most, he must look upon its loveliness no more, but lie among the dead 
 leaders of his name, there yonder to the westward, where the silent graves told 
 the vain story of their lifeless glories
 
 124 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 It was wellnigh the first time that the memento mori " had ever crossed 
 his gay unruffled years; nor did it linger with him long. 
 
 Ten minutes more, and he was within the immense circular and vaulted hall 
 of Clarencieux, in its dim splendor of purple and gold, of Renaissance hues and 
 Renaissance carvings, with the gleam of armor and the flash of Damascus 
 blades from the walls, and with the flood of light pouring down the double 
 flight of stairs that swept upward on either side of the far end. There was not 
 such another hall as that of Clarencieux in the kingdom of England. At the 
 time of the siege, Evelyn Chandos had marshalled and marched six hundred 
 royalists at ease in it under the great banner that still hung there, the azure of 
 the Chandos' colors, with their arms and their lost coronet, and their motto 
 " Tout est perdu, fors 1'honneur " broidered on its folds. His descendant now, 
 as he entered it and came into the scarlet glow of the vast oak-wood fire which 
 burned there almost all the year, looked round it with the affectionate remem- 
 berance of the man who conies back to the place of his brightest childish mem- 
 ories. " I will not leave it so long again," he thought, once more, as he passed 
 through the line of bowing servants. 
 
 His households were always attached to him with a warmer feeling than the 
 mere tie of self-interest. Moreover, there were men and women here in the 
 Clarencieux establishment whose fathers had lived under a Chandos generation 
 after generation, from the days of Flodden Field and Tewksbury. The service 
 they rendered him was given with a loving loyalty, with the old feudal allegi- 
 ance; and even the fashionable French and Italian domestics who had left pal- 
 aces to come to him, such as Dubosc himself, Alexis, his head valet, Morivaux, 
 the groom of the chambers, and others, felt a certain pride in and personal 
 liking for him. Chandos had been born with that nameless gift which some 
 natures have, of insensibly and without effort attracting personal attachment. 
 Dogs and birds and horses and human things alike felt regard for him and 
 gentleness to him at the first sound of his voice. His temperament was one 
 that kills hatred as the sun melts snow. There was but one hatred borne to 
 him, hard and unbending as steel, which it could not soften, any more than the 
 sun can dissolve marble. 
 
 Out of a doorway on the left, in the warmth and the light, and down the 
 staircase, as he heard his host and patron's arrival, came Trevenna, mirthful 
 and full of bon-homine as the brightness of the leaping fire whose ruddy 
 gleams shone on his handsome white teeth and his pleasant smile of welcome. 
 "As your factor, steward, head butler, head secretary, head trainer, minister 
 of the finance, and master of the horse, let me welcome you home, monseig- 
 neur," he cried, as he took the hand Chandos held out to him. London's in 
 desperation at your absence. What a delicious winter you've had in Paris ! 
 Never got a bit tanned in the East, either. How do you keep your skin so fair ? "
 
 CHAN DOS. 125 
 
 " By no cosmetic but cold water," laughed Chandos. " Charmed to see you, 
 my dear Trevenna. No one makes me laugh so well even in Paris, except per- 
 haps my exquisite Rahel. Why didn't you join me there ? " 
 
 " Too busy," rejoined the other shaking his head. He had had delightful 
 quarters at Clarencieux through the winter, running up to town most weeks at 
 his inclination, and asking men down for the pheasants, the coursing, and the 
 deer-drives, till he was quite a popular and courted personage. 
 
 " What a Burleigh shake of the head ! I should like to be told what your 
 business is. Choosing cigars and gathering gossip ? " laughed Chandos. 
 " Well, you know you would have been welcome, had you come. I didn't want 
 you in the East, because you see, my dear fellow, you are not precisely poetic, 
 and I like things to harmonize; but Paris was scarcely itself without you. I 
 thought of you every time I had your favorite ortolans a la, Princesse Mathilde 
 at the Maison Doree." 
 
 " Ah, the little angels ! " said Trevenna, lusciously recalling their spiced 
 and succulent beauties. " Dubosc, even, never gets them quite right. I'd a 
 long talk with him about it. I told him I thought they wanted a shade more 
 lemon, and just to be stewed in the Chambertin long enough to get the aroma; 
 but, like every artist, he's as obstinate as a pig, and won't take a hint. 
 
 "You might be a club-cook, Trevenna," laughed Chandos. "You would 
 soon make a fortune. Any one here yet ? " 
 
 "Only a few men, Greville, Bantry, Le Vere; just a few to amuse you. 
 I have taken infinite care in sending the invitations. There are good talkers 
 and good listeners; there are two or three who hate one another, that always 
 makes 'em sparkle out of spite; and there is not a single one who talks poli- 
 tics. You won't be bored for five minutes. They are all your favorite set. 
 Prince Paul Corona, the Due de Neuilly, and most of the ladies, come, I be- 
 lieve, to-morrow." 
 
 " Ah ? Madame de la Vivarol comes also. She invited herself, and her 
 fourgons are already crossing the Channel." He said it with a little sigh. He 
 would rather she had not been coming; chains, however silken and sweet, were 
 unendurable to Chandos. 
 
 " And you could not say No, of course, to la belle. Did you ever say No, 
 Chandos ? " 
 
 "I think not: why should I? Yes is so much easier, and so much more 
 gracious. No floats you into endless trouble, but Yes pleases everybody." 
 
 "Yes is a deuced compromising little word, though," said Trevenna. 
 
 " It is better to be compromised than to be ungracious," said Chandos, with 
 a lift of his eyebrows. " I will go and have a bath, and tell them to bring me 
 some coffee up, will you, please? I shall not show to-night; they will 
 serve my dinner in the little Greuze room. I have a charming novel of Eugene
 
 ,.,,1 OUIDAS WORKS. 
 
 de Meisedore's I promised him to read; and if you can leave the other 
 men and come and tell me the news of the town, I shall be pleased to see 
 
 you." 
 
 " All right," said Trevenna, as his host passed up one of the great staircases 
 to his private' rooms, a suite looking over the rose-gardens, and consisting of 
 his bedroom, dressing-room, study, atelier, and a beautiful little oval cabinet 
 chamber, called the Greuze room from its being chiefly hung with female por- 
 traits, and such bewitching pictures as " La Cruche Cassee," by that artist, 
 where Chandos dined by himself or with two or three of his choicest guests, 
 when he was not in the mood for the society of the fifty or sixty people who 
 generally filled Clarencieux in the recesses and the shooting seasons. All these 
 rooms opened one within another; and a dainty dinner from Dubosc's genius 
 in the soft, deep hues of the Greuze chamber, with the violet curtains drawn, 
 and the white wax-light shining on the fair female heads, was as pleasant an 
 evening as could be needed. 
 
 " I must see poor Lulli; there is no welcome after all, so true as his and as 
 Beau Sire's," thought Chandos, after his coffee and his bath. " I suppose he 
 is here; of course he is. I wish I could take him news of that lost Valeria." 
 And, acting on the thought, he went to the musician's apartment. He never 
 sent for Lulli. The crippled infirmity of the artist made the traversing of the 
 long corridors and galleries of Clarenciux very painful and tedious to him; and 
 Chandos, who never put himself out of the way for a prince, invariably remem- 
 bered the calamity of the Provencal. The chamber given to Lulli was much 
 like that provided by him in Park Lane, containing everything that could as- 
 sist or entertain him in his art, and, at the farther end, a single statute in Car- 
 rara marble, a Cecilia, by Canova, which gleamed white out of the unlighted 
 gloom as Chandos entered noiselessly, unpreceded by any servant. 
 
 " Lulli, where are you ? " At the first sound of the only voice he loved, or 
 had ever cause to love, the musician, where he sat bent in the twilight, lifted his 
 head with a low, joyous cry, and came forward as quickly as his weak, bent 
 limbs would let him, a man who looked as though he had wandered, by some 
 strange transplanting, out of the dim cells of a paraclete, or the hushed antiqu- 
 ity of some mediaeval city of Italy, from all his brethren who found their pale, 
 sad lives only solaced by some great art-gift, and dreamt of things that they 
 had never known in the monastic silence of a living grave. 
 
 His brown, wistful eyes, so deep, so wise, so dreamy, so spaniel-like in their 
 faithful loyalty, grew brilliant; the tranformation changed the weary listlessness 
 of his face, that never failed to come there at sight of the man who had rescued 
 him and to whom he owed all. He welcomed him, in his own liquid Southern 
 French, with Chandos had rightly adjudged the truest welcome of any in his 
 world. To no one, not even to the women who loved him, did his presence
 
 CHANDOS. 127 
 
 ever bring a pleasure and a gratitude so deep and so sincere as it brought to 
 this poor cripple. 
 
 " Ah, Lulli," said Chandos, with that caressing gentleness with which he 
 always addressed the man so utterly dependent on him, so hopelessly deprived 
 of health and strength and all the joys of living, yet so compensated by nature 
 with one grand gift alone, " I wish you had been with me in the East. I have 
 heard no music from all the singers of Europe that has power to charm me 
 like yours. Do you think the voyage would have harmed you ? " 
 
 " I must have seen strangers, monseigneur," answered Lulli, with that 
 shrinking dread of new faces and new voices, the result chiefly of his infirm 
 health, partly of the languid contemptuous curiosity and aristocratic imperti- 
 nence of those who noticed him, at such rare times as they thought of him, as 
 " the mad musician Chandos keeps to lead his concerts." 
 
 " Well, no strangers should have treated you otherwise than with courtesy 
 in my presence." said Chandos, kindly. " I wish you could shake off this 
 timidity, this great sensitiveness; they do your marvellous talent injustice with 
 the world." 
 
 Lulli shook his head: he knew that even the shield of his friend's power 
 could not ward off him the shafts that struck him home, the barbed arrows of 
 contemptuous wonder, contemptuous loathing, or, worst of all, contemptuous 
 pity. 
 
 " I would do all in the world to please you, monseigneur," he answered, 
 sadly; " but I cannot change rny nature. The little aziola loves the shade, 
 and shrinks from noise and glare and all the ways of men; I am like it. 
 You cannot make the aziola a bird for sunlight; you cannot make me as others 
 are." 
 
 Chandos looked down on him with an almost tender compassion. To him, 
 whose years were so rich in every pleasure and every delight that men can 
 enjoy, the loneliness and pain of Lulli's life, divorced from all the living world, 
 made it a marvel profoundly melancholy, profoundly formed to claim the 
 utmost gentleness and sympathy. 
 
 " I would not have you as others are, Lulli," he said, softly. " If in all the 
 selfishness and pleasures of our world there were not some here and there to 
 give their lives to high thoughts and unselfish things, as you give yours, we 
 should soon, I fear, forget that such existed. But for such recluse devotion to 
 an art as yours, the classics would have perished; without the cloister-penmen, 
 the laws of science would never have broken the bondage of tradition." 
 
 Lulli looked up eagerly, then his head drooped again with the inexpressible 
 weariness of that vain longing which " toils to reach the stars." 
 
 " Ah, what is the best that I reach ? the breath of the wind which passes, 
 and sighs, and is heard no more."
 
 gg OU IDA'S WORKS. 
 
 The words were so utterly mournful that the shadow of their own sadness 
 fell on Chandos as he listened. He sighed half restlessly. 
 
 " Is there any fame that becomes more than that with a few brief years ? I 
 do not know it." ,' , 
 
 Lulli's eyes turned unconsciously to the music-scroll that lay on the desk 
 beside him, the score of passages grand and tempestuous as Beethoven's. " I 
 do not want fame, if they might live," he murmured low to himself, too low to 
 reach the ear of Chandos as he stood above him, who stooped nearer and laid 
 his hand kindly on the musician's shoulder. 
 
 " Dear Lulli," he said, hesitatingly, " I tried to gain news for you of your 
 Valeria whilst I was in Paris. I had inquiries made in Aries; but all was 
 ineffectual." 
 
 Lulli lifted his eyes with that deep, dog-like gratitude which always touched 
 Chandos wellnigh with pain. 
 
 " You never forget me, monseigneur. Take no more heed of her; she is 
 dead to me." 
 
 " Hush ! that is too harsh for your gentle creed, Lulli," said Chandos, 
 whilst his hand still lay carressingly on the Proven9al's shoulder. " I abhor 
 those bitter, brutal Hebrew codes. Wait till at least you know her story." 
 
 " There is no need to wait; it is dishonor." 
 
 Out of the dreaming softness of his Southern eyes new fire flashed, and on 
 the frail delicacy of his face a sternness set. Never yet was there a recluse 
 who had tolerance; and the honor of his genius-dowered name was as dear to 
 the beggared artist as to the haughtiest royal line. 
 
 " As the world's prejudices hold," said Chandos. " There is more real dis- 
 honor in the woman who gives herself to a base marriage for its gold, than in 
 the one who gives herself to calumniation for a generous love. And it may be 
 that Valeria " 
 
 " Monseigneur, 1 pray you, speak of her no more. I have said she is dead 
 to me." 
 
 There was so intense a suffering in the words that Chandos forbore to press 
 the wound still so keenly nerved, still so fresh to every touch, although two 
 years had passed by since the loss of the young Provencal girl from Aries. 
 
 " Then think of her no more, Guido," he said, kindly. " I cannot bear that 
 you should have anything to grieve you. Life is too short to spend its hours 
 in sorrow. And now, how is it with the Ariadne in Naxos ? It must have pro- 
 gressed far, while I have been away ? " 
 
 He had recalled Lulli to a theme even dearer than Valeria had ever been. 
 The Ariadne was an opera on whose composition he was lavishing all his love, 
 his time, his luxuriant fancy, and his singular talents. Chandos himself had 
 written for it the Italian libretto, and had lent all his knowledge of music towards
 
 CHANDOS. 129 
 
 its perfecting; it was yet scarcely finished, but it was to be produced under his 
 own auspices and at his own expense. It would be the touch-stone of Lulli's 
 powers and success, the fiat lux which would either consign him amidst that 
 circle of the lost, those dwellers in the Antenora of dead hopes, who had it in 
 them to begreatand failed, or would place him amidst the names of his idolatry, 
 Gluck, Handel, Mendelssohn, Rossini, Mozart. 
 
 They lingered over it. Chandos heard some portions new to him, and read 
 the score of others, giving it thought and care and interest for a twofold reason, 
 for its own beauty as an opera, and for the hopes which Lulli centered in it; 
 then, leaving the musician to the solitude he prized, he went back to his Greuze 
 cabinet for dinner. 
 
 After that little chef-d'ceuvre of the genius of Dubosc, who, to do him the 
 justice he deserved, never exerted himself more when half a dozen European 
 princes had the menu than when he prepared a succession of delicate trifles for 
 the solitary enjoyment of his master, Chandos stood leaning against the mantle- 
 piece, glancing through his Paris friend's novel. The warmth of the logs on 
 the silver andirons was behind him, the violet velvet and the glow of the painted 
 chamber around, and the light fell full on the amused smile on his lips, the 
 beauty of his face, and the easy, indolent grace of his resting attitude, as Tre- 
 venna drew back the portiere and entered. He looked at his host with that 
 acrid envy which never was stilled in him, the petty, evil envy of a woman, for 
 every elegance of form, for every magnificence of manhood, unpossessed by 
 himself and inherited by the man he watched. Yet he consoled himself, looking 
 on that pleasant repose in the picture-cabinet, that unconscious half-smile over 
 the witticisms of the French pages. 
 
 "Very well ! very well, my grand seigneur !" thought Trevenna: " smile 
 away Clarencieux; you won't smile long." 
 
 And Trevenna, after playing the part of host in the banqueting-hall at dinner 
 to the eight or ten men already staying in the house for the Easter recess, went 
 forward into the ruddy wood-fire light to taste a little Lafitte and eat another 
 olive or two. with his host, and amuse him with all the mirth and mischief of the 
 town gathered in his absence, told as John Trevenna could only tell it, till its 
 wit was as bright as Meisedore's novel, and its relish as piquant as the golden 
 liqueurs. 
 
 "What a good fellow he is!" thought Chandos. "I am half afraid he 
 would be too clever for the Commons; a decorous dulness is what passes best 
 there, and a fellow is almost sooner pardoned for being a bore than for being 
 brilliant. They think there is something so intensely respectable about 
 mediocrity. But still he has so many qualities that might get his cleverness 
 forgiven him, even there. He is a marvellously good man of business, a finan- 
 cier, I will warrant, such as has not sat on the Treasury Board, and he has an 
 
 - VOL. III. 5
 
 130 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 acumen that cannot be overrated. I will certainly get him into St. Stephens ; 
 once in, he will make his own name." 
 
 "Chandos," said the Duke of Crowndiamonds, in the stable-yard, two morn- 
 ings later, when his Grace, with the rest of Chandos' London set, had come 
 down to Clarencieux, " did you hear what that fellow of yours your factor, 
 your protege, what is it ? has been doing while you were away ? " 
 
 "I have no proteges, my dear Crown," said Chandos, wilfully failing to ap- 
 prehend him. " I abhor the word." 
 
 " Well you have the thing, at any rate. You know whom I mean, that 
 witty rascal Trevenna. Do you know what he's been about ? " 
 
 " No. Spending his time to some purpose, I dare say, which may be more 
 than can be said of us." 
 
 The young duke laughed. 
 
 " Doing an abominably impudent thing, to my mind. Been down somewhere 
 by Darshampton (democratic place, you know), talking something or other out- 
 and-out radical. Why, it was all in the papers ! " 
 
 " Never read the papers," said Chandos, with a little shrug of his shoulders. 
 
 "Addressing the masses, you know, as they call it; coming out no end at 
 an Institute, or a what d'ye call "em. Tell him, Jimmy," said Crowndiamonds, 
 wearily, appealing to a certain fashionable hanger-on of his, who played the part 
 in society of the duke's mnemonique. 
 
 " Working men's place at Darshampton, all working men there," supple- 
 mented Jimmy, obediently. " Fellows that look awfully smutty, you know, and 
 throw things they call clogs at you, if they cut up rough; though why they use 
 women's clogs, / don't know. Trevenna been down there; asked to lecture; 
 did lecture ! Talked out-and-out liberalism, ail-but Socialism, by Jove ! 
 Town wondered; thought it deuced odd; knew you couldn't like it; couldn't 
 think what was his game." With which Jimmy, having performed his office of 
 encyclopaedia, turned to the more congenial one of examining a beautiful little 
 mare of the Godolphin strain, which had won the Oaks the year before. Chandos 
 listened, surprised. 
 
 Trevenna at Darshampton ! " he repeated, musingly. 
 
 " Ah, I knew you couldn't be aware of it," resumed Crowndiamonds. " Told 
 them all so; knew you'd have interfered, if you had." 
 
 " Interfered ! How so-? " 
 Why, forbidden it, you know, and all that, of course." 
 
 " Why ? I have no more right to forbid Trevenna's actions than I have to 
 forbid yours."
 
 CHANDOS. 131 
 
 " Oh, hang it, Ernest, you don't mean that. The fellow belongs to you, 
 one of your people, quite; can't have any title to go dead against your political 
 opinions." 
 
 "Never had a political opinion," said Chandos, with a shade of weariness at 
 the mere idea; "wouldn't keep such a thing for worlds. There is nothing 
 more annoying to your acquaintance, or more destructive to your own nervous 
 system." 
 
 " Then, the deuce, Chandos ! you don't mean that you'd let that fellow go 
 on talking radicalism all over the country without checking him, or calling him 
 to order ? " chorused the duke, M. de Neuilly, Prince Paul, and the others in 
 the stables, all of them strict monarchists, conservatives, and aristocrats. 
 
 Chandos laughed, but with a touch of impatience. " You talk as if Tre- 
 venna were my slave, instead of my friend ! Call him to order ! What do you 
 mean ? I may think what I like of his actions; but I have no shadow of right 
 to interfere with them." 
 
 " What ! not if you saw him joining a party that threatened the very preser- 
 vation of your own property, the very existence of your own class ? " 
 
 "Still less then. Self-interest is the last motive that could excuse an aggres- 
 sion on personal liberty." 
 
 " Good gracious ! " ejaculated the duke, as though foreseeing the Deluge. 
 " Then, if you put him into the Commons, as you intend, you will let him choose 
 his own party, go his own ways, run as dead against all your interests and all 
 your opinions, just as he pleases ? " 
 
 " Certainly. Do you suppose I only sell my friendship to secure partisan- 
 ship?" 
 
 " God knows what you do do ! " cried Crowndiamonds, hopelessly. " All I 
 do know is, that I should as soon have thought of seeing Clarencieux turned 
 into a hospital as of hearing you defend radicalism ! " 
 
 " My dear Crown," laughed Chandos, "I am not defending radicalism; I 
 am defending the right of personal liberty. I may deeply regret the way 
 Trevenna takes the House; but I shall certainly have no business to control 
 him there because superiorities of property might enable me to do so. You 
 say, ' You have bought him, therefore you have a right to coerce him; ' I say, 
 ' I have aided him, therefore I am bound never to make that accident a shackle 
 to him.' The man who puts chains on another's limbs is only one shade worse 
 than he who puts fetters on another's free thoughts and on another's free con- 
 science. But, for mercy's sake, drop the subject: we are talking like moral 
 essayists, and growing polemical and dull accordingly ! " 
 
 And Chandos turned to give some Paris bonbons to his favorite Circassian 
 stallion, who was rubbing his sleek steel-gray head caressingly against his hand 
 for the sweetmeats, leaving Crowndiamonds in the conviction that the constitu-
 
 13 2 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 tion was coming to an end, and the Legitimist due and the Tuscan prince 
 strongly of Lady Chesterton's persuasion, that when a man was also a poet 
 Clarencieux might be his inheritance, but Colney Hatch would be his destination. 
 
 Clarencieux was filled with guests on the carefully-chosen invitations of 
 which Trevenna had spoken. He had the very social tactics that enabled him 
 unerringly to mark out harmonizing tints and effective contrasts so as to make 
 a charming whole. His plan was bold and daring, but it never failed: he 
 always asked special enemies together, that they might sparkle the more for 
 being ground against each other's faces, like two diamonds on a lapidary's 
 revolving wheel ; and under his directions the visitors that met at Chandos' 
 house never were wearied, or wearied their host, for a single hour. Few houses 
 can boast so much. According to the seasons, they rode, drove, smoked, 
 played baccarat or billiards, had drives of deer in the forest, and curees by 
 torchlight, French vaudevilles and Italian operettas in the private theatre, spent 
 the day each after his own fashion, free as air, met at dinner to hear some novel 
 amusement every evening, and were the envy and marvel of the county, the 
 county being little wanted in, and generally shutout from, the exclusive gather- 
 ings of Clarencieux. 
 
 Yet, well amused as his guests kept him in the Easter recess, which fell 
 very late in spring that year, Chandos had a certain restlessness he could not 
 conquer, a certain dissatisfaction utterly unlike his nature: he could not forget 
 the Queen of Lilies. Never before had a love touched him that was unwelcome 
 to him, never one that he had attempted to resist; love had been the most 
 facile of all his pleasures, the most poetic but also the most changeful amuse- 
 ment of his life. For the first time he had to resist its passion, and the very 
 effort riveted its influence. He had always forgotten easily and at will; now 
 he could not so well command forgetfulness. 
 
 Now and then all the variety of entertainments that chased one on another 
 failed to interest him, all the brilliance of his companions to suffice for him: 
 the wit and beauty of the great ladies who adorned the drawing-rooms of 
 Cheveley almost tired him; he was conscious of wanting what was absent. It 
 was a phase of feeling very new to him, nor with the nonchalance and content- 
 ment of his temperament and the gayety of his life could it have the rule over 
 him always. But it was there, a dissatisfied passion, from which there was no 
 chance of wholly escaping. 
 
 Moreover, recalling the soft glance of the Lily Queen, he wondered, with a 
 touch of self-reproach, if she had really loved him. He knew many who had; 
 nor was his conscience wholly free frem self-accusation on their score or on 
 hers. 
 
 The Countess de la Vivarol, radiant at Clarencieux, playing in Figaro to his 
 Almaviva, riding a little Spanish mare that would have thrown any other
 
 CHANDOS. 133 
 
 woman, always enchanting, whether she talked of Faience- ware or European 
 imbroglio, lapdogs or protocols, fashions or mesmerisms, flattered herself that 
 her rival the English Lily was wholly forgotten and deserted; but the keen little 
 politician flattered herself in vain. 
 
 Trevenna, with his habitual sagacity, made no such mistake, but pronounced 
 unerringly, in his own reflections, on the cause of his host's needing so much 
 more care to rivet his attention and so much more novelty to amuse him than 
 usual. He guessed why the Princesse Vallera, the Marchesa de Lavoltra, the 
 Contesse Lucille de Meran, and other fair queens of society, reigning through 
 this recess at Clarencieux, failed in charming or winning their entertainer. 
 " If he meet her again, shall I let it go on ? " thought that astute comptroller. 
 "Yes; may as well. It will be another complication, as the diplomatists say. 
 Nothing like fine scenic arrangements for a tragedy ! " 
 
 So the Queen of Lilies would apparently have no foe in John Trevenna, 
 although he had put the pin through the butterflies under the cedars. 
 
 " Reading some unintelligible score of your ancestors, Lulli ? " asked Chan- 
 dos, as, having wandered out alone one morning, taking the freedom himself 
 that he left his guests, he came upon the musician lying in the sun beside the 
 river that wound through the deer-park. The woodlands were in their first 
 fresh leaf; the primroses, violets, anemones, and hyacinths made the moss a 
 world of blossom; nothing was stirring except when a hare darted through the 
 grasses, or a wild pigeon stooped down from a bough to drink or to bathe its 
 pretty rosy feet among the dew. It was peaceful and lovely here in the heart 
 of the deer-forest, with a gleam of the sea in the dim distance at the end of a 
 long avenue of chestnut-trees. " How crabbed a scroll ! " he went on, throwing 
 himself down a moment on the thyme and grass. " The characters must 
 baffle even you; the years that have yellowed the vellum have altered the 
 fashion. Whose is it ? " 
 
 " An old Elizabethan musician's," answered Lulli, as he looked up. "Yes; 
 the years take all, our youth, our work, our life, even our graves." 
 
 Something in his Provencal cadence gave a rythm to his simplest speech ; 
 the words fell sadly on his listener's ear, though on the sensuous luxuriance of 
 his own existence no shadow ever rested, no skeleton ever crouched. 
 
 " Yes; the years take all," he said, with a certain sadness on him. " How 
 many unperfected resolves, unachieved careers, unaccomplished ambitions, 
 immatured discoveries, perish under the rapidty of time, as unripe fruits fall 
 before their season ! Bichat died at thirty-one if he had lived, his name 
 would now have outshone Aristotle's." 
 
 " We live too little time to do anything even for the art we give our life to," 
 murmured Lulli, with his deep-brown Southern eyes dreamily wandering down 
 the green-and-golden vista of the sun-lighted avenue. " When we die, our
 
 13 4 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 work dies with us: our better self must perish with our bodies; the first change 
 of fashion will sweep it into oblivion." 
 
 Yet something may last of it," suggested Chandos, while his hands 
 wandered among the blue bells of the curling hyacinths. " Because few save 
 scholars read the ' Defensio Populi ' now, the work it did for free thought can- 
 not die. None the less does the cathedral enrich Cologne because the name 
 of the man who begot its beauty has passed unrecorded. None the less is the 
 world aided by the effort of every true and daring mind because the thinker 
 himself has been crushed down in the rush of unthinking crowds." 
 
 " No, if /'/ could live ! " murmured Lulli, softly, with a musing pain in the 
 broken words. " But look ! the scroll was as dear to its writer as his score to 
 Beethoven, the child of his love, cradled in his thoughts night and day, cher- 
 ished as never mother cherished her first-born, beloved as wife or mistress, son 
 or daughter, never were. Perhaps he denied himself much to give his time 
 more to his labor; and when he died, lonely and in want, because he had 
 pursued that for which men called him a dreamer, his latest thought was of the 
 work which never could speak to others as it spoke to him, which he must die 
 and leave, in anguish that none ever felt to sever from a human thing. Yet 
 what remains of his love and his toil ? It is gone, as a laugh or a sob dies off 
 the ear, leaving no echo behind. His name signed here tells nothing to the 
 men for whom he labored, adds nothing to the art for which he lived. As it is 
 with him, so will it be with me." 
 
 His voice, that had risen in sudden and untutored eloquence, sank suddenly 
 into the sadness and the weariness of the man whose highest joy is but relief 
 from pain; and it was a keener pang still, the grief of one who strives for 
 what incessantly escapes him. 
 
 " Wait," said Chandos, gently. " Are we sure that nothing lives of the 
 music you mourn ? It may live on the lips of the people, in those Old-World 
 songs whose cause we cannot trace, yet which comes sweet and fresh trans- 
 mitted to every generation. How often we hear some nameless melody echo 
 down a country-side ! the singers cannot tell you whence it came; they only- 
 know their mothers sang it by their cradles, and they will sing it by their 
 children's. But in the past the song had its birth and genius." 
 
 Guido Lulli bent his head. 
 
 " True: such an immortality were all-sufficient: we could well afford to have 
 our names forgotten " 
 
 "Our names will be infallibly forgotten unless we attach them to a great 
 
 :e or to a great battle; nothing the world defies so much as the men who 
 
 the men who kill it. Paradox in appearance, but fact in reality ! " 
 
 :d a sharp, clear, metallic voice the voice to ring over a noisy assembly, 
 
 i no way the voice to suit a forest solitude as Trevenna dashed through
 
 CHANDOS. 135 
 
 the brushwood with a couple of terriers barking right and left at hares and 
 pigeons. The musician shrank back instantly and irrepressibly, as a sensitive 
 plant or a dianthus shrinks at a touch. " Halloo, mon prince ! " pursued 
 Trevenna, cheerily. " You are a disciple of the dolce, and no mistake ! 
 Easiest lounging-chair in-doors and wild thyme out; luxurious idleness really 
 is a science in your hands. If ever you do die, which I think highly doubt- 
 ful, you are such a pet of Fortune ! the order of your decrees will surely 
 be to ' die of a rose in aromatic pain.' Northing harsher could possibly suit 
 you." 
 
 " You antithesis of repose ! " cried Chandos. " You will scare all my 
 breeding-game, frighten all my song-birds, and drive me to a new retreat." 
 
 Trevenna laughed as he dashed himself down on a bed of hyacinths fit for 
 Titania's wedding-couch, that sent out their delicious fragrance, bowing their 
 delicate belles under his weight: Trevenna weighed a good deal, though a 
 small man. Chandos glanced at them. 
 
 " Wanton waste, Trevenna ! You are the genius of destruction." 
 
 " Well, destruction's very pleasant, of anybody else's property. Every- 
 body thinks so, though nobody says so." 
 
 The man had a natural candor in him, with all his artifice of action.' He 
 hated hypocrisy with an oddly genuine hatred, seeing that he was as cool a liar 
 as ever was born. It seemed as if, like Madame du Deffand, he wished to 
 render virtue by his words the honor he robbed her of by his actions; for he 
 talked truths sharply, and as often hit himself with them as other people. 
 
 But why can you want to kill all those poor flowers for nothing ? " asked 
 Chandos, tossing him his cigar-case. 
 
 " For nothing ! Sac a papier ! is it for nothing when I lie at my ease ? 
 To be comfortable is your first requisite of life. Caesar killed men by millions 
 to lie at his ease on purples; why mayn't I kill flowers by millions to lie at mine 
 on hyacinths ? Flowers, too ! A lot of weeds." 
 
 " Oh, Peter Bell the Second ! " cried Chandos, shrugging his shoulders. 
 
 " A primrose on the river's brim 
 A yellow primrose was to him, 
 And it was nothing more," 
 
 quoted Trevenna. " Now, what the deuce more should it be ? How that un- 
 happy fellow has been abused for not being able to see a thing as it wasn't, 
 always the thing for which poets howl at sane men ! Why are he and I re- 
 quired to rhapsodize our hyacinths and primroses ? nice little flowers, one 
 blue, t'other yellow, with a pleasant smell, but certaintly nothing remarkable. 
 What is this miraculous tongue that talks to you artists in a scubby little bit of 
 moss or a beggarly bunch of violets ? "
 
 13 e QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 " Grimm asked Diderot the same question. You would have wondered, 
 like Grimm, what there could be to listen to from an ear of wheat and a little 
 corn-flower." 
 
 " Certainly: Grimm was very like me, a regular gossip," responded Tre- 
 venna, pulling a handful of hyacinths and tossing them up in the air. " My 
 dear weeds, you must die if I choose. Ah ! it's fun to have power over any- 
 thing, great or small. Fouquier-Minville enjoyed cutting off necks by a nod 
 of his own; I understand that; you don't understand it, monseigneur. If we'd 
 been in the Terror, you'd have gone to the guillotine with the point ruffles over 
 your hands, and a mot on your lips, and a superb smile of disdainful pity for 
 the mob; and I should have tossed up my red cap and spun round in the ' Ca 
 ira,' and cheered the the Sansons, and gone safe through it all. But good-bye; 
 I'm going to your outlying farms. Did you know I was a first-rate agricultur- 
 ist? Of course you don't; what do you know about any Bucolic, except the 
 Virgilian ? " With which Trevenna, much too mercurial to sit still five 
 minutes, went on his way, switching the grasses right and left, and with his two 
 little terriers barking in furious chorus. 
 
 Lulli looked after him; Chandos himself even, was glad he was gone. He 
 enjoyed the merry society of his fidus Achates in a club or over a claret; but 
 there were times when, cordial as was his good will to him, Trevenna irritated 
 rather his tastes than his temper, and his incessant banter grew wearisome. 
 
 " You trust that gentleman ? " asked Lulli, suddenly. 
 
 " Entirely," answered Chandos, surprised. 
 
 " J would not," said the Provencal, softly, under his breath. 
 
 " Indeed ! And why ? " 
 
 Over Lulli's face came the troubled, bewildered look which made those who 
 noticed him cursorily think his brain was unsettled. He felt, but he could not 
 define. To a mind only used to desultory dreamy thoughts, it was impossible 
 to trace out its workings by logic. 
 
 " I cannot tell," he said wearily: "but I would not trust him. The eyes 
 are bright and clear, the face looks honest; yet there is craft somewhere. The 
 dogs all slink from him; and the birds, that come to us, fly from him. He is 
 your friend; but I do not think he bears you any love " 
 
 He ceased, looking down, still with that bewildered pain, upon the clear 
 rown river rushing, swollen and melodious, at his feet. Like a woman, he had 
 
 ition, but no power of argument. Chandos looked at him, astonished more 
 
 the words than he had been at the secluded dreamer's distaste towards the 
 busy aud trenchant man of the world. 
 
 I hope you are wrong, Lulli," he said, gently. "7 do" not doubt you are. 
 and that gentleman can have little in common; but you are both valued 
 friends to me What is the matter ? "
 
 CHANDOS. 13? 
 
 Lulli, as he gazed down into the water, had started, turned, and looked 
 behind him into the great depths of shadow, where the trees grew so densely 
 that even at noon it was twilight beneath their branches, which curled, and 
 twined, and grew in ponderous growth, almost rather like a Mexican than an 
 English forest. Lulli's face suddenly flushed, his large eyes opened wider, his 
 lips trembled; he strove to rise rapidly, and fell back. 
 
 "I heard Valeria's voice!" he said, hushed and breathlessly, while his 
 glance wandered in restless longing hither and thither, like a listening deer's. 
 
 " Valeria's ! " echoed Chandos, in amazement, as he rose to his feet. " You 
 must be dreaming, Lulli." 
 
 The Provengal shook his head, and pointed eagerly towards the recesses of 
 the woods. 
 
 " I heard it ! Look; pray look." 
 
 Willing to humor him, yet satisfied that it could be but a delusion of the 
 ear, common enough with such minds as Lulli's when one dearly loved has been 
 lost, he went some little way into the deer-coverts, glanced right and left, 
 heard nothing except the cooing of wood-pigeons, the note of a missel-trush, 
 and the cry of a land-rail, and returned. 
 
 " It must have been imagination, Guido," he said, soothingly. " Some bird's 
 song, perhaps, sounded like a human voice. There is no creature near." 
 
 " I heard it," said Lulli, very low to himself, while his head drooped, and 
 his gaze fell again with the old weariness upon the ebb and flow of the river. 
 He would never have contradicted a thing that Chandos had said, if he had 
 died through it; but the superstitious and ignorant beliefs which the early train- 
 ing of a childhood spent in ultramontanist countries, joined to the deeply 
 imaginative mind of a visionary whom no intercourse with a broader world than 
 his own thoughts enlightened or controlled had imbued him with, made him in 
 his own heart turn rather to the wild and baseless fancy that the voice he 
 believed he had heard was the supernatural sign of Valeria's death, the fare- 
 well of her spirit released from earth. Lulli had been born amidst all the 
 legendary mysticism and mediaeval traditions of an almost Spanish Catholicism. 
 The hues of it had colored his mind too deeply ever to be wholly altered. It 
 made his grandeur as a musician, but equally it made his utter weakness as 
 a man. 
 
 " Poor fellow ! he cannot forget this Valeria," thought Chandos, who was 
 for the first time feeling himself the doubt whether forgetfulness could be 
 commanded, as he went to where he had thrown his horse's bridle across a 
 bough (he had brought no groom with him) for a canter through his own 
 forests, and rode down the length of the avenue at a dashing half-speed which 
 soon broke into an almost racing gallop. An hour afterwards, sweeping round 
 again by nearly the same portion of the woods, only through so dense a covert
 
 13 s QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 that he had to go at much slower rate through the low boughs, all green with 
 their young leaves, and all melodious with the spring songs of innumerable 
 nest-birds, he overtook a solitary pedestrian, considerably to his wonder and 
 annoyance. 
 
 Clarencieux was strictly preserved. It would have been made a show-place 
 during their master's absence only at risk of instant dismissal of any servant 
 concerned in showing it; and no stranger's feet ever trod the mosses and the 
 ferns of the mighty deer-forest sloping to the sea. Chandos checked his 
 stallion as he passed this interloper, and, to his surprise, recognized his near 
 neighbor, the Earl of Clydesmore, a man with whom he had but the most 
 distant acquaintance, having invariably declined the efforts the earl had made 
 towards any sort of intimacy. Chandos never knew bores, not if they were 
 princes, and considered his neighbor a bore of the very worst description : Lord 
 Clydesmore was one of those happily-designated class, the " worldly-holies." 
 
 The earl, a tall, fair man of a rather handsome presence, not more than 
 five-and-thirty years of age, apologized for his intrusion with considerable 
 grace and a little too much effusion. He had lines and a salmon-rod in his 
 hand, and explained himself as passionately fond of all river-science. A grilse 
 he had hooked had dragged him after it down the length of the waterfall two 
 miles, till he had wandered off his own lands into the outer borders of Claren- 
 cieux. He had now fairly lost his road, without being consoled by the grilse, 
 which had broken away with the hook in its jaws; and he was looking out for 
 a keeper to direct him. He detailed his adventures with much too great a 
 length for Chandos, who, infinitely wearied, was still obliged to invite him to 
 the house for luncheon, although he had long abstained from all intercourse 
 with this peer of the new creation. Chandos was inexorably exclusive where 
 intellect did not exist to induce him to break his law. The temper of his house 
 had always been so, with that pride of the great noble, " Je ne suis ny roy, ny 
 prince; je suis le Sire de Coucy;" though, where intellect was, he would 
 willingly be as democratic as even Darshampton could have asked. 
 
 There was another cause, moreover, for little cordiality between them. 
 Before the departure of Chandos for Constantinople, Lord Clydesmore had, as 
 it was well known, offered his hand to the fair Queen of Lilies and been re- 
 fused; and he had attributed very justly the discarding of his own suit to the 
 presence of his brilliant and careless rival, who would not even accept the 
 glorious gift notoriously willing to be given him. 
 
 The earl bore him, indeed, more grudges than this. Though he owned 
 
 Lilhesford, so near on the same sea-board, he had never obtained entrance to 
 
 ie doors of Clarencieux; all his extreme wealth and all his new-gained honors 
 
 d not avail to get him recognition from the master or from the guests 
 
 But he had long vainly pined to dash his holy water with the essence of
 
 CHANDOS. 139 
 
 fashion's perfume; and he suppressed his grudges and his conscientious 
 scruples against what he had been want to term " a house of sin," to accept 
 with satisfaction the distantly made offer of luncheon from his rival, congratu- 
 lating himself that those fair titled beauties whom he had often called " coro- 
 neted courtesans " and " Modern Messalinas " would now most likely send him 
 " At home " cards, and that those who he decreed would be damned in eternity 
 could not well damn him now while in mortal Mayfair. " That miserable 
 roturier ! " thought his Grace of Castlemaine, then on a visit to his grandson, 
 drinking his wine angrily at the table, across which he saw Clydesmore bowing 
 and addressing him blandly. The earl was thinking that after this meeting the 
 haughty old man must give him " Good-day " in the drawing-room at White's. 
 In a few years at farthest, he knew, the duke must be roasting in the fires of 
 Tophet; but meantime it was just as well to get rank from him by a nod before 
 the fire in Boodle's. 
 
 Some dozen people besides the duke had dropped in together for luncheon 
 as Chandos took his titled trespasser into the dining-hall, among them Tre- 
 venna, who came in with a keen appetite after his morning among the outlying 
 farms, where he had astonished the agricultural mind with his science in top- 
 dressing, irrigation, cross-breeds, and mangel. But he stopped a moment 
 over his fricassee to fire an unpleasant query straight at the earl. He liked 
 fricassees, but he liked still better setting anyone at a discomfiture. 
 
 " Ah, my lord ! that little box of Foster Hill is close to you, is'nt it ? Is it 
 true that the Chestertons are just down again there with that invulnerable 
 beauty, the Queen of Lilies ? " 
 
 Clydesmore colored irritably, and darted a quick glance at his host, as he 
 answered, not very lucidly, in the affirmative. He was aware that everyone 
 there knew that he had been rejected, and rejected for this thankless rival. 
 
 "Thought so," went on Trevenna, remorselessly. "Clever little fellow, 
 Chess, to take that box. Capital coverts; first-rate game. More my lady's 
 doing, though: she's lord and lady both." 
 
 As there was nothing to be shot now, except rabbits, the double meaning of 
 his words was obvious. Chandos, at whom not only Clydesmore but his grand- 
 father and La Vivarol as well had both glanced, gently glided in and changed 
 the subject. Not even his rival could tell that it had interested him. 
 
 But that night, when he went to his own chambers from the smoking-room, 
 the laughter of some of the men echoing pleasantly from the distant corriders 
 as they bade each other good-night, he opened first the door of his atelier and 
 went up to a Spanish picture hanging near his easel. It was a picture without 
 any master's name, that he had picked up in one of the dark, winding streets 
 of Granada, pleased with its Murillo coloring, and yet more with its subject, 
 a young Granadine leaning from a moonlit balcony in the coquettish duty
 
 14 o QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 "pdar lapava." There was more of proud, melancholy grace than of coquetry 
 in the noble, moonlit face; and it was strangely like the Queen of Lilies, so 
 like, that one of her first charms for him had been her resemblance to his favor- 
 ite Spanish portrait. He stood and looked at it some moments. 
 
 " I must see her to-morrow again, come what will of it," he thought. 
 
 As he moved away, with all the unrest of an eager and repressed passion 
 come tenfold on him with the knowledge of her presence near, his lamp shed 
 its light full on a scarcely-finished painting of his own upon a rest; it was a 
 soft and deep-hued oil-picture of the Amphitheatre of Aries, with a cloudless 
 sky above, and the lustre of a Provence sunset pouring from the west. It had 
 been sketched in Aries itself two years before. As he glanced at it, a sudden 
 recollection crossed him, a sudden thought sent a flush over his forehead, a 
 pang of anxiety to his heart; he paused before the painting. " She cannot be 
 Lulli's Valeria ?" he said, half aloud. "She never spoke of him; she never 
 seemed to have had a living thing to care for except her own vain beauty. 
 And yet she was an Arlesienne; she was of the age Valeria would be; she was 
 very poor." 
 
 His memory travelled back to the past, far away as it seemed, even by two 
 year's space, and covered with a thousand other memories in his swift and 
 brightly-colored'life, travelled back to a time when he had loitered, in the 
 vintage-month, in the old Roman city, passing on his way with the swallows to 
 spend an Italian winter. 
 
 " I hope to heaven not ! " he thought, with a keener pang than he had ever 
 before known. " Even a thing as worthless as she should have been sacred to 
 me if that great heart of Lulli's centred in her. They have never met; but it 
 would be cruel work, for him and for me, to ask him. She was shameless before 
 I saw her. It would be but worse anguish for him to find his lost Valeria in 
 such as Flora de 1'Onne." 
 
 And he went slowly out, leaving the darkness to fall over the Spanish por- 
 trait and the glow of the Provence sun. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE POEM AMONG THE VIOLETS. 
 
 THE portrait-gallery at Clarencieux was one of the noblest features of the 
 castle. With its ceiling of cedar, its gold panels, its lofty arched win- 
 lows, twenty in number, and its landscape beyond them of the home-park and 
 hanging woods that stretched away to the sea, it would have been remarkable
 
 CHAN DOS. 141 
 
 without its Vandykes, Holbeins, Lelys, Mignards, and Lawrences; with them, it 
 was the idolatry of the virtuosi. Up and down it Trevenna, who certainly was 
 no virtuoso, and could barely have told a Gainsborough from a Spagnaletto, 
 sauntered the next morning, with his hands in his pockets, humming a Chau- 
 miere dance-tune, and reading his letters. He was a very prudent fellow, and 
 did not trust the post with much of his business; what was important he gen- 
 erally did vivd voce, and the man would have been astute indeed who could 
 ever have trapped him into anything that compromised him by the amount of 
 a fourpenny-bit. He had a very wholesome reluctance for signing his name, 
 and any letters he ever wrote were of Spartan brevity. Yet this morning he 
 had had a good many, and they all pleased him. Some were from the firm of 
 Tindall & Co., written by Ignatius Mathias in Hebrew. Trevenna was a clever 
 linguist, and had some half dozen languages at his tongue's end, though he 
 never confessed to knowing more than a very Anglicized, Palais-Royal, cafe- 
 learnt French, which he would jabber villanously. 
 
 " Makes you look un-English to speak Parisian well," reflected this aspirant 
 to be a representative of a British nation; and he would only let men find out by 
 degrees even that he had a most scholarly culture in classics, making the con- 
 cession for the sake of college-men's prejudices, though at Darshampton he 
 would not have had the truth whispered for worlds that he could pen quite 
 perfect Ciceronian Latin. 
 
 From Darshampton, too, a mighty manufacturing town, where faces might 
 be grimy but heads were very clear, letters came that gratified him. He was 
 beginning to be known there in their Unions and their Institutes, talked of 
 there as a rising man and as a rarely quick-witted one. He had felt his way 
 there very cautiously; for he could not serve two masters, and be the Chicot 
 of fashion and the Demosthenes of labor, very well, in a breath. Both his 
 masters would have given him his conge. But he was equal to greater difficul- 
 ties, even, than those of playing the part of amuse to his aristocratic patrons 
 and that of pupil to his democratic inviters at the same time. He could make 
 a club-lounger smile, and he could make a north-country operative grin; and 
 he had not much fear of ultimately turning both to his purpose. For Napo- 
 leon himself had never more intense volition, Robert Bruce himself never more 
 patient perseverance, than this mercurial flaneur of Pall Mall. 
 
 He had come here to read his letters, because no one ever wandered into 
 the portrait-gallery save at such times as it was turned into a second ball-room, 
 and, having finished them, he sauntered up and down, revolving their contents 
 in his mind, a mind into which nothing ever entered but to be fertilized to its 
 widest extent. Just above him, as he reached the end, was an alcove in which 
 hung alone one Kneller picture, answering at the other end a Vandyke Charles 
 the First, as grand a picture as the Petworth, given to Evelyn Chandos by his
 
 142 GUI DA'S WORKS. 
 
 king himself. The Kneller was the portrait of the last marquis, who had joined 
 the standard at Preston, and fought with Perth in the fatal left wing at Cullo- 
 den, breaking his sword at the prince's feet when the staff dissuaded him from 
 a final charge for victory or death. The marquis had been offered life and 
 honors if he would have divulged certain Stuart secrets known to be in his 
 hands, and, rejecting the offer with a calm disdain, had died on Tower Hill 
 with his grand, mournful, moqueur smile on his lips to the last, and bowed his 
 graceful head upon the block with the motto of his race, " Tout est perdu, 
 fors 1'honneur." 
 
 Trait by trait, look for look, the Kneller portrait was reproduced in the 
 features of his last descendant. The picture of the last marquis might have 
 been the likeness of the present Chandos. Trevenna looked up at it. 
 
 "Well, my lord," he murmured, aloud, in that innate loquacity which talked 
 to inanimate things rather than not talk at all," there you are, with your d d 
 proud smile, that he has got just like you to-day. So you began life the most 
 magnificent man of your time, and ended on Tower Hill ? That sort of differ- 
 ence between the opening and the finale is rather characteristic of your race. 
 Perhaps you'll see something like it again." 
 
 The calm eyes of the portrait seemed to glance downward with a serene dis- 
 dain. Trevenna turned on his heel, singing a chanson of the Closerie, and only 
 wheeling round when he came opposite a portrait of a man in the gold robes of 
 Exchequer; it was that of the famous minister Philip Chandos, who had died 
 like Chatham. "Ah, mon ministre ! " apostrophized Trevenna, " your son is a 
 very brilliant personage; and yet 
 * 
 
 Lord Timon shall be left a naked gull, 
 Who flashes now a phoenix. 
 
 You were a great man; but you and I shall be quits for all that." 
 
 At that moment the door opened. Chandos entered the gallery. " What 
 on earth are you doing here, Trevenna ? I have looked for you everywhere. 
 Are you turned connoisseur ? " 
 
 Where he stood under the Vandyke Stuart picture in a velvet riding- 
 dress, he looked so like the Kneller portrait of the last marquis that even Tre- 
 venna almost started, though he was ready with his answer. 
 
 I was reading my letters. This house is so full of people that the library 
 
 is as bad as a club-room. The betting's quite steady in town on the colt " 
 
 " Certain to be. I came to speak to you of -a note I have had this morning, 
 
 among others, from Sir Jasper Lyle. He tells me the state of his health will 
 
 ampel his retirement from the borough. He acquaints me with it first; but he 
 
 will resign immediately; his disease is confirmed, poor fellow ! Now, as you
 
 CHANDOS. 143 
 
 know, the borough is almost wholly at my disposal; to my nominee there will 
 be no sort of opposition, not because the people are not free to act, but because 
 they are a quiet, thin population, who for generations have been used to receive 
 their representative from my family 
 
 " Free and enlightened electors," put in Trevenna, with a certain grim 
 humor in the parenthesis; and yet his heart was beating quicker than it ever 
 beat. He divined what was coming. 
 
 " They have at least been better represented than metropolitan boroughs," 
 said Chandos, with a touch of annoyance. " We have never supported a mere 
 puppet or a mere partisan. We have given the little town to the cleverest man 
 we could find; and my father represented it himself, if I remember, for ten 
 years or more. What I came to ask you was, will you like to be returned for it ? " 
 
 Looking at him, he saw the eager and exultant light flash into Trevenna's 
 eyes, the sudden lightning-like upleaping of a long-smouldering ambition. The 
 daring, aspiring indomitable nature of the man seemed instantaneously revealed 
 before him, from under the surface of social gayeties and jaunty bonhomie. 
 
 "Like it!" In that moment Trevenna felt too -genuinely to have words 
 ready to his facile lips. Political life had been the goal for which through years, 
 when men would have called him a madman for such audacious follies, he had 
 " scorned delight, and loved laborious days," with its set purpose before him, 
 none the less steadily stormed because the golden gates seemed hopeless ada- 
 mant to force. Of late he had said to himself that come it would, come it 
 should. But now that it did come, the thin edge of the wedge which, once 
 inserted, would open for him all the gates of position and power, the jester had 
 no banter, the liar no lie. 
 
 " I thought you would," said Chandos, where they stood under the Stuart 
 picture, with the proud eyes of the last marquis gazing down on them from the 
 far distance. " You are the very man for the Commons, and I should not be 
 surprised if some day I come down to hear you unfold a Budget ! Very well, 
 then; we will put you into nomination immediately Sir Jasper's resignation is 
 made known, and there is not a doubt of the result." 
 
 " But would not you For once in his life, Trevenna was almost 
 
 silent, almost agitated. The great prize of his life had seemed to have fallen into 
 his hands like a ripe fruit. 
 
 "//" said Chandos, horrified. " Have you known me all this time only to 
 ask such a question ? They have begged me over and over again to stand for 
 the town or the county, but I have always told them that if I must suffer for 
 my sins I would prefer purgatory itself at once: I would rather be burnt than 
 be bored ! As for you, I really do believe you will enjoy serving on com- 
 mittees, going in for supply, darting in to save a count-out, and all the rest of it. 
 So it is a settled matter ? "
 
 144 O UIDAS WORKS. 
 
 "Really on my life, Chandos, I cannot thank you enough." Even on 
 Trevenna's face there came something of a flush of shame, and into his voice 
 something of the husky hesitation of conscience-moved restlessness: for one 
 moment the contrast of this man's actions and his own struck him with a force 
 that left him without his usual weapons. Chandos saw in this nothing beyond 
 the re-action of a sudden and pleasurable surprise; he laid his hand kindly on 
 the other's shoulder. 
 
 " Thank me by showing them in the House what my friend can prove him- 
 self ! And, Trevenna, look here: do not think that because you are returned 
 through my influence you are for a moment expected to represent my opinions. 
 The borough is a quiet, colorless little place, that will ask you no questions 
 provided you adequately attend to its sea-coast interests; you may do anything 
 else that you like. I hear that you have lately been lecturing, or something, 
 in the North, that you have been expressing views totally different from those 
 you hear in my set. Now understand, once for all, I wish you to enter public 
 life entirely unshackled. Choose your party, or remain an independent mem- 
 ber: act precisely as you deem most true and most wise. After living among 
 us, I am not afraid you will join the Ultras in pulling our houses down over our 
 heads and in parcelling our estates into building allotments; but, whatever you 
 genuinely believe, let that be what you advocate in the House, as though neither 
 I nor Clarencieux existed." 
 
 With these words he went out, to spare his presence to the man whom he 
 had just assisted to the fruitage of his most hopeless ambition. 
 
 Trevenna stood still and silent, struck mute for the instant with the blaze of 
 his rising fortunes, and moved for one fleeting second with a heavy sense of 
 treacherous shame. "Damnation!" he said, in his teeth: " for five minutes 
 I almost forget to hate him ! " 
 
 Half in shadow, half in sunlight, in the noontide of the day, sat the Queen 
 of Lilies. 
 
 A cluster of tall copper beeches stood out before a deep dark serene of crag, 
 and waved and tossed together in grand confusion, and wild as they had been 
 in the days of the Druids, only broken here and there by the rush of some 
 tumbling torrent. Under the beeches was a broken wishing-well, its stones 
 covered with ivy, its brink overgrown with heaths and maidenhair and count- 
 
 3 violets. Here, some ten miles beyond Clarencieux, in this lonely forest- 
 
 1 of her brother-in-law's shooting-place, Lady Valencia sat in solitude, with 
 falling of the waters only mingled with the thrill of a nightingale's evening 
 
 :e poured out on the hush of the noon. In her most sovereign moments she 
 never looked so lovely as now, in the complete negligence, abandonment,
 
 In her most sovereign moments she had never looked so lovely as now. 
 
 Page 144, Vol. III.
 
 CHAN DOS. 145 
 
 almost dejection, of her attitude. She leaned against the stone coping of the 
 well, one arm resting on it, so that her hand, half unconsciously, played now 
 and then with the green coils of leaves and grasses falling in the water; her 
 head drooped slightly; there was sadness, almost melancholy, in the musing 
 shadow of her liquid eyes. A volume of " Lucrece " lay at her feet; a water- 
 spaniel waited near, wistfully watching for her notice. The melody of bird or 
 river had no music on her ear: she was thinking very wearily. 
 
 Thus she all insensible of his gaze Chandos saw her. 
 
 He paused, checked his horse as he rode through a bridle-path hidden in 
 foliage, wavered an instant, then flung the rein to his servant, bade him ride on, 
 and went backward, through the entangled meshes of the leaves, towards the 
 ruined wishing-well. 
 
 His step made no echo on the moss; unseen he noted the weariness of 
 languor in the dreaming repose, the musing pain, that darkened the eyes that 
 gazed down absently on the purple wealth of the violet buds. " Does she regret 
 me ? " he thought; and at sight of that living beauty which had haunted him 
 through Eastern cities and Italian air, the old soft, wayward, unresisted passion 
 which had so often ruled him, yet never reigned more utterly than it was near 
 reigning now, woke in all its force. He thought neither of penalty nor of con- 
 sequence, of wisdom nor of future; he thought alone of her. 
 
 The movement of his hand as he put aside the red gold of the copper-beech 
 leaves and the light spring buds of the young ivy-coils caught her ear; she 
 lifted her eyes, and met the eloquence of his. She rose, with something almost 
 hurried and tremulous in the dignity of her serene grace; her face flushed, 
 her glance had a light in it he had never seen there; sudden surprise changed 
 the calm of her grand and delicate beauty to a new warmth and hesitation that 
 lent a still fairer life. In that instant, as he saw her under the burnished gold 
 of the arching sunlit leaves, he could not doubt but that she loved him 
 
 " You have returned ? " The words were low and unstudied, as though in 
 the surprise of his presence there her proud tranquillity broke down. 
 
 " Ah ! forgive me that I ever wandered away. Forgetfulness did not go 
 with me." 
 
 He scarcely thought, he never measured, what he said; he thought only of 
 her loveliness, there in the shadows of the spring-time leafage; and the loveli- 
 ness of women had always done with him what it would. He bent nearer to 
 her, looking down into her eyes with a gaze that made them droop, and made 
 her heart beat with a swift, uncertain throb, a vague gleam of hope. " My love ! 
 my love ! " he murmured, thinking no more of the cost and issue of his words 
 than he had thought when he had murmured such against the warm cheek of 
 some young Eastern odalisque, or gazing into the lustre of Southern eyes under 
 the Spanish stars or by the shores of Procida, " we must not part again ! "
 
 14 6 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 The music of his voice stole upon her ear, charming and lulling her into its 
 own trance of passion; the deep warmth of a hot flush stole overall her beauty, 
 intensifying every delicate hue, like the warmth from the noon through the 
 crimson leaves; and as he drew her into his embrace, with his kiss he bartered 
 his peace, his honor, and his future; for it, in that hour of her power, he 
 would have thought the world well lost. The violets blossoming, dew-laden, 
 at their feet flower of the poets, and crown of child-Protus' golden hair- 
 were not more sweet than that first birth and utterance of love. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE POEM AS WOMEN READ IT. 
 
 BEFORE a fire (for she fancied or liked to say she was chilly, in those late 
 April days that were wellnigh as warm as summer) Lady Chesterton lay sulkily 
 reclining in her little boudoir, a little green-panelled chamber, chiefly noticeable 
 for its collection of one of her passions, curious china, Rose Berri, Henry 
 Deux, and every sort of faience that time had ennobled and rarity endeared. 
 She was very sullen, very grave, very moody. She was bitter as gall in her 
 own soul. The distant cousin she hated, because he had inherited her father's 
 title, had been left a fortune that would enable him to raise the Ivors peerage 
 to its old glories, whilst her husband was so heavily in debt that the narrowest 
 continental economy would not better him. This house that they had taken 
 on their hands so vainly, with its shootings that had entailed so much expense, 
 had served them no purpose. Lord Clydesmore was hopeless to attract again 
 after his first repulse; other men were coy of her beautiful sister, a marquis's 
 daughter, and portionless. She herself loved show, wealth, magnificence, all 
 the exclusivism of greatness in its greatest; and she was literally poorer than 
 one of the gamekeepers' wives out in the park yonder, poorer, for the keeper's 
 wife could accept her poverty, and the peeress had to go to court as a lady-in- 
 waiting, and to rack her brains afterwards to stave off the milliner who sent her 
 court -dresses. 
 
 " I wish I were one of those wretched women in the cottages in the woods !" 
 she thought. " They have to bake, and to scrub, and to slap their dirty chil- 
 dren, and to pinch and screw, and live on pork and potatoes; but they are 
 better off than I: they have nothing to keep up ! " 
 
 It was a bitter truth, and she felt its bitterness to the utmost, where she sat, 
 curled in the velvets and silks and luxury, that those she envied would have 
 so envied " my lady " could they have looked on her in her solitude. She
 
 CHANDOS. 147 
 
 turned her head slowly as the door opened, glanced up with half-closed eyes, 
 then returned to the moody contemplation of the fire. She had been a very 
 miserable companion, a very gloomy tyrant, to her sister during this winter, 
 when they had been mewed in leafless woods for nothing, with no dinner-party 
 nearer than fifteen miles, hearing of that " odious man Trevenna's " men- 
 parties at the Clarencieux, and hopeless of ever seeing its lost lord return. Nor 
 had the month or so of the town-season much improved her temper, now that 
 she was back again for the recess. 
 
 Lady Valencia came up in silence till she stood before the fire; her black 
 lace swept round her over a white morning dress (she wore that floating dead 
 white as no other could), and there had caught across it, in unnoticed 
 ornament, one of the long ivy-coils with leaves of darkest, buds of lightest 
 green. 
 
 " What a draught you bring in with you ! " shivered Lady Chesterton, 
 peevishly. " Good gracious ! you are dressed as if it were summer. Take 
 care, pray; you brush Dragee's hair the wrong way ! " 
 
 Moving her skirts from the little lion-dog, Lady Valencia stood silent still. 
 Her sister looked up at her and wondered. The brilliance of a spring-tide 
 seemed to have lingered on the Queen of Lilies; there was a new look upon 
 her face. 
 
 " What has happened ? " asked the peeress, sharply. 
 
 She looked down on the baroness with a certain haughty contempt. She 
 owed her sister many a goading irritation, many a sneering taunt. 
 
 " Your sacrifice at Forest Hill has not been in vain," she said, calmly 
 detaching the green ivy spray from her dress. 
 
 Lady Chesterton started up in her chair, her black eyes all vivid ani- 
 mation. 
 
 " Valencia ! you do not mean that Chandos " 
 
 "Yes," said the Lily Queen, serenely still; but she turned her head with 
 the lofty supremacy of a victorious queen; a proud triumph flashed in the vel- 
 vet depths of her eyes; every line of her form, every curve of her lips, 
 expressed conquest; " yes, we have won. I shall be mistress of Claren- 
 cieux ! " 
 
 Had Chandos been there in that moment, he would have seen it were better 
 for him that he should lie in his grave than that she should be so.
 
 148 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 IN THE ROSE-GARDENS. 
 
 CHANDOS, as it was, could scarcely have said that the same triumph 
 remained with him. 
 
 Waking to calmer reflection and recollection as he rode homeward, the 
 price he must pay for the words he had uttered, for the caress he had given, 
 on an impulse of passion stronger than himself, stole to his thoughts with a 
 chill. For marriage he had an utter distaste, of his liberty a surpassing love; 
 the slightest bondage was unendurable to him. He had never anything to 
 consult except his own free will; and inconstancy in taste, in pursuit, in amuse- 
 ment, and in residence had become his habit, if it were not his nature. To 
 endure control, to have to tell his plans ere he followed them, not to go where 
 caprice took him, unasked and unshackled, to have any companion with him 
 through custom instead of inclination, or to have the same with him long 
 together, all that some men take naturally, to him would have been intolerable 
 slavery. It may be hence imagined that nothing could be more repugnant or 
 less suited to him than marriage; and the thought of what he had done on the 
 spur of an irresistible beauty and a vainly-resisted love weighed on him curi- 
 ously as he rode through the aisles of pines and over the vast undulating sward 
 of the outlying lands, with the sound of the sea from the distance, and in the 
 sunny air the winged dwellers of the beach, the delicate tern, the rare hen-har- 
 rier, the ring-plover, and the mallard, flying above the wild thyme and the still 
 moor-pools. His life had not a shadow: why had he not left it as it was ? He 
 loved her, he loved her with a great passion that, through her beauty, swayed 
 him like a reed; and yet a strange weariness, a strange depression, came upon 
 him as he swept over the wild wolds. He felt as though he had surrendered 
 up his future into bondage. 
 
 As he turned his horse into the home-woods, leaving the purple moorlands 
 that were the sea-shore appanage of Clarencieux at a cross-road, one of his own 
 hunters was spurred after him. Trevenna came up with him. 
 
 " How you do ride ! " cried Trevenna, himself a good but cautious horse- 
 man, not caring much for the saddle. " You will break your neck, surely, some 
 day. How you took that gate ! By the way, if you were to do such a thing, 
 who is your heir ? There is no other Chandos." 
 
 "The estates would go to the Castlemaine family; I have no nearer 
 relatives," answered Chandos, a little wearily. Now, of all other times, he 
 could have wished the incessant chatter of his Chicot far away. 
 
 " Ah, but you'll marry some time or other, of course."
 
 CHANDOS. 149 
 
 Chandos gave a gesture of impatience: the word grated terribly on his ear. 
 Trevenna glanced at him, and knew what he wanted. Through his reconnoi- 
 trer-glass he had seen the wishing-well, and the two who had stood beneath the 
 copper beeches, and he wished to learn how far the affair had gone. The im- 
 patient gesture told him. He had studied every impulse and minutest trait of 
 Chandos' character, till he could gauge his feeling and his meaning to the 
 slightest shade. 
 
 " The ladies were upbraiding you loudly for your desertion, when I left the 
 house. They had sauntered down out of their rooms to ride and drive, and 
 were indignant not to have their host en proie" he went on, carelessly; " As 
 for me, I have been meditating on my coming greatness. Really, have you 
 thought well of it, Chandos ? Your friends will say you have put an adventurer 
 in the House." 
 
 " They will not say so to me; and if they do to you, you can give them 
 more than they send. Besides, you will have good company; did not they say 
 so of Canning ? " 
 
 " Then you are really resolved on lifting me to St. Stephens ? " 
 
 " Assuredly." 
 
 " Upon my word, monseigneur, you make one think of Timon's 
 
 I could deal kingdoms to my friends, 
 And ne'er be weary ! " 
 
 " Timon ! You choose me an ominous parallel. Would you all be ' feast- 
 won, fast-lost ' ? " 
 
 " The deuce ! I daresay we should." 
 
 The answer was rough, but it was true as far as it went. There were times 
 when Trevenna could not quite help being truthful. Lying invariably will be- 
 come as weary work, sometimes, as telling truth becomes to most people; and 
 there was a cynical candor in the fellow not always to be broken into training. 
 
 " I would trust you sooner not to be, Trevenna, for the frankness of that 
 admission," said Chandos, right in his deduction, even if he should be wrong 
 in this present instance. " Look at that glimpse of sea through the pines; how 
 wonderful in color ! " 
 
 The deep blue of the sea-line glistened to violet beyond the dark-green 
 boughs and the russet shafts of the pine-stems. The woods of the deer-forest 
 stretched in rolling masses upward and inland; and beyond, tinged with the 
 brightest light, stood the magnificent pile of the castle. Trevenna looked. 
 
 " Yes, very pretty." 
 
 " Good Heavens ! you speak as if it were the transformation scene of a 
 ballet ! "
 
 15 Q OU IDA'S WORKS. 
 
 " I like a ballet a good deal better. Clouds of transparent skirts are better 
 than clouds of transparent mists. You are very fond of this place, Ernest ! 
 
 " It were odd if I were not. I can fancy how it was deadlier to the last 
 marquis than to sever from friend or mistress, when he had to look his last on 
 Clarencieux." 
 
 Trevenna smiled, and flicked his horse thoughtfully between the ears, as 
 they rode on in silence. 
 
 " Thou givest so long, Timon, I fear me 
 Thou wilt give thyself away in paper, shortly," 
 
 ran the thread of his musings. 
 
 Trevenna's momentary pang of conscience in the morning had been partic- 
 ularly short-lived. It had died with the next look upward to the face of the last 
 marquis. 
 
 At that moment, entering on the clearer spaces of the Home Park, where 
 four avenues of gigantic limes crossed and met each other, one of the most sing- 
 ular beauties of Clarencieux, they encountered another riding-party escorting a 
 little pony-carriage drawn by four perfect piebalds, and containing Madame de 
 la Vivarol and a Russian princess. Among the escort were the Royal Due de 
 Neuilly, and another due, not royal, but a European notoriety all the same, 
 Philippe Francois, Due d'Orvale. Philippe d'Orvale was a character, Europe 
 was given to saying, too, a very bad character. Chief of one of the great feudal 
 races of France, now growing fewer and fewer with every generation, he was, so 
 to speak, born in the purges' and had lived in them up to the time when he 
 was now some fifty years of age. Exceedingly handsome, he still preserved his 
 d^bonnaire graces. Excessively talented, he could on occasion outwit a Met- 
 ternich, a Talleyrand, or a Palmerston. Extremely popular, he was the prince 
 of bon vivants. With all this, Phillipe d'Orvale had achieved a reputation too 
 closely allied to that of his namesake of D'Orleans not to be considered a 
 thorough-going reprobate, and to care infinitely less for succeeding in the field 
 of state affairs and political triumphs than for succeeding in dancing a new 
 Spanish cachucha, in brewing a new liqueur-punch at his soupers a huts clos, in 
 dazzling Paris with some made freak of exuberant nonsense, and in leading 
 the Demi-Monde in all its wildest extravagances. He had a good deal in him 
 of the madcap mixture that was in the character of the Emperor Maximilian, 
 and, like him, scouted courts, titles, states, and dignities for some reckless 
 piece of devil-may-care. He might have been anything he chose; but he, 
 duke and peer of France, decorated with half the orders of Europe, descendant 
 )f nobles who had been cousins of Valois and nephews of Bourbon and Medici, 
 
 i not choose to be anything except the chief of the Free Lances and the 
 sovereign patron of singers and ballet-dancers.
 
 CHANDOS. 151 
 
 Certes, he enjoyed himself, and looked on at his gay world unsated out of 
 his careless eyes; but his family thought him mad, and had, indeed, tried to re- 
 strain him from the control of his vast properties, till Due Philippe, suddenly 
 taking it into his head to show them he was sane, went to Vienna, and conducted 
 a delicate imbroglio so matchlessly for France that it was impossible to support 
 the charge any longer, though, having so vindicated his sanity, he returned di- 
 rectly to his own courses, and was found at breakfast next day with three 
 actresses from the Varietes, an inimitable buffo-singer from the Cafe Alcazar, 
 a posture-dancer off the pavement of the Palais Royal, in whom he declared 
 he had discovered a relative, and a Pifferaro's monkey seated solemnly in state 
 in one of the velvet chairs, munching truffles and praslins, amidst the chorus of 
 Rossini's Papatacci, sung by the whole party and led by D'Orvale himself. 
 
 A man who will set down a Barbary ape at his table, Europe, of course, 
 will pronounce out of his senses: yet a more finished gentleman than Due 
 Philippe never bowed before a throne; and while Europe in a mass pronounced 
 him the most hideous amalgamation of vices, two or three who knew him well, 
 among whom was Chandos, steadily upheld that there was not an ounce of real 
 evil in this bearded bon enfant. 
 
 John Trevenna, as far as dissipation went, was a perfect irreproachable 
 character, and had not really a vice that could be put down at his score; 
 Philippe d'Orvale was a very reproachable one, and had, beyond doubt, a good 
 many: yet perhaps both Guido Lulli and Beau Sire were in the right when they 
 shrank from the keen blue eyes of the one, arid came up without fear, sure of a 
 kindly word, under the sunny gaze of the other. 
 
 The next night there were, as commonly when the house was filled, theatri- 
 cals at Clarencieux. The same Paris troupe which had gone to Constantinople 
 Were down here for the recess, reinforced by a new actress of the most enchant- 
 ing talents, and by John Trevenna, who had the most inimitable powers of 
 mimicry ever seen on a stage, and who now played in the first vaudeville, as an 
 Englishman on his initiatory trip to Paris, in a manner that Arnal himself never 
 eclipsed, and in the second most audaciously mimicked Lord Clydesmore in an 
 interlude written by himself, till even the fastidious and sated audience he 
 played for were in uncontrollable laughter, and even the ladies, his very worst 
 foes, were of opinion that a person who could amuse them so well certainly de- 
 served to go into Parliament, though he did come nobody knew whence, and had 
 lodgings in town nobody knew where. 
 
 Trevenna showed his wisdom in playing the part of a Charles Mathews to 
 this little bijou theatre, since by it he won over the toleration of his most 
 inveterate and most inexorable foes. 
 
 The only guests, besides the thirty-five or forty people staying in the castle, 
 were the Chestertons and Lady Valencia. Nothing had escaped, during the
 
 153 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 two days, of the victory the Queen of Lilies had achieved. Trevenna, the only 
 one who guessed it, held his own counsel ; and Chandos, apart from the aversion 
 he had to giving the vulgarity of publicity to his love, felt that he had a slightly 
 troublesome and embroiled task before him in breaking the intelligence to his 
 fair tyrant, La Vivarol. There was sufficient mortification and irritation in the 
 hearts of his female guests when they saw the rival they had believed hopelessly 
 defeated enter the drawing-rooms of Clarencieux in all the perfection of her 
 loveliness and in all the evident restoration of her supremacy, without their 
 knowing the bitter extent of her triumph. A prouder moment even the Lily 
 Queen had never wished for or dreamt of than when she first passed the thres- 
 hold of Clarencieux into the mighty hall where Evelyn Chandos had marshalled 
 his cavaliers, and knew that she was the future mistress of that royal place; 
 than when she was met upon the great staircase as the Chandos only met their 
 sovereigns, and knew that she was the bethrothed wife of this brilliant darling 
 of courts, this magnificent leader of fashion, whom the world had said no woman 
 would ever so woo and so win. 
 
 Perhaps, indeed, as they passed from the reception-rooms to the dining-hall, 
 and from the drawing-rooms again to the theatre, through the lofty corridors 
 ceiled with cedar and hung with Renaissance decorations on which the first 
 artists of Italy had of late years been employed, her glance too often wandered 
 to the mere art-skill and costliness with which every yard of Clarencieux was 
 filled, to the priceless pictures, to the delicate statues, to the gold and the 
 ivory, the malachite and the jasper, the porphyry and the marble, the collections 
 of a princely wealth and of a race eight centuries old. Perhaps she looked too 
 much at these, the mere possession of accident, the mere symbols of power; 
 perhaps the higher, deeper, softer, treasures of the future she had won escaped 
 her, and were less dear to her than these insignia of her lover's rank, her lover's 
 splendor: perhaps. She had been in the bitter school of titled poverty; from 
 her birth upward she had been so proud, and yet so penniless. 
 
 As they sat at dinner in the banqueting-hall, hung with scarlet and gold, 
 with its ceiling arched above the sixteen Corinthian pillars of porphyry given by 
 La Grande Catherine to a Chandos who had been an ambassador at her court, 
 the Queen of Lilies, haughty as an empress, delicate as a young deer, pure and 
 stately as the flower of her emblem though she was, appraised the grandeur of 
 Clarencieux wellnigh with as critical a surety as Ignatius Mathias could have 
 done, and looked less upward to where her lover sat, than opposite to where, 
 above the sculptured marble of the mighty hearth, above the crossed standards 
 of Evelyn Chandos and the last marquis, of Edgehill and of Preston, there 
 rested in a niche, all wrought in ivory and silver in a curious Florentine carving, 
 the last coronet that had ever been worn by a Chandos, the attaindered coronet 
 of Clarencieux.
 
 CHANDOS. 153 
 
 " Amazingly like the last marquis he looks to-night, by Jove ! " thought Tre- 
 venna, standing behind the curtain of the pretty stage before it drew up for the 
 vaudeville, and surveying through a chink the slope of the theatre filled with 
 arm-chairs, without any partition into boxes, and all glittering with arabesques 
 and gilding and chandeliers, where in the centre Chandos stood leaning above 
 Lady Valencia's chair. " Well, there is a Tower Hill waiting for him too ! 
 Only my lord, with his d d proud smile, said, ' All's lost, except honor ! ' I 
 guess his descendant will say, ' All's lost, even honor ! ' We must not strike 
 till this election matter's over. That put me out of my calculations; and it's 
 too good to lose. Only a little while longer, though, shall 1 play the fool to 
 please his patricians, and monseigneur stand there owner of Clarencieux. 
 Aprh " 
 
 The bell rang a little chime; the curtain, exquisitely painted with a view of 
 Psestum, drew up. Trevenna sauntered forward to greet the Parisienne actress, 
 in his character of Milford Brown-Smith, with a flow of inimitable nonsense, and 
 an effervescence of animal spirits so mirthful and contagious that the most 
 blase of his audience were laughed into an irresistible good humor; and had 
 his election depended on their votes, he would have been safe into his borough 
 that instant. There were only two who, while they laughed, would have with- 
 held their suffrage; they were the Duke of Castlemaine and Philippe Due 
 d'Orvale, the two who, despite the presence of women whose fair eyes had 
 vowed him such soft fidelity, were the two in Clarencieux that night who loved 
 Chandos the best. 
 
 Some faint perception that the tenderness borne him by the one he last 
 wooed was not that with which he, with the fervor of an impassioned nature 
 beneath his carelessness, had loved and been loved under Southern and Asiatic 
 suns, stirred in him even that night. He had been hurried by her beauty into 
 the abandon of a long-resisted passion; but of her heart, of her nature, of her 
 thoughts, he knew nothing. He loved her as poets love, seeing her through 
 the glories of his own imaginings; but he knew no more whether in truth she 
 answered them than he knew what he had done for his own future when he had 
 drawn her into its life with that caress which left him bound to her. 
 
 He had been spoiled by a world that had so long adored him; he had been 
 used to the utmost gratification of every fancy, of every wish; he had been in- 
 tensely loved by women, used to burning words, to Southern passions, to lavished 
 tenderness. In her there was some want that he vaguely missed, some coldness 
 scarcely felt, yet ever there, which now in the first moment of his surrender to 
 her passed over him with a chill. He knew that he had done a fatal thing; and 
 the thought haunted him even in the gayeties of Clarencieux, even when for 
 an instant he was alone with her, as he drew her from the ball-room into the 
 conservatories, aisles of tropical blossom and vegetation glowing with the deep
 
 15 4 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 bronze of South American leaves and the scarlet of Orient fruits and flowers, 
 the foliage of Mexico and the flora of Persia. 
 
 " Ah, my Queen of Lilies ! " he murmured, passionately, " you are fair as 
 the flowers they call you after; but are you as cold ? You have not yet learnt 
 what love really is: look into my eyes and read it there ! " 
 
 His eloquent eyes burned down into hers, their deep and brilliant blue dark 
 with the fire of passion, as he wound her in his arms and covered her lips with 
 kisses. 
 
 She drew herself softly from his embrace, startled and flushed by the warmth 
 of his words, by the ardor of a temperament beside which her own was as ice to 
 the sirocco, as the moon to the sun. 
 
 "Where is it that I fail ?" she whispered; "how would you have me love 
 you ? " 
 
 There was a pang at his heart as he pressed her to his breast with a caress in 
 which he strove to kill the chill doubt waking in him. 
 
 "How? My fairest, words are but cold interpreters; if you knew, you 
 would not ask the question. How ? Speech cannot teach that lore. I would 
 be loved as I love, so only ! " 
 
 " Ernest, pardon me," said the Duke of Castlemaine, as late in that dawn 
 he met his grandson, both on their way to the smoking-room; " but your atten- 
 tions were extraordinarily marked to Lady Valencia St. Albans to-night, 
 almost too much so, since there are princesses of the French and Russian blood 
 in your house. If I were not sure " 
 
 " Dear duke, be sure of nothing." He spoke with a smile, but the smile 
 had in it something that was almost mournful. 
 
 His Grace paused, wheeled round, and stared at him. 
 
 " Chandos ! you cannot mean " He stopped, unwilling to put his doubt 
 
 into plain words. 
 
 " Yes; I mean what you are thinking of. I have said more than I can unsay. 
 Let us drop the subject." 
 
 An oath of the hot Regency days of his early manhood broke from under 
 the white cavalry moustaches of the old nobleman, as he stood and gazed at his 
 favorite descendant in the silvery light from the candelabra above their heads 
 in the corridor. He had no need to ask more questions; he understood well 
 enough, and the comprehension cut him to the heart. 
 
 " Good God, Ernest ! " and there was an accent of genuine grief, as well as 
 of amaze. " And you might have wedded royal women, Louise d'Albe, Marie 
 of August, the Princess d'Orvieto ! you might have claimed the hand of any 
 one of them ! but you declared that you hated marriage."
 
 CHAN DOS. ]55 
 
 " I declared only the truth. Marriage I abhor; but her I love." 
 
 The duke ground his still strong, handsome teeth with a fierce impatience; 
 he knew that the Chandos of Clarencieux libertines perhaps, epicureans al- 
 ways had never let any earthly wisdom or law or plea stand between them and 
 the follies of their hearts or passions. 
 
 " I knew she would do it, if she had the chance," he muttered. " To run 
 after you here, to come into the country the instant you returned from Paris, 
 indelicate, indecent ! " 
 
 Chandos stretched out his hand. 
 
 " Hush, sir; /cannot hear such accusations. It was not her doing that she 
 came; she has always told me that she was strongly averse to it, the more 
 averse because, as I may now confess for her, she loved me." 
 
 The duke swept his hand over his snowy moustaches with a scornful, wrath- 
 ful gesture. 
 
 " Need she have come, then ? The daughter of Ivors can scarce be so 
 utterly destitute of friends. She intrigues for you as markedly as any Flora 
 de 1'Orme, though in a different fashion." 
 
 Chandos turned to him, grave almost to weariness for the moment, but 
 gentle as of old. 
 
 " My dear duke, you know that I would not have a difference with you for 
 the worth of Clarencieux; but you must not use such words in my presence of 
 one whom you will hereafter receive as my wife." 
 
 He paused before the last two syllables; he could not utter them without 
 some pain, without some distrust. His Grace suppressed a deadlier oath; he 
 loved Chandos with more fondness than he would have cared to confess, and he 
 had, besides, the most suberb instincts of thorough-bred courtesy. 
 
 " I beg your pardon," he said, with a bend of his stately head. " I have, 
 of course, no right to comment on your choice or on your actions; but all I 
 would ask you is, what will she recompense you for all you must forfeit 
 for her ? " 
 
 Chandos gave a half-impatient sigh, not so low but that it caught his grand- 
 father's ear. 
 
 " It is useless speaking. It is not that I doubt your wisdom, or dispute 
 your right of counsel; but what is done is done: let us leave a fruitless subject." 
 
 He moved on, and threw open the door of the smoking-room. The duke 
 loved him too well to say more, but he turned back abruptly, bade him good- 
 night, and went to his own apartment. Well as the gallant old man enjoyed 
 the society of a younger generation, and welcome as he was to it by right of his 
 grand intellect, his unquenched spirits, and his high renown, he had not the 
 heart for it now; he felt, vaguely and bitterly, that the cloudless sunshine of 
 fortune would soon or late desert the last Chandos left to Clarencieux.
 
 15 o QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 Chandos himself that night smoked his favorite rose-water narghile in the 
 smoking-room, then sat down with Philippe d'Orvale to ecarte", closely contested, 
 costly, and washed, now and then, with iced sherbet. They played while 
 everybody else slept; then, as d'Orvale went to bed, Chandos instead let him- 
 self out by a side door that opened into the rose-gardens, and walked alone 
 into the sunny, silent morning, with no other companion than Beau Sire. 
 
 With the temper of a voluptuary and the habits of a man of the* world, 
 there was blent in him as strong a love of nature and of all the beauty of forest 
 and moorland, of the change of the seasons, and of the floating glories of the 
 clouds, as the purest of the Lakists ever felt. In truth, he was many men in 
 one: and to the apparent inconsistency it produced in his character were due 
 both the versatility of his talents and the scope of his sympathies. His pene- 
 tration was often at fault; he thought too well of men, and judged them too 
 carelessly; but his sympathies were invariably catholic and true; he understood 
 what others felt with an unerring surety of perception, a quality that invariably 
 begets attachment, a quality that, in its highest development produces genius. 
 
 He walked far, spending two hours in the forest and on the shore. The 
 flight of a flock of sea-swallows, the toss of the surf on the yellow sands, the 
 rolling-in of the great curled waves, the morning life of the woodlands, the 
 nest-song of the thrushes, the poise of a blue-warbler above a river-plant, the 
 circling sweep of an osprey in the air, all had their charm to him; not one of 
 the sights and sounds of the spring-day was indifferent to him or unnoted by 
 him. He loved to lay high prices on the cards in the excitement of a gaming- 
 room, and he loved to lead the wit and wildness of a sparkling, reckless Paris 
 night; but none the less did he love to stand and look over the gray, calm ex- 
 panse of a limitless sea, none the less did he love to listen to the laugh of a 
 west wind through the endless aisles of a forest. 
 
 He strolled till past noon through his lands with the retriever alone beside 
 him, then he re-entered the gardens by the same gate by which he had left 
 them. In them he met, alone also, La Vivarol. He would very willingly have 
 avoided the meeting. He knew how inexorable a tyrant the fair countess had 
 been: it was with difficulty that he had loosened her fetters at all, and the 
 escape he had made had, as he was well aware, never been pardoned him. Of 
 a scene, of anything approaching reproaches, recrimination, or a quarrel, Chan- 
 dos had more than the common horror; it was one of the frailties of his nature 
 to do anything on the face of the earth to avoid a mauvais quart a'heurcf 
 and now his conscience told him that he could scarcely complain if he had to 
 endure one, even if madame were unaware of the lengths to which her rival's 
 triumph extended. He advanced, therefore, with a misgiving. 
 
 " Ah, madame ! good morning. It is very rarely you honor the outer 
 world so early."
 
 CHANDOS. 157 
 
 The countess laughed as silvery a peal as that rung by her toy-dog's little 
 bells. 
 
 " No, indeed. The dawn, and the dew, and all the rest of it are charming 
 in eclogues and pastorals, but in real life they are a little damp ! but to-day I 
 did not sleep very well; my novel was dull, and the gardens looked tempting." 
 
 " Those who are so much the gainers by it will not quarrel with any caprice 
 that brings them to you earlier." 
 
 La Vivarol laughed again, a little contemptuously, letting an echo of sad- 
 ness steal into it. This brightest Venus Victrix was very charry of her sighs, 
 but on very rare occasions she could be mournful with an effect no other ever 
 approached. 
 
 " My favorite rose-gardens," she said, glancing around them. " Their 
 summer beauty is not yet come, though it is very near. / shall never see it." 
 
 " Madame ! what can make you utter so cruel a prediction for Clarencieux ? " 
 
 She let her long eyes, dazzling as a falcon's, rest on him, humid with a mist 
 that he could almost have sworn was of tears. 
 
 " Chut, man ami ! A new queen will soon reign at Clarencieux, they say ; 
 can you pretend that I should be welcome then ? " 
 
 There was a repressed melancholy in the tone more touching than spoken 
 reproach. Like Trevenna, she had long studied and traced his most facile and 
 most accessible weakness. She knew he could never be moved by recrimina- 
 tion; she knew he could be wounded in an instant by tenderness. He was 
 silent a moment, startled and pained; he scarce could tell how to soothe away 
 this bitterness to her. 
 
 " Believe me," he said, a little hurriedly, " whatever changes Clarencieux 
 sees, you will ever be welcomed to it by me." 
 
 " And do you think that with these ' changes ' I would come to it ? " She 
 spoke with a proud rebuke, a melancholy challenge, turning her eyes full on 
 his. Not a woman living knew so well how to place a man in a wrong position 
 and close all gates of escape upon him, as Heloi'se de la Vivarol. Chandos 
 felt inconstant and cruel, felt as she chose that he should feel. 
 
 " However that be," she murmured, dreamily placing him yet further and 
 further at his disadvantage, as only a woman's tact can do. "/wish you every 
 joy, Ernest, that earth can bring. Ernest ! I may call you that still once more; 
 the name will be for new lips in the future." 
 
 The tears shone, -dimming her brilliant eyes; a touching and resigned 
 reproach was in her tone; sadness was tenfold more intense, coming for once 
 in its rarity upon the dazzling, victorious face of the sovereign conqueror 
 Chandos felt guilty, felt repentant, felt everything that she meant he should 
 feel. His wiser judgment might have known that this was but the perfection 
 of acting; but she did not let his judgment come a second into play; she moved
 
 15 g QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 him at once by his heart and by his sympathies. He took her hand, and 
 stooped towards her. 
 
 "Heloise, forgive me. I deeply regret I did not know at least, if 
 
 ever- 
 
 He was about, despite all his consummate tact and his knowledge of the 
 world and of its women, to do so rash a thing as to apologize to her for having 
 deserted his allegiance ! She stopped him softly. 
 
 "Say no more; the past is past. No one you have ever known will wish 
 you happiness as I shall wish it. We are friends now, and ever will be. 
 Another love usurps you; so be it. To me, at least is left your friendship still. 
 It is not too much to ask, Ernest ? " 
 
 " Too much ! It is yours forever." 
 
 He spoke warmly, contrite, and surprised that she had loved him so well. 
 She had never looked more lovely than in this sudden descent from her 
 haughty and contemptuous gayety of sovereign triumph to this mournful and 
 wistful resignation. The pledge he gave her was one that he would never break, 
 for it had been won from him in a moment of acute self-reproach, when he 
 rebuked himself with having trifled too lightly with the peace of one who truly 
 loved him, though he had wronged her by too long deeming that no real love 
 could linger under the mocking worldly brilliance of her careless victories. " I 
 never thought that she had loved me so" he mused, surprised and moved, when 
 he had left her. She had led him by his feelings, and he had neither the keen- 
 ness nor the suspicion in him to doubt that she betrayed him. To Chandos it 
 was far easier to think that he had done a woman of the world wrong by think- 
 ing her too heartless, than to credit that she wronged him by masking a bitter 
 passion that she felt and assuming a gentle passion she did not feel. It was 
 true, she loved him, in her reading of the word; but it was in such a reading 
 that the night before, seeing her English rival's power, she had set her delicate 
 teeth together, and sworn, in her heart, 
 
 " I will have my vengeance ! If it be twenty years hence, I will have my 
 vengeance ! " 
 
 And before twenty years she had it.
 
 CHANDOS. 159 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE WATCHER FOR THE FALL OF ILION. 
 
 " They tell me the Premier has pressed on you again the restoration of 
 your title ?" 
 
 The Queen of Lilies spoke, standing under those very palms, in her sister's 
 town residence under which she had stood when she had first spoken the name 
 of Chandos. 
 
 " Yes, my dearest, he has done so." 
 
 " And you accept ? " 
 
 " No; I decline." 
 
 "Decline!" A dark shadow swept over her fair, serene brow. "Decline 
 the peerage ! And why ? " 
 
 " Why ? For many matters. One, that what was robbed from us by the 
 crown I will not take from the crown as a re-creation. The last marquis laid 
 his life down to preserve his honor. Athens would have given him a statue in her 
 Altis; England, characteristically, gave him a block on Tower Hill. We have 
 never condoned his judicial murder." 
 
 " Refuse the marquisate to gratify the manes of a beheaded ancestor ! 
 What quixotism ! " 
 
 Chandos looked as he felt, annoyed; he was used to be deferred to, and 
 the women he had loved had been playfully gentle even in their most imperious 
 tyrannies. Besides, a deeper vexation smote him; this anxiety for his rank 
 showed that his rank usurped her thoughts. 
 
 " Quixotism it may be; such as it is, it will always govern me; and I should 
 have hoped one who loved me would strive to understand my feelings, as I 
 would strive to understand hers." 
 
 He spoke gravely and gently; but she saw that she had made a wrong move, 
 that he was both pained and offended. 
 
 " But why ? tell me why," she urged, more softly. " Attaindered titles have 
 been restored before now. Others have thought it very right." 
 
 " What others may do has never been my guide." 
 
 " I know ! " The world followed him; she would not have contradicted 
 him. " But forgive me I cannot see your motive." 
 
 " ' Forgive ' is no word between us, my worshipped one. But to tell you my 
 motives I should have to tell you a long story. Suffice it, nothing not even 
 your prayer would eve-r induce me to be made Lord Clarencieux." 
 
 " A story ? Oh, you must tell it me ! "
 
 ICO 
 
 OUIDAS WORKS. 
 
 " Why, my dearest ? We have a story of our own far sweeter than any 
 
 chronicle." 
 
 " No, no. You have excited me now; you must gratify my curiosity." 
 
 She spoke caressingly, but in her heart were a keen irritation and mortifica- 
 tion. She had set all the longing of her ambitious life upon his marquisate. 
 The word of a woman is command to the man who loves her; he smiled, looking 
 down on her, and drawing her nearer in his embrace. 
 
 " You know the life and the death of the last lord ! it is a matter of history. 
 When he joined Charles Edward at Preston, he was the most brilliant man of 
 his time, a wit, a soldier, a poet, a bel esprit, the friend of Philippe d'Orleans 
 and Richelieu, the courtliest noble of his age. He had loved many; but he 
 loved latest, and above all, a duke's daughter, his betrothed wife. When he 
 was flung into the Tower, as you know, they offered him not only life, but 
 highest distinctions, if he would betray a state secret known to be in his pos- 
 session. You are aware that he refused, in words which sent the Whig nobles 
 who came to tempt him out of his presence like lashed hounds. Yet existence 
 was unutterably dear to him. What think you the woman who loved him did ? 
 she, a court-beauty, whom hundreds urged to forgetfulness and infidelity. 
 All she craved from the throne was permission to go to him in his captivity, 
 being ' prouder,' as her letters phrase it, ' to share his doom than to be one with 
 the pomp and pride of emperors.' It was granted, and she was wedded to him 
 one evening in the Beauchamp Tower. She lived with him there four months, 
 while his trial languished on. They feared to murder him, for the Chandos 
 were very powerful then; yet they thirsted like wolves for the great chief's 
 blood. His name was like a clarion to all the gentlemen of the South. Through 
 all these months she never left him for one hour, nor .did one word ever escape 
 her lips to urge him to purchase life at loss of honor. They took him from her 
 side to the scaffold, one fair spring morning, to die, with a smile upon his lips, 
 and those brief words, ' Tout est perdu, for s Vhonneur .' ' They say that from the 
 radiance of scarcely twenty years she changed to the blanched and worn 
 decrepitude of extreme age in that hour of agony when the axe fell upon the 
 neck her arms had wreathed in his last sleep. The son, to whom she gave 
 birth afterwards, grew up to manhood, the estates saved for him by others' 
 intercession, never by her own. She made him swear never to accept the 
 restoration of his father's title, since it would have been to give condonation to 
 his father's murderers. He kept his oath inviolate; and it has been passed on 
 from generation to generation. Now you understand why I will not accept the 
 gift of my attaindered peerage." 
 
 The story had always had a strong and touching charm for women. Even 
 
 [eloise de la Vivarol, most careless, most heartless of young coquettes, had 
 
 listened to it, looking at the Kneller portrait, with tears that started genuine
 
 CHANDOS. 161 
 
 and true into her falcon eyes; and even her mother, the Princess Lucille, that 
 weary, hardened, war-worn, continental Bohemian of the Blood, had heard it 
 in a grave, awed silence, and had turned slowly away: " C'est bien beau ! cet 
 amour qui est plus fort que la mort. Je ne le comprends pas; mais c'est beau ! " 
 
 Now the chastely-trained English beauty, in the purity and freshness of her 
 youth, was less moved by it, understood it less, than the calumny-proof and 
 evilly-accused Frenchwoman. 
 
 She listened, she smiled, she thanked him; but the history did not reach her 
 heart. She felt, moreover, that after what he had now said it would be as useless 
 to urge him to the acceptance of the Clarencieux peerage as to urge on him 
 some actual dishonor; and all the longing of her soul had been set upon that 
 proud marquisate. 
 
 He saw this, yet he tried not to see it; he thrust it from him with a pang. 
 From a woman who had sought him for the sake of the rank and dignities he 
 brought her he would have fled as from a pestilence, let it cost him what it 
 should; yet he had wakened passion for him in her eyes, he had felt her lips 
 meet his in lingering caresses, he had seen her face flush and her heart beat at 
 his words or in his embrace. He believed that she loved him; for she seemed 
 to have no law, no thought, no wish, no memory on earth, save him. And she 
 was very beautiful: heavier sins than those he saw in her would have been for- 
 given and forgotten by any man for the sake of that glory of youth and of 
 loveliness which had ripened in the light of Roman suns and seemed to have 
 their lustre still upon it. 
 
 Her triumph, too, lent her a fresh splendor. The eyes of a woman are 
 never so soft and so luminous as when they smile on the mortification of her 
 own sex. A more bitter blow had never been dealt them than when her fair 
 friends and foes learned that she had subdued one whose proverbial inconsis- 
 tency had so long made his captivity hopeless; and in the humiliated jealousy, 
 the defeated exasperation, which rankled in silence and wretchedness beneath 
 the congratulations of the dainty ladies of rank who had sought him for them- 
 selves or for their daughters and had failed, the Queen of Lilies found one of 
 the dearest of her triumphs. All his feminine world was in a terror of amaze, 
 of indignation, and of despair when the rumor stole among them that the idol 
 of their coteries had been won by the portionless daughter of Ivors. They 
 could not believe it; they would not believe it; and when they were compelled 
 to believe it from the tongue of Lady Chesterton, who floated about with the 
 coolest ice on her lips, and the warmest exultation in her heart, that ever ex- 
 asperated a score of vanquished acquaintance, they declared it, behind her 
 back, the most disgraceful intriguing for him, and began to find out that 
 " Lucrece " was not so very splendid a work after all. 
 
 Demi-Monde were more openly in revolt and more frankly infuriated, yet 
 
 VOL. III.-6
 
 162 
 
 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 comforted themselves more speedily. "// nous reviendra bientot" laughed 
 Flora de 1'Orme. But the priestesses and vestals of the temples of the aristo- 
 cratic and matrimonial Elis had no such consolation. The burnt-offering of 
 Clarencieux and its appanages could only be sacrificed once on their altars, 
 and they beheld it borne away by this unhonored spoiler with an exceeding 
 anguish, the greater that it perforce was mute. What wreaths of aromatic 
 incense, what oblations of sacrifice, had been lavished and wasted ! 
 
 There was not a single person of Chandos' acquaintance to whom the pros- 
 pect of his marriage was not bitterly unwelcome, except, Trevenna, who 
 seemed thoroughly content with it; at which other men wondered, knowing 
 how valuable a place Clarencieux was to him, and how much benefit accrued 
 to him from the careless and gay extravagance of his friend's unwedded life. 
 " But then," they remarked, " Trevenna's always such a good-natured fellow ! " 
 He had thoroughly earned this character. Did any man want anything, from 
 a cigar to a hunting-mount, from a seat down to Epsom to an invitation for the 
 moors, Trevenna would get it for him with the most obliging good nature, so 
 obliging, that men never knew or noticed that the cigars were Chandos', that 
 the mounts were out of his stud, that the drag came out of his stable-yard, and 
 that the Highland shootings were over his heather and forest. Good nature 
 Trevenna held a very safe and excellent reputation. His talents and his 
 shrewdness secured him from ever incurring that contempt, born of familiarity, 
 which good nature is apt to beget; and it was a reputation, as he considered, 
 that kept a clever man " dark " and secured him from every imputation of be- 
 ing " dangerous " or ambitious, better than anything. No one ever suspects 
 an embryo Drusus or Catiline, a lurking Gladstone or Bismarck, in the man 
 of whom everybody says, "Most obliging fellow in the world; always do you a 
 turn ; uncommonly good-natured ! " When the blue-eyed, golden-haired procon- 
 sul cracked his jests with Roscius, and lent his thousands of sesterces in reck- 
 less liberality, and offered his Cuman villa to his boon-comrades, and played 
 the witty fool, with roses on his bright locks, through the hot nights of royster- 
 ing, devil-may-care, dead-drunk Rome, who feared or foresaw in the boon-com- 
 panion the dread conqueror of Aphrodite's Temple, the great dictator of the 
 Optimates, the iron-handed Retribution of the Marians ? 
 
 " What ever possessed you to put that fellow into Parliament, Ernest ? " 
 asked the Duke of Castlemaine, in the window of White's, a fortnight after the 
 recess, flinging down the paper, in which a quiet paragraph announced the re- 
 tirement of Sir Jasper Lyle and the unopposed nomination and election in his 
 stead of the nominee of Clarencieux, John Trevenna, now M. P. 
 
 Chandos raised his eyebrows a little. 
 
 " I put him in because he was fitted for it: not a common reason for elec- 
 tions, I admit."
 
 CHANDOS. 163 
 
 The duke gave a low growl in his white beard. " You think life is to be 
 dealt with by bon mots and epigrams. I can't say the Lower House has much 
 to thank you for in furnishing it with an adventurer ! " 
 
 " It has much to thank me for in giving it a talker who can be logical with- 
 out being long-winded, and sparkling without being shallow, though possibly 
 it won't see the obligation. It reveres the prosy, and venerates the ponderous." 
 
 " And if you had a little of its tastes you would gain in safety what you 
 would loose in brilliancy. You set too much store on mere talent, Chandos." 
 
 "I err in an opposite extreme to most of my countrymen, then, duke." 
 
 " Can you answer one without a repartee ? " muttered his Grace, grandly 
 wrathful at an election from which he had done his best to dissuade his favorite. 
 Prevent it he could not; he had no local influence in his grandson's county, 
 and the little sea-cost borough within twenty miles of Clarencieux had almost as 
 feudal an attachment to the mere name of Chandos as his peasantry and tenantry 
 on the estates. The days of the last marquis were not so far back but the 
 living men could remember their grandsires relating the southern rallying round 
 his standard; and the great fame of the late minister was a thing beloved and 
 honored through the whole of that sea-board as a thing of personal and im- 
 perishable renown. 
 
 " To put an adventurer like that fellow in the House ! " muttered the duke, 
 fiercely recurring to a pinch of his fragrant etrenne. " I confess, I am aston- 
 ished at you, Ernest." 
 
 " I would never have believed it," chorused his son, the Marquis of Deloraine. 
 
 " I did not believe it," echoed the Earl of Pontifex. " When I saw the 
 paragraph in the paper, I set it down at once as a canard." 
 
 " Preposterous ! " murmured a noble lord, who held the Foreign portfolio, 
 from behind his morning paper. 
 
 " The ruin of the Constitution," sighed a colleague. 
 
 Chandos listened a little impatiently for his usual temper, and shrugged his 
 shoulders ever so slightly. 
 
 " I am very sorry if the matter disturb you, but really I fail to see the oc- 
 casion. I confess, it seems to me less damaging to put a man into the Lower 
 House who has every promise for the vocation, except money, than to admit so 
 many, as is now the custom, because money is the only recommendation they 
 possess ! " 
 
 With which concise retort on his and Trevenna's censors, Chandos absorbed 
 himself in a new novel. The duke, who might blame one whom he loved more 
 dearly than any other of his kith and kin himself, but would never endure to 
 hear him blamed elsewhere, laughed, and turned to the Foreign Secretary. 
 
 " Tell your rising men to look to their laurels, Pendragon: this fellow, now 
 he is in, will cut some work out for them. ' Eh, sirrah, and ye're na quiet, I'll
 
 164 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 send ye to the five hundred kings in the Lower House: I'se warrant they'll 
 tame ye,' said James the First to his restive charger. I don't think there will 
 ever have been one of the ' five hundred kings ' more likely to reign paramount, 
 some way or other, than this very outsider, John Trevenna." 
 
 His Grace was a world-wise Nestor of all councils and battle-grounds, and, 
 despite his aristocratic prejudices, judged the audacious outsider correctly. 
 
 The election had been conducted very quietly; there had not been the 
 slightest attempt at even a threatened opposition; as Trevenna said himself, 
 he " took a walk over." Chandos was the idol of the whole country-side, 
 and, for the sake of his great father's memory, no wish of his would have been 
 opposed in his county. He proposed the new member in a few words, which 
 sent a thrill through all his elder auditors; for the voice was the same clear, 
 rich, irresistible voice essentially the voice of the orator which they had 
 used to hear as Philip Chandos '. They had often wished and besought him to 
 represent them in person; but he knew his own character better than they knew 
 it, and 'invariably declined. Without any murmur they took the candidate he 
 proposed to them. The only persons who could have opposed the Clarencieux 
 nominee, on the score of the Conservative creed so long held by the Clarencieux 
 house, namely, the few people in the borough who loved change or studied 
 politics enough to be Whig (and they were very few), Trevenna himself had 
 conciliated. That part of his canvassing he had done alone, unknown indeed 
 to Chandos; and it was a study in itself, the masterly manner in which, 
 abstaining from any avowal of Darshampton politics, such as would have 
 startled out of their wits the old Tory Burghers, whose only creed was the creed 
 professed at Clarencieux, he still managed to dine his few Whig allies, to chat 
 with them in inn-bars, to smoke with them cheerily in their back parlors or 
 their sombre " best rooms," to win them all over to a man, and to leave them 
 with the profound conviction that he only coalesced with their opponents in 
 order that he might ultimately advance and support their own opinions. Tre- 
 venna was a capital posture-dancer in social life, and here he achieved the 
 proverbially dangerous feat of sitting on two stools, with triumphant address 
 and security. 
 
 Still, not here by his own tact, but by Chandos' assistance and friendship 
 alone did he accomplish the commencing ambition of his life, to pass unchal- 
 lenged the door-keeper of St. Stephen's and take his place upon the benches 
 with the " five hundred kings." 
 
 Trevenna was in no sense an impressible man, and assuredly not an imagin- 
 ative one; he would have strolled through the Birs Nimrud or the broken 
 columns of Jupiter Ammon, with the sun full on the glories of the ruined tem- 
 ple, and would have cracked a ginger-beer bottle and wished for a Punch; he 
 would have stood in St. Peter's in the gloom of the Crucifixion-day, while the
 
 CHANDOS. 165 
 
 " Miserere " wailed through the hush and the twilight, and would have amused 
 himself like a schoolboy with letting off a bunch of crackers undetected, to 
 bang and sputter on the solemn silence; he was essentially a " realist," to use 
 the jargon of the schools, and a very jovial realist too. Yet even he, little 
 given to being touched or impressed as he was, felt a certain proud thrill run 
 through him, a certain hushed earnestness fall for a moment on him, as he first 
 walked down the House and took his place in the assembly that John Elliott 
 suffered for, and every tyranny since has feared. 
 
 As he seated himself in the Commons, men noted that he was unusually 
 quite; some thought that this town-gossip, this dinner-wit, this idler of the 
 Park and clubs, was conscious of being out of his element, and felt his own 
 superficial cleverness useless and frivolous in their great congress; one or two 
 thought, noting the keenness of the eye, the meaning of the well-built brow, 
 and the bright indomitable firmness of the lips, that he might be rather, on 
 the contrary, measuring and maturing his strength against the future; and 
 these were the deeper, surer-sighted of his observers. 
 
 Yet even these could not guess that, as he entered the Lower House, Tre- 
 venna's first glance went to the well-known place where the majestic stature 
 and the grand bearing of the famous minister, Philip Chandos, had been wont 
 to rise in all dignity to quell a tumultuous opposition, or to lead a patriot's 
 movement for the honor and in the name of England; and his first thought 
 was, " Monseigneur, here I am at last in your own throne-room, where you 
 reigned and ruled so long. Ah ! I may even hold your sceptre some day, 
 when your brilliant son has died in shame and exile and the very place of his 
 grave been forgotten." 
 
 So, quietly and unostentatiously, with good taste, as even those who be- 
 grudged him the elevation were constrained to admit, not altering his manner 
 nor his mood because he had gained this social status, giving men no touch, 
 as yet, of his quality and his power, training himself wisely, sedulously, and 
 well, and caring little to be noted at present for anything beyond his punc- 
 tual and steady attendance at the House, Trevenna entered on his parliamen- 
 tary career. 
 
 At the same time with his own, a very different ambition and aspiration were 
 forwarded and fructified by Chandos. 
 
 The opera Ariadne in Naxos was completed, and after Easter, through his 
 influence, and chiefly, indeed, at his expense, was to be produced with every 
 magnificence in the presentation, and every assistance in the artists, that could 
 be procured at any cost. On it hung the very life and soul of the musician 
 Lulli. The idealic ambition of the French cripple was as intense in its absorp- 
 tion of him as Trevenna's realistic ambitions were of him; each was literally 
 and equally governed by ambition: the difference was that one worshipped Art,
 
 166 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 the other only coveted Success. Lulli would have expired in rapture if, perish- 
 ing in want and misery, he could have known that the world would treasure his 
 works- Trevenna would not have given a rush for a fame that should have 
 excelled Osar's, Aristides', or St. Paul's, if he had not dined well and drunk 
 well while he lived. Dreaming in his solitary room, the visonary, whose infirm- 
 ities shut him out from every joy and hope that filled the lives of his fellow- 
 men, had created things as glorious as ever issued from the thoughts of Mozart 
 or of Meyerbeer. In self-reliance most helpless, among men weak as an ailing 
 child, so ignorant of all worldly ways and wisdom that an infant of six years 
 might have laughed him to scorn, Lulli in his own domain was a king, and from 
 the twilight of the aching brain, which looked with so touching a pathos, with so 
 bewildered a pain, out of the dreamy depths of his sad eyes, music had risen in 
 its grandest incarnations, poems of eternal meaning had been garnered, beauty 
 that would haunt a listening world and stir it from its sloth into a pang of 
 some sublimer thought than daily toil for greed and gain, had been born in 
 supreme perfection. 
 
 When will men learn to know that the power of genius, and the human shell 
 in which it chances to be harbored, are as distinct as is the diamond from the 
 quartz-bed in which they find it ? 
 
 The Ariadne was the crown of Lulli's life; it was the first-born of his brain, 
 the darling of his thoughts, the fruit of many a long summer day and winter 
 night, given in untiring love to the work of its creation. By it the world was to 
 decide whether this cripple's dream of fame was vain as " the desire of the moth 
 for the star," or whether, when his existence had passed away from the patience 
 and the pain of its daily being, the legacy he left would be upon the lips and in 
 the hearts of thousands, with the legacies of the great masters. 
 
 The day approached at last for the trial, scarcely three weeks since Chan- 
 dos had bartered all the liberty of his future in one caress among the spring- 
 wealth of the violets. Was it well lost ? He thrust the question from him 
 unanswered, and gave himself up to the sway of his new passion unresisting. 
 He had never known sorrow; how could he well know fear ? He lived in a 
 ceaselessly changing succession of amusements, in which there was no pause 
 for doubt, no moment for foreboding; he only felt that she beguiled him more 
 with every glance her eyes gave his; he was only conscious of the impatience 
 of a love which every hour that kept them severed heated and enhanced. 
 Now and then, in truth, he felt as he had felt at Clarencieux, that he was not 
 loved as he loved; now and then the serenity of her nature chilled and chafed 
 the fervor and the passion of his own: but the time was brief. They met in 
 the pauses of pleasures which banished thought from him; and the touch of his 
 kiss, the eagerness of his prayers, the impassioned warmth of his worship, woke 
 the semblance, if not the reality, of response in her. No woman could have had
 
 CHANDOS. 167 
 
 his eyes look into hers and have remained cold to him. The only thing that 
 ever rankled in his heart, and touched him at times with a pang of dread and 
 almost of aversion, was the intensity of the disappointment she could not dis- 
 guise at his refusal of the peerage offered him. As often as she could venture 
 (for, devoted as he was to her, and infinitely gentle as was his manner to all 
 women, and above all to her, she felt that this was a point on which he would 
 not endure pressure), the Lily Queen recurred to the rejection of the Claren- 
 cieux marquisate, and showed herself unreconciled either by his wish or by his 
 history to the loss of that splendid coronet. It was subtlely done, with feminine 
 grace and tact, and with the high-bred delicacy which Lady Valencia could no 
 more have departed from than the antelope could lose its elegance; but the 
 thought was ever there with her, how to surmount the invincible objection which 
 alone, through motives as they seemed to her of such sheer quixotism, stood 
 between her and the proffered title; and he felt, better than he could have 
 defined, the predominance which his rank, his wealth, and his fashion held with 
 her, far over his love and her own. Now and then he feft this so strongly that 
 a passionate regret seized him for the fatal opportunity which had led him away 
 to resign his fate and future to her; but he loved; he had never been over- 
 taken by calamity; he was of a nature on which presentiment could assume no 
 hold; he flung the fear off him, and forgot it, stooping to take the soft touch of 
 her lips. 
 
 " I suppose before long, Trevenna, you will renounce my exchequer-chan- 
 cellorship and begin to prepare yourself for the nation's ? " laughed Chandos, 
 the evening before that on which the Ariadne in Naxos was to be presented. 
 " I cannot hope to keep you as my financier now that you have parliamentary 
 affairs in earnest to work at: still, you must give me notice when you mean to 
 resign. The vacancy will be hard to fill." 
 
 Trevenna laughed also. 
 
 "I confess, I pity my successor, as far as finances go: though it is a very 
 good office for perquisites, it is something tremendous for expenditure. By the 
 way, have you any idea what you do spend, Chandos ? " 
 
 Chandos carelessly shook together the diamonds on a fancy-dress as he 
 made his toilette for a fancy-ball at the Princess Anna Miraflora's, standing in 
 his dressing-room, while Trevenna, after dining, as was often his wont, off 
 Dubosc's masterpieces all by himself, while his host was dining at the Austrian 
 Embassy, chatted with him now before the one went to his bal costume at the 
 princess's and the other to look on at the political costuming and posturing of 
 a debate. 
 
 " An idea of what I spend ? No. I always tell you, knowing the price of 
 things spoils them." 
 
 " But not knowing the price of them may chance to spoil you"
 
 168 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 Chandos laughed. 
 
 " Tres-cher, I am spoilt, have been ever since the great ladies gave me 
 bonbons when I was two years old. I don't deny it; but then it's very pleasant." 
 
 " Very, no doubt. I never tried it. But in sober seriousness, Ernest, do 
 you guess what your expenses are ? " 
 
 " ' Sober seriousness ! ' What an invocation ! Decidedly the House is dis- 
 agreeing with you, Trevenna, and you are imbibing its professional dulness. 
 Give the benches your estimates, please; don't try my patience with them. By 
 the way, though, you are my finance-minister still; will you tell my lawyer 
 to draw up Lady Valencia's settlements immediately, and see to the matter 
 altogether yourself for me ?" 
 
 " With pleasure. What instructions " 
 
 " That is just the point ! Save my having to give any. Meet Chess to- 
 morrow, and do whatever he wishes. I only give you one injunction," added 
 Chandos, dropping his voice so that his attendants could not hear; " arrange 
 them so that Lady Valencia can never feel she had not brought me a fortune 
 as large as my own, and draw them up as you might have drawn them for a 
 princess in her own right." 
 
 "As I should have done if you had followed the duke's counsels. But, as 
 for these settlements, I should be glad of a little graver talk with you. Can 
 you not stop half an hour ? " 
 
 "I ! I am fearfully late as it is; and I have promised Princess Anna to be 
 in time for the Louis Quinze quadrille. Besides, I know what your graver talk 
 means. My dear fellow, go in for supply, and attend committees, if such be 
 your taste; but, for pity's sake, spare me legalities and finance. Settle what 
 they wish upon her; I cannot give you a wider margin." 
 
 " Wide enough ! " said Trevenna, grimly. " I wonder what would be left 
 you if my Lady Chess filled it up ! But that is not all, Chandos. Indeed" 
 
 " Indeed, the ' all,' then, must wait for a better season," laughed Chandos, 
 shaking the jewelled hilt of his rapier into its place: he was dressed as the Due 
 de Richelieu; while the Queen of Lilies would represent the Duchesse de Berry. 
 The princess would never speak to me again if I were to ruin her quadrille by 
 my absence. Good-bye, my dear fellow; and don't learn gravity from St. 
 Stephen's: I am sure you see a perpetual comedy there" 
 
 revenna looked at him as he swept out of the dressing-chamber, with the 
 Dlarencieux diamonds glittering at every point on the lace and embroidery, the 
 black velvet and azure silk, the gold and the silver, of his dress of the Bourbon 
 court. 
 
 ' Go to your last night, monseigneur," he thought. " A week, and those 
 
 londs will be for sale. You want settlements: well, you shall have them. 
 
 The pear is ripe; it shall fall. Take a reprieve for to-night; nothing loses by
 
 CHANDOS. 169 
 
 anticipation. Ten years ! a long time. On my life, I feel rather like the 
 watcher who looked out from his watch-tower through a whole decade to catch 
 the first red light of the leaping flames. Ten years ! a long time: but Troy fell 
 at last." 
 
 With which memory of the days of his school-desk hexameters, Trevenna 
 sauntered out through the luxurious sleeping-chambers, past the waiting valets, 
 and down the staircase to his night-cab, and drove on to the House, where he 
 had already been in attendance from four to eight, and where there was a pro- 
 tracted though not important after-dinner debate. 
 
 Before he went to the body of the House, however, he turned a moment in- 
 to the library, and wrote a little note, which he sent out to his groom to post. 
 
 It was addressed to Ignatius, and was condensed in one word: 
 
 "Act." 
 
 BOOK THE THIRD. 
 
 II avait joui de son reve insens4; 
 Du trone et de la gloire il savait le mensonge, 
 II avait vu de prs ce que c'est un tel songe, 
 Et quel est le n6ant d'un avenir pass6. 
 
 VICTOR HUGO. 
 L'honneur parle; il suffit. 
 
 RACINE. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 "SPES ET FORTUNA VALETE." 
 
 " COME early to-morrow," murmured the Queen of Lilies, as her lover led 
 her to her carriage, lifting her fair eyes, lustrous as those of the daughter of 
 D'Orleans she personated. 
 
 Chandos stooped his head, so that his voice in its soft answer only reached 
 her ear. 
 
 " Would that to-morrow were here, or, rather, that now we did not part ! " 
 
 If he had ever doubted that he was loved, he could not have doubted it 
 now, as he watched the warmth that flushed her face, the light over which her 
 lashes drooped, the half smile, half sigh, which with that divine blush replied to 
 him. 
 
 The costume-ball had been magnificent as though it had been given in the
 
 170 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 Regency age it celebrated, and the Louis Quinze quadrille had been the most 
 splendid of all others in the costly glitter of its grace; the Clarencieux dia- 
 monds outshown all others there. Royal women flattered him on " Lucrece," 
 the greatest statesmen of the day pressed on him the restoration of his marquis- 
 ate; the world adored him as it had ever done, and feminine lips breathed him 
 his 'most delicate and most dulcet incense. The night lived long in his mem- 
 ory. It was the last of his reign, 
 
 It was late when the guests of the Italian princess left her imitation of the 
 fetes of Sceaux and of Versailles; the long line of carriage-lamps glittered far 
 down to the right and left in the uncertain light of an early summer morning. 
 Among the crowd of horses, of lackeys, of chasseurs, and of police, a few 
 wandering night-birds crept in under the wheels and almost under the hoofs, 
 and stared blankly at the glimpse of an unknown world caught through the 
 crevices of the awning, and at the warmth of light and color that streamed out 
 on them from the opened portals. Among them a boy, of such beauty as 
 belongs to the canvas of Spanish painters and to the eyes of Spanish gaditani, 
 stole noiselessly near, and, looking on, crouched, almost kneeling, in the 
 shadow of the portico. One carriage rolled- away; another, with the well- 
 known white-and-silver liveries of Clarencieux, took its place; the name ran 
 along the line of servants; the lad Agostino leaned eagerly forward. Down 
 the steps of the entrance, under the awning, Chandos came, the gaslight shed 
 full on the rich colors and the gleaming jewels of his dress, as Richelieu him- 
 self might have come leaving the gatherings of the Palais Royal. So near 
 leaned the boy that the gold and silk of the sword-knot touched his lifted fore- 
 head. The attendants ordered him sharply off the pavement. Chandos, 
 struck by the look upon his face, so eager, so longing, so full of youth and 
 misery, stopped them, and paused a moment. 
 
 " My poor boy," he said, gently, " do you want anything with me ? Surely 
 I have seen your face before ? " 
 
 Agostino gazed up at him, pale to the lips, and with an utter abject wretch- 
 edness in the darkness of his eyes. He trembled violently. He would have 
 given twenty years of his dawning life to have found courage for speech: yet, 
 now that the opportunity so yearned and sought for came to him, the cowardice 
 of his feminine nature held him paralyzed. 
 
 " Speak. Do not be afraid," said Chandos, kindly. " If you want anything 
 from me, say it without fear. 
 
 The boy's lips parted, but only inarticulate Spanish words halted upon them; 
 the dread of his father's forbiddance, the horror of his English taskmaster's 
 vengeance, held him powerless and speechless. 
 
 " That lad suffers; have him looked to," said Chandos, turning to the foot- 
 men nearest him, while he stooped and touched Agostino's hand with some
 
 CHANDOS. 171 
 
 gold. "Take these; and if you need more help, come to my house in the 
 morning. I will give orders for your admittance. What is your name ? " 
 
 " Agostino Mathias." 
 
 The voice was husky and scarcely intelligible; a great terror the terror of 
 his tyrant lay upon him; yet the strange sudden loyalty and love he had con- 
 ceived for the English stranger, with the face like Guido Reni's golden-haired 
 St. Michael, whom he had seen among the vine-fields of the Vega, looked up- 
 ward longingly and piteously from his eyes. 
 
 " I shall remember," said Chandos, as he stooped nearer and put the sov- 
 ereign or two that he had with him against the boy's closed hand. So much 
 wretchedness in one so young must come," he thought, " from some such pangs 
 of want and poverty as sent Chatterton and Hegesippe Moreau to their graves." 
 
 But Agostino shuddered from the touch of the gold, and shrank back 
 against the stone of the portico. 
 
 " Not your money ! not your money !" he muttered, incoherently, in his 
 Spanish tongue, while he cowered away as though the sovereigns were some 
 leprous thing. 
 
 Chandos saw the gesture; he did not hear the murmured answer. He turned 
 and dropped the pieces in the hand of the servant closest to him. 
 
 " That poor boy can be scarcely, I fear, in his right mind. See to him, will 
 you ? " he said, as he went down the few remaining steps and entered his car- 
 riage, which stopped the way of others. Agostino looked after him with pas- 
 sionate wistfulness, while the great tears gathered and brimmed over in his eyes. 
 The footman touched him on the shoulder and addressed him. Like one roused 
 out of fever and lethargy, the lad started and looked round, then wrenched 
 himself out of the hold the man had laid on him, and fled like a frightened deer 
 down into the darkness of the street. The servant let him go, and slipped the 
 sovereigns in his waistcoat-pocket. 
 
 " He's that uncommon proud, he won't know new 'uns like the Earl of 
 Clydesmore," mused the man, wonderingly, of him by whom they had been 
 given; "and yet he is always willin' to speak to such helpless street-trash as 
 that ! " 
 
 Such a code as this, which could show an hauteur so aristocratic to the 
 plutocracy, yet show a sympathy so democratic to the needs of youth, and 
 poverty, was a social anomaly that sorely perplexed the powdered functionary. 
 In any one less fashionable, less famous, and less proverbially .exclusive than 
 Chandos, he would have set it down, without a second's hesitation, as evident 
 insanity. The world would not much have differed with him. 
 
 " If a boy who calls himself Agostino Mathias come here to-morrow, receive 
 him, and let me know," said Chandos to his maitre d'hotel, as he passed up the 
 staircase of his own house.
 
 172 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 The quick ear of John Trevenna, where he sat below, waiting in the library, 
 with the door a little open, caught the name, and his white teeth set like a 
 bulldog's. 
 
 Ah, young one, curse you ! you try that game ? " he thought. " You will 
 find out what it is to rebel against me, with a convict's chain ready for your 
 mischievous baby-hands." 
 
 The man bowed as he heard Chandos' command. 
 
 " I will be very careful he is admitted, sir. I beg your pardon, but Mr. 
 Trevenna bade me tell you he is waiting." 
 
 Chandos paused in astonishment. 
 
 " Mr. Trevenna ? Why, it is past four o'clock. Is Clarencieux burnt down, 
 that he comes here at such a time ? " 
 
 " I believe he said, sir, his business was urgent: he entreated to see you." 
 
 " Inconsiderate fellow ! I am half asleep," thought Chandos, as he passed 
 up the stairs. "Well, say he can come to me for ten minutes, in my own 
 room." 
 
 " A very good fellow, a very clever fellow, but a man with one failing; he 
 never knows when he is de trop" he musea, as he went on into his own chamber, 
 that was library, atelier, smoking-room, and art-gallery, all in one. It was 
 always ready lighted, and, without waiting to take off his Richelieu dress, he 
 stood against the mantel-piece, striking a match for a cigarette, and thinking, 
 as his hand caressed the eagerly-lifted head of the dog, Beau Sire, less of what 
 Trevenna could need him for, than of how lovely the Daphne looked in the 
 mellow gleam of the light. 
 
 " Who would care for life without Art and Pleasure ? " he thought. 
 
 The handles of the double doors turned sharply; the massive fall of the 
 blue velvet contre-vent was thrust hastily aside; Trevenna entered. The 
 retriever dropped "down-charging" with a fierce, repressed growl; Chandos 
 looked up, and laughed. 
 
 " Adieu to peace ! You can't open a door, Trevenna, without jarring a 
 room. What can possibly bring you here at this time in the morning ? Is 
 Clarencieux burnt, a racer dead, my Titians stolen ? or, what is it ? " 
 
 " I beg your pardon for disturbing you, my dear Chandos," returned the 
 other, with more gravity than had ever been seen in him before; "but it is 
 very imperative that I should talk to you." 
 
 " Talk away, then ! " rejoined Chandos, with a sigh of ennui and resigna- 
 tion; "but, for Heaven's sake, shake off that most unusual and unbecoming 
 solemnity. Who ever would have thought a single week of St. Stephen's would 
 have been enough to make a man so prosy ? Or perhaps it's only training for 
 future ' office,' is it ? " 
 
 Trevenna was silent; he came and stood on the hearth-rug, with so rare and
 
 CHANDOS. 173 
 
 grave a seriousness upon him that he gave no light or humorous answer; he 
 looked at his host where he leaned against the marble, his form, in the Louis 
 Quinze dress, thrown out against the background of the blue velvet hangings 
 of this favorite chamber; then he bent his eyes downward on the carpet: he 
 feared they might betray the thirsty exultation, the eager sleuth-hound longing, 
 that were hidden in his heart. 
 
 "Come, Trevenna," said Chandos, in some surprise and a little impatience; 
 " silence is never your forte. Say what you have to say." 
 
 " Well, I'm a blunt man," answered his friend, as with some effort. " Plainly 
 and briefly, I'm come on a disagreeable errand." 
 
 Chandos shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 " I'd a presentiment of that. People don't stay up for one on pleasant 
 ones. Aprh?" 
 
 " Apres ? " said Trevenna, with something of his old malicious humor gleam- 
 ing out in the corners of his mouth. " It is just the ' aprh ' that I'm come to 
 talk about. You've had a comet-like course, mon prince; did you ever specu- 
 late how comets end ? " 
 
 Chandos looked at him in supreme astonishment; he almost thought, for 
 the moment, that Trevenna's habitual sobriety had given way, and that some 
 hot wines heated his fancies. 
 
 " My dear fellow," he said, with a touch of stronger impatience, " you must 
 really pardon me, but if you only keep out of bed to propose me astronomical 
 riddles, I must, with all courtesy, bid you good-night." 
 
 " Monseigneur, have a little patience. I come on grave matters, and you 
 must hear them," said Trevenna, quietly. " You lock annoyances out with 
 double doors in this chamber; but I fear, do what you will, they will ferret 
 through and follow you at last. I asked you before you went to your fancy- 
 ball, if you knew at what rate you have lived and are living; I ask you, now 
 you have come back from it the same thing." 
 
 " And I give you the same answer: I do not know." 
 
 " Shall I tell you ? " 
 
 " If you please." 
 
 " I will, then; but wait one moment. You are perfectly happy, Chandos ? " 
 
 Chandos looked at him again, in an astonishment not unmixed with 
 amusement. 
 
 " I ? Perfectly ! I don't think I would live a day longer, if I were 
 not." 
 
 Trevenna watched him as he spoke, leaning against the marble, with the 
 deep glow of color, the strewn treasures of art and wealth, the white grace of 
 the statues, and the intense hues of the painted ceiling around and above. In 
 the court costume, with the diamonds flashing through the lace and gold em-
 
 174 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 broideries, the strong resemblance he bore to the last marquis was as great as 
 though the dead man lived again. Trevenna watched him, recompensed at last 
 for a long decade of patient tact, for a lifetime of bitter envy, of gnawing 
 mortification, of impotent hate, of festering jealousy, watched him as the 
 jungle-cheetah watches his prey before the final spring. He went leisurely 
 about his work: the treasured preparations of such long and thirsty toil was 
 not to be devoured in an instant, but tasted slowly in its wicked sweetness, 
 drop by drop. He changed his own position slightly nearer; his features wore 
 a gravity such as became the matters he approached, but a quicker or more 
 suspicious observer than the man who trusted him so freely might have noticed 
 that in the glisten of his clear bold eyes there was a look of eager expectation, 
 and about the firm, humorous lines of his lips there was a lurking triumph, a 
 cynical, malicious relish. 
 
 " You would not live a day, if your fortunes altered ? I am sorry to hear 
 that: for the world, then, may loose you soon. We must take those pretty 
 ivory-handled pistols out of sight; for, though you are so happy now, I fear 
 you will not be so happy in the future." 
 
 Chandos rose from the easy indolence of his resting attitude, and looked at 
 him, with a new light rising in his eyes, a light of anger and of impatience 
 very seldom there. 
 
 " Jesters are privileged proverbially," he said, coldly; " but there are limits 
 to their allowance when their jests have no wit and much insolence. If you 
 have anything to say, say it plainly, and make an end." 
 
 Trevenna's words had angered and astonished him, but they had in no sense 
 alarmed him. In his careless peace and his total ignorance of calamity, their 
 meaning could not possibly suggest itself even so dimly. 
 
 " Tres-cher," replied Trevenna, with an irresistible lapse into his habitual 
 manner, for, though the man was a foul traitor and an unblushing liar, it was 
 against the cynical candor of his nature to be a hypocrite, though he could be 
 one with great effect and success if it were absolutely needed, " that con- 
 founded hauteur of you thorough-breds is deuced provoking; it is, indeed; and 
 people won't put up with it, perhaps, quite so patiently in future. As for say- 
 ing plainly what I have to say, I suppose you will not believe me if I tell you 
 that your expenditure is, and has been for many years, about quadruple what 
 your income is ? " 
 
 Chandos started, some faint perception of the destruction that must follow 
 such a course arresting even his careless indifference and ignorance on all 
 things financial. The next moment he smiled contemptuously at the thought. 
 " My expenditure ? Impossible ' " 
 
 " Only too possible, unhappily. Even a Chandos of Clarencieux cannot live 
 like an emperor with impunity. Royalties come expensive, mon prince; and
 
 CHAN DOS. 175 
 
 who wears the purples must pay for them. Your fortune was fine, but not large 
 enough to bear such a strain as you have put upon it. You have no notion, 
 you say, of all that you have spent. What comes of a man's not knowing the 
 rate at which he lives ? Why, that, sooner or later, the last rope-strand gives 
 way, and he is ruined." 
 
 The word fell strangely on the silence of that tranquil chamber, bringing, like 
 the stroke of death, desolation where all was peace. 
 
 Yet still the word passed by him whom it should have warned; his confi- 
 dence was too secure, his carelessness too entire, his possession of all that was 
 highest and richest and brightest of too long custom, for the first presage of the 
 storm to have power to force its meaning on him. 
 
 A flush of amazed anger passed over his face; he stood erect upon his 
 hearth in a haughty and intolerant annoyance. 
 
 " Have you drunk too much, or are you mad ? This sort of fooling passes 
 all license. If you indeed know what you are saying, I must beg you to leave 
 my presence." 
 
 Trevenna, in answer, stood in a firmer, sturdier attitude, with his feet apart, 
 and his arms folded like the Napoleonic statuettes. 
 
 " I am neither mad nor drunk, and I am not fooling. I wish, for your sake, 
 I could discover it were a nightmare after two dozen oysters; but I can't. I 
 digest everything, and I don't dream ! Briefly, Chandos, I must tell you what 
 I have staved off perhaps too long; but I shrank from the task. I let time pass. 
 I thought you might marry some rich or even royal bride, whose alliance would 
 change the whole aspect; but your bidding me arrange the settlements for Lady 
 Valencia compels me to withhold the truth no longer from you. There is noth- 
 ing to settle on her ! " 
 
 " Nothing to settle on her ? What can you mean ? " 
 
 Still, no doubt, no prescience of the truth, came to him. He looked at 
 Trevenna with a wonder in which some disgust and more pity were mingled; 
 he thought that the strangeness of his sudden mania rose from some unusual 
 indulgence in drink, that filled his brain with these singular, distorted fantasies. 
 " 1 mean what I say, monseigneur. There is not a sou's worth not even 
 those diamonds that glitter so bravely on your dainty dress that is free to go 
 to her dower. Can you not understand me when I tell you that you have lived 
 at the rate of four times the amount of your annual income ? What history 
 does that simple fact suggest ? You must be financier enough to know that ? 
 Hang it, Chandos ! I am not a deep-feeling man, I don't go in for all that, as 
 you know; but I wish from my soul that I could spare you, or that some other 
 could better break to you the news you must hear to-night." 
 
 Chandos listened; a gray, deadly pallor came on his face, his lips grew white, 
 his heart almost ceased to beat; the first shadow of this dim horror stole on
 
 176 QUID A' S WORKS. 
 
 him. A glimpse of its meaning was forced at length upon him; he had heard 
 of such fates for other men. 
 
 He drew his breath with a gasping effort. " If you speak truth, speak out," 
 he said, in that strange and deadly calmness which falls upon the mind and senses 
 before the visitation of some great calamity. A faint, vague sense of this evil 
 approaching him was all he felt; it was not possible that it could come to him 
 yet more fixedly or fully. 
 
 " I speak the sad and sober truth," returned Trevenna, far more quietly 
 than he had ever spoken, his eyes still resting on the Daphne opposite, as though 
 to guard against a tell-tale flash from them of that lustful exhultation that he 
 knew was in their glance. " I can't speak to you as coyly and as delicately as 
 your patrician friends and relatives would do. I'm a plain, frank man, Chandos, 
 and I've the very devil's own mischief-making to tell you of now; but, believe me 
 once for all, it costs me almost as much to tell as it can do you to hear. There is 
 no good in beating about the bush, no good in being discursive over a thing 
 so horrible as this; you must know the worst at once, and it is better, perhaps, 
 told without varnish or veil ; a short shrift and a quick death. That is truer 
 mercy, after all, than all the endless preparation your fellow-aristocrats might 
 
 give you. Listen ! " 
 
 He paused a moment, as though that which he had to bring bore even him 
 down in its bitter burden; but his eyes glanced swiftly and longingly at the 
 man he tortured; he loved this protracted torment. Like a cat, he played with 
 his victim's misery before he killed him; and if without suspicion he could 
 have prolonged it through hours of ignorance and dread, he would have done 
 so with all the endless patience of hate. 
 
 " Listen," he said, more softly; " as I have said, you have long lived in- 
 deed, I think since your majority at the rate of four times your income. You 
 have kept two households in England nearly such as princes keep; you have 
 had your Paris hotel, your Turkish palace; you have lavished money on art, like 
 another Beckford; you have spent God knows what on women; you have given 
 entertainments that cost you (though you never asked the cost) a couple of 
 thousand a night; you have played the patron to every starving genius you 
 met: in a word, you have lived like a king, my dear Ernest, and not being a 
 king, but only an English gentleman, your royalty has broken down, and will, 
 I fear, end in a very unavoidable abdication. In a word, you are in debt to an 
 extent I hardly dare to compute to you. To sell everything you possess will 
 hardly satisfy your claimants; bill-discounters and money-lenders have your 
 signature in their hands, and will call for payment without mercy. Briefly, you 
 have sold your birthright for ten years' enjoyment, and you now are, beyond 
 all hope of ransom, irrevocably and most utterly ruined." 
 
 The word cut down again upon the stillness with a shrill, sharp, pitiless echo,
 
 CHAN DOS. 177 
 
 as a sword cuts down through the air before it falls on the bowed neck of the 
 doomed. 
 
 Its utterance repaid its speaker for all he had foregone, for all he had for- 
 borne, for every slight endured in silence from the world he hated, for every 
 benefit taken with an inward curse from the man he hunted down. He loved 
 that word so well, he could have dinned it on the silence in incessant repetition, 
 hurling down with it the brilliant and gracious life he had so long envied from 
 the thrones of pleasure and of power into the nethermost darkness of hopeless 
 desolation. 
 
 "Ruined! /?" 
 
 Chandos echoed the words hoarsely, faintly, scarcely with any comprehen- 
 sion of it, as a man suddenly wakened from a deep, sweet sleep to learn some 
 unutterable shame or misery that has befallen him repeats the phrase that tells 
 it, mechanically and without sense. The agony of horror that gathered, white 
 and bewildered, on the gallant beauty of his face was in as ghastly a contrast 
 with the glittering splendor of his dress as though the face of a corpse gazed out 
 from the laces and jewels of a gay masquerade. 
 
 "Yes; even you, my brilliant Lord of Clarencieux !" answered the friend 
 who stood upon his hearth; and with the words went an irrepressible snarl and 
 sneer of triumph and of mockery that passed him unnoted in that moment 
 of breathless, burning, inconceivable anguish. " Even you ! Details you will 
 learn for yourself hereafter; for to-night the broad, brief fact's enough. I 
 would have warned you long ago, if you would only have listened; but you 
 know as well as I do you would never hear of business, never think of money. 
 Besides, in truth, I scarcely thought it was so very, so hopelessly bad as it seems 
 now to be. I suppose your marriage with a bride who has no dower has set the 
 fellows on: they are hounding for their moneys now like mad. I have had 
 hard work to keep them even from arresting you : I have, upon my honor ! 
 To-night, when you went out to your princess's ball with all those thousands of 
 pounds' worth of rose-diamonds about you, it was a wonder, on my life, that 
 some one of your hungry creditors didn't stop those dainty jewels. You shall 
 see to-morrow that I tell you but the plain, unvarnished truth. You are so 
 deeply involved now, Chandos, that I doubt if there is a single little cabinet 
 picture on these walls, or a single rood of land at your beloved Clarencieux, 
 that in a month's time you will call your own; " 
 
 " Stop ! oh, my God ! have some mercy ! " 
 
 The words broke out like the last cry wrung from one driven to the extrem- 
 ity of physical endurance, wrung from him in the abandonment of human 
 misery against all strength of manhood and all power of will. He could bear 
 no more; he was stunned and blinded like a man struck from behind him a 
 murderous blow upon the brain which blasts his sight to darkness.
 
 178 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 Ruin ! it had no meaning for him; it came to him like some dim, shape- 
 less, devil -begotten thing that had no form or substance, a hideous lemur of a 
 night's delirious dream. 
 
 Trevenna stood by and watched him; his hour had come at last, the hour 
 which paid him back the cankerous evil, the relentless toil, the unremitting 
 chase, of such long, wakeful, hungry years. This moment had been hoarded 
 up my him as a miser hoards his gold, and now, in its full seizure, he was repaid 
 for all his studied craft, for all his fondly-nursed revenge, for all his unrelin- 
 quished hatred, repaid to the uttermost coin by every gasped breath that he 
 counted, by every shiver of the voiceless anguish that he watched. 
 
 He did not heed the prayer for silence, but took up the broken thread of 
 his discourse, and played with it as though loving it in every shape and on 
 every side. 
 
 " Your property, you see, was fine, no doubt; but fine properties are not 
 Monte-Christo caverns of exhaustless wealth. Dipped into, they will waste. 
 You have eclipsed princes, and starred through all Europe; you pay now for 
 the pre-eminence. You have had women's love, no toy so costly ! you 
 have had the great world's worship, no clientela so expensive ! you have been 
 a dilettante, a lion, a leader of fashion, a man of endless pleasure, no pursuits 
 take so much gold ! You have lived in such a style that you would have run 
 through millions, had you had them; and you had not one million, though 
 you had a noble inheritance. Of course you possess such quantities of pic- 
 tures and statues, and all that kind of thing, and your estate itself is such an 
 untouched mine, that there can be no fear of your personal liberty ever being 
 endangered; but I am grievously afraid, I am indeed, that you will be obliged 
 to give up almost everything, give up even Clarencieux ! " 
 
 The words, so deftly strung together to goad and taunt and add misery to 
 misery, wound their pitiless speech, unchecked, with all the fiendish ingenuity 
 of hatred that could not sate itself enough in the vastness of this wreck it 
 wrought. 
 
 Chandos heard them, yet only dimly as men hear in whose ears the noise 
 of great sea-waves is surging. He raised himself erect, rigid in an unnatural 
 calm. Years of ag2 and wretchedness could not have changed his face as this 
 brief moment had changed it; its radiance and its splendor had died out as 
 though the breath of death had passed on it; its ashen white looked ghastlier 
 beside the ball-room gayety of his dress, and in the stillness that followed the 
 loud, slow, labored beatings of his heart were audible, each throb a pang. 
 " You swear that this is truth ? " 
 
 His voice was broken and strained, like the voice of a man just arisen from 
 a bed ot lengthened sickness; and his hot lips had parted twice before words 
 came to them.
 
 CHANDOS. 179 
 
 " To the uttermost letter." 
 
 Chandos' head dropped as though he had been suddenly stabbed; all the 
 vigor and grace and perfection of his frame seemed to wither and grow old; a 
 shudder, such as the limbs shiver with involuntarily under some unendurable 
 bodily torment of the flames or of the knife, shook him from head to foot. 
 
 " Clarencieux lost ! O God ! " 
 
 The words died in his throat, the stifled cry of a vain agony for his lost 
 birthright. This alone, through all the blindness and the stupor of misery that 
 had fallen on him, rose out clear before him in its burning torture, the pas- 
 sionate yearning of his heart towards his home. 
 
 As the flare of a torch suddenly shows the abyss that yawns beneath the 
 traveller's feet, so the glare and the shame of the sentence he heard showed 
 him the bottomless desolation over which he stood. He was awakened from 
 his dreamful ease to be flung face to face with an absolute despair. For the 
 moment strength gave way, manhood was shattered down, consciousness itself 
 could keep no hold on life; the lights of the chamber reeled in giddy gyrations 
 round him, a sound like rushing waters beat in on his brain, a darkness like the 
 darkness of death fell upon him. He swayed forward, like a drunken man, 
 against the broad marble ledge above the hearth; his hands instinctively 
 clenched on the stone as the hands of those sinking to their grave down the 
 glassy slope of an Alpine mountain clench on the ice-ridge that they meet; his 
 head sunk on his arms, the suffocated labor of each breath panted out on the 
 silence like a death-spasm: at one stroke he was bereaved of all ! 
 
 His torturer looked on. Never in the cells of the Inquisition could Fran- 
 ciscan or Dominican have watched the gradual wrenching of the rack, the 
 winding-out of the strained limbs till they broke, the wringing and bruising 
 and slaying of the quivering nerves till they could bear no more, as Trevenna 
 watched this moral torment, this assassination of joy and honor, peace and 
 love and fame, and every fair thing of a gracious world, laid desert and deso- 
 late at his word. He looked on, as in the legends of the early Church devils 
 looked on at the impotent despair of those whose souls they had lured and 
 tempted and meshed in their net and made their own. He looked on, and was 
 repaid. 
 
 " Chandos," he said, gravely, almost softly, pouring the last drop of burn- 
 ing oil into the fresh wound his stab had dealt, " Chandos, believe me, from 
 my soul \ pity you ! " 
 
 He had studied long the nature of the man now in his power, and he knew 
 the keenest sting to give. Yet for once his greed erred in its mark; the last 
 bolt shortened the hour of his rich, insatiate enjoyment. 
 
 It roused Chandos as the bay of the pack rouses the dying stag from its 
 mortal throes to stagger up and drag its bleeding limbs to solitude, where it can
 
 180 
 
 OU IDA'S WORKS. 
 
 die alone. It pierced his stupefaction; it told him more widely than all other 
 words could tell, how mighty was his fall, how utter his desolation. 
 
 This man pitied him ! He raised himself with a sudden force; the pride of 
 his race was not dead in him, and the same courage in the teeth of calamity, 
 which had sent the last marquis with a smile to the Tower scaffold, was in him 
 now under the lash of his dependant's mockery of compassion. His face was 
 strangely and terribly calm, but a premature age seemed to have withered all 
 life from it; his lips were colorless, and on his forehead alone the dark con- 
 gested blood flushed heavily, red and burning as in the heat of fever. 
 
 " If this be the truth," he said, hoarsely, while his throat was parched and 
 almost voiceless, " you have had little mercy in the telling ! Go; take the 
 town your story; it will startle them. Spare more of it to me ! " 
 
 The words were spoken with a tranquillity more horrible than the fiercest 
 outbreaks of delirium or the most hopeless abandonment of woe. He 
 stood as, in the days of Philip the Fair, one of his race had stood to be bound 
 to the Templars' pyre; his hand was clenched on the marble ledge, and every 
 now and then a quick shudder ran through all his limbs, shaking him as with the 
 shudder of an icy cold; but his eyes were dry, and fronted his tormenter 
 with a look under which the other shrank, and no sign or sigh of pain es- 
 caped him. 
 
 Trevenna moved slightly; he could not meet the gaze of those calm, tear- 
 less eyes, from whose depths there looked so wide a world of unuttered re- 
 proach, of unuttered agony. 
 
 " Chandos, Chandos, there will be no need for me to tell the town; it will 
 be whispered soon enough ! Would you give the task to your debtor, your 
 guest, your friend? No ! There are too many who will take it fast enough. 
 Leave it to the men you have outrivalled and the women you have forsaken ; 
 those are the glib tongues for such a theme! As for mercy 'in the telling, 
 what mercy can the man show who has to bring his death-warrant to another ? 
 I would have warned you long ago, and you would not be warned. Is it my 
 fault that you have wasted your princely substance and are a beggar now ? 
 Oh, my friend, there is no error in this thing save your own." 
 
 He toyed too long with the theme that was so sweet to him; he counted too 
 surely on the endurance of the man he lashed and stung and stretched upon the 
 rack of his subtle mockery of pity and of sympathy; there was a latent force 
 he had not known, a latent passion he had not divined, in the pleasure-steeped 
 softness of his victim's nature. 
 
 Chandos gave a forward gesture, like a maddened animal rising to its spring; 
 he did not reel, or stagger, or let escape one sign of the anguish within him, 
 but he stood there upon his desolated hearth erect, brought to bay as the deer 
 by the sleuth-hounds, livid to the lips, with only the blood burning like fire
 
 CHAN DOS. 181 
 
 across his brow, his golden hair dashed back disordered, his eyes proud and 
 fearless even in their misery. It was no longer Alcibiades amidst the gay 
 levity, the dreamy languor, the fragrant rose-crowns, and the laurel-wreathed 
 amphorae of the revels of his youth; it was Alcibiades, grander in his fall than 
 in his reign, facing alone the dead cold of the winter's night and the un- 
 sheathed circle of his assassins' steel, until they cowed and fell asunder and 
 pierced him with dastard surety afar off with the arrows of the Bactrian bows. 
 He raised his right hand and pointed to the door. 
 
 "If you are man, not devil, let me be ! Go ! I command you! Go ! " 
 
 Bold though they were, his torturer's eyes could not meet hts; victorious 
 though he was, Trevenna dared not dispute that bidding; insatiate though his 
 greed for this exhaustless triumph would still have been for hour upon hour, 
 he was forced to obey that gesture of command. Mastiff-like both in courage 
 and ferocity, he was still driven out as a murderous animal is driven out by the 
 will it reads in a human gaze. He longed to linger there the whole night 
 through, and ring every change upon that note of ruin, and watch every spasm 
 of the overburdened life, and turn every screw and wheel in that rack on which 
 he stretched his friend. But he dared not; he felt that he must leave his work 
 to bear its fruit and harvest of misery unwatched; he knew it as the murderers 
 of Alcibiades knew that none could come near, with life, to the menaced danger 
 and the mighty woe that looked unquailing on them from the flaming eyes of 
 the roused Sybarite, the discrowned idol, the awakened Epicurean, called out 
 in the dead of night to stand face to face with his destruction. The hirelings of 
 Pharnabazus slew the Greek; Trevenna, less merciful, left the living man to suffer 
 
 The velvet swept down behind him, the door closed, and he drew it softly 
 after him; then he paused in the stillness of the breaking dawn that was rising 
 on all the sleeping world without, and listened with an expectancy upon his face. 
 
 On the silence he heard a heavy crashing fall, like the fall of a stricken 
 tree; then all was still with the stillness of the grave. 
 
 He smiled; and passed onward through the second door, and down the cor- 
 ridor and staircase of the house that had been opened to him, night and day, 
 with a hospitality that no claims could weary and no exactions chill, and went 
 out through the lighted hall, with its bloom of exotic color and its richness of 
 jasper and porphyry. As he passed the statue of the great minister standing 
 there, white and majestic, amidst the foliage of American plants and the glow 
 of Eastern flowers, he looked upward to the sculptured face with a glance of 
 triumph, of achievement, of satisfied revenge, that in the intensity of its evil and 
 its cruelty was almost grand by the sheer force of strength and purpose. 
 
 " Monseigneur, monseigneur," he murmured, in that thirsty exultation, 
 flinging his victory and his mockery in the face of the lifeless marble, " how is 
 it with your beloved one now ? "
 
 182 OUIDA'S WORKS 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 "TOUT EST PERDU, FORS I/HONNEUR.' 
 
 THE morning sun straying fitfully in through the thick leafy shades and trel- 
 lised creepers of the winter garden beyond, as the day rose high and bright 
 over a busy waking world, found the ruined man lying where he had fallen, 
 struck down by the blow that had beggared him of all, as a cedar is struck 
 by the lightning. He lay there insensible to all except his agony, his hands 
 clenched upon the leopard skins that strewed his hearth, his brain heavy with 
 the pent blood that seemed on fire. 
 
 The shock had fallen on his life as suddenly as, in tropic latitudes, the black 
 tempestuous night falls down upon the shadowless day. Yesterday he had been 
 rich in every earthly treasure; to-day he was beggared, shamed, dishonored. 
 Ruin ! it was upon him like the vague, confused horror of a nightmare whose 
 bonds he could not break; he could not realize its despair nor measure its de- 
 solation; he felt like one drugged with opiate poisons that bring a thousand 
 loathsome shapes thronging between their dreamer and the light of day and the 
 world of men. He had been a stranger to the mere pain of transient human 
 sorrow; he was stunned to unconsciousness by the world-wide misery that felled 
 him down at a stroke as the iron mace fells an ox. Hours passed; he knew 
 nothing of their flight; the gas burned in the chandeliers above him, still shed- 
 ding its flood of light that looked garish and yellow beside the brightness of 
 morning that streamed in from the garden beyond. There was profound silence 
 round him, broken by nothing save the monotonous murmur of the fountains 
 falling yonder; the faint noise of the streets could not penetrate here, and the 
 sounds of the moving household were shut out in a deathly stillness. He was 
 left to the solitude which was all the mercy that life now could give him. The 
 dog alone was with him, and crouched, patient and watchful, moaning now and 
 then with sympathic pain for the misery it could not comprehend, and gathered 
 close against him where he lay. 
 
 As the sun grew brighter in the palm and flower isles beyond, the retriever 
 tried to rouse him, as on a battle-field dogs will essay to waken their slaughtered 
 masters; it thrust its muzzle against his hands, and laid its broad head 
 against the disordered richness of his hair, moaning with piteous entreaty and 
 fond, dumb caress. At last the patient efforts moved him; he looked up in the 
 dog's eyes with a blind, bewildered gaze, and rose slowly and staggering to his 
 feet, like a man feeble from protracted illness. He had no clear memory of 
 what had passed: he could have recalled nothing, save that one word in which 
 all was told, " ruin ! "
 
 CHAN DOS. 183 
 
 He looked mechanically round the familiar beauty of the chamber; the 
 hues of the pictures, the grace of the sculpture, the lavish luxury of every detail, 
 the peace and fairness of the charmed tranquillity, seemed so many mockeries 
 of his woe. In the midst of wealth he stood a beggared man: with the world at 
 his feet yesterday, he stood now dispossessed of every earthly thing. 
 
 He had sold his birthright for ten years' delight ! And not of the world, 
 not of his wealth, not of the fame of his name and the worship of men, not even 
 of the woman whom he loved, did he think in that first moment of awaking to 
 this mighty desolation that had fallen on him: it was of the trust of his fathers 
 that he had forfeited, of the home of his race that he had lost. 
 
 Esau-like, he had bartered his kingly heritance for the sensuous pleasures 
 of an hour; and the' sole memory that lived through the stupor of his brain 
 were those brief, brutal words that devils seemed to hiss forever in his ear, 
 You have lost all ! " 
 
 A convulsion shook his limbs; a great voiceless sob rose in his throat; his 
 head drooped upon his arms, veiling his face as the Romans veiled theirs before 
 outrage and calamity. " O my God ! my God ! " he prayed, in his agony, 
 
 "give me death, not this ! " 
 
 ******* 
 
 The only mercy life had left him the privilege to suffer in solitude could 
 be his but a brief space. After the bitterness of the night followed the worse 
 bitterness of the risen day, when its witnesses must come about him, when its 
 wretched tale must be wrung on his ear in all its changes; when the world must 
 flood in to wonder, to smile, to sigh, to censure, and, yet worse, to pity; when 
 the condemned must go out to the cross, to be stretched and nailed and lifted 
 up in crucifixion within sight of the gathered crowds. When he remembered 
 all these things, it seemed to him more than life could bear to go through them; 
 when he slowly roused to the real meaning of this beggary that had suddenly 
 seized him in the midst of his joyous and magnificent existence, he recoiled 
 from its endurance with a sickening shudder, as the bravest man will recoil from 
 the approach of a drawn-out and excruciating death. 
 
 Once the thought passed him, Why meet it ? Why await this living grave 
 which yawned for him, when the re' ; ; of the dead might be taken, the blank, 
 best silence of the tomb be ' .0, instead of the world's pillory and the exile's 
 wretchedness ? 
 
 Close at his v ' ^a lay the pistols to which his torturer had referred with a 
 jest that m : at be his tempting; they were loaded to the muzzle, as they had 
 been carelessly laid down the morning previous, after an hour's pistol-shooting 
 in his gardens below with a gay party. His grasp mechanically closed on one 
 of them. Over and over again, in his serene security of happiness, he had 
 smiled and said he would not live to brook a single hour of pain; the jest had
 
 184 OUIDA'S WORKS. 
 
 become a terrible reality. One touch, one moment's blindness, then oblivion; 
 the world and his own ruin would be as naught, powerless to sting or harm. 
 Were it not better than to live on to face all that must come to him with the 
 rising day ? The old weary wonder of Hamlet, that pursues every mind through 
 every age, rose in him now; the old, eternal, never-answered question came to 
 him as it comes to so many: Why live, when every breath of life is pain ? 
 
 For a moment his worst foe was nigh the fulfilment of his worst wish ; for 
 a moment, in the devastation of every hope and every possession, death and 
 its escape allured him with a horrible force. All that made life worth the liv- 
 ing was dead in him; the body only was left to perish: why leave breath in it, 
 when to breathe was only to prolong and to intensify an anguish without hope ? 
 For a moment he lifted the weapon up, and pressed the cold ring of its steel 
 tube against his brow; its chill touch was the only kiss left to him now, the only 
 caress of pity he could know. His head sunk down against it, leaning on its 
 mouth as it had used to lean on the softly-beating hearts of women who loved 
 him. A moment, and his dead limbs would have been stretched there on his 
 hearth in such a close to the history of his life as would have sated even the 
 lust of his unrelenting foe. 
 
 A ray of the sun, straying in across the yellow heat of the chandelier- 
 lights, fell across the white features of a bust that stood at the far end of the 
 chamber, the same features and the same sculpture as the statue to which 
 Trevenna had murmured valediction. The light illumined the marble, giving 
 to the mouth almost breath, to the eyes almost life, with its sweet spring-day 
 warmth. Chandos saw it as his eyes stared vacantly and without sense into 
 the empty space. 
 
 His arm dropped; his hand unloosed its hold; he laid the weapon down 
 unused. 
 
 He had treasured his father's memory, he had venerated his father's fame, 
 with a great love that no time weakened. He remembered how his father once 
 had bidden him make " the people honor him for his own sake; " and he was 
 about to die a dog's death by his own act, lacking the courage to rise and meet 
 the fate that his own madness brought him ! 
 
 With that memory the temptation pa -d. Philip Chandos had died, like 
 Chatham, in his nation's cause; the last marqu^ ^ad died upon the scaffold to 
 save his honor from forfeit, and those who had trustc/ him from betrayal; he 
 would not put beside those deaths the history of a suicide's J: 1 '. 
 
 Such as his doom was he accepted it. 
 
 He rose and walked towards the window, with the uncertain, tremulous gait 
 of a man dead-drunk. He drew the heavy curtains aside and looked out with 
 aching, scorching eyes. The hum of the streets in the distance rolled in on 
 the morning air; the faint busy noises of life came across the stillness of the
 
 CHAN DOS. 185 
 
 gardens; a clock was striking twelve. Each sound, each murmur, every echo 
 of the existence stirring round him, every shiver of the linden leaves near him, 
 throbbed through his brain as though they were clanging, jangling iron strokes 
 of deafening bells; every sense and pulse of living things came to him with an 
 excruciating pain, like the touch of a knife on a bared nerve. The day was at 
 its height; solitude could be no longer possible. Even now the woman whom 
 he loved watched for his coming; in a few hours his world awaited him; even 
 that very night, all that was highest and fairest in the land was bidden to his 
 house; even that very night, the fame and fashion of his name were to give 
 success to the crippled artist's best-beloved creation. The world looked for 
 him; to be alone was too rich a luxury, too merciful a sentence. He must go 
 out and endure this thing which had come to him in the broadness of daylight, 
 in the sight of all men. 
 
 As memory rushed on him of all that must be borne, of all that had been 
 lost, he bent his head as though under the weight of some insupportable bodily 
 burden; a sickness of horror was upon him; he strove to realize all that was 
 ended for him, and he could not. Only yesterday his hands had been filled 
 with every fairest gift of life; he could not bring himself to know that they were 
 now stricken as empty as the outstretched hands of any beggar sitting at his gate. 
 
 The paralysis of an absolute despair fell on him, mute, tearless, unmoved, 
 the rigidity that falls on mind and brain and heart under the pressure of 
 some immeasurable adversity. 
 
 He had to hear the worst; with the rising day came all the day's course 
 must unfold. He could not have the partial peace of loneliness; he could not 
 have such comparative mercy as those have who, bereaved of what they love, 
 know their doom at once and can seek solitude to bear it. Step by step, letter 
 by letter, he must pass through every detail of his desolation; and, soon or 
 late, publicity must proclaim it to all who should choose to listen. He could 
 have no rest, no pause, no reprieve; his misery had hunted him down, and 
 must be met and faced. 
 
 The sun shining in through the gas-light, that burned dull and lustreless in 
 the noonday, shone on the diamonds glittering on his dress; his eyes fell on 
 them as, in the extremity of wretchedness, the mind will strangely play with 
 some trifle of which it has no consciousness. He looked at them dreamily, 
 and wondered why he wore them: a blank had fallen between him and every 
 memory; it seemed a lifetime since the night just passed; it seemed as though 
 the life that was parted from him by a few hours only had been destroyed for 
 an eternity. Yet with the sight of them came one remembrance; he heard, as 
 if it stole on his ear now, the low whisper of the lips he loved, as they had 
 murmured, " Come to me to-morrow," murmured it with the softness of a 
 good-night blush, with the lingering light of sweet eyes of farewell !
 
 18 e OUIDA'S WORKS. 
 
 The morrow was now to-day. How had it dawned for each . 
 
 * * * * * * 
 
 He had to hear the worst. In this thing there could be no delay; under 
 this sentence there could be no waiting-point of preparation or of hope. He 
 must meet the gaze of other men, and listen while their voices coldly told the 
 story of his ruin. 
 
 He bade them come and tell him all, to the furthest letter of his doom. 
 Despair is often bitterly calm; it was so now with him. In solitude, nature had 
 given way, and sunk prostrated; before another's eyes, pride supplied the place 
 of strength, and lent him its fictitious force. He met his fate as the last max- 
 quis had met his; and in the sight of men the enervated Epicurean showed the 
 steel-like endurance of the Spartan. With the noon Trevenna returned, as a 
 hound returns to the slot of his quarry, when once loosed from the coursing- 
 slip that has held it back perforce. He re-entered the chamber as soon as per- 
 mission came to him. He was the holder of all papers, the comptroller of all 
 finance, the director of all affairs, connected with the Clarencieux properties; 
 with him, even more than with the lawyers, lay the knowledge of all their 
 minutiae; through him, more than through any, must come the unfolding of 
 the million things that went to make up the one vast sum of destruction. He 
 could not be driven out from the scene of his work; for, by him alone could 
 the thousand meshes of the net which, unseen and unsuspected, he had woven, 
 be traced and moved. He had secured more than his victory and his ven- 
 geance; he had secured the imperative necessity that he should behold the 
 fruits of both. 
 
 Yet even he, evil as was the brute greed in him, pitiless as was the envious 
 hatred which scarcely success could slake, started, as he entered again the 
 room he had changed from its dreamful peace into a torture-chamber as terrible 
 as any that the will of Torquemada ever shut in with iron-clamped walls and 
 filled with human misery, started at sight of the wreck that he had wrought. 
 Last night he had looked upon Chandos in the full brilliance of his youth, of 
 his splendor, of his fashion, of his shadowless content; he saw him now broken, 
 exhausted, aged, altered as the flight of twenty peaceful years could never have 
 changed him. He was still in the court-dress of the ball he had quitted when 
 his fate fell on him: its richness was disordered, its lace crushed and soiled, its 
 ribbon-knots and broideries tangled; but its jewelled elegance set in deadlier 
 contrast the haggard whiteness of his face, the shattered look of his whole form; 
 it marked in ghastlier contrast what he had been and what he was. 
 
 But "calamity is man's true touchstone," as Beaumont and Fletcher wrote. 
 Met by misfortune, he who had shunned every shadow and every weariness 
 with all the indolence and fastidiousness of the voluptuary faced it with a proud 
 serenity from which no confession of suffering was wrung.
 
 CHANDOS. 187 
 
 The gas was still burning in all the crystal globes and silver branches as 
 Trevenna entered. Chandos had no sense of the things that were about him, 
 of the dress he wore, of the passage of the noonday hours; and his household, 
 who felt that some great adversity had suddenly befallen him, dared not venture 
 nigh unsummoned. He stood against the hearth as his guest advanced; his 
 eyes were bloodshot, his hair disordered and damp with the dew of his fore- 
 head; his face was bloodless: beyond these, he "gave no sign." 
 
 Trevenna stretched out his hand in their old friendship and familiarity of 
 greeting. Chandos did not give his own: he looked at Trevenna with a tran- 
 quil lingering gaze; if there were reproach in it, the reproach remained other- 
 wise unspoken. 
 
 " Tell me all," he said, briefly; and his voice, faint though it was, did not 
 falter. 
 
 For one instant his traitor was silent, baffled and wonder-struck. 
 
 Fine as were his intuition and insight into character, he had made an error 
 common with men of his mold; he had undervalued a nature it was impossible 
 he could comprehend. Studying the weaknesses of his patron's temper, he had 
 not perceived that they were rather on the surface than ingrained; he had dis- 
 dained the facility that had lent Chandos so willing a tool into his hands, the 
 gentleness, the frankness, the generosity, the unsuspecting pliability of temper; 
 he had looked with contempt on the imaginative, idealic mind and the effem- 
 inate softness of the man he hated. He had never perceived that there were 
 qualities beneath these that might leap to life in an instant, if once roused; he 
 had never dreamed that Alcibiades the voluptuary could ever become Alci- 
 biades the warrior. Had he found Chandos shot by his own hand, in the light 
 of the young day, he would have felt no surprise; he would have thought the 
 close in fitting keeping with the tenor of his career; to find him braced to look 
 his desolation calmly in the face staggered, and almost unnerved him. 
 
 But in an instant he recovered himself. The ruin was complete; and it 
 should go hard, he thought, if to it he did not drive his victim to add dishonor ! 
 
 With the concise rapidity of a mind trained to precis-writing and to logical 
 analysis and compression, he had every detail clear as the daylight, proved to 
 the letter; and he showed with mathematical exactitude that everything was 
 gone. His papers were of the plainest, his accounts the most perfectly audited, 
 his representation of others' statements lucid to a marvel. If he had been 
 opening a budget to a crowded House, he could not have more finely mingled 
 conciseness with comprehensiveness, geometrical exactitude with unerring 
 quotation, than now when he came to prove the hopelessness of his best friend's 
 beggary. 
 
 Hopeless it was. The inheritance which Chandos and his world had thought 
 so secure and so exhaustless had melted away asa summer evening's golden
 
 188 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 pomp and color fade, till not a line of light is left to show where once it glowed. 
 It was the old, worn-out, ever-recurring story of endless imprudence, of abso- 
 lute destruction. If other hands had woven half the meshes of the net spread 
 round him, if other hands had spread their snares and temptings to make the 
 fatal descent the surer, if any villany were in this thing, there was no trace that 
 could even hint it. It might even have been said that the best had been done, 
 with patient labor, to arrest the downward and irresistible course of a blind and 
 unthinking extravagance, and done wisely and toilsomely, though in vain. 
 
 It was true, as he had stated, that Chandos had lived at a rate of expendi- 
 ture quadrupling his income; vast sums had been drawn out without thought 
 or inquiry, and in many cases there was no record of why or how they had been 
 used. He had lived with prodigal munificence; his houses had been as open, 
 night and day, to all who choose to enjoy their hospitality, as the palace of 
 Philip of Burgundy: his gold had been ever ready to aid his friend or to assist 
 his foe. None had come to him for help and gone from him empty-handed; 
 he had relieved the necessities of other men, without a memory that they might 
 recoil on him and become his own. His households had been very large, and 
 utterly unchecked; the maitres-d'hotel, the butlers, the heads of every office, 
 had exercised their own choice in the magnitude of their expenditure. No in- 
 quiry had ever been made as to the cost of all the princely entertainments for 
 which each one of his residences had alike been noted. He had given money, 
 drawn money, scattered money, as he was asked; and the indulgence in every 
 fancy, and the ignorance of all wealth's worth, which were the fruit of the 
 habits he had been bred in from his earliest childhood, he made him as uncon- 
 scious that he was sapping the very root and foundation of his whole fortunes 
 as the madman of the ancient fable, who sawed asunder the branch on which 
 he rested and which alone held him suspended above a bottomless abyss. 
 
 It was true, as Trevenna had said, that, having but ordinary possessions of 
 an English gentleman (and much of Clarencieux was rendered, by its very 
 dower of wild beauty, in beach and rock and forest wilderness, profitless in a 
 monetary sense), he had spent his years as though he had been a sovereign -with 
 an exhaustless treasury. He had given as royally, he had paid as lavishly, he 
 had bought in every delicate gem or priceless picture, he had offered his aid to 
 every unfriended talent or merit, as though he had had, not the rent-roll of 
 Clarencieux, but the exchequer of two kingdoms as the ever-filling well from 
 which to draw. 
 
 This having been done through ten years of an uncheckered life, there was 
 no wonder in the crash that followed it. No warning had arrested him midway 
 in its ruinous course; Trevenna had uttered none, and the remonstrance of any 
 other could only have reached him through Trevenna's medium. 
 
 The whole mass of the fortune was expended; the debt-pressure had accu-
 
 CHANDOS. 189 
 
 mulated to an enormous extent. Who could say where what was scattered was 
 gone ? Who could check now the piled-up bills of hirelings and kitchen-chiefs ? 
 Who could tell now whether all the great sums paid had been paid rightly ? 
 Who could know whether the items of that magnificent prodigality were justly 
 scored down or not ? It would have been as hopeless a task to thread the buried 
 intricacies of all these things as to take the Danai'ds' labors and seek to fill 
 with the waters of a too-late prudence the bottomless vessels through which 
 this lost wealth had been poured. 
 
 Trevenna, indeed, had every detail at his fingers' end. He ran through 
 them as rapidly and as accurately as though he told the details of a new tax to 
 the benches. He showed how, when he had first come to share any manage- 
 ment of these matters, the locust-swarm had already eaten far into the fair 
 birthright that Philip Chandos had bequeathed. He failed to show why he 
 had not forced the bitter knowledge on his friend's careless ease in time to save 
 much, though not all: yet even this discrepancy in his narrative he glossed 
 over with an orator's skill, a tactician's sophistry, until he seemed throughout 
 it to have been the one steadfast, wise, and unheeded Artabanus who had vainly 
 stood by the side of the crowned Xerxes and pleaded with him not to fling 
 riches and honor and life into the grave of the devouring ^Egean. 
 
 Chandos heard in unbroken silence. 
 
 Gigantic sums were numbered and added before him in gigantic confusion. 
 Tables of figures and of estimates were placed before his eyes, and told 
 him nothing, save that their sum-total was bankruptcy ! He had never known 
 or asked the cost of the pleasures he enjoyed; he had never speculated on the 
 worth of all the luxuries by which he had been surrounded from his infancy. 
 His mind had never been trained to balance the comparisons of receipt and 
 expenditure. He could have told, to a marvel of accuracy, whether a picture, 
 a statue, a cameo, was worth its price, through the fineness of a connoisseur's 
 judgment; but beyond these he knew no more than any child-Dauphin in the 
 Bourbon age what was the value of all the things which made up the amusement 
 and adornment of his life. A man well skilled in finance finds it a hopeless 
 task to glean the truth of squandered moneys. To him only one thing could 
 stand out clear and immutable, the fact that all was gone. It was impossible 
 for him to dispute the mass of evidence heaped before him, as impossible 
 also to dispute the mass of debt that was brought before him. He had 
 believed that no creditor had ever had claim on him for a day; but, now that 
 the demands were made, he could not prove they were undue. Of receipts, of 
 accounts he had never given a thought: his agents and his stewards had been 
 allowed carte blanche to do as they would; they could not be blamed for hav- 
 ing used the power, and there was no evidence that they had abused it. The 
 demands of the debts were vast; there was not a witness that could be brought
 
 190 
 
 OU IDA'S WORKS. 
 
 to their injustice or their illegality. There was nothing with which to face 
 or to deny them; they must devour as they would. He heard in unbroken 
 silence. Once alone he spoke: it was as the name of Tindall & Co., the bill- 
 discounting firm, among his creditors, came into sight, pressing for heavy sums. 
 " How are they among the swarm? " he said, with that unnatural serenity which 
 he had preserved throughout the interview unmoved still. " I never in my life 
 borrowed gold, either of Jew or Christian." 
 
 For an instant the face of his tormentor flushed slightly with the same 
 transient emotion of shame which had moved him in the portrait-gallery of 
 Clarencieux. 
 
 " For yourself ? Perhaps not to your own knowledge," he answered, 
 promptly; "but for your friends you have many a time. How many bills you 
 have accepted for men in momentary embarrassment ! In nine cases out of 
 ten these bills have never been met by those in whose favor they were drawn. 
 They have always been popular with the trade. Your signature was thought 
 the signature of so rich a man ! This firm has bought in most of that floating 
 paper, and has taken its own time to press for payment: that time has come at 
 last. There lies your writing; the bills cannot be dishonored without dishonor- 
 ing you. No loan was ever so costly to its lender as that loan which looks so 
 slight at first, the loan of your mere name ! " 
 
 Chandos heard him calmly still. The extremity of misery had reached 
 him, and the peace of absolute hopelessness was on him. 
 
 "You say, 'perhaps not to my own knowledge;' unknown to me, then, 
 have I borrowed moneys of these usurers ? " 
 
 " Once or twice lately, yes. Forgive me, Chandos, if in my zeal to screen 
 or save you I plunged you deeper into this chaos. You sent over for great 
 sums to be lodged in Turkish and Athenian banks, whilst you were abroad this 
 winter: you wrote to me to lodge them there. I knew that if I sent, on your 
 bidding, to your own bankers, the amounts you required from time to time 
 would overdraw by thousands the little left of your original capital, and that 
 the bank would inform you of your improvidence without delay or preparation. 
 I could not tell how to spare you; and I always persuaded myself that in some 
 way or other mainly, I thought, by some very high marriage you would re- 
 build your shattered fortunes; I went to these Tindall people; I effected ar- 
 rangements with them to supply you with the moneys. They held my acknow- 
 ledgements for the amounts till you returned; they knew me, and they knew you. 
 When you came back, you may remember, I brought you papers to sign at 
 Clarencieux, and pressed you to give me a business interview. You would not 
 wait and hear me, you never would ; you signed ; and I had not heart or courage, 
 I confess, to tell you then at how terrible a pass things were with you. I did 
 wrong; I admit it frankly. I was guilty of what I should call the most villa-
 
 CHANDOS. 191 
 
 nous procrastination in another man; but I knew it was too late to save you. 
 I was willing to let you have as long a repreive in your soft pleasures as I could; 
 and until your engagement with the Lady Valencia I always thought that some 
 distinguished and rich alliance would restore the balance of your affairs. And 
 there is this much to be said for it: the error I committed in essaying to save 
 you added but very, very little to the mountain already raised of inextricable 
 debts and difficulties. It only gave you six months more of peace: you, 
 self-indulgent as you have been, would have deemed even those worth pur- 
 chasing." 
 
 The sophistries were deftly spoken. To a man more aware of business 
 customs and of monetary negotiations, Trevenna would have been too astute 
 to offer such an untenable and unlikely explanation; with Chandos the discre- 
 pancies passed unnoted, because he knew nothing of the method of pecuniary 
 transactions. All he had known had been to draw money and to have it. But, 
 though the financial errors passed him, his instinct led him to feel the falsity 
 and the hollowness of the arguments to himself. Suspicion was utterly foreign 
 to him; his attachment to Trevenna was genuine and of long date; doubt forced 
 itself slowly in on a nature to which it was alien: yet a vague loathing of this 
 man, who had let him go on unwarned to his destruction, began to steal on 
 him; a disbelief in his friend wound its way into his thoughts with an abhorrent 
 strength. It had been there when he had refused his hand in the day's accus- 
 tomed greeting. 
 
 His eyes dwelt on Trevenna now with a strange wistfulness, rather reproach 
 than rebuke, a look which mutely said, " Is it thee, Brutus ? " 
 
 "I understand," he said, simply; "you have betrayed me ! " 
 
 For the instant his traitor's eyes dropped, his cheek flushed, his conscience 
 smote him. Under the accusation of the man to whom he owed all, and whom 
 he had pursued with a bloodhound's lust, the baseness of his own treachery 
 rose up for a single moment before his own sight. But it passed; he even 
 frankly met the eyes whose silent reproach condemned him more utterly -than 
 any words. 
 
 " Betrayed ? Do you take me for a second Iscariot ? Betrayed ! how so ? 
 Because I tried to save you pain with means that proved at best fallacious ? 
 Because I was guilty of an error of judgment that I frankly regret and as frankly 
 condemn ? No ! blame me as you will, I may have deserved it; but accuse me 
 of disloyality you shall not. If every one had been as faithful to you, Ernest, 
 as I have been, you would not now hear the history of your own ruin." 
 
 There was a grim, ironic truth in the inverted meaning of the last sentence 
 that the temper of the speaker relished with cynical humor. If others had been 
 as faithful to Chandos in friendship as he had been in hatred, the positions of 
 both would have indeed been changed.
 
 192 
 
 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 Chandos answered nothing; his eyes still rested with the same look on the 
 man whom he had defended through all evil report and enriched with such un- 
 tiring gifts. The truth of his own nature instinctively felt the falsity of the 
 loyality avowed him; yet that such black ingratitude could live in men as would 
 be present here were his doubt real, took longer than these few hours more 
 evidence even than these testimonies to be believed by him. He had loved 
 humanity, and thought well of it, and served it with unexhausted charity. 
 
 Trevenna moved slightly; hardened and tempered as was the steel of his 
 bright, bold audacity, even he could not bear the voiceless rebuke that asked 
 still, " Et tu, Brute ? " 
 
 "Let us speak of the future," he said, rapidly; "we have seen that the 
 past is hopeless and irremediable. You know the worst now; how do you 
 propose to meet it ? " 
 
 " You have said already, all must go." 
 
 The same perfect tranquillity was in the reply; it was the ossification of 
 despair. 
 
 " True, even Clarencieux." 
 
 The deadliest words that he had spoken in the past night ! he could not 
 resist the choice of them again. He knew the sharpest torture he could inflict 
 lay in them. 
 
 An irrepressible shudder shook his listener's limbs, but he bent his head in 
 unchanged silence. 
 
 " And will the woman you love not go with the rest ? " 
 
 Chandos moved involuntarily, so that his face was in the shadow. 
 
 " She will be given her freedom." 
 
 Trevenna looked at him with the same impatient amaze with which he had 
 started as he had entered the chamber. He could not realize that the voluptuary 
 whose weakness he had so long studied, that the pleasure-seeker whose poco- 
 curantism had so long been the subject of his scorn, could be the man who 
 answered him now, thus calm in his endurance. 
 
 " But, if she love you, she will not take it. If all that you poets say of 
 the sex be true, she will cling but the closer to you in your fallen fortunes. 
 What think you ! I, I confess, doubt it. She is so poor; she is so ambitious; 
 she has so sought the restoration of your marquisate ! " 
 
 Chandos stretched out his hand; his breath caught as with the pang of one 
 who can endure no more. 
 
 " It matters nothing to speak of this. I have heard your worst tidings; now 
 leave me for a space." 
 
 " No; hear me yet a little longer. I fancy I see a way to spare you some 
 portion, at least, of your inheritance, and to spare you at least this loveliness 
 you covet. Will you listen ? "
 
 CHANDOS. 193 
 
 He made a gesture of assent. Hope was dead in him; but he was passive 
 through the very exhaustion of extreme suffering. 
 
 " See here ! " pursued his tempter. " If you go to her and say, < I am a 
 beggared man,' will her tenderness remain with you ? You know her best. I 
 trust it may; but, frankly, my friend, I fear ! She loves you; yes, all women do. 
 She loves you as well as she can love; but she loves power more. Tell her of 
 this thing which has overtaken you, and I believe she will be lost to you forever." 
 
 Chandos shrank from the words. 
 
 " Leave me ! let me be ! It avails nothing " 
 
 " Yes, it does. Why need she know it? " 
 
 The question stole out, tempting and alluring as the sophistries that 
 beguiled Faust. 
 
 " Why ? " He re-echoed the word almost in stupor. 
 
 " Ah, why ? Who need tell her ? Listen here. I can temporize with your 
 creditors for a little while. Each does not know how heavy the claims of the 
 rest are, and none wholly suspect hell-hounds though they be how complete 
 is your beggary. Your marriage is fixed for an early date from this; let the 
 settlements be drawn up as they would have been, and the ceremony concluded. 
 A marriage, even though to a penniless bride, will throw your creditors off their 
 cast. They will believe you are secure, or would you wed with one so portion- 
 less? You can leave for abroad on your marriage-day; I fancy I could quiet 
 them enough to let you go. Take the Clarencieux diamonds with you. Mean- 
 while I will send off, under divers names and in secret, many treasures of 
 yours, that will pass out of England unknown to those who have these claims, 
 and will be sufficient by their sale to enable you to live in moderate ease, 
 though, it is true, without affluence. The rest you must let go; but you 
 will have secured much, your liberty, your love, and a remnant of your 
 possessions." 
 
 " What ! you would tempt me to dishonor ! " 
 
 The temptation broke down the enforced serenity that Chandos had hitherto 
 borne; the veins swelled out black upon his forehead, a shuddering passion 
 seized him, his voice was hoarse and harsh. 
 
 . " Dishonor ? Whew ! " answered Trevenna, lightly. " Call it so, if you like, 
 / call it common sense. How many men, pray, quit England for their debts, 
 and see nothing but a sensible care-taking for themselves in it ? Doubtless 
 there are in those bills and estimates very heavy overcharges we can't check 
 them now; but I don't doubt there are; maitres d'hotel will cheat, butlers will 
 charge percentage, tradesmen will add compound interest, bill discounter's 
 will demand usurer's toll; if you take a little from them, you only take your 
 own. As regards your fair Queen of Lilies, if she love you, what wrong can 
 you do her? Wed her, and she will be your own; and, granted, she is very 
 
 VOL. ill. 7
 
 194 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 lovely. Go to her now and say, ' I am a beggared, self-outlawed, ruined man/ 
 and you must know as well as I, Chandos, that in a few months' time you will 
 see her given to one of your rival's arms." 
 
 Chandos swept round to face him, the fire of passion flashing into the 
 weary pain of his eyes, the contraction of a great torture in the quivering lines 
 of his lips. 
 
 " Are you a fiend ? You would tempt me to disgrace, after having lured 
 me into ruin ? " 
 
 " Patience, caro mio" said his allurer, softly. " You are hard on your best 
 friend. And dorit be so disdainful. Men stood it while you dazzled the world; 
 but they won't be so passive when the comet has taken its plunge into dark- 
 ness. They'll bear the curb when it pays, but they won't when it don't ! 
 Tempt you ? what is there of ' dishonor ' in what I suggest ? On my life, I see 
 nothing. Last night you knew no more of your ruin than the world knows 
 now; certainly, you are justified in withholding the world from your confidence 
 as long as you choose. Is a man ' dishonored ' because when he holds a bad 
 hand at whist he does not show the cards and tell his ill-luck, but keeps his own 
 counsel and plays the game out in the best way he can ? Your cards are bad 
 now; but you are no more bound to expose them than he. Men are not your 
 keepers, that you are called on to proclaim to them that while you thought 
 yourself a millionnaire you were, in truth, a beggar. You are proud: why give 
 yourself this degradation ? why pillory yourself for public mockery ? You have 
 dazzled them and outshone them: will you bear their laugh and their sneer 
 when the tables are turned ? You have had homage from the highest: will you 
 brook it when the lowest, unpunished, may jeer at your fall ? You have lived 
 with royal brilliance: will you feel no sting when society chatters of how rotten 
 at core was the royalty ? You love with all the blindness of passion: will you 
 feel no sting when the beauty you covet is possessed and enjoyed by another?" 
 
 Blunt, sometimes coarse, in ordinary speech, when he saw occasion Tre- 
 venna could summon both eloquence of language and pursuasiveness of phrase, 
 could wind with subtle tact into the hearts of his listeners and strike surely and 
 softly what bolt he would home. 
 
 Chandos heard him: his head had sunk upon his breast, and from his white, 
 parched lips his breath came in painful, gasping spasms. His agony was 
 mortal; his temptation, for the moment, was very great. 
 
 Subtlely and insidiously the words stole on his ear, goading pride, tortur- 
 ing passion, waking all the longing of desire, lulling and confusing every 
 dictate of honor, like the dreamy potence of a nicotine, till cowardice looked 
 strength, fraud looked wisdom, till a sin seemed just, a lie seemed holy. 
 
 "Because you have forfeited your birthright," pursued his Iscariot, "you 
 are not called on to beggar yourself utterly and to summon the world in to pity
 
 CHAN DOS. 195 
 
 and to jibe you. That which you did not know yourself last night, it can be a 
 small sin not to proclaim to men to-day ! If she loves you, she will thank you 
 that you do not mar her sweetest hours with your own calamity. If she loves 
 you, the blow will fall softer on her if she only learn it when she is your wife, 
 whom no evil can part from you. Conceal your ruin but a few weeks,- a few 
 days, and the woman you covet is yours; proclaim it now, and you will for- 
 feit her, with all the rest that you have gambled away in ten mad years. Do as 
 I say, and her beauty is your own." 
 
 A sigh, wrenched as in a death-pang, alone answered him. Chandos stood, 
 still with his head sunk, and great dews gathered on his brow: honor drifted 
 from his grasp and paled and withered under this devilish tempting; while 
 passion, coiling round his strength, numbed him to all memory, save of his own 
 burning pain, its own imperious dictates. 
 
 "Can you hesitate ?" said Trevenna; and his eyes gleamed with an eager 
 light, as he lured his prey on. " Only withhold for a few days the knowledge 
 you yourself had not last night, and she is given to you; tell it, and some other 
 will taste the sweetness of her lips, and rifle as his own the loveliness you covet. 
 Choose." 
 
 A low moan broke from the man he tortured; he wavered: he almost 
 yielded; he was sorely tempted. 
 
 All his nobler, better instincts were forgotten under the spell of that insid- 
 ious tempting: all he knew was the yearning of his love; all he heard was the 
 subtle voice that bade him take evil as his good, was hung out to him, as the 
 sole price of all he longed for, one single sin, a lie, a sin so venial, as men 
 hold it, a sin so familiar in the world, that every trader's ordinary commerce 
 and every social difficulty's small entanglement is filled with it and solved by it, 
 a sin so slight, as a baneful license has decreed it, yet a sin in his eyes accursed 
 as the vilest of dishonor, a sin, as he deemed it, that would mark him out for- 
 ever an alien to his blood and a disgrace to his name. 
 
 For the instant only it tempted him, tempted him with all the mad long- 
 ing of passion that dulled and dwarfed all other thoughts in its own intensity; 
 then the voluptuary, who had never in his life risen to front a painful thought or 
 to deny desire, had strength to overcome this allurement which came to lead 
 him into shame and evil whilst he was broken and worn out with misery. He 
 lifted his head, and for the moment his voice rang out all faint with pain and 
 want of food and sleep as it was with the old, clear melody of other days: 
 
 " Out of my presence ! Cease to tempt me ! cease to torture me ! By 
 God, I will not yield ! " 
 
 Trevenna bowed, and backed towards the door; he was too careful a tacti- 
 cian to press what was useless, to pursue what was unasked. 
 
 "So be it, monseigneur; I have done ! I spoke but in the roughness of my
 
 196 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 common sense, in the ignorance of my coarser nature of the fine porcelain you 
 haughty gentlemen are made of. I would have served you, had you let me; 
 but since you have such a fancy for flinging yourself to the crying pack, why, 
 it must be so; and they are ready ! You have the last marquis's superb con- 
 solation, ' Tout est perdu, fors Vhonneur! I hope it may content you ! " 
 
 Chandos, from where he stood, crossed the room with a sudden impulse, as 
 a stag, driven from bay, springs at the hounds surrounding him. 
 
 " If it were not tomake you viler than the beasts, I should think it failed 
 to content you and that, after the beggary you have let me drift to without 
 a word of warning, you want to drive me farther yet down into shame and 
 shamelessness ! " 
 
 Trevenna looked at him with a steady, unflinching gaze; he was on his 
 guard now. 
 
 " You speak on the spur of pain, mon prince, and wrong me. I sought to 
 serve you. If my blunter, ruder senses failed to feel the ' dishonor ' your 
 aristocratic blood recoils from, put it down to my failure in delicacy, not to 
 my lack of loyalty. One word more, and I leave you, at your wish. Have 
 you forgotten that this is the day of the new opera, and that all your world will 
 be about you before many hours ? Without you, the opera must fail. Shall I 
 give out that you are ill, and that the matter is postponed ? " 
 
 Chandos shuddered involuntarily, and the nerves of his mouth quivered. 
 All that had befallen him, all that the future held, had never stood out before 
 him in its desolation as now, when he remembered the world. 
 
 " Alter nothing," he said, with an effort. " Let them come." 
 
 " Come ! What ! Can you meet them ? " 
 
 He smiled, a smile more utterly haggard and heart-broken than any 
 sign of grief. There was a meaning in it, too, from whjch the daring and 
 hardy nature of his foe recoiled. 
 
 " I have neither killed myself nor you in these past hours. There is little 
 that will he hard to endure, since I have withheld from that!" 
 
 Trevenna looked upward at him for one glance, then, silenced and with an 
 unfamiliar awe and fear upon him, let fall the heavy velvet and left him once 
 more to his solitude.
 
 CHANDOS. 197 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE LOVE OF WOMAN. 
 
 SUCH temptation as Chandos now resisted is like an ordeal by fire to men 
 of strong will and of braced endurance; with him, formed to yield and to enjoy, 
 to surrender himself to pleasure and caprice, to be facilely persuaded, and to 
 resist nothing that allured him, it was the first conflict that had ever come to 
 him. Yet where men moral in their lives and stainless in their repute might 
 not have shrunk from the lie, but might have eagerly embraced the expedient, 
 he whom many called an effeminate ibertine had found strength to save his honor 
 from the shipwreck which swamped all beside. 
 
 The woman he loved he would not win by a fraud. 
 
 The day was far spent when his tempter left him. Of the flight of time he 
 had no consciousness; one thing alone he remembered now: she must know it, 
 and at once. The agony of the last few hours had kept him strong and braced, 
 as men are with the burning strength of opium or brandy. When life has done 
 its worst, it lends a singular power, for a brief time, to endure it. Nothing 
 greater than this can come upon us; and we gain such a courage as that force 
 of desperation with which Spartans and Thespians buckled on their shields and 
 waited calmly in the Pass for that certain death which Megistius had foretold 
 to them. Thus it was now with him; he acted mechanically, and with a calm- 
 ness that was horrible even to himself, as he left the favorite and luxurious 
 chamber which had been fated to see suffering as intense as ever filled a lazar- 
 ward, and went out into the bright air of the young summer. 
 
 As his carriage, with all its blinds down, rolled through the streets, he 
 leaned his forehead on his hands, and wondered if he lived, or if he lay dream- 
 ing in his grave. Every sound, every sight of the familiar thoroughfares, 
 seemed unreal and unknown to him, as to one who rises from a bed of fever; 
 he felt to have no share in all the life about him, no more part with it than 
 though he came, a disembodied ghost, to gaze upon the scenes of his past life 
 on earth. He had never known before this what it was to suffer for an hour: 
 in the intensity of his present suffering, existence itself seemed paralyzed in 
 him. The light of the sun blinded him; the movement and noise around 
 seemed loud on his ear as the roar of torrents; every sense and nerve was 
 quickened to acutest perception; yet he never lost the sensation of unreality, of 
 consciousness completely severed from corporeality. 
 
 The Queen of Lilies stood beside one of the windows of her own boudoir,
 
 198 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 restless, disquieted, half swayed by anger and half by anxiety. So many hours 
 of the day had passed, and her lover had not approached her. Where she stood, 
 there was nothing near her but the foliage and clusters of innumerable flowers; 
 the brightness of the declining day was shed full on her. She looked a woman 
 to satisfy a sculptor's dream, to haunt an artist's thoughts, to be hymned in a 
 poet's cantion; yet there was about her that nameless and fugitive coldness 
 which, in the fairest statue, chills the senses and the heart. 
 
 Her hand was listlessly wandering among the clusters of blossoms; and 
 every now and then, as the impatience and disquiet of her thoughts increased, 
 she broke them off and cast them down, beating her foot in haughty irritation 
 on them till their fragrance and their color perished. 
 
 The door unclosed; she turned, a smile lighting her eyes and lending a 
 lovely warmth to her cheek. She swept forward with the grace of her step, 
 with half-playful, half proud words of reproach for suck unexplained desertion. 
 Quickly they paused upon her lips; she looked in his face alarmed and amazed. 
 
 " Ernest ! what has happened ? You are ill ? " 
 
 For all answer, he pressed her to his heart and kissed her many times with 
 a passion almost terrible in its force, the fever of his lips scorching her own 
 like fire. He held her as men hold the dead form of their mistress, which they 
 must lay down and leave forever, never again to meet their sight, never again 
 to cling to their embrace. 
 
 Then in silence he released her, with his last caress upon her lips, and moved 
 from her, while his limbs, weak with long fasting, shook like a woman's, and 
 his head sank down upon his breast. He would sooner have gone out to his 
 death upon a scaffold than have told her what he came to tell. 
 
 She watched him in fear and terror. She saw that he had suffered as no 
 physical pain could make him surfer; she saw that he was altered as no illness 
 could have changed him. She swept softly to his side again; she laid her fair 
 arms round him; she lifted to him her beautiful face, which in that moment 
 tempted him to dishonor as his betrayer's words had never done. 
 
 " My love, my love," she murmured anxiously, " what is it ? what has 
 grieved you ? " 
 
 He turned his eyes on hers, and in them she read a look that paralyzed 
 her, that haunted her throughout her lifetime, a look of such unutterable an- 
 guish that she cowered down and shrank back as she met it, struck by it as by 
 a blow. 
 
 Calamity has come to me," he said, briefly, whilst his voice sounded 
 low as a reed, and wrung from him as confessions were wrung from men 
 
 " I have been living a lie to you and to the world. Listen." 
 icn, as he spoke the last word, his calm forsook and his strength failed 
 him; he fell before her, his hands clenched in her dress, his head bowed down
 
 CHAN DOS. 199 
 
 upon her feet. In a few broken, passionate, disconnected words, wild in their 
 misery, yet burned into her mind forever as aqua-fortis burns its record into 
 steel, he told her all. 
 
 There was a profound silence in the chamber, a silence in which he only 
 heard the dull, oppressed beating of his heart, a silence in which his head 
 was still bowed down as he knelt. He dared not look upward to her face. He 
 loved her, and it passed the bitterness of death to bring this misery on her 
 young life; he loved her, and he had to utter words that might divorce them 
 for eternity. 
 
 For many moments the silence lasted, a silence so agonized to him that 
 in it he seemed to live through years, as men in the moments of a violent 
 death. He longed, as one perishing in the desert longs for water, for one 
 word of tenderness, one promise of fidelity; he longed for them with an inten- 
 sity great as the fall he bade her look upon. 
 
 None came. 
 
 She drew herself slowly from him where he knelt, and stood in the dignity 
 of her matchless grace, mutely gazing at him with those eyes which had all the 
 chilliness, as they had all the lustre, of the stars. Her face was white and 
 drawn like his own; but in the amazed fixity into which it had set there was no 
 trace of pity for him, there was no grief that sprang from tenderness. 
 
 " This is a strange tale," she said, at last, and her voice was bitterly, bitterly 
 cold, though it was tremulous with the tremor of incredulous rage. " A strange 
 tale. You must pardon me if I fail to believe it." 
 
 He looked for the first time upward at her. All hope he might uncon- 
 sciously have cherished that her love might be stronger than its trial, and vows 
 that had been vowed him in his prosperity not prove false in his adversity, for- 
 sook him now. He rose slowly to his feet, and stood beside her; and in his 
 eyes came the same wistful reproachful pain that had been in them when he 
 had looked at his betrayer, the pain that silently said, " Dost thou, too, then 
 forsake me ? " 
 
 " Believe ! " he said, wearily; " believe ! Can you look me in the face and 
 doubt ? " 
 
 She stood aloof from him, lifted in her full height, her foot beating the 
 bruised colorless petals of the flowers she had destroyed, her fair face haggard 
 and rigid, her gaze fixed on him pitiless yet passionate in the coldness of its 
 unrelenting scorn. 
 
 " Believe ! " she repeated, while her lips shook and her bosom heaved. 
 " Believe that you are the ruined bankrupt that you tell me, yes; but believe 
 that you have been in the ignorance of your own beggary that you plead, no ! 
 ten thousand times no ! " 
 
 He looked at her in a mute amazed stupor that stilled the force of the
 
 200 
 
 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 anguish in which he had knelt before her into an icy serenity such as that with 
 which he had faced John Trevenna. 
 
 He had never known but the tenderness and the softness of women. This 
 vileness of imputed fraud flung at him by the one who but a moment before had 
 lifted her sweet lips for his kiss paralyzed him with its wantonness of merciless 
 indignity. 
 
 " Ruin does not fall in a day," she pursued, while the haughty acrid words 
 came from her lips in a quiver of rage that her graceful breeding alone reined 
 in from the violence of passion. " Such ruin as yours is, you confess, the work 
 of years. How perfectly you have duped the world and me ! " 
 
 He who had loved her with a great and most disinterested love, yet who 
 had refused 19 win her through a falsehood, could have killed her in his agony 
 as he heard her now, could have crushed her in his embrace, and trampled out 
 this life that looked so fair aud was so merciless, that had smiled on him with 
 so divine a forgery of love, and that flung at him in his darkest hour a dishonor 
 that his worst foe would never have dared to hint. 
 
 Yet he stood before her with a calm dignity, a proud reproach. 
 
 " Look in my eyes, and see if I could lie ! Had I chosen, I could have 
 wedded you by a fraud, and made you mine, in ignorance of my fall. As it is, 
 I set you free: it is your right." 
 
 "My right?" There, in the glow of the late day's sunlight, she stood 
 amidst the flowers, her patrician beauty instinct with the scornful passion that 
 her own lost ambitions, her own thwarted pride, made so intolerable a misery, 
 fronting him with a gaze as unyielding as stone, scourging him with words 
 clear and frozen in their utterance as ice. " Indeed ! my right ! The pity is 
 you did not earlier remember what my rights and the world's both were, ere 
 you chicaned us and misled us with the paste brilliance of your tinsel glitter. 
 You could have wedded me by a fraud ? I wonder you could hesitate at one 
 fraud more, when you were so long practised in so many." 
 
 " Oh, God ! And yesterday you loved me ! " 
 
 The cry broke out involuntarily from him. Yesterday her soft caresses had 
 been his; a few days or weeks later, and she had been his wife; now from 
 her lips poured the cruellest invectives his ruin could ever hear, from her 
 thoughts came the foulest taunt that could be thrown at him to goad his 
 wretchedness. 
 
 " Yesterday, yes ! Yesterday the world and I alike believed in your honor 
 and your rank. Yesterday we did not know you as you are, a gamester, a 
 trickster, a living falsehood to us both." 
 
 Men under less torture than he bore then have killed with a madman's 
 blow the fair, false thing that taunted and that jibed them. A convulsive effort 
 of self-restraint shuddered through him; then he stood tranquil still, and al-
 
 "FOH THE MERCY OF GOD, MY LOVE, MY WIFE ! "Page 201, Vol. III.
 
 CHANDOS. 201 
 
 most yielding to her still the forbearance her sex claimed for her. She had no 
 pity for him; he would claim none. 
 
 " Your insult is undeserved," he said, briefly, while his teeth clenched tight 
 to hold back the flood of passionate yearning, of agonized reproach, that rushed 
 to his utterance. " Believe or not, as you will ; I have spoken truth, and all 
 the truth. I sought you when my fate was such as all men envied me; it has 
 changed, and I set you free. All I ask is, for the sake of others, keep these 
 tidings back until to-morrow; and, for yourself, forgive me that I ever 
 
 His voice broke down; his control forsook himj; he loved her, and he thought 
 only of all they would have been, of all they never now could be, to one an- 
 other, and his heart went out to her in a great resistless longing that shattered 
 pride and forgot injury, and only craved one touch of tenderness, one echo of the 
 fond faith but yesterday so lovingly vowed to him. He was not changed : were 
 these accidents of fortune, this visitation of calamity, to make him loathsome 
 where he had been adored ? 
 
 He stretched out his arms involuntarily in the suffering of his passion. 
 
 " For the mercy of God, my love, my wife ! for the sake of all we should 
 have been ! speak gentler to me in our wretchedness." 
 
 It was the only prayer he ever prayed for pity. In the moment of its en- 
 treaty, something softer, some grief more piteous and less absorbed in selfish 
 violence, passed over her face. In the moment of that gesture of beseeching 
 tenderness she could have thrown herself upon his breast and given up the 
 world for him. Trevenna had rightly said she loved as well as she could love, 
 and in this instant life asunder seemed a doom too ter-rible to bear. But the 
 impulse passed swiftly: the weight of the world was heavier and stronger on 
 her than her love for him; he had destroyed her ambitions and had shattered 
 her victory; she knew no thought save for what she deemed her wrong, no grief 
 save for what she deemed her degradation; for the loveliness enshrined a heart 
 of bronze, and her solitary idol was herself. She stood unmoved, her head 
 turned towards the light with a gesture of scorn, her foot still treading out the 
 bruised fragments of the wasted flowers. 
 
 " Claim gentler words when you can prove juster deeds," she said, with a 
 bitterness that seemed to leave her fair lips with the lash of a leaden-weighted 
 scourge. "You have lived one long falsehood in the sight of men; they may 
 believe your pleaded ignorance of your bankrupt shame; they have long been 
 your dupes, and they may be so still: /shall not. The premier offered you 
 your marquis's coronet; go take it ! You refused it to my wish; you will accept 
 it to screen you from the claimants of your debts ! " 
 
 His gaze fastened on her, riveted there by a horrible fascination. Were 
 those eyes, that froze him with so unpitying a hate, thee yes that yesterday had
 
 002 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 smiled up in his own ? were those lips, that lashed him with such brutal taunts, 
 the lips that yesterday had met his own in their last lingering caress ? 
 
 His breath came slowly, and drawn with effort, as though life were ebbing 
 out of him; yet he stood before her prouder and sterner in the extremity of in- 
 sult than he had ever been in the full splendor of his power. 
 
 " Silence ! You shame your sex ! I ask you forgiveness of any wrong I 
 may, through my own improvidence, have wrought you; but I thank God that 
 I have known you as you are before my life was cursed with you." 
 
 Without another word, he turned and left her, left her with the crushed 
 blossoms lying beneath her foot, and the summer light upon her loveliness. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE LAST NIGHT AMONG THE PURPLES. 
 
 THE new opera began. 
 
 The house was crowded with all that had rank and had fashion to make 
 the applause become renown. For the sake of its patron, the aristocracies of 
 England and of France came to its representation, willing to be charmed and 
 prepared to admire; for the sake of its patron, court-beauties flocked thither, 
 resolute to be enchanted though there were not a note of melody in it; and 
 connoisseurs came in the gentlest, most generous of tempers, inclined to be 
 lenient, indeed, secure to be pleased. All the world was ready to be complacent 
 to Genius, since Fashion had chanced to have lent it her bright-jewelled aegis. 
 There is a sublime arrangement in this world: the greater things must always 
 be floated up by the lesser. Does not the world phrase it that a queen " honors " 
 a great statesman with her presence, and that a prince " honors " a great artist 
 with his sitting ? The world always loves these transposed phrases and clings 
 to these inverted orders of precedence. 
 
 So Fashion was prepared to patronize Genius; happily for Genius, it does 
 not do it very often. 
 
 The Ariadnt in A T axos was commenced, and the most brilliant audience of 
 the season glanced in surprise to the empty box of its patron. The grand swell 
 of the overture rolled out, and thrilled through the silent house with a new 
 emotion. Such marvellous poems of sound, such pathetic echoes of sadness, 
 such intense vibrations of passion, such spiritual cadences of thought ! in the 
 creation that had issued from the lonely chamber of suffering, from the dreamy 
 mind of a feeble cripple, there was that which caught the ear of the hearers
 
 CHANDOS. 203 
 
 with a new voice and spoke to them with a new eloquence. They came to 
 patronize; they stayed to feel ! 
 
 As the overture closed in the throbbing of the waves of melody that swelled 
 with a mighty thunder through the stilness, into the dazzling light and glitter 
 of the thronged theatre Chandos entered. 
 
 The fairness of his face was unusually pale and unusually cold; his eyes 
 had dark shadows under them, and had a singular hectic brilliance; otherwise 
 there was no change. 
 
 "Late he is; been drinking," said a person in the stalls, who did not know 
 him. 
 
 "Never drinks," said one who did. "Been gambling." 
 
 Trevenna, sitting by, set his teeth while he smiled. 
 
 " Gambling ' au roi depouille? Curse him ! he dies game," he thought 
 while he looked upward to the box as Chandos advanced to the front and stood 
 there for a second, as though blinded with the light, then seated himself in his 
 accustomed chair and leaned slightly forward in full view of the thronged build- 
 ing, where there was scarce a seat in the grand tier but held some titled friend 
 or foreign beauty who knew him familiarly or loved him well. No other noticed 
 that slight pause as he stood with a paralyzed, dizzy stupefaction coming into 
 that blaze of radiance and crash of sound, no one except his foe, who knew 
 all that was suffered in it and all it meant. There had never been a night in 
 which Chandos had been more on people's lips, and more in their praise and 
 babble, than he was to-night. The interest of the stage and of the artists whose 
 unrivalled talent had been brought together to do justice to the new opera was 
 divided with the interest that the well-known box where he sat had for all present. 
 Foreigners looked at him eagerly as the man with whose fetes all Paris had 
 rung; strangers had him pointed out to them as the leader of the aristocracy, 
 the former of fashion, the author of " Lucrece," the owner of Clarencieux. 
 Peeresses wondered at the absence of his betrothed, and spoke of his appear- 
 ance as the Due de Richelieu at the princess's fancy-ball, of his Watteau 
 water-party at his Richmond bijou villa, of the magnificence of the bridal gifts 
 he had ordered for the Queen of Lilies. Poor men envied him bitterly, bit- 
 terly; and rich men wondered why, with all their wealth, they could not buy his 
 grace, his fame, his popularity. Women who had been loved by him, or had 
 loved him vainly, looked at him, and alone were struck by some vague sense of 
 pain and disquiet at the serenity of his face, at the glitter in the blue depths 
 of the eyes that had ever till now smiled at life with so careless a brilliance. 
 
 He sat unmoved. He spoke, listened, acted precisely as he had done on 
 any other of the many nights when he had led the verdict of that house on some 
 new talent; there was not even a tremor in his hand, not even a quiver in his 
 voice. The intense strength of intense agony was lent him fora time; the
 
 204 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 world-wide desert of desolation that spread around him gave him the desert's 
 arid and passionless calm; he had all the fictitious force, all the mechancial 
 action, of fever. The recklessness of his nature was roused till he could have 
 laughed aloud to think how he sat there, the observed of all eyes, the envied of 
 all men, accredited by the world about him with every gift the gods could give, 
 and knew himself that not a beggar in the streets was poorer, not a homeless 
 dog starving to death more wretched, than he was. 
 
 He had not come to play out his terrible comedy from mockery or desper- 
 ation; he had come because even in his darkest hour he would not forsake the 
 man who was dependent on him, and whose whole future hung on the success 
 which his own presence here alone could be certain to secure. But passing 
 through it for this man's sake, the gigantic gulf that yawned between what he 
 seemed and what he was, the knowledge of what his world thought of him and 
 said of him in this his last night's reign over it, and of the mighty lie that, all 
 unwitting to him, his whole life had been and was, struck on him with the hor- 
 rible jest which despair oftentimes will seem to itself, and woke in him the des- 
 perate and reckless laughter with which men of his race had ridden in the old 
 days of warfare down on to the ring of spear-heads, down on to a certain death, 
 to laugh still while the life-blood burst forth from a hundred wounds and the 
 hoofs of trampling chargers broke their bone and tore their nerve. 
 
 The music swelled out on the air, rising in aerial cadence and throbbing in 
 eloquent passion, now clear and fresh as a spring bird's song, now supreme in 
 its melancholy as the moan of autumn winds through Western forests of pine. 
 Every joy denied him, every hope forbidden him, every smile he sought in vain, 
 every sigh he breathed in suffering, Guido Lulli seemed to have recorded here. 
 The music was sublime as a song of David, pure as a young child's eyes. It 
 might not throughout be coldly perfect for the ear, but it was far more; it was 
 passionately human for the heart, it was eternally true for every time. 
 
 Chandos sat unmoved to the end. To him though his hand had molded 
 many of its parts, though his sympathy had cherished it from its earliest birth, 
 though his thoughts had many a time vibrated to its every chord, it was without 
 sense or melody or meaning now; it was like the sound of rushing waters in his 
 ear, no more. Yet he sat unwavering to the end, and led with an unerring pre- 
 cision the bursts of applause that ever and again rang through the Opera-House. 
 
 It closed; the last magnificent chords re-echoed through a dead silence; 
 then, through the thunder of public admiration, the name of Guido Lulli was 
 given forever to the fame he sought. 
 
 Chandos rose and left his box with an apology to the Due d'Orvale and a 
 Russian prince, who, with others, had joined him there. He went to one, small, 
 obscure, shut wholly away from the sight of the audience; here, alone, Lulli 
 had been placed, shunning the view of the glittering throng, and dreading the
 
 CHAN DOS. 205 
 
 notice or the speech of any with the nervous terror of a recluse. He unclosed 
 the door softly. Stretched senseless on the ground he saw the Provencal's 
 form, his hands above his head as he had fallen in the moment of ecstasy when 
 for the first time the voices of the world had given him that promise of immor- 
 tality of which he had so long and vainly dreamed. 
 
 Chandos stooped and raised him gently, the movement and the sweep of air 
 from the open doorway roused him from his trance; his eyes unclosed, he 
 looked upward, scarcely conscious still. 
 
 " It has triumphed ! Ah ! I can die so happy ! " 
 
 The words left the cripple's lips with the sigh so rare in human life, the 
 sigh of perfect joy. 
 
 His gaze, dreamy and distant, like one who sees the visions of the future, 
 wandered back, and knew the features that bent above him. The smile that 
 was like sunlight beamed upon his face; he took his benefactor's hands and 
 kissed them, the great tears coursing down his cheeks. 
 
 " Monseigneur, this is your gift ! I cannot thank you. What are words ? 
 You have given me life, and more than life; you have given me immortality ! 
 / cannot reward you, but night and day I pray that God may pay my debt." 
 
 A smile came on Chandos' lips, a smile so sad that it might have been 
 either curse or prayer. He stooped over Lulli, and spoke with an infinite 
 gentleness. 
 
 " You will be very famous in the years to come. Once or twice remember 
 that I aided something to it. I shall be repaid enough." 
 
 And with those words of farewell a last farewell, though the other knew it 
 not he left him before the musician could reply. 
 
 "You eclipse yourself to-night," said a French princess to him, when an 
 hour later, his great world, having ordained the triumph of the opera, came, as 
 they had long been bidden, to an entertainment in celebration of the success of 
 the Ariadne in IVaxos. " You revive the fetes of our Grand Siecle." 
 
 He bowed, and smiled slightly. 
 
 "You do me much honor, madame. It was in the Grand Siecle that a 
 Chandos gave a supper to Marie Antoinette when she was dauphiness, with 
 which all Paris rang from the Court to the Cerveau, and when his guests were 
 gone, fell on his own sword ! " 
 
 " How horrible ! " murmured the lady. " Pray, do not revive the century 
 to that extent." 
 
 " Oh, no. We wear no rapiers, and we make no scenes."
 
 206 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 Every highest title, every fairest beauty, in the two aristocracies of which he 
 was the idol came to his house that night; every distinction in intellect, or 
 blood, or fashion, or loveliness met round him as they had met a thousand 
 times. The gardens were lighted with innumerable lamps gleaming among the 
 trees; the winter-garden glanced a very paradise of Oriental color; the wax 
 radiance fell on fairest brows, and the diamonds and sapphires glistened among 
 silkiest hair; the low, pleasant murmur of voices, with " fashion not with feeling 
 softly freighted," filled the chambers: the echoes of music came from the ball- 
 rooms beyond; all the old life that he had known so well, and led so dazzlingly, 
 was about him now for the last time. 
 
 As the " thousand great lords " who " drank and praised the gods of gold 
 and silver " at Belshazzar's banquet, while laughter and song echoed through 
 the high halls of Babylon, saw not the foreshadowed doom written on the brow 
 of the lord of the feast, and read not among the jewelled arabesques of the 
 palace-wall the " Mene, Tekel, Upharsin " that rose out to his own sight, so 
 those who came to Chandos to-night saw no sign upon his face, and had no 
 thought that this was a farewell, a farewell to joy, and peace, and women's 
 love, and the honor of men, and all the gracious gifts and treasures of his life. 
 They did not know. They saw no change in him. Great ladies found his 
 voice as soft, his courtesies as graceful; men thought his wit keener, his insouci- 
 ance lighter, than they had ever been. He had said in his heart that none 
 should be able on the morrow to recall having noted in him one shadow of pain. 
 The men of his race had always been proud as they were reckless, capable of 
 intense endurance as they were resigned to limitless indulgence; the spirit of 
 his race rose in him now. Throughout this night a night when such agony 
 was on him as men of stronger will and harder training might have sunk under 
 without shame he let the world about see no trace that all was not with him 
 as it had ever been. His face was quite colorless, and now and then he lost all 
 sight or sense of where he was; yet he never let a word, a glance, a sigh, escape 
 him which could have told his deadly secret. 
 
 One only, mingled among the crowds of princes, peers, and statesmen by 
 right of long-established footing and familiarity, noted the dark gleam in his 
 eyes as of one who defied fate with all the delirious daring of desperation, and 
 knew all that was suffered, all that was suppressed, and was content. 
 
 Once their eyes met, with a swaying cloud of perfumed laces, and delicate 
 hues, and fair faces, and glittering orders, and sparkling jewels, parting them 
 for the breadth of a chamber. It was a strange fellowship between the betrayer 
 and the betrayed, this solitary knowledge of the doom that hung over the house 
 that was now filled with light and melody and the music of women's voices and 
 the names of those who controlled nations, this mutual consciousness alone 
 that as they met now they met for the last time forever, that when this night
 
 CHANDOS. 207 
 
 should end with it would end forever the shadowless life that had been here 
 so long. 
 
 To-night was the supreme martyrdom of the one, the supreme triumph of 
 the other. 
 
 " Finished at last ! " thought the man who had never let go his vow of ven- 
 geance since the summer night long before in his childhood when he had sworn 
 it at his mother's instance. " All the toil, all the lie, all the envy, all the bitter- 
 ness and humiliation, finished forme; all the glory, all the peace, all the fame, all 
 the luxurious ease and the royal pride and the world-wide love, finished for you. 
 After to-night we shall change parts, my proud, beautiful, caressed darling of 
 women, my careless Chandos of Clarencieux ! Ah, what a thing is patience ! 
 it sits and weaves so long in the gloom futilely, but it traps at the last. There 
 is only one thing wanting, if you would wince. But you die like the last mar- 
 quis, curse you ! you die game through it all ! " 
 
 Imperceptibly, one by one, the aristocratic crowd thinned, and left the long 
 vista of rooms that had so often and so long seen the most exclusive and the 
 most superb entertainments of the time; they passed away, seeing nothing, 
 dreaming nothing, of the fate that had fallen on the man who thus took his 
 farewell of them, but speaking only, as their carriages rolled away, of the new 
 genius that he had introduced among them, and of the lavish and fantastic roy- 
 alty of splendor with which his fetes were always given. , The murmur of the 
 voices died away, the strains of the music ceased, the low subdued laughter 
 sank to silence, the glittering throngs dispersed; they left him his long-familiar 
 friends, companions, and associates never again to rally round their rot gail- 
 lartt, never again to be summoned at his bidding. 
 
 He stood alone, alone as he must ever be henceforth. 
 
 The perfect stillness followed strangely on the movement and melody and 
 radiance of life that had all died out; a clock struck a mournful silvery chime 
 upon the silence, the fall of the water splashed in the fountains; other sound 
 there was none. The light from a million points fell on the clustering colors 
 of the tropic flowers, the drooping fronds of the pale-green palms, the fair 
 limbs of the statues, the deep glow of the paintings: he looked at these things, 
 and knew that from this hour they would be his no more. 
 
 To-night for the last time they were his own; when the sun should rise, the 
 fiat would go forth that would scatter them abroad to strangers' hands and 
 enemies' spoil. Henceforth they and he would be divided, the things that he 
 had gathered and cherished would be divided, broadcast to whoever should
 
 208 OVID AS WORKS. 
 
 choose to buy, and under the roof that had known him so long his voice 
 be unheard, his face unseen, his name forgotten, his place behold him no more. 
 
 Far behind him, parted from him by an eternal gulf, lay the life of his past, 
 which had been one glad and gorgeous revel, one cloudless and unthinking joy, 
 and which he must now lay down, as the Discrowned whom the Praetorians 
 summoned laid aside golden pomp, and Tyrian purples, and brimming amphorae, 
 and dew-laden rose-crowns, and went out, unpitied and alone, to die. 
 
 That sweet and cloudless life of his rich past ! to-night he was dethroned 
 and driven out from it forever; to-night, a living man, he knew all the desola- 
 tion of death, and in the full glory of his youth was condemned to the anguish 
 and the beggary of impoverished and stricken age. 
 
 To-night he was driven out to exile; and behind him closed forever were 
 the barred gates of his lost Eden. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE DEATH OF THE TITAN. 
 
 THE Duke of Castlemaine sat in his library in his mighty Abbey of War- 
 burne, whither he had come by his physician's counsels. He was alone; for 
 secretaries and chaplains and stewards were no companions for the superb old 
 Titan of the Regency. His bright blue eyes, so fiery and so eloquent still, were 
 looking outward at the tumbled mass of rock and moorland and giant forest- 
 breadths that made the grandeur of Warburne; his head so stately, though 
 white with eighty winters, was slightly bent; his thoughts were with dead days, 
 days when his voice rang through the House of Peers or wound its silky 
 way to the hearts of women, days when he could riot in the wildest orgies 
 through the night and dictate despatches on which the Fate of Europe hung, 
 with a clear brain and a calm pulse, when the morning rose, days when he 
 had loitered laughing over ladies' supper-tables with half a dozen duels on his 
 hands, and looked in the soft eyes of cloistered Spaniards ere leading his cavalry 
 to the charge, days when his frame had been iron and his voice magic, when 
 nations were guided by his will and soft lips had been warm on his own, days, 
 in one word, of his Youth. 
 
 Though in extreme age, the duke was a greater man yet than those of this 
 generation, more powerful, more fearless, more full of fine wit, of stately 
 courtesy, of haughty honor. He was of another breed, another creed, another 
 age, than ours, the age when men drank their brandy where we sip our claret, 
 when men punished a lie with their sword where we pass it over in prudence,
 
 209 
 
 when disgrace was washed out with life where we bring it in court and make 
 money of it, when if their morals were more openly lax their honor was more 
 inexorably stringent, when if their revels were wilder their dealing was fairer, 
 and when the same strength which made their orgies fiercer and their blow 
 harder made their eloquence loftier, their mettle higher, their wit keener, their 
 courage brighter, than our own. And in his extreme grace the Titan was a 
 Titan yet, dwarfing and paling those of weaklier stature and of more timorous 
 breed. He sat there looking out at the brown moors, warm with the golden 
 gorse; and he moved in surprise as the door opened, with a smile of pleasure 
 lighting his eyes. 
 
 " You ! Has an earthquake swallowed the town, that we see you in the 
 country, my dear Ernest ? " 
 
 Even as the first word was spoken, even as his first glance fell on Chandos, 
 he knew vaguely but terribly that some calamity, vaster than his thoughts 
 could compass, had fallen here, on the man whom he cared for as he cared for 
 no other of his race. Chandos was the only one of his blood who had his own 
 code, his own creed, the only one in whose companionship he heard the echoes 
 of a long-passed age; and he was proud of him, and built mighty hopes on 
 him, proud of his eminence, of his brilliance, of his success, proud even of his 
 personal grace and beauty. 
 
 Chandos drew near without a word. Those who loved him as the old duke 
 loved saw a change on him more ghastly than though they had seen his face 
 set in the colorless calm of sudden death. 
 
 Castlemaine leaned towards him, and his long white fingers closed with a 
 convulsive pressure on the Mignard snuff-bok that he held. 
 
 " What is it ? " 
 
 Chandos answered nothing; he sank down into a seat, and his head fell for- 
 ward on his arms. The recklessness of desperation, the fever of utter hope- 
 lessness, had given him strength to pass through the ordeal of the night before; 
 but here his strength broke down. He knew how the pride of the gallant old 
 man had been centred in him; he suffered for the pain he must deal, not less 
 than for the misery he bore. 
 
 The duke's mellow voice shook huskily: 
 
 " Tell me in a word. I have never loved suspense." 
 
 Chandos did not lift his head; his answer came slowly dragged out, hoarse 
 and faint from exhaustion, excitation, and long want of food and sleep: for he 
 had tasted nothing from the hour that he had learned his fate, and his eyes had 
 never closed. 
 
 " I can tell you in one word: ruin ! " 
 
 The duke's hand trembled, making the diamonds flash and glitter on the 
 enamel lid; it had never so trembled when it had shaken the dice, though a fort-
 
 210 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 une hung on a throw, when it had lifted a pistol, though a life hung on the shot, 
 when it had pointed to a serried square of Soult's picked troops, though an 
 army hung on the charge. 
 
 " Ruin ! A wide word. And for whom ? " 
 
 " For me." 
 
 " You 1 " 
 
 " Yes ! " he answered, with a reckless laugh, such a laugh as the gamester 
 gives when his last coin is staked and gone and no resource is left except the 
 suicide's grave. "As Trevenna phrases it, ' Croesus has ceased to reign in 
 Sardis ! ' It will amuse the world, for a week at least. A long time for the 
 absent to be remembered." 
 
 A deep oath sprang from the close-shut lips of the old duke; his face grew 
 white as the hoary silky hair that shaded it, and the diamonds shook and glit- 
 tered in the tremor of his hand. But he loved the temper that made a jest even 
 of a death-blow; he had seen much of it in his early day; he followed the lead 
 with gallant endurance. 
 
 " Ruin for you ? It is very sudden, is it not ? Tell me more; tell me more." 
 
 His voice was very faint, but it was steady; he loved the man of whom he 
 heard this thing with the generous love of an age that kept all the warmth and 
 all the fire of his youth; yet they were both of the same school, they both 
 suppressed all sign of pain as shame. He heard; his head the head of an 
 Agamemnon bowed; his hand closed convulsively on the Louis Quatorze toy; 
 his breathing was quick and loud. Once alone he interrupted the recital ; it 
 was at Trevenna' s name. 
 
 " That vile fellow ! I bade you beware of him. He hates you, Ernest." 
 
 "It maybe/' said Ohandos, wearily. "I have almost thought so since 
 since this. And yet he owes me much, more than you know." 
 
 " Who hate us so remorselessly as those who owe us anything? " 
 
 " Then are men devils ! " 
 
 " Most of them. Who doubts it ? Did he ever owe you any grudge ? " 
 
 " None, only benefits." 
 
 " They are the less easily forgiven of the two. Had you any mistress whom 
 this man loved ? " 
 
 " Never, to my knowledge." 
 
 " But you may have had, unknown to you ? ' Who was the woman ? ' may 
 be asked wellnigh of every feud and misery ! Whatever for, he hates you, 
 haunts you, envies you ruthlessly, hates you if only because his hands are 
 large and coarse and yours are long and slender ! " 
 
 " You make him knave and fool in one." 
 
 " The combination is not rare ! But, pardon me, go on. I will hear more 
 patiently."
 
 CHAN DOS. 211 
 
 He heard very patiently, heard to the end. 
 
 His head sank, his breathing grew fast and labored, the veins swelled on 
 his still fair broad brow, his giant limbs trembled. It was the heaviest blow 
 life had it in its power to deal him; and, though still of the race of Titans, the 
 duke had lost something of the force of his manhood; the strength which had 
 risen from the Regent's orgies unscathed, and borne unjaded the heat and bur- 
 den of Vittoria and Waterloo, was not now what it had been. 
 
 " Great God ! if Philip Chandos had foreseen 
 
 His voice faltered; his listener stretched out his hand in an involuntary 
 supplication. 
 
 "In mercy spare me that! Do you think /have not remembered 
 him ?" 
 
 There was a piteous anguish m the few words, that pierced the duke's heart 
 to the core; his own tones, as he answered, were sorely enfeebled for the voice 
 that had used to roll his thunder through the Lords, and peal down the ranks 
 of " Castlemaine's Horse," in the dauntless days of his manhood. 
 
 " I meant no reproach ! You would have heard none from your father's 
 lips. He loved you well; and though you have been improvident, you have not 
 lost all. You have been true to your house : you have saved your honor. 
 Pardon me, Ernest; your news has left me scarcely myself. But but must 
 Clarencieux go ? " 
 
 Where Chandos sat, in the gloom of themullioned window, the shiver passed 
 over him that had always come there at the name of his idolized inheritance; 
 he could have better borne to part from wealth, and repute, and the love of the 
 world, and the love of woman, than he could bear to part from Clarencieux. 
 
 " They say so," he answered, simply. 
 
 " My God ! and we cannot help you. Warburne is mortgaged to its pettiest 
 farm. We of the Plantagenet blood ! are beggars ! I would give my life to 
 aid you, and I have nothing." 
 
 The confession broke from him so low that it barely was above hi breath. 
 It was very terrible to the great noble to know that in the dire extremity of the 
 man he loved he could aid him no more than though he were the poorest peasant 
 on his lands. 
 
 Chandos looked up; the unnatural coldness and fixity that had set upon the 
 fairness of his face from the moment this calamity had fallen on him softened 
 and changed; his lips trembled; he rose with a sudden impulse, and stooped 
 over the duke's chair, laying his hand tenderly on the old man's. 
 
 " Forgive me that I bring this shame and wretchedness upon you. I came 
 here that you might learn it from no other first; not the least bitter of my 
 memories has been the grief that I must entail on you." 
 
 The duke's fingers grasped his hand close, and wrung it hard; no reproach,
 
 212 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 no rebuke, came from him; he could not have raised his voice more than he 
 could have lifted his arm against Chandos in his suffering. 
 
 "Do not think of me; I shall live but little time to suffer anything. One 
 question more. She who is to be your wife ? " 
 
 Chandos moved from him into the shadow that was thrown darkly across 
 the casement by the great cedar-boughs without. 
 
 " She is dead to me." 
 
 Another oath, loud and deep, rattled in his hearer's throat; the fire of his 
 manhood's wrath gleamed in his azure eyes. The haughty patrician could 
 have borne anything sooner than this, that one of his blood should be for- 
 saken. Still, no recrimination escaped him; he never said "/ warned you ! " 
 The grand old pagan of a colossal age, hardened by long combat, and used to 
 the proud supreme dominion of a great chieftainship through such long years 
 of war and of state power, was more merciful to adversity than the young and 
 delicate Lily Queen. 
 
 Silence fell between them. The duke sat with his white crest bowed, and an 
 unusual dimness over the brightness of his Plantagenet eyes; and every now and 
 then the diamonds in the box he held shook with a quick tremor in the sunlight. 
 
 " What will you do ? " he asked, suddenly, shading his glance with the 
 enamelled box. 
 
 " Do ! " echoed Chandos, wearily; it seemed to him that his life was ended. 
 " What is there to do? Nothing; except to end like the last marquis. An 
 axe on Tower Hill was more dignified, but a dose of laudanum will be as 
 rapid. It would make the best ending for the story for the clubs, and the 
 sales will realize better if their interest be heightened by a suicide ! " 
 
 The duke looked hastily up, with that fin sourire with which throughout his 
 career his Grace of Castlemaine had veiled very deep agitation. 
 
 "Well, you would have precedent. You would but do what Evelyn 
 Chandos did after his master's death, you remember ? Doubtless it would finish 
 the meftdrame well for the world. Still, were I you, I would not. I am an 
 old soldier, and I confess I do not like surrender to fortune or anything else. 
 Your father died in the Commons like a gladiator; I should not like you to die 
 in a ditch like a dog. They would not be meet companion-pictures. Besides 
 I do not wish to see your grave; I have seen so many ! " 
 
 Calmly, dispassionately, the old soldier spoke, toying with his Bourbon box. 
 None could have guessed the intense anxiety hidden under that courtly man- 
 ner, the yearning emotion concealed under that serene smile. Once only his 
 voice shook: he had seen the graves of so many ! of the friends of his youth, 
 of his brothers in council, of the comrades who had fought and fallen beside 
 him, of the women who had lain in his bosom and smiled in his eyes. He had 
 seen so many !
 
 CHAN DOS. 213 
 
 Chandbs knew his meaning, knew all that was veiled under the gracious 
 courtesy, the gentle smile; those brief and tranquil words to him bore an 
 unspeakable eloquence, an eloquence which moved him as no insult, no 
 indignity, no adversity, had power to move him. 
 
 Where he stood, he bowed low, very low, till his head was stooped and his 
 lips touched the aged noble's hand. 
 
 "You are right, and I thank you. Have no fear; your words shall be 
 remembered. Whatever my fate is, I will accept it and endure it." 
 
 The duke looked upward at him. 
 
 " I am glad," he said, almost faintly. " Centre fortune bon cceur. Pardon 
 me if I intrude my counsels: it is the privilege of Nestors to prose ! You go 
 now ? I shall see you again ? " 
 
 " Surely." Chandos' voice sank very low as he stood before the grand old 
 man. " Before I go forgive me." 
 
 The duke's eyes, so blue, so fiery still, dwelt on him with a great unuttered 
 tenderness; and the tones that had used to ring like a clarion down the battle- 
 fields were gentle as a woman's. 
 
 " I have nothing to forgive. Had you loved and served yourself as you 
 have loved and served others, it would not be thus with you now." 
 
 Then they parted, never to meet again. 
 
 The duke sat listening to the echo of his footsteps, then, with a slight sigh, 
 he leaned back in his arm-chair, his hand relaxed its clasp upon the jewelled 
 box, a weariness came over him new to his nerve of steel, a mist stole before his 
 eyes, shutting from his sight the flickering leaves and the purple moorlands and 
 all the light and movement of the forest-world. 
 
 The summer light quivered through innumerable boughs, young fawns 
 played in the warmth, white clouds drifted over sunny skies, and a nest-bird 
 above in the cedar's branches sang low and softly, as though not to break the 
 rest of the sleeper within. And the duke still leaned back in his ebony chair, 
 with the slight smile about his lips, and the diamonds flashing in the box that 
 was lying at his feet. 
 
 The golden day stole onward, the shadows lengthened, the birds sought 
 their roost, and the young fawns their couches; the peace of evening brooded 
 on the earth, all things were at rest, and so was he; for he still sat there, motion- 
 less and with the jewels gleaming at his feet. 
 
 The sunset faded, and the twilight came, the purple haze upon the moor- 
 lands deepening to night. Still he sat there, while the shadows stole the brill- 
 iance from the diamonds and softly veiled his face as though in reverence. 
 And when some of his wide household, who were so nigh, yet whom he could 
 not lift his hand to summon, dared to venture at length unbidden to his pres-
 
 314 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 ence, they found him thus; and a great awe fell on them, and the hush of a 
 breathless dread; for they knew that they were standing in the presence of 
 
 Death. 
 
 The last of a race of Titans had died, as well became him, in silence and 
 alone, without a sign, and with a smile upon his lips. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 "AND THE SPOILERS CAME DOWN." 
 
 IT was night at Clarencieux. 
 
 In the Greuze cabinet, where a few weeks before Chandos had stood lightly 
 glancing through the French novel, with the warmth of its fire shed mellow and 
 ruddy about him, he stood now. The twilight of the summer evening had but 
 just fallen; the pale moon steamed in through the oriels; even the fair, rich 
 hues of the French painter's women looked ashen and weary in the misty half- 
 light that was alone in the chamber. Chandos leaned against the high carved 
 marble of the mantel -piece; his chest was bowed as with the weight of age; he 
 breathed heavily, and with each breath pain; his face was white as the sculp- 
 ture he rested on, and set into that deadly calm which had never left him when 
 in others' sight. The tidings of the duke's death had reached him some days, 
 and had filled up the measure of his anguish, adding to it the torture of a pas- 
 sionate regret, of an eternal remorse. He had loved the grand old man from 
 whose fearless, fiery eyes no glance but one of kindness and of gentleness had 
 looked on him from his earliest childhood; and he knew that the shock of his 
 own ruin had slain the mighty strength of the old noble, if ever grief killed age. 
 
 He stood alone; his heart seemed numb and dead with misery; he gave no 
 sign of emotion; no tears had ever come into his eyes since the hour in which 
 his fate fell on him. The nights had passed pacing sleeplessly to and fro his 
 chamber, or heavily drugged to rest with opium; the days had passed almost 
 fasting, and in an apathy that awed those about him with a vague terror lest 
 his end should be in the vacant gloom of madness. He was self-possessed, 
 self-controlled; he answered tranquilly, he heard patiently; but there was that 
 in this mechanical action, this unnatural serenity, that had a more horrible 
 dread for those who saw him than all the ravings of delirium, all the passion of 
 grief, could ever have had. 
 
 The door unclosed: John Trevenna entered. 
 
 " They are all here," he said, more softly than he had ever spoken. 
 
 Chandos bent his head and followed him out of the chamber. They who 
 waited were his creditors.
 
 CHANDOS. 215 
 
 In a day. with the rush of hell-hounds let out of leash, and as though at a 
 given unanimous signal, his claimants had poured and pressed in on him, bay- 
 ing with one tongue for their own quarry, money. He had bidden them all 
 meet here, and they had come without one missing, a strange gathering for 
 the halls of Clarencieux, where kings had used to find their surest shelter, 
 and courts had been entertained through Plantagenet and Elizabethan and 
 Stuart days. 
 
 They were collected in the great banqueting-hall; a mob of more than a 
 hundred men, men who had come down on the same errand, in the same 
 temper, sullen yet eager, defiant yet suspicious, savage yet audacious, men 
 who had no mercy on a dethroned royalty, and who had no sight save for the 
 deficit they pushed to claim. Still even on them the solemn and venerable 
 beauty of Clarencieux had a quieting spell. As they had entered, their voices 
 unconsciously had sunk lower, their gait involuntarily had grown less swagger- 
 ing; and as they stood now, counting with greedy eyes the worth and magnifi- 
 cence of the banqueting-room, a silence had fallen on them. 
 
 " Feels a'most like a church," whispered one, a picture-dealer, as he looked 
 down the vista of the double porphyry columns. 
 
 As he spoke, Chandos entered. 
 
 He bowed to them with a grave and courteous grace; all had their hats on, 
 even those better bred, from the sense of scorn in which they held a debtor, 
 and for the sake of vaunting and of claiming their own superiority. Involun- 
 tarily, as they saw him, they uncovered in respectful silence, the Jew Ignatius 
 Mathias, who represented the bill-discounting firm, alone remaining the excep- 
 tion. Trevenna's eye had glanced at him as his hand went to his velvet cap, 
 and his arm had dropped as though paralysed. 
 
 In the stillness Chandos advanced up the hall, his eyes resting unmoved on 
 the strange and motley group that filled with their uncomely forms, and with 
 almost every type of European nationality, the porphyry chamber where king 
 and prince and peer had used to sit, his guests and his boon friends. His 
 perfect calmness was unchanged; his bearing was grave and proud; his face 
 looked white as the marble of a statue against which he paused, death-white 
 beside the black velvet of the morning-dress he wore, but it was composed, 
 haughty, thoughtful, strangely like the face of the last marquis. There was 
 not a murmur, not a whisper, raised; there was that in his look which held the 
 coarsest, the greediest, the most pitiless, silent. 
 
 He stood beside the statue (it was that of his father) and turned towards 
 them. He was at the upper end of the porphyry hall, and the multitude faced 
 him in the glow of the lights that were illumined here. 
 
 " Gentlemen," he said, calmly, with a tremor in his voice, though it was faint 
 as after long illness, " I have but a few words to say to you. You are here to
 
 216 
 
 OUIDA'S WOXKS. 
 
 enforce your claims. Of any one of those claims I was in ignorance a few days 
 since; but I dispute none of them: the improvidence of my life has left me no 
 title to do so. You will doubt me, perhaps, when I say I never knew I owed a 
 single debt; yet such is the truth." 
 
 There was a stir among the crowd, restless, pained, yet curious; they could 
 
 not tell the meaning of this, yet they were stirred with a singular awe and 
 
 wonder. One voice, the picture-dealer's, rough yet cordial, broke the silence: 
 
 " We believe you ! damned if we don't ! You ha'n't got a face what lies ! " 
 
 Chandos bent his head in silent acknowledgment. 
 
 " For the rest," he continued, still with that unchanged tranquillity, " I have 
 but little to add. The amount of your claims on me is, in the aggregate, suffi- 
 cient to wreck fortunes ten times larger than mine has been; yet, as I under- 
 stand, you can be paid in full by my entire surrender of all that I possess. 
 This surrender I make; my lawyers will explain its value better than I can do. 
 I resign everything unconditionally to you; it has become no longer mine, 
 but yours. I believe there will be enough to satisfy you to the uttermost 
 farthing." 
 
 The murmur rose deeper and louder in the hall ; the mass of men swayed 
 together as though stirred by a universal impulse. They had come prepared 
 to bully, to bluster, to demand, to enforce, and they were disarmed. Moreover 
 as he stood against the statue, they remembered the fame of Philip Chandos; 
 the coarsest among them felt a pang of shame that his only son should be 
 standing thus before them now. 
 
 They looked at one another; they could not comprehend this man who 
 voluntarily came and laid down all his possessions at their feet, and yet in their 
 own rough way they understood him; they would fain now have sympathized 
 with him had they known how. The picture-dealer a rude, broad boar, who 
 was worth near a million, and whose claims were the largest of any there, save 
 the Jew's pressed himself forward again, and spoke what all there felt, spoke 
 with a genuine emotion in his harsh voice, with a mist before his sharp and eager 
 eyes: 
 
 " Sir, you're a gentleman, and have behaved like one. We thank you, all 
 on us. If we'd a' known, we'd a' waited, ay, bless you, we would; but that 
 a'n't here nor there. Your father was a great man, but damned if I don't 
 think you're a greater; and if there's any little matter any picter', or that like 
 that you set particular store on, say the word, and it shall be kept for you, or 
 I'll know the reason why." 
 
 " Spoke up right well, Caleb ! hear ! hear ! " muttered another; and the 
 applause was echoed and murmured down the whole body of the hall, till even 
 the fashionable tradesmen, who had heard and had looked on supercilious and 
 impassive, were moved by it, and joined it.
 
 CHAN DOS. 217 
 
 Chandos bowed his head again. 
 
 " I thank you for your good will and for the belief you give me. I will 
 leave you now. My men of business will conclude all arrangements with you, 
 and my servants will bring you refreshments here. For your offer, there is 
 nothing I would claim. I have said I give up all; but if there be any surplus 
 left, I will ask you to do me the favor to sink it in an annuity for one who has 
 been long dependent upon me, and whose health can never let him be as other 
 men are: I mean the musician, Guido Lulli." 
 
 A profound silence followed on his words, the silence of supreme astonish- 
 ment. He might have taken advantage of their offer to ask anything, and he 
 thought only of providing for a foreign cripple ! 
 
 Caleb, the dealer, broke the stillness as before, dashing his hat down on the 
 mosaic with a stormy oath. 
 
 " I wore that hat afore you; I'd sooner uncover to you than to all the 
 kings. Lulli shall be took care of; /'ll go bail for that." 
 
 Chandos turned with that royal grace which had made him the darling of 
 courts, and could never leave him while he had life, and silently stretched out 
 his hand the delicate patrician hand which his foe had hated to the rough, 
 uncleanly, hairy palm of the dealer. Then, with a bow to the standing multi- 
 tude, he passed out of the porphyry chamber; and they made way for their 
 debtor as men make way for monarchs. 
 
 The Israelite Ignatius smothered a sigh in his patriarchal beard. 
 
 " Agostino was right. It is worse than murder ! " he thought. 
 
 Trevenna ground his teeth, baffled even in the sweetness of his utter victory. 
 
 " Curse him ! Do what you will, you can't lower him ! " he mused. 
 
 Caleb, the dealer, stood curiously looking at and touching with a sort of 
 wonder his own tough broad right hand. 
 
 "He shook it, he did," he murmured; "and they call him as proud as the 
 devil. He warn't above taking it. Damn me if it shall ever do so much dirty 
 work agen ! " 
 
 A few hours later, Trevenna re-entered the Greuze cabinet. 
 
 Chandos sat alone before the still-opened window; there was even now no 
 light, except the pale radiance of the moon, in which the fair women of the 
 French painter lost life and color and smiled a deathly smile. His head was 
 drooped forward; his eyes fixed on the moonlit forest and river scenes beyond. 
 In his hand was the tube of a great Eastern narghile, and the smoke that curled 
 from it was suffocating in its perfume; it was the smoke of opium. Thus, 
 hour after hour of night or day, in solitude, he would sit and gaze out at the
 
 218 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 lands he had lost, and strive to steep his senses and his agony in the insensi- 
 bility of the nicotine. 
 
 Trevenna looked at him and smiled. 
 
 "Ah, monseigneur," he thought, "you are proud as the devil, and calm as 
 a statue, and unmoved as ice, before the eyes of the world; but you suffer the 
 worse for that. You bear it grandly now, and will not show that you are fallen; 
 but you will go to wreck and ruin body and soul in no time, for all that. You 
 have taken to opium, have you ? There will not be much left of your beauty 
 and your genius in twelve months' time. You had better have shot yourself 
 that night you were so minded to; it would have saved you a world o f trouble, 
 and could not have destroyed you more utterly than that will do ! " 
 
 He moved forward; Chandos neither heard nor saw him. Trevenna called 
 him by his name; he did not raise his head nor give a sign of knowledge; he 
 sat, bent forward, looking dreamily out at the night-world of dew-laden grasses, 
 and mighty forests bathed in starlight, and dark skies with wreathing mists of 
 white summer vapor, and beyond all the silver line of the calm sea. 
 
 Trevenna touched him on the shoulder; then he raised his eyes; there was 
 in them so senseless, so sightless a look of intolerable pain, yet almost utter 
 unconsciousness, while, dilated by the opiate, the pupils were twice their natural 
 size, that the man who had pursued him might well have thought his pursuit 
 would end in the chambers of a madhouse. 
 
 " Chandos, can't you hear me ? " 
 
 " Hear ! " he echoed, wearily. " Shall I never have heard all ? What more 
 can there be ? " 
 
 " What more ? Then have you no heed as to what becomes of Claren- 
 cieux?" 
 
 Trevenna saw the shudder which always passed over him at the name shake 
 him from head to foot. 
 
 " No heed ? // " 
 
 In the stifled words there was a piteous anguish that might have moved his 
 torturer to mercy, were not the man who hates, a bloodhound whom no death- 
 struggles will sate till the last drop of life-blood has ebbed out. 
 
 " Well, it must go," he went on without remorse; he had had many a pleas- 
 ant banquet in that choice Greuze room, but none so full of flavor to him as 
 the banquet he enjoyed now. " The men are in a good mood; you have pleased 
 them mightily; and it's a great pity when you had the offer that you didn't clinch 
 it and ask 'em straight off for the Clarencieux diamonds. I do believe you 
 might have had them. Englishmen are such almighty fools when they once get 
 soft and sentimental ! Still, though they've taken such a fancy to you, they 
 won't do without their money. Park Lane must go, and Clarencieux must go ! " 
 
 Chandos rose to his feet; his large eyes, looking twice as large with the
 
 CHAN DOS. 219 
 
 dark dreamy gaze the opiate gave them, dwelt with weary, heart-sick pain on 
 his tormentor. 
 
 " Why come to tell me this ? You heard me. I gave them all." 
 
 Trevenna shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 " Tres-cher, you did. It was just as well to give it them with a good grace, 
 seeing that they would assuredly have taken it. But the point that concerns 
 Clarencieux is, how will it go ? It may go by private contract, if they're all of 
 one mind, which no set of Britons ever was yet; if not, it goes by public 
 auction." 
 
 Chandos drew his breath with a sharp contraction. Despite the dull, heavy, 
 half-drunk stupor of the opium, each one of these phrases quivered through him 
 with a fearful force. 
 
 " And if it go by public auction, they will divide it," pursued Trevenna, 
 while almost unconsciously in his triumph he lost his caution, and in his friend's 
 ruin eased himself for the yoke so long borne before his friend's superiority by 
 an indulgence in a contemptuous authoritative insolence that prudence would 
 have forbidden him, precious as its enjoyment was. 
 
 " Divide it ! " 
 
 The echoed words were hollow and inarticulate; a fresh misery faced him. 
 He knew that he and his home must part, that strangers must rule in his 
 father's heritage, and that the place he loved must see his face no more; but 
 he had never thought that his heritage could be parcelled out and severed among 
 the spoilers, and scattered north and south, east and west. 
 
 "Yes, divided." 
 
 The certain vulgarity which had always underlaid the tone of Trevenna's 
 manner, though his scholarly culture had counterbalanced it and his familiarity 
 with good society almost effaced it, came out now almost unconsciously to 
 himself, as he stood on the hearth, with the careless insolence of a coarse tem- 
 per to adversity, and addressed, with a roughness he had never dared to use, 
 the man who now had no power and no title in the home that had so long called 
 him master. 
 
 " You won't be consulted, you know; it's theirs now, and of course they'll 
 go the best way to work to make money by it. We can't help that: wish we 
 could ! It will bring most so, sold in lots. The Castle will go with the Home 
 Park, of course; some millionnaire will buy it, very likely, just as it stands, fur- 
 niture, pictures, and all; or else, they say, it may be bought by Government 
 for a new military hospital. I don't know about that myself; but some say so. 
 The rest will go in lots; the forests will fetch no end for timber; those oaks 
 and elms are worth any money for ship-building and railway-carriages. The 
 deer-park they'll turn into a sheep-walk, kill the herds, and drain the land; and 
 all that waste part by the sea, so pretty to look at, you know, and worth just
 
 220 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 nothing at all for agriculture, they'll sell for building purposes. All that rock, 
 and gorse, and moor, and pine-wood will tell uncommonly well in an auctioneer's 
 periods. The air's beautiful; the sea runs right up under the trees. It will 
 take the public mightily as a bathing-place. I'll be bound in ten years' time 
 villas will cover the whole sea-line, and hotels will be cropping up among the 
 firs like mad. A company's sure to dart at it." 
 
 For his life he could not restrain the merciless jocularity; it was so delicious 
 to him to stand there in that Greuze cabinet, where the pangs of envy had 
 gnawed him so bitterly many a time, and parcel out by his words the magnifi- 
 cent demesne he had longed so savagely to see sold to the Egyptians and 
 divided among the thieves, as the sons of Jacob longed to tear the many-colored 
 coat in rags and sell the favorite of Israel into bondage. 
 
 Chandos, standing where he had risen, heard in silence, his teeth clenched 
 on his under lip till the blood started among the golden luxuriance of his beard, 
 and his breath came slow, loud, and stertorously. 
 
 " Best thing that can be done with it for you," went on Trevenna, standing 
 at ease there, with his hands behind his back, and in his whole attitude the 
 insolence of a coarse triumph more legibly spoken than he knew. " There may 
 be a surplus if it sell well, and of course that will come to you. I don't think 
 there can be much; but still something, ever so little, if it's only just as much 
 as you used to give for an actress's bracelet, of course we shall be glad if we 
 can save for you now. I suspect the building idea will be very profitable; there 
 are always such a lot of builders ready to rush at a new place; and when the 
 villas spring up like mushrooms, and the lodging-houses grow thick, I shouldn't 
 be surprised if Clarencieux beats Ventnor. By Jove ! what would the last 
 marquis have said if he : d foreseen bricks and mortar invading his mighty Druidic 
 woods ? " 
 
 Still Chandos said nothing; his eyes never left their gaze at Trevenna, but 
 there was rising in them darker and darker that look which the Hanoverian 
 nobles had seen in the eyes of the last marquis when he had sent them from 
 his Tower cell, with a single syllable, like lashed curs. 
 
 " But what I came to ask you, my dear Chandos," pursued his tormentor, 
 " was, What will you do ? What is your future to be ? " 
 
 Still no word of answer escaped Chandos; and Trevenna's glance meeting 
 his, his pitiless pursuer thought, " Small need to ask.. Before another three 
 months are out, he will be raving mad in some lunatic ward." 
 
 " You must do something," continued Trevenna, with a kick to the silver 
 andirons. " You have not the worth of one of those fire-dogs now. If you 
 had listened to me, you might have been living comfortably abroad, with the 
 Lily Queen to console you; but you wouldn't. You chose 'honor.' Now, 
 honor don't give us bread and cheese. It's quite a patrician luxury, and I can
 
 CHANDOS. 221 
 
 assure you you'll never get your salt out of it. There a'n't anything the world 
 pays so badly; you see, there a'n't any demand for it ! What's to be done ? 
 To be sure, you write; but now you're down in the world, tres-cher, I'm sadly 
 afraid your books will go down in the world too, and I shouldn't be at all sur- 
 prised if the critics find you immoral. They always do, unless a writer gives 
 'em good dinners; they always shy that stone, unless their hands are filled with 
 a claret-jug. Besides, as Scott says, ' literature's a good crutch, but a sorry 
 staff,' unless you cant in it; and I don't suppose you'd ever cant, not if you 
 were living on a loaf in a garret ? " 
 
 Still there was no answer to him; only the gleam in his dilated eyes grew 
 blacker as Chandos heard. 
 
 " Literature, of course, you can turn back to," resumed Trevenna, too 
 appreciative of the satisfaction he enjoyed, and "too absorbed in his ingenuity at 
 stretching every pulley and turning every screw of the rack he had his prey 
 stretched on, to note how dangerous a pastime he had chosen. " But I fear 
 you won't be much able to write at present. Meanwhile, of course Warburne 
 will be open to you; but I suppose you will hardly care to live there, a hanger- 
 on upon your mother's family. Forgive me if I speak bluntly. I mean well. 
 What remains ? You can say with truth, if ever anybody could, ' I cannot 
 work, to beg I am ashamed.' To be sure, the country the Cabinet would 
 give you some post, perhaps, out of respecjt to the great minister's name; but, 
 on my life, unless it's to choose pictures for the nation, or to preside over a 
 competitive examination of pretty women for the palm of beauty, I don't know 
 any public office for which you've trained ! You're an Epicurean, and there's 
 no room for Epicureans in these busy, practical days. Your pride, your po- 
 curantism, your art-fancies, your fashionable caprices, were thought charming 
 by the world, my dear Ernest, while you were rich and were its idol; but I am 
 sadly afraid, now that you're a sold-up bankrupt, the world won't care to give 
 you back your v ery good dinners, and will tell you, like Job's friends, 
 that the best thing you can do to please them is to 'curse God and 
 die.' " 
 
 He had gone one step too far. As the lion-tamer amuses himself with goad- 
 ing and insulting the fallen monarch that lies chained before him, till he forgets 
 that the desert-blood is still there, and in incautious insolence tampers and 
 stings one moment too long, until the captive king, with a single leap, clears 
 his barrier and breaks his bonds, and avenges his injuries with the old desert- 
 might, so Trevenna had played for one moment too protracted with the man 
 he tortured. With a spring light and long as a deer's, unerring and irresistible 
 as a leopard's, Chandos threw himself on him, one hand grasping his shoulder, 
 the other twisted tight in the linen at his throat, and silently, with a resistless 
 force, strong as steal to clasp, thrust him downward across the painted cabinet
 
 222 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 towards the door, his height above the low square form of Trevenna, like a 
 Greek god's above a 'faun's. 
 
 " To-night at least this house is mine. If it were not that I have benefited 
 you, if it were not that you are too vile to be avenged on, you should not leave 
 me with life in you, you mocker, liar, traitor, you foul tempter who sold your 
 friend ! " 
 
 The words were uttered low in his throat, yet so distinct that every syllable 
 in them vibrated on the other's ear; and, powerless, breathless, deprived of all 
 his strength and all his self-possession by the amaze that seized him, and by 
 the force that hurled him out, Trevenna was thrust passive and without 
 answer through the doorway of the Greuze cabinet, and flung down on to the 
 floor of the corridor without. 
 
 The door closed, baring him out. ' He rose livid with rage, and passionately 
 bitter that in one moment of thoughtless self-indulgence he should have undone 
 the caution and the acumen of so many years and betrayed the carefully veiled 
 secret of his hate. Yet, as he shook himself, jarred but unbruised by the fall 
 on the yielding velvet carpets, he smiled in a contemptuous triumph, a compen- 
 sative satisfaction: he had what life could never take from him, his vengeance. 
 
 " The last exercise of your droits de seigneur, my beggared Lord of Claren- 
 cieux," he thought, content, though angered at himself. " You won't find any 
 one put up with your pride now. You are bitter; yes, I daresay you are bitter; 
 but all your misery won't prevent this haughty castle going to the hammer, and 
 one day or other you shall see me in it ! When I do come, I'll light my first 
 fire with my Lord Marquis's Kneller picture, and I'll build my kennels with the 
 pounded dust of Philip Chandos' statue ! " 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE FEW WHO WERE FAITHFUL 
 
 THE morning came, a beautiful summer morning, with its light on the sea, 
 and its west wind blowing over the limitless blossoms of acres on acres of lilies- 
 of-the-valley and of wild dog-roses that filled the forest-glades with fragrance 
 and made their dewy couches for the deer and their perfumed shelter for the 
 earth-nesting birds. The earliest rays glancing in to the painted cabinet found 
 Chandos sitting there as he had sat all the night through; he had never stirred: 
 now and then his head had sunk forward on his breast, and the sleep of the 
 opiate had fallen on him for an hour, heavy, dreamless, merciful, insomuch as 
 it annihilated thought; at all other times he sat motionless, save once or twice
 
 CHANDOS. 223 
 
 when he drank off great floods of iced water on brimming draughts of brandy, 
 looking outward at all he loved so passionately, at all he had lost forever. 
 
 With that single roused action towards his traitor, all revival of sense or 
 movement seemed to have ebbed out again in him. He sat dulling his senses 
 to insensibility with the nicotine, but never dulling with it the pangs that ate 
 at his heart, as the vulture at Prometheus'. 
 
 Trevenna had not made a wide nor an unlikely guess when he had thought 
 to himself that the end of the brilliant career he had so brutally and lustfully 
 envied would be a mad-house. 
 
 The joys of Chandos had been vivid and unshadowed above all other men's; 
 his suifering was proportionate. The very nature which had rendered his pleas- 
 ures so perfect in the days that were gone, now only seemed to render his torture 
 ten thousand-fold more acute. The opiate drugged his brain and his senses, 
 but it could not drug the mortal anguish that never for one moment would be 
 still. 
 
 He never noticed the rising of the day, he never saw the sun grow brighter 
 and higher in the east; he knew nothing; his eyes only fastened with a look 
 that never left them on the sea and the woodland, and all the forest beauty that 
 had been his so long, that never now would be his own again. Couched at his 
 feet the dog Beau Sire lay, stirless through the day and night, lifting his head 
 now and then with a low moan; the brute was faithful where the hand he had 
 filled with gifts and benefits numberless as the sands of the sea had turned 
 against him. 
 
 All was very still. Trevenna with the creditors and lawyers, had left in the 
 past night; the men whom they placed in charge had been enjoined to show 
 the strictest respect for his privacy. The household among them old people 
 who had known the great minister's youth and had idolized his heir from the 
 cradle were dumb and paralyzed with amazement and with grief; none of 
 them dared venture near him. Nothing roused him from his stupor, the 
 stupor in which the brain, the more finely it be organized, the more vividly 
 it imagines, and the more exquisitely it creates, the more fatally still will lose 
 its reason and perish in delirium or in vacuity. Ignatius Mathias was not in 
 error when he had thought that his taskmaster's work was worse than murder. 
 The sharp ringing shot, the certain mortal stab, of the assassin, would have been 
 mercy to it. But Trevenna was too wise and too ingenious for those; he slew 
 more slowly, and he kept within the law. 
 
 As the noon was high, and the sunlight without shadow across the breadths 
 of grass-land in the hush in which the song-birds ceased, and even the busy 
 wild pigeons rested on the wing, the slow sullen tramp of the steps of many 
 men came on the stillness, echoing dully on the road of the western avenue 
 that swept round by the western wing in which the Greuze room was. The
 
 224 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 solid measured beating of the many feet did not awake him from his apathy of 
 drugged unconsciousness; the noise of the irregular marching of varied steps 
 as they crushed the ground beneath the woven boughs of the arched aisles of 
 beech and chestnut did not reach his ear. The men came on to pass round 
 the castle to the front; they were men of all ages and of different ranks, but 
 well nigh all of the same type, the type of the two classes of Old England 
 whom she never hears the name of now, the yeomen and the peasantry; the 
 fair, florid, blue-eyed, broad-shouldered, bulldog type of what were once her 
 franklins and eorlmen, that now here and there fast fading out are still her 
 tenant-farmers and her country cotters, still reap her yellow harvests, and still 
 live in the green shadow of her woods. 
 
 They came on very slowly, their heads bent, their heavy steps dragging 
 with a weary, melancholy effort. They came as they had followed the bier of 
 Philip Chandos, as they would have followed the funeral of his son. 
 
 They had learned that a worse thing than death had fallen on Clarencieux. 
 They moved with a certain solemnity and dignity, rough and various as the 
 men were in person and degree; for one emotion was upon them all, and a pro- 
 found grief lent its sanctity, almost its majesty, to the weather-beaten faces on 
 which the warmth of the early summer shone down through the leaves, and to 
 the stalwart stature and the bent frames which were side by side as age and 
 youth, as the tenant of thousands of acres and the peasant who lived in a shiel- 
 ing, advanced together in a long line up the double avenue. 
 
 At their head, walking alone, was a very old man of more than eighty-five 
 years; his form gnarled and tough as one of the oaks of the deer-forest; his 
 white hair on his shoulders like one of the patriarchs of Israel ; his face tanned 
 to a ruddy brown, that no near approach of death could pale. He leaned 
 heavily on an elm staff, and the lines in his still-comely face were deep-set as 
 though his own plough had riven them. 
 
 As they paced near, the loud swelling noise of their marching smote dully 
 on the hushed noontide. At last it reached the ear of Chandos; he raised his 
 head, heavy with the opium-fumes, and saw them. He knew them, every man 
 of them; he had known them from the earliest moment when every creature 
 on the broad lands of Clarencieux had striven with all the loving loyalty of 
 feudal affection to do their best to please and to amuse the golden-haired young 
 child of the great house of Clarencieux; 
 
 The sight roused him in an instant, breaking away the mists, dissipating the 
 lethargy gradually settling on his brain. 
 
 " Oh, my God ! " he moaned, aloud; " and they must suffer too ! " 
 Not alone could he bear his burden; not alone could his fate strike him; it 
 would crush others in his fall, remove the landmark of the fatherless, drive out 
 the old man from his lifelong hearth, send the worn-out peasant from the cot-
 
 CHANDOS. 225 
 
 tage-hearthstone that had been his so long, and fell the green, glad welcome of 
 the forests that the fathers' fathers of the most aged there had known and 
 loved as familiar and venerable things. 
 
 He had thought of them before, thought often of all who must suffer 
 through him; of the retainers made homeless in their old age; of the tenants 
 given over to hard hands; of the men who had lived on those lands from their 
 birth, like their fathers before them, condemned to see their roof-trees sold be- 
 fore their sight, and to be driven across the western seas to seek new homes, 
 when they had had no other wish save to be laid in peace beside their people in 
 the familiar graves beneath their village spire. He had thought of them; no pain 
 could make him selfish; but he had never thought of them as he thought now 
 when the three hundred south-countrymen who held his fiefs, large or small, 
 came up in the noontide through the western avenue. Involuntarily he rose; 
 they saw him, and paused before the opened casement on the broad stretch of 
 turf, all checkered with the shadows of the crossed branches. The oriels 
 reached nearly to the ground; he was as much in their presence as though they 
 had entered the building, and that which they came to say seemed best spoken 
 under the summer freedom of the sky. With the same unanimous movement 
 as his creditors they uncovered to a man, standing with as much reverence be- 
 fore the ruined bankrupt as they had stood before the Lord of Clarencieux. 
 The sun shone clear upon his face, and at what they read there the change so 
 unutterable that a few days had sufficed to work they were silenced with as 
 unspeakable a horror. They knew then that this thing of which they had 
 heard was true. 
 
 The old man who stood at their head advanced slightly. He was their 
 spokesman, who had rented and farmed the greenest lands of Clarencieux, and 
 had lived under the same broad thatch-roof as his ancestors had dwelt under 
 since days beyond their memory, when the Chandos had been peers, and had 
 marched with their brother-barons to win at the sword's point the chartered 
 liberties of England. He was a brave and staunch old patriarch, holding him- 
 self proudly as any Saxon thane, yet loyal to the house he loved, as the Chandos 
 had been loyal to their Plantagenet kinsmen and to their Stuart kings. 
 
 He by name Harold Gelart stood forward, his white hair floating in the 
 soft west wind. 
 
 " My lord " (the owner of Clarencieux had been their lord to all the yeomen 
 on the lands since that unforgotten, unforgiven day- when the Hanover boor 
 had slaughtered in cold blood their last marquis), " my lord, is this thing true ? " 
 
 Harold Gelart could not have put into clear words the shame' and misery 
 which he had heard had come to Clarencieux. 
 
 Chandos bowed his head. 
 
 The dense throng gathered under the leafy shadow of the elms moved with 
 
 VOL. III. 8
 
 226 
 
 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 a shuddering, swaying motion. Against all witness they had disbelieved it till 
 they should hear its utterance from his own lips. Its blow to him was scarcely 
 less than was its blow to them. 
 
 The old farmer bent over his elm staff as though the shock that had been 
 so deadly to him in the past night smote him afresh. 
 " Will the lands be sold ? " 
 
 His voice was hoarse, and panted slowly out, and he covered his face as he 
 asked it. To him it was such unutterable shame, such insupportable disgrace, 
 to speak such words to the son of Philip Chandos, to their beloved and honored 
 favorite, who had been with them, and been dear to them, from the first days of 
 his bright childhood. 
 
 Chandos bowed his assent once more. 
 
 Speech would not come to him, and none was needed as they looked upon 
 his face. 
 
 They were strangely, terribly still, that mass of toil-worn, air-freshened, 
 stalwart men, whose strength could have wrecked Clarencieux from terrace to 
 turret, had they hated its beauty with Trevenna's hate. What they heard might 
 drive any or all of them out to new homes, might consign them to new and 
 pitiless dealers, might level the homestead they cherished, and might ruin them 
 in many fatal and unlooked-for ways. But in this moment it was not of them- 
 selves they thought; it was for the great house that had fallen, for the dis- 
 possessed lord who stood before them. 
 
 Harold Gelart, the oldest among them, and elected their ambassador, a man 
 of few words, tough in his mold as any oak that stood the shock of the sea- 
 storms, yet tender at heart as any sapling fresh in its first green leaf, lifted his 
 head, while great drops welled slowly out of his aged eyes and down the sun- 
 burnt furrows of his face. 
 
 " If it had pleased the Almighty God to have laid me in my grave before 
 this day ! " 
 
 It was the only moan that escaped the brave old yeoman. The honor of 
 his " lords " had been his honor, their fame his fame; loyalty to them had been 
 one, in his simple creed, with loyalty to his God; and though he knew not but 
 that the old moated ivy-hidden grange, where he and his had dwelt so long in 
 peace, might be sold above his head and new landlords eject him to find a 
 fresh resting-place in his last years, no syllable would ever have escaped him to 
 add a blow to the misery that had fallen upon Clarencieux. 
 
 Chandosjooked at him, and at the crowd that gathered so mutely under the 
 elms; and the icy, stony rigidity, the almost senseless stupor, which had been 
 upon his features, changed and softened as it had done at the dead duke's 
 words. He had known those furrowed, bronzed faces ever since his youngest 
 years; he had seen them gather round him in loyal attachment on every anni-
 
 CHANDOS. 227 
 
 versary of his birth, at every return to his home, at ever Christmas-tide that he 
 had been among them. They were familiar to him as the venerable trees 
 beneath which they stood; and he knew that they and he met for the last time. 
 
 " My friends," he said, gently (and his voice had the composure with which 
 he had addressed throughout his creditors, but shook slightly), " the worst that 
 you can hear is true. You and I must part, forever. I hope that my fate may 
 not recoil on you; but it is too likely you may suffer through me. I have been 
 blind and mad. Forgive me that I thought too little of all I owed my heritage." 
 
 The words reached the farthest that stood on the outskirts of the throng, 
 hollow and feeble though the once rich music, of his tones was now. A single 
 sound, like one deep, vast sob, shook the crowd as they heard. They loved 
 him well for his own sake, for his father's sake, for the sake of his great name 
 and race, that had been part and share of their own honor for so long. 
 
 Harold Gelart lifted his white head, like the head of a Saxon franklin, and 
 spoke with the broad, marked dialect of the southern seaboard steeping his 
 words in its accent. 
 
 " My lord, we aren't here to reproach of you; you have done what you will 
 with your own. We are come to tender you our loyalty, to say a few words to 
 you, an you will." 
 
 The old patriarch, whose life was spent amidst the woods and fields, whose 
 rising and going to rest were with the larks of his corn-lands, found words with 
 difficulty. His speech was ever laconic, and little above a peasant's; and the 
 most silver-tongued orator would have found utterance hard under such grief 
 as that he choked down now. 
 
 " Speak on," said Chandos, gently still. He knew that, bitterly as they 
 tortured him, they came there out of love for him. 
 
 " My lord, it is just this, no more," said the old man; while the broad 
 provincialism of his county-tone gave a rough, imploring earnestness, beyond 
 all oratory, to his words. " You tell us the lands must go; we have heard yester- 
 night that a sore and wicked thing have befell you: it don't need to speak on it, 
 it's too bitter in all our teeth; and them as has wrought it on you, may the 
 vengeance of God overtake ! " 
 
 Chandos stayed him with a gesture. 
 
 " No ! to pray that were to call a curse on me. I but reap the harvest of 
 my own utter madness." 
 
 Harold Gelart's eyes flashed with a fire that age could not wholly dim, and 
 he struck his elm staff down into the turf with mighty force. 
 
 " Where be them that never warned you ? Where be them that feasted at 
 your cost ? Where be them that knew all was rotting under you, and never 
 spoke the word that might have saved you in good time ? Where be them ? 
 Let their guilt find them out ! "
 
 2 o 8 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 There was a rude grandeur in the passionate imprecation, as the old man 
 raised his head and looked upward at Clarencieux, where the colossal walls 
 towered above him, as though marking the vengeance of the great dead who 
 had reigned there. Then he turned his eyes on Chandos. 
 
 " I ask pardon, my lord; I feel dazed-like with the misery ! What we come 
 to say to you is only this. We hear a power of money is wanted: if the money 
 was forthcoming any other way, the lands would be safe? We fancy so: we 
 don't know much; but we guess that. Now, we aren't rich men, none of us; 
 but, put together, we're worth summat. We've saved a good bit, most of us; 
 and, clubbed together, it will make a bigger sum than may-be anybody'd think. 
 Now, my lord, we don't mean no offence; we've lived under you and yours all 
 our lives, and we love you like as if you were our king. Now, will you let us 
 pay the money ? We'll clear the lands, anyhow; we'll clear summat, at least as 
 far as it'll go. We'll give every penny we can scrape together; and we'll bless 
 you for using of it, as we used to bless your father's name when, let state and 
 grandeur load him ever so, he never forgot us. Take it as we give it, right 
 down with all our hearts; there a'n't a man among us but what would go con- 
 tent, and feed with his dogs, and fodder with his cattle, to know that he'd 
 been of ever such a little bit of help in saving you and saving Clarencieux ! " 
 
 Harold Gelart paused, his voice shaken and stifled; the drops streaming 
 unbidden, like a woman's, down his withered cheeks, in the passionate earnest- 
 ness his errand lent him. Never, in all the years of his tough, sun-tanned, 
 wind-beaten, healthy, vigorous life had such a weakness been wrung from him. 
 
 From the yeomen and peasant throng a murmur came such as that which 
 the speech of the dealer had roused in the porphyry chamber, but louder, 
 bolder, rough, and honest, with the simple warmth of those who gave it. It 
 was the ratification by every man present of the words and of the offer of their 
 spokesman. Every man there bent his head, as they bent it entering their 
 woodland church: so, silently, they registered their adhesion to his promise. 
 
 Chandos stood and heard. A strange alteration passed over his face; all 
 its frozen calm changed; for the first time since the night that he had learned 
 his doom, the blood rushed back in a hot flush over his features; he quivered 
 through all his frame, as if they had struck him some heavy-weighted physical 
 blow. He was silent. 
 
 At his silence, the throng stretching far away under the elm-glades before 
 him surged nearer by one impulse; every unit of that swaying mass pressed 
 forward to pledge his sincerity and the willingness of his gift, and from their 
 throats, to a man, one shout broke: 
 
 " My lord ! take it, take it, and buy back the lands ! What is ours is 
 your'n ! " 
 
 "Ay, ay ! " swore the staunch old Gelart, while with his brown, horny hand
 
 CHANDOS. 229 
 
 he dashed back the salt from his lids. " And only just reckoning, too. What 
 was your'n have been ever free to us in your days and in your forefathers'; 
 no soul was ever pressed, no soul ever hungered, no soul ever pined, on these 
 lands. What is ours is your'n." 
 
 Chandos was silent still. The change on his face grew softer, warmer, 
 better, with each moment; the vacant lethargy of the opiate cleared more and 
 more away from his senses; but his head was sunk upon his chest, and for the 
 first time since his ruin had been known to him tears gathered in his eyes and 
 fell slowly one by one. The loyalty showed to him moved him as insult and as 
 anguish had had no power to do; the rain of those bitter tears saved him from 
 madness. 
 
 He stood back in the shadow, so that his face was concealed from them; 
 the weakness he could not for the instant control wrung his pride aud rung his 
 heart; with the warmer gratitude and emotion that their generous fealty brought 
 him was blent the shameful misery that he the last Chandos of Clarencieux 
 should ever stand thus before the tenants of his lands. Their love touched 
 him with an intense pain that he should ever have tried and proved it thus. 
 
 They mistook his silence, and the movement with which he involuntary drew 
 back into the gloom of the Greuze chamber, for offence; and their spokesman, 
 Gelart, pressed slightly nearer, laying hold, in his earnestness, of the oak frame- 
 work of the oriel. 
 
 " My lord, it sounds bold and coarse, may-be, as I puts it, for we to come 
 bringing our money to you, but it a'n't meant so; we come out o' love and 
 loyalty to you, just out o' that. Your house have been our glory and our 
 friend; we can't a-bear to see it fall and not to heave a shoulder to its prop. 
 Leastways, my lord, if you'll just let us save the lands: we sha'n't be a-doingit 
 for you; we shall only be let to save ourselves from new masters, nothing 
 more. The charity'll be to us." 
 
 The old yeomen was rude in speech and tough in fibre, but a true inherent 
 delicacy lived in him for all that; he strove as far as his powers could to put 
 the services they came to render in the guise of a service permitted them to aid 
 themselves. 
 
 Chandos came forward, and took the old man's brown hands in his, and 
 pressed them silently: words were very hard to him to utter then. 
 
 " My friends," he said, unsteadily, while his voice vibrated on the quiet of 
 the sunny summer day, "thank you I cannot; such service as you would render 
 me is not to be recompensed by any gratitude. If I could take a debt from 
 any man, I would take one from you. But were I to stoop so low as to rob you 
 of your earnings to arrest my ruin, you would be right to deny that I could ever 
 be the son of Philip Chandos." 
 
 A perplexed, piteous pain cast its shadow over the honest, ruddy faces upon
 
 2 3o QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 which he looked: some perception of his meaning, some sense that could he 
 take their offer he would be no longer what the men of his race had been, stole 
 on them. They would have given their lives for him in that hour; and they 
 had some faint knowledge that he was right, that his acceptance of what they 
 tendered, in all the cordial singleness of their hearts, would stain the man 
 they came to save more deeply than his calamity. 
 
 Old Gelart lifted his eyes. 
 
 " Master, master," he whispered hoarsely, " it would be to save his name, 
 his lands. I think he'd 'a' let us do it." 
 
 The yoeman had been of the same years with the great minister, and had 
 loved and honored him with all a vassal's feudal strength. 
 
 Chandos shivered at his words. 
 
 " No," he said gently, though in his voice there was an accent that pierced 
 the hearts of the listening crowd. " I have dishonored him enough: as I have 
 sown, so I reap: it must be so. Yet, because I refuse you, do not think me 
 dead to all your love, senseless to all your fidelity. We shall never meet 
 again; but to my dying day I shall never forget you, never cease to honor 
 and to thank you." 
 
 A mighty sob, like the wrung-out moan of a giant, shook the whole throng 
 like one man. They had heard from his own voice the fiat of farewell; they 
 had learned from his own lips that the doom of Clarencieux was sealed, that 
 they and the race they honored would be severed for evermore. 
 
 They looked upon his face in as eternal a parting as the strong bold men 
 who had dwelt upon his lands and fought under his standard had looked upon 
 the face of the last marquis when he had ridden forth to join the rallying, 
 ridden foith never to return. 
 
 And they wept sorely, like women. 
 
 The length of the summer hours passed, the shadows of the clouds sweeping 
 over the breezy uplands, the swathes of scythed grass, the golden gorse of the 
 moors sloping to the sea, and the swelling woods of the deer forests. A fairer 
 day had never dawned and closed on Clarencieux. Far in the distance a white 
 sail glided in the offing; the stags couched slumbering under the umbrageous 
 shelter of the green-wood aisles; the brooks murmured their incessant song of 
 joy, bubbling through the maidenhair and beneath the wild-rose boughs: its 
 beauty had never been more beautiful. 
 
 Like the youth whom the ancient Mexican world decked with roses, and led 
 out in his loveliness in the light of the sun, ere the knife of the priestly slaugh- 
 terer laid his dead limbs to be severed on the altar of sacrifice, the lands 
 stretched smiling in the warmth, unshadowed by the doom that would dismem- 
 ber and distroy them.
 
 CHANDOS. 231 
 
 To part from them forever ! easier to lower the life best loved within the 
 darkness of the grave, easier to lie down in the fulness of youth and die, easier 
 to suffer all that the world can hold of suffering, than to leave the birthright 
 every memory has hallowed, every thought cherished, every childhood's love 
 endeared, every pride and honor of manhood centred in, and the one mad ruin 
 of an Esau's barter lost. 
 
 The night was down, with the shine of the stars on the sea, and the call of 
 the deer on the silence, with the grand woods bathed in dew, and the moorlands 
 steeped in a hushing quiet; and with the night he must pass out from Claren- 
 cieux a self-exiled and self-beggared man. All through the day he had 
 wandered in monotonous, almost unconscious action among the places that he 
 loved; by the waves where they stretched under endless crests of rock and below 
 beetling walls of pine-topped granite; over the heather, blossoming on leagues 
 on leagues of brown wet sand, where the grouse nested and the sea-swallow 
 skimmed; through the dark, interminable aisles of oaks without a memory that 
 could gauge their hoary age; through the rich, wild s-plendor of forest-growth, 
 all melodious with birds and with the noise of babbling waters; by the side of 
 lonely lakes belted in with leafy screens, under the shelter of towering head- 
 lands, all clothed with fern and pine, and with the fragrant wealth of linden- 
 flowers and the clinging luxuriance of summer creepers; through them he wan- 
 dered, almost insensibly, walking on mile on mile without a sense of bodily 
 fatigue, wearing out physical strength without a knowledge of its loss, beaten, 
 strung, haggard, wellnigh lifeless, yet conscious of nothing save that he looked 
 his last forever on the place of his birth and his heritage. 
 
 It was near midnight when he reached his home in sheer exhaustion. Of 
 the flight of time, of the bodily suffering that racked his limbs, of the weakness 
 upon him from want of food, he knew nothing, he only knew that before the 
 next day dawned he must leave Clarencieux, his own no more, but given over 
 to the spoilers. All the familiar things must pass from him, and be his no more. 
 The trees that had shed their shade over his childish play would fall under the 
 axe; the roof under which kings had sought covert from the men of his blood 
 would know him no longer; strangers would sit by the hearth to which hunted 
 princes had fled knowing they were safer trusting in the honor of a Chandos 
 than amidst the Guards of their lost throne-room. In the banqueting-hall, 
 where his ancestors had gathered the chiefs of the nation, curious throngs 
 would rush to stare and barter; the very marble that wore his father's sem- 
 blance would be sold to whoever would buy; the very canvas from which his 
 mother's eyes smiled on him would pass away to hang on dealers' walls. In 
 the place that had been sacred to his race none would pause to recall his name; 
 in the heritage where his sovereignty had been absolute, his lightest word treas- 
 ured, his idlest wish fulfilled, he would have no power to bid a dog be cared
 
 232 GUI DA'S WORKS. 
 
 for, no right to arrest a hand that should be raised to tear down with laugh and 
 jibe the records and the symbols of the honor of his house. 
 
 Through the years, however many, that his life should stretch to, never again 
 could he lay his head under the roof that had sheltered his childhood's sleep; 
 never again could his eyes look upon the things beloved so long: never again 
 could his steps come here, where every rood was hallowed and where no race 
 but his race had ever yet reigned. 
 
 In that hour nothing but his oath to the man who had bade him live on and 
 meet his fate, whatever that fate should be, stood between him and a self- 
 sought grave. 
 
 Death took the young, the fair, the well-beloved; O God ! he thought, why 
 would it pass him by ? why would it leave him breath on his lips, strength in 
 his limbs, consciousness in his brain, when all that was worth living for was 
 dead, when every pulse of existence through his veins was but a fresh pang ? 
 Death ! he had known its worst throes a thousand times with every familiar 
 thing on which his eyes had looked their last; he had passed through its worst 
 bitterness without a voice to comfort, without a hand to succor him, with every 
 farewell gaze at all the living things, at all the forest haunts, at all the summer 
 loveliness, with which he had parted as the dying Raphael parted with longing, 
 yearning love from the glories of the canvas that the mists of dissolution 
 blinded from his sight. Death ! he had died a million deaths from the hour 
 when he had known that he must part with Clarencieux. 
 
 It was long past midnight; all was very still. Through the open casements 
 came the lulling of the sea, and the faint, delicate murmur of leaves stirring in 
 a windless air, moved only by the weight of their clinging dews or by a night- 
 bird's wing. All in the vast building slept; all who loved him in the household 
 (and they were many) had looked their last upon his face, the face that most 
 of them had known since the laugh of its childhood had been on it. He could 
 have no eyes upon him in this the last hour. All was- quite still; the moon- 
 light streamed in, clear and white and cold, through the unclosed windows; the 
 whole of the great limitless vista of chamber opening on chamber stretched on 
 and on in the spectral silver light; the hush of the grave rested on the mighty 
 halls where white-crossed Crusaders had denied, and houseless monarchs had 
 been sheltered, and revellers feasted in the king's name through many a night 
 of wassail, and his own life of careless, cloudless pleasure spent with so lavish 
 a hand its golden moments. The quivering ashy gleam of the star-rays poured 
 down the porphyry chamber, leaving deep breadths of gloom between the aisles 
 of its columns, touching with a mournful light the drooping standards and the 
 lost coronet of the last marquis, shed full across Philip Chandos' statue, and 
 leaving in its darkest shadow the motionless form of the exiled and beggared 
 man by whose madness the honor had departed from their house.
 
 CHANDOS. 233 
 
 Standing there before them, those memorials of the dead, he felt as though 
 they drove him out, dishonored, alien, accursed as any parricide. Through 
 him had gone what had been dearer to them than life; through him had 
 perished what they had trusted to him; through him their name must be 
 tarnished by sneer, by scorn, worse yet, by pity; through him their might, 
 their fame, their stainless heritage, were dragged in the dust and parted amidst 
 thieves. The crime of Orestes seemed scarce more of parricide than his crime. 
 
 Had not his oath held him, had not his word, pledged to one who now lay 
 in his fresh grave, bound his arm powerless, in that hour he would have fallen, 
 killed by his own hand, beneath his father's statue, where the moon touched 
 with its brightest lustre the proud brow of the marble that stood there as 
 though to bear witness against the wreck and shame of his ruined race, the 
 desolation of his forsaken hearth. 
 
 The stillness of the after-midnight was unbroken; once the distant belling 
 of a deer echoed over the park without; other sound there was none. He 
 seemed alone with the dead he had dishonored, with the great dead whose 
 memories he had shamed and whose treasures he had sold into bondage. 
 
 He looked at those lifeless symbols as though they were his judges and 
 accusers; and a hoarse shuddering cry broke from him and moaned down the 
 silence of the prophyry hall. 
 
 " Oh, God ! I saved our honor ! " 
 
 He felt as though he had pleaded before their judgment-seat, as though 
 he called on them to bear with him in his agony, to be merciful to him in his 
 misery. He had not bartered all their birthright: he had not given up his honor 
 into slavery ! 
 
 The hushed, grave-like calm that followed on the echo of his words was like 
 the calm of a lone cathedral; it cast back upon his heart in terrible isolation 
 the sense of how utterly he, who had loved men so well and been the caressed 
 of so many voices, stood in his poverty and his exile alone. 
 
 Slowly, very slowly, he looked once more at all that he must leave forever, 
 then turned to pass out from the porphyry chamber. But the tension of his 
 strength gave way; weakened by little food, and worn out by exhaustion, his 
 limbs shook, his frame reeled; he swayed aside like a tree under the blows of 
 an axe, and fell prone across the threshold, the moonlight bathing him where 
 he lay. 
 
 For hours hours he was stretched senseless there, the dog the one friend 
 faithful couched down by him in a sleepless guard. The night passed linger- 
 ingly; the flicker of the gentle leaves, or the soft rush of an owl's wing, the 
 only noise that stirred in it without. Now and then there was the sweeping 
 beat of a flight of deer trooping across the sward that echoed from afar; once 
 a nightingale sang her love-song with a music of passsionate pain. There was
 
 234 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 no noise of life in the great forests without; there was none here in the moonlit 
 banqueting-hall. 
 
 The wind freshened as the day drew near, blowing through the vastness of 
 the forsaken chambers down the aisles of the porphyry columns; its cooler 
 breath breathed on him and revived him; he stirred with a shuddering sigh. 
 His limbs were stiff and paralyzed; his blood seemed frozen; the warm air 
 around felt chill as a tomb. He rose with difficulty, and dragged himself, like 
 a man crippled with age, across the threshold that his steps should never 
 repass. The faint light of the young day was breaking, and shed a colder, 
 grayer hue on all its splendor, from which the white majesty of the sculpture 
 rose, like a spectre keeping silent witness over the abandoned solitude. 
 
 Thus, with his head bowed, and in his step the slow, laborious, feeble effort 
 of bodily prostration, he passed onward, onward through all that never again 
 could his eyes look upon, save in such remembrance as dreams lend to sleep, 
 to mock the waking of despair, onward through the mighty entrance-hall, in 
 which the silence as of death reigned, where the steel tramp of the soldiers of 
 the king had once re-echoed to its vaulted roof. 
 
 He looked back, in longing as agonized, in thirst as terrible, in yearning as 
 speechless in its love as that with which eyes look backward to the bier in which 
 all that made life worth its living to them lies sightless, senseless, and forever 
 lost. He looked back once, in such a gaze as men upon the scaffold give to 
 the fairness of earth and the brilliance of sunlight that they shall never gaze 
 upon again. Then the doors closed on him with a hollow, sullen sound; he 
 was driven out to exile, and his place would know him no more. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE CROWD IN THE COUR DES PRINCES. 
 
 WITH the day after his last entertainment the ruin, so sudden and so vast, 
 had been rumored on the town. 
 
 Convulsed with amaze, aghast with indignation, indignant in incredulity, the 
 world at first refused to believe it; persuaded of its truth, it went as nearly mad 
 with excitement as so languid and polite a world could. 
 
 Well as he had entertained the world, he had never, on the whole, so richly 
 banqueted it as now, when it could surfeit itself upon a calamity so astounding. 
 It was grateful to all, which no good news could ever claim to be, the story 
 was so utterly undreamt of, so perfectly complete, without a flaw to make it less
 
 CHAN DOS. 235 
 
 terrible, a loophole to make it less dark. It was a boon beyond price in the 
 hot languid days of a waning season; it only needed a suspicion of crime to be 
 as refreshing as the sudden sweep of a trainontana through the sultry dulness 
 of a Neapolitan noon. Just a thread of " something wicked " woven with it 
 would have made it the cause ce'lebre of fashionable drawing-rooms. As it was, it 
 was convulsingly amazing enough to be on the lips of every creature in the town; 
 and inimitably coined rumors, turned out with an exquisite promptness and 
 ingenuity from the mint of slander, soon supplied that sole deficiency of the 
 scandalous element with an industry and adroitness beyond all praise. " In 
 the misfortunes of our friends there is always some relish," says the Fronde 
 philospher; and when this adversity piques the palate, amuses the ennui, and 
 soothes the vanity, the wretchedness of a friend and brother may become very 
 singularly acceptable. 
 
 It burst upon the town like the bursting of a shell. In its first rumor it was 
 utterly discredited. " Absurd ! Had they not been at his ball last night ? 
 Had not every one seen him at the new opera ? Ruined ? preposterous ! He 
 could never be ruined. They knew better." 
 
 Then, when the truth became indisputable, gossip-mongers quarrelled for it 
 as a flock of street-sparrows quarrel for a crumb of bread; and the town felt 
 virtuous and outraged. To have been led into offering such clouds of incense, 
 year after year, to a man who all the while was on the eve of bankruptcy ! 
 society felt morally indignant and unjustifiably treated. Nothing so marvel- 
 lous, nothing so incredible, had startled his order for many a long year; in the 
 clubs and the drawing-rooms, in the Rooms and the Lobby, in the lounge of 
 the Park and the tte-a-tete of the boudoirs, there was but one theme, his dis- 
 appearance and his ruin. No loss could have been so irreparable as the loss of 
 their leader; no shock could have been so intense as the fall of their idol; no 
 episode could have been so thrilling as their reception by him the very night 
 before his story was known. Gourmets were in despair, there would be no 
 such dinners elsewhere; and club-wits were in paradise, there could be no 
 dearth of a topic. Ladies fainted with grief, and revived to wonder if his Li- 
 moges ware would be sold, and wept their bright eyes dim, to clear them again 
 with eager speculation as to the fate of the Clarencieux diamonds; divided 
 interests reigned together in their hearts: it was agonizing, it was terrible; no 
 one would ever give them such fetes, but it was possible all clouds have their 
 silver lining that the Chandos jewels perhaps might come into the market ! 
 
 The Countess de la Vivarol set her delicate teeth as she heard of it, and felt 
 her cheek grow white, rusee, dazzling young diplomatist as she was. 
 
 " I hate him; I have my vengeance. I ought to rejoice," she thought; "and 
 
 yet " And yet in solitude her tears fell. " II est si beau ? " she sighed to 
 
 herself.
 
 236 O UIDAS WORKS. 
 
 " He is ruined ? Well, I have helped to do it," said Flora de I'Orme, with 
 gay self-accusation. 
 
 " What a pity ! " lamented Claire Rahel. " The art of opera-suppers will 
 perish with him." 
 
 "There is an overruling Providence," sighed the worldly-holies: " his books 
 are not fit to be read. Genius ? yes, no doubt; but what is genius without 
 principle ?" 
 
 " Died game," said a Guardsman. " By George, one saw nothing last night." 
 
 " Always eccentric," hinted a club-lounger. " A little mad, /think; and, 
 on my word, it's the most charitable thing to suppose." 
 
 "Deceived us shamefully; acted most dishonorably," wept Lady Chester- 
 ton, to her allies. " My sister's peace is ruined forever; indeed, I fear for her 
 very life. But we may be thankful perhaps for even this terrible blow; it may 
 have saved more. What happiness could she have looked for with a gambler, 
 a libertine, a free-thinker, however brilliant his career ? " 
 
 Two or three women notably one beautiful Roman princess, with the 
 splendor of Rome in her eyes suffered passionately in their solitude, passively 
 though they had listened to the world on the subject, and thought, wearily 
 pushing off their weighty hair from their brows, " /would have gone with him 
 to his beggary." 
 
 For the rest, the world talked itself out of breath over its lost leader's fall, 
 and picked the story of his calamity as a carrion picks the bones of the dead 
 camel. It flavored their white soups, was the choicest olives to their wines, 
 spared them silent moments, let the dull seem witty if he brought a piquant 
 addition to it, and gave a lulling morphine to the pangs of jealous vanity. The 
 world was perfectly certain, of course, that the assertion of ignorance was merely 
 a blind, and that they had been wittingly duped many years. A man run 
 through a fine fortune without knowing it ? ridiculous ! And the world began 
 also, as Trevenna prophesied, to find out that " Lucrece " was very immoral. 
 
 Thus the babble busied itself over the wreck of a life, denying it even that 
 sanctity of solitude which even barbarians have conceded to calamity, and ex- 
 posing it far and wide in those pillories where no adversity can veil, no misery 
 can hallow, no dignity beneath misfortune can avail to shield those once given 
 over to the mercy of insatiate tongues. 
 
 They were shocked, grieved, horrified; most compassionately sympathetic, of 
 course ; but they were quite of opinion that the idol they had followed had been ut- 
 terly worthless, and began to discuss with unanimous vivacity the chances of who 
 would be most likely to secure the prize of the inimitable genius Dubosc. It was 
 perhaps regarded as almost the cruellest stroke of the whole fearful affair when 
 the fact oozed out that the celebrated chef alleged his spirit to be broken, and 
 announced his intention of retiring for the rest of his days to a villa at Auteuil,
 
 CHAN DOS. 237 
 
 there to devote his mind primarily to uninterrupted study to the effects that 
 might be produced by certain elements unrevealed on the red mullet, a prob- 
 lem which had long pursued him, and to indite a work which should annihil- 
 ate Brillat-Savarin and become the eternal Libro d'Oro of gastronomists. 
 
 The world, altogether, was harshly treated. There was no scandal or 
 crime in the story of ruin, which omission rendered it curry without its 
 cayenne; and the great coveted master Dubosc was lost to it. It could 
 have lived without its late idol well enough, but it could not be reconciled to 
 living without his cook. So it said one De Profundis over the virtually dead 
 man, and turned to his sales much as it would have turned from his tomb to his 
 catalogues. No one asked where he had gone; what did it matter ? Take 
 what route he would, he would be sure to go to Avernus. 
 
 Men there were, it is true, who took it strongly to heart in their own silent 
 Quietist fashion, who smoked huge cigars over it in gloomy silence, who could 
 not forget, try as they would, the voice that had always spoken them a gay 
 welcome, the hand that had been always stretched out to aid them, the eyes 
 that had never looked harshly on any living thing. There were men, many men, 
 of his own order, who loved him, who could not think of him without 
 feeling like fools, as they phrased it; and there were others not of his set, 
 young men of talent and ambition, who had found an Augustus in this sparkling 
 Catullus, who had been given fashion in their art by a word from him, and who 
 had known no patron so sure, so generous, so omnipotent. These lamented 
 him sorely, bewailed him bitterly in their souls; but their voices could not be 
 heard amidst the veering wind of the condemning breath of many thousand 
 lips; and the world in general fluttered the catalogue-leaves with raised eye- 
 brows, and murmured its strictures on the morality of " Lucrece." He was 
 ruined, and they had been deceived; it was frightfully shocking, of course; but 
 meanwhile the virtuosi felt curious about the Quercia terra-cottas and the 
 Fragonard medallions; Turf-men could not but congratulate each other that 
 the famous Clarencieux strains would become public property; dilettanti 
 thought of the superb Titians and exquisite Petits Maitres they had envied so 
 long: Pall Mall loungers rumored on his cabinets of cigars, and epicures 
 longed to read the catalogue of his Comet, his Regency, and his Imperial 
 growth wines; whilst ladies comforted themselves for their darling's loss by 
 projects for securing his Delia Robbia ware, his Evangeliarium in conical 
 letters enriched with crystals en cabochon, his Cellini vases, or his Pompadour 
 cabinets. He had amused them, no doubt, far more brilliantly than any other 
 ever would do; but, since he was gone, it was as well to console themselves 
 with his collections. Chandos before had entertained but his order; now he 
 furnished entertainment for all the world. 
 
 When the palace-gates were opened in the raw gray of the morning, and the
 
 238 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 Poissardes rushed in, eager, envious, insatiate, devouring, filling the Cour des 
 Princes, what matter to them that the privacy of Versailles had never before 
 been broken save by laughter and music and the soft fall of women's steps and 
 the glitter of a throng of nobles ? what matter that Calamity held the throne- 
 room, that the mighty adversity had set its seal of sanctity upon the threshold ? 
 Like the Poissardes in the Cour des Princes, the crowds rushed to enjoy the 
 ruin of the leader of fashion, and gave not one thought to the fate of the dis- 
 crowned. His palaces was theirs to wreck and to burn as they would; they 
 pillaged with both hands. 
 
 Moreover, as Philippe Egalite, if history bewray him not (which, sooth to 
 say, it often does), took a latent pleasure in that rifling of his house, in that de- 
 struction of his order, and went up to see the crowd thronging through the dis- 
 mantled palace-chambers with a smile on his lips, and his little cane swinging 
 lightly between his fingers, to see the annihilation of the Eldest-born, to see the 
 rooting up and trampling down of the White Lilies, even, like Monseigneur 
 d'Orleans, some there were of his own relatives, of his own rank, who came up 
 to watch the spoliation, and to view the wreckers among the household treasures 
 of the fallen man, with a certain sense of gratification, with a certain self-con- 
 gratulatory remembrance that he had most inconveniently outshone them. 
 
 The comet was quenched in the blackness of darkness. Well, on the whole, 
 the stars felt they showed better. 
 
 And the mondes sympathized tenderly with the gross wrong done the Lily 
 Queen, and sajd they were grieved that even the honor of his great father's 
 name could not keep Chandos from such extravagance and such dissipations as 
 had disgraced him, and wondered whether those famous Titians of his really 
 were genuine, they had their doubts, and murmured to each other, in the 
 fragrant air of their boudoirs, that there was a terrible story very terrible of 
 one of his Eastern girls, hushed up and lying at the root of a great deal of this 
 sudden disappearance. Then the papers, too, took up the theme, and embel- 
 lished it in leaders and notes of the week; and the Hypercritic recanted, and 
 found the tone of " Lucrece " most unhealthy. 
 
 " Dieu ! how droll an end to his royalty ! It is horrible, and yet it's amus- 
 ing," said Flora de 1'Orme, casting herself down, on the day of the first view, 
 on one of the couches in his own room, while strangers stared up at the painted 
 ceiling, tossed over his portfolios, appraised the bric-a-brac, wondered at the 
 Daphne, and talked that the French sovereign had bought all the Old Masters. 
 What Demi-Monde said openly, a higher and more delicate Monde thought 
 secretly, a point of coincidence common betwixt the two. 
 
 The world found it amusing, this discrowning and disrobing of its idol. 
 His treasures were scattered far and wide; his favorite gems were numbered in 
 lots; his pictures were borne from barren walls to hang under other roofs and
 
 CHANDOS. 239 
 
 in other lands; the Daphne was torn from her rose-hued shrine to pass to a 
 Russian palace; the Danaid was bought by an American fur-dealer to go to his 
 mansion in the Fifth Avenue; the plate was bought by the great jewellers to be 
 remelted; the Circassian girls were hired by a French due; the Park Lane 
 house was let to strangers, new millionnaires of Melbourne-made fortunes, 
 who had the painted ceiling gilded over, the winter-garden changed into a cov- 
 ered glass building for skittles, and the studio turned into a lumber-closet. 
 
 The world had followed him, worshipped him, caressed, quoted, courted, 
 adored him; but when his catalogues closed, his interest for it had passed 
 away. His closest friends were not altogether sorry to have his Titians in 
 their galleries, his clarets in their cellars, the Clarencieux breed in their racing- 
 establishments, and to feel that one who had eclipsed them had passed out of 
 sight. His ruin was a nine days' wonder; then a peeress ran way with a fa- 
 mous Tenor, and usurped the attention of society. Women taught themselves a 
 pretty blush when the shocking work "Lucrece" was spoken of; and men laid 
 bets at evens that he had killed himself. 
 
 The world indeed felt that such an end for the tragedy was due to it, 
 specially as it had been acutely disappointed in the fate of Clarencieux. 
 
 The summer days found Trevenna at the place that was lost forever to the 
 great race which had reigned there since the thrones of Rufus and Beauclerc. 
 Ostensibly he was there in a self-imposed devotion to his ruined friend's in- 
 terests, keeping watch and ward over the spoilers. Indeed, the world altogether 
 gave Trevenna credit for behaving very admirably in the matter, for showing 
 an excellent spirit throughout. He seemed really grieved in his own manner; he 
 confessed himself " cut up," lamented that Chandos would never take his warn- 
 ings, and carried himself with so candid a contrition, so genuine a friendship, 
 that society who could learn more to satisfy its curiosity through him than 
 through any one thought very well of him. Society naturally could not 
 doubt his regret for a man with whom he had dined almost every day of his life, 
 and began to discover that he was a very sensible and very entertaining person: 
 he spoke with so much good feeling, and yet with so much just discrimination, 
 of his friend's self-destruction. He would never have dissipated so royal a 
 property. 
 
 It was thought, too, very delicate in him that, after the first shock of the 
 town, he withdrew himself as much as possible to Clarencieux, to avoid hearing 
 the misfortune discussed, and to guard, as far as he could, the conduct of the 
 sales from dishonesty. Of course he had no power, as he said; still, if there 
 were any residue, he should too gladly save it for his lost friend, though no
 
 240 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 one knew whither that friend had gone; and, at all events, it was as well to keep 
 some note of the creditors' proceedings. In truth, in all his life Trevenna had 
 never enjoyed himself so thoroughly. 
 
 To lounge through the porphyry chamber, with a bailiff eating his luncheon 
 under the coronet of the last marquis, to saunter through the portrait-gallery 
 and hear dealers appraise the Lelys and Lawrences, the Vandykes and the 
 Jamesones, to ride through the forests and know they would soon be felled as bare 
 as a plateau, to feel his horse's hoofs sink into the rose and lilac heather-blooms 
 and think how building-lots would soon crush all that flower-fragrance out of 
 sight, to look across from the deer-park over the sea and muse how the mighty 
 herds would be driven out and dispersed, while scaffoldings of bathing-hotels 
 would rise to front the waters where now no step stirred the ospreys and no 
 sound scared the silver-gulls, this was Trevenna's paradise, the paradise he 
 had set himself to gain ever since the oath he had sworn in his childish ven- 
 geance, standing in the streets of Westminster. Hannibal-like, he had sworn 
 in his boyhood to sack the citadel of his foes; more fortunate than Hannibal, 
 he had seen his Rome fall. 
 
 All the cruellest traces of ruin were those which brought him most closely 
 home the unction of his success: the Greuze room, with the writing-table strewn 
 just as the pen had last been thrown down; the studio, with the unfinished 
 picture on the easel, the unused colors dried upon the palette, the brushes 
 scattered as they had been laid aside by a careless hand, the beautiful heads of 
 women and the delicate grace of landscapes that never now would be completed 
 by the fancy which had created them; the statues with their snow-white limbs 
 smutched by the dirty fingers of appraisers; the treasures which had been the 
 gift of monarchs noted down at their net value; the volumes that were the 
 collections of centuries numbered and ticketed in lots; the rose-terraces, with 
 all their luxuriance of blossom, their perfect sculpture, their summer sunlight, 
 filled with the gathering of traders, Jews, and brokers: these were the things 
 that brought to him the full realization of his uttermost desires. 
 
 "We should put the escutcheon up, and paint 'Ichabod' under it: the 
 glory has gone from your house, my superb aristocrats ! " thought he, as he 
 lounged down the fa?ade of the building; and, but that it would have looked 
 a strange lament for his ruined friend, he could have enjoyed doing that bit of 
 buffoonery himself. Like many men of strong will and indomitable endurance, 
 like Cromwell, and Napoleon, and Frederick, he had a dash of the broad 
 jester m him, a love of comic, farcical bathos; it enters largely into many of 
 the most powerful characters. For sheer schoolboy, devil-may-care love and zest 
 in the devastation, he could have taken a brush himself and painted " Sic tran- 
 sit" on the white pedestal of the minister's statue; for he was very human in 
 his Mephistophelism, and jovial, almost, in the old rich Hellenic sense in his
 
 CHANDOS. 241 
 
 animal spirits. Besides, he had worn a curb so long; it was a delicious sensation 
 to be utterly free and utterly victorious. 
 
 A good many of those into whose hands Clarencieux had fallen had made 
 their camp there for a day or so, whilst the valuation was being made. It was 
 given over to many masters; it had none in especial. Trevenna took his quar- 
 ters there unmolested. He was, of course, closely allied with the lawyers, 
 familiar for years with the agents; and he had a pleasant way with him that 
 made him welcome even to those whom ostensibly he came to inspect and 
 control. He occupied the rooms Chandos had himself always used, that suite 
 of the Greuze chambers looking out on the deer-park; and as he stretched his 
 limbs on the bed, under the costly canopy of silk and lace and golden broid- 
 eries, he could say to himself, what few ever can say, " I have accomplished the 
 dreams of my youth." He did not say so, so poetically; but he thought, with 
 a laugh of self-congratulation, 
 
 " My brilliant Chandos ! which of us is the victor now ? " 
 
 And deeper than that jesting triumph, more bitter, more intense in exhulta- 
 tion, more exhaustless in sovereign supremacy, was the sense in him of having 
 struck down forever the aristocrat he had hated, and of having alone, unaided, 
 sheerly by force of his own masterly intelligence and his own matchless wit, 
 pioneered himself into a road on which he would distance the patrician he had 
 so long and so futilely envied, and mount higher and higher, till he filled the 
 void and ascended the throne from which he had flung down his rival. 
 
 Thought of remorse, touch of self-condemnation, there were none in him; 
 he had hugged what he deemed his own wrong till he had learned to look on 
 treachery as a legitimate shield and on chicanery as a legitimate weapon. 
 Moreover, he was of a bright, world-wise, unerring, unscrupulous strength of 
 nature, that never succumbed to weakness and was never tainted by after-doubt. 
 
 That this nature was also one that no benefit could soften, no gratitude 
 warm, was the most damning thing in the close-wrought steel of its formation. 
 
 The third day of his stay in the Greuze suite, he sat at dinner with the land- 
 steward and one of the late lawyers of the ruined house. He was popular with 
 business-men of every class, though they sometimes shirked his pungent knowl- 
 edge of them; and, now that he was a Member, they in especial began to find 
 out how racy his wit was, and how cordial his bonhomie. 
 
 The confusion that reigned in the building pleased him; he would have liked 
 to have seen the whole stripped and gutted by fire, if he could; he would have 
 watched the leaping flames devour Clarencieux as the Romans watched them 
 devour the fair palace-walls of the city of the Barca blood. The old servants 
 who came to him, homeless, with tears running down their cheeks, thinking 
 little of their own fortunes, but begging him to tell them if he knew aught of 
 their beloved lord, the weary, dejected faces of the keepers and the tenants
 
 342 QUID AS WORKS 
 
 when he met them in the shadowy woods, the emotion with which strong men 
 shook like women as they spoke of the master they had lost, all these touched 
 him not a whit. They angered him, because there was one throne from which 
 he could not oust Chandos, the hearts of his people; but they touched him 
 not a second. And in like manner the desolation and confusion of the house- 
 hold pleased him; and he would rather have seen a broker cracking a bottle of 
 rum at the ebony tables of the banqueting-room, than he would have sat there 
 to be entertained with all the sovereigns of Christendom. Therefore his dinner 
 in the Greuze cabinet to-night, though a hasty and ill-assorted one, had more 
 flavor in it than all the delicate and unsurpassed tete-a-tete banquets which he 
 had used to eat there with the owner of Clarencieux. He had never enjoyed 
 himself more than as he leaned back in the Louis Quinze arm-chair that 
 Chandos had used to occupy, puffed his smoke into the fair eyes of the French 
 painter's women, and ate his cutlet off the gold plate with the arms of Claren 
 cieux raised in bas-relief upon it, which would soon pass to a millionnaire's 
 ormolu buffet or be melted down in the silversmith's smelting-room. 
 
 As he sat there, the crash of wheels driven at a gallop ground the avenue- 
 road beneath the windows; a carriage swept round and paused. Silence fol- 
 lowed. " Is it Esau come back to look at his lost land ? " thought Trevenna. 
 Audacious, bold as a lion, and masucline in all his courage and his powers 
 as he was, he could never think but with a qualm of that night in which the hand 
 of the man he had pursued and goaded had been upon his throat, forcing him 
 backward out of his presence. It was bitter to his manhood that sudden sur- 
 prise should have so thrown him off his guard, that he had endured the indignity 
 of being thrust away like a cur; and even his fearless temper felt that it might 
 be possible to jibe and sting and taunt a man made mad with misery one step 
 too far. And yet the unsatisfied hatred in him, the love and zest in his con- 
 quest, made him think, despite that, 
 
 " I wish he might come back, just come back to see us here." 
 
 As the thought crossed him, the door of the Greuze cabinet was flung open, 
 the Due d'Orvale strode in, his frank face flushed, his chestnut hair just dashed 
 with a white thread here and there tossed back disordered, his hazel eyes 
 aflame. 
 
 "Where is Chandos ? " 
 
 His mellow voice rang out almost in the fierceness of a challenge. He 
 entered without any of the ceremony customarily shown his rank, and without 
 any of the formalities of greeting: U fou d'Orvale" as his world called him, 
 disdained both ceremonies and formalities. 
 
 Trevenna rose and received him with that informal indifference with which 
 (it was his best and highest point) he received a prince, as unembarrassedly as 
 he would have done a sweep. Indeed, there was something grand and true in
 
 CHAN DOS. 243 
 
 his intense democratic scorn for titular differences, if he had not stifled his 
 democracy when it was expedient, as he courted his hated aristocrats when it 
 was lucrative. 
 
 " Where is Chandos ? " repeated D'Orvale, imperiously. 
 
 " Don't know, M. le Due," said Trevenna; " perhaps in Hades." 
 
 " You don't know ? " 
 
 The eyes of Monseigneur Philippe began to sparkle dangerously. Sweet- 
 tempered to a fault, and wildly reckless of himself, he loved hotly, and hated 
 hotly too. 
 
 " Nobody knows, M. le Due," returned Trevenna, with a latent irrepressible 
 delight at standing there on the hearth at Clarencieux and saying this of its 
 dispossessed and exiled lord. " I suppose you will have heard 
 
 Philippe d'Orvale stopped him with a passionate .Parisian oath, and struck his 
 right hand on the console by which he stood, till the room rang with the 
 echo. 
 
 " Heard ? Yes, I have heard. The news reached me in Russia. I have 
 travelled night and day since, without stopping, though till I reached England 
 I believed the tale the blackest falsehood ever spawned. You do not know 
 where he is gone ? " 
 
 " Nobody does, I have said, M. le Due," rejoined Trevenna, a little impa- 
 tiently. He held the French prince in profound derision, as a man who, having 
 the chance to rule half the continent had he chosen, spent all his substance on 
 cafe singers and posture-dancers. " He is gone, I am sorry to say; and the 
 world expects him to send in a sensational suicide." 
 
 The brown eyes of Due Philippe, so kindly and so full of gayety and mirth 
 at other times, grew full of ominous wrath; his colossal strength that stood un- 
 impaired all the wild excesses of his life, towered in the light against the violet 
 hangings of the cabinet; he faced Trevenna with a superb disdain, mingled 
 with the impatient grief that his face, mobile as a woman's and transparent as 
 a child's, betrayed without disguise. 
 
 " What ! what ! Did everyone forsake him in a single day ? " 
 
 Trevenna shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 " Men are rats, monseigneur, scurry towards a full granary, and scamper 
 away from a rotting house. As for the forsaking, I don't know about that. 
 He gave a ball one night, and let the town hear next day he was all-but-bank- 
 rupt; he made a present of everything to his creditors, and disappeared another 
 night, God knows where. Now a man who does that don't please society." 
 
 If Philippe d'Orvale had doubted the fate that had befallen his friend, he 
 could have doubted no longer when these words were spoken under the roof of 
 Clarencieux, by the man Chandos had protected, befriended, and benefited. 
 
 He shook with .rage as he heard; the reckless and dissolute prince-Bohemian
 
 244 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 might have many vices, but he had not the most dastardly vice on earth: he 
 had no desertion for the fallen. 
 
 "You were his debtor, sir; of course you are but a time-server ! " he said, 
 with the haughty contempt of the Vieille Cour on his fine lips, the noblesse 
 spirit waking in him, utterly as it was accused of slumbering whilst he drank 
 with buffo-singers, laughed with polichinelle-showmen, danced the mad Rigol- 
 boche and Cancan at the Chateau Rouge, and learned their argot de la Halle 
 oyster-feasting with blooming Poissardes, in all his headlong Paris orgies. 
 " It is true, then, all this accursed history that I hear in every mouth ? " 
 
 " Only too true," said Trevenna, more gravely. He would have rather had 
 any eyes on him than those of this devil-may-care and dauntless noble, this 
 eccentric and hare-brained original, this bon enfant of the Coulisses and the 
 Chaumiere, whom Europe had pronounced insane for inviting Barbary apes to 
 breakfast; for he knew how Philippe d'Orvale loved his friend. " Only too 
 true, M. le Due. Chandos has -lost everything, and gone no one knows whither; 
 out of England, no doubt. It was very suddenly that the crash came at last, 
 though, of course, the extravagance of years had long led up to it." 
 
 Philippe d'Orvale swung from him, and turned to the other men with the 
 grand disdain with which he would have turned on to the Marseillaise 
 swarming on the Terrasse des Feuillans, had he lived in the days of the 
 Lilies. 
 
 " You were all the Creatures of his bounty. Can you serve him no better 
 way than by sitting drinking his wines in his chambers ? Could he not be gone 
 one hour before you carrion-crows came to pick your feast ? Answer me in a 
 word. What has been done to save him ? " 
 
 " To save him ! " echoed Trevenna, whose imperturbable nonchalance and 
 good humor alone left him able to answer the sudden attack of the fiery 
 Southern noble, which had paralyzed his companions. " Everything, M. le 
 Due, that tact and good sense could suggest. But you cannot dam up an 
 avalanche once on its downward road; no mortal skill could arrest his ruin. It 
 was far too vast, too complete." 
 
 Philippe d'Orvale seemed as though he heard nothing; he stood there in his 
 herculean stature, with his fiery glance flashing on the men before him, his lips 
 drawn into a close tight line under the chestnut shower of his beard. So only 
 had they set once before, when he had seen a young girl struck and kicked by 
 her owners on a winter's night outside the guingette, where he had been as a 
 Pierrot to a barriere ball of ouvriers and grisettes; and the man who had beaten 
 her till she moaned where she lay like a shot fawn had been felled down in the 
 snow by a single crashing stroke from the arm in whose veins ran the blood of 
 French nobles who had charged with Godefroi de Bouillon, and died with 
 Bayard, and fought at Ivry under the White Plume.
 
 CHANDOS. 245 
 
 " What is left him ? " he asked, curtly. His breath came short and sharply 
 drawn. 
 
 " Nothing, monseigneur." 
 
 Trevenna felt his hate rising against this haughty roysterer, this sobered 
 reveller, who came to challenge the hopelessness and the completeness of the 
 devastation he had wrought. He could not resist the malicious pleasure of 
 standing there face to face with the aristocrat-ally, the titled boon-companion, 
 of the ruined man, and dinning in his ear the total beggary that had fallen on 
 his favorite and his friend. 
 
 " Nothing ! Not a shilling ? " he repeated, with the same relish with which 
 a hound turns his tongue over his lips after a savory, thirsty plunge of his 
 fangs into the blood he is allowed to taste. 
 
 " ' Nothing ! ' Is this place gone ? " 
 
 " It is going by auction, M. le Due." 
 
 The curt, caustic complacency of the answer was not to be restrained for 
 all that prudence could suggest. 
 
 " Good God ! what he has suffered ! " 
 
 The words broke unconsciously from D'Orvale's lips: he knew how he had 
 suffered. In the moment he almost suffered as much. Due Philippe was 
 reckless, wayward, wasteful of the goods of the earth and the gifts of his brain, 
 was eccentric to the verge of insanity, and fooled away his mature years in the 
 follies of a Rochester, in the orgies of a Sheridan; but he had a generosity as 
 wide and a heart as warm as the stretch of his Southern lands, as the light of 
 his Southern suns. For a moment the grief on him had the mastery; then, 
 shaking his hair as a lion shakes its tawny mane, he dashed his hand down 
 again on the marble breadth of the console. 
 
 " Sold ? By the heaven above us, never ! " . . 
 
 Trevenna bowed with a tinge of ironic insolence of which he was scarcely 
 aware himself. 
 
 " It would be happy if monsiegneur could make his words good; but, un- 
 fortunately, creditors are stubborn things. Clarencieux is no longer our poor 
 friend's, but belongs to his claimants. It will be parcelled out by the auc- 
 tioneer's hammer." 
 
 " Never ! " 
 
 Trevenna bowed again. 
 
 " With every respect, M. le Due, for your very strong negative, I fear it is 
 quite impossible that it can take effect. Clarencieux is doomed ! " 
 
 D'Orvale flashed his glance over him with that mute scorn which his grand- 
 father had given to Sanson when he sauntered up the steps of the guillotine as 
 calmly as he had gone through a minuet with Marie Antoinette or Lamballe. 
 
 "You triumph in your patron's adversity, sir ! That is inevitable; every
 
 246 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 jackal is content when the lion falls ! By the God above us, I tell you Claren- 
 cieux shall not be bartered ! " 
 
 Trevenna shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 With every deference, M. le Due, your language, though you are a prince, 
 is not polite. With regard to Clarencieux 
 
 " It shall be mine." 
 
 The words were said as Philippe d'Orvale could say such when he chose, 
 with a dignity that none could have surpassed, with a sovereignty that sat finely 
 on him in its negligent ease, with a force of will which now and then flashed 
 out of his mad caprices and his fantastic vagaries, and showed what this man 
 might have been had he so willed to lead the world instead of to be the hero of 
 a night's wild masking, the king of a score of wine-cup rioters. 
 
 " Yours ? Impossible ! " 
 
 Trevenna was startled almost into self-betrayal of the thirst that was upon 
 him for the dispersion and destruction of the lands of Clarencieux, of the 
 terror that seized him lest by some mischance any portion of the bitterness of 
 his fate should be spared to Chandos, any fragment of the home he had been 
 exiled from be saved from ignominy and outrage. 
 
 " Impossible ? " echoed Philippe d'Orvale. " No one ever says the word 
 to me ! " 
 
 There was all the superb defiance of the old nobles of Versailles, all the 
 disdainful omnipotence of the ancient regime, in the reply. When he would, 
 he could exert his command as imperiously, as intolerantly, as any marshal of 
 Louis Quinze. 
 
 " Indeed ! I fear his creditors will say it." 
 
 Trevenna could pause neither for the courtesies of custom nor the cere- 
 monies of rank; he could have killed, if a glance would have slain, this loathed 
 French noble, who, with his seigneur's sympathy and his aristocrat's loyalty to 
 his order and his friend, came to arrest the consummation of that unsurpassed 
 edifice of vengeance which he had erected, at such labor and with such genius, 
 to crush the might of Clarencieux and lie heavy above a suicide's grave. 
 
 A fierce oath, passionate as a tornado, broke from under the sweeping beard 
 of Due Philippe where he stood. But that his partrician honor forbade him to 
 strike a man whom his partrician pride could not have met and satisfied as his 
 equal, he could have dashed Trevenna down on the hearth he insulted, with a 
 single blow of his stalwart right hand. 
 
 "Say it ?" he repeated. " By God, then, they shall not. What! parcel his 
 lands out among thieves ? let a broker be master here in his stead ? sell his 
 home to some trader's new gold ? Never, while there is life left in me ! never, 
 if my own castles are mortgaged over my head to get the money they ask ! 
 Where is your country's gratitude, that they let his father's memory go pawn ?
 
 CHANDOS. 247 
 
 Where are all those he benefited, that there is not a voice lifted against 
 such shame ? " 
 
 Trevenna shrugged his shoulders. That this man was a prince and a million- 
 naire whom he bearded he cared not two straws: he only remembered 
 Philippe d'Orvale as a madman with whose outrageous follies all Europe had 
 rung; he only remembered him as one who clung to the idol the world had 
 dethroned, and who threatened to tear down the topmast laurel-wreath with 
 which his own hand had crowned his labor of vengeance. 
 
 " Monseigneur d'Orvale," he said, with that malicious banter which Tre- 
 venna could no more hold back in his wrath than the leopard in his will hold 
 back his claws, " if the country spent its money on every great man's extrav- 
 agant scions, it would have some uncommonly uncomfortable legacies. It 
 don't even pay its own debts; deuce take me if I can see why it should pay 
 Chandos' because his father once was First Lord of its Treasury and he has 
 seen fit to squander as pretty a property as ever was made ducks and drakes 
 of for pictures and dinners and women. As for those he benefited, granted 
 they're a good many; but if a lot of artists, and singers, and dancers, and shabby 
 boys who think themselves Shakspeares, and bearded Bohemians who swig beer 
 while they boast themselves Raphaels, were all to club together to help him 
 with a shilling subscription, I don't suppose they'd manage to buy back much 
 more than a shelf of his yellow French novels. I'm as sorry for him as you 
 can be (you can't doubt my sincerity, I shall never get such good dinners); but 
 I candidly confess T don't see, and can't see, why, just because he has been a 
 fool and a spendthrift, a whole nation of sane people are bound to rush to his 
 rescue with their purses wide open. As he sowed, so he reaps; nobody can 
 complain of that." 
 
 Due Philippe shook in all his mighty limbs; and as he looked at the speaker 
 planted there lightly, firmly, with his feet apart and the. insolence of triumph 
 irrepressibly spoken in his face and his attitude, he could have leaped forward 
 like a staghound and shaken all the life out of him with a single gripe. It was 
 with a mighty effort that he kept the longing in. '", 
 
 " If you reap as you sow, M. Trevenna, you will have a fine harvest of woven 
 hemp ! " he said, curtly, in the depths of his brown beard, as he swung with an 
 undisguised loathing from him, and turned towards the other men, who, mute 
 with astonishment, and out of deference for the rank of the mad noble who had 
 broken in on them thus, stood passive. "You are his men of business, are 
 you not? wreckers enriched by the flotsam and jetsam you save out of 
 his shipwreck ? Listen to me, then. Whoever they be, or however his creditors 
 hold this place, it shall be mine. Whatever price they ask, whatever liabilities 
 be on it, I will give them and I will discharge. Let them name the most ex- 
 travagant their extortion can grasp at, it shall not be checked; I will meet it.
 
 248 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 I will buy Clarencieux as it is, from its turrets to its moorlands; do you hear ? 
 Not a tree shall be touched, not a picture be moved, not a stone be displaced. 
 It shall be mine. And, hark you here; I offer them their own terms, all their 
 greed can crave or fancy; but tell them this, on the word of Philippe d'Orvale, 
 that if they do not part with it peaceably, if they do not send their hell-dogs 
 out of its places and take the bidding I give them, I will so blast their names 
 through Europe that their trade and their credit shall be gone forever, and they 
 shall perish in worse beggary than this that they have caused. Tell them that, 
 Europe can let them know in what fashion I keep my oaths, and with to- 
 morrow make Clarencieux mine." 
 
 The passionate words quivered out on the silence of the painted chamber, 
 furious as a hound's bay, firm and ringing as an army's sound to assault. Then, 
 without another syllable, Philippe d'Orvale swung round and strode out of the 
 cabinet, his lion eyes alight with a terrible menace, his lion's mane of hair 
 tossed back. He had said enough. When once he roused from his wild mas- 
 querades and his headlong Bohemianism to use his leonine might and to vindi- 
 cate his princely blood, there was not a man in all the breadth of the nations 
 that ever dared say nay to the " mad duke." 
 
 He saved Clarencieux, saved it from being sundered in a thousand pieces 
 and given over to the spoilers, though he could not save the honor of its house, 
 the ruin of its race. The world was bitterly aggrieved, it was deprived of 
 so absorbing a theme, of so precious a prize; and Trevenna could have 
 killed him. 
 
 The pyramid of his vengeance had risen so perfectly, step by step, without 
 a flaw; it was unbearable to him that the one stone for its apex should be want- 
 ing, the one last line of the record of the triumphs engraved on it should be 
 missing. He had swept all the herds away, leaving not one; it was unendura- 
 ble to him that the last coveted ewe-lamb should alone have escaped him. He 
 had destroyed Chandos utterly, hopelessly, body and soul, as he believed, 
 slain honor and genius and life in him, without a pause in his success. It was 
 intolerable to him that the last drop should not crown the cup, that the 
 green diadem of the Clarencieux woods should wreathe its castle untouched, 
 that the royalties of the exiled race should be left in sanctified solitude, in lieu 
 of being flung out to the crowds and parcelled among the Marseillaise in the 
 desolated courts of the princes. 
 
 He had longed to see, had it been possible, the plough pass over the lands 
 and the harrow rake out every trace of the banished race; he had longed to 
 see, if he could, the flame of the culturer licking up all the beautiful, wild, use- 
 less wealth of heather and fern and forests lilies; he had longed to hear the 
 hammers clang among the woodland stillness, to watch the oaks crash down 
 under the axe, to behold the beauty crushed out under the iron roll and the
 
 CHAN DOS. 249 
 
 timber scaffolding of the new speculators, to know that the very place and 
 name and relics of the exiled lord were effaced and forgotten. Through 
 Philippe d'Orvale this last crowning luxury was denied. 
 
 Clarencieux, though he had driven from it the last of its race, escaped him, 
 escaped the indignity, the oblivion, the desecration, he had planned to heap on 
 it; he had made its hearths desolate, but his arm was held back from the final 
 blow with which he had planned to make them also dishonored and to raze 
 their stones as though no fires had ever burned there, till sheep should have 
 grazed where kings had feasted, and wheat have waved where its dead rulers 
 had their graves. 
 
 Through Philippe d'Orvale it was denied him. 
 
 Thus, some were faithful to the fallen idol: the sun-browned men who 
 toiled from dawn to evening among the seas of seeding grass and the yellow 
 oceans of the swelling corn; the crippled dreamer whom his fellows thought an 
 idiot that a child might lead; the reckless voluptuary, the prince-Bohemian, 
 whom the world called a madman and vested with every vice that libertines 
 can frame; the dog whom human reason disdains as a brute without speech: 
 those were faithful, those only. But they were many, as the world stands. 
 
 The two who were deadliest against him, and chiefest without pity or mercy 
 in his fall, were the man he had succored with his friendship and his gold, and 
 the woman he had loved and honored.
 
 250 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 1 Delexi justitiam et odivi iniquitatem, propterea morior in exilio." 
 
 HlLDEBRAND. 
 
 " Is not the bread thou eat'st, the rope thou wear'st, 
 Thy wealth, and honors, all the pure indulgence 
 Of him thou would'st destroy ? 
 Why, then, no bond is left on human kind." 
 
 DRYDEN. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 " FACILIS DESCENSUS AVERNI." 
 
 IT was far past midnight in Paris; a chilly, bitter winter's night, in the turn 
 of the going year; a night without stars, in which the snow drifted slowly down, 
 and the homeless crouched down shivering into a traitorous sleep, a merciful 
 sleep, from which they would wake no more, an endless sleep, to be yearned 
 for passionately when there can be no bread for the parching lips, if breath 
 linger in them, no peace for the aching eyes, if they wake again to a world of 
 want. 
 
 It was long past midnight in one of the gambling-dens which mock the law 
 in the hidden darkness of their secret haunts, the dens which no code will 
 ever suppress, which no legislature will ever prevent. Where any vice is de- 
 manded, there will be the supply; let every shape of forbiddance be exercised 
 as it may, in vain. Wherever men be hungered for their own ruin, there will 
 be also those who bring their ruin to them. 
 
 This was one of the worst hells in Paris, the worst in Europe. Men who 
 dared venture nowhere else came here; men on whom the grasp of the law 
 would be laid, were they seeii, came here; men who, having exhausted every 
 form of riot and debauchery, had nothing left except the gamester's excitation, 
 came here; it embraced them all, and finished the wreck that other ruin had 
 begun. Other places allured with color, with glitter, with enticing temptations: 
 this had none of these; it allured with its own deadly charm alone, it made its 
 trade terribly naked and avowed; it let men come and stake their lives, and
 
 CHAN DOS. 251 
 
 raked the stake in, and went on without a pause; it was a pandemoniac paradise 
 only for those already cursed. It was hidden away in one of the foulest and 
 most secret nests in Paris; its haunt was known to none save its frequenters, 
 and none. so frequented it save those whom some criminal brand or some des- 
 perate doom already had marked or claimed. Close at hand to it, in an outer 
 chamber, were the hot drinks, the acrid wines, the absinthe, and the opiates 
 that were drunk down by ashen lips and burning throats as though they were 
 water; these alone broke the ceaseless tenor of the gambling; these alone shared 
 with it the days and nights of those who plunged into the abyss it opened for 
 them. Often all on through the dawn, and the noon, and the day, the flaring 
 gas-jets of its burners would be kept alight: the crowd that filled its room would 
 know nothing of time, not know even that the sun had risen. The gay 
 tumult of the summer life in Paris would be waking and shining on all around 
 it in the clear life of the fresh hours; and still here where the sullen doors barred 
 out all comers the gamesters would play on, play on, till they dropped down 
 dead-drunk, or reeled insensible with want of food and drugs or nicotines. The 
 Morgue had never owed so many visitants to any place as it had owed to this; 
 the Bagne had never rceived so many desperadoes as it had received from 
 here; the walls of Bicetre had never been so filled with raving brainless lives as 
 it had been filled with by the haunters of this den hidden in the midst of curl- 
 ing crooked streets and crowding roofs, like a viper's nest under the swathes 
 of grass. 
 
 Those who owned it were never known; the longest frequenter of its room 
 never knew who the bank was; it was a secret profound, impenetrable, guarded 
 as closely as its own existence was guarded from the million eyes of the clair- 
 voyant law. No one knew that in one or two superb hotels, with fine carriages, 
 fine dinners, fine linen, with fashionable wives and blameless reputations, with 
 a high name on the Bourse and a reception at the Tuileries, dwelt, in peace and 
 plenty the proprietors. 
 
 Does the world ever guess how a millionth part of the money that fills it 
 is made ? The world at large, never ! 
 
 It was far past midnight in the hell: the gas-glare fell on the painted faces 
 of unsexed women and on the haggard brows of men who had played on here 
 all through the day and played on all through the night. The croupiers were 
 relieved at intervals: the gamblers never moved; they hung there till the 
 sheer physical powers of life gave way, and famine forced them from the tables; 
 stirless and breathless, only at long intervals rending themselves from it to 
 take the drugs and the stimulants that soddened their senses, they were 
 riveted there by one universal, irresistible fascination. Features of every 
 varied kind were seen in the gaudy flare of the gas; but they all wore the same 
 look, the thirsty, sleepless, intense look of ravenous excitement. It was not
 
 252 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 the polished serenity of fashionable kursaals, the impassive languor of aristo- 
 cratic gaming-tables, the self-destruction, taken with a light word, of the salles 
 of Baden, of Homburg, of Monaco; it was gambling in all its unreined fever, in 
 all its naked excitation, in all its headlong delirium, in all " its arid quest for 
 wealth midst ruin." 
 
 There is a vast error in which the world believes, that gamesters are moved 
 by the lust of gain only, by the desire of greed, by the longings of avarice. It 
 is not so; the money won, they toss it back without an instant's pause, to risk 
 its loss at venture. Avarice is no part of the delirium which allures them with 
 so exhaustless a fascination; the spell that binds them is the hazard. Give 
 a gamester thousands, he cares for the gold only to purchase with it that 
 delicious, feverish, intoxicating charm of chance. There is a delight in its 
 agony, a sweetness in its insanity, a drunken, glorious intensity of sensation 
 in its limitless swing between a prince's treasures and a beggar's death, which 
 lends life a sense never known before, rarely, indeed, once tasted, ever 
 abandoned. 
 
 There was scarcely even a sound in the fatal place. Once now and then an 
 oath, a blasphemy, or a shuddering gasping breath broke the charmed stillness, 
 in which the click of the roulette-ball, the rattle of the dice, or the rapid mon- 
 otone of the croupiers reigned otherwise alone. The room was crowded. Men 
 who had grown old and gray and palsied waiting on the caprices of the color, 
 men who had wasted on the framing of cabals, intellects that might have 
 rivalled Newton's or Descartes', men who had consumed their youth in this 
 madness, and, young yet, looked for nothing save a death in a hospital and a 
 pauper's unowned grave, men who had flung away high birth, high gifts, high 
 chances, and came here to wear out the last few hours of dishonored lives, 
 men with eyes in which the wasted genius of a mighty mind looked wistfully 
 out through the bloodshot mists of a drunkard's sight, men who had the 
 trackers of turf-law or of social law in their trail, and, hiding for very life, 
 knew no nest surer than this foul one, all these were here in the tawdry glitter 
 of the flaring gas-jets. And there were women, too, some young, some fear- 
 fully young, loveless and rouged, and hacking bitter coughs, or laughing 
 ghastly laughs, playing, playing, playing insatiate, with the thirsty, eager, 
 devilish glare aching in their painted eyes. 
 
 Among them stood Chandos. 
 
 The look which had set on his face the night that he had left Clarencieux 
 had never left it; its glorious beauty survived the ravages of misery, the gaunt 
 sleeplessness of a gamester's days, the wreck of all greater, all better, higher 
 things in him. Nothing could stamp it out utterly; but it had something more 
 fearful than any one of the other faces crowded round them, though they would 
 have furnished a painter with a thousand dreams for the Purgatorio, though
 
 CHANDOS. 253 
 
 they would have given an artist a throng of hope-forgotten, devil-tortured 
 wretches fettered in the bottomless circle of Dante's Antenora. It survived to 
 show all that he had been, to mark more utterly all he had become. 
 
 For he had fallen very low. 
 
 To meet his ruin, he had risen with the haughty pride, the reckless courage, 
 of his race, risen to front it with a calmness and a force that none had looked 
 for in him. He had met calamity greatly; he had been tempted to sell his 
 honor for passion's sake, and he had repulsed the temptation; he had been al- 
 lured to evade justice, and secure comparative peace, by acting a lie to the 
 world; he had refused, and had given up all, to remain with a stainless honesty 
 and a conscience uncondemned. He had done these things with a sudden 
 power of will, a sudden steel-knit strength of resolve, that had sprung in the 
 instant of their need, giants full-armed, from the voluptuous unheeding indo- 
 lence and indulgence of his life. But characters cannot change in a day; en- 
 durance may be forged hard in the flame of adversity, but it will give way 
 many a time first, and melt and writhe and bend and break at last. When all 
 had been done, all ended, all sacrificed, all lost, the force which had sustained 
 him had broken down, the utter reaction followed. 
 
 The habits of his life had left him with no shield, the temper of his creeds 
 had left him with no shelter, against the storm that had burst over him. His 
 only knowledge had been how to enjoy; none had ever taught him how to 
 suffer. A limitless indulgence had been the master of his existence; he had no 
 comprehension of calamity. With latent greatness, he had dominant weakness; 
 as the limbs that lie ever on the couches of down are enervated and sinewless, 
 so his nature, that had basked ever in the warmth and the light of enjoyment, 
 had no stamina to bear the crushing desolation that struck all from his hands 
 at one blow. In the moment of emergence, of temptation, he had risen equal 
 to it, risen above it, and been great; in the darkness that followed, in the dark- 
 ness in which he was driven out into exile, stripped, mocked, abandoned, left in 
 beggared solitude, to drift to his grave as he would, he sank under the burden 
 that he bore. A strong man might have gone down powerless under the accu- 
 mulated anguish, the blasted devastation, of such a fate. He who had known 
 nothing but the caress of fortune from his birth, he who had all the loathing of 
 pain and of deformity of the Achaean nature, he who had never felt a desire un- 
 fulfilled, a command unaccomplished, he who had been pliant to frailty, 
 yielding to effeminacy, could have no sustaining force to enable him to face 
 and to contend with the destruction that smote him to the earth. All who had 
 kissed his feet forsook him as though he were plague-stricken; there was little 
 marvel that he forsook himself. 
 
 He seemed to walk like a blind man through a starless night; he had neither 
 sight nor knowledge: all that was left to him was the consciousness of misery,
 
 254 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 the power to suffer; the power to endure was dead. He drifted senselessly on, 
 far on evil roads, far towards the murder in him of all that he had once been. 
 He lived in infinite wretchedness, and the very memory of all better things 
 died out in him. There is no arrest in a downward road. In the way of 
 honor and honesty, and every holier thought and loftier effort, life piles obsta- 
 cles breast high; but in descent there is no barrier, down the ice-slope there is 
 no pause, till the broken limbs are dashed to pieces in the black crevasse below. 
 When his last step had passed the threshold of his home, he had left all 
 likeness of what he once had been. There the proud blood of his race had 
 taken the simulance of strength, and had upheld in him some likeness of their 
 honor, of their power, of their grandeur, even beneath the strokes of his ad- 
 versity; but once passed forever from Clarencieux, the only influence that had 
 sustained him was gone; he fell without an effort. His foe might have been 
 consoled for the one failure which had saved the woods and stones of his 
 hatred from destruction, had he seen how courage and reason and genius and 
 manhood were perishing with the body and soul of the man he had betrayed. 
 In the sheer instinct for covert in which the hunted animal unconsciously 
 finds his lair, he had made his way to the safe solitude and secrecy of a great 
 city. He shunned every sign, every sight, that could recall the world he had 
 left to him, or him to it. The place of his refuge was known to none; it was 
 hidden among the innumerable roofs of a close quarter; it was quitted only at 
 night or in the earliest gray of the morning, and quitted then only for the 
 gambling-dens. There was not a creature with him or near him that he had 
 known or loved, save his dog. The animal never left him; he would lie at his 
 feet in the gaming-hells, or would wait all day and all night outside the doors; 
 he would crouch down by him on the cold and cheerless bed of some wretched 
 lodging, as he had done under the silken hangings of a palace; he would watch 
 with ever-wakeful eyes by his side where he was stretched in the stupor of an 
 opiate or the heaviness of brandy-lulled sleep. The love even of the dog was 
 precious to Chandos in his desolation; as far as he noted or felt anything, he 
 was grateful for it. But he noted little. A burning fever consumed him at 
 times; at all others he was sunk in a lethargy more dangerous for his reason 
 than even the oblivion of opium-dreams. The loss of lands, of wealth, of 
 power, he would have met with the courage of race and of manhood; it was the 
 desertion of every creature he had aided, of every life he had loved, it was the 
 Judas-betrayal of all he had trusted, that had killed all strength and all life 
 in him. 
 
 He lived in intense wretchedness; the little gold he had on his person was 
 not so much as he had spent on a woman's bracelet, on an hour's entertain- 
 ment. The absolute fangs of want might be upon him in a single day. He 
 who had feasted emperors more brilliantly than they reigned in their own courts,
 
 CHANDOS. 255 
 
 and who had only spoken a wish to have it fulfilled as by an enchantment, 
 might any day actually want bread. Everything around him, everything touched 
 or seen or heard, was such as would have been loathsome and unendurable to 
 his voluptuous and fastidious habits a few short weeks before: yet these he was 
 barely conscious of; he was lost in the stupefaction of a misery too great to have 
 any other sense awake in it. Now and then he would glance with a shudder 
 round the places to which he wandered; now and then he would turn sickening 
 from the food offered him; more often all things passed him unnoted, and in 
 his eyes there came gradually the lustreless dreamy vacancy which presages 
 the rupture of the reason, the dulling of the brain. For hours he would lie 
 prostrated. When he rose, it would only be to drag his limbs wearily out into 
 the night and go to the gaming-hells, where intoxication as sure, and even yet 
 more deadly, was to be found, where alone he gained such gold as sufficed to 
 keep life in him, and to give him a stake to cast again. 
 
 Strangely enough, the temptress favored him. Hazard often allures her 
 prey with that merciless mercy, and fills his hands only to hold him closer in 
 her coils. He won enough to keep life in him, such as life was now. 
 
 This was the issue to which his career had come; this was the fate to which 
 he, who in his bright visionary childhood had vowed to rival in his nation's 
 story the chivalrous honor of an Arthur's fame, had come; his pride trampled 
 out, his genius drowned in drugs, his waking hours consumed in the gambler's 
 delirium, almost all manhood slain in him. The Hebrew's thought was right; 
 his enemy's work on him was worse than murder. It was a terrible abasement, 
 a terrible surrender; it was frailty, cowardice, suicide; but the storm had 
 beaten down on his once proud head till it hung in a slave's shame. Existence 
 had grown so hideous to him that he sunk beneath its ceaseless torture, longing 
 alone for death. 
 
 Those who have from early years been tired in the fires of affliction may 
 grow the sterner, firmer, more highly tempered for it, like the wrought steel; 
 but those to whom it has been wholly unknown in the soft sensuousness of a 
 joyous life, stagger and fall swooning at the first intolerable breath of its blast- 
 ing furnace. When a mortal is bound to the agony of Prometheus, the man 
 may well succumb where the god could scarce endure. 
 
 Chandos stood now amidst the crowd about the play-tables, in companion- 
 ship with much of all that was worst and most desperate in Paris. He did not 
 know them; he scarcely knew how vile the character of many round him was. 
 In the brilliance and aristocratic exclusion of the life he had until now lived, 
 he had been as ignorant of the world without his charmed circle, he had been 
 as ignorant of all depravity that was unrefined, of all vices that were hidden 
 away with poverty and criminality, as any one of the fair patrician women of 
 the courts. His license had been the license of a graceful Catullus; his sins had
 
 256 
 
 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 been the soft sins of an elegant Sardanapalus; he knew nothing of the ignominy 
 of great cities; he knew nothing of the coarse criminality of such as those who 
 harbored and gambled here. He had strayed to its haunt by chance; he re- 
 turned again and again for the sake of its secrecy, its opium-drugged wines, its 
 reckless play. He had no knowledge of the companions with whom he was 
 thrown; he was too utterly lost in his own misery to note or to loathe them, 
 whilst they looked on, half awed, half curious, at one whom all Pans knew by 
 name and sight, whose history all knew also, as he came among them day after 
 day, night after night, with that deathless beauty, that inextinguishable grace 
 left in him, as they were left in the slaughtered body of Alcibiades, to show how 
 royal a blood had run in his veins, how mighty, how majestic, how hopeless a 
 wreck was there. 
 
 Once one of them touched his arm, a young girl, not twenty, but with long 
 years of age and crime and shameless shame under the scarlet rogue that glowed 
 her cheek, on the sallow, aching, burning brow from which her gold-hued, flower- 
 decked hajr was pushed. 
 
 " Why are you here ! You are as beautiful as a god ! You are not like us 
 yet." 
 
 He looked at her with a dull vacancy, and answered nothing as he filled a 
 glass with brandy. She thrust the opiate he had mixed with it back to his hand. 
 " Drink enough to kill yourself at once. Don't live to be what you will be. 
 Such as you go to a madhouse." 
 
 Her words dreamily pierced through the semi-insensibility of his brain: he 
 set the opiate down undrunk, for that once. He thought of the dead man 
 who had bade him meet his fate, whatever his fate became; but the next moment 
 he was again at the gaming-table, the next moment only its mad tempting was 
 remembered. 
 
 He never heeded what he won, what he lost, though he knew that the very 
 food of the next day hung in the hazard; he would have blessed the famine 
 that should have killed him. But he had the gamester's instinct in him; the 
 gamester's peril alone gave him an oblivious intoxication; he never left it, except 
 when he wandered out to some sleeping-place and flung himself down to sleep, 
 wellnigh as lifelessly as the dead sleep, hours, perhaps days through. 
 
 So months had gone with him. The splendid strength and stamina of his 
 frame resisted the ravages that were consuming them; but what was worse than 
 the body perished: the mind decayed, swiftly, surely. 
 
 Months went by; he thought time would never end. The golden summer, 
 the ruddy autumn, the bitterness of early winter, had passed ; he noted no 
 change of seasons ; night and day were alike to him; he only dully wondered 
 how long life would curse him by leaving its throb in his heart, the breath in 
 his lips.
 
 CHANDOS, 257 
 
 He had played thirty six hours now at a stretch, among the painted women 
 and the haggard men who filled this pandemonium. He had played on till he 
 had lost all, the only time that he had ever done so; the last franc was 
 staked and swept away. He stood blankly gazing down at the tables; he felt 
 that the means of gaining the one intoxication that was precious to him was 
 gone, he had no remembrance that it turned him on the streets a beggar. The 
 eager throngs, seeing the card pass without his stake being laid on, pushed 
 fiercely, ravenously, to get his nearer place. He let them take it, moving as a 
 somnambulist, and made his way down the staircase and through the low, 
 masked side door that alone lent admittance to the gambling-rooms: the face 
 of the house was merely a fruiterer's and a tobacconist's shops. He went out 
 mechanically; he knew he must get more gold or go without this, which had 
 become the single craving necessity of life. Where ? He who had owned the 
 aristocracies of whole nations as his friends, and had given to all who had 
 asked, as though the world were his, had not a shilling now to get him bread. 
 
 He walked on aimlessly, unheeding the snow which poured down on his 
 bare head, the cutting north wind that blew like an ice-blast. It was between 
 three and four in the morning; there was scarce a soul abroad. In the quarter 
 where he was few carriages ever rolled, and the thieves and revellers who filled 
 it were mostly housed in some den or another in the inclement weather. The 
 dog followed him closely; otherwise he was almost alone in the tortuous, end- 
 less streets, whose windings he took without knowing whither they took him. 
 The bitter rush of the wind lifted the masses of his hair, the sleet drove in his 
 eyes, the cold chilled him to the bone; he was adrift in the streets of Paris, 
 without a sou to get him food or bed, he who a few months before had reigned 
 there in a splendor passing the splendor of princes ! 
 
 He longed for death, longed as man never yet longed for life. The un- 
 speakable physical misery alone passed his strength; to the nerves that had 
 shrunk from pain, to the senses that had been steeped in every pleasure, to the 
 tastes that had loathed unsightliness as a torture, to the habits that had been ener- 
 vated in all the richness of enjoyment the wretchedness that was now his portion 
 was horrible beyond the utterance. He who had never known what an hour's 
 suffering, what a moment's denial, were, now endured cold, and exposure, and 
 need of food, and all the racking pangs of want and fever, like any houseless 
 beggar starving in the night. 
 
 He wandered on and on, still always in the same quarter, still always keep- 
 ing, by sheer instinct, far from all that he had once known, far from all that 
 had so lately seen him in the magnificence of his reign. He wandered on, un- 
 der the lowering walls of pent-up dwellings, through the driving of the slowly- 
 falling snow, against the cutting breath of the ice-chill air. A strange faintness 
 stole on him, a strange numbness seized his limbs; he began to lose all sense 
 
 VOL. in. 9
 
 258 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 of the keen blasts that blew against him; the intensity of the cold began to 
 yield place to a dreamy exhaustion and prostration, half weary, half soothing: 
 he felt sleep stealing on him, deep as death. He had no wish to resist, no 
 power to overcome it; the languor stole over all his frame, his limbs failed him; 
 he sank down and stretched himself out as on some welcome bed, with a heavy 
 sigh, lying there on the snow covered ground, with the snow falling on his closed 
 eyes and the wind winding among his hair. The dog couched down and pressed 
 its silky warmth against his breast; profound rest stole on him: he knew no more. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 "WHERE ALL LIFE DIES, DEATH LIVES." 
 
 THERE was intense solitude in the dark, cheerless night; the snow drifted 
 noiseless down; now and then the wild winds broke and howled with a hollow 
 moan: all else was very still, still as the starless, ink-black skies that bent 
 above. One shadow alone moved through the gloom that a yellow lamp-light 
 here and there only served to make more impenetrable, a shadow frail, bent, 
 delicate as a woman's, feeble as that of age, the shadow of a cripple. 
 
 He dragged himself along with slow and painful effort; when he passed 
 under one of the lamps, its glare shone on a face fair and spiritual, with great 
 dark dreaming eyes, that looked out at the snow-flakes wearily, the face of 
 Guido Lulli. The fragile, helpless, pain-worn Provenal, who shuddered from 
 cold as a young fawn will shudder in it, and who had barely till now quitted 
 the chamber where he wove his melodious fancies and forgot a world with 
 which he could have no share, was out in the bitterness of the winter's night, 
 on a quest that his fidelity had never slackened in through many months of 
 vain toil and fruitless search. The search was ended now. 
 
 His foot touched the outflung arm of the form that lay prostrate, half on 
 the stone of the steps on which it had sunk, half on the road to which the 
 limbs had been stretched in the strange peace and languor which had come 
 with the slumber of cold and fasting. 
 
 The snow had fallen faster and heavily in the last few moments ; it covered 
 the hands, and was shed white and thick upon the uncovered hair and upturned 
 brow. A lamp burned just above; its flicker, glowing dully through the raw 
 gray mist, shone on the death-like calm of the features in the breathless rest 
 of sleep from which few ever waken. Lulli stooped and looked, then, with a 
 great cry, sank down on his knees beside the senseless form. He knew it in a 
 glance, all changed though it was: his search was over.
 
 CHANDOS. 259 
 
 The dog lifted his head and gave a moaning recognition, half of joy, half 
 of entreaty; but he would not stir from where he crouched on his master's 
 breast, lending with his warm breath and his curly hair and his massive strength 
 such aid and protection as he could against the blasts of the storm and the 
 chills of the night. If any life lingered, he had saved it. 
 
 " My master ! Found at last, and found O God ! too late ! " cried 
 Lulli, as he strove, all weak and feeble as he was, to raise the prostrate form 
 in his arms, to draw the limbs from the road, to rest the head against his 
 bosom, to dash the snow from the wet hair, and to chafe the stagnant chillness 
 of the frozen hands. 
 
 " Monseigneur, monseigneur ! is it thus with thee ? " murmured the Pro- 
 vencal, in the loving sweetness of his Southern tongue, while the great tears 
 coursed down his cheeks and fell fast as the snow-flakes on the brow and eyes 
 of Chandos, the brow that was contracted even in senselessness as with an 
 unbearable pain, the eyes that were closed so heavily, so wearily, the long 
 thick lashes lying on the cheek white as the snow-covered stone on which it 
 had been resting. 
 
 The musician loved him with a tenderness intense and enduring; and there 
 was something that might have moved a heart far less warm than the lonely 
 cripple's in the sight of the magnificent limbs stretched lifeless as a corpse, of 
 the drooped head that hung like the head of the dead, of the hair, that women 
 had loved to toy with, dank and dogged with moisture, and of the features, 
 only of late so brilliant with genius and with life, haggard, colorless, and 
 drawn as by death, in the tawny flickering glare of the swinging lamp above. 
 
 Lulli laid his hand upon the heart; it beat dully, faintly; and the dog's 
 nestling body had preserved existence where otherwise in the bitter cold and 
 dangerous sleep the pulse of the blood must have ceased. Lulli looked round 
 wildly, and raised his voice in a shout for aid; helpless and weak as he was in 
 all actions for himself, loyalty and gratitude gave him the strength of giants to 
 save the man who in his own extremity had saved him. 
 
 There was no answer to his call. He was alone in the bleakness and the 
 darkness of the wintry dawn, with one whom he firmly believed to be dying, 
 dying of cold, of exposure, and of want; the man whom but a year before he 
 had known in every luxury and every pleasure that the world could give, the 
 man who had come to him in the summer-heats of Spain as the savior of his 
 life and art, who had seemed to him the very incarnation of beauty, of joy, of 
 splendid manhood, of proud, rejoicing, perfect strength. 
 
 In his desperation he found the force that nature had denied his limbs and 
 nerves; he raised the insensible form up from the snow in which it sank half 
 buried: he stripped himself of the furs he wore and covered Chandos' chest 
 with them; he chafed his hands and pressed them against his own lips to give
 
 260 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 them warmth; he shouted for help till his voice rang down the deserted street, 
 waking all its hollow echoes, and died away unanswered. 
 
 The roll of a carriage coming slowly, and muffled on the whitened roads, 
 smote^on his ear at last; he raised a louder cry, with all the power he could 
 gather. He heard a women's voice from the interior bid the coachman stop 
 and wait. In the dull gleam of the lamp he could see the glitter of jewels flash 
 as she leaned out; her words came strangely clear to him through the frosty 
 darkness, as she asked, in French, 
 
 " What is it ? " 
 
 " One dying, and from cold ! " he answered her, his voice thick and 
 tremulous with the sobs that shook him like a child. 
 
 " Dying ! Wait while I see," said the voice he had heard, as the form he 
 could dimly perceive through the gloom swayed from the carriage-steps and 
 came towards him; a woman who had been, who indeed was still, very lovely; 
 a woman whose youth was waning, but who still was young; a woman in rich 
 costly draperies that the yellow light glittered on, and with the blue gleam of 
 sapphires above her brow. She was the lionne, Beatrix Lennox. 
 
 A moment, and she stood besides Lulli, disregarding the snow-flakes that 
 drove against her, and the icy wind that blew through her scarlet cashmeres. 
 She was a woman of swift impulse, of warm pity. 
 
 " Is he dying, you say ? " she asked with an infinite gentleness in her voice, 
 while she stooped to look at the prostrate form. She started with a loud cry. 
 
 " Chandos ! merciful Heaven ! " 
 
 Her lips turned very pale, not her cheek, for that was warm with a bright 
 delicate bloom of rouge, and into her eyes the tears sprang salt and full. Her 
 voice trembled. 
 
 " Oh, Heaven, what a wreck ! I have seen so many, yet never one like this ! " 
 
 She was silent a moment, gazing down at the senseless features, and softly 
 touching, with a caressing hand, the dead gold of the hair, all wet and whitened 
 by the driving of the snow. Then she turned with a nervous energy; she was 
 impetuous and rapid, and firm in act. 
 
 " He is not dead," she said, impatiently; " but he will die if he stays there. 
 Lift him into my carriage, quick ! We must get him warmth and stimulants; 
 my house is so far off, and there is no fit place here " 
 
 " My lodging is not distant. Let him come there," pleaded Lulli, piteously, 
 while he drew the inanimate hands closer into his own, as though afraid he 
 should be robbed again of the one so long lost, so terribly found. 
 
 "Yes, yes; anywhere that is near ! " she answered, rapidly, while she flung 
 the scarlet down-lined draperies she wore about the half-dead limbs, and stood, 
 regardless .of the blasts that howled, and of the heavy icy mists that descended 
 on the earth like sheets of solid water, as her servants, at her bidding, raised
 
 CHANDOS. 261 
 
 him and laid him gently down upon the cushions of her carriage. She felt 
 nothing of the searching wind, nothing of the drenching storm, nothing of the 
 flakes that were driven against her delicate skin and her masked-ball dress. 
 Her eyes were dim with tears; her lips shook; her heart ached. 
 
 " How many fallen I have seen!" her thoughts ran; "yet never such a 
 fall as his." 
 
 When life and sense returned to Chandos, he was stretched before a wood 
 fire, that shed its ruddy, uncertain light over a darkened room; the dog was 
 licking his hands and murmuring its love over him where he lay; and beside 
 him, watching him, were the musician and the richly-hued and delicate form of 
 the famous Bohemian, Beatrix Lennox. 
 
 He looked up with a weary sigh; he knew neither of them; his mind was 
 dull, and wandering far in the past. 
 
 " Clarencieux ? " he muttered, dreamily. It was the one loss ever at his 
 heart, the one name ever in his thoughts. 
 
 It struck those who had heard it with a pang; they knew how endless must 
 be this longing, how endless this loss. 
 
 Lulli stooped over him, his voice very broken. 
 
 " Monseigneur, do you not know me ? " 
 
 Chandos looked at him dreamily, blindly. His head fell back with a sigh 
 of weariness. 
 
 " No, no; if you had been merciful, you would have let me die." 
 
 The words told his listeners more mournfully, more utterly, than any others 
 could have done, how bitter to him had become the burden of the life once so 
 rich and gracious. 
 
 Beatrix Lennox, albeit a woman who had known the world in phases that 
 harden and chill and fill with an ironic mockery for most emotions those who 
 do so know it, looked on at him, where he lay, with eyes of pathetic pain, dim 
 and aching with unshed tears. She had seen him but so late in all the glory 
 of his kingly manhood, of his unshadowed youth ! She thought, in that strange 
 blending of assimilation and of incongruity which not seldom accompanies 
 hours of profound suffering, of the old words of the Romaunt de Duguesclin: 
 
 N'a filairesse en France qui sache fil filer 
 Qui me gagnait ainois ma finance & filer. 
 
 " There is not the woman living," she thought, " who could look on him now 
 and not give her all to gain him ransom from his misery, if she could." 
 
 Lulli, his voice broken with the weeping that shook him like a young child, 
 stooped over him in the same entreaty, passionately praying for his recogni- 
 tion.
 
 262 
 
 OL 7 IDA'S WORKS. 
 
 " Monseigneur ! my master, my friend, my savior! look at me; you 
 
 know me ? " 
 
 The long-familiar tones reached the brain, dulled by cold and want of food. 
 Chandos raised himself and looked at him, vacantly yet wonderingly, but with 
 a half-smile that passed over his face a moment to fade the next. " Is it you ? " 
 he said, faintly. " Where am I ? What has happened ? " 
 
 Lulli could not answer him: the musician had been strong to save him 
 while danger nerved and emergency compelled him; but now the reaction told 
 on him, his old weakness returned, he wept, trembling sorely like a woman. 
 The affections and the feebleness of his nature were both very feminine; and 
 it was an anguish beyond his strength to see stretched before him in that sense- 
 less wretchedness, the man to whom he owed all, and whom he had last beheld 
 the idol of a brilliant world, the darling of a throng of friends, the caressed 
 sovereign of a limitless homage. 
 
 Chandos lifted his eyelids, laden still with the sleep that had been so nearly 
 the sleep of death, and saw Beatrix Lennox. He remembered them both then, 
 and, in the old instincts of his marked courtesy to women, strove to rise. 
 With an effort he staggered to his feet, and leaned heavily against the high 
 slate shelf above the warm wood-piled blazing hearth. He could not speak; 
 the sight of these two faces so well known in his past that past which seemed 
 severed from him as by the gulf of a lifetime brought back with a flood of 
 memories on his slowly waking thoughts what he had been, what he was. 
 They, looking on him and seeing the ruin a few months had wrought, did 
 not know how vast, how terrible the change was in him more utterly than he 
 himself. 
 
 His eyes closed involuntarily with a shudder. He had buried his life in the 
 dens of the populous city to escape all sight of those once familiar to and with 
 him. That any of those should meet him now was torture almost unbearable 
 to the pride which survived in him above all that had sought to shame and 
 stay it. 
 
 " How do I come here ? " he said, feebly, while his gaze wandered towards 
 them with the pathetic glance of a man paralyzed, whose eyes alone can 
 speak. 
 
 " The cold had struck you, and you had fallen," answered Beatrix Lennox, 
 in her voice that fell on him like soothing music. " My carriage was near; we 
 brought you to M. Lulli's room. You are weak still ; the night was so bitter. 
 Wait and rest before you speak." 
 
 She restrained the tears that choked her utterance; for, with the tact that 
 nature gave her, she divined how terrible must be to him the knowledge that 
 they had found him in his destitution and his suffering, they, who had been 
 the companions of his glittering prosperity, the one the recipient of his widest
 
 CHANDOS. 263 
 
 charity, the other the guest of his gayest hours. She sought to hide her own 
 knowledge of it as she could. 
 
 Lulli, the impressionable, transparent, childlike Southern, could exercise no 
 such self-restraint; he knelt at Chandos' feet, his head bowed in his hands, his 
 heart half broken. 
 
 " Oh, monseigneur," he murmured, passionately, piteously, " how have I 
 searched for you ! how have I grieved for you ! I sought you night and day, 
 sought you living or dead. Could you not have trusted me? Could you not 
 have let me go out with you to your exile ? " 
 
 Chandos looked down on him, and a sigh, quivering as a sob, broke from 
 him unconsciously. 
 
 " Forgive me, Lulli," he said, gently; " I was selfish; I forgot you; I forgot 
 you would be faithful." 
 
 " You never forgot ! " cried the musician, lifting his head eagerly, while he 
 flung back the silky masses of his dark hair off his eyes. " You never forgot 
 me; you only forgot yourself ! You remembered my needs, you remembered 
 my helplessness, you remembered to save me and serve me to the last: all you 
 forgot was how I loved you ! " 
 
 Chandos stretched out his hand to him with his old gesture; he could not 
 answer, the Provencal's fidelity moved him too deeply, stirred him too bitterly, 
 in its contrast with the abandonment of wellnigh every other. 
 
 Beatrix Lennox drew nearer, and laid her hand softly on his arm. 
 
 " You were very near death an hour ago. Rest now, and take what I 
 bring you." 
 
 With the skill and speed of her sex, though some there were who said the 
 lionne had left far behind in other years the softness of her sex, she brought 
 him with her own hands some delicate food and some warm and fragrant coffee, 
 standing there in her masquerade-dress all glittering with Venetian gems and 
 Venetian grace, with the ruddy wood-fire light upon her, as she had stood in 
 the driving down-pour of the snow-storm. The hand that held him the food so 
 tenderly had but just laid aside the black coquette Venetian mask of her opera- 
 ball; but of a surety the ministration was not less gentle, the heart that 
 prompted it not less full of divine charity, than if it had just cast aside the gray 
 serge of a religious recluse. 
 
 It was the first food for months from which he had not turned in loathing; 
 he took it with a gratitude that, though his eyes alone spoke, sank into her 
 memory forever. She saw, what Lulli did not see, that it was the first he had 
 taken for many hours, and that long fasting had done its work on him not less 
 surely than the winter night. 
 
 " Can he want bread ? " she thought, with a quiver of horror. Heartless 
 though the world called her, this reine gaillarde of a lawless court, she would
 
 26 4 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 have gone and sold her jewels and her cashmeres to bring him gold, had she 
 not known by instinct that, though he might die of hunger, he would never 
 take an alms. 
 
 " I owe you a great debt, Mrs. Lennox," he said, simply, as his eyes rested 
 on her, all the light dead in them, a heavy languor weighing down their lids, 
 and a haggard darkness circling them, but with their weariness a look of infinite 
 thankfulness to her and to the one man who alone had never forsaken and 
 reviled his memory. 
 
 " You owe me none." The words were very low, as she stood swaying to 
 and fro the gold strings of her Vene.tian mask. " Chandos, I owed you some 
 time ago a far greater one." 
 
 " Owed me ? " 
 
 His senses and his memory were still dim; warmth and, with warmth, life 
 were fast flowing back into his veins, but he felt as one in a dream; the faces 
 he looked on were so familiar, the place was so strange, he could not disen- 
 tangle fact from fantasy. 
 
 " Yes ! " 
 
 She came closer towards him, standing there in the reflection of the blazing 
 wood, with the scarlet and black folds of her masquerade-dress sweeping down- 
 ward in the glow, and her haughty, handsome face turned to him with an inex- 
 pressible sweetness and tenderness tremulous upon it. The thought woke in 
 him vaguely, even in that moment, Had this woman loved him ? She, swift to 
 read unspoken thoughts, guessed it. 
 
 " Do not think that," she said, with a smile of infinite sadness. " I never 
 loved you; it is very long since my heart beat. But I would serve you any- 
 how, anywhere, if I could. Do you remember being with me at an opera- 
 supper at the Maison Dore"e, years and years ago ? No ! how should you ? 
 It was only memorable to me. Some German prince gave the supper, who I 
 forget now; but there were women present with whom even I abhorred associa- 
 tion. The jests were very free, the license very unchecked, and I I had for- 
 feited the right to resent. You alone noticed it, you alone pitied me; you 
 went and spoke in a whisper to the prince. He laughed aloud. ' The Lennox, 
 
 who is she to ' You silenced him. ' She was at least the daughter of a 
 
 gallant gentleman; that should not be forgotten.' Then you came to me with 
 your gentle courtesy, and offered to take me to my carriage. Ah ! I was 
 wrong to say I never loved you. I loved you then / I never forgot it, I 
 never shall." 
 
 Chandos looked at her with a great gratitude, and yet a pain wellnigh as 
 great; tenderness shown him subdued and touched him as it subdues and 
 touches a woman. 
 
 /'God knows it was trifle enough. If others remembered as you do "
 
 CHANDOS. 265 
 
 He paused; no words ever escaped him that could sound like a lament for 
 the ingratitude that had forsaken him on every side. 
 
 " Ah," she said, passionately, " it was no trifle to me. If ever I can repay 
 it, if it be twenty years hence, I will, let the payment cost what it may." 
 
 The promise was very hurried and broken in its utterance for the most 
 fluent and most eloquent woman of her time; she took his hands in hers, and 
 bent over them. 
 
 " If you could let me serve you ! " she murmured, as softly as his mother 
 could have breathed him her farewell; then, with a long, loving gaze, she left 
 him, the black and scarlet hues of her draperies lost in the gloom of the fire- 
 shadows. She could have stayed with him, stayed with him willingly, to aid, 
 to tend on, to assist him with every ministry that love with which no touch of 
 passion blent could give; but she knew him to be very proud; she saw that 
 pride was not dead, but lived in passionate pain beneath calamity; she felt that 
 the fewer eyes there were upon him now, the better could he bear the knowl- 
 edge that they had found him, a homeless wanderer, dying in the streets of 
 Paris. So, true to her unselfish instinct, and guided by a tenderness higher 
 than compassion, she left him, she whom the world called an adventuress 
 without pity and without conscience. 
 
 As she passed from the chamber, he sank down wearily and faintly, his 
 head bowed on his breast, his limbs stretched out in racking misery from cold 
 and stiffness in the heat of the leaping flames. He, who in his superb complete- 
 ness of strength and of health had never known what the illness of a day was, 
 suffered now every ill of mind and body, suffered almost more in this moment, 
 when the reviving warmth and the stimulant of the choicer food gave him the 
 power of vivid consciousness, than he had done in the stupor of his opium- 
 drugged senses. Yet no word, scarcely any sign, escaped him of what he 
 suffered; there was too proud an instinct in him still. Lulli watched him 
 silently; the dog nestled close in the light of the hearth. For many moments 
 there was not a sound in the chamber; sheer physical aching pain wore Chandos 
 down, seeming to load him with the weight of iron chains, to burn him with 
 the scorch of fire. He wished he wished to God that they had left him in 
 that dreamless slumber upon the snow to die, with no more knowledge of the 
 life he quitted than the frozen stag that stretches out its stiffened limbs upon 
 some desolate moor-side. 
 
 Gradually, slowly, bodily exhaustion conquered; the pangs that racked his 
 frame were soothed to comparative peace by the after-action of the opiates he 
 had so long" taken; the warmth of the hearth lulled him to rest; his eyes closed, 
 his breathing grew gentler and more even; he stretched himself out with a 
 weary sigh, as he had done in the darkness of the streets, and he slept at last 
 as he had never slept since the night he learned the story of his ruin, slept
 
 266 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 for hour on hour, with scare a breath that stirred the stillness of his repose or 
 could be heard upon the silence. That sleep saved him from the fate which 
 the girl in the gambling den had foreseen for him if he lived. 
 
 When he awoke, the sun was high in the western skies; it was far after 
 noon. Lulli sat beside him, watching with a patience no length of vigil could 
 exhaust; the dog lay asleep; the ruddy glow of the great fire on the hearth was 
 dying down, though its intense heat still filled the chamber. His eyes, as they 
 unclosed, met Lulli's resting on him with that unwearied spaniel look which 
 had scarce ever relaxed its watch over that repose which so re'sembled death. 
 
 " Is it you, Guido ? " he asked faintly. " Ah, yes, I remember. And you 
 have been waiting by me there so many hours ! " 
 
 The Provencal strove to smile, though the tears stood thick in his eyes. 
 
 " Monseigneur, I would never weary of that." 
 
 " I know. There are few like you." 
 
 " Monseigneur, if all those whom you once served were like me, there would 
 be many throngs." 
 
 Chandos answered nothing; he raised himself on his left arm, and lay on 
 the hearth, gazing at the flicker of the crimson flame, at the fall of the gray 
 noiseless ash. 
 
 The deadliest pang to Richard Plantagenet, in all the bitterness of his dis- 
 crowned fortunes, was when his hound, who loved him, who caressed him, who 
 had been fed from his hand and had slept by his pillow, went from him to fawn 
 on Bolingbroke. " // vous suivra, il m'Jloignera" said the forsaken king, a 
 whole history of infidelity in the brief pathetic words. The deadliest pang of 
 his lost royalties to Chandos lay in the abandonment of all, save this poor 
 cripple, whom he had loved and saved, and who had caressed him in the days 
 of his purple and his power. 
 
 " You can tell me," he said, suddenly, his voice was very hushed, and 
 came with effort through his lips, " what is the fate of of " 
 
 His lips could not phrase, but his listener divined, the word. 
 
 " Clarencieux ? " asked Lulli. 
 
 He bent his head. 
 
 The musician looked at him eagerly. 
 
 "Did you not know? Monseigneur d'Orvale has bought the whole ? " 
 
 Chandos looked up, a flush of breathless gratitude, of incredulous relief, 
 banishing for the moment all the broken, aged, colorless pain from his face. 
 
 " Is it true ? Philippe d'Orvale^? " he panted, with a thirsty anguish that 
 told how more at his heart than any other thing had lain the weight of his 
 home's loss. 
 
 " Would I cheat you ? True as that we live. He forced them to surrender 
 it to him, bought it untouched, undespoiled."
 
 CHANDOS. 267 
 
 " Thank God ! " 
 
 He covered his face with his hands, and for the only time in all his adver- 
 sity, save the moment when old Harold Gelart had spoken under the elms of 
 the western terrace, great storm-drops forced themselves through his closed 
 lids and his clenched fingers, and fell one by one, like the rain before a tempest. 
 
 Far more to him than any mercy ^to himself was the mercy which had saved 
 Clarencieux from sacrilege and barter and destruction. 
 
 " Monseigneur d'Orvale has it," pursued the swift sweet voice of the Prov- 
 encal, " Not a tree will be touched, not a thing be displaced. He sent for me, 
 and bade me live there; but I could not: it would have broken my heart. He 
 has sought for you everywhere; he has longed to find you; he would have you 
 return to it as though it were your own still." 
 
 Chandos shivered were he sat. 
 
 " // I am dead to it forever." 
 
 He could not have borne to look upon the purple distance of its woods, he 
 could not have borne to stand beside the far-off course of the mere river that 
 flowed towards it, he who had forfeited his birthright. 
 
 Lulli was silent; his eyes watched ever, with a dog-like love, the form of 
 Chandos, where he lay at length in the dying glow of the flames, his face hid- 
 den, his frame shaken now and then with an irrepressible shudder. An unutter- 
 able thanksgiving was in his heart for the fate which had spared his home and 
 the lands from the shame and the ruin of dissolution; yet the knowledge that 
 another dwelt there, that another had bought his heritage forever, brought in 
 him, as it had never come before, the full realization of his own eternal exile. 
 
 He raised his head after many moments, and strove to steady his 
 voice. 
 
 "Thank him from me; he will know how I thank him. I used to feel how 
 true, how generous, his heart was, now noble a friend he would ever be. Tell 
 him he is merciful beyond men's mercy " 
 
 " You will tell him?" asked Lulli, softly; "you will see him? He loves 
 you so well." 
 
 Chandos gave an irrepressible gesture of pain. 
 
 "Not yet; not yet," he said, hurriedly. "I doubt if ever " 
 
 The words were unfinished; in his own soul he felt as though never could 
 he force himself to look on the friends and companions of that lost life which 
 seemed to lie so far behind him in a limitless distance, dead and past forever. 
 Nor in himself did he think that he would long live, long bear this burden of 
 hopeless wretchedness, long endure this existence which was unceasingly up- 
 on the verge of madness or of death. 
 
 What had he now ? The food that he ate here might be the last ever to pass 
 his lips. He had not a farthing wherewith to buy bread even for his dog.
 
 268 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 Lulli looked at him wistfully, and stooped forward nearer, a kindling light 
 
 on his face. 
 
 " Monseigneur, hear me ! " he said, very low, with a fervent, touching en- 
 treaty in his whispered Southern tongue. " When I was dying, you saved me; 
 when I was in beggary, you gave me food and shelter; when I was poor and 
 friendless and alone, you were the world to me. You found me in misery, and 
 pitied me, and for the art that is my life and my soul you gained me hearing 
 and you gave me fame. Through you I am no more poor; they talk of me; 
 my Ariadtif has been heard through all the width of Europe, and they have 
 paid her beauty with their gold, though that was never my thought with her. 
 Listen ! Pay my debt to you I never can; I love to owe it and to cherish it. 
 But in some little sense I may serve you; in some degree you can make me 
 happy by letting me ask you to remember it. Stay with me; let me toil for 
 you, labor for you, wait on you, gather the gold they offer me for you. It will 
 be such joy to me ! Without the sound of your voice, I am like a blind man 
 lost in this wide world; if you will only wait with me, you can give me back 
 strength, power, ambition, everything, and I shall love the coins that I hate 
 now, if you will let me glean them all for you, let me do for you in some little 
 kind all that you did for me when I was a homeless cripple, dying, with all the 
 music that was in me killed and silenced by my hunger and my poverty." 
 
 His voice rose in his impassioned entreaty, till it thrilled through the still 
 chamber like one of his own melodies; he would have slaved, have starved, 
 have killed himself, to have saved or served the man who had had pity on his 
 youth. 
 
 Chandos heard, and the words moved him deeply as the words of the old 
 yeoman had done. He never lifted his head, but he stretched out his right 
 hand silently, and grasped the frail, nervous, transparent hand of the musician 
 in a close clasp. 
 
 " What you wish cannot be," he said, huskily. " I should be lost to shame 
 indeed ! But from my heart I bless you for your fidelity, for your love." 
 
 " Cannot be ? Why not ? In my need you aided me ? " pleaded Lulli, his 
 wistful eyes pleading more fervently than his words. He knew too little of the 
 world to know why, in his own sight, Chandos would have felt himself shamed 
 beyond all humiliation had he listened to his prayer. 
 
 The blood flushed his listener's forehead with a pang of the old pride of his 
 proud race; he could not tell this guileless, generous, devoted creature that he 
 would sooner die like a dog, die of famine, in the streets, than live on upon the 
 alms of his debtor. 
 
 " It cannot be," he said, gently. Do not ask it, Lulli. If you have 
 fame and comfort, I am more than rewarded by you." 
 
 The Proven ? al's face darkened mournfully; the whole of many months had
 
 CHAN DOS. 269 
 
 been passed in a vain quest for his lost master, in an unwearied though, as it 
 had seemed, hopeless search, through which his sole sustaining thought had 
 been to find his solitary friend and to repay in some faint measure all the gifts 
 he owed. 
 
 Chandos rose slowly from where he leaned upon the hearth; his limbs were 
 still stiff and weak, though the profound repose of long-unbroken sleep had 
 restored him something of strength, and the life-giving warmth in which he had 
 rested had lessened the pain in his brow and eyes and the oppressive weight on 
 his lungs. 
 
 "You are not going ? you will not leave me ? " cried Lulli, with an accent 
 almost piteous. He had ever before his thoughts the senseless form on which 
 by so hazardous a chance his search had led him in the snow-storm of 
 the past night; he could not bear to let him go from his sight to risk the same 
 fate in loneliness and misery again. 
 
 Chandos looked at him with something bewildered in his glance; the ques- 
 tion brought back on him the full sense of his own aimless and hopeless life. 
 Where should he go ? what should he do ? In the desert of the world he stood 
 alone; he had not enough to get him bread. 
 
 " Stay with me ! oh, for pity's sake, stay with me," pleaded Lulli, passion- 
 ately. So willingly would he have given up everything on earth to be allowed 
 to starve for the only living creature who had ever pitied him. 
 
 Chandos gave a faint sign of dissent; he knew not what he should do, he 
 knew not whether in the next day and night he might not perish of the same 
 exposure and want he had been now rescued from; but his highest instincts 
 were not dead in him; he would not linger here, though for one moment phy- 
 sical weakness and all the long habit of physical indulgence came upon him 
 with a fearful longing to lie down and rest without effort in the soothing heat 
 of the hearth, to stay in the lulling peace and shelter of the quiet chamber. 
 
 Serious illness was on him, as well as the inertia of fever and of languor. 
 For the moment he felt it beyond his strength to pass out into the bleak biting 
 wind, to face the homeless night, to accept the fate that drove him out into the 
 wilderness of the great city, with none to give him rest, with nothing to buy him 
 food. He longed to turn back, and lie down and die in the dreamy comfort of 
 that calming fire-glow. 
 
 But he moved away, only pausing one moment to droop his head to Lulli's 
 ear with a single question more: 
 
 " Tell me, before I go, what of her ? " 
 
 The musician knew that he meant the woman he had loved ; he was silent, 
 and turned shuddering away. 
 
 " Do not ask me ! do not ask me ! " he murmured, passionately. 
 
 Chandos staggered slightly; he was very weak.
 
 270 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 " Is she dead ? " 
 
 " Would to heaven she were ! " said Lulli, with a force that thrilled for the 
 moment wtih the fierce vengeance of the South. The gentle dreamer, who 
 would have pardoned the cruellest wrongs done to himself, could hate and 
 could avenge where those he loved were wronged. 
 
 " Hush ! I have loved her," said Chandos, faintly. " What of her ? I can 
 bear all now." 
 
 " She is Lord Clydesmore's wife." 
 
 The answer was ground out between Lulli's teeth; he loathed, as he had 
 loathed the unknown lover of Valeria, the woman who had abandoned and the 
 man who had supplanted Chandos. 
 
 Chandos swayed forward as though about to fall. 
 
 " Oh God ! his wife ! " 
 
 The words broke from him like a wrung-out cry; in that moment he re- 
 membered nothing save the passion wherewith he had loved her, save the 
 beauty which was given to another. He made his way with a blind swaying 
 movement towards the door; he had no sense now except that he must be 
 alone, alone to bear this crowning bitterness which had befallen him. 
 
 " Wait ! wait ! " cried Lulli, imploringly. " Oh, Heaven ! why would you 
 have me tell you ? Wait ! You will come back to me ? " 
 
 Chandos put him aside gently, though he had no consciousness of what 
 he did. 
 
 " Yes, I will come back," he answered, mechanically, without the sense of 
 what he promised, as he made his way out once more into the bitter winter air. 
 He had forgotten all, except that the one who should now have lain in his 
 arms his wife had gone, so soon, to the love and the embrace of his rival ! 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 IN THE NET OF THE RETIARIUS. 
 
 LULLI looked for him in vain. He never returned. It was not that he 
 broke wittingly his promise; he never knew that he had made it. 
 
 He dragged his limbs, how he could not have remembered, to the only 
 home he owned now, a home he had not coins enough on him to keep another 
 night, a pent, dark, dreary chamber in one of the million houses of the 
 crowded streets, with only one better thing in it, that it was so high, so near the 
 clouds, that a clear space of the winter skies looked down on it, and the cold 
 serene radiance of a few stars could be seen from it above the jagged peaked
 
 CHAN DOS. 271 
 
 roofs. There the illness on him flung him down; he lay prostrate many days, 
 many nights, with no watcher beside him save the dog, except once in several 
 hours, when the woman of the house came and filled afresh the flagon of water 
 that he drank from eagerly, and looked at him with a pitying wonder, rather 
 for his beauty than for his danger, and went away and left him; for she only 
 knew him as a beggared gamester, and would have turned him, half lifeless, 
 wholly senseless, into the streets, had it not been that, woman-like, she was 
 moved to compassion by the physical graces that no ruin could kill in him, and 
 that touched her to pity as he lay unconscious there. 
 
 " As handsome as a fallen angel ! " she would mutter to herself, while, 
 though but an old, bent, savage, avaricious crone, she would just touch softly 
 with her yellow horny hand the gold locks that women had used to crown with 
 roses. " An aristocrat ! an aristocrat ! Mort de Dieu ! how many of them 
 I have seen die off like murrained cattle from their gaming-hells! " 
 
 So, just for the sake of his fair hair and his beautiful mouth, like the mouth 
 of a Greek god, she tended him enough to keep life in him like a flickering 
 flame; for the rest, he lay alone in the midst of the peopled city where he had 
 once reigned supreme, dying in his solitude for aught that any knew or cared. 
 The winter stars shone clear through frosty nights, and looked in on him 
 prostrate there, with his head fallen back, and his eyes without light or sense, 
 and his chest rising heavily and wearily with anguish in every breath the 
 inflamed lungs drew; while the dog watched beside him, moaning now and 
 again its piteous wail, or covering with its caresses the clenched hands and the 
 contracted brow. Winter dawns broke chill and gray; winter days rolled 
 darkly on; winter nights passed with riotous storm or frost so crystal clear, 
 through which the cold moon shone like a shield of steel; he lay there in his 
 loneliness as though in his grave, forgotten, and without a friend in the midst 
 of thousands who had feasted at his tables, in the heart of palaces where his 
 word had been as law. Yet the life in him would not die. 
 
 It survived through all; it recovered without aid, without succor, without 
 other comfort than was given him by the warmth of the animal's nestling body 
 and the cooling draught of the icy water. Whilst he lay there, one only, 
 beside the old brown withered crone who tended his wants in the few intervals 
 of her daily toil, came and watched him. One only of all those who had 
 known him and been succored by him discovered the wretchedness of that last 
 retreat and stood beside the bed where he was stretched. Hate is swifter of 
 foot and surer of chase than love, and will remember and search, untiring, 
 when love has grown weary and laggard. 
 
 One only came and mounted the narrow, dark, rickety stairs, and entered 
 the room where there was no single thing of solace or of mercy except when the 
 clear pale light of the stars shone down from above the endless roofs; one only
 
 OVID AS WO&RS. 
 
 stood beside the pallet where the man whom all Europe had caressed and 
 honored had no watcher but a starving dog. Trevenna stood there looking on 
 his work, and was content with it. Philippe d'Orvale had baffled him of his 
 vengeance on the senseless stones of Clarencieux, but none could take from him 
 his vengeance on the living man whom his patient hate had slain more merci- 
 lessly than by a swift and single death-stab. 
 
 All the long years of subtle dissimulation, of carking envy, of longing thirst 
 to destroy the peace and the brilliance of the life he pursued, of gifts accepted 
 with greed because they were the means of conquest, but loathed and cursed 
 and adding by each one a stone to the load of his hatred, all these were over 
 and over recompensed now, here, in this darkened, poverty-bared garret in the 
 city of Paris, where his prey, in torture and in famine, lay insensible beneath 
 his gaze. 
 
 Of all the women who had listened to Chandos' love-words and toyed with 
 the brightness of his hair, there was not one who now held a stoup of water to 
 his lips. Of all the hands that he had filled with gold, there was not one now 
 to touch with pitying caress the brow all bent and dark with pain. Of all the 
 mouths to which he had given food, there was not one now to murmur a gentle 
 word over his misery. Of all the throngs whom he had bidden beneath his roof, 
 of all the lives he had made prosperous and joyous, of all the friends who had 
 laughed with him through the long luxuriant summer day of his existence, there 
 was not one now who asked whether he were living or dead. There was but 
 his enemy, who looked on him and rejoiced. 
 
 Every unconscious sigh that broke from him, every movement of his fevered 
 aching limbs, every breath drawn through his agonized lungs, every contraction 
 that knit his burning forehead in his suffering, every look of dull sightless 
 suffering from the blind and sleepless eyes, his foe watched, and was content. 
 
 Quand j'6miettais mon pain & 1'oiseau du rivage, 
 L'onde semblait me dire, " Espfere ! aux mauvais jours, 
 Dieu te rendra ton pain." Dieu me le doit toujours ! 
 
 wrote the poet Moreau, dying in his youth of lack of the food dogs rejected. 
 Chandos had thrown his bread on many waters, giving to all who asked, to all 
 who were heavy-laden, to all who lived in darkness and in want. It was un- 
 recompensed and owing to him still. He needed it now, but none repaid it. 
 There only remained with him his foe, who brought him the hyssop and the 
 aloe when he died for a drop of the clear living rivers of the land he had 
 left. 
 
 " Water ! water ! " he murmured, unceasingly, where he was stretched in 
 his delirious stupor. Trevenna poured some absinthe, and touched his lips 
 with it. He shuddered, all unconscious as he was, and turned with a heavy
 
 CHANDOS. 273 
 
 gasping sigh from the loathsome drink, so bitter, so abhorrent to the fever- 
 burnt, dry lips that longed to steep themselves forever in the cool flow of sweet, 
 fresh waters. Trevenna smiled. 
 
 " Beau seigneur ! " he said, softly, to himself, " I have drunk bitterness 
 long; it is your turn now." 
 
 He lay insensible, defenceless; the width of his chest was bare, and the 
 loud panting, inflamed beatings of his heart could be seen where it throbbed 
 like the passionate aching heart of a mured eagle. Trevenna laid his hand on 
 it, and his eye glanced to a knife that lay on the deal board on which his 
 pitcher of drink was set. 
 
 "How easy ! " he thought. " But I have done better. I have killed him; 
 but I have never broken a law. A stab there would be mercy to him; he shall 
 never get it from me." 
 
 Chandos' arm moved where it hung over the bed, seeking instinctively, all 
 dead to what passed or what looked on him though he was, the place whence 
 he was used to take the cup of water which the woman of the house set by him. 
 For the sake of his beauty, she had been pitiful in the last hour, and had 
 sliced in it a few cuts of orange to cool the thirst that devoured him. His hand 
 wandered in a pathetic uncertainty, seeking, as a blind man's seeks, the only 
 thing he had life left in him to long for. Trevenna moved the table from his 
 reach, and emptied out upon the floor the orange-water. Had he written the 
 " Purgatorio " and the "Inferno," he would have invented more devilish tor- 
 tures than Dante framed in the Caina, Ptolomea, and Antenora. 
 
 The thirst, parched and delirious as the thirst of men in the desert, consumed 
 his victim with an intolerable torment; the mouth was white and dry as dust, 
 his forehead red with the heated blood, his eyes wide open with a terrible, 
 senseless stare: thrown back there, with his bare chest grand as the chest of a 
 Torso, and the luxuriance of his hair tangled and tossed and lustreless, yet re- 
 taining the beauty with which nature had created him deathless to the last, he 
 lay like a young gladiator flung down in the sand of the arena by the clinging 
 serpentine coils of the Retiarius. Indistinct, disconnected words broke now 
 and then from his lips, in the wanderings of thoughts that in the misery of that 
 thirst stretched far away into dim memories of his past, to the forest freshness 
 of English brooks, to the deep still blue of Austrian lakes, to the sweet music 
 of waters falling through innumerable leaves down the steep height of many- 
 colored stone, of the grand breadth of Euphrates rolling beneath its palms, of 
 the silver-sheeted Danube lying in the deep shadows of its woods, of the stilly 
 mummur of winding waters in the Italian spring-tide leaf, flowing lazily and soft- 
 ly beneath the green wild arums, and the tawny bed of osiers, and the wreath- 
 ing boughs of Banksia roses, and the gentle fragrance of the young vine's 
 flower-buds. They were on his lips ever, in longing, fugitive, broken memories,
 
 274 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 those scenes and hours of his past, those thoughts of the earth's fair freshness 
 
 that was dead and lost to him. 
 
 Trevenna stood still and listened to the unconscious, unbidden suffering that 
 longed for all that it was exiled from, that spoke in those broken words of all 
 the glories of remembered hours, all the freedom of the forests and the seas, 
 while life was wrung and death embittered by that one poor piteous want, one 
 draught of the water that beggars might drink from every brook that bubbled. 
 He listened; he could have listened forever. 
 
 He thought of the night when he had ground the Paris sweetmeats into the 
 mud of the gutter, and registered his childish vow; he had kept it to the letter. 
 Happier than Shylock, he had cut the piece of his vengeance from the living 
 heart of his victim, with none to stay his hand. 
 
 The gray chilly twilight of a winter's day filled the attic; the light of the 
 first faint moon-ray glistened on the bare walls and the naked floor; the noise, 
 the stench, the noxious reeking air of the alley below could reach but little 
 here; only an oath, or a laugh more ghastly than the oath, pierced the stillness 
 of this chamber in the roof, while through its broken casement the tide of the 
 icy night-wind poured bitterly in on the uncovered chest, on the fevered limbs, 
 on the darkened aching brow. 
 
 There was no pang of conscience in the watcher there, no memory of the 
 friendship that had trusted, of the loyalty that had saved him, no thought of 
 his own fraud, of his own baseness. He only remembered what this man had 
 been in the splendor of his promise, in the gladness of his youth, in the brill- 
 iance of his renown; and looked at him lying thus, and was content. When the 
 net had wound its coils, and the strangled limbs were powerless, and the 
 strength reeled and fell under its twisting, writhing meshes down into the sand, 
 the Retiarius had no pity, but he looked upward to where the shouts of " Euge ! " 
 and the turned-down hands decreed with him no mercy to the vanquished, and 
 he plunged in again and again the fangs of his trident, seeking the last life- 
 blood. So it was now with Trevenna. His net had been deftly flung, and had 
 brought his adversary down, blinded and paralyzed; but he would never have 
 wearied of stabbing again and again, while there was life to feel. 
 
 He turned reluctantly away: he could have lingered there whilst there was 
 a pang to watch, a sigh to count. He heard the footfall of the old Auvergnat 
 woman heavily treading over the bare boards. She touched his arm, a 
 hideous, brown, wrinkled, shrivelled being of nigh eighty years, with avarice in 
 her blank glance, and a horrible old age upon her. 
 
 " You know him ? " she asked. 
 
 I know a little of him," he answered, indifferently. " You had better not 
 keep him here longer than you can help; he may get you into trouble." 
 
 He roused her fears and her selfishness, that even this miserable hand
 
 CHAN DOS. 275 
 
 might be withheld from easing the suffering they looked on. The Auvergnat 
 looked at him in terror. 
 
 " With the police ? " 
 
 Trevenna nodded and shrugged his shoulders. The old creature, steeped 
 in Paris vice and devoured with Paris avarice, set her teeth hard. 
 
 " By the Mother of God ! I would have turned him in the streets days ago 
 if he were not as beautiful as a marble Christ." 
 
 Trevenna laughed, a loud, coarse, jeering laugh. 
 
 " His beauty ! You old crone, what can that be to you ? If you were 
 twenty, now " 
 
 She turned on him her darkling and evil glance. 
 
 " Women are fools to their tombs. I cannot hurt him; I should see his 
 face forever." 
 
 Trevenna shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 " If you wish to serve him, get him let into some pauper madhouse. It is 
 the only thing you can do for him." 
 
 She shuddered a dissent. 
 
 " They would shear all that in a madhouse ! " she said, drawing through her 
 hard withered hands the silken fairness of his hair. " When I was young, I 
 would have given my life to kiss that gold, when I was young ! " 
 
 The words muttered half sullenly, half longingly, on her lips; the memory 
 made her touch gently, almost tenderly, the locks that lay in her horny palm. 
 She felt for him, almost, in a way, she loved him, this battered, evil, savage 
 old creature of Paris; but she would strip the linen from his limbs to thieve 
 and sell, for all that. 
 
 " Send him there all the same," said Trevenna. " It is the only place that 
 will shelter him now; except one, to be sure, the Morgue ! " 
 
 And with these words to rankle and fester, and ripen if they should, in the 
 soul of the old beldam who had all to lose, nothing to gain, by the life of one 
 whom she had robbed of everything, Trevenna went lightly down the high 
 crazy staircase that passed through so many stories to the basement; there 
 was a more intensely victorious glance in his eyes, a smile of tenfold success 
 on his mouth. 
 
 " My brilliant Chandos ! my brilliant Chandos ! " he said, half aloud, " how 
 is it with you now ? " 
 
 And he went out into the night, leaving the man who had rescued him 
 from his prison to perish of thirst, or of famine, or of fever, to die in the 
 streets or to live like a chained beast in a madhouse, whichever should chance 
 to be the fruit and the end of his history. 
 
 Trevenna never laughed more merrily at the vaudeville of the Bouffes, never 
 ate his salad with keener relish at the cafe Riche, never looked on at Mabillewith
 
 276 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 more good-tempered indulgence for the follies which had no attraction for him- 
 self, than he did that night. Once he laughed aloud, so gayly, so long, that a 
 friend near asked what the jest was. He laughed again. 
 
 "I am thinking of Belisarius begging an obole; and of Henry IV. hunted 
 and naked, and dead of starvation, at Spires ! " 
 
 His friend stared, and thought the wine was in his head. But it was not; he 
 was only drunk with success. 
 
 The doom of his prey, however, than at least, was not the madhouse or the 
 grave. He rose from his bed at length, the superb frame with which nature had 
 dowered him resisting all the stress and peril that had sought to under- 
 mine it. He wondered wearily why he could not die. 
 
 The woman who had brought him drink and tended him now and then, for 
 the sake of those lips like the Sun-God's, of those limbs like the Antique, had 
 robbed him of the little he had left while he lay insensible, of the diamond 
 links in his sleeves, of the gold buttons in his shirts, of the fine cambric of his 
 linen, of the few traces left to him of the old luxuries of his usage. She said, 
 when he could hear, that she had been at great cost for his illness: he believed 
 her; he could not tell that her pitcher of water had been the sole thing set 
 by his side. 
 
 Having lost what he had lost, moreover, what could the few things stolen 
 now be to him ? 
 
 Thus, when he rose at last and staggered out from the wretched dwelling 
 where he had not a coin left to keep even its roof above his head, he was liter- 
 ally beggared, beggared almost as utterly as any unknown corpse that lay 
 waiting burial in the dead-house by the Seine. 
 
 Since the far-gone German days when an emperor vainly begged bread at 
 the monastery he had endowed, and dragged himself to a vault to die unsepul- 
 chred, there had hardly been a fall more vast, more sudden, from the height of 
 power to the depths of poverty. 
 
 He went feebly out into the early night, that by a chance was clear, starlit, 
 and mild. Beau Sire looked up at him and moaned; a piteous hunger gazed 
 out from the dog's eyes, he was famished; he had wellnigh starved through all 
 the days and nights that he had kept guard by his master. He had not a sou 
 left him to buy the animal food. 
 
 He shuddered as he met the wistful, uncomplaining, hungry eyes, he who 
 had never beheld pain save to relieve or to release it ! He stood alone in the 
 busy, rapid, lighted, heedless tide of life in a Paris night, and had not wherewith 
 to buy a crust to keep the brute that loved him from starvation. He thought 
 with a longing agony of his promise to the dead man who had bade him live to 
 meet his fate; the oath was a bitter one to keep. 
 
 He almost reeled through the first street that his steps turned into; illness
 
 CHAN DOS. 277 
 
 had mortally weakened him, and his head swam with the booming noise of the 
 traffic, and with the stench of the crowds. The retriever followed him feebly: 
 famine was telling on its strength; and, like its master, used to all luxury and 
 to all delicacies for so long, it was untrained to want: its eyes were growing 
 dim and ravenous. 
 
 Chandos felt his limbs fail him; the exhaustion of severe illness was on him 
 with nothing of shelter, of stimulant, of repose, to support him under it. He 
 sank down almost unconsciously on some stone steps of the narrow thorough- 
 fare he had wandered into, and drew the dog to him with its fond head nestled 
 in his breast; he could not bear the mute appeal of those longing, piteous eyes. 
 The crowds swept past him, rich and poor, chiefly the latter, for it was in a 
 densely peopled and ancient quarter, but all bent fast on their own errands. 
 Two or three turned their heads back over their shoulders to look at him, with 
 his arm resting on the shoulders of the animal that pressed so closely to him; 
 none did more. They were the hurried pleasure-seekers and the toiling laborers 
 of a great city; they could have no heed of one misery amidst so vast a canker 
 of universal want and greed. 
 
 The throngs passed him like a throng of phantoms; he thought, as he sat 
 there, of the thousand nights when he had driven through Paris with all the 
 rank, with all the brilliance, of the Court of St. Cloud around him, with no 
 name more famous, with no presence more courted, at Tuileries or Faubourg, 
 than his own. 
 
 Now he must let his dog hunger for a broken loaf ! 
 
 Where he sat, the lamp-light flashed on the collar the retriever wore, a 
 handsome toy of silver, with his arms embossed upon it, a relic of his long- 
 lost life. The collar was of value; and the woman who had robbed him of 
 every other trifle would have robbed him even of that, had not Beau Sire kept 
 her off it through his passionate menace of her with his mighty fangs. His 
 hand wandered to the padlock fastening it: how many hours it recalled to him, 
 that burnished glittering ornament where it gleamed under the dog's black 
 curls ! hours of fresh autumn mornings among the woods of Clarencieux, with 
 the whirr of a pheasant's wing through the reddening gold of the leaves; of 
 breezy Scottish days, with the splash of the cool brown water, and the flush of 
 a snow-white swan, and the balmy honey-smell of the heather, while the grouse 
 gave her note of warning to the thoughtless grazing deer; of glowing deep-hued 
 Eastern sunsets, where the reeds of the Nile trembled in the after-glow, or the 
 curling flight of the desert-hawk soared upward above the ruins of the temples 
 of Jupiter Ammon; hours when the days and the nights were all too brief for 
 the glad luxuriance of the " life he was gifted and filled with." 
 
 The great tears gathered in his eyes and fell down, wrung slowly, one by 
 one, upon the shining metal; then he unfastened the collar, and rose and
 
 278 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 crossed the street to a small dark house where he saw that things were pawned, 
 a minor, obscure Mont de Piete. He entered and laid the toy down. 
 
 "Take it," he said, faintly, yet with a new, strange fierceness in the words, 
 
 the fierceness that comes with the gnawing of want; " take it, and give me 
 
 food for the dog." 
 
 The owner of the wretched place stared at him, and balanced the collar 
 thoughtfully in his hands, amazed at the richness and the workmanship of the 
 thing offered him. He gave one glance, suspicious, curious, leering; but the 
 look soon passed; he saw his first thought of theft was wrong; he saw, as the 
 old crone had seen, " an aristocrat " in the man who craved food from him for 
 that costly ornament. 
 
 " It is of value, of great value," he muttered, in the surprise of the mo- 
 ment, balancing still with critical wonder the silver links and plates, and peer- 
 ing through his test-glass at the graven crest and shield. 
 
 " Give me food for him, and take it." 
 
 The words were very low, but there was something of menace in them. 
 The man, old and, though avaricious, not dishonest, for his trade, glanced half 
 frightened at their speaker, and, keeping the collar in his hand, stooped under 
 his dirty counter, and drew out a plate of his own supper, good food enough 
 though course, and heaped up in abundance. The retriever devoured it as 
 only starvation can devour. 
 
 The pawnbroker watched him with a half-stupid wonder, then took three 
 napoleons from his desk and pushed them towards Chandos. 
 
 " Your silver thing is worth more than your dog's meat. Take those." 
 
 The collar was worth thirty, as he knew well ; he voluntarily gave three. 
 He thought himself stupendously honest: so he was, as the world goes. 
 
 A deep flush came for the moment in Chandos' face; he drew back with 
 an involuntary gesture of repulsion. Want had not killed in him yet the partri- 
 cian impulses of his blood: then, as the color faded, leaving him deadly pale, 
 he stretched out his hand and took it. It would keep life in him for another 
 week. 
 
 " I thank you," he said, simply, as he bowed with his old courtly grace to 
 the man who with wide-open eyes watched him with a fascinated amaze. 
 
 " Mon Dieu ! " murmured the pawnbroker, as he turned to leave the place, 
 -" mon Dieu ! how strange a man ! He wants food for a dog, and he bows 
 like a king. Well. I gave him three, I gave him three; I almost wish I had 
 given him more." Still, even as it was, he felt by that voluntary gift of three he 
 had been virtuous enough to deserve the Prix de Montholon. There are many 
 in higher trades than his who consider that to abstain for a little part from all 
 the cheating they have it in their power to do is to attain a high degree of 
 social and commercial honesty.
 
 CHANDOS. 279 
 
 Chandos, with the retriever leaping and fawning on him in gratitude and 
 pleasure, turned to pass from the place. In the entrance stood Trevenna. 
 
 Well clothed in dark warm seal-skins that hung lightly on him, with a 
 Russia-leather case in his hand, from which he had just paused to take a cigar, 
 with his ruddy color brighter, his white teeth whiter, and his keen, frank eyes 
 bluer in the winter air and glancing gaslight, he stood in an easy comfort, in a 
 traveller's carelessness; and on his mouth was a lurking smile, a smile of irre- 
 pressible amusement, of ironic triumph. He had watched Chandos many a 
 time in the gambling-hell, in the midnight streets, in the opium-drunkenness, 
 before he had stood and looked at him on what seemed his death-bed. He had 
 seldom lost sight of him; he had been the only one who remembered him; for 
 hate is more enduring than any love. But now only for the first time Chandos 
 knew that his gaze was on him, now when the hazard of accident had made 
 his bitterest enemy pause at the door of the pawnshop and look on at the barter 
 of the silver toy. 
 
 And not in the first instant when Chandos turned and saw him could he wholly 
 hide the caustic mockery, the victorious success, with which he had watched 
 this last depth of hopeless misery into which the man he had pursued had 
 fallen; not in that moment of supreme domination over his fallen friend could 
 he resist the impulse that beset the single weakness lurking in his bright, bold 
 nature, the weakness of an insatiable and woman-like avidity of hate. 
 
 He stretched out his hand with his old ready, pleasant smile; the palm was 
 filled with some ten or a dozen sovereigns and a few crisp bank-notes just won 
 at the whist-tables of the Jockey Club. 
 
 " Tres-cher ! when we last met, you used me rather roughly because I 
 offended you with a bit of common sense; the direst insult to you men of 
 genius. But let bygones be bygones. Take what you want, Chandos; you did 
 the same for me once. Take 'em all: do, now. You won't believe how, from 
 my soul, I pity you. Pawned the dog's collar oh, the deuce ! Is it so bad as 
 that ? You look as if you wanted food yourself: why didn't you write to me ? 
 I'm a poor man, as you know; but still a five-pound note " 
 
 He knew so well how to pierce with the cruellest strokes the most sensi- 
 tive nerves of the nature he had studied so long and so minutely. The 
 words might have passed on a stranger's ear as kindly meant, though coarsely 
 phrashed; he knew how more bitter than all taunts, more unbearable than all 
 outrage, would they be to the man who stood before him. 
 
 He was not prepared for their effect. 
 
 Chandos looked at him a moment in silence, then dashed his hand down 
 with his own clenched fist in a sudden blow that shattered in the mud the coins 
 and notes. 
 
 " Take care ! or you shall have the same on your jibing lips."
 
 280 OUIDA'S WORKS. 
 
 The menace was low-breathed, but it thrilled with a fierce intensity of 
 suppressed passion. Trevenna had not calculated or remembered the change 
 that wretchedness and desperation work in the gentlest natures; he had never 
 thought how the softest and most pliant temper, goaded by indignity and 
 altered by circumstance, will turn at last ferocious like a wild boar at bay. 
 
 He stooped, amazed and for the instant speechless, and picked up the 
 scattered money from the doorstep and the street (Trevenna never wasted 
 anything; it was one of the secrets of his success); then he looked up with the 
 insolence of superiority, the coarseness of triumph, that he could no more have 
 spared to the man before him than the hound will spare the stag he has pulled 
 down the gripe of his fangs, the wrench of his jaws. 
 
 " On my honor, monseigneur, we can't stand that style now, you know. 
 We put up with your pride when you were the lord of Clarencieux, but I'll 
 be hanged if men will let you come it over them now. You've lost your head, 
 that's what it is, with gaming, and drinking, and going to the bad. I'm deuced 
 sorry for you, on my word I am; awful break down, I know, and a good deal 
 of excuse: still, when a man would take pity on you " 
 
 Chandos' hand fell with a swaying weight upon his shoulder and forced him 
 back off the step, off the stones. Under the goad of his foe's insults, under the 
 taunting pity of the man he had saved and enriched, all the weakness of illness, 
 all the dizziness of exhaustion, seemed to leave him; he felt as though the force 
 of lions flowed back into his veins. 
 
 " Come out into some lonely place," he muttered in Trevenna' s ear. 
 " Come quietly, or I shall find strength to kill you still." 
 
 Trevenna was a courageous man, but also he was a sagacious one; he knew 
 what the gripe of the hand that held him, what the gleam of the eyes that stared 
 into his, foreboded. He turned of his own accord passively down a solitary, 
 gloomy, unlighted court of a dreary uninhabited fifteen-century hotel, not far 
 from the Tourelle de la Reine Isabeau, in the ancient Rue du Temple, where 
 the darling of Paris was struck down by the assassins of his foe of Burgundy. 
 
 Chandos had never released his grasp upon his shoulder; he forced him 
 slowly on and backward into the darkness of the stone-paved court. Men 
 turned and looked at him; he had no sense of them; he only saw John Tre- 
 venna's face. Once alone there, in that gaunt black silence, he released him 
 and shook him off. 
 
 " Now tell me why you hate me ! " 
 
 The words were distinctly uttered, and were not loud; yet for the moment 
 of their utterance, as he had done once before, Trevenna felt very near his 
 death. But he was a bold man; he did not quail; he laughed audaciously. 
 
 "Why do 1 hate you? What a question ! In the first place, you can't 
 know I do."
 
 CHANDOS. 281 
 
 Chandos took a step nearer to him; his eyes were black, his lips were livid. 
 
 " No lies ! Why do you triumph in my ruin ? How have I ever wronged you? " 
 
 Trevenna laughed again; his temper was up for once, his savage hatred had 
 
 got the better of him, his caution was forgotten in the irresistible delight of 
 
 flinging off the disguise he had worn so long, and taunting and cursing his fallen 
 
 antagonist openly while he was powerless; even as yonder, under the House of 
 
 the Image of Our Lady, the boar of Burgundy had commanded the " coup de 
 
 massue" to the fair lifeless body that his brute envy had slaughtered in its youth. 
 
 " I have no title to aspire; 
 Yet if you sink, I seem the higher," 
 
 he chanted with a malicious humor. "That couplet is true to the core. 
 Triumph? I don't triumph. I only offer to lend you a five-pound note; and 
 you look deucedly as if you wanted it. Of course there's something droll in such 
 a fall as yours. I can't help that. To think of all you used to be and all you 
 are ! The sea-saw of Fortune was never half so strikingly illustrated since the 
 days of Crcesus." 
 
 There was very little light where they stood, none save such as the winter 
 moon shed; but there was enough for him to see the face above him, and the 
 words stopped abruptly even on his fearless lips. 
 
 He knew that for far less provocation than this blood had been shed a 
 million times since the days of Cain. 
 
 " Answer me," said Chandos, and there was a menace in the patient words 
 more deadly than lies in passion; "answer me. Why do you hate me as 
 devils hate ? " 
 
 " Can't say how devils hate ! Don't believe in 'em," said Trevenna, flip- 
 pantly. His audacious and insolent temper was dared and roused; though he 
 had died for it, he would not have abandoned his victory. " No more do you. 
 They all say now ' Lucrece ' is a deistical work; a season later, it'll be atheisti- 
 cal. Trust public opinion to run all down-hill when once it takes the turn. 
 What if I do hate you ? I'm not singular. No end of men hate, you, man 
 beau Chandos ! " 
 
 Something of the fierce concentrated passion faded from the face on which 
 the white moon shone; a great weariness of pain came there. 
 
 " Hate me ? " he re-echoed, dreamily. " I never wronged man to my own 
 knowledge. Why should men hate me ? Why should you ?" 
 
 Trevenna shrugged his shoulders, and shook his seal-skins with a careless 
 laugh. 
 
 " Why ? Why, hate's sown broadcast, like so much thistle-down. Why ? 
 Perhaps you robbed me of my mistress, or I envied yours. Perhaps you beat 
 me once at ecarte. Perhaps you only provoked me with your d d languor of
 
 o 83 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 aristocratic hauteur; that did a deal of mischief for you with a good many. 
 Perhaps you incensed me with the very cursed grace of your generosities, with 
 the very royal nonchalance of your liberalities; that annoyed more than you 
 wot of too. Hate ? Why, what is there to wonder at in that ? If I loved you, 
 now, you might think it out of the common ! " 
 
 And yet, were love won by friendship, loyalty, and gifts, how had he bought 
 this man's ! The memory rose in him where he stood, with the goading banter 
 of Trevenna's ironies on his.ear; yet there was too grand a fibre in his nature, 
 too proud a chivalry in his blood, for him to smite his torturer with the past 
 of forgotten benefits, for him to appeal against ingratitude with the rebuke, 
 " / served you ! " 
 
 Yet to the thoughts of both one memory unbidded rose, the memory of 
 the summer night among the green pine-woods of Baden, when a helpless 
 debtor, pining in the Duchy prisons, had been released by the free, loving hand 
 of the young heir of Clarencieux. 
 
 The memory came over Chandos with a sudden pang that stilled the pas- 
 sion in him, and filled him only with a yearning, wondering anguish of regret. 
 
 "You hate me ! " he said, slowly. " You!" 
 
 It was the only utterance of reproach that passed his lips; in it a world was 
 spoken. Though every other living thing had forsaken him, he would have 
 sworn that this man would have been faithful as the dog beside him. 
 The rebuke, slight as it was, struck such lingering conscience as Trevenna 
 retained, and, with that sense of momentary shame, stung afresh all his greedy 
 triumph, his jeering exultation, his untiring mockery, into their pitiless exercise. 
 
 " Well, if I do ? What if I do ? You'll call me a hound that bites the hand 
 that fed him. Basta ! monseigneur; there are some gifts and caresses we can't 
 forgive so soon as we could forgive a kick or a curse. Human nature ! You 
 loved human nature; don't you love it now ? You were an aristocrat, and I 
 hated aristocrats. A la lanterne with every one of 'em. Not but what I'm 
 sorry for you, deuced sorry for you. I'll try to get you a place, if you'll tell 
 me what you'll fill. There are lots of things they'll give you; the world heartily 
 pities you, you know, though you were so imprudent. Besides, if anybody 
 ever hated you, my poor Chandos, they can afford to forget it now. You can't 
 sink lower, a cleaned-out gamester, a sotted opium-drinker, a beggar in the 
 street ! " 
 
 The last words had scarce left his tongue in their insolence of assumed com- 
 passion, in their vindictiveness of victorious jibe, when Chandos dashed his hand 
 back on his lips, smiting them to silence, the sole answer that he gave his 
 traitor. His face had changed terribly as he stood and heard; the instinct of 
 vengeance, the instinct to kill, had weakened in him; for the moment a very 
 hell of crime was in him.
 
 CHANDOS. 283 
 
 Trevenna's laughing, sanguine, sun-tanned features turned livid, and set 
 fixed as in a vice; the blow stirred black blood in him. Lightly as a leopard, 
 and as savagely, he sprang forward on the man he hated. For one instant, in 
 the gray gloom of the old lonely court, there was a close-locked struggle; wrong 
 and hate found their last issue in the sheer animal blood-thirst, the wild-brute, 
 untamed instincts that live latent in all men: the next, the unequal contest 
 ended. Just risen from his sick-bed, weak with long fasting and past illness, 
 fever-worn, and already blind and dizzy with the single exertion of the crashing 
 blow that he had dealt, Chandos reeled over under the fresh strength and supple 
 science of his adversary, and swayed back heavily on the grass-grown stones of 
 the desolate court. The dog, who had wandered away for a moment, sprang 
 back with a lion's bound and a lion's bay as his master fell, rushed at Trevenna, 
 buried deep fangs in his clothes and flesh, tore him with mad fury off Chandos, 
 and stood guard over the senseless and prostrate form; none could have put 
 a hand on it now and lived. 
 
 Chandos lay there as he had lain in the frozen night when Guido Lulli had 
 found him, utterly still, utterly senseless. His face was turned upward, and 
 the moon shone on it with a white, cold, clear light. 
 
 His foe looked at him, standing much as in the dim centuries of the Moyen 
 Age, a little farther under the shadow of the tower of fair Queen Isabeau, John 
 of Burgundy had once looked on in the evil night at the stone-dead body of 
 the man his jealous, covetous lust of ambitious envy had pursued and hunted 
 down to the death. 
 
 He had his victory, so sweet to him that he never felt the blood pour from 
 his shoulder, where the retriever had seized him and dragged him off. 
 
 " How easy to kill him now ! " he thought. " Bah ! only fools break laws. 
 He will be dead soon enough; he is worse than dead now; he can suffer. I 
 wish priests' tales were true, and souls could live. I wish his father's could 
 have power to see him as he lies, see the wreck of him and the ruin." 
 
 There was a hard, ravenous, gloating longing in the thought that stretched 
 out beyond the grave. Not content with its work on earth, he looked linger- 
 ingly, enjoyingly, reluctant to pass away; but it was rare that caution with him 
 could be conquered by passion or desire, and he knew that if he waited a 
 moment more the dog would be at his throat. He looked once more with a 
 smile, a smile of full success, then went out from the still quadrangle, leaving 
 the chill moonlight to settle in a broad unbroken space where Chandos lay. 
 
 That black shade of the old Rue du Temple had seen many murders since 
 the night when Louis d'Orleans was felled down there as he rode from his tryst 
 with Isabeau; but it had never seen fouler murder than that which John Tre- 
 venna had done, though he had held back his hand from the shedding of blood, 
 from the breaking of law.
 
 284 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 "SIN SHALL NOT HAVE DOMINION OVER YOU." 
 
 THE square court, surrounded with its four blank granite moss-grown walls, 
 with the round pointed towers looming darkly up towards the sky, was wholly 
 forsaken; it was three parts in ruin; no one wandered there save once or twice 
 in the length of the night, when the beat of the patrol's step sounded through 
 it, waking its hollow echoes. It was as still as when, in the mediaeval ages 
 which saw its stones raised, the monks of its brotherhood had flitted ghostlike 
 through its shadows; the pale moon only looked down on it, her spectral 
 swathes of light falling across the leaden gloom of the damp, lichen-covered 
 pavement. 
 
 How long he lay there he never knew; hurled back, but swaying over from 
 faintness rather than from injury, he had fallen in a dead swoon, his head strik- 
 ing the stones with a dull sound that echoed through the silence. The fresh 
 night-air not cold, but stirred with a cool westerly wind revived him, blow- 
 ing over his forehead and eyes. He had been struck down heavily, flung in 
 wrestling by a merciless hand; but there was little sense of pain on him as he 
 woke to the knowledge of where he was and of what had chanced; his bodily 
 weakness had prevented the struggle and the resistance that might have been 
 fatal to him. He looked up at the moon shining so far above, so clear, so 
 bright, so tranquil; life seemed to have faded far away from him, and to have 
 left him in the calmness of the grave. 
 
 He rose with difficulty, his limbs felt powerless and broken, and he stag- 
 gered to an old stone bench hard by, where a shattered fountain-spout slowly 
 let fall a stream of water that ebbed away, glistening and shallow, in the star- 
 light over the squares of the pavement. He stooped and drank eagerly from 
 it, it was cold and pure, then sank down on the bench where many weary 
 and heavy-laden had rested before him in the pressure of the centuries gone, 
 in the violence and the darkness of the Middle Age. The dog gathered itself 
 close against him; there was no sound of the world without, save the dull roar 
 of the distant night-traffic and the striking of church-clocks upon the stillness: 
 they seemed alone in the heart of Paris, God-forgotten, man-forsaken, in the 
 midst of the peopled world. 
 
 In the stillness, in the solemn night, with the serene luminous stars gazing 
 down on the darkness of earth around him, the opium-mists, the brandy-drugged 
 stupor, the delirium of exhaustion, so long on him, passed away; the thoughts 
 of his mind grew clearer, for the first hour since the day of his ruin. An in- 
 tense agony was on him, the deep, still, tearless agony of absolute despair.
 
 CHAN DOS. 285 
 
 Yet he seemed to look on the ruin of his life as from a burial-place from which 
 he would never rise; to look on and see the world that knew him no more, the 
 love that had abandoned, the friendship that had betrayed him, as one dead, 
 whose sense and soul returned to behold all that he had cherished revile his 
 memory and forget his loss. He had no feeling of present existence; all he 
 knew was that in the world of men he had no place, that in the hearts of the 
 vast multitude of earth he had no remembrance, that he had perished forever 
 into oblivion when the stroke had smitten him down. There, in the stillness 
 and solemnity of night, all things seemed manifest to him; apart from all that 
 he had once known, he seemed to gaze on it and hear its pitiless course pass 
 on, as a man lying paralyzed watches and listens, having no more part or share 
 with the humanity around him than though his shroud had covered him, having 
 no hand to raise if his cheek be smitten, having no arm to lift if a fool mock 
 his misery, having no lips to speak if a lie make foul mirth of his name; life- 
 less, and yet among the living; slain, and yet alive to suffer. 
 
 This is how it seemed to him that he was now.' Breath was in him, that 
 was all he claimed of life; in every other thing he was a corpse; felled into a 
 grave, whence he heard the jibing laughter of those who jested at his fall, the 
 restless feet of those who passed on and bade him be forgot, the stones flung 
 down on him by the hands he had filled with gifts, the kisses that were wel- 
 comed by the cheek his kiss had warmed! He was dead; and as the dead he 
 was abandoned and forgotten. 
 
 The beauty that had been his was given to the embrace of another; the 
 caress that had been on his lips now burned as softly on the mouth of his 
 spoiler; the roof that had sheltered him from his birth up covered the sleep and 
 the revel of strangers; the treasures that had owned him master, and been 
 gathered by him from north to south, east to west, were scattered broadcast 
 over the earth; the world that he had led knew him no more, and never named 
 his name; the women who had smiled in his eyes, and wound their wreathing 
 arms about his neck, let their bright hair brush the bosoms and their pulses 
 thrill to the whispers of newly-wooed lovers; the men whom he had served 
 followed the light of rising suns, and gave no heed to the eternal night that 
 had fallen for him: all that he had loved, all that he had owned, all that he 
 had lost, was gone to make the joy of other hearts: his fate was the fate of 
 the dead. 
 
 He was forgotten in his misery, as slaughtered kings are forgotten in their 
 sealed sepulchres; and his sceptre was not even broken, in pity and honor for 
 his name, above his grave, but passed to the hands of those who dethroned him, 
 bringing them his wealth, his crown, his treasuries, his lieges. 
 
 Of all that he had possessed, of all he had reigned over, he could claim 
 nothing, not even a heart that had loved him.
 
 286 
 
 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 He knew the width and depth of his desolation as he had never known it. 
 The man whom he had fed as utterly as he had fed the dog at his feet, when 
 he had been starving and homeless and friendless, the man whom he had lifted 
 from a foreign prison and served as few serve their own flesh and blood, the 
 man who had been his guest, his debtor, his suppliant for the very bread and 
 wine of his table, had turned against him, had deserted him, had cursed him 
 with a foe's hate; no other thing could have told him how utterly he had sunk, 
 how utterly had the world forsaken him. 
 
 This man had flung his scorn at him, and had reviled him with a traitor's 
 pitiless mockery; he knew it was the last depth of his fall, the last and the most 
 infamous witness of his degradation, as the Plantagenet had known it, when 
 the hound that had been reared by his hand went from him to fawn on the 
 conqueror. 
 
 In the state to which his mind had sunk, in the world-wide wreck that he 
 saw around him, the strangeness of Trevenna's hatred struck him little; he did 
 not muse, as earlier he would have done, on what could be the secret and the 
 spring of this coarse, merciless passion of enmity in one to whom his gifts had 
 been as many as the sands of the sea, and whom he had served more truly 
 than he had served himself. He accepted it with the hopeless apathy that 
 comes with despair: all left him, all changed with his changed fate, all con- 
 demned him where all had caressed him; it seemed but of a piece with the 
 rest that the greatest of debtors should bring him as payment the blackest 
 of ingratitude. 
 
 He had loved men so well, he had trusted them so blindly, he had benefited 
 them so loyally, to believe in their baseness had been so impossible to his 
 nature, and to conceive their infidelity so distant from his every thought, that, 
 in an inevitable reaction, he now, beneath the scourge of their mockery and 
 the time-serving of their desertion, looked for no faith amidst them, wondered 
 at no betrayal. The woman who had nestled to his bosom with languid eyes 
 of eloquent love and sweet words of eternal tenderness had forsworn her vows 
 and sold herself for the gold of another lover; he could feel no wonder that 
 the man who had been bound to him by the ties of self-interest and human 
 gratitude had turned traitor too. In one sense only did the full bitterness 
 and shame of Trevenna's taunts strike home to him: they showed him how 
 low he must have sunk that this man could dare revile him. It was less loath- 
 ing of his foe that rose in him than it was loathing of himself; it was less 
 hatred of his betrayer's infamy than it was hatred of his own abasement. He 
 shuddered as he thought what adversity already had made him; he dared not 
 think what a brief while more might make him. 
 
 The bodily illness which had held him prostrate so long* had, in a degree, 
 done him good; it had weakened his frame, but it had saved his reason; it had
 
 CHAN DOS. 287 
 
 rescued him from madness, as a heavy fall that makes the blood flow from the 
 surcharged brain may rescue the man it injures. A few nights more of the 
 life he had led, of the heavy drugs, the burning drinks, the endless gambling, 
 the hell of vice, the delirium in which he sought forgetfulness, and he would 
 have been dead at the Morgue or raving in a madhouse. The lengthened 
 sleep that had preceded the congestion of the lungs which cold and lack of food 
 produced, and the danger in which he had lingered through so many days, had 
 cooled and had saved him, had stilled the fever in his blood, and freed his 
 reason from the half-drunk phantoms in which it had lost itself and had been 
 broken and blinded for so long. He rose from his wretched bed but the 
 shadow of what he had once been; but the look was gone from his eyes which 
 had made the fille de joie in the gaming-den thrust the opium to him and bid 
 him not live to be what he must be. 
 
 Her words' came back to him now where he sat, the serene, cool night, 
 through which the stars alone looked, stilling the riot of his mind with the 
 sense of their own eternal calm. " What he must be ! " He knew well enough 
 what that was. 
 
 A little while more of such a life as he had led since the day of his ruin, of 
 those hideous orgies, of that drunken stupor, of that horrible and ghastly union 
 of poverty and intoxication, of despair and vice, and the lowest creature that 
 crawled through the midnight snows to devour the stray relics of offal that the 
 curs had left would be as high as he; a little more, and every better thing 
 would be crushed out in him, and the vilest den would spurn him from it to 
 die in the river-slime like a choked dog. 
 
 " What he must be ! " 
 
 His head sank down on his hands as the words drifted slowly through his 
 mind; what could he choose but be ? 
 
 Had he embraced dishonor and accepted the rescue that a lie would have 
 lent him, this misery in its greatest share had never been upon him. He would 
 have come hither with riches about him, and the loveliness he had worshipped 
 would have been beyond the touch of any rival's hand. Choosing to cleave to 
 the old creeds of his race, and passing, without a backward glance into the 
 paths of honor and of justice, it was thus with him now. Verily, virtue must be 
 her own reward, as in the Socratic creed ; for she will bring no other dower 
 than peace of conscience in her gift to whosoever weds her. " I have loved 
 justice and fled from iniquity; wherefore here I die in exile," said Hildebrand 
 upon his death-bed. They will be the closing words of most lives that have 
 followed truth. 
 
 What could he be ? What could the future, if he lived for one, hold for 
 him ? Misery, privation, abandonment, solitude, the ceaseless thirst of vain 
 desires, the unending void of eternal losses, the haunting knowledge of all he
 
 288 OU IDA'S WORKS. 
 
 might have been. These were what faced him; these were what alone awaited 
 him. If he lived on, he could but look for these, and for worse yet, he to 
 whose beauty-steeped senses every passing pain had been unknown, every sight 
 of deformity been veiled ! He thought of the old sacred legend of Herodotus. 
 
 how, when the Argive mother prayed at the temple of Juno in Argos for the 
 
 highest blessing that mortals can attain to be bestowed on Cleobis and Bito, 
 her prayer was granted: her sons fell asleep to awake no more. He knew now 
 its terrible truth, its eternal meaning, he who had thought ten thousand times 
 the span of his rich and shadowless life would be too brief a space to spend 
 on earth ! Death; it would not come to him; and he longed for it as a man 
 in a desert land, shipwrecked amidst the burning wealth of color and the cruel 
 wantonness of beauty round him, longs for water as he perishes of thirst. 
 
 Still yet, even yet, a pulse of life stirred that he could not with his own hand 
 slay; it was the power of the genius in him. Dulled, drugged, stifled, paralyzed, 
 beneath the weight of infinite wretchedness, the frozen apathy of despair, the 
 fever of vice, the pangs of famine, it was not dead, and the taunts of his foe had 
 stung the pride sleeping with it into fresh existence; with the outrage of John 
 Trevenna some faint throb of the thoughts and the instints of old returned. 
 The insult of his debtor and his traitor had been the crowning agony of his 
 passion; but it brought back life in him, as the plunge of the surgeon's steel 
 will bring it back and cut the cords of death by the very force and suddenness 
 of its stab. 
 
 A gentler hand could not have saved him or arrested him; the unpitying and 
 brutal thrusts of his adversary roused him ere it was yet too late. 
 
 There, in the silence, in the solitude, with the dark walls brooding above 
 him, and the cold winter's moon looking down, something of the grandeur of 
 resistance, something of the calm endurance, came on him. Should this man 
 see him die in a bagnio? point to him as one so womanish weak that the first 
 stroke of calamity had slain him? mock him as a madman, who, having squan- 
 dered his birthright, flung his manhood and his mind and his soul away 
 with it? 
 
 Before his memory rose that day in his childhood when he had told his 
 father what his future should be made; he had thought of it ere now,- never as 
 now. He saw the purple mists of the distance, the golden brown of the autumn- 
 woods in the warmth of the sunset, the far-stretching sea growing dim in the 
 dying light, while away to the westward the red flush of the after-glow lin- 
 gered; the very scent that uprose from the dew-laden earth, the very breath of 
 the wind stirring the coils of the leaves, came back to him; he saw his father's 
 eyes look down on him with a proud tenderness, a gentle smile, seeing in him 
 the sole successor of the finest ambitions of a stainless and world-famous life, 
 the reaper of his ripe triumphs, the heir of his honor and his heritage. " I will
 
 CHANDOS. 289 
 
 live so that the nation shall only need to write ' Chandos ' on my grave, and 
 the name will tell its own tale! " The words, in all their childlike visionary 
 impulse, all their pure impossible ambition, all their high and chivalrous desire, 
 came back upon his mind with a deadly anguish. These had been the dreams 
 of his youth; and he had kept true to them thus! 
 
 He had been gifted with such a genius as was in Alcibiades when he listened 
 in love to the golden words of his master, or heard the shouts of the people 
 give him to triumph as his chariot-wheels crushed the wild thyme they threw. 
 Should he perish, like Alcibiades, in the arms of a courtesan, lost to all that 
 earlier and holier time ? A greater inheritance than that which he had squan- 
 dered had been given him in his intellect; a greater suicide than that of the 
 body would be the suicide that now was destroying the mind with which nature 
 had dowered him. 
 
 Freedom was left him, and intellect, the two first treasures of life; whilst 
 the powers of his brain were still his, and his liberty, the poet would have 
 said, 
 
 Then first of the mighty, thank God that thou art. 
 
 There are liberties sweeter than love; there are goals higher than happiness. 
 
 Some memory of them stirred in him there, with the noiseless flow of the 
 lingering water at his feet, and above the quiet of the stars; the thoughts of his 
 youth came back to him, -and his heart ached with their longing. 
 
 Out of the salt depths of their calamity men had gathered the heroisms of 
 their future; out of the desert of their exile they had learned the power to re- 
 turn as conquerors. The greater things within him awakened from their 
 lethargy; the innate strength so long untried, so long lulled to dreamy indo- 
 lence and rest, uncoiled from its prostration; the force that would resist and, it 
 might be, survive, slowly came upon him, with the taunts of his foe. It was 
 possible that there was that still in him which might be grander and truer to 
 the ambitions of his imaginative childhood under adversity than in the volupt- 
 uous sweetness of his rich and careless life. It was possible, if if he could 
 once meet the fate he shuddered from, once look at the bitterness of the life 
 that waited for him, and enter on its desolate and arid waste without going 
 back to the closed gates of his forfeited paradise to stretch his limbs within 
 their shadow once more ere he died. 
 
 There is more courage needed oftentimes to accept the onward flow of exist- 
 ence, bitter as the waters of Marah, black and narrow as the channel of Jordan, 
 than there is ever needed to bow down the neck to the sweep of the death- 
 angel's sword. 
 
 He rose slowly and looked upward ; the hours had fled, the city was sleeping, 
 the busy feet of the crowds were silent, and the hush of an intense rest was 
 
 VOL. III. 10
 
 290 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 on the world around him. Beneath it vice might yet riot and misery still 
 moan; but it was towards dawn, and the noiseless peace was unbroken; the 
 trembling rays of moonlight shivered on the water's surface, and far above, 
 shining from the deep, blue-black, fathomless vault, the lustre of the stars 
 burned through the brilliancy of winter air, a myriad worlds uncounted and 
 unknown. Men had abandoned and hope forsaken him; on the earth he 
 had no place, and in human love no memory; but there, under their solemn 
 light, their own tranquillity encompassed him; solitude lost its desolation 
 in the eternity and the immensity of that limitless space, of that unknown 
 deity. A lifetime suffered here, what was it? the span of a single day in 
 those bright worlds beyond the sun. In face of that changeless and endless 
 calm, the burden of so brief a labor might well be borne; sufficient if through 
 travail the faintest shadow of likeness unto truth were gained. To many in 
 their suffering that unalterable and eternal serenity of nature is pitiless, is unen- 
 durable; they find no mercy in it; no shelter, and no aid; to him it was divine 
 as consolation, divine with the majesty of God. Above the fret and vice and 
 wretchedness of earth it brooded so still, so cold, it stretched so boundless and 
 so deathless out into the infinite realms of space! from it there seemed to 
 breathe the promise of a future when men should live " sceptreless, free, uncir- 
 cumscribed;" from it there seemed to steal the bidding, " Let the world abandon 
 you, but to yourself be true." 
 
 His foe too early had triumphed. 
 
 Though he had lost all, there were with him still the dreams of his youth; 
 the world forsook him, and the width of the earth stretched before him, a 
 desert laid waste, barren and pitiless as stone, through which he must pass, 
 wearily and in solitude, to live and to die alone; yet he arose with his dead 
 strength revived, with the calm of a passionless endurance fallen on him. 
 
 He accepted the desolation of his life, for the sake of all beyond life, 
 greater than life which looked down on him from the silence of the night.
 
 CHANDOS. 291 
 
 BOOK THE FIFTH. 
 
 Seggundo in piuma, 
 In fama non'si vien. DANTE. 
 
 Comme il 6tait reveur au matin de son age, 
 Comme il etait penseurau terme du voyage ! 
 
 HUGO. 
 
 Lucky men are favorites of Heaven. 
 All own the chief, when Fortune owns the cause. 
 
 DRYDEN. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 IN EXILE. 
 
 IT was sunset in Venice, that supreme moment when the magical flush of 
 light transfigures all the Southern world, and wanderers whose eyes have long 
 ached with the grayness and the glare of northward cities gaze and think them- 
 selves in heaven. The still waters of the lagunes, the marbles and the porphyry 
 and the jasper of mighty palaces, the soft gray of the ruins all covered with 
 clinging green and the glowing blossoms of creepers, the hidden antique nooks 
 where some woman's head leaned out of an arched casement, like a dream of 
 the Dandolo time, when the Adriatic swarmed with the returning galleys laden 
 with Byzantine spoil, the dim, mystic, majestic walls that towered above the 
 gliding surface of the eternal water, once alive with flowers, and music, and the 
 gleam of golden tresses, and the laughter of careless revellers in the Venice of 
 Goldoni, in the Venice of the Past. Everywhere the sunset glowed with the 
 marvel of its colors, with the wonder of its warmth. 
 
 Then a moment, and it was gone. Night fell with the hushed, shadowy 
 stillness that belongs to Venice alone; and in place of the riot and luxuriance 
 of color there was the tremulous darkness of the young night, with the beat of 
 an oar on the water, the scent of unclosing carnation-buds, the white gleam of 
 moonlight, and the odor of lilies-of-the-valley blossoming in the dark archway 
 of some mosaic-lined window. 
 
 One massive and ancient house towered up amidst many another palace,
 
 292 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 a majestic, melancholy place, with shafts of black marble and columns of por- 
 phyry, and deep sea-piles that the canal bathed into a hundred umber tints. 
 Long ago some of the greatest of the oligarchy had held there their highest 
 state; now it was scarcely habited, left to decay, and lost in gloom, a sep- 
 ulchre of dead glories, while the insolence of foreign mirth and the shame of 
 foreign arms outraged the captive and widowed beauty of the Adriatic spouse. 
 It was lonely and unspeakably desolate; with the gliding sheet of the still 
 water beneath its walls, and the long sombre lines of forsaken palaces stretch- 
 ing beyond it on either side, and facing it in the splendor of the early moon. 
 Yet it was infinitely impressive, infinitely grand, standing there with its mediae- 
 val sculptures touched with rays of starlight, and its costly marbles washed by 
 the ebbing of the tide. 
 
 At one of its lofty, narrow casements a man leaned out into the fragrant 
 spring-tide air; he had risen from close studies in the chamber within vast in 
 space as a king's throne-room, barren in garniture as a contadina's hut to 
 watch the fading of the sun, the sudden loss of all the wealth of color in the 
 gray hues of evening; and he lingered still, now that the night had wholly 
 fallen. In that stillness, in that soft lapping of the water, in that glisten in the 
 distance of the silvery lagune, in that scarcely-stirring wind filled with the 
 breath of opening blossoms, there was a lulling charm, there was the echo of 
 a long-lost youth. 
 
 His face was of a great beauty; though many yea'rs had passed over it, 
 time could touch and could dim it but little; but in the eyes there was 
 the exile's weariness and the deep thought of the scholar; on the mouth there 
 was that certain look which comes of bitter pain borne, of strong victories 
 wrung from calumny and poverty and hard defiance, such a look as Dante 
 might have worn, yet less harsh, though not less mournful, than the Floren- 
 tine's. He looked down on the deep and sleeping shadows, on the gliding 
 darkness of the canal below; the sweetness of the young night, the Adriatic 
 fragrance of the sea-wafted air, brought him a thousand memories across the 
 desert of long years. 
 
 "Through his mind floated such thoughts as wearied Cleon: 
 
 Indeed, to know is something, and to prove 
 How all this beauty might be enjoy'd is more; 
 But, knowing naught, to enjoy is something too. 
 Yon rower with the molded muscles there, 
 Lowering the sail, is nearer it than I. 
 
 There had been a time when every breath of life had been for him enjoy- 
 ment, rich as the god's life of Dionysus. In moments such as these he longed 
 for that dead time, as the poet Ovid, in the ice and winter storms and snow-
 
 CHANDOS. 293 
 
 bound forests of his Danubian exile, longed for the golden sunlight, for the 
 purple pomp, for the glad idolatry of the vine-crowned land that knew his place 
 no more. 
 
 " Am I any nearer the ambitions of my youth than I was twenty years ago ? 
 am I as near ? " he thought. In the voluptuous hush and fragrance of the 
 Venetian night his years seemed cold and fruitless and heavy-laden. 
 
 Where he stood, in the dark arch of the window, the measured music of oars 
 beat the water; beneath the walls several gondolas glided; on the silence rose, 
 chaunted by the mellow voices of young Venetians, a hymn of liberty. They 
 might pay to their tyrants wellnigh with life for its singing; yet that knowledge 
 gave no tremor to the cadence that rang so bold and so clear in the stillness. 
 Passionate, yet unspeakably sad, rich as the world of color that had just passed 
 from the world, but melancholy as the breathless stillness of the calm lagunes, 
 the ode of freedom was sung by the lips of those who knew themselves to be 
 slaves, young, fresh voices, the voices of youth and of vivid ambition, yet 
 touched to a deeper meaning and vibrating with a hopeless desire; for they 
 were the voices also of forbidden hope, and of thoughts held in bond and en- 
 chained. It was the " lo triumphe " of liberty, 
 
 Thou huntress swifter than the Moon ! thou terror 
 Of the world's wolves ! thou bearer of the quiver, 
 Whose sun-like shafts pierce tempest-tossed error 
 As light may pierce the clouds; 
 
 but also it was the lament of Leopardi, the lament most weary, most utterly 
 desolate, of all upon earth, the lament of men whose hearts ache for lofty 
 aims and noble fields, and whose lives are denied all purpose and all effort, 
 of men whose country is in thraldom. 
 
 The chaunt ceased; all the many and melodious tones which had risen on 
 the night and swelled louder and sweeter down the canal, till the boatmen far 
 off heard the echo and gave it back, were suddenly silenced, as a choir of song- 
 birds will cease at noontide. In the prow of the foremost vessel a young 
 Venetian rose, the gleam of his auburn hair and the kindling light on his face 
 like some old painter's Gabriel or Michael yonder in the gloom of the ancient 
 churches. He lifted his eyes to the arch of the casement where he stood up in 
 the white, tremulous lustre of the moon. 
 
 "You have striven for the freedom of thought and for the liberty of judg- 
 ment," he said, simply. " Venice, who has lost them both, loves you for that 
 which you have loved, and gives you thus the only homage she now dares." 
 
 Without pause, without a word more, the rowers bent above their oars, the 
 gondolas floated down the dark surface, the young impassioned faces of the 
 singers turned backward with a- fond and reverent farewell as their vessels
 
 294 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 swept into the shadows, so deep, so rayless, underneath the walls of the aban- 
 doned palaces: it was all they had to give, that song of freedom in a fettered 
 land. 
 
 He to whom they gave it thought it more than the gift of crowns laid at his 
 feet. It touched him strangely with its suddenness, with its meaning, this 
 gratitude rendered to him by the young, pure, patriot- voices of those who might 
 pay the cost of that night's utterance with the pain of captive's bondage or of 
 exile's banishment. It was more worth to him than any diadem with which the 
 world could have anointed him, this recognition of what he sought, this knowl- 
 edge of why he labored. 
 
 It came to him as answer and rebuke to the thoughts which had been with 
 him as that unbidden music rose upon the night. To enjoy was much; but to 
 seek truth and labor for freedom might be more. 
 
 " One fetter of tradition loosened, one web of superstition broken, one ray 
 of light let in on darkness, one principle of liberty secured, are worth the living 
 for," he mused. "Fame! it is the flower of a day, that dies when the next 
 sun rises. But to do something, however little, to free men from their chains, 
 to aid something, however faintly, the rights of reason and of truth, to be un- 
 vanquished through all and against all, these may bring one nearer the pure 
 ambitions of youth. Happiness dies as age comes to us; it sets forever, with 
 the suns of early years : yet perhaps we may keep a higher thing beside which 
 it holds but a brief royalty, if to ourselves we can rest true, if for the liberty of 
 the world we can do anything." 
 
 For he was one of those who to the cause of freedom and of truth bring the 
 wealth of their intellect and the years of their life, and receive but little requital 
 save a sullen reverence wrung from an unwilling world, and the railing bitter- 
 ness of the crowds who abhor light and hug error and tradition close. His 
 words stirred with shame the hearts of nations steeped in lust and lethargy and 
 the greed of gold ; and they awoke to hoot and hiss the one who dared to rouse 
 them from their torpor or arrest them in their money-changing. His thoughts 
 sank down into the unworn hearts of youth, and they shook themselves free 
 from the ashes of superstition and the chains of creeds; and the priests of 
 superstition cursed him. His utterance probed the surface of the world, and, 
 piercing its panoply of wordy falsehood, brought to it the clear keen light of 
 skepticism and truth; and the world was weary of him, it slept so much more 
 soundly beneath the veil and in the darkness. He loved men with a pity and a 
 tolerance no trial could exhaust; he would have led them, if he could, to the 
 search and the knowledge of other things than their gold-thirst and their para- 
 dise of lies; and they turned back to their treasuries of money, to their 
 granaries of hypocrisies, and would have none of him. Their ears were wilfully 
 deaf, their eyes were wilfully blind, their feet loved the trodden paths, their
 
 CHANDOS. 295 
 
 hands were busy grasping their neighbor's goods; they wondered at and they 
 reviled him; they would not follow to the mountain-air he bade them breathe; 
 they stayed in the mud, seeking a coin. He was alone. The world gave him fame 
 grudgingly, reluctantly, because it could not withhold it longer; but it left him 
 alone and condemned because he saw no holiness in the shrine of gold and 
 no right divine in the tyranny of tradition. 
 
 He was alone; eagles that love the high light-penetrated air, that has no 
 mist and clog of earth-born dust, must ever dwell in solitude. Yet now and 
 then there came to him, as there had come from the voices of fettered men to- 
 night, an echo of his owr. thoughts, a recognition of his own labors, and these 
 sufficed to him. 
 
 Where he leaned now, in the fragrant Venetian night, with the Southern 
 song of liberty still seeming to linger above the waters, and the moonlight full 
 upon the decaying grandeur of the forsaken sea-palaces, he thought of the 
 words of Dante, written in exile, as he lived in exile now. 
 
 They who labor justly for the sheer sake of truth find no present reward: 
 will they hereafter find it ? A weary question; one to which men never yet 
 have gained an answer. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 IN TRIUMPH. 
 
 THE stars as they shone on Venice, shone likewise farther northward on 
 one of the mighty, labyrinthine, ink-black cities of labor. The heavy pall of 
 smoke loomed over the forests of roofs, of chimneys, of factories, of churches; 
 the bells of the latter were chiming with incessant, joyous, pealing clangor, 
 bells that rung a chime called of God every seventh day in the midst of the 
 worship of Mammon, bells put up in many a steeple, iron offerings to Deity by 
 iron hands that wrung the last bitter drop out of poverty, and clammed the 
 last starveling of labor, and bought redemption cheaply by a sop to a parish 
 priest. 
 
 The bells were rhyming wildly, with no pretence, happily, that it was in the 
 honor of Godhead now, tossing upward through the weight of murky air wave 
 on wave of changing sound, of riotous triumph, of passionate, mirthful, ran- 
 dom, uncouth music like the harmony of Thor's great hammers. Under the 
 sea of iron-echoing noise vast crowds pressed tumultuous, in a grim triumph 
 like that of the metal melodies. Their hard, keen, indomitable faces were 
 sharp-set as the knives they made, were massive as the iron they worked; and 
 on them was the flush and the pride of victory. It was on the night of a great
 
 296 OUJDA'S WORKS. 
 
 election, an election that had followed in Lenten time on a sudden and un- 
 looked-for dissolution, an appeal to the country as agitating as it had been 
 unforeseen; and they had brought to the fore their champion, their idol, the 
 most famous of all his party. In this vast city of Darshampton there was but 
 one name and but one sovereignty, his. The people had crowned him; and 
 who should dare to discrown ? 
 
 In one of the chambers of a magnificent hotel, he stood in the dusky red 
 glow of the sunset that burned through the smoke-laden atmosphere and fell 
 about his feet as though it to were eager to seek him out and smile on him, 
 this man, omnipotent in all he undertook. A crowd of friends were about him, 
 breathless in congratulation on what was but a repeated triumph, waiting in 
 delighted warmth of welcome on one in whom they saw a deity more potent 
 than all the gods of Semitic or Achaean creeds, the deity of a supreme Success. 
 Throngs had been about him from earliest days, throngs of friends, of flatter- 
 ers, of men who believed in him honestly and would have fought for him to the 
 death had need been, of men who believed in nothing except the divinity of 
 success, and followed that idolatrously in him because they saw his acumen 
 never fail, his fortune never change. The city would give him its banquet to- 
 night; his party brought him devoted gratitude and ecstatic pride, the country 
 bestowed upon him scarce less admiration; young men looked to him as their 
 leader, elder looked to him to reap the harvest of the seed they had sown in the 
 future; the aristocracy dreaded, the plutocracy bribed, the multitude adored 
 him. He was a great man already; later on he would be a greater, popular 
 beyond all conception, triumphant in whatever he essayed. 
 
 The shouts and the cheers of the populace swelled louder and louder; the 
 clamor was hoarse, Titanic, almost terrible in its imperative power, as the voice 
 of the People always is when once it thunders through the land, imperative 
 for murder as imperative for bread, mighty and resistless alike in both. Here 
 it rose with one accord, with one word, his own name. They had brought him 
 in, those men with their horny, supple hands, and their blackened, resolute 
 brows, and their limbs like the limbs of the old Bersaerkers, those men of the 
 Black Country, who grasped so doggedly at truths sharp as steel, yet grasped 
 at but half-truths, and, so blinded, reached but hatred of an Order when they 
 thought they grasped at liberty for Mankind. The shouts swelled ouder and 
 louder, more and more full of peremptory demand; they had brought him 
 through, or thought they -had, and clamored for their idol. 
 
 He humored them ever, as a lion-tamer humors his cubs, that he may cut 
 the claws and grind smooth the teeth and make the brave beast lie down 
 passive as a spaniel at his beck, and turn to profit the world's terror when he 
 shows how docilely he guides the wild, tawny desert-king that at his bidding 
 would leap forth and tear and slay.
 
 CHANDOS. 297 
 
 He went out on the balcony, and the din of the acclamations rolled up to 
 the red evening skies like thunder. In the large square before the building, 
 and in the transverse streets that crossed and met, the dense multitudes were 
 gathered, wave on wave of human life, surging in in swift succession, and 
 stretching far andjjwide away beyond the sight, like a stormy and restless sea. 
 Their dark faces, swarthy and begrimed, shrewd and stern, were turned upward 
 to the balcony with an eager pride and pleasure, while from the brawny chests 
 of the iron-workers that tremendous welcome rang. The sun shone more bur- 
 nished red in the crimson, heavy west, and, slanting in broad, glowing, dusky 
 streams of light athwart the misty gloom, fell on that ocean of upraised faces, 
 and across the eyes of the man they honored, eyes so keen, so mirthful, so 
 unerring, so full of sagacious life, of triumphant victory. 
 
 " He is the man for the Future," said one stalwart worker, with the breath 
 of the furnace-blasts and the blackness of the iron-foundry upon him, yet who 
 read Bentham, and Fourier and Mill. 
 
 One, less book-wise and more world-wise, pierced nearer to the secret of 
 success, to the root of popularity, as he answered, 
 
 " He's more: he's the man for the Present." 
 
 " And the man for the People ! " shouted a third, behind them. The words 
 .were caught up and echoed on all sides, till they ran through the packed thou- 
 sands like electric fluid, till from the whole of the swaying gigantic mass the 
 words broke unanimously, rising high above the pealing of the bells and the 
 strife of the streets, hurling his name out in that grim, passionate, furious love 
 of a multitude which has ever in it something, and wellnigh as much, of menace 
 as of caress. 
 
 He nodded to them with a pleasant, familiar smile, such a smile as a boy 
 gives to his favorite and unruly dogs; then he stood more forward against the 
 iron scroll-work of the balcony, looking down on that movement beneath him, 
 and spoke. 
 
 Not for the first time here, in Darshampton, by many, the ringing, metallic 
 clarion-roll of the voice they knew so well stilled them like magic; thrilled them 
 as hounds thrill at the notes of a horn, and held them in check as the horn 
 holds the pack. He spoke as only those can speak who have been long trained 
 to the public arena, who have studied every technicality of their science and 
 every weakness of their audience, who have brought to it not only the talent of 
 native skill, but the polish of long usage, the power of assured practice. He 
 spoke well, keen, trenchant, vigorous, humorous oratory, English to the back- 
 bone, coarse in its pungency, withal, here as it could be scholarly elsewhere, 
 striking to the heart of its subject as surely and as straightly as the arrow of 
 Tell to the core of the apple. There was a breathless silence while he spoke, 
 the trumpet-like tones of his ringing voice penetrating without effort to ,the
 
 298 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 farthermost of the listening throngs, the Swift-like humor and wit shaking sar- 
 donic laughter from the brawny chests of his hearers, the biting and incisive 
 reasoning drawn in by them as eagerly as town-dusted lungs draw in the salt, 
 fresh breezes of the sea. He was their master, though they thought them- 
 selves his electors and creators; and he played at will on them, as a strong, 
 skilled hand plays on a stringed instrument, moving it to what cadence he 
 chooses. They listened in devoted silence, only broken by tumultuous cheer- 
 ing, or by the hoarse, gaunt laughter that was ominous as any curses raised 
 against what they hated. He spoke long, though so succinctly, so pungently, 
 that the minutes of his speech seemed moments; then ceased, while the red 
 sun-glow still strayed to his feet, and the chimes of the bells swung wild 
 delight, and the shouts of the populace teeming below deafened, the air with 
 his name. 
 
 He laughed to himself as he bowed many times his thanks and his farewell, 
 then sauntered from the balcony into the lighted and crowded room, glancing 
 back at that shifting sea of upraised, earnest, hard-lined faces in the dusky heat 
 of the fading sun. 
 
 " D d rascals, every one of you, my friends," he thought " or out-and-out 
 fools; Gods knows which. Rave about oppression and the wrongs of Capital to 
 Labor, while you send your children to sweat, at five years old, in furnaces, and 
 threaten to kill your brother if he don't join your trade-union and strike when 
 he's told; clamor for the rights of man, and worry your brains after political 
 economics, while you think all the ' rights ' centre in scribbling your name in 
 a poll-book and talking mild sedition in a tap-room ! Oh, you precious fools ! 
 how we use you, and how we laugh at you ! " 
 
 For he was not even wholly true to those who were so true to him; and he 
 had no belief even in their thorough, heartfelt earnestness, erring from imperfect 
 vision, and distorted from imperfect education, but sincere and true in its widest 
 errors. 
 
 They thought they had made him what he was; he knew that they were his 
 tools, his wax, his weapons. 
 
 He glanced back once- on to the vast, oscillating crowd in the reddening 
 angry sunset mist, and the laugh of a consummated victory, the insolence of a 
 secure triumph, was in the backward flash of his eyes, mingled, too, with a 
 certain proud power, a certain exultation of self-achieved distinction. His 
 name was still echoing to the skies from the lungs of the close-packed throngs. 
 
 "Who dare sneer at that name now?" he thought: and there was in that 
 thought the glow which Themistocles felt when they who had exiled him as a 
 nameless thing of the people, to wrestle him the base-born in the Ring of 
 Cynosarges, welcomed him in the city of the Violet Crown as ihe victor of 
 Salamis, the slayer of Persia.
 
 CHANDOS. 299 
 
 Then he went within from the stormy clangor and the scarlet flush of even- 
 ing, and was feasted through that night by the men of the mighty town, nobles 
 who hated him bearing their part in his honor, rivers of wine flowing to his 
 toast, the crowds of the streets knowing no theme but his present and his future, 
 the nation on the morrow saying, as the city said to-night, " He is a great man, 
 he' will be a still greater." 
 
 BOOK THE SIXTH. 
 
 From the world as it is Man's, into the world as it is God's. 
 
 COWLEY. 
 
 Sie ist volkommen und sie fehlet 
 Darin allein dass sie mich liebt. 
 
 GOETHE. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 "PRIMAVERA! GIOVENTU DELL' ANNO!" 
 
 DOWN at the foot of the mountain-slopes reaching to Vallombrosa, hidden 
 away in the deep belt of the chestnut-forests, was a little Tuscan village. 
 Sheltered high above by the pines of the hills, and veiled from every glance by 
 the thick masses of the chestnut-leaves, no strange foot ever scarcely wan- 
 dered to it. It was out of the route of travellers; it had slumbered here for 
 ages: it had been here when Milton looked on the Val d'Arno; it had been 
 here when Totila thundered at the gates of Rome; it had been here when 
 Plautus caught in the color of his words the laughter, the mirth, the tavern-wit, 
 the girls a libre allure, the wine-brawls, and the Bacchan feasts of the Latin 
 life; it had been here through all changes; but it had never changed. Belike, 
 it had been sacked by Caesar, razed by Theodoric, visited by Stilicho, plundered 
 by the Franks of Carl; but it was still the same, surviving all ruin, and covered 
 in the spring-time with so dense a leafy shade that the gray tint of its stone, the 
 red brown of its few roofs, showed no more than the oriole's nest through the 
 boughs. The purple plums of the olives ripened and were gathered, the red 
 osiers changed to tender green, the grapes were garnered with the vintage-tide, 
 the cattle came down the hill-sides when the sun sank low, the chestnuts turned 
 to ruddy brown and broke their husks and fell upon the moss; a few lives were
 
 300 O UIDAS WORKS. 
 
 born, a few lives were buried. These were all the changes known there, the 
 changes of the night and day, of the seasons of the year, and of the coming t>f 
 life and.of death. The light of the after-glow shone on it, the scorch of the 
 later summer parched its fields and woods, the snows of winter lay upon its 
 hill-top and gleamed between the darkness of its pines, the breath of the spring 
 breathed the flower-glory over its land, and uncurled the white spiral blossom 
 of its arums in the water-bed; but through wars and rumors of wars, through the 
 Campaign of Italy as through the wars of the great Captain, through the ravages 
 of the Cinque Cento as through the raids of the Goths and the Gauls, the little 
 woodland nook of Fontane Amorose remained unaltered, as though the foot of 
 Dionysus when it had pressed its sward had bidden its blossoms keep an 
 eternal bloom, and the Dryads and the Satyrs, driven from every other ancient 
 haunt, still lived beneath the green fronds of its trailing plants and laughed 
 amidst the bronzed gold of its autumn vines. 
 
 It was in the " mezza notte d' Aprile," beloved of painters, hymned of poets, 
 which makes of all the Southern land one fresh and laughing garden. Upward 
 yonder, higher still on the hills, there was some little chillness lingering still, 
 and the air blew keener through the aisles and pines; but here, midway in the 
 sloping of rich mossy greensward, deeply sheltered by its beeches and chest- 
 nuts and by the slopes of its fir-woods, the delicious spring of Italy was in its 
 fairest, with the purple orchid glowing in the noon, and the delicate wind-flower 
 fanned by the breeze, and the young buds of the vine opening in the clear and 
 perfect light. A few miles from the clustering dwellings of Fontane was a 
 grove of beech-trees, always, save at the height of noon, dark as twilight; for 
 the branches were dense, and the trees towered massive and many. Yet in the 
 heart of them was a nook fit for the couch of a Naiad fit to have had laid 
 down in it the fair lifeless limbs of Adonis. In the shade of the leaves the 
 moss and grass were ever fresh; the sun-tan of midsummer never brought 
 drought there; anemones and violets, and all wild flowers that bloom in Tuscan 
 woods, filled it with odor and color, and through it welled the bright clear water 
 of a broken fountain, so old that underneath its moss might still be traced the 
 half-effaced Latin inscription. By it perhaps Virgil once had leaned, or Claudian 
 rhymed his epic; at its spring the beautiful evil lips of Antonina might have 
 drunk, or, lying beside them, Lucretius might have thought of the Etrurian 
 shades, looking far down into those deep, rayless aisles of beech, sublime and 
 sad as his own genius. Where the water rippled, losing itself among the mosses 
 and the orchids, a glory of sunlight came, touching to silver the wing of a 
 wood-pigeon poised to drink, lending a warmer blush to the white wild rose as 
 the rifling bee has hummed far down in its violated chalice, and shedding its ripe 
 gold on the hair of a young girl leaning motionless there. 
 
 The birds, fearless of her presence, paused in their flight to glance at her;
 
 CHAN DOS. 301 
 
 the nightingales, thinking it night in the beech shadows yonder, sung her their 
 softest songs; the butterflies alighted on the flowers her hands held; they knew 
 her well, they loved her; they were her only playmates in the long Italian day. 
 Arum lilies, and the pale-green blossoms of ivy, and anemones glowing' crimson, 
 and the emerald coils of moss, were in a loose sheaf on her lap; she sat in a 
 day-dream, watching the mystical flow of the water as though its patient music 
 could sing her the hymn of her future. 
 
 She was very young, but on her beauty was the Tuscan glow; and she had 
 already the tall, slender, yielding, voluptuous form of the South. In the hair, 
 like a chestnut that has the fleck of the sunlight upon it, in the deep eyes with 
 their blue-black lustre and their dreamy passionate lids, in the lips so soft, so 
 proud, so mournful, in the brow, broad and thoughtful like an antique, in the 
 brilliance and the light upon the face, were all the Southern types: it was only 
 in the fairness of the skin that something more Northern might have been 
 fancied; in all else it was the rich and sunlit loveliness of Italy. 
 
 Her hand rested on the stones that bore the Latin words, all covered now 
 with the wild growth of ivy; her gaze rested on the water sparkling so bright 
 in sunshine here, flowing so dark beneath the grasses there; the sheaf of wood- 
 land wealth rested listlessly on her lap. She leaned there, in her childhood's 
 carelessness, in the classic solitude, against the black shades of the beech-woods 
 that closed her in as in a temple, and only let the flood of sun pour down across 
 the ruined Roman fountain and the countless flowers at her feet. 
 
 She was fair as Sappho while yet love was unknown and a child's laughter 
 amidst the roses of lona was only hushed now and then by vague and prescient 
 dreams; she was fair as Heloise while yet only the grand serenity of the Greek 
 scroll lay opened before her eyes and no voice beside her had taught a lore 
 more fatal and a mystery more mournful than the wise words of Hellas. 
 
 She was very lovely, motionless here where no sound came except the lulling 
 of the water and the gliding noise of a bird's wing, where the tender green of 
 blossoming vines hung coiled above her head, and where the deep bronze of the 
 beech -belt drew round her the gloom of the night. 
 
 Where she leaned thus, one passing through the denseness of that gloom 
 saw her, unseen himself, and paused; he thought of Proserpine among the 
 flowers ere the cruelty of fate fell on her. The young life and the grass-grown 
 ruin, the aisle of color and sunlight, and the mass of enclosing shade were a 
 picture and a poem in one, the gladness of a Greek idyl, with the mystic dark- 
 ness of a Northern Saga. 
 
 Once he would have lingered there, drawn the ivy-wreaths from the hands, 
 wooed the eyes from their musing gaze, paused beside her in the leafy peace, 
 once in the days of his youth. Now he looked an instant, thought how fair she 
 was, and passed onward down his lonely path far into the beechen shadows.
 
 302 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 CASTALIA. 
 
 SUDDENLY, without a warning, the radiance of the late day clouded, the 
 stormy cirri whirled together in angry turbulent masses, the clouds swept up 
 with instantaneous movement, like the ranks of any army hurrying to battle; 
 one of the tempests of the South broke over the spring-tide peace of hill and 
 valley, rainless, furious, driving down the hill-sides, flashing in flame through 
 the depths of the woods, rending off the shoots of the vine and the buds of 
 the olive, blinding the trembling cattle, breaking the fast-rooted pines like 
 reeds, rolling its thunder down the mountain and over the plain till the earth 
 shook and the end of the world seemed to come to the peasants crouching be- 
 neath their roofs, well used though they were to the sweep of the hurricane, to 
 the blaze of the skies. Before the mules could patter along the stony roads, 
 before the contadine could reach homeward as they came from antique Pelago, 
 before the workers could leave the olive-fields and vineyards, before the mild- 
 eyed oxen of the Apennine could be driven through the rank hill-grass, without 
 warning, the mighty clouds gathered, the night fell, the fires ran down the 
 heavens, the storm broke ! 
 
 Through it, as best he might, he who had an hour or two before passed 
 through the moss-grown path of the beech-woods made his backward way.- He 
 had seen it gather as he crossed the broad stretch where the cross stands, and 
 the view of the Val d'Arno lies unfolded in all its beauty; but before he could 
 retrace many steps of his road, the full force of the tempest was down. It was 
 now peril to life and limb to be out in its fury; the melon-plants were torn up 
 by their roots, the twisted olives writhed into tenfold contortion, the peaceful 
 bubbling waters turned into angry torrents, the young trees were uprooted and 
 hurled down the steep descents; the darkness was impenetrable, except when 
 the lightning lit the whole land in its glare, and the rushing of stones and of 
 boughs and of saplings, as the winds tore them up and whirled them on its blast, 
 roared with a thunder only -drowned in the peals that shook from hill to hill 
 and echoed through the solitude of the forests. 
 
 He could not even tell his road; he had lost its certainty in the blackness 
 around; the woodland paths were all so similar, the tracks ran all so much 
 alike under the pines, and stretching towards Vallombrosa that he told with 
 difficulty how near or how far he was from the refuge of Fontane Amorose, or 
 from the shelter of his own house-roof. All that he could do was to retain his 
 footing against the fury of the hurricane, and to make head as best he might 
 against the force that drove him back at every step, and the deafening din that
 
 CHANDOS. 303 
 
 rioted around. Unknown to himself, he had wandered back once more into 
 the beech-glades, and was lost in their impenetrable shades, instead of holding 
 on his upward road along the hill-side through the pines. As he went, feeling 
 his way slowly through the dense hot gloom that was like the gloom over earth 
 and sky when the lava-torrent of Vesuvius bursts, he trod on some fallen 
 thing that his foot crushed ere he felt it. He stopped and stooped to it; he 
 thought it might be some frightened hare or some large bird struck in the 
 storm and entangled in the yielding, clinging moss. The darkness was dark as 
 that of a moonless midnight; he had no sense to guide him but the sense of 
 touch. The grasses and the flowers, all bruised and beaten, met his hand; 
 then, as it moved farther, it wandered to the loose trail of some floating hair, 
 and passed over the warmth of human lips and the outline of a woman's cheek 
 and bosom. He thought of the Tuscan child whom he had seen in the sunset 
 light. 
 
 The heavy tresses lay in his hand; he could not tell whether she were living 
 or dead, she was so still in the darkness. He passed his hand gently over her 
 brow, she did not move; he spoke, she did not hear; he drew her loosened 
 dress over her uncovered chest, she did not feel his touch. There was warmth 
 from the lips on his palm, there was a faint pulsation in the heart as he sought 
 for its throb ; that was all. Else she lay, as one dead, at his feet in the black- 
 ness of the driving storm, in the din of the echoing thunder. 
 
 The fire flashed from the cleft skies; the blaze of an intolerable light poured 
 down. In it he saw her features, and the broken stone of the Latin ruins, with 
 the water gliding into its deep, still pool. She was stretched senseless on the 
 very grasses amidst which she had leaned in her summer dream; her eyes were 
 closed, and her breathing was so low, so lingering, that it seemed each breath might 
 be the last she drew. He paused a moment, leaning over her with the thick 
 wealth of the hair lying in his hand; he could not leave her, and succor there 
 was none. With little thought, save such an impulse of pity as that in which a 
 man might raise a fawn his shot had struck, or a song-bird his foot had trodden 
 on, he stooped and raised her in his arms. Her head fell back, her limbs were 
 powerless, she lay passive and unconscious -in his hold; forsaken here, she 
 must perish: death was abroad in every blast, in every flash. He hesitated no 
 more, but leaned her brow against his breast, and, thus weighted, went on his 
 toilsome and perilous way through the beech-glades. He knew his road now; 
 that was much; and he was not very far from his own home. He forced his 
 passage slowly and with difficulty through the denseness of the woods. It was 
 a tedious and dangerous toil; her long hair blew in his eyes, her burden 
 chained his arms, the great blasts blew against him with the blow of a sea-wave; 
 the forest now was sunk in the ink-black gloom of night, now alive with lurid 
 points of flame; his sight was blinded, and his strength sorely spent. But still
 
 304 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 as he went he sheltered her, and he pierced his road at length through the aisles 
 of the beech-wilderness till he came into the broken arches of what had once 
 been stately Roman courts. So far near his refuge, he paused a second to take 
 rest; the vivid lightnings filled the arcade with their glow, the peal of the storm 
 rolled above; he leaned against a marble shaft and looked down on his burden. 
 Her head rested on his breast as peacefully as though she slept upon her 
 mother's heart; the long dark lashes swept her cheek; her lips were slightly 
 parted with a warmer breath. There was a touching sanctity in the uncon- 
 scious rest, a plaintive appeal in the extreme youth and in its death-like 
 calm. 
 
 " Poor child ! " he thought, " she may live to wish she had been abandoned 
 there to die in the peace of her childhood." 
 
 In other years his lips would have called back the sleeping life with a caress; 
 now he looked on her with a passionless pity, gentle because profoundly sad, 
 sad because she had so much youth, and that youth was a woman's. 
 
 Then he went onward through the shattered arches that were canopied and 
 covered with* impenetrable ivy and feathery grasses tinted to every hue in the 
 flashings of the light, and entered by a low side-door the first court of a Latin villa 
 half in ruins, crossed the court, and passed into the first chamber. It was long 
 and lofty, and had in it the decay of a patrician greatness; fragments of a per- 
 fect sculpture were upon the walls, a fresco in hues fair as though painted but 
 yesterday covered the ceiling, the pavement was of mosaic marbles; these were 
 all of its old classic glories that time had left untouched: for the rest, it was an 
 artist's studio, a student's library, strewn with papers and with books, with here 
 and there a cast or bronze; at the far end a lectern with a vellum manuscript 
 open upon its wings, and in the midst an Etruscan lamp swinging from on high 
 and shedding a subdued silvery light and a soft perfume on the gloom. Here 
 he brought her, and laid her gently down upon the cushions of a couch. She 
 knew nothing of what was done with her. He went to a flask of Montepulciano 
 standing near, poured some of the wine out, and touched her lips with it. She 
 drank a little, by mere instinct; the warmth revived her; her lids trembled, 
 then unclosed, and her eyes looked out with a dreamy, bewildered sight- 
 lessness. 
 
 " What is it ? Where am I ? " 
 
 He bent to her soothingly, speaking her own Tuscan. 
 
 " Have no fear, my child; you are safe now. I found you in the storm and 
 brought you here." 
 
 Her glance met his; consciousness came to her, the color flushed back into 
 her face; a shyness, half awe, half shame, was on her. 
 
 " You saved my life, eccellenza! How can I thank you ? " 
 
 " By telling me you are unhurt."
 
 THE HOURS PASSED, THE PICTURE GREW. Page 316, Vol. III.
 
 CHANDOS. 305 
 
 She looked at him with that awed wistfulness, that earnest wondering grati- 
 tude, of a child. 
 
 He'touched the bright masses of her hair, moving them back from her 
 brow, she was so young; he caressed her with his hand as he would a 
 wounded bird. 
 
 " I fear you are in pain ? There is a bruise on your temple; and you were 
 senseless when I found you. Do you suffer now ? " 
 
 She sighed, a sigh rather of rest and of wonder than of pain. 
 
 "Oh, no! not much. You brought me from the forest? How good! how 
 merciful! " 
 
 She stooped her head with the supple grace of the South, and kissed his 
 hand with the reverent supplication and thanksgiving of a young slave to her 
 owner. He drew it from her quickly. 
 
 " My child, do not pay me such homage for a mere cornmon charity. What 
 creature with the heart of a man could have left you to perish alone ? The 
 blow must have struck you down senseless. Was it 'from a bough, do 
 you think ? " 
 
 She shuddered with the memory. 
 
 " I cannot recollect. The storm came up from the back of the woods 
 before I saw or thought of it; it burst suddenly, and as I went something struck 
 me down; whether it was the flash or a fallen branch, I can remember nothing 
 since, till I awoke here." 
 
 She lifted herself a little, and glanced round, the chamber with the startled 
 wonder still in her eyes, as of one who wakes from a deep sleep in a strange 
 scene; her glance came back to him, and dwelt on him with a venerating mar- 
 vel and admiration: she knew his face well, though until that day he had never 
 seen hers. Her sweeping lashes were weighted and glistening with tears as she 
 looked, sweet, sudden tears of an infinite gratitude for her rescue, and to him 
 by whom she had been saved. She was very fair in that moment. 
 
 Her hair, all loosened by the wind, fell backward and over her shoulders, 
 like a shower of molten gold; the warmth of the chamber, and the surprise of 
 her waking thoughts, gave a glow like a wild rose to her cheeks. Some of the 
 ivy- coils that she had dropped in her haste to rise and flee from the storm had 
 caught in the gay color and the white broideries of her simple picturesque dress: 
 an artist would have given a year of his life to have painted her as she was then, 
 in the shadowy chiar'oscuro of the lamplight, in the marble waste of the far- 
 stretching, half-ruined chamber. 
 
 A dim fugitive memory wandered before him with the glance of her eyes, 
 a likeness that he could not trace, yet that pursued him, rose before him with 
 the earnest, haunting beauty of her face. Far down in his past it lay; he could 
 not disinter it, he could not give it name or substance, but its shadow
 
 306 OUIDA'S WORKS. 
 
 flickered before him. She was like something remembered, like something re- 
 covered, this strange young Tuscan girl whom chance had thrown across him. 
 
 "You are tired and exhausted; lie still," he said, gently, as she strove to 
 rise. "They shall bring you food; I need some myself; and in an hour the 
 storm may lull, perhaps. May I ask who it is that my roof has the honor 
 to shelter ? " 
 
 She looked at him still with that wistful wondering homage; she was very 
 shy with him and the language of courtesy was unfamiliar to her; it was 
 very new to her to be addressed so. 
 He smiled. 
 
 " What is your name, poverina ? " he asked her. 
 
 Her eyelids drooped, the hot color deepened in her face; she hesitated a 
 moment. 
 
 " They call me Castalia." 
 
 " Castalia! a fair and classic name! And what else? " 
 "Nothing elsa, eccellenza!" 
 
 Her voice was very low; her head sank, the tears glittered thickly on the 
 length of her lashes. In the answer she had told him all the history she had. 
 
 He was silent a moment, regretful that he had pained her; his voice was 
 very tender as he spoke again. 
 
 " And your mother, is she living ? " 
 She shook her head. 
 
 He looked at her with a deep pity, this child with the brilliance of Southern 
 suns about her,, and a fate so lonely and so blighted at the outset. 
 
 He asked her no more; but, as a Tuscan woman answered his summons and 
 brought into the chamber a tray of fruits, and macaroni, and truffles, with some 
 flasks of Italian and Rhine wines, he served her with his own hands as assidu- 
 ously, as reverently, as any would serve a queen. And as the rest and the food 
 revived her more and more, and more and more restored the animation to her 
 lips, the lustre to her eyes, she seemed, in the antique classic Doric charm of 
 the silent chamber, like some gem of the old Venetian masters set in the white 
 coldness of the marble walls, like some lusttous, gold-leaved, Italian flower 
 sprung in its bud from the gray solemnity, the sublime decay, of Roman ruins. 
 He wondered whence she came and what she was, this Tuscan child with 
 the grace of a daughter of the Antonines, who was without a name; and once 
 more the memory which had haunted him rose again, not to be grasped, but 
 lost in the mazy shades of a far-distant past. 
 
 The storm was at its height, there seemed little chance of its abatement; the 
 mighty din of its thunder rolled like the roar of a hundred battles, and the 
 moaning and trembling of all the beech and chestnut woods were heard on 
 the stillness. She shuddered as she listened.
 
 CHANDOS. 307 
 
 " Ah! I should have been lying dead in all that terror now, but for your pity! " 
 
 " Do not think of it," he answered soothingly. " Let the storm rage *as it 
 will, you are safe here with me. Tell me, where is it you live ? " 
 
 She looked at him with an intense sadness,"Very strange upon the glow and 
 glory of her youth; and, though the flush grew hotter in her face, it was proud 
 and still in its pain. 
 
 " Illustrissimo," she said softly, for there was a breathless awe of him upon 
 her, mingled touchingly with a spaniel-like trust, " You ought to know whom 
 your house shelters; it is only just. I have no name; I have no history. My 
 mother died when I was a few months old; she came a strang'er, and the vil- 
 lage knew nothing of her, only this, she was not wedded. The Padre Giulio 
 and his mother adopted me; they have been very good. The name they found 
 on me was Castalia. I have nothing more to tell." 
 
 The simplicity of the words lent them but the deeper sadness; the restrained 
 pain, the half-haughty, half -appeal ing shame, with which she spoke them gave 
 them but the stronger pathos. They touched her listener greatly: 
 
 "Thank you for your confidence, my fair child," he answered her, with a 
 pitying tenderness in his voice, she was so young to be already touched with 
 life's suffering and the world's reproach. "You do not know your history; 
 there is room, then, to hope it a bright one." 
 
 She shook her head. 
 
 " Illustrissimo, how? It began in shame; it will end in a convent." 
 
 " A convent ? Better the tomb! " 
 
 He spoke on an impulse. To cage her to that living death of the veil 
 seemed barbarous as to shut away in darkness, till it died, one of the golden- 
 winged orioles that fluttered through the length of a spring day below the 
 slopes of Vallombrosa. 
 
 " Yes better a thousand times! " she answered him, with a sudden vibration 
 of passion that told how surely passion would wake in her one day. " In the 
 grave one sleeps unconscious! But, forgive me, eccellenza; I weary you. Let 
 me go." 
 
 "Go! with the storm at that height? You would go to your destruction. 
 No living thing could pass from here to Fontane in such a night. Wait a 
 while; it may lull presently. And give me no titles of deference; I can claim 
 none." 
 
 She looked at him wistfully, with a shy surprise, like that with which a forest- 
 bird glances at a stranger. 
 
 " You must be a great lord? " she said, softly and hesitatingly. 
 
 He smiled, something wearily. 
 
 My greatness if I ever truly had any departed from me long ago. I 
 am no noble-. I am little richer than your peasants of Fontane."
 
 308 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 She glanced round the chamber: to her, after the bare simplicity of the 
 Fontane hamlet, the frescoes, the sculpture, the mosaics, though they were but 
 the relics of Latin ruins, made it seem a palace; then her glistening meditative 
 eyes eyes divine of the South dwelt on him. 
 
 " You are lord of yourself, at lea,st ? " she said, lingeringly, with the naif 
 expression of a child. 
 
 " I have but a rebellious subject, then," he answered, with a tinge of sad- 
 ness that did not escape her. " But, poverina, you look feverish and tired. I 
 have been thoughtless for you. You must have been terribly hurt by that 
 blow, I fear. Are you in pain? " 
 
 She smiled at him, a smile of infinite patience and sweetness, that brought 
 back in his thoughts once more a memory he could not follow. 
 
 " Not much: it is nothing." 
 
 She would not confess that, in truth, an intolerable pain ached through her 
 bruised temples, and that an utter exhaustion was stealing fast upon her. 
 
 "Lie still; then," he said, bending over her; "the tempest is at its worst 
 now. Take no heed of me, but sleep, if you can. Your eyes are too heavy and 
 too hot, and I have let you talk when you should have been at rest." 
 
 She thanked him softly, and obeyed him; the color grew richer in her cheek 
 at his touch, but she offered him no opposition; she watched him with a rever- 
 ent, wondering homage; she revered him already like a king, like a deity. 
 
 He had saved her life, and he had brought her here to this mellow light, to 
 this delicate temple-like chamber, to this dream, as it seemed to her still, of 
 classic beauty, of hushed repose, that had followed on the tumult of the tempest 
 like an enchantment. She had passed all her young years in the chestnut- 
 shadows beneath Vallombrosa, and she had far too much innocence, far too 
 much faith, to think of harm that could be done her in this solitude, to feel any- 
 thing but a sublime, devoted trust in the stranger who had saved her life. 
 Moreover, the weariness that was growing on her, the sleep that weighed down 
 her eyelids, the reaction from the shock and peril of the night, left her little 
 sense save of a lulling peace that surrounded her, of a voice that soothed her 
 like music, of a wish to be silent and still and keep unbroken this soft charm. 
 
 He left her, and went to the lectern at the farther end of the room, where 
 the vellum scroll lay, a disputed manuscript of Boethius; he leaned his arms on 
 the desk, he bent his eyes on the Latin words of the last of the Romans, of the 
 man martyred for too much truth. On the wide stone hearth some pine logs were 
 burning, for the evenings were chilly, though the days were so warm; the 
 aromatic odor of the lamp filled the room with a sweet, faint incense; the 
 shadows were deep in all the farther parts of the hall, only about the hearth 
 was the ruddy, flickering glow of the pines; all else was in gloom. The roar 
 of the storm was almost ceaseless, and the drenching rains broke above the low
 
 CHANDOS. 309 
 
 Latin roof like a waterspout. He heeded them little; his thoughts were gone 
 back into the studies that filled his days and nights. She heeded them no more; 
 an irresistible exhaustion had weighted her eyes, till they closed unconsciously; 
 she lost all knowledge of where she was, and slept. 
 
 The hours passed; he almost forgot that he was not wholly alone. The 
 volumes about him were many, and rare, and old; the classic treasures of dead 
 empires and buried freedom were before him; their eternal charm, so old yet so 
 vernal, their thoughts, so familiar, so long known, yet never sounded, as it 
 semed, in all their depths, enchained him in their compensative beauty. He 
 was such a scholar as the world lost of late years at Damascus, when Henry 
 Buckle died of fever, with those last words of love for his labor on his lips: 
 " My book! my book !" 
 
 The hours passed uncounted; the thunder had somewhat lulled, but the 
 winds were a hurricane, and the drenching downpour of rain scoured the land 
 and howled through the pine and the beech woods. It was a night which broke 
 the mountain firs like saplings, and wrenched up the gray writhing olives by 
 the roots, and laid the young birds stone dead by the score. No human thing 
 could venture out in it and be sure of life. The twelfth hour struck from the 
 campanile as the lull of the moment succeeded to the roar of the storm; he 
 lifted his head from where he bent over the lectern, and looked at the young 
 companion chance had so strangely brought there. In the glow of the embers 
 she lay, in her delicate, richly-hued beauty, a child in her innocence and her 
 tranquil rest, far more than a child in her grace and her charm, a thing of 
 light, and life, and color, and youth, in the cold, classic solitude of the lonely 
 and half-ruined hall, whose cracked mosiac had been worn by the passing of so 
 many banished feet that had trodden through their brief day and had glided 
 onward down into their tombs. He watched her with an indefinable pity, 
 with a fugitive, intangible remembrance pursuing him; her brief story was so 
 mournful, and the memory that pursued him was so strong, though he could 
 find it no clue and would give it no substance. As a chord of music, as a 
 flower blooming in a desert place, as a sound of harvest-chant or a spring- 
 bird's singing, will bear us back to long-gone hours, so the sight of her bore 
 his thoughts backward to years that were sealed forever, thoughts that 
 thronged on him, many, and embittered by their own sweetness, as the thought 
 of all that he will never again see comes on the exile with the mere scent of 
 faded leaves brought to him from the summer woodlands that hear his step 
 no more. 
 
 In them he was lost, as he leaned against the broad bronze wings of the 
 lectern-eagle, with his eyes on the ring of ruddy color that circled her like a 
 halo. The storm shook above the low, flat roof of the Latin villa, breaking on 
 it as with the force of a waterspout. He roused himself and went near her.
 
 310 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 " She cannot go out in such a night as this," he thought. 
 
 She slept still, softly as a child, the long black fringes of her eyelashes 
 lying on her flushed cheeks, a proud, resigned sadness, like the memory 
 of her stained birth and lonely fate on her face. He was loath to break 
 her rest, yet he knew that to let her sleep on here would be to let the coarse 
 tongues of the mountain-peasants touch even her defenceless childhood. He 
 stooped and passed his hand lightly over her brow. At the touch, slight as it 
 was, she wakened instantly; the blue-black lustre of her eyes startled into 
 consciousness, the flush on her cheek bright as the scarlet japonica-blossoms. 
 She started up, ashamed. 
 
 " Oh, eccellenza, forgive me ! I have been asleep! " 
 
 He smiled kindly at her alarm and her penitence. 
 
 " Naturally, after your danger and your fatigue. It was the best restora- 
 tive you could have. It is midnight now, and the storm is scarce lessened " 
 
 " Midnight ? " she murmured, terror-stricken. " The Padre Giulio will be 
 so wretched! What will he think ? Let me go; pray let me go." 
 
 "Impossible; you would go to your certain death. I could not venture 
 myself in such a night; you hear the hurricane ? You must remain with me." 
 
 " With you ? " she repeated, under her breath. 
 
 "Surely: I would not let a dog leave my roof in such weather as this is. 
 Besides, you are miles higher on the slope here than Fontane; the return to 
 the village would be impossible for those far hardier than you." 
 
 She looked at him with a wondering awe; he seemed to her such an emperor 
 as Marcus Antoninus, who had laid down his pomp and come to dwell a while 
 like other men. The deep-blue, weary, brilliant eyes that gazed on her made 
 her think of the serene, imperial eyes of Augustus. 
 
 " I am a total stranger to you, it is true," he said, gently, misinterpreting 
 her silence; "but you are not afraid to remain in my house? I am only here 
 for a villegiatura, and the place is desolate enough, but it will at least give you 
 shelter." 
 
 She lifted her head with the proud grace that would have paled and shamed 
 the grace of many royal women. 
 
 "Afraid? Afraid of you? What could I fear ? You saved my life; it is 
 yours to command. All is I cannot thank you enough." 
 
 The words were very touching in their liquid Tuscan, in their complete 
 innocence, and in their perfect trust. 
 
 "You have nothing to thank me for; a mule-driver or a charcoal-burner 
 must have done for you what I did," he answered her, his voice unconsciously 
 softening. "And now go to rest; you want it. I will send the women to you, 
 and they shall remain in your chamber; for you are not well enough to be left 
 alone."
 
 CHAN DOS. 311 
 
 " Ah, eccellenza how good you are! " she murmured. A few years older, 
 and she would have been grateful to him in silence, better knowing the motive 
 of his words. "But indeed I am strong now; we, below Vallombrosa, have 
 the strength of the mountain-air, and shall I not trouble you with staying 
 here ? " 
 
 " Far from it; you bring your own welcome, like the birds that come and 
 sing under our windows. Good-night, poverina, and sleep well." 
 
 He held his hand out to her; she was but a child to him, and a child who 
 had been sheltered on his breast through the driving of the storm. She stooped 
 with the exquisite softness of movement of Southern women, and touched the 
 hand he gave her, lightly and reverently, with her lips. 
 
 " I would thank you, excellenza, but I cannot." 
 
 She did thank him, however, better than by all words, with that hesitating 
 touch of her young lips, with that upward glance of her eyes, languid with sleep 
 and fatigue, yet lustrous as the Tuscan skies by night, eyes that seemed to 
 him to have some story of his past in their depths. 
 
 Then he summoned the women to her, peasants who dwelt in the villa, and 
 he left her. 
 
 He, having surrendered to her, though she knew nothing of it, the only 
 habitable chamber that the half-ruined villa afforded, stretched himself in the 
 warmth of the pine logs on the wolf-skins strewn before it. She had brought 
 back to him, why or whence he could not tell, memories that he would willingly 
 let die, memories that, through the length of weary years, burned still into his 
 heart with unutterable longing, with intolerable pain. 
 
 In the loneliness of the old classic hall, in the leaping light of the pine flames, 
 throngs of shadowy shapes arose around him, the shapes of his past, sum- 
 moned by the light of a child's smile. 
 
 She meanwhile lay wakeful, yet dreamy, gazing out at the unfamiliar 
 chamber and the swaying figure of the peasant-woman keeping watch over her 
 and nodding in her sleep. Her- thoughts were steeped in all the wonders of 
 legendary lore, and she fancied some enchantment had been wrought in her 
 since, out of that awful forest- darkness, she had been brought to this charmed 
 stillness in w.hich only one remembrance was with her, the remembrance of the 
 musing, lustrous, weary eyes that had looked so gently on her, of the voice that 
 had soothed her terror and her pain with an accent softer than she had ever 
 heard. She thought of him, and thought, as one other had once done before, 
 that he was like the Poet-king of Israel, but having known the bitterness of 
 abdication, having known the ingratitude of the people. Then her musing be- 
 came a dream, and, with a smile upon her lips, she slept under a stranger's roof 
 till the tempest had passed away and the dawn was bright. As she awoke, the 
 morning had risen. The sun broke in full glory over a splendid mass of purple
 
 312 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 cloud and tumbled storm-mist that glowed in magnificent color beneath the 
 newly-risen rays. The earth laughed again even amidst her ruin, her ruin 
 of crushed olive-buds, and uprooted saplings, and trees rent asunder, and 
 nests flung down, with the young birds killed, and the mothers flying with 
 piteous cries over the wieck; but the wheatsprouts were too low to be 
 harmed; the vines, though they trailed and hung helplessly under the dead 
 weight of rain-drops, were still only in blossom; the watercourses made the 
 wilder, merrier music, filled to overflowing, and laying in swathes the rank 
 grasses of their beds; the mules began to patter over the broken paths, picking 
 their careful way over the dislodged boulders of rocks and the deep channels of 
 brimming brooks. Beneath Vallombrosa the morning was fair and sun-lightened 
 again, deadly through the tempest had been over-night, and rough work of de- 
 struction though it had wrought. With the sun she rose, her youth, like the 
 youth of the spring and the earth, the brighter for the storm and the danger 
 gone by. There was the flush of waking childhood and of past sleep upon her 
 cheeks, and her eyes had the gladness of a wondering dream in them, as she 
 found her way, marvelling if she dreamed a fairy-tale, down some broken marble 
 steps and out into the air. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 "GIOVENTU! PRIMAVERA DELLA VITA!" 
 
 THE full light poured into the open loggia before the half-ruined courts and 
 halls of the Latin villa. Within, the one spacious chamber, with its frescoes 
 and the mosaics, its books and scrolls, was bare enough. But the world of 
 blossoming spring, of morning mists, of lavish foliage that opened out before 
 it, made ample amends for any poverty and .decay of the interior; and it was 
 perfect for a villegiatura, this deserted place that Roman pomp had once filled 
 in Augustan days. 
 
 In this loggia, reading, her host sat, a man no longer young, though as 
 yet there was no silver amidst the fair and golden length of his hair; a man 
 of a grave grace, of a serene, meditative dignity of look and of movement 
 that had in it something that was very weary, yet something not less grand, 
 not less royal : he might have been a king in purples rather than what he was, 
 an exile, and poor. 
 
 The book was open upon his knee, but his eyes were not upon it for the 
 moment; they were resting on the gardens without, gardens, wild, forsaken, 
 uncultured, but only the more beautiful for that, with dark waters winding
 
 CHAN DOS. 313 
 
 under laurel-thickets, and green cistus, and ilex, and pomegranate, and Banksia 
 roses growing at their will, and, all ivy-coiled and covered, broken fragments 
 of arches and statues and fountains. What he watched in them was the passage 
 of the young Tuscan flitting through them with the freedom of a chamois in 
 her step, and all the languor of a dew-laden flower in her loveliness. 
 
 Sixteen years beyond the Apennines bring womanhood; they had brought 
 it to her in the loveliness nature had dowered her with, but in all else she was 
 young as a child, she who had never wandered from the chestnut shadows of 
 her village, who had but dimly heard of another vast world beyond the beech- 
 woods, who had known no friends but the birds who sang to her, who had 
 known no pleasures but to watch a blue-warbler shake his bright wings in the 
 myrtles, or to look deep down into the heart of a passion-flower and build a 
 thousand fancies from its mystic burning hues. She was a child with the 
 beauty of a woman; there could be no greater peril for her. 
 
 He thought so as he saw her in this deserted garden. Art had no handling 
 with her; the pure hill-air of Tuscany had made her all she was; and she had 
 the abandon and the unconsciousness of some rich plumaged bird, now floating 
 softly through the sunlight, now pausing on the wing, now alighting to drop 
 down in happy rest in a couch of feathery grasses. 
 
 He gazed at her as she wandered through them, that exquisite ease in her 
 step which many a royal woman has not, which a contadina may have balancing 
 on her dark imperial head a pannier of watermelons. The lizards did not 
 hurry from her, but watched her with curious eyes; the timid hares let her 
 stoop and stroke them; the old owls blinking in the ivy let her lift her hand 
 and touch their crests; the wood-doves flew about her and pecked the buds 
 from the boughs she held up to them. She bent over the black swollen water, 
 and saw her own reflection laurel-crowned as the branches met above her head; 
 she gathered the lilies of the valley, the buds of Banksia roses, and the young 
 green ivy-blossoms, and crowned herself with them till the wreath was too 
 heavy and shook all her glistening hair downward in a shower of gold, like a 
 picture of Flora. Then, lastly, she sank to rest on a gray rock f fallen sculp- 
 ture, the crown of flowers still above her brow; and after the glad, thoughtless 
 pastime of a child, the proud and profound sadness that usually in repose was 
 on her face succeeded it with a charm not the less great because so sudden. 
 
 It was like the sudden fall of evening over the brilliance and the glow of 
 her own Tuscan landscape. 
 
 As he saw it, he left the loggia and went towards her. She did not hear his 
 step till he had approached her close; then she sprang up with the swiftness of 
 a fawn, and with words of gratitude made only softer by the awe of him which 
 lent her its delicate coyness. 
 
 "I have been watching you for the last half-hour, Castalia," he said, gently.
 
 314 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 " I am glad you could find such companions in my flowers and my birds; there 
 is little else here fit for your bright youth." 
 
 She colored under his gaze, and put her hands up hurriedly to remove the 
 dew-laden wreath of bud and blossom; she had forgotten it till his speech 
 brought it back to her thoughts. He put out his own hand and stayed her. 
 
 " Not for worlds! I wish Titian lived to paint you! you look like a young 
 priestess of Flora. But, tell me, what spell have you that tames the lizards, 
 and stills the hares, and brings all the birds to your hand ? " 
 
 She lifted to him her musing eloquent eyes, grave as a child's when he 
 pauses to think. 
 
 " I do not know, eccellenza, unless it may be because I love them so 
 well." 
 
 His face grew a shade darker and yet softer; her words recalled the fond 
 belief of his own youth. 
 
 " You think love begets and secures love ? I thought so once." 
 " And was it not so ? " 
 
 "No; but that knowledge should not kill love in us; there is much that 
 is worth it, if there be much that is not. Because a viper turns and stings you, 
 it would be wild vengeance to wring the wood-pigeons neck." 
 
 He spoke half to his own thoughts, half to her; she regarded him with a 
 reverent, grateful, wondering gaze; in her little beech-forest nest of Fontane 
 she had never seen anything like him. She who had known but one bent old 
 priest, and brown, brawny muleteers and vintagers from whom she shrank as 
 the white sea-swallow shrinks from the hard beak and cruel pursuit of the kes- 
 trel, thought almost he must be more than mortal. 
 
 "I ought to leave you, 'lustrissimo ?" she said, hesitatingly. "I have 
 troubled you so long." 
 
 " Do you wish to leave me ? " 
 
 Her eyes opened more lustrous than ever in their surprised negation. 
 "Wish? oh, no!" 
 
 " Well, do not leave me yet, then. Come within, and let me see, though no 
 Titian, if I can paint you with your crown of flowers. Your Padre Curato will 
 feel no anxiety, I sent a messenger to him to say you were here." 
 
 The gravest contrition stole over her face, she looked penitent as a chid- 
 den child. 
 
 "Oh, 'lustrissimo! I had forgotten him. How ungrateful, when he is so 
 good! How selfish one grows when one is happy! " 
 The naif confession amused him. 
 " Then you are happy with me? " 
 
 " Eccellenza," she said, under her breath, " it seems to me that I have been 
 happier than in all the years of my life."
 
 CHANDOS. 315 
 
 The reply pleased him. He had always loved to see happiness about him. 
 
 " I am glad it should be so. And do not believe that happiness makes us 
 selfish; it is a treason to the sweetest gift of life. It is when it has deserted us 
 that it grows hard to keep all the better things in us from dying in the blight. 
 Men shut out happiness from their schemes for the world's virtue; they might 
 as well seek to bring flowers to bloom without the sun." 
 
 He spoke again rather to his own thoughts than to her, but she understood 
 him. This young Tuscan, lost amidst the chestnuts beneath Vallombrosa, 
 had in her the heart of a Heloise, the mind of a Hypatia, though both were in 
 their childhood yet. 
 
 " Eccellenza," she said, hesitatingly, " that is true. If we keep light from 
 a plant, it will grow up warped. When they condemn, do they ever ask if what 
 they condemn had a chance to behold the light ? Perhaps perhaps if my 
 mother had been happy she would not have been evil, as they call her ? " 
 
 The color burned hotly in her face, but her eyes were raised in wistful en- 
 treaty to him; it was but very vaguely that she understood the shame that she 
 was made to feel was on her birth, but very dimly that she comprehended some 
 vast indistinct error with which her dead mother was charged. 
 
 The question touched him with great pity. 
 
 " Poverina" he said, caressingly, " do not weary your young life with those 
 subtleties. You do not know that error lies at all upon your mother's history; 
 who can, since you say that history is wholly unknown, even to her very name ? 
 It may be that the thing the world your little woodland world, at least 
 blames in her was some unrecognized martyrdom, some untold unselfishness. 
 At all events, be she what she will, you are stainless and blameless; all you 
 need seek is to be so forever." 
 
 She looked at him with a look of passionate, of intense, yet of restrained 
 feeling, which told him how well she would love some day, and how bitterly 
 she would suffer. 
 
 " I thank you, eccellenza," she said, her voice very low, " more for those 
 noble words than for the life that you saved me." 
 
 The brief answer was very eloquent, eloquent of her nature and of her 
 gratitude. He said no more, but led her within to the old hall, only fit for a 
 summer residence for an artist, or a scholar sufficently content with its classic 
 charm and forest wildness to bear its scant accommodation. An easel stood 
 before the open colonnade facing the gardens; he paused before it, and 
 glanced at her. A lovelier theme never lured any painter's brush, with the 
 fresh crown of lilies and rose-buds and light-green blossoms of ivy shaking 
 their dew upon the gold-flaked shower of her hair. He looked at her, then he 
 threw aside the colors he had taken up. 
 
 " Twenty years ago I could have given your picture there," he said, half
 
 316 OU IDA'S WORKS. 
 
 wearily. " Now I have not the heart to paint you, my fair child. I have not 
 the great inspiration, youth." 
 
 Twenty years ago he would have found no hour more beguiling than that 
 spring morning with the young Tuscan, bringing the bloom of her beauty and 
 of her crown of flowers out on the canvas; now it only recalled to him all he 
 had lost. 
 
 A shadow stole over her eyes; he saw it, and turned back to the easel. 
 
 "Are you disappointed, poverina?" 
 
 She looked beseechingly in his face. 
 
 " I never saw any paintings except those in our little chapel." 
 
 " No? Well, then, I will try and give you your desire." 
 
 He took the colors and brushes up again, and, standing before the easel, 
 sketched her as she leaned against one of the pillars of the colonnade, the rich 
 glow and warmth of her young face but the brighter for the whiteness of the 
 lilies and the deep green of the leaves that circled her hair. He had both the 
 skill and habit of Art; and the impassioned brilliance of her beauty, with the 
 coronal of blossoms weighting her forehead with the weight of all diadems, rose 
 gradually under his hand out of the sea of brown opaque gloom on which it 
 was painted. The hours passed, and the picture grew; it beguiled him for the 
 time of heavier cares, and won him out of deeper thoughts; yet ever and again, 
 as he lifted his eyes and glanced at her, the weariness which had made him turn 
 from the task came over him again. He thought of so many golden hours, 
 when faces as fair had bloomed to fresh life thus on his canvas, and the glory 
 of his youth had been with him to lend its sweetness to the eyes, and teach the 
 language of love to the lips, of those he painted. The soft labor only recalled 
 to him so many days that were dead. 
 
 The noontide was intensely still, the heat of the sun quivered down through 
 the open arches of the colonnade; the picture grew clearer and richer beneath 
 his hand, and the blossoms faded where they crowned her head. She untwined 
 them and touched them mournfully. 
 
 " Ah, eccellenza, they are all dying! " 
 
 He smiled, not without sadness, too, though it was for deeper things than 
 the flowers. 
 
 "Never mind; you have had their sweetness. Be content with that. 
 Nothing endures." 
 
 " But it is better never to have had them than to see them withered! " 
 
 " I doubt that. If we should have been spared much pain, we should also 
 Have missed much joy." 
 
 His thoughts were with other things, though he spoke still in the figure of 
 the flowers. He had seen his own crowns wither and fall and be trodden under 
 foot, yet he would never have worn them. She looked at him in silence, rever-
 
 CHANDOS. 317 
 
 ently, wonderingly; she mused on what his history could be; she thought him 
 a king in exile. So, in a sense, he was. 
 
 There was an infinite shyness of him in her that gave her tenfold more 
 charm, it was so innocent, and so full of religious veneration. He seemed to 
 her like the archangels of her Church, so full of majesty, so full of pity. She 
 thought with him of all the grand, serene, lonely lives that she had read of in 
 the Latin legends. 
 
 He rose, and turned the easel to her. 
 
 " Castalia, do what even wise men never do; see yourself as you are." 
 
 She came forward, and looked, as the sun fell full on the work of a few hours, 
 and her countenance changed as by magic; a breathless surprise was on her 
 lips, a scarlet flush upon her cheeks, the light of an immeasurable admiration 
 and amaze beamed in her eyes. She stood entranced at the likeness of her- 
 self, as, with its diadem of blossoms, it gazed out at her from the brown 
 shadows of the background. 
 
 " Well ? " he asked her, smiling. 
 
 She turned to him bewildered and beseeching. 
 
 "Oh! 'lustrissimo, can it be? Am I as beautiful as that?" 
 
 " Did the river and the fountain never tell you so before ? " 
 
 Her head drooped, the color in her cheek deepened; her innocent delight 
 had no thought of vanity, but at his words she remembered what she looked on 
 was herself. 
 
 " And yet it is beautiful! " she murmured, very low, as though in apology. 
 " And if I be really like it " 
 
 " What then ? " 
 
 A prouder, more passionate glory flashed into her face; she lifted her head 
 with the royalty of a daughter of emperors, mingled with a great softness of 
 regard. 
 
 " Then, I think, if I could once see the great world I might reign there, and 
 I might win some love, and not be scorned as peasants scorn me here. Would 
 it not be so, eccellenza? " 
 
 He paused a moment; the words touched him to compassion. How little 
 she knew that her nameless loveliness would only bring her in the "great 
 world " a sovereignty and a love that would be but added shame! Nor could 
 he tell her. 
 
 " Would it not be so, eccellenza ? " she asked him, eagerly again. 
 
 "Yes," he answered, slowly; "doubtless it would. But do not wish it, if 
 you be wise. Your diadems would not be so pure as the one that lies withered 
 there; your brows would soon ache under them, and for the love " 
 
 "Ah! " she said, softly, whilst the glow faded, and her eyes filled with tears 
 as she spoke with the pathos and the guilelessness of a child, " I long to be
 
 318 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 loved! All the children of Fontane have their mothers, who look brighter when 
 they see them near; but I am all alone. I have been alone so long! " 
 
 The words had an intense and touching piteousness in them; a harder 
 nature that her listener's was would have been moved by them. How could he 
 find the cruelty to tell her that the chances were as a million to one that the 
 only love she would ever meet in this world beyond the pine woods, to which 
 she vaguely looked as the redresser of her wrongs, would be one less merciful 
 to her even than the bitterness and loneliness which now visited on her in- 
 nocence and her youth the unproven errors of her dead mother? Twenty 
 years before he would have heard her with little thought, save to let his lips 
 linger on the brow whence the faded ivy-buds had fallen, and murmur to her 
 the tenderness which her unawakened heart longed for, as an imprisoned bird 
 longs for the shelter of summer leaves and the whispers of summer rivers; 
 now such a thought as this was distant from him as the wide unknown world 
 was far from her. 
 
 But pity her he did, profoundly. This nameless, motherless child, with her 
 radiant grace and her pioud instincts, was as desolate as any chamois-fawn lost 
 on the hills and driven as an alien from every herd with which it seeks a 
 refuge. 
 
 " You will have love, some day, poverina," he said, gently, " and as much 
 as you will; you will hardly lift such eyes as those to ask for it in vain." 
 
 She sighed, and her head sank lower, while she looked still at the painted 
 likeness of herself. She was unaware of any tribute to her beauty in his words; 
 she thought he meant that some, one day, would pity her. 
 
 " Ah, eccellenza," she answered, wearily, " where is the worth of love, if 
 with it is scorn ? " 
 
 The thoughtless taunts and tlie careless jests which among the peasantry 
 had been cast at her from her birth up as a foundling rather in the mothers' 
 jealousy of her face and the children's resentment of her love of solitude, than 
 from any cruelty or any real contempt- had sunk deeply into her nature, 
 rousing rebellion and disdain wellnigh as much as they caused sorrow and a 
 vague sense of shame. 
 
 He saw how great a shipwreck might be made of her opening life, even 
 from the very purest and loftiest things in her, if this outlawry banned her long, 
 if this passion of mingled defiance and humiliation were fostered by neglect 
 He spoke on that. 
 
 " Scorn! Why dwell on scorn ? It is unworthy of you. It is a word that 
 may bring a pang to those who merit it by their own ill deeds; it need have no 
 sting for any other. Keep your life high and blameless, and you will afford to 
 treat scorn with scorn." 
 
 She did not reply to him with words, but she flashed on him with an answer-
 
 CHAN DOS. 319 
 
 ing glance the night-like lustre of her eyes, in an eloquence, in a comprehension, 
 in a promise, that accepted his meaning far more deeply and more vividly than 
 by speech. He saw that she might be led by a cord of silk, that she would 
 not be driven by a scourge. 
 
 He stood a few moments in the shadow of the colonnade, later, when she 
 had left him, looking at the painting that had grown out of the deep, sombre 
 backwork by the work of his own hand, the head alone luminous, from the evil 
 of gloom around it, with its spiritual radiance, crowned by that wealth of 
 flowers; he looked, then turned it aside towards the wall, so that the richness 
 of color no longer smiled out of the opaque shadows, and went within to his 
 solitude. That face, gazing out from the darkness under the diadem of woven 
 blossoms, seemed like the phantom of his own dead youth. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 "SEIGNEUR! AYEZ PITHS." 
 
 NEVER in the rich days of the Cinque Cento, of the Dandolo age, when the 
 cities of Italy were filled with pomp and mirth and music, when the mighty 
 palaces were wreathed with flowers that lent their bright blush to the white 
 stone and glowed over the black marbles, when the dark arches framed 
 hair like the gold arras that draped the balconies, and lips ripe as the scarlet 
 heart of the rose that glowed in their bosom, and eyes that sent men to far 
 Byzantium, or to the oaths of the Templar, with the riot of burning thoughts 
 which drove their steel with fiercer thrust into the Paynim foe, never among 
 those " dear dead women," whose lost loveliness the poet mourns, was any 
 beauty rarer or more lustrous than that of the young Tuscan who had grown up 
 under the forest-shadows below Vallombrosa, scarce more tended, not more 
 heeded, than one of the passion flowers that bursts into its glorious bud unseen by 
 any eyes above the broken stone of some ruined altar of Pan. Though her years 
 were so few that the fulness of her beauty might yet be scarcely reached, she 
 had already the splendor of a Titian picture on her, the superb grace, wild as a 
 deer, proud as the daughter of Caesars, that here and there still lingers, as 
 though to verify tradition, in the women of Campagna or of Apennine. 
 
 The loneliness of her childhood, the consciousness of a ban placed on her, 
 the haughty instincts which had weakened in self-defence against the shafts of 
 scorn, the solitary and meditative life which she had led, had lent her a certain 
 patrician pride, a certain thoughtful shadow; a wistful pain sometimes gazed 
 out of the depths of her blue-black eyes; a lofty rebellion sometimes broke
 
 320 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 through the dreaming gladness of her smile. She was happy, because she was 
 young, because she was sinless, because she had the innocence which finds its 
 joy in the caress of a bird, in the radiance of a sunset, in the mere breath and 
 consciousness of existence; but she had the pang of wounded pride, the burden 
 of a scarce-comprehended shame, and the vague, bitter, impassioned longing of 
 a mind too ardent and too daring for its sphere; and these gave their character 
 to her face, their hues to her youth; these made her far more than a mere child, 
 however lovely, can be. She was like Heloi'se ere her master had become her 
 lover, and while her eyes, as they gazed on the Greek scroll or the vellum 
 Evangeliarium, were brilliant with the light of aspiration and dark with the 
 thoughts of a poet, but had never yet drooped, heavy with the languor and 
 burning with the knowledge of love. 
 
 From the aged priest she had learned all his scholarly lore that plunged 
 deep into the life of the past, and drank deep of Latin and Hellenic culture; he 
 had loved the rugged roads of wisdom, the unfathomed sea-depths of knowl- 
 edge, the buried treasures of cloister folios and of crabbed copia, she had 
 loved them too. With no other in the obscure hill-side, to which fate had con- 
 demned him, to give him sympathy or understanding in these things, the stern 
 old man had taken eager pleasure in steeping with them the virgin soil of a 
 young and thirsty mind. In the bare, gray, narrow chamber of his dwelling, 
 with its single lancet window through which crept the mellow sunlight from the 
 cloudless skies, the fair head of the child Castalia, with its weight of burnished 
 tresses, had bent above the huge tomes and the century-worn manuscriptum 
 for hour on hour, like Heloi'se in the cell of the canonry. She had a passionate 
 love of those studies; and, whilst they filled her mind with great and impersonal 
 thoughts, they did much to console her for her fate, and much to enrich her 
 intelligence far beyond her years and her sex. They, and the beauties of the 
 earth and the seasons, were her sole pleasures. The priest's mother, under 
 whose roof she lived, was nearly ninety years, descript and harsh, who, well 
 as she loved her foundling in her heart, could be no aid or associate to her. 
 With the peasantry, the people who maligned her unknown parent, she would 
 have no converse in their flower- feasts and their vintage celebrations. She 
 lived alone with the learning of dead ages and the fragrance of a forest-world. 
 
 Some, such an isolation would have maddened or ruined; Castalia, with a 
 singular vividness of imagination, and a proud patience beneath the passionate 
 warmth of her nation, had received through it a higher nature than any other 
 and happier life could have developed. 
 
 She was a poem, with her aristocracy of look that might have sprung from 
 some great race like the Medici or the Medina-Sidonia, and with her slight, 
 sad, all-eloquent story, that needed no detail to fill it up; with her touching 
 desolation of circumstance and of destiny, and her brilliant youth that in its
 
 CHAN DOS. 321 
 
 elasticity and its enthusiasm broke aside all barriers of doom and pain and 
 found its careless joy God-given from a song-bird's carol, from a cloister- 
 scribe's story, from the tossing of a sea of green rushes in the wind, from the 
 dreams of an outer world, unknown and glorified in fancy into paradise. She 
 was a poem in the spring-time of her life and in the spring-time of the year. 
 
 The smile of women's eyes had no beckoning light for him, the whisper of 
 women's allurement no sorcery for his ear; he had been a voluptuary in an 
 earlier time, but he had passed through bitterness and poverty, and sensuous 
 charms had ceased to hold him. Yet there was enough of the poet lingering 
 in him to make him vaguely feel some memories of youth and some tenderness 
 of pity arise as he looked on the bright head that he painted with its diadem of 
 flowers, on the opening life that he had found in this beech-wood nest. Had 
 chance not thrown her on him, he would never have sought her; brought to 
 his protection, to his compassion, she won her way to him in the spring of the 
 divine Tuscan year as some forest-fawn whom' he should have found wounded 
 and beaten in the storm might have come to his hand in after-days, and been 
 caressed for the sake of its past peril and its present gratitude. 
 
 He had sought the seclusion of the old Latin villa for the isolation which he, 
 a writer and a thinker of whom the world spoke, often preferred to the life of 
 cities, under gray Alpine shadows, in still Danubian woods, by olive-crested 
 Southern seas, or amidst the Moorish ruins of a Granadine landscape. Wealth 
 he had none; he was poor; but as each young year awoke in its renaissance, 
 he liked to have around him the richness of color and fragrance, the beauty of 
 the earth's dower, that needed no purchase, but could be made his own by each 
 who loved it well enough to understand its meaning. 
 
 In the monastic twilight and silence of the old classic hall, the painting with 
 the crown of flowers glowed brightly and vividly like a living thing from out 
 the gloom; and with the deep studies and the solitary thoughts which had here- 
 tofore usurped him, the memory and the presence of this fair child mingled, 
 not without a charm, a charm which had something of recollection. The re- 
 membrance was fugitive, and he could never bring it clearly before his knowl- 
 edge; but it was there, and strong enough to make him seek more of her 
 history. The search was futile: there was no more to know; her mother had 
 died, mute and nameless, and whence she came there was no record there was 
 not even a suggestion to show or to hint. One thing alone was certain; her 
 mother had worn no marriage-ring, and the only word marked on the child's 
 linen was the single one Castalia. 
 
 The woman had been of great beauty, the peasants said, though worn and 
 haggard, a Southern beauty, with eyes that burned like flame, and a terrible 
 wandering look; but she had been utterly exhausted when she had reached 
 Fontane, and had lain almost speechless, until in the middle of the hot, heavy, 
 
 lL 11
 
 323 UIDAS WORKS. 
 
 tempestuous night she had looked with a glance that all could read from the 
 face of the priest to the sleeping form of the child, and had sighed wearily and 
 restlessly, and died. 
 
 The blank in the history made it but the more mournful, the more suggestive. 
 An exceeding pity moved in him, as he heard, for the life ushered in in such 
 abandoned desolation, and for which there seemed no haven open save the 
 cloister, a fate as barbarous for her radiant and impassioned loveliness, which 
 not even the melancholy of her fate could dim, as to wring the glad throat of a 
 song-bird in the full rush of its forest melody. With him at least she was 
 happy, she who had never known what happiness was, except such forms of it 
 as the sweet, irrepressible intoxication of the mere sense of existence which 
 youth gives, and the joys that a vivid imagination and a passionate, poetic tem- 
 perament confer. In his presence she was happy, and he could not refuse it to 
 her. Few days passed without his seeing her, in the beech-grove where he had 
 first glanced at her by the broken fountain, in the pine-woods sloping up towards 
 Vallombrosa, in the deserted gardens or in the ruined hall of his own Latin 
 villa. He had no thought in it save that of compassion, even whilst her lus- 
 trous eyes vaguely recalled him his past; and in the untutored thoughts that had 
 fed in these hill-solitudes on the legacies of the Hellenic schools and the liter- 
 ture of the Renaissance, he found the wakening intellect of a Corinna. Love 
 had long been killed in him; it was a thing of his youth, never, he believed, 
 like that youth, to revive, and no touch of passion mingled with the pity she 
 aroused in him; but that pity was infinitely gentle, and to her the most precious 
 mercy that her life had known. 
 
 In her home, silence and austerity reigned with the stern simplicity of the 
 primitive Church. From the peasants she met with at best a good-natured in- 
 solence that was to her instinctively imperial nature worse than all neglect; from 
 him alone she met with what ennobled her in her own sight, and filler her to- 
 wards him with a passionate gratitude and veneration that was only not love be- 
 cause no knowledge of love had dawned on her and because an absolute sub- 
 mission and awe were mingled with it. To her he was the incarnation of all sub- 
 lime lives that she had dreamed of over the histories of Plutarch, and Tacitus, 
 and Claudius, of Augustin, and Hildebrand, and Basil ; to her he was as an em- 
 peror to his lieges, as an archangel to his devotees; all grand and gracious 
 things to her seemed blended in him, and all lofty and royal lives of poet, 
 saint, or king with which her memory was stored seemed to her met in his. It 
 was not love that she bore him; it was something infinitely more uncoscious and 
 more idealized: it was an absolute adoration. 
 
 She did not know why the hours were a dead worthless space unless they 
 brought her to his presence, why the mere distant sound of his voice filled her 
 heart with a joy intense as pain, why any suffering he had bidden her would
 
 CHANDOS. 323 
 
 have been sweeter than any gladness, why the forest-world about her wore a 
 light it had never had before: she did not know; she only knew that all the 
 earth seemed changed and transfigured. He was not blind to it; it touched 
 him, it beguiled him, it pleased him; it was very long since anything had loved 
 him and been the happier for his smile; it was very long since these softer, 
 slighter things had come into his life, and they had a certain charm for him. 
 
 There had been a time when all women's eyes had gained a brighter light 
 at his approach, though that time lay far away in a deserted land; yet in some 
 faint measure it revived for him, as he saw the silent welcome, more eloquent than 
 all words, of this young Tuscan's glance; and to him she was but a beautiful 
 child, to be caressed, without deeper thought. 
 
 "Eccellenza ! " she said, hesitatingly, one day that he had paused by her 
 beside her favorite haunt by the Roman fountain in the black belt of the beech- 
 woods, " you tell me that I have talent; you say that my voice, when I sing 
 the Latin chants that you love best, is mus-ic the world would love too. Would 
 they do nothing for me in the world ? " 
 
 That "world" was so vague, so far off, so dim, so glorious to her! She 
 could not have told what she thought lay beyond those chestnut-belts that she 
 had never past; but her ideal of the unknown land was divine as Dante's of the 
 City of God. 
 
 He answered her slowly: he knew the fate to which her defenceless and 
 nameless beauty would there be doomed; but he could not find the heart to 
 break her fair illusion. 
 
 "They might, they would; but you are better and safer here in your 
 mountain shelter." 
 
 A quick sigh escaped her. 
 
 "Oh, no! " 
 
 " No ? How can you tell that ? You do not know what would await you. 
 Be happy while you may, Castalia; the world would crush you! " 
 
 She looked at him wistfully, while a grander power and aspiration than the 
 mere longing of a child for " fresh fields and pastures new " gleamed in eyes 
 that with a little while would burn with passion as they now glanced with light. 
 
 " It is only the weak who are crushed. They could not scorn me for my 
 birth and loneliness if I forced them to say, ' See! fate was harsh to her; but 
 God gave her genius and endurance, and she conquered! ' ' 
 
 The words and the tone moved him deeply, the fearless youth, with its 
 faith, its fervor, its courage, its sublime blindness of belief, recalled to him his 
 own. 
 
 "Ah, Castalia!" he answered, gently, "but the world loves best to dwarf 
 God and to deny genius. And genius in a woman! Cyril's envy stones 
 Hypatia, and casts her beauty to the howling crowds."
 
 304 OUIDA'S WORKS. 
 
 Her head drooped, but the look of resolve, though shadowed, did not pass 
 off her face. 
 
 "Perhaps! Yet better Hypatia's glory won with her death than along, 
 obscure, ignoble, useless life! You say, be happy here, 'lustrissimo: happy! 
 when all my future is the convent ? " 
 
 It was a great terror to her, that monastic doom to which the priest in- 
 exorably condemned her future; other provision he could make none for her. 
 She was so full of vivid, luxuriant, abundant, glowing life. Life was to her an 
 unread poem of such magical enchantment, an ungathered flower of such 
 sorceress-charm; and nothing opened to her except that living tomb! 
 
 He gave an involuntary-gesture of pain. 
 
 " God forbid ! Some fairer fate will come to you than that. To condemn 
 you to a convent-cell! it would be as brutal as the captivity of H61ol'se." 
 
 A brooding weariness passed over the beauty of her face. 
 
 "But Heloise was happier than I-should be. She had been loved once? " 
 
 There was no thought in her as she spoke, save the longing for tenderness 
 ever denied her, and an instinctive comprehension of the passion and the 
 sacrifice of Paraclete. 
 
 Where he leaned against a beech-stem above her, his hand touched her hair 
 lingeringly and tenderly, as it had done when he had brought her through the 
 storm, like a touch to a fluttering bird. 
 
 "You would love like Helo'ise, Castalia? " 
 
 She drew a deep, soft breath; she was always awed with the despair and the 
 beauty, half mystic, wholly sublimated to her, of that eternal tale. 
 
 "Ah! who would not? That alone is love! 'Quand I'empereur cut voulu 
 m'honorer du nom de son epouse, j'aurais mieux aimer etre appelee ta 
 maitresse! ' ' 
 
 The words of Heloi'se on her innocent lips, which uttered them with no 
 thought save of their devotion and their fidelity, their choice of slavery to her 
 lover rather than of imperial pomp with any other, had an eloquence and a 
 temptation greater than she knew. 
 
 He sighed almost unconsciously; it was the love of which he had dreamt in 
 his youth, dreamt, and never found. 
 
 " Castalia! you make me wish we had met earlier! " 
 
 The words escaped him involuntarily. She lifted her eyes in wonder: his 
 meaning she could not guess. 
 
 " Earlier, eccellenza! why? " 
 
 He smiled; he was glad that she failed to understand him. 
 
 " No matter! What is it you are reading there ? " 
 
 She lifted him the book; an Italian translation of an English romance, 
 " Lucrece."
 
 CHANDOS. 325 
 
 A shadow, weary and heavy, came on his face as he glanced through the 
 pages. 
 
 " You know it? " she asked him. 
 
 " Yes, I know it." 
 
 " I love it so well ! " she said, passionately. "It was left here by chance 
 years ago, by some travellers going through the Vallombrosa. It is beautiful ! 
 it is like the life of Heloise! It moves me as the winds do when they make 
 their music through the woods and seem as though they called on men to cease 
 from evil and remember God." 
 
 The words, fantastic, yet very eloquent in the Tuscan tongue, while her 
 eyes grew humid, and the color on her cheeks grew warm as the scarlet heart 
 of a pomegranate, were perhaps the truest homage the work had ever known. 
 
 He closed the book and gave it back. 
 
 " Since you feel it so, you give the author his best reward." 
 
 " But you must think it great, too ? " 
 
 " No; it is very imperfect. No one knew that better than he who wrote it." 
 
 " It is perfect to me. And who was he, its writer ? " 
 
 " You see his name there." 
 
 " Yes, his name; but his fate ?" 
 
 " Was, they say, a very common one. It was the fate of Icarus, who thought 
 himself a winged god and fell broken to earth." 
 
 " He never fell ignobly," she said, below her breath. " He strove to rise 
 too high, perhaps; and those who were earth-bound envied him, and shot him 
 down as hunters shot an eagle; but whoever wrote Jhat book would only gather 
 strength from any fall." 
 
 He answered her nothing. A little later, and he spoke of other things. 
 
 The spring deepened into early summer; he had been seven weeks in the 
 Latin villa since the day he had found her in the storm, and he saw her often. 
 He was beguiled with her, and the thoughts of her cultured fancy, all untinged 
 by the world's taint, as they were, had a certain charm for the scholar, not less 
 than her personal loveliness had a charm for one who had been, as the world 
 held, a libertine. But either passion was dead in him, or her defencelessness 
 lent her sanctity in his sight; for no warmer word or glance than that of a pity- 
 ing and pure tenderness ever came from him to teach her either his power 
 of hers. 
 
 She knew nothing of his history, not even his name; to the peasantry he 
 was simply " the stranger." He was sojourning here for the villegiatura, and 
 into his solitude none had ventured until she had been taken there by the haz- 
 ards of the mountain weather. Muse on what could be his history she often 
 did, but to question him on it she no more would have thought of than, in the 
 old legends of her Church, those whom angels visited thought of pressing curi-
 
 326 QUID AS" WORKS. 
 
 ously upon their reverenced guest. She followed other words of Helo'ise, " En 
 toi je ne cherchai que toi, rien de toi que toi-meme." It was he who was the 
 idol of her thoughts; what he was, whence he came, she never sought to know. 
 The kingship of the earth would not have seemed to her an empire too superb 
 for him to have forsaken. She would have believed whatever he should have 
 told her of himself, save evil. As it was, he told her nothing; and he spoke 
 her language and the dead Latin, which was equally familiar to her, so that he 
 might have been a Tuscan by birth, or, as her fancy imaginative to extrava- 
 gance sometimes could have almost conceived, have lived in those ages of 
 Augustan Rome or Gracchan Revolution of which he loved best to converse. 
 
 Utterly at his mercy she was: of peril to her from him she had no concep- 
 tion, what he had commanded she would have obeyed implicitly; of her own 
 danger she was profoundly ignorant; and that he could have erred she would 
 have no more believed than the simple fanatics of, her native beech-woods 
 would have believed in the error of the saints and seraphs to whom they prayed. 
 The very difference in their years, wide as it was, lent an additional charm to 
 their intercourse, and even an additional danger, since it lent it also an appar- 
 ent and fallacious security. 
 
 Later on that same day, returning through the forest above Fontane to the 
 ruined villa where he lived in the ascetic simplicity of a man whose only riches 
 lie in his own intellect and in the books that he can gather round him, he saw 
 her again, as the sudden break in the wall of leaves and the sudden descent of 
 the rocky pathway brought him to a gray antique broken bridge that spanned 
 what was now little save a dtied water-course, orchid-filled, with a narrow glim- 
 mering brown brook under the flowers. She was leaning over the parapet, rest- 
 ing her arm on a basket of fruit. There was the indolent reposeful grace of 
 her Southern blood in the attitude, but there was also something of depression; 
 and while a joyous light flashed into her eyes, he saw they had been dim with 
 tears. He paused beside her. 
 
 " Castalia ! what has vexed you ? " 
 
 " An idle thing, eccellenza." 
 
 " Nothing is idle if it have power to wound you. Tell me." 
 
 A proud pain, that was half of it scorn for itself and half the impatience to 
 repay scorn, was on her face as she raised it. 
 
 " It is my folly to be wounded! But as two contadine passed me a while 
 ago, they thrust out their lips with a smile that was wicked, and looked at me. 
 ' Altro! come la madre, cosi la figlia! ' And I knew that they meant disdain at 
 me and at her; and my heart ached because I could not revenge. Revenge is 
 guilt, the Padre Giulio says; it may be, but when they mock at her it would be 
 very sweet to me." 
 
 The strength of Southern vengeance gleamed for a moment over the soft-
 
 CHANDOS. 327 
 
 ness of her youth; he saw how easily the noble nature here might be driven to 
 desperation and to guilt. If the lash of scorn fell on her, it would never 
 chasten, but it would goad and madden into rebellion, perhaps into reck- 
 lessness. 
 
 " Poverina /" he said, caressingly, "evil be to those who cause you one 
 moment's pain. Does so much coarseness and cruelty exist even in your 
 primitive valley ? But do not heed them, Castalia; these women are beneath 
 your regret; and, remember, calumny can only lower us when it has power to 
 make us what it calls us." 
 
 Her glance gave him eloquent and grateful comprehension. 
 
 "Oh, 'lustrissimo! it is not their scorn that I heed; it is only I am afraid 
 that it may bring me yours. And death would be more merciful to me! " 
 
 The words touched him deeply, more deeply than he showed; for he 
 sought to turn her thoughts from herself, as he took her hands in his own and 
 looked down into the splendor of her eyes. 
 
 " Castalia, never fear that. I honor you for what you are, my child. Your 
 mother's error if error it were can never rest upon you; and the world is 
 often sorely at fault in its judgments. It condones its thieves, and condemns 
 its martyrs. But you are rash to attach so much value to my opinion. You 
 do not know who I am, whence I come, what my history may be." 
 
 " But I know you. Had I sought to know more, woTild you not have thought 
 me unworthy of so much ? The fable of Psyche is so true; where doubt has 
 once come, faith is dishonored." 
 
 He smiled at the fable she chose, and her insight into human nature. 
 
 " Right. I think Eros was justified in taking wing and in never returning; 
 but still there is such a thing as prudence. How can you tell that some guilt 
 does not rest on me ? that I come here because I am a marked and disgraced 
 man ? that I may be utterly unlike all you believe me ? " 
 
 She looked at him proudly and yet sadly. 
 
 " Eccellenza, those who bear guilt do not look as you look; and, whatever 
 you be, you are great." 
 
 " No ! I told you I am a fallen Caesar, and dropped my purples long ago." 
 
 " But his purples are the least part of Caesar's greatness." 
 
 " Not in the world's estimate. Come let me see you homeward." 
 
 He raised the load of yellow gourds and luscious summer fruits, glowing 
 amidst leaves and wild flowers, as he spoke; she tried to take it from him. 
 
 "Oh, illustrissimo ! do, not do that ! You must not carry a burden." 
 
 " I have carried many," he said, half with a smile. She looked at him still, 
 with that reverent, wistful look; she wondered what he had been. 
 
 " You have ? But they must have been the weight of royalties, then. Give 
 me the fruit ! Pray do not take it for me ! "
 
 328 OU IDA'S WORKS. 
 
 "Castalia, an emperor is bound to serve a woman. We have that lingering 
 chivalry among us, at least." 
 
 The rocky road wound down under beech-boughs, and over green turf, and 
 into the twilight of dense woods, till the aerial campanile of Fontane rose in its 
 delicate height like a frozen fountain out of the nest of leaves. The Tuscan 
 sunset, in all its glow, was just on earth and sky as they entered the valley where 
 the white spire and the masses of chestnut-wood stood out against the intense 
 blue of the early summer heavens. 
 
 " Coleridge cried, ' O God, how glorious it is to live ! ' " he said, rather to 
 himself than to her, as they came into the rosate radiance. " Renan asks, ' O 
 God, when will it be worth while to live ? ' In nature we echo the poet; in the 
 world we echo the thinker." 
 
 The light was gone, the twilight fallen, as he left her at the little chalet 
 where the charity of the Church sheltered her. He drew her to him with an 
 involuntary action of tenderness. 
 
 " Castalia, good-night! " 
 
 Her eyes looked up to his in the shadows heavily flung around them by the 
 bending boughs. The infinite beauty of her face had never been more fair; 
 almost unconsciously, something of the softness of dead years revived in him; 
 he stooped his head, and his lips touched the flushed warmth of her cheek in 
 farewell. The kiss startled her childhood from its rest forever; with it the 
 knowledge of love came to her. 
 
 A sudden consciousness, a sudden alarm, quivered through her; her heart 
 beat like a caught bird, in a sweetness and joy that made her afraid of their 
 terrible strength and made her tremble before him as though criminal with 
 some great guilt; she stood like an antelope that in its wild, shy grace only 
 tempts the hunter the more: what she felt had a strange awe for her, and as 
 strange a rapture. Though given only in compassionate tenderness, the caress had 
 taught her the meaning of passion; her color burned, her eyes sank under his. 
 
 At that instant the tread of a heavy step was heard on the silence; she fled 
 instinctively, fleet as a fawn, into the deepening shadow of the arched and 
 open door; he turned away and went back up the woodland road to his own 
 dwelling. Fronting him, in a faint ray of dying light that slanted through the 
 wall of chestnut and of cypress, the old priest stood, his grave, austere features 
 rugged as the riven rock. 
 
 " Give me a word with you," he said, simply. 
 
 He whom he checked in his path looked up and paused; he had scarcely 
 seen, and as scarcely thought of, the self-appointed guardian of Castalia. 
 
 " A word with me? Assuredly." 
 
 The priest looked at him with searching eyes, in which there was still a 
 great sadness and a great appeal.
 
 CHANDOS. 329 
 
 " Whoever you be," he said, briefly, " whether great, as I deem by your 
 bearing, or no, 1 speak to you not as the one owning authority, nor as one hold- 
 ing myself God's command, but simply as man speaks to man." 
 
 "Say on." 
 
 " Then I say, have you thought what it is you do now ? " 
 
 " Do? I fail to understand you." 
 
 He spoke patiently still; but there was a touch of intolerance in the tone. 
 
 " I will make my meaning plainer, then," said the Italian, who had 
 in him the temper with which Savonarola upbraided the Triple Tiara and 
 preached the ruthless doctrine of renunciation. " Do you mean to ruin that 
 young life? " 
 
 "God forbid!" 
 
 He meant it in utmost sincerity, and surprise was the strongest feeling in 
 him for the moment. The disavowal softened the Tuscan. 
 
 " Then do you know that they speak evil of her on your score ? Do you 
 know that, through you, they say the shame of her mother is hers ? " 
 
 His face grew dark. 
 
 "They lie, then, utterly! Teach your flock more charity to youth and 
 innocence, holy father. And let me pass; I cannot wait for this catechism." 
 
 The Tuscan bent his head, with a certain dignity. 
 
 " I thank you for that denial. I did not need it; her eyes are too clear 
 beneath mine. Yet allow me a few words more. You give her no love, prob- 
 ably; but you are already far more her religion than the creed I have taught 
 her from infancy. How will you use your power over her ? " 
 
 He was silent; his thoughts were little with the speaker, he was thinking of 
 the lips that had trembled beneath his own. 
 
 " You may lead her where you will; I confess it you! You, a stranger, who 
 saw her first but a few weeks ago, have a force to mold and sway her that I 
 never won, I who have reared her and succored her wellnigh from her birth," 
 said the Italian, with a bitterness in which was a yearning pain. " It may be 
 that I have seemed harsh to her; it may be that I have missed my way, that, 
 while I strove overmuch to shield her from her mother's error, I forgot to woo 
 her trust and her heart, I forgot that a child, and a woman-child above all, 
 needs love and needs indulgence. It may be that I erred. Be it so or not, 
 you can command her; and I can no more stay her from your sorcery than I 
 can check the winds. Yet you say you would not blight her life; you speak as 
 though you had pity on her. You say you leave her innocence sacred; but 
 will you, then, rob her of peace ? You say you will not lead her to dishonor: 
 will you not spare her also the bitterness of a knowledge that must destroy the 
 virginity of the heart ? You say the slanderers lie: will you not, then, be 
 wholly merciful, and leave her ere she learns to love you too well ? You can
 
 330 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 make her the plaything of an hour; but it will only be at the price of her 
 whole future." 
 
 He stood silent still while the old priest spoke. The appeal surprised him, 
 and awakened many thoughts that had never before dawned in the compassion 
 and tenderness he had felt to Castalia, to this young girl who looked at. him 
 with such spaniel-eyes of love and brought him back so many memories of his 
 youth. He had not thought of cost to her. 
 
 " Your lips touched hers to-night," pursued the Tuscan. " The woman who 
 has once felt shame under a caress has already lost half her purity. You gave 
 her in that a memory which will burn into her heait with humiliation every 
 time that she thinks of you. You may mean her no injury now; but you are 
 one who has lived long, doubtless, in the pleasures of the world: how will it end 
 if you remain near her? " 
 
 He raised his eyes, where they stood in the early evening light falling so 
 faintly through the parting in the barrier of cypress, and looked full at the 
 Italian. 
 
 " You plead with me for her; to what fate do you condemn her yourself? 
 The cloister ? Have you ever thought what it is to bury her in that tomb 
 which cannot claim even the repose of the graves of the dead ? to bar her out 
 from light and laughter and melody and joy ? to chain her loveliness where 
 no kiss shall ever meet her own, no heart beat on hers, no eyes see her smile, 
 no lover seek her embrace ? Have you ever thought what you will do when 
 you seal down such luxuriant life as hers to beat, and struggle, and desire, and 
 pine, and wither, and perish alone ? Yours is cruelty, not mine! " 
 
 The Tuscan's furrowed cheek grew paler; he was too deep a scholar to be a 
 fanatical churchman, and in his close, stern rugged soul he cherished Castalia 
 tenderly. 
 
 " I mean no cruelty, Christ knows. But I have no other shelter for her, 
 and there at least she would have innocence." 
 
 " Innocence forced and untempted ! what is it better than sin? Let her take 
 her chance in the width of the world, let her even know trial and poverty and 
 temptation, let her be a wanderer and a beggar, if she must; but leave her the 
 free air, and the forest liberty, and the human love that is her right, and the 
 possibility at least of joy ! " 
 
 The Italian sighed wearily. 
 
 "I strive for the best; and my cruelty is not as yours. I would save her 
 at least from actual pain; you if you do her no worse thing will bind on her 
 a passion and a regret that will consume her to her grave. I know her nature; 
 and though she has the innocence, she has not the inconstancy, of a child: she 
 will not forget. There is but one way to spare her: leave her." 
 
 He was silent a while longer, as the priest's words ceased, and there was no
 
 CHANDOS. 331 
 
 sound save the falling of a water-course rushing downward through the gloom 
 and through the leaves. 
 
 " I will leave her," he said, at last, " if you in turn give me your word 
 never to force her life into a convent ! " 
 
 The Tuscan bent his head. 
 
 " I promise." 
 
 " So be it. I will make her no farewell ; let her think me heartless of her, 
 if she will; so she will best forget." 
 
 Then he went upward through the evening shadows, along the slope of the 
 hills, to the loneliness of the Latin villa. In the gloom of the deserted hall 
 the picture of the diadem of flowers alone gleamed radiant as a ray of the 
 moonlight fell across it. He paused before the painting, and a sudden pity 
 stole on him. 
 
 The promise that he had given had a certain pain for him. It was not love 
 that he felt for her. There had been too great a darkness on his life for the 
 softness of that passion easily to revive; but he had found a pleasure in once 
 more, after lengthened solitude, being the subject of that sweet, reverent 
 adoration; and she had inspired him with an unspeakable compassion for her 
 fate, which could not let him muse without anxiety upon that fate's inevitable 
 future. There had been a time when the lavishness of his gifts and the influ- 
 ence of his word could have lifted her into happiness as easily as a flower is 
 transplanted into sunlight from the shade; but that time was far away. He 
 felt the hardest pang of poverty to those of generous nature: he had nothing 
 to give. 
 
 He had offered the promise, and he would redeem it because she was 
 motherless and defenceless, and therefore sacred to him; but he stood and 
 looked at the flower-crowned painting with a pang of regret. 
 
 " It is a harsh mercy that he asks of me," he thought; " and yet what else 
 should be the end ? Love is no toy for me now; and she is worthier of a hap- 
 pier fate than to be the passing fancy, the consolation of an hour, to a worn 
 and wearied life." 
 
 On the morrow, ere the sun was high, he was far from Vallombrosa.
 
 332 GUI DA'S WORKS. 
 
 BOOK THE SEVENTH. 
 
 Let go thy hold when a great wheel goes down the hill, lest it break thy neck with fol- 
 lowing it; but the great wheel that goes up the hill, let him draw thee after. 
 
 SHAKSPEARK. 
 
 He that calls a man ungrateful, sums up all the evil that a man can be guilty of. 
 
 SWIFT. 
 
 If the deed were evil, 
 Be thou contented, wearing now the garland. 
 
 SHAKSPEARK. 
 
 L'artiste est un dieu tombe qui se souvient d'un temps ou il creait un monde. 
 
 ARSENE HOUSSAYE. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 "DO WELL UNTO THYSELF, AND MEN WILL SPEAK GOOD OF THEE." 
 
 THE member for Darshampton sat at breakfast in his house in town, 
 a fine mansion, whose rental was two thousand a year, yet in whose unostenta- 
 tious and solid comfort there was the impress of sterling wealth, but not a trace 
 of parvenu arrogance or ill taste. It was luxurious, certainly; but withal it was 
 quiet, subdued, and bore the impress of a plain sobriety, but a settled affluence. 
 There was no " veneer " in a particle of it, and a good deal of it even had that 
 ugliness which in this country is considered a voucher for practical utility and 
 moral virtue. The fashion of all its decorations and garniture had little beauty; 
 they were angular and commonplace, but they were never florid, and their gold 
 was real gold, their velvets were real velvet. 
 
 He sat at breakfast in his dining-room, which saw given, season after sea- 
 son, the very best dinners in town. It was a long, low room, hung with crim- 
 son and with a few fine pictures; at the farther end was a white bust on a pillar 
 of jasper: it was the bust of a long-dead statesman, Philip Chandos. The 
 member for Darshampton was taking his breakfast, surrounded with a sea of 
 morning papers; he had already done two hours' hard work with his secretary,
 
 CHANDOS. 333 
 
 dictating, annotating, reading reports, computing satistics, conning over precis. 
 Leisure, indeed, was a thing he never knew; untiring, elastic, indefatigable, un- 
 sparing, he was an admirable man of business, and every moment of his day 
 was consumed in a labor seemingly borne as lightly as it was in reality thoroughly 
 done, whatever its natrre. 
 
 Public life was his natural sphere; to it he brought a brain, ever vigilant, 
 an energy ever unconquerable, a facility that might have been almost too 
 facile had it not been corrected by a keen and vigorous patience that would 
 never slur over anything, and that searched out the minutest points of every 
 subject. Yet the enormous variety, and the intensity of application that char- 
 acterized his work, told in no sort of way on his health: he felt well, looked 
 well, slept well; he never found any tax on his strength touch him, more than 
 if he had been made of oak or granite; he never knew what pain or what weariness 
 was. He reaped now the recompense of the training, the temperance, and the en- 
 tire freedom from all license in vice that he had imposed on himself so severely 
 throughout his early manhood. His eyes were as bright, his skin as clear, his 
 teeth as white, his smile as merry, as twenty years before; John Trevenna was 
 unchanged, unchanged in form and feature, in manner and in mind. In the 
 first, the man was too healthily framed to alter much with time; in the latter, 
 he was too integrally original, and bore too thorough and marked an idio-- 
 syncrasy, to alter while he had life. He cut his impress on the world about 
 him, he did not take his mold from it: men of this type change little. More- 
 over, Trevenna had Success: it is a finer tonic than any the Pharmacopoeia 
 holds, specially for those who, like him, are too wise to let it be also a stimulant 
 that intoxicates or an opiate that drugs them. 
 
 He had success of the richest and fullest. Slowly won, but surely, he had 
 mounted his cautious and victorious way to those heights that long ago had 
 been a goal of which men would have called him a madman ever to dream, and 
 had netted together the innumerable threads of his policies and his efforts, till 
 he had woven them into a rope-ladder strong enough and long enough to en- 
 able him to reach the power he had coveted from earliest boyhood. -His rise 
 had, in appearance, been gradual, yet it had been rapid in fruits and in attain- 
 ment; and there were few men living of whom so much was thought in the 
 present, from whom so much was expected in the future. The sedulous training 
 he had pursued so patiently had brought its own reward: none went to the 
 political arena more finely prepared for it; none had more completely gained a 
 footing and a power there. 
 
 The first words he had uttered in the House had told them his quality, had 
 told them that no ordinary man had come among them to represent that little 
 borough of the southwestern sea-board ; but he had been careful, and he had 
 been wise. He had not alarmed them with a sudden burst of talent; he had
 
 334 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 been Content to run a waiting race for the first, and to bide his time. He had 
 let his influence grow; he had been noted earliest rather for his admirable 
 common sense and his practical working-powers than for anything more brill- 
 iant; and gradually as his critical audience, who regarded him as an outsider 
 and an adventurer, became cognizant of his value, he allowed the true resources 
 and the real capabilities of his mind to be discovered. Festina lente was his 
 motto, and he had followed it with a patience the more marvellous in one whose 
 quick, energetic, prompt, caustic temper always urged him to instant action and 
 ironic retort. 
 
 Now he had his reward; his weight was immense, his popularity with the 
 large and wealthy and liberal mass of the country, extreme. Ministers dreaded 
 him, chiefs of his own party recognized in him the first of all their auxiliaries; 
 Government would have bought his silence with anyplace; the benches never 
 were so crowded as on a night when one of his watched-for and trenchant 
 speeches rang through the drowsy air of the Lower Chamber like the clear 
 stirring notes of a trumpet. He was rich; his commercial speculations, made 
 with that unerring acumen which distinguished him, had prospered and 
 multiplied a thousandfold; all he undertook succeeded. Those who had 
 sneered him down had become compelled to court and conciliate him; great 
 orders who had dubbed him nobody, and shut him with scorn outside their pale, 
 now learned to dread him as their direst opponent. Houses where he had used to 
 enter on sufferance now received him as an honored guest; statesmen who had 
 once blackballed him at clubs now would have given any splendid bribe he 
 would have taken to still his defiance or to secure his alliance. Against pres- 
 tige, prejudice, poverty, the sneer of the world, the antagonism of the nobility, 
 the uttermost disadvantages and difficulties of position, Trevenna had fought 
 his way into a foremost rank, and compelled his foes to acknowledge and to 
 dread the man whom they had laughed down as an insignificant farceur, a 
 nameless club-lounger. His conquest was grand; the indomitable courage 
 that he had brought to it, the exhaustless endurance with which he had sus- 
 tained defeat and humiliation, the untiring resolve with which he had kept one 
 aim in view so long and beaten down the barriers of class and custom, are the 
 most magnificent qualities of human life. The work was great, and greatly 
 done. The man who vanquishes the opprobrium of adverse orders and the 
 opposition of adverse circumstances is a soldier as staunch as the Barca brood 
 of Carthage; but the weapons with which the fight had been fought here were 
 foul as an assassin's, and the root, like the goal of the struggle, was envy. A 
 man may rise with an admirable perseverance and dauntlessness; but the 
 hatchets with which he carves his way up the steep shelving ice-slope may 
 nevertheless be blood-stained steel and stolen goods. We are too apt, in our 
 wonder and our applause at the height to which he has attained against all
 
 CHAN DOS. 335 
 
 odds, to forget to note whether his steps up the incline have been clean and 
 justly taken. 
 
 Trevenna's frankness, his bonhomie, his logical brain, his racy eloquence, 
 his practical working-powers, his taking candor, with which he avowed himself 
 of the middle classes, claiming no rights of birth, his cheerful and unerring 
 good sense, with which he would alike treat a political question by ex- 
 amining its business utility, and disarm a social sneer by disclaiming all pre- 
 tensions to rank or to dignity, charmed the world in general, paralyzed his aris- 
 tocratic foes, and pioneerd his way wherever he would, giving him a wide and 
 sure hold on the classes to whose sympathies he made his direct appeal. The 
 fine intrigues by which power had been secretly won to him, the merciless 
 knowledge with which he coerced those whose histories he held in a tyranny 
 none the less irresistible because tacit, the paths in which his finesses had 
 wandered to gather his hold on so many, the sinks out of which his wealth had 
 been taken, as gold is found in the sewers, the manifold infamies into which 
 his bright skill had dived, to issue from them with a terrible omnipotence, the 
 network of inimitable chicaneries, ever wisely to windward of the law, with 
 which he had overspread the world he had vanquished, the commercial gam- 
 bling in which he had filled his treasuries by a fluke, and doubled and quad- 
 rupled gains gotten by lies, the hearty, ironic, good-humored, rascally contempt 
 in which he held all mankind and disbelieved in all honesty, these were un- 
 known, unguessed, alike by the people who believed in him, by the aristocracies 
 who hated him, by the party who adored him, and by the world on which he 
 had, against odds so vast, graven the impress of his daring and splendid talent. 
 
 When the white block of marble shines so solid and so costly, who remem- 
 bers that it was once made up of decaying shells and rotting bones and millions 
 of dying insect-lives pressed to ashes ere the rare stone was ? 
 
 Trevenna's success was, like the bricks of the ancient temples, cemented 
 with the blood of quivering hearts; but it was all the firmer for that, and none 
 the less victorious. Now, where he sat in his dining-rcom, he glanced down 
 the leaders of his own especial organ, a journal that ever sounded " lo triumphe" 
 before him, glanced amusedly over the closing words of the column devoted 
 to the praise of " the most promising statesman we possess, the assured chief 
 of the future, the great orator by whom Darshampton is so nobly represented." 
 
 " Of unflagging energy," pursued his claqueur of the Communist, " of the 
 highest political probity, of a fixity of principle never to be turned from its 
 goal by the gilded bait of office, of talent most versatile, yet which never in- 
 terfere with his devotion to the smallest business detail or mercantile interest, 
 essentially English in creed, bias, and temper, preferring solid excellence to 
 the flashy fascination of superficial attainment, and signalized by cordial and 
 earnest sympathies with the wishes and the rights of the masses, it is to Mr.
 
 336 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 Trevenna that all thoughtful and advanced minds must inevitably look for prog- 
 ress and assistance in the future cf our nation. The laws, the liberties, the do- 
 mestic virtues of the hearth and home, the independence abroad, and the pros- 
 perity of internal interests, the maintenance of religion and morality, the secur- 
 ity of the birthright of freedom to the poorest life that breathes, all that are so 
 notably dear to every Englishman are equally precious to him; and their pres- 
 ervation from all foreign taint and alien tyranny is the object alike of his pub- 
 lic and private career. Conquest does not recommend itself to him as peace 
 and charity do; and the clash of arms is jarring on his ear when heard instead 
 of the whirr of a myriad looms, bread-winning and bread-giving. The welfare 
 of the vast industrial classes of Great Britain is at his heart before all else; and 
 to the sway which he exerts over the Senate, even when its members be most 
 strongly adverse to him, we may apply the trite lines of the ' ./Eneid/ ' Hoc tibi 
 erunt artes,' etc. etc." 
 
 So the Communist. Trevenna laughed: the lion had too much racy humor 
 in him not to enjoy the ridicule of his jackal's fine peroration. 
 
 " Very well, my good fellow," he thought, condescendingly. " Laid on a 
 trifle too thick, perhaps; and you will call the Commons a ' Senate,' and nothing 
 will cure you of trotting out your bit of school Latin, whether it quite fits or 
 not: still, it does very well. ' Virtues of the hearth and home;' ah? nothing 
 brings down the House like that. We're as blackguard a nation as any going 
 in vice, but we do love to amble out with a period about domestic bosh. 
 My puffs were neater when I wrote 'em myself; no gale blows you so bravely 
 along as the breeze you pick yourself out of the wind-bag. Who should know 
 so well as yourself all your most telling hits, your titbits of excellence, your 
 charming niceties of virtue? The puff perfect is the puff personal 
 adroitly masked. Mercy on us ! I do believe Htidibras is right, and the 
 cheated enjoy being cheated. If I told my dearly beloved masses, now, ' You're 
 a lot of uneducated donkeys, but you're my best stepping-stones, and so I 
 make you lie down and I get into your saddles,' they'd be disgusted to-morrow. 
 I talk liberties, moderated Socialism, philanthropy, and moralties; I wear the 
 Bonnet Rogue discreetly weighted down with a fine tassel of British prudence, 
 and they believe in me ! Can't, either, quite, surely ? And yet I don't know; 
 there isn't anything so easily taken in as a whole country. Nine-tenths of a 
 nation are such fools, that's where it is; of course the other tenth part do what 
 they like with them." 
 
 With which reflection on the aggregate of whom he was an honored repre- 
 sentative, Trevenna ate a rognon au mn de Madere. His delight in the infinite 
 jest of the world was unchanged; he enjoyed with an unction never sated the 
 whole of the vast burlesque to which he played the triumphant part of Arlec- 
 Qhino; his heart was as light as a boy's, and his humor as savory as Falstaff's.
 
 CHANDOS. 337 
 
 Having worn the robes of respectability of a grave and reverend signior, all day 
 long before the people, he would come home and toss them off with as mischiev- 
 ous a glee at the perfection with which he had played his part, as in earlier 
 days he had tossed aside his domino and mask after teasing the life out of 
 everybody at a masquerade. He ate his kidney, glancing over some other 
 journals that echoed the Communist with a more or less different wording, and 
 some Opposition ones that flattered him equally well by damning him so very 
 strongly that nothing but an acute dread of him could make them so bitter. 
 Of the two, perhaps these pleased him the best. Intense abuse may be, on the 
 whole, a surer testimony to your power then intense praise, and, moreover, he 
 was of that nature which is never so vigorously happy as when it has something 
 to combat. He was made of splendidly tough stuff, this man who had been so 
 long looked down upon as a mere town-chatterbox and diner-out; and he throve 
 on every added effort which endeavored to displace him, and only grew the 
 more firmly rooted for it. Breakfast done, and a first-rate cigar or two smoked, 
 he rose, nodded to the white bust at the end of the chamber with mischief in 
 his eyes, as though it were a living thing (he liked to see that bit of statuary 
 there, as soldiers like to see their enemy's standards droop on their mess-room 
 walls, in witness of hard-fought and successful war), and went out to his busy 
 day. He toiled none the less than he had done when self-educating himself 
 for the tribuneship he now filled; he was not a whit less punctual, arduous, and 
 methodical than he had been when he had ground logic and finance and laws 
 of exchange, while the world thought him an idle fldfieur; everything he under- 
 took was done with a conscientious thoroughness, none the less complete be- 
 cause its far-sighted motive was ultimate aggrandizement. Let him have risen 
 as high as he would, he would never have spared himself: he loved work for its 
 own pleasure, as a man loves swimming. 
 
 His party was out of office at this time, had been so for some two or three 
 years; whenever they should come in again, he knew they could not help but 
 offer him a seat in the Cabinet; well as many of them detested him, they dared 
 not risk his enmity or his opposition. To get them into office once more, 
 therefore, and write himself the Right Honorable John Trevenna, he labored 
 assiduously, and for the opposite faction with a terrible ability. He had so 
 weakened, undermined, countermined, impugned, ridiculed, arraigned, and 
 stripped bare their policies, that it was generally believed they would be com- 
 pelled before long to try an appeal to the country. They had no one strong 
 enough in debate, though they had several brilliant speakers, to oppose the 
 sledge-hammer force of his close arguments and the weight of his keen logic, 
 that felled their defences with its sharp pole-axe. 
 
 He accorded now two hours after breakfast to correspondence and such 
 matters; then he gave audience to a Darshampton deputation, who came in
 
 338 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 sturdily sullen, but were received with such a chatty familiarity, such pleasant 
 good nature, that they went out again docile and enchanted, and never had 
 time to remember till they were half-way home that they had extracted no 
 pledge from him and received not one single definite answer; then he saw some 
 score or more of different visitors, breathless with political anxiety or brimming 
 with political rumors; a private interview with a foreign ambassador, and a 
 confidential tte-a-tete with a great lord of his party, followed; then he saun- 
 tered into one or two of the Pall -Mall clubs, as full of news, wit, and good 
 humor as when he had made his repartees to get his dinners; then he drove 
 down to show at a couple of garden-parties at a French prince's and a Scotch 
 duchess's, vivacious, full of fun, charming the ladies as " so droll, so original ! " 
 and playing lawn-billiards as if he had not another stake in the world; then he 
 went to the House for a couple of hours and launched a short speech that told 
 like a rifle-shot; then he went to a dinner-party at a great chief's of his party; 
 and thence to an Embassy-ball. 
 
 There were wars and rumors of war political pending; there was agitation 
 in the great aristocratic ranks of opposition; there was excitement and intrigue 
 in the whole of the world of state-craft. It was a crisis, as the grandes dames 
 murmured with emphasis, and he liked to show these nobles, these hereditary 
 statesmen, these women who had once scarcely bowed to him as a " rank out- 
 sider," that he could take the emergency with all the sang-froid imaginable, 
 gossip as pleasantly as though no import hung on the night, and chatter with a 
 duchess about Tuileries tittle-tattle till he was called away and carried forcibly 
 off by a whip who was in the height of haste and trepidation. 
 
 " He will cut some work out for you," had the old duke once said of him; 
 and Trevenna made good his words. His party hated alliance with him, but 
 they no more dared alienate him than they dared have call him in Darshamp- 
 ton what they called him in secret, a demagogue. Of a truth he was no 
 demagogue; he was far too wise and far too cultured. He was simply a 
 sagacious, audacious, astute, and unerring politician, willing to lead the people 
 as far as it was his interest to do so, but not one step further, if they starved 
 by the thousand. 
 
 Many lords had come down to hear the Debate; the Ladies' and Strangers' 
 Galleries were full, the crowds outside the House packed close in expectation; 
 it was known that the fate of parties hinged chiefly on this night's issue. With 
 a gray paletot over his evening dress, he sauntered to his place, imperturbable, 
 nonchalant, looking as bright and as keen as though he were just going up to 
 the wickets at cricket. All eyes were on him; he was used to that by this time, 
 and liked nothing better. He loved to know that his brisk, elastic step, and 
 his good-humored, easy bearing, were as well known here as the haughty grace 
 of Philip Chandos once had been. The ambition of his life centred in the
 
 CHANDOS. 339 
 
 turn of the night; the hopes of his party centred in himself. It was his to 
 attack, and, if possible to defeat, the Government, and all the resources of his 
 intellect had been brought to meet the need; yet, as he took his seat, he was 
 as genial, as bright, as light-hearted, as though he were a schoolboy, and was 
 so without a shade of affectation in it. He had the qualities of a very great 
 man in him, and he loved the atmosphere of conflict. 
 
 His famous rival's speech closed: it had been brilliant, persuasive, subtle, 
 launching an unpopular measure with consummate skill, and fascinating, if it 
 failed to convince, all auditors. It was no facile task to reply to and refute 
 him. Trevenna rose, one hand lightly laid on the rail, the other in the breast 
 of his coat; on, his lips was his pleasant, frank smile: the Opposition had 
 learned to dread its meaning. The House was profoundly hushed as his voice, 
 perfectly moderated, but resonant, telling and clarion-like, pierced the silence. 
 He knew well how to hold its ear. 
 
 He was a master of the great art of banter. It is a marvellous force: it 
 kills sanctity, unveils sophistry, travesties wisdom, cuts through the finest shield, 
 and turns the noblest impulses to hopeless ridicule. He was a master of it; 
 with it he rent his antagonist's arguments like gauze, stripped his metaphors 
 naked, pilloried his logic and his rhetoric, his finance and his economics, and 
 left the residue of his ornate eloquence a skeleton and a laughing-stock. He 
 did this matchlessly, and did not do it too much: he knew the temper of his 
 audience, and never transgressed its laws of courtesy. He carried it with him 
 as by magic, and from his lighter weapons he passed on, and took up the 
 terseness of reasoning, the closeness of logic, the mathematical exactitude, the 
 shrewd, practical common sense, without which no speaker will ever thoroughly 
 gain the confidence and homage of the English Commons. It might not be the 
 silver eloquence of a Demosthenes, but it was the oratory suited above all to 
 his theme and to his place, classic, moreover, even whilst it was business-like 
 and restrained, as befitting a gathering of gentlemen, even whilst most auda- 
 cious, most pungent, most merciless in raillery and attack. 
 
 The House cheered him in riotous excitement as he sat down, and the su- 
 preme triumph of a triumphant life was given him. His speech did a rare thing 
 in St. Stephen's: it influenced the votes: the Government was defeated hope- 
 lessly on a great issue, and could have no choice but to resign. 
 
 There was the grandeur, if there was the insolence, of supreme success, self- 
 won, in Trevenna's eyes and in his thoughts, as he went out in the lateness of 
 the night with the cheers that had ratified his victory still seeming to echo in 
 his ear. He looked, as his carriage rolled through the gaslights, down the dark- 
 ling streets of Westminster, and thought of the night he had stood there as a boy 
 and trodden out the luscious Paris bonbons of a young child's gift. What he 
 had done since then !
 
 340 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 "Beaux seigneurs ! what of the outsider now?" he mused, with his victori- 
 ous smile on his mouth. In a week's time I shall be called the RIGHT HON. 
 JOHN TREVENNA; and they dread me so bitterly they will dare to refuse me no 
 place in the Cabinet that I choose to command." 
 
 "The ministry will go out. Sit down, and don't yawn: there is no end to 
 do," he said, curtly, to his secretary, as he threw off his paletot and entered his 
 library. It was nigh four in the morning; but his indefatigable elasticity and 
 energy knew no fatigue. As though just fresh to the work, he plunged into 
 correspondence that no precis-writing could have made terser and no diploma- 
 tist have surpassed for masterly surface-honesty and secret reticence. A splen- 
 did campaign was to be commenced. The army of attack had been triumphant; 
 the army of occupation was to be headed in the future. There would be 
 others higher than he in the titular dignities of office, but there would be none 
 to higher in virtual power. 
 
 " Ah, monseigneur," he thought, as he passed through his hall and glanced 
 at the great bust of the minister, " it is 7 who hold your sceptre." And he went 
 lie down as lightly as a boy of ten, to fresh and dreamless sleep. 
 
 " Do well unto thyself, and the world will speak well of thee." It was 
 rare indeed that ever now there was found one bold enough to murmur 
 against the wealthy speculator, the popular favorite, the astute politician, the 
 audacious and sagacious winner of all life's choicest prizes, the bitter word 
 that had long ago been cast at him, " adventurer." 
 
 Others forgot that old time; he did not. He loved to remember every jot 
 of it. He loved to remember the vow he had sworn in the midnight streets in his 
 childhood. He loved to remember every privation endured, every smart felt, 
 every insolence taken in silence, every long lonely night spent in hard toil and 
 pitiless study, while the merry world laughed around in its pleasures and vices. 
 He loved to count how much he had conquered, and to pay back jibes of 
 twenty years ago, treasured up and waiting their vengeance; he loved to make 
 men who had turned their back on him then bow before him now, and to glance 
 downward on the vast decline up which he had mounted, and to think how the 
 sureness of his foot and the keenness of his eye had brought him against all 
 difficulty to the table-lands where he now stood secure. All he forgot were 
 benefits. 
 
 With these triumphal thoughts did remorse ever mingle ? Did he ever 
 remember the cost to other lives at which so much of his victory had been 
 gained ? Did he ever give a flush of shame when he recollected how he had 
 rewarded evil for good, and bitten through with tiger-fangs the hand which had 
 loaded him with gifts, and betrayed and robbed and driven down to ruin the 
 most loyal friend that ever gave him fearless faith ? Never once ! Amidst 
 the paeans of success conscience has small chance to be heard, and the temper
 
 CHANDOS. 341 
 
 of Trevenna was proof against all such weakness. He would have said that 
 he knew neither form of ill-digestion, neither dyspepsia nor repentance. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE THRONE OF THE EXILE. 
 
 IT was in the boudoir of the great house of Lilliesford, shaded, fragrant 
 with innumerable plants, a room where coquetries of the softest would have 
 their fullest play, where, however, it was oftener that a political coterie wove 
 its silken meshes for men's souls and official places. There were times when 
 the great of the nation would listen there to the charming voices that murmured 
 of a " crisis; " there were times when foreign diplomatists, in a coin of vantage 
 beneath the bronze shade of broad Mexican leaves, would unwind other coils 
 than those of the floss silks that they held; there were times when ladies, in 
 this witching temple of secrecy, would believe they governed the universe 
 because they schemed for a party, and would think they had the making of 
 history because they had the gift of a place. Very beautiful women were seen 
 in it sometimes, but they were rarely the gay young sovereigns; they were 
 rather the older and more stately leaders of the world political. For of these 
 latter was the Countess of Clydesmore. 
 
 She sat there now, in the darkest depth of the shadow, her head slightly 
 bent, no light on the rich brown wealth of her hair or the sculpture-like per- 
 fection of her features. She was a woman whom her own great world revered: 
 no levity ever touched her name, no coquetry ever lowered her dignity. 
 Ambitious she was, though she scarce knew what for, rather for the simple 
 sake and sweetness of power and of prerogative than anything else. If her 
 heart remained cold as ice to the man whose name she graced and whose 
 children she had borne, if her young sons never saw any smile in her eyes, 
 but shrank from her in their infancy, chilled and afraid, her world did not 
 know this, and, had it known, would have thought it [no breach of the social 
 code. We lay blame to society because it judges from the surface: idle 
 blame: how else can it judge ? 
 
 She was a stainless wife, of a lofty purity of life; if in her soul she hated 
 with a hate intense as passion the man to whom she had bound captive her 
 beauty, if when she looked on the children she had brought him she pressed 
 her lips tight to hold back a curse on them because he was their father, who 
 could tell this ? None, save the husband who had heard another name than 
 his own murmured in the dreams of her bridal sleep, save the young boys
 
 342 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 who glanced at her with timid, troubled eyes, and wondered why, when, for 
 duty or for appearance, she had touched their cheeks with a kiss, she had 
 thrust them away with an involuntary revulsion as they saw her thrust a tire- 
 some dog. 
 
 Now Lady Clydesmore leaned back, musing of the prospects of her party. 
 She reigned for reigning's sake; she wove for weaving's sake; she was ambitious 
 because her nature could not choose but be so; she intrigued because she was 
 weary of her life and forgot herself a little the quicker in these cabals. It was 
 neither for her husband nor her sons that she labored: if the rising of her hand 
 could have made the one a king, she would not for his sake have raised it; if 
 by lifting it the others could have died out of her sight and out of her memory 
 and sunk into their graves, it would have been lifted as eagerly, as pitilessly, 
 as ever Roman matrons gave the sign for the slaughter in the arena. But the 
 acquisition of privilege and the vanity of her own splendid dominion were the 
 passions of her character: she had sickened long ago of the reign of her beauty; 
 the domain of intellectual and political pre-eminence remained to her, and she 
 had occupied it and usurped it. 
 
 The three ladies with her had their toy-dogs, in the shape of a young duke, 
 a Guardsman, and a foreign attache, at their side, but were talking now of one 
 who had also won his way to that closely-fenced and closely-crowded table-rock 
 of political strife. 
 
 " It could not have been formed without him," said one fair politician. 
 
 " Oh, no," assented a yet warmer partisan. " He could make his own terms." 
 
 " He was moderate to be content with the Colonial," murmured the Lady 
 of Lilliesford. 
 
 The Board of Trade might have done ? " suggested the first. 
 
 "Certainly not; he would not have taken it," negatived the second, Lady 
 Dorenavant, with a certain contempt. " The Foreign seals now " 
 
 "Oh, no," dissented her adversary; "we should have twenty wars on our 
 hands in as many weeks with his brusque, brief despatches. They would be 
 very Napoleonic; but he would say to the Pope, 'You belong to the past; off 
 with you ! ' and would write to France, ' We hate you, and you hate us: why 
 mince the matter ? ' He would not be conducive to European harmony." 
 
 Lady Dorenavant, a still brilliant matron, gave a lazy gesture of dissent. 
 
 " Is that all you know of him ? In the Foreign Office, or anywhere else, he 
 would always do just the thing that needed to be done, and no more. He can 
 keep Darshampton in good humor; it is more unmanageable, on the whole, than 
 Europe." 
 
 " I agree with you," murmured a third fair Chevreuse of politics. " I be- 
 lieve he would hold the Foreign portfolio and hold it well. He would keep 
 peace; but there would be no fog in his correspondence, and no beating about
 
 CHANDOS. 343 
 
 the bush. What he had to say would be said briefly, firmly, and with infinite 
 tact. The only pity is he was nobody." 
 
 " Everyone has forgotten that by now," said Lady Clydesmore, with a curl 
 of disdain on her thoughtful lips, that was followed by a darker and more bitter 
 shadow where she sat in the shelter of the curled tropic leaves. 
 
 "No: it is never forgotten and never forgiven," said the last speaker, with 
 delicate disdain; for she was a very keen wit, a very truthful temper, and de- 
 spised her own party now and then not a little. " But, you know as well as I, 
 we can't afford to appear to remember it. He is so much to us." 
 
 " I do not see there is anything to be forgotten," said Lady Dorenavant, 
 who piqued herself on being positively " Red " in her political tastes in theory, 
 but who would nevertheless never have set foot again in any house in which the 
 order of precedence had been violated in going down to dinner and the heraldic 
 dignities of her house been offended in any iota of ceremonial. " That is such a 
 miserable monoply, such an old-world opticism, to adhere so much to lineage. 
 For my own part, I never forget that the^greatest men of all nations have sprung 
 from the people. Life is too earnest, truth too broad, for these insignificant 
 class-distinctions." 
 
 " Quite so, dear," yawned her pretty, inconsequent antagonist. " We all say 
 that nowadays. But why aren't you true to your theory ? Why don't you let 
 Adeline marry poor Langdon ? " 
 
 " That is absurd! " said the socialist peeress, a little nettled; for no one 
 likes to be twitted with turning theories into action. " Nobody is talking of 
 marriage: we are speaking of men who attain power without the hereditary right 
 to it. I confess, I admire self-made men; there is such a rugged grandeur 
 about the mere idea of all they have contested with and conquered." 
 
 Which was a beautiful absence of all prejudice on her ladyship's part, 
 slightly nullified in its weight by the fact that she had a month before half 
 broken her daughter's heart, and spent all her most bitter and deadily court- 
 liness of insolence and opprobrium on that daughter's lover, a great artist 
 who had had the presumption to think that his fine celebrity and his gallant 
 love might mate him with the young azure-eyed aristocrat, and in return had 
 been stoned and pierced with a great lady's polished insults. 
 
 " Besides," she pursued, now on her favorite theme, " you cannot call him 
 a self-made man: he was always among us, always at the best houses, entered 
 Parliament at a very good age, has always known everybody and been seen 
 everywhere. I remember his first speech so well ! It was short, he had too 
 much tact to detain the benches long, but so pithy, so trenchant, so precise to 
 the purpose, so admirably uttered ! I remember saying to poor Sir James that 
 very night, ' See if I am not right; we shall have a recruit well worth studying 
 and retaining there.' And he did see I was right."
 
 344 OUIDA'S WORKS. 
 
 She nestled herself among her soft cushions with complacent remembrance; 
 she had been the first to discern the faint beams of the rising sun. 
 
 " What that man has done since then ! " murmured the Countess of Clydes- 
 more, rather to herself unconsciously than to her companions. 
 
 At that instant a hand thrust aside the sacred velvet curtain before the open 
 folding-doors, that rarely was drawn aside save by the few privileged comers 
 who were made free of the guild: the subject of their words and thoughts 
 entered the boudoir. He was just then a guest for an autumnal week at 
 Lilliesford. 
 
 Lady Clydesmore did not look up; a slight gloom came over her face, and 
 the abrupt rapidity of entrance jarred her nerves. Lady Dorenavant smiled a 
 bland welcome. 
 
 "Ah, Mr. Trevenna, you come to enliven us! " He laughed a little as he 
 tossed himself down into a low easy-chair beside his aristocratic champion. 
 
 "You have faith in my powers of enlivening? Well, so have I, I think. 
 I actually once contrived to make a royal dinner only half as dull as a sermon! " 
 
 " You happy fellow! " murmured the young duke. " What specific have 
 you against dulness?" 
 
 " Don't know," answered the popular politician, shrugging his shoulders 
 and hitting, as he usually did, the truth, " except it may be that I never feel a 
 dull dog myself." 
 
 " But then that's just it: how is it you don't? " 
 
 " Ah! that is just it. Can't say. Natural constitution, I suppose, and a 
 good digestion; good conscience, if you like it better, that sounds more pretty 
 and poetic. Though really, as a practical fact, I believe it's a good deal easier 
 to carry a murder comfortably on one's soul than a Lord Mayor's dinner com- 
 fortably on one's chest." 
 
 " You speak as if you had tried both," said the languid, disdainful voice of 
 his hostess from the shadow. 
 
 " So I have. I've eaten Corporation turtle, and I've murdered many a 
 little Bill, hopeless little bills that scarcely saw the light before I strangled 
 them. But I can't say their slaughter was heavy to bear, whatever the debate 
 upon them might be. Lady Dorenavant, what are you reading ? Anything 
 good ? " 
 
 " An old acquaintance of yours," she said, handing him the book. 
 
 He had read it, but he turned the leaves over as though he had not, lifting 
 his eyebrows where he lay back luxuriously coiled in the depths of a couch. 
 
 " Ah ! poor Chandos ! Frightens people dreadfully, doesn't it ? Sort of 
 Buddhism, eh ? sublimated Cartesianism, intended for the thirtieth century 
 or thereabouts ? Makes a science of history, and gives a sinecure to Deity ! 
 Believes in other worlds, but smashes Providence as a used-up Dens er machind;
 
 CHANDOS. 345 
 
 utterly contemns the body, and isn't very clear about the soul. That's the 
 style, isn't it ? " 
 
 The grand dark eyes of Lady Clydesmore loomed on him from her corner 
 in the shadow. 
 
 " You travesty what you have not read," she said, slowly and curtly. " The 
 book is a great book." 
 
 " Sorry to hear it ! It won't bring him a shilling, then. As for writing all 
 those heterodox before-your-time speculation and philosophies, it's the sheerest 
 madness, if you want to live by what you write, as of course he does. If you're 
 an unfrocked priest, now, or a curate without a chance of promotion, it's all 
 very well to do it: you have a piquance about you from having stoned your 
 own gods; and if you can't be a success, it's just as well to go in for the other 
 side toto corde, and come out in full bloom a martyrdom. But just to write a 
 'great book,' and look to posterity to reward you, mercy alive ! I'd as soon 
 sow corn in the sea, or try to get a ladder to the stars ! " 
 
 " I can believe you," said the voice of his hostess, with that veiled bitter- 
 ness still in it; "no one would accuse you of doing anything without the 
 certainty of present reward." 
 
 He laughed with the charming good humor with which he always won over 
 the most sullen and angry mob, sooner or later, to his side. 
 
 "No: I don't ' go in for the angels.' Too unsubstantial and too solemn 
 for me. Where's the use of working for posterity ? A comet may have sent 
 the earth fizzing into space before it's fifty years older. Besides, I've an 
 English prejudice that real, sensible, practical work deserves its reward and 
 gets it. I think in the long run all things bring in their net value. It's 
 only -the mortified vanity of those who carry bad goods to market that makes 
 them start the hypothesis that they're unsalable because they are too superior." 
 
 " They may be right sometimes, if they say because they are too true to be 
 welcome," said the Countess of Clydesmore, in that slow, languid, yet almost 
 acrid tone with which she had spoken throughout from her distant nook of 
 shadow. 
 
 " Oh, yes," he laughed, carelessly toying with the book he still held. 
 " Chandos, here, tells a good deal too much truth: they'd forgive him his unortho- 
 doxy sooner than they'd forgive him his accuracy. All men are candid when 
 they're in extremis and have nothing left to lose, bankrupts, beggars, mori- 
 bunds, authors in the Index, and thieves in the Old Bailey ! " 
 
 " You are complimentary to authors," laughed Lady Dorenavant. 
 
 " Never like them," returned the successful politician. "They are so un- 
 practical. If they write fiction, it's puppets; if history, it's prejudice; if phi- 
 losophy, it's cobwebs; if science, it's mares' nests: let them take what they will, 
 it must be more or less moonshine. Now, if I ever wrote a book "
 
 346 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 11 What should it be ? " asked his fair partisan. 
 
 " Well, it should be what everybody should like, a true contemporary 
 Chronique Scandaleuse, such as his secret police summed up to Louis Quinze, 
 every day, of the doings of Paris. How it would sell ! specially with a tag of 
 religion to finish, and a fine blue-light of repentance burning for the British 
 public at the end of every wickedness ! It would sell by millions where this 
 book, that my Lady Clydesmore says is a ' great book,' sells by tens." 
 
 The languid grandes dames laughed softly ; it was the fashion to admire and 
 to quote all he said as " so infinitely humorous," "so admirably original !" 
 Yet beneath the art-bloom on her cheek Lady Dorenavant felt herself turn pale. 
 There was a family secret of a terrible shame to her house, that had been buried, 
 as they had thought, five fathoms deep, where none could disinter it; and John 
 Trevenna had found it out, and had let them learn that he had done so. All 
 the weight of her vast influence, of her political favor, had been thrown into the 
 scale many years gone by to purchase silence; yet she had never felt secure 
 that her bribe, magnificent and mighty in profit though it was, had availed. 
 There is no sign and seal to those bargains, and the tacit bond may any day be 
 broken by the stronger side. 
 
 "A religious 'tag'! What a word! " smiled a radiant blonde. "I thought 
 you were never irreverent now ? " 
 
 " Never," he responded, promptly. " It never does to be unorthodox in a 
 
 country where the Church is a popular prejudice 1 beg pardon; I meant 
 
 bulwark. I had my unregenerated days, I know, when I didn't go to church; 
 but I hadn't heard grace said before dinner by an archbishop then; that does 
 more than anything, I think, towards correcting one's soul, if it's a little adverse 
 tendency towards cooling the soup. You don't talk Pantheism or Positivism 
 when you've once stayed with a primate. But I didn't come to chatter: I ven- 
 tured into this sanctum sanctorum to show you these." 
 
 With which he unfolded some afternoon letters he had in his hand, and, 
 lounging comfortably in that velvet nest by the side of the queen and priestess 
 of his own especial party, went deep with her into their various contents and 
 their news political, as deep, at least, as he chose to go. He always satisfied 
 his confidantes that they knew as much as he did; but he always spread the 
 surface: he never showed the whole. There is not an art so delicate and so full 
 of use as that art of apparent frankness: it conciliated the very women who had 
 been his deadliest foes, and, while they imagined themselves his allies, they be- 
 came at his fancy his dupes. They were his scouts, his sharpshooters, his 
 skirmishers, his spies, those dainty, haughty, high-bread patrician chatelaines; 
 they fetched and carried, they parried and bribed, for him; they played into 
 his hands, and they worked out his will; and they never knew it, but all the 
 while thought themselves condescending with a superb grace and tact to secure
 
 __ CHANDOS. 347 
 
 a serviceable recruit, and guessed no more the remorseless and vulgar uses to 
 which he turned them than the sun guesses the use that photography makes of 
 his glory when it turns his rays into detectives and brings them as witness in law- 
 courts. He stayed there some twenty minutes; the boudoir was not seldom a 
 cabinet council-room in the recesses, and all the ladies in it now were for him 
 and were with him. He never sought women, not a whit; they must come to 
 him, must need him, and must serve him; but he knew how to turn to account 
 better than any man living all their armory of slender, invincible, damascened 
 weapons, the better because no glance of lustrous eyes ever had power to 
 quicken his pulse one beat, because the softest voice that ever wooed his ear 
 never had charm to lull his wisdom for a second. Love was a trumpery non- 
 sense that never could enter the virile sagacity of Trevenna's mind. And now, 
 when he had done with the ladies, he went to play rackets with the young Lord 
 Lilliesford, the eldest son of the house. 
 
 He knew how to do this sort of thing, how to enter with infinite glee into 
 a boy's sports, yet how never to risk losing the faith he had impressed men with 
 in his unerring acumen and practical talents. Everyone felt the contagion of 
 the bright, vivacious, untiring good humor which could make a leading politi- 
 cian love a lark like an Etonian; and it was not assumed with him. He was 
 essentially full of animal spirits, and never had to simulate them by any hazard. 
 It was one of the chief secrets of his social success: men who might have feared 
 him or mistrusted him whilst they were with him in the political field lost their 
 awe or their distrust, and could not choose but warm to him, when they saw 
 him taking a blind fence " like a good 'un," telling mischievous stories in a 
 smoking-room, or heartily snowballing public-school lads on the terraces of 
 some famous house. 
 
 " Look at him playing with that boy ! What a capital fellow he is ! Goes 
 in for it, by George, as if he hadn't anything else to live for ! " said a peer, 
 Lord Dallerstone, as he watched the science with which Trevenna caught the 
 ball on his racket. He had ceased to be "Charlie," and had left far behind 
 him the troubles of his F. O. days of dandyism and "dead money;" but he had 
 never forgotten Trevenna's aid, and did him in repayment many a public ser- 
 vice with most loyal gratitude. The popular favorite had always had the knack 
 of throwing his crumbs upon the waters that they returned to him in whole 
 quarterns of wheaten bread. 
 
 Lady Clydesmore gave a careless glance at the game, then turned away with 
 an imperceptible shudder. The haughty grace of her young son, so like her 
 own, had caught her eyes, and she held him in a bitter aversion for his father's 
 sake. 
 
 Not that Lord Clydesmore was anything save a gentle and generous hus- 
 band: he was, indeed, nervously afraid of his wife. But she had let dislike
 
 348 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 gather and gather in her towards him, till the earl, always irritably timorous of 
 her, scarce ever now entered her presence in solitude. She would have con- 
 demned with all the icy severity of a patrician matron the errors of a too ardent 
 passion, the devoted self-abandonment of an uncalculating love; but she placed 
 no check on the silent, unseen indulgence of an intense abhorrence, that made 
 her husband feel like a whipped hound under the lash of her unuttered scorn, 
 and her children shrink from the frozen apathy of her fair face. 
 
 " There are serious complications," said the earl, musingly, after a length- 
 ened conversation with his guest, in a ride which had succeeded to the rackets. 
 His party did not altogether relish union with the Darshampton representative, 
 but they were glad of his alliance and dared not brook his opposition. 
 
 " I don't see anything that need disturb us," said Trevenna, carelessly. He 
 made no solemn mysteries of his political views; he always showed his cards 
 frankly, as frankly as the Greek shows them to the watching gattrie when he 
 knows the marks upon the backs of them are only to be traced by his own eye. 
 "On the contrary, when the House meets, we shall have a good working 
 majority that, well handled, should keep us in for years. If there be no internal 
 dissensions among us, there can be positively nothing that can unseat us for 
 sessions, unless very unlooked-for contingencies arise. You know we've such 
 a good cry: we're all for the people ! " 
 
 He laughed a little as he said it. To Trevenna's acute mind, there was 
 always a good bit of absurdity in the political dance of his burattini, and while 
 he used his marionnettes with all the gravity needful, he could not help being 
 tickled at the gaping national audience which believed in them and never spied 
 out the strings. 
 
 " Their interests, indeed, are always first at my heart," said the earl, who 
 was in the ministry himself, was a strict Churchman, and was considered a great 
 philanthropist. "The country trusts no one better than yourself: in real truth, 
 there are few, if any, to whom it owes more." 
 
 " You do me much honor by such an opinion," bowed Trevenna, who man- 
 aged the noble lord as he liked. " It is my highest ambition to serve the nation 
 to the best of my insignificant powers; but meanwhile I am quite content to 
 yield the/<z.y to men of your rank and weight." 
 
 " Sensible fellow," thought the lord; " so moderate ! Who can be so blind 
 as to accuse him of Socialism ? " 
 
 " Pro me is more my cry than pro patrid. I'm a selfish man," laughed 
 Trevenna, with that confession of egotism which sounded so charmingly frank. 
 "I don't pretend to be among the 'idealists.' Apropos, have you read that 
 new book by Chandos ? The countess thinks very highly of it." 
 
 The earl reddened: he had never ceased to be jealous of the man he had 
 supplanted, of the man he knew his wife still loved.
 
 CHANDOS. 349 
 
 "I never read his books," he said, frigidly. "The immorality of his early 
 life finds meet issue in the irreligion of his later years. His influence is widely 
 fatal. I am happy to think your acquaintance with him has been long at an 
 end." 
 
 " Oh, we were old comrades in my wild and unconverted days. / should 
 never have dropped him, indeed, for old acquaintance* sake; but years ago 
 time of his crash he behaved ungratefully to me, very badly, on my word ! 
 after I'd been slaving my life out for him, too. I'm not a sensitive man, never 
 was; but that cut me up a good deal." 
 
 "Ah ! I am not surprised to hear it. It is singular that great genius is 
 almost always companioned with so much depravity ! " 
 
 Trevenna laughed. 
 
 " Thank God, he didn't give me genius, only talent. Talent wears well, 
 genius wears itself out; talent drives a snug brougham in fact, genius drives a 
 sun-chariot in fancy; talent keeps to earth and fattens there, genius soars to 
 the empyrean to get picked by every kite that flies. Talent's the port and the 
 venison, genius the seltzer and souffles, of life. The man who has talent sails 
 successfully on the top of the wave, the man with genius beats himself to 
 pieces, fifty to one, on the first rock ahead. Ah ! there's our very man of 
 genius's lost Clarencieux. Just see the tops of the towers. Would you mind 
 riding over ? " 
 
 The earl gave a hurried though bland dissent. 
 
 " Pardon me: pray ride there if you wish; but I have promised to visit a 
 tenant who is, I sadly fear, dying. We are close to his farm now. Call for me 
 as you come back. The poor man begged to see me; and there are high and 
 holy duties which one must not neglect, even when they are irksome." 
 
 " High and holy fiddlesticks, my friend ! You're a very poor hypocrite, but 
 you're a very good card," thought Trevenna, as they parted. Lord Clydes- 
 more, with his irreproachable moral character, great wealth, and solid standing 
 in public life, was one of his prize puppets in the ballet that he made all his 
 fantoccini dance, while he turned the handle of the barrel-organ to what tune 
 he would. 
 
 Trevenna's hatred was class-hatred. Could he have followed the bent of 
 his mind, he would have had as little scruple and as much zest in the sweeping 
 away of the Optimates as Marius had in their slaughter. He would have held 
 back his hand from their extermination as little as did the ruthless old plebeian, 
 hating them as Marius hated the men who had worn the golden amulet and the 
 purple robe whilst he was following the ploughshare over the heavy clods of the 
 tillage. This animosity was strong in Trevenna; nothing could cool it, nothing 
 soften it; success in no way changed it, for in success he saw that these, his 
 born foes as he thought them, dreaded him, but detested him. The bitterness
 
 350 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 was oddly woven in with the brightness and the vigor of his nature, otherwise 
 too healthy and too well balanced to cherish passion; but it was deathless with 
 him. Still, he was too acute a man to let this appear in his public or private 
 life: he appreciated too ably the temper of his times and his country to allow 
 this wholesale enmity to be betrayed. Trevenna would have enjoyed to be the 
 leader of a great revolution; but he had no ambition to remain a popular 
 demagogue in an anti-revolutionary nation. He considered it very unpractical 
 and unprofitable, and, while he cared not one whit for all the creeds and prin- 
 ciples in the world, he cared very heartily for the solid advantages and the real 
 power that he set himself to win. The pure impersonal longing of a Vergniaud or 
 a Buzot, the sublime devotion of a Washington or a Hampden, were utterly in- 
 comprehensible to him. Trevenna was too thoroughly English to have a touch 
 of "idealism," and not to measure all things, principles included, by the pocket. 
 Therefore he rushed into no extreme; but, whilst at Darshampton he went as 
 near socialism and communism as was needful to please his auditors, and went 
 into them, moreover, with a racy relish, he was careful to do and to express 
 nothing which should terrify the bulk of the Commons or disqualify him in the 
 country's view from the tenure of office. Had he flung himself headlong into 
 the cause of the people and into the service of a republican code he would have 
 been a far better and more honest man than he was; but he would not have 
 been so clever, and he would not, assuredly, have been so successful. He knew 
 what he was about too well to tie himself to a principle; the only principle he 
 ever consistently followed was his own interest. He was a man who could tell 
 the temper of the hour he lived in to a miracle, and adapt himself to it with a 
 marvellous tact and advantage. They who do this are not the highest order 
 of public men, but they are invariably the most successful and most popular. 
 If a genuine loyalty to any creed could once have fairly taken hold on him, it 
 would have gone far to redeem him; but it could not. His hate was strong 
 against an order, certainly; but his solitary creed was a very simple one, his 
 own self-advancement. 
 
 He rode now by himself, on a ride that he usually took whenever he was 
 staying at Lilliesford: he rode towards Clarencieux. A few miles of fair speed 
 brought him within sight of the magnificence of the building, with the glow of 
 the sun on its innumerable windows, and the upward-stretching masses of the 
 rising woods at its back. It was grand, historic, inexpressibly beautiful in the 
 decline of the day, with the golden haze over its dark sweep of endless wood- 
 land, and the rush of water beneath the twilight of the boughs, the only sound 
 on the air. A stranger coming thus upon it would have paused involuntarily at 
 the solemnity of its splendor of sea and land, of hill and vale: Trevenna checked 
 .his horse, and gazed at it with a smile. 
 
 " ' The glory has departed, and his place shall know him no more,' " he
 
 CHAN DOS. 351 
 
 muttered. " How scriptural I grow ! Ah ! he's gone forever ! And / could 
 buy that now; I will buy it, too, just to cut the forests down, and turn the 
 pictures to the wall, and send the last marquis's coronet to the smelting-shop. 
 He is gone forever, and I come here as a Cabinet minister. Vengeance is a 
 good Madeira: it gets mellower by keeping. There is nothing on earth so 
 sweet, except its twin Success ! " 
 
 Seventeen years had gone by since he had first taken his vengeance; but 
 whenever, in the full and rapid whirl of his busy life, he had time to remember 
 and to look back, which was but rarely, it was sweeter than of old, even to 
 him, deeper, richer, fuller of flavor, as it were, like the wine with which he 
 compared it. The farther his own ascent bore him up to the heights of wealth 
 and power, the keener was the pleasure with which he could look on Claren- 
 cieux. There had been a woman-like malignity in the jealousy he had once 
 felt for its owner; there was a woman-like avidity in the triumph with which he 
 now gazed at the stately pile where he had used to be a nameless and a penni- 
 less man, where he now stood a successful and ambitious victor, while its last 
 lord was exiled from his inheritance and forced down into bitterness and 
 poverty. 
 
 A laborer near him was working at a sunken fence in the deer-forest. The 
 man straightened his back, and shaded his eyes, and looked at him, knowing 
 his face. 
 
 Trevenna, always communicative and always good-naturedly familiar with 
 the working-classes, it was a part of his stock in trade, nodded to him. 
 
 " Fine day, my good fellow. Have you an easy time of it on these 
 lands ? " 
 
 " Main and easy, sir," answered the man, thrusting his spade into the soil 
 with his heel, and standing at leisure for a talk. " There's naught to complain 
 of hereabouts." 
 
 " Glad to hear it," said Trevenna; though he thought to himself, " If every- 
 body gave your answer, where deuce the would all the politics and our trade 
 be ? " " So you're all content, are you, under the French due ? " 
 
 The hedger and ditcher took his spade up with some clods of earth on it, 
 turned them thoughtfully, as though there were consolation in the act, patted 
 them, and looked up again. " The duke's a good master, and a free giver, I 
 ain't a-saying a word agen him; but " 
 
 " But what ? What else the dickens can you want, my man ? " 
 
 The laborer lowered his voice, and uncovered his head. " Sir, we want 
 him." 
 
 Trevenna's teeth crushed in a snarl like an angry dog's. " Him ? Whom ? " 
 he asked, with an impatient irritation. 
 
 " Him as we have lost this many years, sir," said the man gravely and
 
 352 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 gently, leaning his arm on his spade. "We ha'n't forgot him, we ha'n't. 
 Not none on us." 
 
 " Indeed, my good fellow," laughed Trevenna, with a petulant anger in 
 him that the exiled man should be remembered even by this laborer in the deer- 
 forest, " you are uncommonly loyal for nothing. He thought deuced little 
 
 about you." 
 
 " That's as may be, sir. He was a gay gentleman, and had many things 
 to please him, and that like; but he was a good master to the poor, and we was 
 proud on him, we was; that's just it, proud on him," continued the hedger 
 and ditcher, with a steady resolve -and a wistful regret commingled. "We 
 won't see his like again; and the country-side ha'n't been the same since he was 
 took from us. Old Harold Gelart, he died ten years and more ago; but his 
 death-word was for him as we lost. ' Bring him back! ' he cries; ' bring him 
 back! ' and he looks wild-like as he says it, and dies." 
 
 The speaker stooped and thrust his spade afresh into the rich, damp earth: 
 he felt a choking in his throat. Trevenna's thrust the box-spur into his horse's 
 flank, and urged him forward with a snarl at the beast for checking. It in- 
 censed him that he could not hurl down Chandos from this last throne left 
 him, the hearts and the memories of his people. 
 
 The laborer looked up once more, touching his hat with an eager anxiety. 
 "I beg pardon, sir, but you was his friend, you were: can't you tell me ? 
 A'n't there no hope we'll ever have him back ? " 
 
 Trevenna laughed, and threw him down a half-crown. 
 
 " Not the faintest, my man. When you see those towers walk out and sit 
 in the sea ! not till then. Beggared gentlemen don't get out of beggary quite 
 so easily." 
 
 And he rode on at a hand-gallop. 
 
 " Mercy ! what fools those clods are ! " he thought. " How they remem- 
 ber ! Seventeen years ! Why, in the world, there, it's time enough for us to recast 
 Europe, and knock down kings, and pull up old religions and plant new ones, 
 and bury whole generations and forget 'em again, and cry, ' Le Roi est mort ! 
 Vive le Roi!' fifty times over; and here are these dolts under their forests 
 sleeping the years away in idiocy, and dreaming of a prodigal and a bankrupt 
 whom they haven't seen for half a lifetime." 
 
 It incensed him that there should remain to the disinherited even such 
 shadowy remnant of his forfeited royalty as lingered in the remembrance of 
 these peasantry. He could not forgive the throne that the exile still held in the 
 hearts of his lost people. 
 
 One other, as well as he, thought of Chandos in that moment. The mis- 
 tress of Lilliesford sat alone in her writing-cabinet, and on the chillness of her 
 face there was the mournful agitation which trembles on the cold surface of 

 
 CHANDOS. 353 
 
 waters when the dead float below them. The dead were rising now beneath 
 her icy calm, dead words, dead lays, dead love. In her hand, just taken out 
 of a secret drawer, were some faded letters, tender notes, short and graceful, 
 such as were written by those who love, in days when they meet wellnigh 
 every hour. 
 
 The wife whom the world quoted for her haughty honor, her unblemished 
 name, the chaste purity of her proud life, looked on them till her head drooped, 
 and her eyes grew dim with a thirsty pain, and her lips quivered as she gazed. 
 She had forsaken him; but she knew now that she had erred to him. She 
 would have given her life now to have felt his kiss once more upon her lips. 
 
 Though the traffic had been sanctioned by the Church, she had been in no 
 sense superior to any courtesan who sells her beauty for men's gold, when she 
 had sold her own in barter for the rank she held, for the things of wealth that 
 were about her, for the possessions of a husband she scorned and hated. And 
 in that moment of weakness she would have given them all back for one hour 
 of the love she had lost. 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 " HE WHO ENDURES CONQUERS." 
 
 UNDER the deep leaves of Fontainebleau, in the heart of the forest, in the 
 golden pomp of early autumn, when only a few trees were bronzed with the 
 reddening flush of the waning summer, there stood an antique wooden building, 
 half lodge, half chalet, all covered with the quaint floral and faun carvings of 
 the Moyen Age, and buried away beneath dense oak-boughs and the dark 
 spreading fans of sea-pines. It was old, dark, fantastic, lonely; yet from 
 under its low peaked roof music was floating out like a Mass of Palestrina's 
 from within a chamber dark and tranquil as an oratory. The musicians were 
 seated in the glow of a western afternoon sun, that shone all amber and crim- 
 son and mellow through the open painted panes. They were strangely dissimilar, 
 yet bound together by one love, their Art. The first was a grand old Roman, 
 like a picture of Bassano; the second a South German, with a fair, delicate 
 head, spiritualized and attenuated as Schiller's; the third was a little nut-brown, 
 withered, silent creature, ugly and uncouth as Caliban ; the leader was a crip- 
 ple with whose name the world had come to associate the most poetic and 
 ethereal harmonies that ever rebuked the lusts and the greed of its passions 
 and cares. They were often together, these four brothers in art, and no jeal- 
 ousies ever stirred amidst them, though they all served the same mistress; three 
 of them implicitly loved and implictily followed the fourth, though he never 
 
 VOL. III. 12
 
 354 O UIDAS WORKS. 
 
 asked or thought of mastery, but was still humble in his great powers as a child, 
 still thought the best he could reach so poor beside his dreams of excellence. 
 The world treasured his works, and paid lavishly with its gold for the smallest 
 fragment of his creations, the slightest and the briefest of his poems of sound; 
 but this brought him no vanity, no self-adoration. He worshipped his art too 
 patiently, too perfectly, ever to think himself more than a poor interpreter, at 
 his uttermost, of all the beauty that he knew was in her. Success- makes many 
 men drunk as with eating the lotus-lily; success only made Guido Lulli scorn 
 himself that he could not tell men better all the sublime things his art taught 
 him. 
 
 Their music filled the chamber with its glory, and that glory flushed his 
 face and lit his eyes as it had always power to do, as the world had now seen it 
 in the moments of his truimphs, until it had learned to know that the feeble 
 visionary whom it called a fool was higher and holier than it in all its stirring 
 strength and wealth. He roused to life the beating of its purer heart; he led 
 it towards God better than any priest or creed. But he held himself throughout 
 but an unworthy priest of the mighty hierarchy of melody; he held himself but 
 a feeble exponent of all the glory, unseen of men, that with his dreams was 
 opened to him. They thought and called him great; he knew himself unwise 
 and faint of utterance as a young child. 
 
 Against the casement . leaned one whom the Hebrew lad Agostino had 
 likened in his youth to David of Israel in fulness of royalty, when the smile of 
 women and the sun of Palestine had their fairest light for the golden-haired, 
 golden-crowned king; whom the young Tuscan Castalia had likened now to 
 David when his royalty still was with him, but when the treachery of men had 
 eaten into his soul, and the heat and burden of battle darkened his sight, and 
 the shadows of night lengthened long in his path. 
 
 Chandos came here as men in the old monastic days came, war-worn and com- 
 bat-wearied, into the hush and the majesty and the subdued color-glow of the 
 abbey sanctuaries, to leave their arms and their foes without for a while and 
 forgotten, and to lie down to rest for a brief hour on the peaceful altars where 
 in the silence they remembered God. 
 
 He was changed, utterly changed; not so much in his face or his form; 
 the beauty with which nature had dowered him so lavishly could not perish, 
 except with death itself; and though the brilliance, the carelessness, the gay 
 and cloudless light which had made painters take him as the Sun-god were 
 gone, the grave and serene melancholy, the deep and weary thought, which 
 were upon his features now shadowed them indeed, but gave them a yet higher, 
 a yet grander cast: it had the power of Lucretius; it had the weariness of Mil- 
 ton. Dead in him forever, lost never again to be recovered, were the bright- 
 ness, the splendor, the radiant and fearless lustre, of his early years: they had
 
 CHANDOS. 355 
 
 been killed, killed by a merciless hand, and could no more revive than the 
 slaughtered can revive in their tombs. Yet not wholly had calamity conquered 
 him; and form the black depths into which misery had thrust him to die like a 
 drowned dog, he had risen with a force of resistance that in some sense had 
 wrung a victory from the fate that sought to crush him. 
 
 In the old court of the Rue de Temple he had accepted adversity, and lived 
 for the sake of the honor of his fathers, of the dignity of his manhood, of the 
 heritage of his genius. From that hour, though he had longed as the tortured 
 long for death many a time, he had never swerved from the path he had taken ; 
 in the arid, lifeless, burning desert-waste around him he had gone on, resolute 
 and unbeaten, wresting from its very loneliness and barrenness the desert-gifts 
 of strength and silence. His nature was one to loathe the burden of existence 
 unless existence were with every breath enjoyment; yet when every breath was 
 pain he bore with it as men whose tempers were far stronger and more braced 
 by training might never have found ability to do, bore with it for the sake of 
 the loftier things, the prouder powers, that would not die in him, and that naught 
 except dishonor or his own will could slay. 
 
 The little gold given for the silver collar had sufficed to keep life in him a 
 few days; when those were ended, he had gone to the house at which the French 
 editions of his works had been produced, and asked the chiefs of it simply 
 for work. Perhaps he was greater when he said that word than he had been 
 in all the magnificence of his joyous reign. The heads of the firm, generous 
 and scholarly men, touched to more pity than they dared express (for so brief 
 a while ago they had known him as the darling of the court circle, the idol 
 of Paris fashion and Paris aristocracy), eagerly gave what he sought, 
 classical work which, though but the labors of routine and of compilation, 
 still brought his thoughts back preforce to the Greek studies that had ever been 
 his best-beloved treasuries of meditation and of knowledge. He labored for 
 his bare subsistence, for his day's' maintenance; but the exertion brought 
 its reward. It gave him time to breathe, to think, to collect his efforts and his 
 energies; for his intellect seemed dead, and his thoughts numb. He wondered 
 if it were true that the world had told him so brief a time ago that he had 
 genius. Genius ! his very brain seemed dull as lead, hot as flame. Yet he 
 took the sheer laborious, mechanical work, and he bent himself to it; he bound 
 his mind to the hard mental labor as a galley-slave is chained to his oar; and 
 he who had never known an hour's toil spent day after day, month after month, 
 in the thankless, unremitting mental travail. It brought its recompense: his 
 mind through it regained its balance, his reason its tone; the compulsory exer- 
 tion did for him what nothing else could. It took him by degrees back into 
 that impersonal life which is the surest consolation the world holds; it revived 
 the lost tastes, it reopened the deep scholarship, that even in his gayest years
 
 356 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 had been one of his best-loved pursuits; it led him to take refuge in those vast 
 questions beside which the griefs and joys of life, alike are dwarfed, those 
 resources of the intellect which are the best companion and the truest friend of 
 one who has once known them and loved them. In his past career he had 
 never exerted all the powers that nature had gifted him with; the very facility 
 of his talents had prevented it, and brilliant trifles had rather been their fruit 
 than anything wider or weightier. Now in the treasuries of study and in the 
 solace of composition he alike found a career and a hope, an ambition and a 
 consolation. 
 
 The ruin that had stripped him of all else taught him to fathom the depths 
 of his own attainments. He had in him the gifts of a Goethe; but it was only 
 under adversity that these reached their stature and bore their fruit. 
 
 When the world had forgotten for some years, or, if it ever remembered 
 him, thought he had killed himself, it learned this suddenly and with amaze- 
 ment. His name once more became public, never popular, but something 
 much higher. He was condemned, reviled, wondered at, called many bitter 
 names; but his thoughts were heard, and had their harvest. Aristocratic as 
 his tastes were, and proud though he had been termed, he had always had 
 much that was democratic in his opinions; for he had ever measured men by 
 their minds, not their stations; such freedom was in his works, and they had 
 done that for which the song of the Venetian youths had thanked him. Against 
 much antagonism, and slowly in the course of time he won fame. Riches he 
 never made; he was poor still; but he was nearer the fulfilment of the promise 
 of his childhood now, when the chief sum of the world was against him, than 
 in the days of his prosperity, when the whole world lay at his feet. Happiness 
 he had not; it could be with no man who had such losses ever in his memory 
 as his; but some peace came to him; a great and a pure ambition was his com- 
 panion and his consoler, and a grander element was woven in his character than 
 fair fortune would have ever brought to light. England he never saw. The 
 intercession of his relations or his acquaintance might with ease have procured 
 him affluent sinecures; but he would have held it degradation deep as shame 
 to have taken them. His cousin of Castlemaine once wrote and offered one: 
 he simply declined it. By his own folly his ruin had been wrought; by his 
 own labor alone would he repel it and endeavor to repair it. He accepted pov- 
 erty, and lived in exile, associating with many of the greatest thinkers of 
 Europe; but into the pale of the fashionable world he had once led he never 
 wandered, and in the palaces in which he had once been the idol of all eyes he 
 was never seen. The friends of that past time knew of him indeed by the 
 intellectual renown he had won, but it was very rarely that they looked upon 
 his face. Cynic he could not grow; he did not curse the world because to him 
 it had been base; he believed in noble lives and staunch fidelities, though
 
 CHANDOS. 357 
 
 treachery had trepanned and love abandoned him. The bitterness of Timon 
 could have no lodging with him; but an unspeakable weariness often came 
 on him. 
 
 He had lost so much; and one loss that of Clarencieux gnawed ever at 
 his heart with an unceasing pang. There were times when he longed for his 
 perished happiness with the passion with which an exile longs for the light of 
 his native s-uns. 
 
 He listened now to the melodies that filled the chamber. Lulli's was the 
 sole life which had been faithful to him, save that of the dog, buried now 
 under Sicilian orange-boughs, in the grave to which old age had banished it, 
 but lamented and remembered with more justice than many a human friend is 
 regretted and mourned. The music, a new opera-overture of the Provencal's, 
 closed with its noblest harmonies, reeling through the air like a young Bacchus 
 ivy-crowned. Then it stayed suddenly, the hands that drew out its charmed 
 sounds pausing as moved by one impulse; three of them bowed their heads. 
 " It will be great," they said, reverently, adding no other word, and went their 
 way silently and left the chamber. Guido Lulli was alone with his guest. 
 The victorious radiance, the sovereignty in his own realms, that had been on 
 him as he called out to existence the supremacy of his own creations, faded 
 into the hesitating, doubting hope of a child who seeks the praise of a voice he 
 loves. 
 
 " And you, monseigneur ? " he said, appealingly. " Can you say, too, it 
 will be great ? " 
 
 Chandos lifted his head. 
 
 " You ask me, Lulli ? The world has long told you, and truly, that you can 
 give it nothing that is not so. You surpass yourself here; ft will be noble 
 music, nobler even than anything of yours." 
 
 The eyes of the cripple beamed. The world had long crowned him with 
 the Delphica laurus, yet he still came with the humility of a child to receive the 
 laurel he loved best in the words of his old master. 
 
 " The world may have told me, monseigneur, but that were nothing unless 
 you spoke also. What would the world have ever known or heeded of me without 
 your aid ? Known of me, do I say ? It is not that I heed; it is my works. I 
 shall pass away, but they will endure; my body will go to corruption, but they 
 will have immortality. I thank God and you, not the world, that what is great 
 in me will not perish with what is weak and vile." 
 
 " I understand you; others might not," answered Chandos, as he looked at 
 the delicate kindling face of the only man who had given him back fidelity 
 and gratitude, a face that time had changed in so little, save in the white 
 threads that gleamed among the dark masses of hair. " Men prostitute their 
 genius now, as the courtesan her beauty; they think little think nothing of
 
 358 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 impersonal things. Hypocrisy pays; they supply it. Were blasphemy the 
 better investment, they would trade in it. You are fortunate in one thing; 
 you speak in a language that cannot be cavilled at or misunderstood." 
 
 " But deaf ears were turned to it till, through you, the disbelievers listened." 
 
 " Hush ! Let the dead bury their dead. I do not look back; I wish that 
 no one should." 
 
 " But I cannot forget ! Such debts as mine are not scored out." 
 
 " In your nature. Yet I served many more than I served you. You are 
 the only one who remembers it." 
 
 He spoke without bitterness; but the words were the more profoundly sad 
 because there was no taint of acrid feeling in them. Lulli glanced at him with 
 an anxious reverence. Though he was famous now in his own art, and though 
 wealth, or what seemed so to his simple tastes and needs, had come to him 
 with the applause of cities and the praise of princes and the renown of nations 
 for his music, he felt to Chandos the same fond, faithful loyalty and veneration 
 as when he had been a dying boy on the bleak hills of Spain. In truth, the 
 more he gained from the world's recognition, the more his gratitude found to 
 owe. 
 
 " You served so many ! yes," he said, with a vibration of such passion as 
 had used to move him with a sudden vehemence when he thought of his lost 
 Valeria. " And they were curs who tore down one by whom they had been 
 fed, one whom they had fawned on for a word of notice! The vilest of them 
 all, what is he now ? High in honor among men." 
 
 A darkness passed over his listener's face, a gloom like night, yet a disdain 
 as strong as it was silent, such a look as might come upon the face of a man 
 who saw one whom he knew assassin and traitor courted and adored by the 
 peoples. 
 
 " Ah! give him your scorn now. One day you shall give him your ven- 
 geance! " cried the musician, with that passionate desire of revenge which he 
 could never, under any wrongs, have known on his own behalf, but which he 
 had felt for Valeria, and which he felt for Chandos. 
 
 Chandos' head drooped slightly where he sat, and into his eyes came the 
 shadows of a thousand bitter memories. 
 
 " Perhaps," he said, under his breath. 
 
 The evil tempted him; if ever it passed into his hands, its widest exercise 
 could be no more than justice. In his dark hours there were times when no 
 other thing looked worth the living for, or worth the seeking, except this, 
 vengeance upon his traitor. 
 
 Lulli gazed at him regretfully and with a self-reproach; he had not meant to 
 stir these deep-closed poisonous pools of deadly recollection; he had not meant 
 to recall a past that was, by a command he obeyed with the docile obedience 

 
 CHANDOS. 359 
 
 of a dog, never named between them. His music was, to the man he honored, 
 as the music of the young Israelite was to the soul of the great stricken king 
 whom men forsook and God abandoned. His conscience and his love alike 
 smote him for having jarrred on these forbidden chords and wrought harm 
 instead of bringing consolation. 
 
 He leaned forward, and his voice was infinitely sweet. 
 
 " Forgive me. You have loved truth and served men through all, despite 
 all; it is not to you that I should talk of such a tiger's lust as vengeance, though 
 vengeance there were righteous. If they had not driven you from your para- 
 dise, would you ever have been your greatest ? If you had not been forced 
 from your rose-gardens out into the waste of the desert, would you ever have 
 known your strength ? Till you ceased to enjoy, you were ignorant how to 
 endure." 
 
 The words were true. The bread of bitterness is the food on which men 
 grow to their fullest stature; the waters of bitterness are the debatable ford 
 through which they reach the shores of wisdom; the ashes boldly grasped and 
 eaten without faltering are the price that must be paid for the golden fruit of 
 knowledge. The swimmer cannot tell his strength till he has gone through the 
 wild force of opposing waves; the great man cannot tell the might of his hand 
 and the power of his resistance till he has wrestled with the angel of adversity 
 and held it close till it has blessed him. 
 
 Still, the thought will arise, Is the knowledge worth its purchase? Is it not 
 better to lie softly in the light of laughing suns than to pass through the black- 
 ness of the salt sea-storm out of pity for men who will revile the pursuit of a 
 phantom goal, that may be but a mirage when all is over ? 
 
 This thought was with him now. 
 
 " God knows ! " he said. " Do not speak against my golden days; they were 
 very dear to me. I think I was a better man in them than I have ever been in 
 my exile. A happy life, a life that knows and gives happiness as the sunlight; 
 it cannot last on earth, may-be, but it is life as no other is, while it does." 
 
 Lulli was silent. The yearning regret that unconsciously escaped in the 
 reply pierced him to the heart, even though he, to whom existence had been 
 one long spell of physical pain, and to whom all strength and joy were unknown, 
 could but dimly feel all that the man who spoke to him looked back to with so 
 passionate a longing. 
 
 " The revellers in Florence," he murmured, softly, " had delight and glad- 
 ness, and made of life an unbroken festa, while Dante was in exile. Who thinks 
 of them now ? even of their names ? But on his door is written, ' Qui nacqui 
 il divino Poeta.' " 
 
 Chandos rose with a smile, a smile in which there was a weariness beyond 
 words.
 
 360 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 "A tardy and an empty recompense ! While they write on his door to-day, 
 reviling those who were blind in his generation, they repeat in their own times 
 the blindness, and the persecution to free thought, by which the poet and the 
 thinker suffered then and suffer still." 
 
 Throughout the years which had gone by since the fall of his high estate, 
 no lamentation, no recrimination, had ever been heard to pass his lips. When 
 the tidings floated to him of success piled on success that his enemy and his 
 traitor achieved, he listened in silence, too proud to condemn what was beneath 
 envy and beyond vengeance. Men sought oftentimes to make him speak of 
 the past and speak of Trevenna; they never succeeded. He held his peace, 
 keeping patience with a force of control which amazed and bewildered those 
 who had known him as an effeminate, self-indulged voluptuary, and had looked 
 from him for a suicide's story, or, at best, for a bitter upbraiding of the curse 
 of fate. They never heard a word from him either of regret at his own ruin or 
 of anger at his debtor's success. He endured in as absolute a silence as ever 
 an Indian endured when bound to the pyre. To two only, two who alone 
 remained to him out of the throngs who had once thought no honor higher 
 than to claim his friendship, did he ever speak either of his fate or of his 
 foe; and to them he spoke but reluctantly. They were Lulli and Philippe 
 d'Orvale. 
 
 The lustre of the descending sun was bright through all the forest-glades as 
 he left the musician's house now, and went alone through the great aisles of oak 
 and elm, and under the shadow of the stone boulders and rugged masses of naked 
 or moss-grown granite, with the rush of falling waters thundering now and 
 again on the silence. The love of the earth's freshness and fragrance and 
 beauty would never die in him; he had too much of Shelley's nature. The 
 bleakness of poverty, the narrow rigidity of want, the colorlessness of life with- 
 out the glow of passion, the warmth of pleasure, the vividness of sensuous 
 charms and sensuous delights, the richness of luxury, and the power of pos- 
 session, all these, which he had known in their deprivation and their misery, 
 had not altered this in him; and the chief solace of his life had been the conso- 
 lation that he had been able by his temperament to find in the antique tran- 
 quillity of the cities of Italy, in the solemn repose of mighty Alps, in the 
 changeful loveliness of Southern skies, in the intense splendor of Oriental 
 landscape. The artist and the poet were too closely blent in him for him 
 ever to cease to heed these things; and yet there were times when there was 
 in them for him an anguish that seemed to pass his strength. He had once 
 looked on them with such careless eyes of sunlit joy, with the warmth of their 
 suns on women's cheeks, and the laughter of idle summer-day love on their air ! 
 There are many natures, steel-knit, Puritan, austere, narrow in limit and in 
 sight, which never know what it is to enjoy, and never are conscious of their
 
 CHANDOS. Ml 
 
 loss; but to his, and to characters like his, life without this divine power of en- 
 joyment differs in little differs in nothing of value from death. 
 
 Now, as he went through the woodland shades, with the checkered light 
 across the moss of the paths, his heart went back to the time of his youth, the 
 time when no other doubt had rested on him in such forest-luxuriance than 
 
 to ask, 
 
 Oh, which were best, to roam or rest ? 
 The land's lap or the water's breast ? 
 To sleep on yellow millet-sheaves, 
 Or swim in lucid shadows just 
 Eluding water-lily leaves? 
 Which life were best on summer eves? 
 
 It might be true, as the French cripple had said, that he was greater now 
 than he had been then, that in conflict he had gained, and had become that 
 which he would never have done or been in the abundance, the indolence, the 
 shadowless content, and the royal dominion of his epicurean years. But for 
 himself in many moments, at the least the vanity in all things, in wisdom as 
 in riches, that Ecclesiastes laments, smote him hard; and he would have given 
 the fame of a Plato, of an Antoninus, of a Dante, of a Shakspeare, to have 
 back one day of that glorious and golden time ! 
 
 The sun had wellnigh set; here, in the darkness of the oak-glades, there was 
 little but a dusky, ruddy glow, fitful and flamelike. He passed slowly onward; 
 his head was uncovered, for the air was sultry, and such breeze as arose was 
 welcome; here and there a stray lingering sunbeam touched the fairness of 
 his hair; otherwise the depth of the forest-shadow was on his face, that wore 
 ever now, though it was serene in repose and its smile was infinitely sweet, the 
 weariness and the dignity of pain silently borne, which long ago had hushed 
 with their royalty of resolve and of suffering the hungry crowd gathered in the 
 porphyry chamber. An artist, hidden among the thickness of the leaves, 
 sketching the great oak-trunks, looked up as his step crushed the grasses, a 
 swift, slight, breathless look; then, as though he saw some ghost of a dead 
 age, the painter shivered, and let fall his brushes, and cowered down into the 
 gloom of the tall ferns with the shrinking horror of a frightened hare. 
 
 "Ah, Christ !" he murmured, in Spanish, "how weary he looks of his 
 exile ! and how king-like in his dignity still ! Misery has not embittered him. 
 He must have a rare nature. If I had found strength to tell him all that night 
 in the street, how would it have been now ? It could not have been worse with 
 us; and it was an Iscariot's sin only to know, to share ! 
 
 Chandos passed onward, not seeing him there beneath the shelter of the 
 spreading ferns; his thoughts were sunk far in the past. He had met his fate 
 with a tranquil endurance, with the proud and uncomplaining temper of his 
 race, which had in all centuries risen out of the softness of voluptuous in-
 
 362 QUID AS WORKS, 
 
 dulgence to encounter misfortune grandly; but not the less was life very joy- 
 less to him, and the bitterness of its vain toil oftentimes pursued and mocked 
 him. As he went, on the silence rang the clear mellow notes of a hunting- 
 horn, and the echo of a horse's feet: into the open green plateau immediately 
 below the rising ground on which he was, a horseman dashed rapidly, and 
 reined up, looking about him, a court guest, by the court hunting-dress he 
 wore, with its scarlet and green and gold, and its gold-handled forest-knife. 
 
 " Hola! has the Palace party passed ? " 
 
 As he glanced up, the words died on the speaker's lips; for the first time 
 their eyes met since the night in the Rue du Temple. In the red, faint, lower- 
 ing light, under the dense shade of the oak-boughs, with the twilight of the 
 autumn- bronzed leaves flung heavily down between them, Travenna saw him 
 where he stood on the slope, with the black wall of foliage behind him, and a 
 single faint ray of the declining sun shed full across his eyes, that were filling 
 dark as night with the sudden upleaping of silent passions, of thronging mem- 
 ories, of unavenged and unextinguished wrongs. 
 
 When they had last met, the murderous hand of his traitor had flung him 
 down on the blood-stained stones of the old monastic court, and had left him 
 to perish as he might in the heart of the sleeping city, in the cold of the winter's 
 night. When they had last met, John Trevenna had cursed him where he lay 
 senseless, and had wished his father's soul could know his ruin, and had be- 
 lieved no more that the life he had destroyed would ever again be raised 
 among living men, and gather strength to vanquish and endure, than if he had 
 struck to its heart with a knife and flung the corpse out to the river. 
 
 For the first moment there was no memory on either save' that memory, and 
 Trevenna's face paled and lost its healthful glow. He had known that his prey 
 had survived to bear calamity and exile and follow the guidance of a pure and 
 impersonal ambition; the world had often spoken each other's names on their 
 ears; but they had never met till now, now when the form of Chandos rose 
 before him in the reddened sullen glow of the dim forest-aisles, like a resurrec- 
 tion from the grave. And, in the first moment, all his intensity of hate revived 
 in its ancient lust, burning in him none the less, but the more, because it had 
 wreaked its worst to |atiety. He hated to think Chandos lived; he hated to 
 know he had not sunk, body and mind into debauchery and insanity; he hated 
 the very beauty that he knew so well of old, because years and pain would not 
 destroy it ! 
 
 Then the insolence, the mockery, the audacious greedy exultation of his 
 triumph governed him alone; the pride of success and supremacy made him 
 feel drunk with the joy of his victory. He bowed to his saddle with a con- 
 temptuous reverence. 
 
 " Ah, beau sire ! it is many years since we met. We said once we'd see
 
 CHANDOS. 363 
 
 which made the best thing of life, you, the visionary, or I, the materialist. I think 
 I've won, far and away, eh ? The fable says iron pots and china pots can't 
 swim down the stream together; your dainty patrician kuig's-pattern Sevres 
 soon smashed and swamped among the bulrushes; my nameless, ugly, battered 
 two-penny tin pipkin got clear of all shoals, and came safe into port, you see. 
 I was your palace jester once: what do you think of my success now ? " 
 
 Chandos, raised above him by the rocky slope on which he stood, looked 
 down and gazed at him full in the eyes: for the instant, Trevenna would have 
 quailed less if a dagger had been at his throat. Neither shame nor conscience 
 smote him; but for the instant some touch of dread, some throb of what was 
 wellnigh fear, came to him, as the voice that had used to be so familiar on his 
 ear, and that had been unheard through so many years of silence, fell on his 
 ear in the hush of the forest, clear, low, cold as ice, with the quiver of a mighty 
 passion in it. 
 
 " I think it great as your imfamy, great as your treachery; greater it can- 
 not be." 
 
 Trevenna laughed: his savage mirth, his taunting buffooney, his unreined, 
 exulting malice of triumph, were all let loose by the scorn that cut him like a 
 scourage, and which he hated because he knew that, however high he rose, how- 
 ever proud his rank, however unassailable his station, this one man knew all 
 that he had once been, knew whose hand had first raised him, knew that he was 
 the vilest ingrate that ever sold his friend. 
 
 "Whew!" he cried; "you areas haughty as ever. How do they stand 
 that, now you're only a heterodox author with a dubious reputation ? You are 
 bitter on me: well, I can forgive that. 'Tisn't pleasant, I daresay, to have 
 sparkled like a firework and then gone out into darkness, a failure ! But 
 you'd ten years of it, you known; and it's my turn now. I'm a Right Hon. and 
 a millionnaire; I'm a Cabinet minister, and I'm staying at court. I mean to die 
 in the Lords, if I don't die in the Lord; and I'm only waiting for the ' mad 
 duke's' death to go and buy Clarencieux. When I retire into the Peers' Para- 
 dise, I'll take my title after it, John Trevenna, Baron Clarencieux ? Won't 
 it sound well, eh ? " 
 
 With a single leap, light, resistless, unerring as in his earliest years, Chandos 
 leaped down the slope on which he stood, his face darkly flushed, his lips set 
 straight and stern in the shado.wy fiery autumn light; with the swiftness and 
 force of a panther's spring he threw himself on Trevenna, swaying him back off 
 his saddle and out of his stirrups to the ground, while the horse, let loose from 
 the weight of its rider, tossed its head impatient in the air and galloped alone 
 down the glade. 
 
 " You make me vile as yourself ! Dare to own or to taint Clarencieux, and 
 as we both live I will kill you ! "
 
 364 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 The words were low breathed in his foe's ear as he bore him backwards, but 
 the more deadly in meaning and in menace for that; then he shook Trevenna 
 from him and left him, and plunged down into the dark thick depths of the 
 leaves. He knew if he stayed to look on at his debtor the mere brute instincts, 
 the sheer Cain-like passions, which slumbered in all would conquer him and 
 force him on to some madness or some crime. The voice of his tempter and 
 betrayer had come back on him across the wide waste of spent and desert years, 
 and had brought the passions and the shame and the despair of his conquered 
 ruin fresh on him, as though known but yesterday. 
 
 " Oh, God ! " he thought, " what have I vanquished, what have I learned ? 
 This man makes me a brute like himself; one trial, and my creeds and my 
 patience and my strength break like reeds ! " 
 
 For Trevenna had been the bane, the temptation, the tyrant, the poisoner, of 
 all his life, and was so still. Through his foe even the pure and lofty hopes 
 which had alone sustained him were broken and polluted. This man had fame 
 and success in the world that applauded him ! What was renown worth, since 
 it went to such as this mocker ? a crown of rotten rushes, an empty bladder 
 blown by lying lips, a meed to the one who dupes a blind world best, a prize 
 that goes to the stump-orator, to the spangled mountebank, to the blatant char- 
 latan, to the trained posture-maker of political and intellectual life ! What 
 avail was it to labor for mankind, when this ingrate was their elected leader, 
 their accepted representative ? What worth to toil for liberty and tolerance, 
 when the one whom humanity crowned was the ablest trickster, the adroitest 
 mime, the cheat who could best hide the false ace in his sleeve by a face of 
 laughing candor and a fraud of forged honesty ? 
 
 Trevenna had robbed him of all; Trevenna wellnigh robbed him now of the 
 only solace that his life had left. The success of his traitor made him doubt 
 truth itself. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 "QUI A OFFENSE NE PARDONNE JAMAIS." 
 
 " CURSE him ! There must have been something sorely ill managed by me 
 that he ever lived after that night. Curse him ! When he lay in that garret 
 dying, who could dream he would ever rise again, unless it were to go to a 
 madhouse?" mused Trevenna before the fire in his dressing-room in the 
 palace. He had been slightly bruised, but not hurt; and he had told the court 
 party, whom he had found and rejoined as soon as he had called his horse to 
 him, that an oak bough had struck and blinded him, so that he had fallen out of
 
 CHANDOS. 3G5 
 
 his saddle. As he sat now, smoking, with his costly velvets wrapped around 
 him, with all the elegance and luxury of a palace in the suit of chambers allotted 
 him as an English minister and a guest of the first circle of autumn visitors, 
 there was something of irritation and impatience even amidst his triumphant 
 reflections. He could not resent the force used to him, for he was too wise to 
 let the world know of that forest-meeting; and he hated to think that his intri- 
 cate nets had had a single loose mesh, by which his prey had escaped the ruin 
 of mind and body that he had made sure would accompany the ruin of peace 
 and pride and fair fortune; he hated to think that while Chandos lived there 
 would live one who knew him as he was, knew what he had been, knew the 
 treacheries by which his rise had been consummated, knew the stains that 
 darkened the gloss and the symmetry of the splendid superstructure of his 
 success. 
 
 They had never met until now; and he hated to feel that the sting of his 
 victim's scorn had power to pierce him; he hated to feel that a ruined exile 
 could quote against him the time when he the millionnaire, the minister, the 
 court guest, the national favorite had been a debtor in gaming-prisons, an 
 adventurer without a sou. 
 
 " And yet I don't know," he mused on, while a smile came about his 
 mouth, and he gave a kick to the ruddy embers of the fire. " I'm not sorry he 
 lives, either: if he were dead he wouldn't suffer, and if he were dead he 
 wouldn't see me rise ! " No ! I like him to live. He'd have missed all the bit- 
 terness of it, if he'd gone in his grave then. How I sting him with every step 
 I get ! How his heart burns when he reads my name in the Cabinet ! How 
 it must ring and goad and taunt and madden him when he knows I'm in his 
 palaces, and have got his prosperity, and have won my way to the proudest 
 position a man can hold in England. No ! I'm glad he lives. Gad ! I'll ask 
 him to Clarencieux, one day." 
 
 And he plunged his hands in the pockets of his crimson velvet neglige, and 
 laughed to himself. The nation would have been something amazed if it had 
 seen its astute statesman mockingly exultant over his triumphs as any school- 
 boy over his cricket-innings; but this was part and parcel of the man's jovial, 
 malicious, farcical, racy temper; and the sweetest morsel in all his triumphs 
 was that each step and each crown of them was a revenge. 
 
 " Mercy ! what a fool he's been ! " he thought. " Cared for nothing, while 
 he had the power, but pleasure and revelry, and making love to women, and 
 playing Lorenzo the Magnificent, and now solaces himself in his poverty with 
 turning metaphysical questions inside out, and brodant sur la toile ciaraignfa, 
 as they say here, and caring for the future of the world, and working out the 
 scientific laws of history ! Mercy ! as if it mattered to us whether the world 
 goes smash when we've no more to do with it ! However, I don't understand
 
 366 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 him; never did. A man who cared so little for money as he did never could 
 be quite sane. Even now he's such a fool; he's never said to me the one thing 
 he might say, that I was his debtor." 
 
 To dream that there might be a generosity too proud to quote past services 
 against a present traitor utterly escaped Trevenna: he was far too practical to 
 have glimpse of such a temper; he only thought the man a fool, a wonderful 
 fool, who forebore to taunt him, with the stone that lay so ready to his hand, in 
 the reproach, "I served you." 
 
 "No; I'm glad he lives. It would be Hamlet with the part of Hamlet left 
 out, if he didn't exist to watch my triumph ! " he mused, clenching the matter 
 in his own mind, and getting up to summon his valet and dress for dinner. His 
 momentary bitterness was all gone. Here he was, the guest of a sovereign, 
 with a name that had fame in the Old and New Worlds, riches as much as he 
 needed them, a future brilliant as his present, an ambition without limit, and a 
 station that enemies and friends alike must envy. He was content, very richly 
 content, as he sauntered down to join the Palace circle, distinguished as the 
 most eloquent, the most penetrating, the most liberal, and the most promising 
 statesman of the English Cabinet, his opinion s,ought by princes and diplo- 
 matists, his words heard as words of gold breathed from the lips of one who 
 would probably govern in the highest rank of all in the future, his views studied 
 with interest, as those of the favorite of a great people, even his mere badinage 
 graciously sought by grandes dames who once denied him cards to their recep- 
 tions. The high orders detested him still, it is true; but they feared him, and 
 they courted him. They thought they propitiated him by such concessions. 
 Never was error wider He used them, and despised them. 
 
 " M. Trevenna, permit my congratulations on your late magnificent coup 
 d'etat," smiled the Comtesse de la Vivarol, who, under a new dynasty, reigned 
 in the court, a power now, as she had earlier been a beauty. 
 
 He bowed his thanks. 
 
 " You do me much honor, madame. I trust we have the aid of your favor- 
 ing sympathies ? " 
 
 " Personally, yes; scarcely your party. You are all so decorous and so 
 dull in your Parliament. Whoever turns the handle, the organ plays the same 
 tunes." 
 
 " And you would like an infusion of the (a ira ? Well, I should not object 
 to it, myself; but I shouldn't dare to introduce it. I'm very prudent ! " 
 
 " Indeed! You go rather far, too, at Darshampton " 
 
 Trevenna shook his head. 
 
 " Darshampton ? They will tell you there that I am devoted to the civil 
 and religious institutions of the nation. Why, I have built a church! It cost 
 me a deal in painted windows; but you don't know what it has done for me in
 
 CHANDOS. 367 
 
 reputation. It's made two spiritual lords believe in me, and given me postiche 
 as a ' safe man ' in perpetuity. Really, for a good public effect, I think nothing 
 is better than a church. Men think you have such a thorough conviction of 
 orthodox truth, if you adore the Lord in stucco and oak-carving! " 
 
 La Vivarol laughed. 
 
 " You were not so orthodox once ? " 
 
 " No; but I am now. I go to church every Sunday, specially when I'm 
 down at Darshampton. To be unorthodox is like walking out on a midsummer 
 day in your shirt-sleeves. It's refreshing to take your coat off, and it's very 
 silly to cajry a lot of sheep's wool that you pant under; but all the same, no 
 man who cares what his neighbors say walks abroad in his waistcoat. Ortho- 
 doxy and broadcloth are fallacies d, la mode : if you air yourself in heresy and 
 a blouse, the parsons and tailors, who see their trades in danger, will get a writ 
 of lunacy out against you. 
 
 The countess looked at him with a certain meaning in her brilliant eyes. 
 
 " You are a clever man, M. Trevenna ! You know how to manage your 
 world. But does it never tire you, that incessant promenade in such unim- 
 peachable broadcloth ? " 
 
 Trevenna met her eyes with a gleaming mischief in his own. He attempted 
 no concealment with her; the keen wit of the aristocratic politician would, he 
 knew, have pierced it in an instant; and she, who had once bidden him appren- 
 dre & s'effacer, alone never let him forget that she had known him when he was 
 on sufferance and obscure. 
 
 "Tire?" he said now; " no, never ! Who tires on the stage, so long as 
 they clap him, and so long as it pays ? It is your dissatisfied, unappreciated 
 men that may tire of their soupe maigrej nobody tires of the turtle-soup of 
 success." 
 
 " Then you don't believe in surfeits ? " 
 
 " Not for strong digestions." 
 
 "Perhaps you are right; and there is no absinthe that produces incessant 
 appetite so well as intense self-love." 
 
 Trevenna laughed good-humoredly; he acknowledged the implication. 
 
 " Ah, madame, you know I never denied that I was selfish. Why should I ? 
 If one don't love one's self, who will ? And, I confess, I like present success. 
 Immortality is terribly dull work; a hideous statue, that gets black as soot in 
 no time; funeral sermons that make you out a Vial of Revelation, and discuss 
 the probabilities of your being in the regions of Satan; a bust that slants you 
 off at the shoulders, trims you round with a stone scallop, and sticks you up 
 on a bracket; a tombstone for the canes of the curious to poke at; an occa- 
 sional attention in the way of withered immortelles or biographical Billingsgate, 
 and a partial preservation shared in common with mummies, auk's eggs, snakes
 
 3G8 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 in bottles and deformities in spirits of wine that's posthumous fame. I must 
 say I don't see much fun in it." 
 
 The comtesse smiled a gracious amusement over her fan. 
 
 " You have different views from your old friend." 
 
 "Who? Chandos ? Poor fellow! he was always eccentric; lived in the 
 empyrean, and had ideas that may be practicable in the millennium, but cer- 
 tainly won't be so before. ' Great wits to madness/ etc. After having squan- 
 dered all that made life endurable, he consoles himself, I believe, with the 
 belief that people will read him when he's dead. What a queer consolation! 
 Stendahl thought the same thing: who opens his books now ? " 
 
 " Though you despise immortality, M. Trevenna, it seems you can still 
 grudge it," said La Vivarol, with that quick, penetrative wit which could be 
 barbed as an arrow. 
 
 Trevenna felt angry with himself for having been trapped into the words. 
 
 " I grudge him nothing, madame," he laughed, good-humoredly, " least of 
 all a mummy-like embalming by posterity's bibliomaniacs. Indeed, now. I am 
 come in office^ I shall try and induce him to accept something more substantial. 
 I believe he's as poor as Job, though he's still proud as Lucifer." 
 
 " He had somewhat of Job's fortune in his friends," said the comtesse, with 
 a smile, as she turned to others, and let a due occupy the prie-Dieu near her, 
 which Trevenna, at that sign of dismissal, vacated. 
 
 " What does she still feel for him ? love, or hate ? I can understand most 
 things," thought Trevenna, " but hang me if I can ever understand love, 
 past or present. It's a Jack-in-the-box, always jumping up when you think it's 
 screwed down. It's like dandelion-seeds for lightness, blowing away with a 
 breath, and yet it's like nettles for obstinacy; there's no knowing when it's 
 plucked. up. A confounded thing, certainly." 
 
 Like a wise man, he had taken care to have nothing to do with the con- 
 founded thing, and, in consequence, digested all his dinners, and never mud- 
 dled any of his affairs. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 "NE CHERCHER QU'UN REGARD, QU'UNE FLEUR QU'UN SOLEIL." 
 
 IN the deep gloom of an antique, forsaken, world-forgotten town of Italy, 
 silent, grass-grown, unspeakable desolate, with the brown shadows of its ancient 
 houses, and here and there the noiseless gliding form of monk or nun flitting 
 across the deserted spaces, a head, like a Guido Aurora in its youth, like a 
 Guido Magdalen in its sadness, leaned out from the archway of a bridge-
 
 CHANDOS. 369 
 
 parapet, with the fair warmth of the cheek and the chestnut light of the hair 
 lying wearily on the pillow of the rough-hewn stone. Fallen so, half uncon- 
 sciously, to rest, the girl's form leaned against the buttress of the old river-way 
 that spanned tawny shallow waters only traversed by some olive-laden canal- 
 boat, whose stripped sails flapped lazily in the sun; her brow was sunk on her 
 hand; her eyes, full of passionate pain, watched the monotonous ebb and flow 
 of the stream; her whole figure expressed an intense fatigue; but on her face, 
 with all its brooding, tired suffering, there was a look of patient and unalterable 
 resolve. 
 
 " So endless ! so endless ! " she murmured to the silence of the waters. 
 " Surely God will have pity soon ! " 
 
 There was only, in answer, the changeless, sullen ripple of the river far below, 
 the silence that seems so bitter to those who suffer in their youth, and who 
 think some divine voice will surely whisper consolation, the silence eternal, in 
 which later they find man must live and must die. 
 
 A bent, browned, weather-worn fruit : seller, with a burden of melons and 
 gourds and figs fresh from the tree, traversing the steep incline of the bridge, 
 paused and looked at her. She was very poor, and she was old; but she had a 
 tender soul under a rough rind. She touched the girl's fever-flushed cheek with 
 the cool fragrance of a bough of syringa, and spoke very gently in her broad, 
 mellow peasant-dialect: 
 
 " Poverina, thou art tired. Take some fruit." 
 
 She started, and looked up; but there was almost apathy in the smile with 
 which she shook her head, it was so listless in its melancholy. 
 
 "You are very kind; but I want nothing." 
 
 "That is not true," said the old contadina. "Thou art in want of much; 
 thou art too weary for thy youth. Where are thy friends ? " 
 
 " I have none ! " The answer was the more pathetic for the proud, re- 
 strained sadness with which it was given, as she rose from her leaning attitude, 
 impatient of pity, though not ungrateful for it. 
 
 "None ? Mother of God ! and so young ! Thou art seeking some one?" 
 
 A deep flush passed over her face; she bent her head in assent. 
 
 " Ah ! thou seekest those who love thee ? " 
 
 The color burned deeper on her cheek; her eyes looked down on the water 
 again with their aching pain. 
 
 " No," she said, simply. " I only seek to find one; and when I have found 
 him, and heard his voice once more to die." 
 
 She spoke rather to her own thoughts than to the peasant. The old woman's 
 deep-set eyes grew very gentle, and her lips muttered, in wrath, 
 
 " Che e e ! Is it so with thee ? an r '. so young ! The Madonna's ven- 
 geance fall on him, then, whoever he ty ror having caused thee such shame ! "
 
 370 QUID AS WORKS, 
 
 The words acted like a spell; she lifted herself from the drooping languor of 
 her rest, and flashed on the peasant from the superb darkness of her eyes an 
 imperious regal challenge of rebuke and amaze. Who the speaker was she for- 
 got; she only remembered the sense that had been spoken. 
 
 " Shame ? / have no shame ! My only glory is to have seen and known 
 the noblest life on earth. The only hope I live for is that I may be worthy 
 to hear his words once more. Vengeance on him ? God's love be with him 
 always ! " 
 
 She passed onward with a sovereign's grace, moving like one in a dream; 
 though the passion of her words had risen to so sudden and vivid a defence, 
 she seemed to have little consciousness of what she did, whither she went. 
 Then, as though a pang of self-reproach moved her, she turned swittly and 
 came back, and stooped over the aged contadina, raising the fallen fruit with 
 a self-accusative gentleness, beseeching even while it still was so proud. 
 
 " Forgive me! You meant kindness; and you did not know. I was un- 
 grateful and ungentle; but I am very tired! " 
 
 Her lashes were heavy with tears, and a sigh of intense exhaustion escaped 
 her. The peasant, touched to the quick, forced the freshest fruits into her 
 hands. 
 
 "Carissima ! I thought nothing of it. I only pitied thee." 
 
 At the word the haughty rebellion of a royal nature gleamed in the sadness 
 of the beautiful eyes that looked down on her. 
 
 " Pity is for those who ask alms or stoop to shame: do not give it to 
 me." 
 
 " But art thou all alone ? " 
 
 "Yes; all alone." 
 
 "Christ! and with thy beauty! Ah! insult will come to thee, though thou 
 art like a princess in her exile; insult will come, if thou art alone in the wide 
 world with such a face and such a form as thine." 
 
 On her face rose a look of endurance and of resistance far beyond her 
 years. 
 
 " Insult never comes except to those who welcome it. Farewell! and believe 
 me from my heart grateful, if I have seemed not to be so enough." 
 
 And she went on her way, with the mellow light of a setting sun on her 
 meditative brow, and the shadow of the gray parapet cast forward on her 
 path. The fruit-seller looked after her wistfully, perplexed and regretful. 
 
 " The saints keep her! " she muttered over her tawny gourds and luscious 
 figs. " She will need their care bad enough before she has found out what the 
 world is for such as she. Holy Mary! whoever left her alone like that must 
 have a heart of stone." 
 
 The girl passed onward over tne rise and descent of the old pointed bridge;
 
 CHANDOS. 371 
 
 there was the flush of fever on her cheek, the exhaustion of bodily fatigue in 
 her step; but her eyes looked far forward with a brave light, resolute while 
 it was so visionary, and her lips had as much of resolve as of pain on 
 them. In one hand swung a pannier full of late summer flowers, woven with 
 coils of scarlet creepers, and with the broad bronzed leaves of vine, in such 
 taste as only the love and the fancy of an artist-mind could weave them; 
 in the other she held, closely clasped, the bough of blossoming syringa and a 
 book well worn, that she pressed against her bosom as she went, as though it 
 were some living and beloved thing. There was an extreme pathos, such as 
 had touched the peasant-woman, in the union of her excessive youth and her 
 perfect loneliness; there was something yet higher and yet more pathetic in the 
 blending in her of the faith and ignorance of childhood that wanders out into 
 the width of the world as into some wonder-land of Faery, and the unwearying, 
 undaunted resolution of a pilgrim who goes forth as the pilgrims of Christen- 
 dom went eastward to look on their Jerusalem once and die content. 
 
 The bridge led down across the river into a wide square, so still, so 
 deserted, so mediaeval, with its vast abandoned palaces and its marvellous 
 church beauty, with only some friar's shadow or some heavily-weight mule 
 crossing it in the light of the Italian sunset. In the low loggia of one of the 
 palaces, altered to a posting-house, a group was standing, idly looking at the 
 grass-grown waste, whilst their horses were changing. They were a gay, rich, 
 titled set of indolent voyagers who were travelling to Rome from Paris, and 
 were as incongruous with the monastic silence and solitude of the town that 
 lay in its death-trance as a Watteau painting in a Gothic hall. They saw her 
 as she came beneath the balcony, with the book against her bosom, and the 
 abundance of the flowers drooping downwards in rings and wreaths of color as 
 she bore them. Murmurs of admiration at her loveliness broke irresistibly 
 even from the world-sated men and women who leaned there, tired and im- 
 patient of even a few minutes' dulness. 
 
 " The old traditions of Italia, the ideal of Titian himself ! " said one of 
 them. " Bellissima, will you not spare us one of your lilies ? " 
 
 She looked up; a flush passed over her face at the familiarity of the ad- 
 dress, and its natural pride deepened; she paused, and glanced at the women 
 of the group. 
 
 " Those ladies can have them, if they wish." 
 
 " But must not I, my exquisite young flower-priestess ? " laughed her first 
 questioner. 
 
 She let her grave luminous eyes dwell calmly on him. 
 
 "No, signore," she said, simply; but the brevity of the words rebuked the 
 insolent ease of his manner better than any lengthier ones. 
 
 One of the women leaned down, amused at her companion's rebuff and
 
 372 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 mortification; the loggia was so low that she could touch the flowers, and she 
 drew out one of the clusters of late lilies. 
 
 " My fair child, do you sell these ? " 
 
 The color deepened on her face; she lifted herself with a haughty grace. 
 She was not ashamed of having sold the flowers, but she was ready to resist to 
 death any aggression that held her lowered through that necessity. 
 
 " I have done, signora." 
 
 " Then you will sell them to me," said the other, as she dropped into the 
 basket a little gold piece and took up the blossoms. A hand as soft as her own 
 put back the money into her palm. 
 
 " I have sold them for what they are worth, a few scudi; I give them to 
 you gladly, and I do not take alms from any." 
 
 They looked at her in wonder; the dignity of her utterance, the purity of 
 accent, the royal ease in her attitude, amazed them. An Italian child, sell- 
 ing flowers for her bread, spoke with the decision and the serenity of a 
 princess. 
 
 " But you will let me offer it you as a gift, will you not ? " asked the aristocrat, 
 with a smile, in the languid, careless amusement of one who tired of her 
 companions and impatient of detention, beguiles the time with the first thing 
 that offers. 
 
 She shook her head. 
 
 " Would you take gold as a gift yourself, signora ? " 
 
 The great lady reddened ever so slightly; the words spoken in all simplicity 
 pricked her. It was rumored by her world that empires and governments had 
 on occasion bought her silence or her alliance by magnificent bribes. 
 
 "Pardieu, my loveliest living Titian!" laughed the French marquis who 
 had first addressed her, " Madame la Comtesse does not sell flowers in the 
 street, I fancy." 
 
 Her eyes swept over him with a tranquil meditative disdain. 
 
 " There is but one rule for honor," she said, briefly; "and rank gives no 
 title for insolence." 
 
 " Fairly hit, Villeroy ! " laughed the great lady, who had recovered her 
 momentary irritation. " My beautiful child, will you tell me your name, at the 
 least ? " 
 
 "It is Castalia." Where she stood before the loggia, with a troubled 
 seriousness in the gaze of her brilliant eyes (for the tone of the marquis had 
 roused more anger than his mere words), her -hand moved the book against 
 her heart. " If I were to ask these ? " she mused. " It is only the nobles who 
 will ever tell me; it is only they who can be his friends. I have never found 
 courage to speak of him yet; but, until I do, I cannot know." 
 
 " Castalia ! " echoed the aristocrat. " A fair name, indeed, as fair as you
 
 CHANDOS. 373 
 
 and your flowers. You will not let me repay you for your lilies; is there 
 nothing you can let me do for you ? " 
 
 Castalia looked at her musingly; the words were gentle, but there was 
 something that failed to reassure her. She stood before the half-insolent 
 admiration of the men, the supercilious admiration of the women, of this titled 
 and aristocratic group, with as complete a dignity and indifference as though 
 she were a young patrician who received them; but she felt no instinct of 
 regard or of trust to anyone of them. Still she drew nearer the loggia, and 
 held out the book reluctantly to her questioner; her eyes filled with an earnest, 
 terrible, longing wistfulness; the words were only wrenched out with a great 
 pang. 
 
 " Signora, yes; can you tell me where he is ? " 
 
 Her hand pointed to the name on the title page, and her voice shook with 
 the intensity of anxious entreaty over the last two words. 
 
 The countess glanced at the volume, then let it fall with amaze, as she 
 gazed at the pleading, aching eyes that'looked up to hers. 
 
 " Chandos ! Mon Dieu ! what is it to you ? " 
 
 " You know him ? " There was the tremulous thirstiness of long-deferred, 
 long-despairing hope in the question, but there was also something of the 
 passionate jealousy of Southern love. 
 
 The aristocrat looked at her with searching, surprised, insolent eyes, in 
 which some anger and more irony glittered, while she turned over the leaves of 
 the book. 
 
 " It is ' Lucrece ! ' " she murmured, " ' Lucrece ! ' ' In the moment her 
 thoughts went backward over so many years to so many buried hours, to so 
 many forgotten things, to so many by-gone scenes. The book came to her like 
 a voice of the past. 
 
 " You know him ! " A quivering emotion rang in the voice. 
 
 " What interest has he for you ? " 
 
 The lady had recovered her momentary amazement, and the smile with 
 which she spoke thrilled with fire and struck like ice the heart of Castalia, 
 though that heart was too guileless to know all the smile meant. But the an- 
 guish of a hopeless and endless search was stronger on her than the sense of 
 insult; her eyes filled with the beseeching misery, like a wounded animal's, and 
 her hands, as she drew back the volume, were crushed on it in a gesture of 
 agonized supplication. 
 
 " You know his name, at least ? Ah ! tell me, for the love of pity, where 
 he is gone ! " 
 
 The aristocrat turned away with a negligent cold contempt. 
 
 " Your friend wanders all over the world; if you want to discover him, you 
 have a very poor chance, and one I am scarcely disposed to aid."
 
 374 O UIDA ' S WORKS. 
 
 " Chandos, now he has turned philosopher, retains pretty much the same 
 tastes he had as a poet, I suppose ? " she murmured, with a smile, to one of her 
 female friends. "The girl is very beautiful, certainly; but how shameless to 
 ask us ! It is scarcely creditable to an author 'who writes such eloquent periods 
 on Humanity to leave her to starve by selling lilies ! " 
 
 The slight, scornful laugh caught Castalia's ear, as the cold words of the 
 first phrases had stung all her pride and killed all hope within her; a great 
 darkness had come over her face, the force of Italian passion gleamed in her 
 eyes, but her face was white and set, and her lips were pressed together to hold 
 in the words that rose to them. She turned away without another entreaty; 
 not even to learn of him would she supplicate there. The marquis, with a light 
 leap, cleared the loggia and gained her side. He was young, handsome, and 
 his voice, when he would, was sweet as music. 
 
 " You seek the writer of that book ? " he said, gently touching the volume. 
 
 The look she turned on him might have touched the sternest to pity. 
 
 " Ah, signore, yes ! " . 
 
 The answer broke from her with a sigh that was beyond repression. Her 
 eyes grew dim with tears. The world held but one idea, one thought, one exist- 
 ence, for her, and her love was at once too utter an absorption and too absolute 
 an adoration to be conscious of anything except its one search. 
 
 " Come with me, then, and I will tell you what you wish." 
 
 A radiance of joy and hope flashed over the sadness of her face. She did 
 not know how dangerous an intensity that sudden light of rapture lent her 
 beauty; she only thought that she should hear of him. 
 
 " 1 will come," she said, softly, while her hand still held the book to her 
 bosom; and she went, unresisting, beside him to the place to which he turned, 
 a solitary, darkened terrace, heavily overhung by the stones of an unused 
 palazzo, with the river flowing sluggishly below. 
 
 "Why do you want to seek him ?" her companion asked. 
 
 In his heart he thought he knew well enough. Her lover had abandoned 
 her, and she was following him to obtain redress or maintenance. 
 
 Her eyes dwelt on the water with the earnest, lustrous, dreamy gaze that 
 had used to recall so vague a memory to Chandos. 
 
 "Signore, only to see him once more." 
 
 " To see him ! To stir him to pity, I suppose, to make some claim on him? " 
 
 She did not comprehend his meaning; but she lifted her head quickly with 
 the imperial pride that mingled in so witching a contrast with her guileless and 
 childlike simplicity. 
 
 " Signore, I would die sooner than ask his pity; it would be to ask and to 
 merit his scorn. Claim, too ! What claim ? Have subjects a claim on their 
 king, because he has once been gentle enough to smile on them ? When I find
 
 CHANDOS. 375 
 
 him, I will not weary him; I will not let him even know that I am near; but I 
 will search the world through till I look on his face once more, and then the 
 joy of it will kill me, and I shall be at rest with my mother forever." 
 
 He looked at her, mute with surprise. If she had been attractive in his 
 sight before, she was tenfold more so now, as she spoke with the exaltation of 
 a love that absorbed her whole life, making her unconscious of all save itself, 
 and the mournful simplicity of the last words uttered with a resignation that 
 was content, in the dawn of her youth, to receive no other mercy than death. 
 He was amazed, he was bewildered, he was entranced; he felt an envious pas- 
 sion in an instant against the one for whom she could speak thus; but compre- 
 hend her he could not. He was shallow, selfish, a cold libertine, and at once 
 too young and too worldly to even faintly understand the mingling in her nature 
 of transparency and depth, of tropical fervor and of utter innocence, of fearless 
 pride against all insult and of absolute abandonment to one idolatry. He 
 spoke in the irritation of wonder and annoyance. 
 
 " The author of ' Lucrece' is much flattered to be the inspirer of so tender a 
 love ! I am afraid he has been but negligent of the gift." 
 
 The words were coarser than he would have used save on the spur of such 
 irritation; their effect was like a spell. The flush that was like the scarlet 
 depth of a crimson camellia covered her face in an instant, her eyes darkened 
 with a tremulous emotion that swiftly altered to the blaze of Tuscan wrath, her 
 lips trembled, her whole form changed under the sudden change of thought; 
 the shame of love came to her for the first moment, as the lips of another man 
 spoke it; she had been wholly unconscious of it before. She was seeking him 
 as devotees sought the Holy Grail, as a stray bird seeks the only hand that has 
 ever caressed and sheltered it. The word or the meaning of passion had never 
 been uttered to her till now. An intense horror, consumed her, horror of her- 
 self, horror of her companion; she shuddered where she stood in the hot air, 
 but the proud instinct of her nature rose to sustain herself, to defend 
 Chandos. 
 
 " You mistake, signore," she said, with a calm that for the moment awed 
 him. " He whom I seek, I seek because he is my only friend, my only sov- 
 ereign lord; because my debt to him is a debt so vast, a debt of life itself that 
 life can never pay. He was never negligent of me, never; he was but too 
 good, too generous, too gentle." 
 
 He looked at her, perplexed and ncensed. He vaguely felt that he was in 
 error; but he was distant as ever from the truth. All he knew was that he had 
 never, in the whole range of courts, seen loveliness that could compete with the 
 face and form of this young seller of the Tuscan lilies. 
 
 "Forgive me," he murmured, eagerly; "I meant no offence. Only to look 
 on you is sufficient to "
 
 376 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 "You said you would tell me where he is." She spoke very low, but her 
 lips were set. She began to mistrust him. 
 
 "I will; but hear me first. He whom you talk of is very poor; he is no 
 longer young; he is a madman who spent all his millions in a day, and who 
 always played at his fancy with women, and left them. He is not worthy of a 
 thought of yours." 
 
 The glorious darkness of her eyes grew like fire; but she held her passion 
 in rein. 
 
 " Keep the promise you made me," she said, in her teeth. " Tell me of 
 him." 
 
 " I will. One moment more. He cannot care whether you live or die, or 
 would he have left you thus ? " 
 
 It was a random blow, essayed at hazard, but it struck home. She grew 
 very pale, and her lips shook; yet she was resolute, resolute in her proud 
 defence and self-restraint. 
 
 " Signore, there was no cause why he should care. I was but as a broken 
 bird that he was gentle to; he had a right to leave me, no right to think of me 
 one hour." 
 
 He repressed an impatient oath. He could not understand her, yet he felt 
 he made no head against this resignation of herself to neglect and to oblivion; 
 and the splendor of her face seemed a hundred times greater because of this 
 impotence to make any impress on her thoughts. 
 
 " At least, if he had had the heart of a man, he could never have forsaken 
 or forgotten you," he urged, tenderly. " Listen. I, who have seen you but a 
 moment ago, give you too true a homage to be able to quit your side until 
 you deal me my fiat of exile. In the world there the world of which perhaps 
 you know nothing I have*riches and honors, and pleasures and palaces, that 
 shall all be yours if you will have them. Come with me, and no queen shall 
 equal your sway. Come with me, and for all those lilies I will give you as 
 many pearls. Come with me; you shall have diamonds in your hair, and slaves 
 for your every wish, and I the chiefest yet the humblest of them all; you shall 
 have kings at your feet, and make the whole world mad with one glance of 
 those divine eyes. Come with me. He never offered you what I offer you 
 now, if you will only trust to my truth and my love." 
 
 He spoke with all the hyperbole that he thought would best dazzle and en- 
 trance one to whom the beauties and the wealth of the world alike were un- 
 known, one in whom he saw blent the pride of patricians with the poverty of 
 peasants, spoke with his eyes looking eloquent tenderness, with the sun on 
 his handsome head, with the mellow, beguiling music in his voice. For all an- 
 swer where she stood, her eyes dilated with abhorrent scorn and slumbering 
 fire; she shuddered from him as from some asp. She did not comprehend all
 
 CHANDOS. 377 
 
 to which he wooed her, all that he meant to convey; but she comprehended 
 enough to know that he sought to bribe her with costly promises, and outraged 
 her with a familiarity offensive beyond endurance. 
 
 "No! "she said, passionately, while the liquid melody of her voice rang 
 clear and imperious, " no! he never offered me what you offer me, insult. 
 Neither was he ever what you are, a traitor to his word! " 
 
 She turned from him with that single answer, the blood hot as flame in her 
 cheek, her head borne with careless, haughty dignity. She would not show 
 him all she felt; she would not show him that her heart seemed breaking, 
 breaking with the bitterness of disappointment, with the sudden vivid sense of 
 ineradicable shame, with the absolute desolation that came on her with the first 
 faint sickening perception of the meaning and the tempting of evil. 
 
 Mortified, irritated, incensed at defeat where he had looked for easy victory 
 and grateful welcome, the young noble caught her as she turned, flung his 
 arms about her ere she could stir and stooped his lips to hers. 
 
 " Bellissima ! do you think I shall lose you like that ? " 
 
 Before his kiss could touch her, she had wrenched herself free, flung him 
 off, and struck him across the mouth with the bough of syringa. The blow of 
 the fragrant white blossoms stamped him coward more utterly than a weightier 
 stigma could have stamped it. 
 
 Then she broke the branch in two, threw it at his feet as a young empress 
 might break the sword of a traitor, and, leaving all her lilies and wealth of leaf- 
 age scattered there, she quitted him without a word. 
 
 Bold though he was, her pursuer dared not follow her. She looked down at 
 the water, as she went along its sullen course, with a smile, and leaned her lips 
 on the book's worn page. 
 
 " He touched them once," she thought; " no other ever should while that 
 river could give me death ! " 
 
 A deadly horror, a tumult of dread and of loathing, were on her. She never 
 rested, all tired though she was, till she was far out of the town, and amidst the 
 vine-fields, whose leaves were bronzed, and whose purple and amber clusters 
 were swelling with their richest bloom, near the vintage. The shadows, and the 
 stone wilderness, and the contracted air and space of cities, were terrible to her; 
 mountain-winds and forest-fragrance and the free stretch of limitless vision had 
 been as the very breath of life to her from her infancy; caged in the darkness 
 and the heat of cities, she would have died as surely as a caged mocking-bird 
 dies of longing for the South. She dropped to rest, still by the side of the 
 water under the shade of the vines, while the buildings and bridges of the town 
 sank down behind a cypress-crowned crest of hills, gray with olives, or bare 
 where the maize had been reaped. The browned leaves and the reddened fruit 
 hung over her; the water-flags and the purling stream, narrowed and shallow
 
 378 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 here, were at her feet; alone, the great tears rushed into her eyes, and her scarce- 
 flown childhood conquered. 
 
 " Oh, God ! the width of the world ! " she murmured, while one sob rose in 
 her throat, it seemed so vast, so endless, so naked, and so pathless a desert. 
 This was the world to which she had used to look as the redresser of her wrongs, 
 the battle-field of her victories, the fairy-realm of every beauty, the giver of 
 such golden crowns, such hours of paradise ! this world that seemed so full of 
 lives rushing to their tombs, wherein no man cared for his brother, where all 
 was hard, and heated, and choked, and pitiless, and none paused to think of 
 God ! this world in which there was but one life for her, and that one lost, 
 perhaps lost forever. 
 
 This boundless width of the world! to wander through it, ever seeking, 
 never finding, wearing the years away in fruitless search, pursuing what, like 
 the mountain-heights, receded farther with every nearer step, looking in all the 
 multitudes of earth for one face, one regard, one smile! The burden lay 
 heavy on her young heart, and the heart-sickness of toil without end was on 
 her to despair. But the nature in her was brave unto death, and the venera- 
 tion she bore her one idol enchained and possessed her whole existence. She 
 had a child's faith, a woman's passion, a martyr's heroism. 
 
 She looked up at the sunlight through the mist of her tears; and trust was 
 strong in her, strong as the anguish that made her fair lips white and hot in its 
 pain and her brief life seem near its ending. 
 
 " He is poor, he has suffered," she mused, recalling the words that had 
 been spoken against him. " He is so great; but he has lost his kingdom. 
 When I find him, then, there may be some way I may serve him, some way 
 as slaves serve." 
 
 To hear that he had want and sorrow had seemed to bring him nearer to 
 her, had bound her heart closer yet to one who was not less a sovereign to her 
 because a sovereign discrowned. She marvelled what his history could be. 
 All of glory, of dignity, of sacrifice, of desolation, that wronged greatness bears, 
 thronged to her thoughts as the story of his life. She knew him now as the 
 unknown man of whom she had said, on the faith of his written words, that he 
 would have gathered strength from any fall; and she knew no more than this. 
 If was enough; it spoke more to her than if she had been told of empires that 
 he owned. She knew the kingdom of his thoughts, the treasures of his mind; 
 through his words he had spoken to her long ere her eyes had rested on him, 
 and she had revered him as her master ere ever she had heard his voice, as 
 Heloise had revered the genius which roused the nations and shook the churches, 
 ere ever Abelard had stood before her. 
 
 It bound her to him in a submission absolute and proud in its own bondage 
 as was ever that of Heloi'se.
 
 CHANDOS. 379 
 
 It mattered nothing to her what his life had been, a reign or a martyrdom, 
 a victory or a travail; what he was was known J;o her, and she asked no more. 
 Yet, where she leaned alone, the color glowed into her face; she shrank and 
 trembled in the solitude as though a thousand eyes were on her; for the first 
 time the sense of shame had touched her, for the first time the vileness of evil 
 had approached her, and both left her afraid and startled. 
 
 " They spoke as though it were sin to seek him," she thought. " Will he 
 be angered if I ever find him ? I will never go near him, never ask his pity, never 
 let him know that I am by; I will only look on him from some distance, only 
 stay where I can hear his voice afar off if I live. But whenever I see him 
 the joy will kill me; and better so, better far than to risk one cold word from 
 him, one look of scorn. He said the world would crush me, and stone me like 
 Hypatia. The world shall not; but one glance of his would, if it ever rebuked 
 me ! " 
 
 A shiver ran through her as she mused. 
 
 She had cast herself on the desert of the world in darkness, as the lamps of 
 sacrifice are cast on the stream by Indian women at night. All was strange to 
 her, all cold, all arid, all without track or knowledge or light. The beauty of 
 her voice in choral service and the flowers that she gathered from forest or 
 river were all her riches, and hand to guide her she had none. But all fear for 
 herself, all thought for herself, were banished in the domination of one supreme 
 grief, one supreme hope. The world was so wide ! When would she find 
 him ? 
 
 Her tears fell heavy and f^st, down into the white cups of the faded lilies 
 at her feet. The world was so wide, and she was so lonely, she whose heart 
 ached for love, whose eyes ached for beauty, whose youth longed for happiness 
 as the hart for the water-springs. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 "NIHIL HUMANI A ME ALIENUM PUTO." 
 
 " IF you would but come back to us ! " Philippe d'Orvale spoke softly, as a 
 woman speaks in tenderness. He stood on the hearth of his great banqueting- 
 room, all rich and dark in its burnished lustre of gold and scarlet, like an old 
 palace chamber of Venice; his hair, that silky lion's mane, was white, but un- 
 der it the brown Southern eyes flashed, full of untamed fire, and from the depths 
 of the luxuriant snowy beard laughter fit for Olympus would still shake the silence 
 with the ringing, riotous mirth of yore. Now those eyes were grave with a wist-
 
 380 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 ful shadow, and the voice of the reckless prince Bohemian had a silver gentle- 
 ness. " If you would but come back to us ! " he said, again, as he had said it 
 many times through the length of weary years. " The people hunger for you. 
 They bear patiently with me, but it is in bitterness; they have never been re- 
 conciled to my rule, though its yoke is light. Come back ! It is unchanged; it 
 will be as your own: it should be your own at one word, if you would but 
 let me ! " 
 
 Where Chandos stood, in the shadow of the jutting angle of the alabaster 
 sculpture above the hearth, a shiver shook him that he could not restrain, like 
 that which strong limbs give irrepressibly when a bared nerve is cut and wrung. 
 His own voice was very low, as he answered, 
 
 "To thank you were impossible; I have found no words for it through 
 seventeen years. Your friendship may well avail to outweigh a whole world's 
 faithlessness. But to accept were to sink myself lower in my own sight than 
 my worst ruin ever sank me. Were I to go back on another's bounty, I would 
 give the men who still remember me leave to stone me as I went, and curse me 
 in my father's name." 
 
 Philippe d'Orvale's superb head drooped in silence: the proud noble knew 
 the temper that denied him, and honored it, and could not dare to press it to 
 surrender, knew that denial to him was right and just, even whilst his heart 
 longed most to wring assent. That denial had been given him steadily through 
 the long course of seventeen years, given by one who had once never known 
 what it was to forbid a desire or control a wish, by one to whom exile was 
 the ceaseless and deadly bitterness that it was to Dante, by one who longed 
 for the mere sight of the forest-lands, the mere breath of the forest-winds, of 
 the birthright he had lost, as the weary eyes of the Syrian Chief longed for a 
 sight of the Promised Land, that he had to lie down and die without entering, 
 banned out to the last hour. 
 
 Chandos saw the pain on him, and stretched out his hand. 
 
 " My best friend, if I could take such charity from any, it should be from 
 you. But you must feel with me that to give consent to what you wish were to 
 lose the one relic of my race I have striven to keep, its barren honor." 
 
 Due Philippe's mighty grasp closed warm and firm on his, though his head 
 was still sunk. 
 
 " I know ! I know ! Yet all I ask is leave to give a sovereign back his 
 throne. No more than my house did to my cousin of Bourbon." 
 
 A bitterness and weariness exceeding passed over Chandos' face. 
 
 " And the sovereign who bartered his kingdom for ten years' mad delight 
 had but justice done him when it was swept away forever. But speak no more 
 of it, for God's sake ! I am weak as water, here \ " 
 
 "Weak ! and yet you refuse?" .
 
 CHANDOS. 381 
 
 " I refuse, because to accept were disgrace; but there are times when I could 
 wish still that bearing me the love you did you had shot me like a dog, while 
 I could have died in my youth ! " 
 
 The words were hushed to a scarce-heard whisper, as they escaped through 
 his set teeth; they were a truth rarely wrung from him, the truth that through 
 the patience and the peace and the strength he had forced from calamity, 
 through the silence in which he had borne his doom and the high ambition 
 which guided and sustained him, the old passionate agony, the old loathing of 
 life that was pain, would break with a resistless force, and make him long to 
 have died in that golden and cloudless light of his lost years, died ere its 
 suns had set forever. 
 
 "Weak! This is rather strength, since, wishing this thus, you still have 
 borne against it, and lived on, and conquered! " 
 
 Chandos' face was in the -darkness of the shadow where he leaned; and as 
 the flame of the hearth shed its flickering glow on it, there was a heart-sickness 
 in his smile. 
 
 '' I have no strength! A foe's taunt can make a brute of me, a friend's 
 tenderness unnerve me like a woman. Sometimes I think I have learned nothing; 
 sometimes I think no reed was ever frailer than I. A while ago a young girl 
 showed me ' Lucrece: ' I knew, as I saw the book, what Swift felt when he 
 shed those passionate tears for the genius he had in his youth! " 
 
 "Yours is greater than in your youth." 
 
 "Ah! I doubt it. Youth is genius: it makes every dawn a new world, 
 every woman's beauty a love-ode, every breath a delight. We weave phi- 
 losophies as life slips from us; but when we were young our mere life was a 
 poem." 
 
 Dark hours came on him oftentimes; the Hellenic nature in him, that 
 loved beauty and harmony and the soft lulling of the senses, could not perish, 
 and, imprisoned in the loneliness and colorless asceticism of need and of exile, 
 ached in him and beat the bars of its prison-house in many a moment. He 
 had subdued his neck to the yoke, and he had found his redemption in sub- 
 limer things and loftier freedoms, as Boethius under the chains of the Goth 
 found his in the golden pages of the "Consolations;" but there were times 
 when the Greek-like temper in him still turned from life without enjoyment, as 
 from life without value. 
 
 The heart of Philippe d'Orvale went with him. The careless, royal, head- 
 long levity of the princely Bohemian had made of life one long unthinking 
 revel. Dynasties and creeds and nations and thrones might rock and fall, 
 might rise and totter, round him; he heeded them never, but drank the purple 
 wine of his life brimming and rose-crowned, and learned his science from wo- 
 men's eves, and sung a Bourbon chant while others grew gray in the gall of.
 
 382 O UIDAS WORKS. 
 
 state harness, and shook the grand, mellow, rolling laughter from his colossal 
 chest at the vain toil of the heart-burning world around him, while he held on 
 his gay, endless, Viking-like wassail. Of a truth there are creeds far less frank 
 and less wise than his; and of a truth there are souls far less honest and bold 
 and bright. He would have lost life rather than have broken his word; and no 
 lie had ever stained his fearless, careless, laughter-warmed lips. Of a truth 
 the mad duke had virtues the world has not. 
 
 His eyes dwelt now with a great unspoken tenderness on Chandos. 
 
 " Yet you are greater than you were then," he said, slowly. " I know it, 
 I who am but a wine-cup rioter and loving nothing but my summer-day fool- 
 ing. You are greater; but the harvest you sow will only be reaped over your 
 grave." 
 
 " I should be content could I believe it would be reaped then." 
 
 " Be content, then. You may be so." 
 
 " God knows ! Do you not think Marsy and Delisle de Sales and Linguet 
 believed, as they suffered in their dungeons for mere truth of speech, that the 
 remembrance of future generations would solace them ? Bichat gave him- 
 self to premature death for silence' sake: does the world once in a year speak 
 his name ? Yet how near those men are to us, to be forgotten ! A century, 
 and history will scarce chronicle them." 
 
 " Then why give the wealth of your intellect to men ? " 
 
 " Are there not higher things than present reward and the mere talk of 
 tongues ? The monstrari digito were scarce a lofty goal. We may love Truth 
 and strive to serve her, disregarding what she brings us. Those who need a 
 bribe from her are not her true believers." 
 
 Philippe d'Orvale tossed his silvery hair from his eyes, eyes of such sunny 
 lustre, of such Southern fires, still. 
 
 " Ay ! And those who held that sublime code of yours, that cleaving to 
 truth for truth's sake, where are they ? How have they fared in every climate 
 and in every age ? Stoned, crucified, burned, fettered, broken on the vast 
 black granite mass of the blind multitude's brutality, of the priesthood's curse 
 and craft ! " 
 
 " True ! Yet if through us, ever so slightly, the bondage of the creeds' 
 traditions be loosened from the lives they stifle, and those multitudes so weary, 
 so feverish, so much more to be pitied than condemned becomes less blind, 
 less brute, the sacrifice is not in vain." 
 
 Philippe d'Orvale shook himself like a lion lashing to rage. 
 
 " In your sense, no. But the world reels back again into darkness as soon 
 as a hand has lifted it for a while into light. Men hold themselves purified, 
 civilized; a year of war, and lust and bloodthirst rage untamed in all their bar- 
 barism; a taste of slaughter, and they are wolves again ! There was truth in
 
 CHAN DOS. 383 
 
 the old feudal saying, ' Oignez vilain, il vous poindra; poignez vilain, il vous 
 oindra.' Beat the multitudes you talk of with a despot's sword, and they will 
 lick your feet; touch them with a Christ-like pity, and they will nail you to the 
 cross." 
 
 There was a terrible truth in the words: this man of princely blood, who 
 disdained all sceptres and wanted nothing of the world, could look through and 
 through it with his bold sunlit eyes, and see its rottenness to the core. 
 
 Chandos sighed as he heard. 
 
 " You are right, only too right. Yet, even while they crouch to the tyrant's 
 sabre, how bitterly they need release ! even while they crucify their teachers 
 and their saviors, how little they know what they do ! They may forsake them- 
 selves; but they should not be forsaken." 
 
 Philippe d'Orvale looked on him with a light soft as women's tears in his 
 eyes, and dashed his hand down on the alabaster. 
 
 " Chandos, you live twenty centuries too late. You would have been 
 crowned in Athens, and throned in Asia. But here, as a saving grace, they will 
 call you ' mad ! ' ' 
 
 Chandos smiled. 
 
 " Well, if they do ? The title has its honors. It was hooted against Solon 
 and Socrates." 
 
 At that moment they were no longer alone; a foreign minister entered the 
 reception-room. Only at Philippe d'Orvale's house in Paris was Chandos 
 ever seen by any members of the circles which long ago had followed him 
 as their leader. With the statesmen, the thinkers, the scholars of Europe, he 
 had association: but with the extravagant and aristocratic worlds where he had 
 once reigned he had no fellowship; and the younger generation, who chiefly 
 ruled them, had no remembrance and but little knowledge of what his career 
 once had been in those splendid butterfly-frivolities, those Tyrian purples of a 
 glittering reign. A Turkish lily, when all its pomp of color and of blossom 
 has been shaken down in the wind and withered, is not more rapidly forgotten 
 than the royalty of a fashionable fame when once reverse has overtaken it. 
 But his name had power, though of a widely different sort; and its influence 
 was great. Science saw in him its co-revolutionist against tradition; weary 
 and isolated thinkers battling with the apathy or the antagonism of men found 
 in him their companion and their chief: young and ardent minds came in eager 
 gratitude to his leadership; the churches stoned, the scholars reverenced him; 
 the peoples vaguely wondered at him, and told from mouth to mouth the 
 strange vicissitudes of his life. From the deep, silent heart of old Italian 
 cities, where many of his years passed, his words came to the nations, and 
 pierced ears most dead and closed to him, and carried far their seed of freedom, 
 which would sink in the soil of public thought, and bear full harvest only, as
 
 384 OUJDAS WORKS. 
 
 Philippe d'Orvale had said, above his grave. Men knew that there was might 
 in this man, who had risen from a voluptuary's delight to face destruction, and 
 had forced out of adversity the gold of strength and of wisdom. They listened, 
 
 even those who cursed him, because he spoke too widely truth. They 
 
 listened, and they found that an infinite patience, an exhaustless toleration, a 
 deep and passionless calm, had become the temper of his intellect and of his 
 teaching. It was too pure, too high, too profound for them, and too wide in 
 grasp; but they listened, and vaguely caught a loftier tincture, a more serene 
 justice, from him. 
 
 The career which his youth had projected, in the splendid ideals of its faith 
 and its desire, could have been possible only in the ages when the world 
 was young, and the sceptre of a king could gather the countless hosts as 
 with a shepherd's love into one fold, under the great Syrian stars, when the 
 life of a man could be as one long magnificence of Oriental day, with 
 death itself but the setting of a cloudless sun, and the after-glow of a fame a 
 trail of light to nations East and West. The dreams of his youth had been 
 impossible: yet one thing remained to him of them, their loyalty to men and 
 their forbearance with them. In one sense he was greater than his father had 
 been: statesmen mold the actions of the Present, but thinkers form the minds 
 of the Future. It is the vaster power of the two. 
 
 It was late when he left the Hotel d'Orvale. He had spent the hours with 
 some of the most eminent statesmen of the continent. All men of mark heard 
 his opinions with eagerness and with deference: a man who had in him the 
 brilliance of a Pericles, and who lived now as simply as an anchorite, who had 
 the powers that could have ruled an empire, and who was content with the 
 meditative life, the impersonal ambitions, of a career of which no material re- 
 compense was the goal, perplexed them and impressed them. When he had 
 had the opportunity, he had never sought either rank or state power; now that 
 his intellect was his only treasury, he never sought to purchase with it either 
 riches or the revival of his lost dignities. They did not comprehend him; but 
 the absolute absence of all personal ambition impressed them in one who when 
 his word was omnipotent had never exercised it to obtain the place and the 
 power which made up their own aims, and who now gave his years and his 
 thoughts to the search of truth, unheeding what it brought him. They won- 
 dered that, with his fame, he endeavored to attain no material rewards, no po- 
 litical influence: in that wonder they missed the whole key of his character. 
 He had been too proud ever to be attracted by the vulgarities of social dis- 
 tinctions in the years when any could have been his for the asking; now the 
 same temper remained with him. Then, as a careless voluptuary, he had smiled 
 at and pitied those who wasted the golden days in the feverish pursuit of ephem- 
 eral renowns; now, as a great writer, he had the same marvel, the same con-
 
 CHANDOS. 385 
 
 tempt, for the minds which could stoop their mighty strength to seek a mon- 
 arch's favor or a court's caprice, to gain a Garter ribbon or to form a six-months' 
 ministry. The strife and fret of party had little more dignity in his eyes than 
 the buzzing and pushing of bees to enter a honey-clogged hive. The hero of 
 public life is a slave, and a slave who must wear the livery of conventional 
 forms and expedient fallacies. Chandos had too much in him of the moqucur 
 disdain, of the unfettered negligence, of his earlier years, to be capable of 
 seeing charm in that gilded servitude. He loved freedom, absolute freedom: 
 he could no more have lived without it than he could have lived without air. 
 
 He knew that it was well that there should be men who would harness them- 
 selves to the car of the nations, and^think that they led history, while they were 
 in truth only the driven pack-horses of human development or national decad- 
 ence; but he would no more have gone in their shafts than an eagle will wind 
 a windlass. 
 
 As he went now, through the lateness of the night, with the fragrance of 
 the Luxembourg gardens on the air, his thoughts were grave and far away. 
 The name of Clarencieux had reawakened in him the old anguish of longing to 
 be once more beneath the shelter of the familiar roof, the green leafage of the 
 beloved woods. It might be a weakness, he knew it; but the longing was at 
 times an agony as intense as Napoleon's longing, in exile, for "the mere scent 
 of the earth in Corsica." To live far sundered from the home of his fathers 
 was the deadliest divorce in all his losses; years could do nothing to temper or 
 to soften that bitterness; he had bartered his heritage, and, Esau-like, knew his 
 self-wrought disinheritance eternal. 
 
 The stillness of the night so late that the crowds had thinned, and there 
 were but little noise and movement even in the greatest thoroughfares brought 
 back on his memory the nights in which he had lain dying for a draught of cold 
 water in the dens of this brilliant city, of the nights when, in infamy and 
 shame and misery, he had sought to kill rememberance and existence in joyless 
 vice and opiate slumbers, in orgies that he loathed, in drugged sleep that lulled 
 his mind into an idiot's vacancy. That time was vague and unreal to him as 
 the phantasma of fever to the man who awakes from them; but he never looked 
 back to it without a shudder. His fall had been so vast, and the plank so frail 
 that alone had arrested his headlong reel into a suicide's grave or a madman's 
 darkness ! All men had forsaken him then, save one, his enemy, forsaken 
 him, though their hands were full of his gifts, forsaken him, leaving him to die 
 like a dog. But he had not in return or in revenge abandoned them: he knew 
 the terrible truth of the " Qui vitia odit, homines odit," and he would not let 
 hatred of their ingratitude dwell with him and turn him cynic, for he cleaved to 
 them in tenderness still. Perhaps in this yet more than in all other efforts of 
 his later life he kept true to the dreams of his youth, this patience with which 
 
 VOL. Ill, 18
 
 386 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 he loved men and believed in their redeeming excellence, even through all 
 which might have bidden him, as his foe had once bidden him, ' curse God 
 and die ! " 
 
 As he passed now through the richer and finer quarters towards a retired 
 and little-frequented street where he had his temporary dwelling in the centre 
 of Paris, he passed close by the gates of a- ducal mansion. Before them stood, 
 among a long line, a carriage handsomely appointed, with powdered servants 
 and laced liveries moving to and fro. An English minister was coming out to 
 the equipage, with some light, costly furs thrown loosely over his full dress. 
 They looked at each other in the gas-light: a moment was enough for recog- 
 nition. 
 
 Trevenna waved his hand towards his carriage with a laughing smile. 
 
 " Ah, mon prince ? you on foot ? How times are changed! Get in; pray 
 do. I'm very forgiving, and I'll give you a lift for auld lang syne." 
 
 Chandos passed on, without a word, without a sign, as though he had not 
 heard. Yet men have slain their foes, in hot blood and cold, for less than this 
 mocker's baseness and outrage. 
 
 The petty jeer of the indignity was fouler than a wrong worthier of resent- 
 ment. When the soldier of the guard spat in Charles Stuart's face, the insult 
 was the worse because too ignominious for scorn, too low for revenge. 
 
 He went onward down into the solitude of the tortuous winding, one of 
 those streets in which bric-a-brac, and priceless china, and old pictures, and old 
 treasures of every sort are heaped together in little, dark unguarded windows, 
 and are only told from the shadows by the shine of a diamond or the shape 
 of a quaint vase forcing itself up from the dimness and dust. There came 
 feebly towards him in the gloom the tall, bowed form of an old man, with white 
 hair floating on his shoulders, and his hands feebly stretched before him in the 
 wavering, uncertain movement of the blind. The figure was impressive, with 
 its long, flowing, black garments, and its stern, antique, patriarch-like look so 
 painfully in contrast with the extreme feebleness of excessive age and that 
 plaintive, flickering movement of the hands. 
 
 " Oh, my God ! " he was muttering, piteously, " where is he ? where is he ? " 
 
 The grief and appeal of the accent, the helplessness of the sightless action 
 accompanying it, arrested Chandos. He paused, and touched the blind wan- 
 derer on the arm. 
 
 " Whom are you seeking ? Can I help you ? " 
 
 The old man stopped his slow swinging step, and caught the gentleness of 
 the tone with the quickness to sound that compensates for the loss of sight in 
 so many. 
 
 " I search for my dog, sir," he answered. " He is my only guide, and I 
 have lost him."
 
 CHANDOS. 387 
 
 " Lost him ? How far from this ? " 
 
 "Some way. He broke from me: children lured him, I think. He was 
 very pretty, and the life he led with me was but dull. It is natural he should 
 forsake me." 
 
 Chandos listened, struck by the accent: he had known what it was to have 
 an animal the sole friend left. 
 
 " Dogs rarely forsake us. I should hope he will come back to you. You 
 cannot find your way without him ? " 
 
 The other shook his head silently, a grand, majestic, saturnine old man, 
 despite the decrepitude that had bowed his back and the melancholy supplica- 
 tion in which his- trembling hands were outstretched. 
 
 Chandos looked at him silently also: there was something in his look and 
 in his manner which impressed him with their intense sadness. No memory 
 revived in him, but compassion moved him. 
 
 "Tell me where you live: I will see you home," he said, presently. It was 
 not in his nature to leave anyone so aged to wander wretchedly and uncer- 
 tainly in the darkness or the after-midnight. Trevenna would have enjoyed 
 stealing the dog away, and leading the harrassed creature round and round in 
 a circle by a thousand mystifications; but to Chandos there was something of 
 positive pain in the sight of any human being stranded in the midst of that 
 peopled city for sheer need of a hand stretched out to him. Men had been 
 false to him; but he remained loyally true to them. 
 
 The blind man turned with an involuntary start of wonder and of gratitude. 
 
 " You are very good, sir! Will it not trouble you ?" he said, hesitatingly. 
 His ear told him that the voice which addressed him was the voice of a person 
 of gentle blood. 
 
 " Far from it. Men must be very heartless if they could all leave you to 
 need such a trifle as that." 
 
 " Men owe me nothing," said the other, curtly, whilst he went on to tell 
 his residence. 
 
 Chandos said no more, but went thither, slackening his pace to the halting 
 step of the one he guided. It was some little time before he could find the 
 place he was directed to; when he did so, it was a tall, frowning, ruined house, 
 jammed amidst many others, with the shutters up against the lower windows, 
 and poverty told by all its rambling timbers. 
 
 " Open, sir, since you are kind enough to take pity on me," said the blind 
 man, as he gave him a key, to which the crazy door yielded easily. " My 
 room, such as it is, is the first on the fifth story." 
 
 It was a miserable chamber enough, bare and desolate, with a rough pallet 
 bed, and an unspeakable nakedness and want about it. A little lamp burned 
 dully, and threw its yellow light on the peculiar and striking figure of the man
 
 388 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 he had guided; and he looked at him curiously, a man of ninety winters, with 
 the dark olive of his skin furrowed like oak-bark, with his sweeping, pointed 
 beard snow-white, a man who had suffered much, needed much, endured much, 
 and possibly done much evil, in his day, yet commanding and solemn in his 
 excessive years as the figure of a Belisarius sightless and poverty-stricken and 
 forsaken by those for whom he had given his life-blood. He turned to Chan- 
 dos with a stately and touching action. 
 
 "Sir, who you are I cannot tell; but from my soul I thank you, from my 
 heart I would bless you if I dared." 
 
 Chandos lingered, leaning against the barren, unsightly wall. . He might be 
 in a den of thieves, for aught he knew; but there was that in the Israelite (as he 
 justly deemed him) that moved him to interest. Since the glory of his summer- 
 day world had closed on him, he had gone far down into the depths of human 
 suffering and human sin; he had known life in its darkest and in its worst, and 
 he evaded nothing to which he could bring either aid or consolation. The 
 mingled infirmity and wisdom of his glorious manhood had been to abhor and 
 shun every sight and shape of pain; since he had tasted the bitterness of ruin, 
 he had passed by no pain that he could hope to succor. 
 
 " You should not be alone at your years," he said, gently. " Have you noth- 
 ing but this lost dog to take heed of you ? " 
 
 " Nothing, sir: he is gone now." 
 
 "I trust not. I will try and find him for you. Pardon me, but at your age 
 it is rare to be wholly solitary." 
 
 " It is ? " said the blind man, with a sententious melancholy. " I thought the 
 reverse. We have outlived our due time. We have seen all die around us; 
 we ought to be dead ourselves." 
 
 Chandos was silent; he stood, thoughtful and almost saddened by the Israel- 
 ite's words. He was alone himself, he, for whom the world had once been 
 one wide palace, filled with courtiers and friends; he looked to be so alone to 
 his grave. 
 
 At that moment there came the rush of eager feet, the panting of eager 
 breath; the unlatched door of the room was burst open. A little dog of the 
 Maltese breed scoured across the floor, and leaped on the old man with frantic 
 caresses; its desertion had been but for a moment, and its conscience and its 
 love had soon brought it back. The Jew took it fondly in his arms, and mur- 
 mured tender names over it; then he turned his blind eyes on Chandos. 
 
 " Sir, I thank my little truant that through his abandonment I learned that 
 one man lived so merciful as you." 
 
 "There are many; do not doubt that. Forgive me if I seem to force your 
 confidence, but I would gladly know if I can aid you. Rich I am not, but there 
 might be ways in which I could assist you."
 
 CHAN DOS. 389 
 
 He spoke very gently: this old man, grand as any sculpture of Abraham or 
 Agamemnon, in his extreme loneliness, in his extreme poverty, awoke his 
 sympathy. 
 
 The Hebrew drew his bent form straight, with a certain unconscious majesty. 
 
 "Sir, my confidence you cannot have; but it is only meet that you should 
 know I am one who often has worked much evil, and who has been once 
 branded as a felon." 
 
 Chandos looked at him in silence a moment; he could believe that evil had 
 left its trace among the dark furrows of the sombre and stern face he looked 
 on, but criminal shame seemed to have no place with the Jew's patriarchal 
 calm and dignity. 
 
 " If it be so, there may be but the more cause that you need aid. Speak 
 frankly with me." 
 
 " There are those who say my people never speak except to lie," said the 
 Hebrew, briefly. " It is untrue. But frank I cannot be with you, with any. 
 Could I have be been so, I were not thus now." 
 
 " How ? Did you refuse the truth, or was it denied you ? " 
 
 " Both. I heard a story once, whether fact or romance I cannot tell ; it 
 struck me. I will tell it to you. There was an old soldier of the Grande 
 Armee, who was bidden by his chief to execute some secret service and never 
 speak of it. He did it; his absence on his errand was discovered; he was tried 
 for desertion or disobedience, I forget which. Napoleon was present at the 
 trial; the accused looked in the face of his master for permission to clear him- 
 self by revealing the truth; the face was chill as stone, mute as steel; there 
 was no consent in it. The soldier bared his head and held his peace; he under- 
 went his chastisement in silence; he muttered only ever after, in insanity, 
 ' Silence a la mort ! ' ' 
 
 Chandos heard, moved to more than surprise. He saw that this poverty- 
 worn blind Hebrew was no common criminal and had had no common fate. 
 He leaned forward and looked at him more earnestly. 
 
 " And the soldier's doom, was that yours ? " he asked. 
 
 The Jew bent his snow-white head, pressing the little nestling dog closer to 
 his bosom. 
 
 " Much such a one." 
 
 " You were of the army, then ? " 
 
 "No; but I had a chief as pitiless as Napoleon. No matter ! he had the 
 right to be so. It is not for me to speak." 
 
 The words were spoken with the patience of his race, and infinite pain 
 passed over the harsh, saturnine sternness of his face. 
 
 " But you would seem to say that by silence you were wronged. Tell me 
 more plainly."
 
 390 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 A sigh escaped the close-pressed lips of the aged man. 
 
 " Sir, you have been good to me; it is not for me to deny what I can justly 
 tell. That is not much. I was in the employ of an Englishman; we drove an 
 evil trade, a trade in men's ruin, in men's necessities, in men's desperation. 
 It is a common trade enough, and there are hundreds who drive in their car- 
 riages, and live amidst the great, who have gained their wealth by that trade 
 and by no other. I was a hard man, a shrewd, a merciless; I asked my pound 
 of flesh, and I cut it remorselessly. Life had been bitter with me; it had 
 baffled me when I would have done righteousness; it had denied me when I 
 would have sought justice: it had damned me because of my wandering race: 
 with the book of my religion in their hands, Christians flouted me and scourged 
 me, a Jew dog, a Jew cheat, a Jew liar ! If I said truth, none believed me; if 
 I did honestly, all laughed, and thought that I had some deeper scheme of vil- 
 lany beneath. I would have acted well with men, but they mocked me; and 
 then I took my revenge. I do not say it was right; but it was human." 
 
 He paused; the died-out light began to gather in his sunken eyes, the mem- 
 ories of manhood to kindle on his brown and withered face; his voice grew 
 stronger and deeper, as it thrilled with the remembrance of other days. Chan- 
 dos stood silent, looking on him with a strange force of interest, while the dull 
 feeble flickering of the oil-flame shed its faint illumination on the old man's 
 Syrian-like form. 
 
 " I was sorely tossed, and beaten, and reviled: I became bitter, and keen, 
 and cruel. I was like iron to those Gentiles who needed me and, when they 
 needed, cringed. I said in my soul, ' You call me a Jew robber: well, you shall 
 feel my knife.' And yet I declare that, till they made me so, I had served men 
 and striven to make them love me, hard as it is for a poor man, and a Jew, to 
 gain a friend among Christians ! They have stolen our God; but they only 
 blaspheme in his name, and call the people whose creed they borrow by the vil- 
 est obscenities of their streets ! So I grew like a flint, and I checked not at 
 cunning. One innocent may be wrongly suspected until he is made the thing 
 that the libel has called him. I was a usurer: you know what that is, a man 
 who makes his gold out of tears of blood, and fills his caldron with human flesh 
 till its seething brews him wealth. I had only one softness in me: it was my 
 love for my wife." 
 
 His -voice quivered slightly; even the memory of the dead love that lay so 
 far away in the grave of buried days had power to shake him like a reed. 
 
 " She was as beautiful as the morning, twenty years or more younger than 
 I; but she loved me with a great love, and while she was in my bosom she 
 made me seek to be as she was. Well, she died. My life was dark as mid- 
 night, and my heart was ice. For a while I was mad; when my senses came to 
 me, I set myself to the lust of gold, to the grinding out of my deadly pain on
 
 CHANDOS. 391 
 
 the lives that had mocked me. Thus I became evil, and men crushed me, 
 justly then. I made much money, and, years after, I lost it, in schemes in 
 which it had been risked. I fell in the straits of extreme poverty; in them I 
 met, in the dens of a great city, an Englishman who was good to me and 
 succored me. Afterwards we entered into negotiations together; he joined my 
 old firm, it did not bear my name; he became *'/.- in fact, I was but his 
 manager, clerk, subordinate; but the public still thought me the principal. 
 He was very clever, very able; he knew the world widely, and he had fashion- 
 able acquaintances by the hundred. Between us, he secretly, I openly, we 
 spread our nets very far; we drew many lives into the meshes; we made much 
 money; he did, at least: his was the capital, his the profit; I did but the work 
 at a salary. We were always strictly to the letter of the law; but within the 
 law we were very hard. Oh, God ! now that I am blind and forsaken, I know 
 it ! Well, meanwhile my son had come home to me from Spain, a beautiful, 
 gracious child, who brought his mother's look in his eyes. In him I was almost 
 happy; for him I worked unceasingly; thinking of him, I did my master's 
 bidding with alacrity and with little heed for those who suffered. For seven 
 years my boy grew up with me from a child to a youth; and when he smiled 
 at me with his mother's smile, I would have coined my life, if I could have 
 done so, to purchase him an hour's pleasure. And in those seven years the firm 
 had prospered marvellously, and my master so I call him made much wealth 
 from it in secret. At the time of the eight or ninth year, when my son was 
 eighteen " 
 
 He paused; though his eyes had no sight in them, he veiled them, drooping 
 his head in shame as his words were resumed. 
 
 " The lad erred, erred terribly. I cannot speak it ! Dishonesty, glossed 
 over, had -been round him so long, it was not his crime. He saw us thieve: 
 how could he learn to keep his young hands pure ? He forged my master's 
 name, in thoughtlessness, and thinking, I believe, that such money was our 
 common due, since I worked for it. I knew then a worse anguish than when 
 my darling had died. My master found it out, he found everything out: the 
 boy was in his power. He could have sent the young life to a felon's doom: he 
 was merciful, and he spared him. For it let me ever hold his name in blessing." 
 
 He bent his head with a grave, reverential gesture, and was silent many 
 moments, his lips mutely moving, as though in prayer for the benefactor of his 
 only son. 
 
 " He spared the youth always: let it ever be remembered by me," he 
 resumed, while his voice was broken and very faint. " To purchase his 
 redemption, to repay his ransom, I gave my body and my mind, by night and 
 by day to travail. I did iniquity to buy my son's peace: that was my sin. 
 My master was lenient, and spared him from accusation: that was his clemency.
 
 392 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 By one and by the other the child was saved. He was so gentle, so loving, 
 so bright, so full of poetic thoughts and noble longing; it must have been a 
 mortal fear that ever drove him to that single crime! Or rather, I have 
 thought later, it was the thoughtless fault of a child who did not know the error 
 than he did. Well, my master had been pitiful to the thing I loved. I owed 
 him my life more than my life for that. A few years, and the test came to 
 me. I have said inviolate secrecy was kept on his association with the business 
 that I conducted. No living creature guessed it. His own friends by the score 
 were among our clients, among our victims; but none of them ever dreamt that 
 he had anything to do with the usury on which they heap their curses. One 
 night he had visited the office (a thing he rarely did), and had taken away with 
 him the title-deeds and family papers of one whose extremity of need had 
 forced him to lodge them with me as security for an immediate loan. That 
 very night their owner came down in hot haste; he had obtained' money by a 
 sudden and a marvellous stroke of fortune, and was breathless to recover his 
 pawned papers and pay back the loan. The deeds were not there ! To say 
 where they were would have been to betray my master. I could not produce 
 them; I could not explain their absence. The gentleman was very fiery and 
 furious; he would not wait; he demanded his papers back. Give them I could 
 not, and I had neither time nor means to communicate with my master. The 
 gentleman, hot-blooded and young, gave me into arrest for their detention and 
 disappearance. The trial ensued. Since my arrest I had watched and waited 
 for some word, some sign, from my master which should tell what I should do. 
 I waited in vain: none came. I was placed in the dock, and tried for the theft 
 of the deeds. My counsel were bitter toward me, because I would not be 
 'frank ' with them and explain; I could only be silent unless my master gave 
 me freedom to speak. Ife knew he could trust me. Besides, had he not the 
 lad's fame and life in his power? He was there, in court, listening. I 
 looked at him; he looked at me. I read ' silence ' hidden on his face, as the 
 soldier saw it on Napoleon's. It was enough. I was silent. It was his due, 
 and my right of obedience. He had spared my son in his error; I had sworn 
 to keep his secret till death. The trial took its course; they found me guilty. 
 I was sentenced to ten years' penal servitude. It was a grave offence. The 
 deeds were gone: they were never found: I suppose my master destroyed them. 
 It was a fearful loss for their owner, and they could not choose but judge that 
 I had held them back or burnt them, for theft or for the sake of extortion. I 
 suffered the punishment; but I never broke my silence." 
 
 There was a sublime simplicity, an inexpressible grandeur, on the old man, 
 as he spoke, bowing his head as though borne down by the weight of that en- 
 forced burden of silence, stretching out his trembling hands as though in sup- 
 plication to God to witness how he had kept his oath.
 
 CHAN DOS. 393 
 
 Chandos, where he stood in the gloom of the poverty-stricken chamber, un- 
 covered his head with a reverent action before the sightless gaze of the blind 
 man. 
 
 " Let the evil of your -life be what it may, in that martyrdom you washed 
 it out with a nobility men seldom reach." 
 
 His words were low and heartfelt: the unconscious dignity of the self-de- 
 votion and of the fidelity to a promised word was too lofty to his thought to 
 be insulted with an offering of mere pity. 
 
 A warmth of surprise and of pleasure passed over the withered olive face of 
 the Israelite, though it faded almost instantly. 
 
 " It was duty," he said, simply, " the duty of a debtor." 
 
 " Rather it was the sacrifice of a martyr. But he, this brutal taskmaster, 
 who could condemn you to such a doom, who could stand by and see you suffer 
 for his sake, what of him ? " 
 
 " I say nothing of him: he is sacred to me ! " 
 
 " Sacred ! though he cursed you thus ? " 
 
 " Sacred, because he spared my son." 
 
 Chandos bent his head. 
 
 " I understand you; I honor you. But it was a terrible ordeal. Few con- 
 strue duty so. And your son, what of him ? " 
 
 " I am as one dead to him." 
 
 Ignatius Mathias said the words very softly, whilst over the bronzed, worn 
 rigidity of his patient face came the softer look which it only wore at the 
 thought of Agostino. 
 
 " Dead to him ? Is he, then, so ungrateful ? ' 
 
 The Hebrew shook his head with a quick negative gesture of his hands. 
 
 " He is never ungrateful ; he felt only too vividly, and he loved me well. 
 But I had sent him out of the country before this happened, sent him, my 
 master permitting, to people of mine in Mexico. It was bitter for me to sever 
 from him. But the lad's spirit was broken; I knew nothing but change of 
 scene could ever restore him. Journals did not reach him there in the western 
 country. I learned that he was recovering health and courage, and was prose- 
 cuting a career for which he had from childhood shown genius. I learned that 
 he knew nothing of my arrest and of my trial: I thanked God; for I knew how 
 it would have grieved him. He might have done something very rash, had he 
 heard that I suffered or was accused. As it was, I bade them tell him I was 
 dead. It would cause him pain, great pain, for he loved me, strange as it 
 may seem that he should, but less pain than the shame that must have fallen 
 on him with the other knowledge. It was weak in me, perhaps, but I could 
 not bear that my only son should think, with the world, that I could be guilty 
 of that crime. And if he had not thought it, it would have been worse: he
 
 394 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 would have been galled to some act of desperation. He heard, as I say, of my 
 death; he suffered, but less than he would have suffered knowing the truth, 
 knowing the punishment I underwent. Yet the deadliest thing in my chastise- 
 ment was that I could never look on his face, never listen to his voice, never 
 let him hear that I lived! " 
 
 The old man's voice faltered slightly; even his strength, that had been like 
 wrought iron to endure, and that had held his soul in patience for so long, 
 could not look back at that time of torture and keep its force unbroken. 
 
 " At the end of ten years I was liberated. They had not been cruel to me 
 as a convict. They pitied my age, I think, though at first they had little 
 mercy, because they held me a Jew thief. I was free, a beggar, of course; 
 and at eighty-four years one cannot begin the world again. Besides, I was as 
 one branded: go where I would, the police followed me, and warned others of 
 me; I was a leper and a pariah in the midst of men. I did not starve, for 
 my people are good to the helpless; but all thought me guilty, and no 
 creature trusted me. I heard of my darling, of my son: he was pros- 
 perous. He was achieving fame and success in the life he had chosen; he 
 was, I hoped, happy. I could not be so brutal, so selfish, as to seek him out 
 and say, ' Behold, your father lives!' when he must. have found in his father a 
 convicted felon just set free from his public punishment. I could not blithe 
 his youth and his peace by rising up as it were from the grave and forcing on 
 him my age, my poverty, my disgrace, as the world held it. He had mourned 
 for me, and ceased to mourn long before: I could not open his wounds afresh; 
 I could not humiliate him with a criminal's claim on him. Not that I wronged 
 him ever, not that I ever doubted him; let me have been what I should, I knew 
 his heart would be tender to me and his roof be offered me in shelter. But 
 because I knew, I could not bring that wretchedness on him; I could not injure 
 him in the world's sight by standing by him a liberated felon; I could not tor- 
 ture him by showing him my wrists, on which the chains of the convict gang 
 had weighed, by bidding him look back with me upon my prison-cell, my 
 prison-shame. I left him to believe me dead. I never looked upon his face 
 except by stealth. I never listened to his voice except standing hidden in some 
 dark archway to hear him speak as he passed by me in the streets. I have 
 watched for hours under the shelter of green leaves to catch one glance of him 
 as he came forth. I have waited for a whole night through, in storm or snow, 
 to see him leave some house of pleasure or some labor of his art. It was my 
 only thought, my only joy. I thanked God that I still lived in the days when 
 I had looked a moment on his beauty. And now that too is gone. I am blind, 
 and I have nothing left except to listen for the echo of his step! " 
 
 Silence followed his closing words; his head sank, his hands were pressed 
 together like one who is tortured beyond his strength. All answer, all conso-
 
 CHAN DOS. 395 
 
 lation seemed mockery beside the supreme renunciation and desolation of this 
 living sacrifice of an immeasurable love, that gave itself to martyrdom without 
 a thought of its own devotion, without a memory of the vastness of its own 
 unasked and unrewarded sacrifice. 
 
 Veneration, strong as his pity, moved the blind man's auditor as he heard; 
 the heroism of the abnegation was noble in his sight, with a nobility that no 
 words could dare taint or outrage with either compassion or homage, a nobil- 
 ity that raised the Hebrew outcast to a loftier height than the great of the 
 earth often reach, than the sunlight of a fair fate ever "gives. 
 
 " Your Psalmist said that he had never beheld the righteous forsaken, nor 
 the seed of the virtuous begging their bread," he said, slowly, at length. 
 " How is it that you, then, are poor ? You should be in the smile of your 
 God." 
 
 The Israelite sighed wearily. 
 
 " It has ever seemed to me that David spoke in a bitter irony. Yonder in 
 Syria, as here among us, sin throve, doubtless, and loyal faith passed unnoticed, 
 unrecompensed by a crust. Yet I do not say this for myself. I merited all I 
 suffered. I was merciless; I lived to want mercy. It was very just." 
 
 There was the inexorable meting out of the Mosaic code to his own past, 
 and to his own errors, in the still, calm, iron resignation. 
 
 " Moreover," he added, with a certain light and hope that kindled the 
 faded fire of his sightless eyes, " if we follow duty because it brings us gold 
 and peace and man's applause, where is there effort in the choice of it ? It is 
 only when it is hard that there can be any loyalty in acceptance. Not that / 
 should speak of this. I loved evil and avarice and cruelty too long, and fol- 
 lowed them too fondly." 
 
 " At the least, your atonement might outweigh the crime of a Cain ! " 
 
 The Hebrew sighed wearily again. 
 
 " Can evil ever be outweighed ? I doubt it. We may strive to atone, but 
 we can never efface. The past work spreads, and spreads, and spreads, like a 
 river broken from its banks; and all the coffer-dams we raise in our atonement 
 cannot stay the rushing of the waters we have once let loose. Ah ! if when 
 evil is begun we knew where it would stretch, men's hands would be kept pure 
 from very dr^ad of their own awful omnipotence for ruin ! " 
 
 The words died faintly away. Remorse had too wide a part in this man's 
 memories for any thought that he redeemed his past crimes by his present sac- 
 rifice to have power to enter into him in any form of consolation. 
 
 He recovered himself with an effort, raising his blind eyes as though he 
 could still read the face of the one who listened to him. 
 
 " Sir, you have heard me with a gentle patience. I thank you. I never 
 spoke of these things until I spoke them now to you. Your voice is sweet and
 
 396 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 compassionate; it seems to me as though I had once heard it before now. 
 Will you tell me your name among men ? " 
 
 "Willingly; though I have no memory that we have ever met before. My 
 name is Chandos." 
 
 A change, as intense as though some sudden pang of disease had seized 
 him, convulsed the Israelite's whole frame; his thin withered lips closed tight, 
 as though to hold in words that rushed to them; his hands clenched together. 
 A revulsion passed over him, as if the whole dark, poisonous, pent tide of his 
 past years swept in, killing with their return all the higher and better thoughts 
 that but now had ruled him. 
 
 " Do you know me ? " asked Chandos in surprise. 
 
 The Spanish Jew answered with an effort, and his voice was harsh and jar- 
 ring: "I know your name, sir; all the world does." 
 
 Chandos looked at him with awakened curiosity: the agitation which this 
 old man showed at his recognition was scarcely compatible with the mere scant 
 knowledge of his public reputation. Still, no remembrance of the solitary 
 morning in the porphyry chamber, when he had seen the Castilian, came to 
 him. In that terrible hour he had only been conscious of a sea of unfamiliar 
 faces, thirsty faces eager for his wealth, strange faces forcing themselves in 
 to see the ruin of his race, and hungry, insolent faces gathered there to be the 
 witnesses of his abdication and his fall. He remembered them distinctly no 
 more than Scipio could have remembered the features of each unit of the 
 libellous crowd that thronged about him to attain his honor and discrown his 
 dignity, until beneath the shadow of the Temple of Jupiter he rebuked them 
 with one word, " Zama." 
 
 " If you know my name, then," he said, after a slight pause, " I hope you 
 will let it be a guarantee to you that I will do my utmost to serve you, if you 
 will but show me the way. You interest me powerfully, and I honor you from 
 my heart. Can I not help you ? " 
 
 The old man turned away, and leaned over the lamp, so shading it that the 
 light burned low: he had learned the marvellous self-guidance of the blind in 
 those matters, and knew by its warmth that the flame was high and fell upon 
 his face. 
 
 "No one can help me, sir. That I may be forgotten is all I ask." 
 
 " Do you mistrust my willingness, then ? I hope not," said Chandos, 
 gently. He noted the harsh, abrupt change in the Jew's manner; but he 
 thought rt might be but the weariness and waywardness of old age and long 
 and bitter endurance. 
 
 'I mistrust you in nothing," said the Hebrew, while his voice was very low. 
 "But I need no aid: my people will not let me want. I thank you for your 
 goodness; and I bid you remember me no more."
 
 CHANDOS. 397 
 
 There was a mingled austerity and appeal in the tone that gave it a singular 
 vibration of feeling; in it there was something like the thrill of shame. 
 
 Chandos lingered a moment still ; he was loath to leave the old and sight- 
 less sufferer to his solitude, yet he saw that his presence was unwelcome now, 
 however gratitude forbade the Israelite to say it. 
 
 "But your people forsake you," he persisted, gently; "you have but a dog 
 for your friend. I have known what such solitude is; I would gladly aid you 
 in yours. Will you not trust me with your name, at the least ? or your son's 
 name ? " 
 
 The Hebrew turned resolutely away, though his voice trembled as he re- 
 plied, 
 
 " My son's will never pass my lips. Mine was buried forever in my felon's 
 cell. I have told you I am dead ! Leave me, sir; and believe me an ingrate, 
 if you will. I have been many things that are worse." 
 
 Chandos looked at him regretfully, wonderingly; he was loath to quit the 
 chamber in which so strange and so nameless a tale had been unfolded to him. 
 
 " There is nothing worse; but I shall credit no evil of you," he answered; 
 " and when you need friendship or assistance, think of my name, and send to 
 me." 
 
 There was no reply: the face of the blind man was turned from him. He 
 waited a moment longer, then went out, and closed the narrow door of the 
 room, leaving the Hebrew to his loneliness. 
 
 He would willingly have done more here, but he knew not how. 
 
 The little dog, sole companion of the Castilian's solitude, nestling to him, 
 as the door closed, with caressing fondness, felt great tears fall slowly one by 
 one upon its pretty head, and lifted itself eagerly to fondle closer in the old 
 man's bosom. But Ignatius Mathias paid it no heed; he had no answering 
 word for it: his hands were wrung together in an agony. 
 
 " Oh, God ! " he murmured, " and I lent my aid to rob, to ruin, to destroy 
 him ! Oh, God ! why could I not die before he heaped the fire on my guilty 
 head, with his gentle words, with his pitying mercy ? " 
 
 CHAPTER VII. ^ 
 
 " PALE COMME UN BEAU SOIR D'AUTOMNE." 
 
 As Chandos descended the staircase, he paused to ask a woman, who 
 seemed mistress of the house, the Hebrew's name. She gave him the alias by 
 which the old man was known there. It told him nothing: the real name 
 would scarcely have told more. The whole time of his adversity was almost a
 
 398 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 blank in his memory, blotted out at the moment of his suffering by that suffer- 
 ing's sheer intensity, and effaced yet more utterly, later on, by the gambler's 
 orgies into which for a year he had sunk without an effort at redemption. It 
 seemed to him sometimes now that the cloudless life he had led ere then must 
 have been the golden and lotus-steeped dream of some summer night: of the 
 darkness which had followed on its ending he had barely more recollection 
 than a man has of the phantasma of fever. Between the night when he had 
 first learned his irreparable losses and that on which he had been struck down 
 by his foe in the court of the Temple, all was a blank to him, from which a few 
 broken points of terrible remembrance alone stood out, the sole measure- 
 marks in that wide waste of desolation. 
 
 The stairs were narrow and crooked, ill lit by a dusky oil-lamp flickering 
 low in its socket. Something in the house had seemed familiar to him, and as 
 he passed downward he knew it again. It was the place in which he had lain 
 dying and unconscious, with the winter stars looking down through the broken 
 garret-roof, and the dog's fidelity alone watching beside him. He shuddered 
 as he recalled it; for the moment the thought stole on him, would it not have 
 been better that his life should have ended there ? The richness and the frailty 
 of his nature alike had needed light and color, and the sweetness of delight, 
 and the vivid hues of beauty and of pleasure. Now that, like Adam, he had 
 long toiled alone in the bleak and barren earth of his exile, like Adam he 
 might have gathered the bitter wisdom of far-reaching knowledge; but also, 
 like Adam, the gates of Paradise had closed on him forever. He was a wan- 
 derer, and without joy; there were times, as he had said that night, when he 
 wished to God that it had been given him to die in his youth. 
 
 As he passed now down the stairs, the black, sweeping folds of a woman's 
 dress touched him: he paused to give her space. In the gleam of the lamp- 
 light a face, still beautiful, though haggard and darkened, was turned on him: 
 it was the face of Beatrix Lennox. 
 
 She started, and a gentler, better look shadowed and softened her features. 
 
 " You!" 
 
 She knew him, knew him as soon as her eyes lighted on him in that dusky 
 yellow gloom, this woman who, in the midst of reckless, sensuous, unscrupu- 
 lous, world-defiant life, had borne him a tenderness silent as death, pure as light 
 His face was graven on her heart, that face which she had first known in all 
 the splendor and all the radiance of its earliest manhood, which she had 
 recognized once in the blackness of the stormy, snow-veiled winter night, 
 which she knew now in the dignity and the sadness of its later years. 
 
 He paused a moment, surprised and uncertain. All that past time was so 
 dim to him, all remembrance of her had been so merged in the misery he had 
 endured on the night of their last parting, when he had learned that the one he
 
 CHANDOS. 399 
 
 then loved had forsaken him, and had been so swept away in the blank of star- 
 vation and of bodily illness which had succeeded it, that he had little memory 
 of all he had owed her in that wintry midnight when she had found him sinking 
 into the sleep of death. It was confused, and it made indistinct even his knowl- 
 edge of her as she stood beside him now, after the passage of so many years. 
 Her eyes, once so victorious in their empire, so unsparing in their sorcery, 
 dwelt on him with an extreme desolation. 
 
 " Ah ! you have forgotten me ? Well you may: even Death forgets me, I 
 think." 
 
 Her voice, so liquid and so silver-sweet, stirred his memory as the features 
 in their change could not do. He took her hands in his. 
 
 " Forgotten ? Never. Do not so wrong my gratitude. Some part of my 
 life seems a blank to me; but that life lived in me at all was owing to you. 
 And now that we meet, how can I thank you ? There are no words for such a 
 service." 
 
 She smiled, though her eyes still dwelt on him with that desolate and long- 
 ing look. 
 
 " Is it so great, a service to save life ? Mercy were rather the other way. 
 Yet perhaps not for you; you have made a noble use of adversity. But it was 
 little enough /did. I would have served you, God knows; but the power was 
 never mine." 
 
 He looked at her with a pang at his heart. All the companions of that joy- 
 ous royalty, in which Fortune had seemed but the slave to obey his wish and to 
 crown his desire, were dead or lost, forgotten or unknown to him, now; and 
 her voice struck chords long unsounded and better left in peace, awoke mem- 
 ories of a world abandoned forever, of a youth forever gone. Those long nights 
 of pleasure, those dazzling eyes of women, those chimes of laughter without a 
 care, those flower-smothered Cleopatran revels, those hours of careless joyance 
 that had not a thought of the morrow, how far away they seemed ! He stood 
 looking down on her in the sombre shadow of the wretched staircase, his 
 thoughts rather in the past than with her. He did not know that she loved him, 
 he had never known it, loved him so that she, the reckless and lawless 
 Bohemian, would for his sake, had it been possible, have led the noblest life 
 that ever woman led on earth, loved him so that, through that purer love hating 
 herself, she would no more, in the days of her beauty, have wooed him to her 
 than she would have slain him, no more have offered him her tenderness than 
 she would have offered him hemlock, loved him too well ever to summon him 
 amidst her lovers. 
 
 " How is it that we have never met ? " he asked her, " never met until in 
 such a place as this and at such an hour ? " 
 
 She smiled. She had looked on his face many and many a time, unseen
 
 400 OUIDA'S WORKS. 
 
 herself; she had suffered for him in his bitterness, she had gloried in his en- 
 durance, though she had never gone nigh him, but rather withdrawn herself 
 from every chance of recognition. 
 
 " You have never seen me ? I have been long dead, you know. Women 
 die when their beauty dies. Come within: I have one word to say to you." 
 
 She turned into a chamber somewhat lower on the staircase, poor, dark, 
 chilly, in the feeble light of flickering candles. 
 
 " You live here ? " 
 
 When he had known this woman, she had commanded what she would from 
 peers and princes, who had been only too proud to be allowed the honor of 
 ruin for her sake. 
 
 She flung off her the heavy folds of her cloak; and, as the richer hues of 
 the dress beneath were dimly caught in the faint light, there was something 
 still of the old regality which had made Beatrix Lennox the fairest name and 
 the haughtiest queen in the whole of the dauntless army of the Free Com- 
 panions. 
 
 " No; I am not quite so bad as that yet. I came here to-night to see one 
 who is dying fast, with not a living soul to tend him. 
 
 " Ah ! you belied the charity of your heart, then ? at least you know the 
 mercy of human pity still, as you knew it once for me." 
 
 " Hush ! Charity ? Mine ? You do not know what you say. Is repent- 
 ing of a millionth part of a torrent of evil charity ? The man who dies there 
 was my victim. Years ago I drew him on till he fooled away everything he 
 owned for my sake. I cared no more for him than for the sands of the sea; 
 but it amused me to watch how far his folly would go. He loved his wife; I 
 made him hate her. He had ambition; I made him scoff at it. He had riches; 
 I made him squander them for an hour's caprice of mine. He had honors; I 
 made him trail them in the mud, like Raleigh's cloak, that I might set my foot 
 on them. Well, then I flung him away like a faded flower, like a beryl out of 
 fashion; and I find him, years after, dying in want and shame. Call mine 
 charity ? Call me a murderess, rather ! " 
 
 There were no tears in her eyes; but there were more intense misery and 
 remorse in the calm words than ever tears yet uttered. 
 
 He looked on her with infinite compassion. 
 
 "/ call you nothing harsh: you were at least my savior." 
 
 Her beautiful, dark, wild eyes gazed at him with gratitude, in which no 
 acceptance of the forgiveness of herself mingled. 
 
 " Ah, Chandos, I am heart-sick of the world's babble about your sex's tempt- 
 ing. It is we who tempt you ; it is we who blindfold you, we who are never 
 satisfied till we have won your lives to break them, we who curse you in sin 
 and in pleasure, in license and in marriage, we who, if we see you at peace,
 
 CHANDOS. 401 
 
 think our vanity is at stake till we drive peace away ! The moralists rant of 
 us as martyrs ! They little know that our mockery of love destroys a thousand- 
 fold more lives than it has ever blessed." 
 
 She spoke with passionate bitterness. He answered nothing; he felt the 
 truth of her words too well; and yet with the thoughts of love there stole on 
 him one freshj one soft memory, that of the child Castalia. 
 
 Beatrix Lennox roused herself with the smile which even in its sadness had 
 something of the sorcery that nature had given her and that death alone could 
 take away. 
 
 " Forgive me ! It was not to speak of these things that I brought you here. 
 It was but to ask you, have you found yet who is your worst foe ? " 
 
 " Yes; I was my own." 
 
 " Well, you were because you loved others better than you loved yourself. 
 But that is not my meaning. Long ago, did you ever receive an anonymous 
 letter that warned you against John Trevenna ? " 
 
 His face darkened at the name. He paused, silent for a moment. She 
 gave him no time to reply. 
 
 " If you did, I wrote it." 
 
 " You ? " 
 
 He looked at her in surprise. 
 
 " I ! I dared not warn you more openly; I was in his power, as he had so 
 many in his power. I knew that he hated you terribly, bitterly. There was 
 something between you he never pardoned. Why was it ? What wrong had 
 you ever done him ? " 
 
 " None: I only served him." 
 
 " Ah ! then it was that he could not forgive ! I knew it as women know 
 many things men never dream that they even divine. I knew it by a thousand 
 slight signs, a thousand half-betrayals, which escaped his caution and your 
 notice, but which told his secret to me. As for its root, I knew nothing. It 
 was jealousy; but whether simply of your social superiorities, or whether com- 
 plicated by more personal antagonism, I cannot tell. I used to fancy that some 
 woman might be the cause of the envy. Where tares grow to choke the wheat, 
 it is always our hands that sow them ! " 
 
 " A woman ? " He thought of the words that, long years before, had been 
 spoken by the old man whom his adversity had slain. " There was no love- 
 feud between us; and I doubt if love ever touched him: he was not one to 
 harbor it." 
 
 " An egotist can always love well enough to deny what he loves to another. 
 Be the cause what it will, he hated you, hates still, I have no doubt, though 
 the world has found out an idol and a celebrity in him. Ah, Heaven ! what a 
 travesty of all justice is that man's success ! "
 
 402 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 " It is the due of his intellect." 
 
 It was not in him to disparage the merits or the- attainments of his foe. 
 She looked at him with a wonder in which mingled something of impatience, 
 more of veneration. 
 
 " Ah, Chandos, how can the world understand you ? You speak well of 
 your worst traitor ! " 
 
 " I but give him the due of his abilities: you would not, surely, have me do 
 less ? " 
 
 " But you know he is your vilest enemy." 
 
 "Yes; he has declared himself so." 
 
 " And still you give him generous words ? " 
 
 " Words ? What are words ? If it ever came to deeds, I might prove 
 little better than he in brute vengeance." 
 
 The animal lust, the evil leaven, which lie in the loftiest and the purest 
 forms of human nature, ready to rouse and steep themselves in Cain's revenge, 
 were on him as he spoke. He knew how this man's outrage had power to 
 move him; he knew how if vengeance ever came into his hand he would have 
 passion in its using, beside which all the tolerance and self-knowledge gathered 
 from suffering would break like reeds, would crumble as ashes. 
 
 She watched him still with that same blent wonder and reverence in her 
 aching eyes. 
 
 " Chandos, for less than this Iscariot's crime men have cursed their foes 
 living and dying; and you you still are just to him ! " 
 
 A look that had for the moment the old proud disdain of his earlier years 
 passed over his features, even while his teeth set and his hand clenched. 
 
 " Because the man is vile, would you have me sink so low myself as to deny 
 his meed of intellect, and decry his success, like a mortified woman who depre- 
 ciates her rival ? He is famous, and his intellect deserves his fame. But 
 think me none the better that I say so. There are times when I could find it 
 in me, if a reckoning came between us, to wring life out of him as I might 
 wring it out of any snake that poisoned me." 
 
 There was the vibration of intense passion in the words, though they were 
 low-spoken. As the evil influence of Trevenna had betrayed his youth and 
 drawn his manhood to its ruin, so it entered him now and filled him with the 
 virus of brute longing, and shook to their roots the proud patience and the 
 pain-taught self-discipline which he had learned in the years of his exile. 
 There were times when remembering the friendship and the gifts he had lav- 
 ished on this man, and remembering the taunts, the mockery, the hatred, the 
 injury with which he had in turn been requited, he could have gone back to the 
 old barbaric weapons, and dealt with the traitor hand to hand, blow for blow. 
 
 The venom of envy could never enter him; but he would have been more
 
 CHAN DOS. 403 
 
 than human if, through these many years of loss, and weariness, and divorce 
 from all he had once loved and owned, the triumphant passage of the man who 
 would but for his aid have been obscured in a debtor's prison, the plaudits that 
 the world bestowed on the man whom he knew base as any assassin who slew 
 what had saved and succored him, had not possessed an exceeding bitterness 
 for him, had not sickened him oftentimes of all hope or belief in justice, 
 earthly or divine. Once Trevenna had hoped to wreck his genius as well as his 
 peace, his intellect as well as his fortune, his soul as well as his beauty and his 
 heritage. Once Trevenna had loved to think that this well-planned murder 
 would kill in its victim all higher instincts, all likeness of honor, and all purity 
 of conscience: it was possible that, even at the end, his wish might find fruition, 
 that, under the weight of accumulated wrongs, long-chained passions and 
 long-strained endurance might give way and find their fall in dealing retribution, 
 which, just, in its chastisement, would still be the forbidden justice of some in- 
 voluntary and avenging crime. Some thought of this passed over the mind of 
 the world-worn and reckless Bohemian who gazed at him. She stooped for- 
 ward eagerly, and, in the yellow shadows, the softened emotion that was upon 
 it lent the fairness of other years to her face. 
 
 " Chandos, whatever he be, he is beneath you. An evil impulse wrung 
 from you is more than all his baseness is worth. He has robbed you, I believe, 
 of much; but his worst robbery will be if ever he wrenches from you your 
 better, your nobler nature." 
 
 An impatient sigh escaped him. 
 
 " That is to speak idly. I am no better than other men; and I am no demi- 
 god, to rise above all natural passions and see evil triumph unmoved. It were 
 a poor, paltry vanity to point at his successes and tell men they were unjust be- 
 cause the winner of them was my foe. He is famous; let them make him so. 
 But not the less, if ever the power of chastisement come into my hands, shall I 
 hold the widest as his due. Robbed me, you say ? Yes, I believe now that 
 half my ruin was robbery, or little better; but the theft was wisely to windward of 
 the law. If he thieved from me, there was no proof of it." 
 
 She shook her head. 
 
 " He was too keen, too prudent, too wise. Devour your substance I know 
 that he did; but he would have ever been mindful of Bible precedent, and would 
 only have taken your inheritance by persuading you to disinherit yourself for 
 some pottage of pleasure or of indolence. Men who break laws are, at their 
 best, but half knave, half fool: he is too able to be numbered among them. 
 
 "Doubtless! the world's greatest criminals are those who never stand in a 
 dock," he answered her, as his mind went back to the story of the blind Hebrew. 
 " There is a man here, a Jew, whose history tells that he rejects all assistance, 
 almost all sympathy; but he merits both. Will you see him if it be possible ? "
 
 404 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 "Surely, for you. A blind Jew? I have noticed him as I passed; but I 
 am no fit missionary of consolation to any living thing! /, Beatrix Lennox! " 
 
 " Well, you," he said, gently, " you are here on an errand of mercy to- 
 night." 
 
 She flashed on him a glance almost fierce, had it not been so melancholy. 
 
 " Grand" chose ! I am here because one whom I murdered lies dying, with- 
 out a creature to tend his death-bed. A noble mission, truly! Ah, Chandos, 
 I am not one of those miserable cravens who, having given all -the flower of 
 their years to the working of evil, buy a cheap virtue back by insulting a God 
 they disbelieved in over their revels with the offer of the few tame, barren, un- 
 tempted years they have left them! That is a wretched travesty, a terrible 
 blasphemy: do not think I stoop to it. But yet you you who know human 
 nature so well, and are so gentle to it, though it basely abandoned you 
 you, who have the heart of a poet and the tolerance of a philosopher 
 will believe me when I tell you that there are times when I hate myself more 
 utterly than any ever hated me, justly though they had cause ? You will 
 know that there may be so vast an evil in us and yet that there may linger 
 some conscience ? " Her words swept on, without waiting for answer. " You 
 never knew my story. None will ever know it, as it was. I was sold into 
 marriage, almost in childhood, as slave girls are sold to a harem. Well, if I 
 hated my bondage as they hate theirs, where was the wonder ? whose was the 
 sin ? But that matters nothing. Those who err can always find apology of 
 their error; I will be no such coward. Still, it was through this that John 
 Trevenna had his hold on me. My husband " her dark, imperial face still 
 flushed and the long hazel eyes still flashed at the words " held his wife's 
 charms only as his property, to turn to such account as he would. He was 
 very poor, very extravagant He found that rich men, fashionable men, admir- 
 ing me, gave horses and carriages, and venison, and game, and dinners, and 
 invitations to great houses, and anything and everything, and would play on in 
 our drawing-rooms at whist and billiards till the stakes and the bets rose to 
 thousands and tens of thousands. You can guess the rest. I was his decoy- 
 bird. What a school of shamelessness for a girl not twenty ! How I loathed 
 it ! how I loathed it ! only the more because it was glossed over with fashion. 
 Well, Trevenna had immense sway over Colonel Lennox; he had it over every- 
 one, when he cared to attain it. He saw my hatred of the part I was driven to 
 play; he contrived to lighten it. He never hinted any love; it served to give 
 me confidence in him; he was the only man who never spoke of it to me, never 
 so much as whispered a thought of it. He earned my gratitude by freeing me 
 from my husband's persecution; but he made me understand that, in return, I 
 must serve him by acquainting him with all the embarrassments, all the weak- 
 nesses, of the innumerable men about me. I was glad to comply: the terms
 
 CHAN DOS. 405 
 
 seemed light, and, mind you, they were only tacitly offered. I bought my free- 
 dom by being his tool. I did not know I did harm then: I have believed, since, 
 that I did more than when I allured them by my coquetries that my husband 
 might win their gold at pool or at cards. That was how I came into Trevenna's 
 power; that was why I dared not write more openly to you of a hatred I had 
 fathomed, though he had never uttered it. Forgive me Chandos, if you can 
 for so much weakness, so much selfishness ! " 
 
 He had listened, absorbed in the history she told, in the dark and cruel pres- 
 sure which had been upon one whom the world had held so heartless, so reck- 
 less, so wayward, so dazzling a lionne: he started at the last words like one 
 whose dream is broken. 
 
 " Forgive ! I have nothing to forgive. I had no claim that you should care 
 for my friends or my foes. And this was the way he gained his power ! My 
 God is it possible ? " 
 
 He did not end his words; the thought swept past him, extravagant and 
 vague, were the taskmaster of Beatrix Lennox and the taskmaster of the Cas- 
 tilian Jew one and the same? She looked up; she saw his face darken; she 
 heard his breath catch as, for the first time, the possibility that his enemy was 
 the tyrant whose hand had lain so heavy on the Hebrew flashed on him. 
 
 " What is it ? " 
 
 " Your words have brought a strange fancy to me; that is all. A ground- 
 less one, perhaps, yet one I must follow." 
 
 She rose; and her deep, sad eyes dwelt on him with a love that she had 
 never had let him read, she in whose hands love had been but a net and a 
 snare." 
 
 " Follow it, then, and God speed you ! It is of your enemy, of my bond- 
 master?" 
 
 He bent his head in silence. Thoughts had rushed in on him with so 
 sudden and so passionate a force that to frame them to words was impossible; 
 they were baseless and shapeless as a dream, but they came with an irresistible 
 might of conviction. He waited a moment, with the mechanical instinct of 
 courtesy. 
 
 " Can I not aid you ? The dying man whom you spoke of, can I do noth- 
 ing for him ? " . 
 
 She gave a gesture of dissent, almost savage, if the softness of her inal- 
 ienable grace could have ever let her be so. 
 
 " Why always think of others instead of yourself ? You had never been 
 ruined but for that sublime folly ! No; you can do nothing for him. He will 
 be dead by the dawn. I killed him. I never cared for him; but I do care 
 that you should not look on my work. It has been thoroughly done: no 
 woman ever wrecks by halves."
 
 406 OUIDA'S WORKS. 
 
 There was in the half-ironic, half-scornful calmness of the words a grief 
 deeper than lies in any abandonment of sorrow. He stooped over her an 
 instant, touched, and forgetting his own thoughts in hers. 
 
 "I no not say, Feel no remorse; for that were to say, Deny the truest of 
 your instincts. But you were cruelly wronged, cruelly driven. There is much 
 nobility still, where so much tenderness lingers. Farewell: we shall meet 
 again ? " 
 
 She looked at him with that long, lingering look that had so hopeless a 
 melancholy. 
 
 "Ah! I do not know. Death will be here-to-night; perhaps he will be 
 gentle and generous for once, and take me with him, at least, if his promised 
 sleep have no awakening. There is the fear, the old Hamlet-fear, never set 
 at rest either way ! " 
 
 He left her, and she leaned a while against the bare table, her hands 
 clenched, in the still rich masses of her hair, her lips pressed in a close weary 
 line, her eyes filling slowly with tears. 
 
 " Ah! " she mused, in the aching of her heart, " have nine-tenths of us ever 
 any real chance to be the best we might ? If I had lived for him, if he had 
 ever loved me, or one like him, no woman would have been truer, gentler, 
 purer, stronger to serve him, or more utterly under his law and at his feet, 
 than I!" 
 
 He left her, and went again upward to the Hebrew's chamber. A strange 
 instinct of vengeance, a sudden impulse of belief urged him on. Though no 
 hint had been dropped that the Jew's tyrant was the enemy of his own life, a 
 conviction strong as knowledge had centred in him that the man spoken of 
 wasjohn Trevenna. He thrust the door open hurriedly, and entered; the 
 little lamp still burned dully there, but the blind Israelite and the dog were 
 both gone. Standing alone in the desolation of the narrow chamber, he 
 could almost have believed that the tale he had heard had been a dream of 
 the night, and the antique form of the old man but one of its sleep-born 
 phantoms. There had passed but the space which he had spent with Beatrix 
 Lennox since he had been told the recital : yet either answer was purposely de- 
 nied to his questions, or the refuge the Jew had sought amidst the people of 
 his nation was too secret to be unearthed, for no search and no inquiry brought 
 a trace of him; he was lost, with the vague outline of his history left unfilled, 
 lost in the wide wilderness of a large city's nameless poverty. With its mem- 
 ory upon him, Chandos went out into the gray, subdued light of the now- 
 breaking dawn; the thoughts which had moved him had stirred depths which 
 time had long sealed. For many years he had striven to put from him the 
 remembrance alike of his wrongs and of his losses; he had believed the first 
 to be beyond avenging, as the latter were beyond redemption; he had striven
 
 CHANDOS. 407 
 
 to live only the impersonal life of the thinker, of the scholar, to leave behind 
 him alike the unnerving weight of regret and the baneful indulgence of a vain 
 suspicion. But here the things of those dead days had risen and forced them- 
 selves on him; to his mind came what until then had not touched him, the 
 belief that his foe had dealt him wider treachery than the mere treachery of 
 friendship, that Trevenna had done more than leave him unwarned in a 
 dangerous downward course, but had robbed him and trepanned him under the 
 smooth surface of fair and honest service. The utter extravagance and heed- 
 lessness of his joyous reign had left him no title to accuse another of causing 
 any share of the destruction which followed on it; and the organization of his 
 mind was one to which such an accusation could but very slowly, and only on 
 sheer certainty, suggest itself. Yet now, looking backward to innumerable 
 memories, he believed that, in the pale of the law, his traitor had been as 
 guilty of embezzlement as any within the law's arraignment; he believed that 
 his antagonist had tempted, blinded, robbed, and betrayed him on a set and 
 merciless scheme. 
 
 Recalling the points of the Spanish Jew's relation, slight and nameless as 
 the recital had been in much, something that was near the actual truth came 
 before his thoughts. He remembered how heavily the claims of a money- 
 lender's house had pressed on him for obligations in his own name, and for 
 those where his name had been lent to others. If his foe and the Hebrew's 
 tyrant were one, how vast a network of intrigue and fraud might there not have 
 been wound about him! It was but imagination, it was but analogy and pos- 
 sibility, that suggested themselves vaguely to him: yet they fastened there, 
 and an instinct for the " wild justice " of revenge woke with it, passionate and 
 unsparing. To fling his foe down and hold him in a death-gripe as the hound 
 pulls down the boar, with a longing as intense upon him in its dominion as it 
 was on David of Israel when the treachery of men and the triumph of- evil- 
 doers broke asunder his faith and wrung the fire of imprecation from his lips. 
 
 As he looked back on all he had suffered, all he had lost, all he had seen 
 die out from him forever, and all that forever had forsaken him, he felt the 
 black blood of the old murderous instinct latent in all human hearts rise and 
 burn in him: utterly foreign to his nature, once grafted, it took the deadlier 
 hold. 
 
 " Oh God ! " he said, half aloud, in his clenched teeth, as he passed the en- 
 trance of the miserable house, " shall his crimes never find him out ? " 
 
 These crimes had given his betrayer a long immunity; they had given him 
 a lifetime of success; they had given him riches and favor and the fruition of 
 ripe ambitions; they had given him the desire of his heart and the laurels of 
 the world: would the time ever come when they should be quoted against him 
 and strip him bare in the sight of the people ? The bitterness of unbelief, the
 
 408 QUID AS U'ORKS. 
 
 weariness of desolation, fell on Chandos as the doubt pursued him. He had 
 cleaved to honor for its own sake, and had loved and served men, asking 
 no recompense; but he remained without reward. Pursuing fraud, and tyranny, 
 and the wisdom of self-love", and the tortuous roots of unscrupulous sagacity, 
 his enemy prospered in the sight of the world, and put his hand to nothing that 
 ever failed him. There was a pitiless, cold, mocking sarcasm in the contrast, 
 which left the problem of human existence dark as night in its mystery, which 
 shook and loosened the one sheet-anchor of his life, his loyalty to truth for 
 truth's own sake. 
 
 The heart-sickness of Pilate's doubt was on him; and he asked in his soul, 
 "What is truth?" 
 
 As he passed out into the narrow -arched doorway, some young revellers 
 reeled past him, handsome, dissolute, titled youths, who had been flinging 
 themselves in the air in the mad dances till the dawn, at a ball of the people, 
 dressed as Pierrots and Arlequins. They were going now to their waiting car- 
 riages, talking and laughing, while the sound of their voices echoed through 
 the stillness of the breaking day in disjointed sentences. 
 
 "Castalia! Beau nom ! Selling lilies with a face like a Titian: how 
 poetic ! " 
 
 " Very. But somebody, apparently, had left her to the very dull prose of 
 wanting her bread, a common colophon to our idyls ! " 
 
 " Wandering with a few flowers; and Villeroy could neither tempt her nor 
 trap her ! He must have been very bete ! Or. she " 
 
 " A Pythoness. He is terribly sore on the subject. Pardieu ! I wish we 
 had her here ! Women grow dreadfully ugly." 
 
 They had passed, almost ere the sense of the words had reached his ear 
 and pierced the depth of his thoughts: involuntarily he paused where he stood 
 in the entrance. 
 
 " Castalia ! " 
 
 He murmured the name with a pang; the indefinite words he had heard 
 suggested so terrible a fate for her; and his heart went out to her in an infinite 
 tenderness, that beautiful child, brilliant as any passion-flower, desolate as any 
 stricken fawn ! 
 
 " Who is she ? " 
 
 Beatrix Lennox, standing unseen near him, heard alike the revellers' words 
 and his echo of the name. 
 
 He started and turned to her. 
 
 " She whom they spoke of ? I do not know; at least, I hope to Heaven 
 I do not ! " 
 
 " But the one who is in your thoughts ? " 
 
 She, who loved him, had caught the softness of his voice and its eager
 
 CHANDOS. 409 
 
 dread as he had repeated the name that had suddenly floated to his ear in the 
 depths of Paris. He paused a moment; then he answered her: 
 
 " You have a woman's heart; if it can feel pity, know it for her. She is 
 nameless, motherless, friendless; and I could only as a harsh mercy, yet the 
 best left to me leave her." 
 
 Her face grew paler; her lips set slightly. 
 
 " You loved her, Chandos ? " 
 
 A.n impatient sigh escaped him. 
 
 " No ! at least those follies are dead with my youth. If we had met 
 earlier ' 
 
 Her eyes dwelt on him with a passionate sadness. 
 
 " Love is not dead in you ; it will revive," she said simply. "Tell me of 
 her." 
 
 "There is nothing to tell. Her parentage is unknown; she lives below 
 Vallombrosa, and has but this one name, Castalia. She will have the beauty 
 and the genius of a Corinne; and she lies under the ban of illegitimacy, with 
 no haven except a convent." 
 
 " But if she be the one of whom those youths spoke ? The name is rare." 
 
 He stayed her with a gesture. 
 
 " Hush ! do not hint it ! If harm reacli her, I shall feel myself guilty of 
 her fate." 
 
 Her voice sank very low. 
 
 " What, then ? you only forsook her when you had wearied of her ? " 
 
 "No: you mistake me. No man could weary of that exquisite life; and it 
 is as soilless as it is fair. I meant but this: I believe her young heart was 
 mine, though no love-words passed between us; and I have doubted sometimes 
 if my tardy mercy were not a cold and brutal cruelty. Because passion has 
 no place in my own life, I forgot that regret could have no place in hers." 
 
 He spoke gravely, and his memory wandered from his listener away to that 
 summer eve when some touch of the old soft folly had come back on him as 
 his lips had met Castalia's, away to the hours when the lustrous ejpquence of 
 her beaming eyes had reflected his thoughts, almost ere they had been uttered, 
 in that pure and perfect sympathy without which love is but a toy of the senses, 
 a plaything of the passions. 
 
 Beatrix Lennox looked at him long in silence. 
 
 " She is dear to you ? " she said, at length. 
 
 He smiled, very wearily. 
 
 " If I let her be so, it would be the sure signal for her loss to me." 
 
 He had lost all that he had ever cherished. Then, bending his head to her 
 in farewell, he went out into the dawn alone. 
 
 Beatrix Lennox stood in the dark and narrow entrance, watching him as he
 
 410 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 passed away in the twilight of the dawn, through which the yellow flicker of the 
 street-lights was burning dully. Her black robes fell about her like the laces 
 of Spanish women; her face was very pale, for there was no bloom of art on its 
 cheeks to-night, and her large eyes were suffused with tears over the darkness 
 of their hazel gleam. There was beauty still in her, the beauty of an autumn 
 evening, that had the faded sadness of dead hopes and the tempest-clouds of 
 past storms on its pale sunless skies and on the red fire of its fallen leaves. 
 
 " He loves her, or he will love," she murmured, in her solitude. " I will 
 seek out this child, and see if she be worthy of him. Ah ! no woman will be 
 that ! A great man's life lies higher than our love, loftier than our reach." 
 
 A few hours later, in the writing-cabinet of her Roman villa a famous 
 diplomatist sat, one who wove her fine nets around all the body politic of the 
 continent, who schemed far away with Eastern questions and Western com- 
 plications, who had her hand in Austria, her eyes on Syria, her whisper in the 
 Vatican, her sceptre in the Tuileries, her allies among the Monsignori, her 
 keys to all the bureaux secrets, her subtle, vivacious, deleterious, dangerous 
 power everywhere. 
 
 She was a terrible power to her foes, a priceless power to her party. Those 
 brilliant falcon eyes would pierce what a phalanx of ministers could not over- 
 come; that unrivalled silver wit could consummate what conferences and coa- 
 litions failed to compass; that magical feminine subtlety could dupe, and mask, 
 and net, and seduce, and wind, and unravel, and give a poison drop of treachery 
 in a crystal-clear sweetmeat of frankness and compliment, and join with both 
 sides at once, and glide unharmed away, compromised with neither, as no male 
 state-craft ever yet could do. The only mistake she made was that she thought 
 the growth of the nations was to be pruned by an enamelled paper-knife, and 
 the peoples^that were struggling for liberty, as drowning men for air, were to be 
 bound helpless by the strings of Foreign Portfolios. But the error was not only 
 hers; male state-craft has made it for ages. 
 
 Now it was of an idle thing she was speaking. One of her attendants stood 
 before her, a slight, pale, velvet-voiced Greek, long in her service, and skilled 
 in many tongues and many ways. He was reciting, with his finger on a little 
 note-book, the heads of some trifling researches, very trifling he thought 
 them, he who was accustomed to be a great lady's political mouchard. 
 
 " Still wandering; close on Venetia; will soon want food; takes no alms: 
 left Vallombrosa two months ago; is known only by the name of Castalia; 
 parentage unknown; reared by chanty of the Church ; supposed by the peas-
 
 CHAN DOS. 411 
 
 ants to have fled to a stranger who spent the spring there in a villegiatura. 
 That is all, madame." 
 
 She listened, then beat her jewelled fingers a little impatiently. 
 
 " That is not like your training, to bring me an unfinished sketch." 
 
 "There is nothing to be learned, madame." 
 
 The amused scorn of his mistress's eyes flashed lightly over him. 
 
 "If a thing is on the surface, a blind man can feel it. Go; and tell 
 me when you come back both the name of this stranger and the name of her 
 mother." 
 
 " It is impossible, madame." 
 
 She gave a sign of her hand in dismissal. 
 
 "You must make impossibilities possible, if you remain with me." 
 
 The voice was perfectly gentle, but inflexible. Her servant bowed, and 
 withdrew. 
 
 "She is belle & faire peur. I will know what she is to him," murmured 
 Heloise de la Vivarol. 
 
 The fair politician had not forgotten her oath. 
 
 Two weeks later, the Greek, who dared not reappear with his mission unac- 
 complished, sent his mistress, with profound apology for continued failure, a 
 trifle that, by infinite patience and much difficulty, had been procured, with 
 penitent confession of its theft, from a contadina of Fontane Amorose, a 
 trifle that had been taken from the dead and secreted rather from superstitious 
 belief in its holy power, than from its value. It was a little, worn, thin, silver 
 relic-case: on it was feebly scratched, by some unskilful hand, a name, 
 " Valeria Lulli." 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 " RECORD ONE LOST SOUL MORE." 
 
 IN his atelier, early in the next day, an artist stood painting. His studio 
 looked on part of the Forest of Fontainebleau. The garden was very tranquil 
 below; and the light within shone on casts, antiques, bronzes, old armor, old 
 cabinets, and half-completed sketches, all an artist's picturesque lumber. He 
 had a fair fame, and, though not rich, could live in ease. He did not care for 
 the gay Bohemianism of his brethren; he had never done so, A sensitive, 
 imaginative man, poet as well as painter, of vivid feeling and secluded 
 habits, he preferred solitude, and made companions of his own creations. He 
 stood before one now, lovingly touching and retouching it, a man with 
 Southern blood in every line of his limbs and his features, with a head like a
 
 412 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 Murillo picture, and a rich Spanish beauty that would have been very noble, 
 but for a look of wavering indecision and a startled, timorous, appealing glance 
 too often in his eyes. 
 
 It was not there now; he was smiling down on his picture with a blissful 
 content in its promise. It had the pure, clear, cool color of the French school, 
 with the luxuriance of an overflowing fancy less strictly educated, more abun- 
 dantly loosened, than theirs; it was intensely idealic, far from all realism, 
 withal voluptuous, yet never sensual. The type of his nature might be found 
 in the picture; it was high, but it had scarcely strength enough in it to be the 
 highest. Still, it was of a rare talent, a rare poetry, and he might well look on 
 it contented; he only turned from it to smile more fondly even still in the face 
 of a young girl who leaned her hands on his shoulder to look at it with him, 
 a girl with the glow in her laughing loveliness that was in the warm autumnal 
 sunlight without, the loveliness rich and full of grace of a Spaniard of Mexico. 
 
 "You are happy, Agostino, with it and with me ? " she asked, in a caressing 
 murmur, with her ripe scarlet lips, that had the bloom of their earliest years on 
 them, close against his. 
 
 There was a passionate love in his eyes, and there was something of as pas- 
 sionate a regret, as he answered her: 
 
 " Mi querida! you and it give me all the happiness I ever know." 
 
 And that was much, in such moments at least, with the gloriousness of his 
 own art on the canvas before him in a shape that men would admire and honor, 
 and that spoke to his heart more sweetly than it could ever speak to theirs, and 
 against his cheek the full and fragrant lips of a woman he had loved at a glance 
 with a Southern fervor, and won at a sharp cost that heightened the joy of pos- 
 session. In that moment at least the artist, the lover, was happy. 
 
 As he stood before his picture, in the peace of the early day, the door 
 opened, a light quick step trod on the oak floor. 
 
 " Ah, cher Agostino ! how go the world and the pictures ? You and La 
 Seiiora are a study for one ! " 
 
 The painter started, with a sudden shiver that ran through all his limbs; a 
 deathly pallor came under the warm olive tint of his cheek; he stood silent, 
 like a stricken man. The Spanish girl, who had hurriedly moved from his 
 embrace, with a blush over her face, did not see his agitation; she was looking 
 shyly and in wonder at the stranger who entered so unceremoniously on their 
 solitude. 
 
 " Haven't seen you for some time, my good Agostino," pursued John Tre- 
 venna, walking straight up towards the easel, without taking the trouble to 
 remove his hat from over his eyes or his cigar from between his lips, bright, 
 quick, good-humored, careless, and easy, as he was everywhere, sauntering 
 up the body of the Commons, chatting at a cover-side, discussing foreign
 
 IT is IMPOSSIBLE, MADAME." Page 411, Vol. III.
 
 CHANDOS. 413 
 
 questions in a Legation, or playing billiards with a duke. " What are you 
 doing here ? anything pretty ? Queer thing, Art, to be sure ! Never did 
 understand it, never should. Let me see: a young lady without any drapery, 
 unless some ivy on her hair can be construed into a concession to society on 
 that head. and a general atmosphere about her of moist leaves and hazy un- 
 comfortableness. Now you've 'idealized' her into something, I'll be bound, 
 and will give her some sonorous Hellenic title, eh? That's always the way. 
 An artist gives his porter's daughter five francs and a kiss to sit to him, dresses 
 her up with some two-sous bunches of primroses from the Marche des Fleurs, 
 paints her while they smoke bad tobacco and chatter argot together, and calls 
 her the Genius of the Spring, or something as crack-jaw. Straightway the con- 
 noisseurs and critics go mad: it's an 'artistic foreshadowing of the divine in 
 woman; ' or it's an ' idealic representation of the morning of life and the bud- 
 ing renaissance of the earth;' or it's a 'fusion of many lights into one har- 
 monious whole;' or it's some other art-jargon as nonsensical. And if you talk 
 the trash, and stare at the nude 'Genius,' it's all right; but if you can't talk 
 the trash, and like to look at the live grisette dancing a rigolboche, it's all wrong, 
 and you're ' such a coarse fellow ! ' That's why I don't like Art; she's such a 
 humbug. ' Idealism ! ' Why, it's only Realism washed out and vamped up 
 with a little glossing, as the raw-boned, yellow-skinned ballet-hacks are dressed 
 up in paint and spangles and gossamer petticoats and set floating about as fairies. 
 'Idealism ! ' that's the science of seeing things as they aren't; that's all." 
 
 With which Trevenna, with his glass in his eye and his cigar in his teeth, 
 completed his lecture on art, hitting truth in the bull's eye, as he commonly 
 did, refreshing the Hudibrastic vein in him for his compulsory hypocrisies by 
 a sparring-match with other people's humbugs. He lied, because everybody 
 lied, because it was politic, because it was necessary, because it was one of the 
 weapons that cut a way up the steep and solid granite of national vanity and 
 social conventionalities; but the man himself was too jovially cynical (if such 
 an antithesis may be used) not to be naturally candid. He would never have 
 had for his crime the timorous Ciceronian euphemism of Vixerunt ; he would 
 have come out from the Tullianum and told the people, with a laugh, that he'd 
 killed Lentulus and the whole of that cursed set, because they were horribly in 
 the way and were altogether a bad lot. He held his secret cards closer than 
 any man living; but all the same he never pandered with his actions under 
 specious names to himself, and he had by nature the "cynical frankness" of 
 Sulla. Indeed, this would sometimes break out of him, and cleave the dull air 
 of English politics with a rush that made its solemn respectabilities aghast, 
 though the mischief happened seldom, as Trevenna, like Jove, held his light- 
 ning in sure command, and was, moreover, the last man in the universe to risk 
 an Icarus flight.
 
 414 GUI DA'S WORKS. 
 
 Meanwhile, as the great popular leader uttered his diatribe against art, 
 standing before the easel, puffing smoke into the fair face of a young Dryad, 
 who might justly have claimed sisterhood with Ingres' creations, the painter had 
 remained silent and passive, his Rubens head bent down, on his face a still, 
 cold, gray look, like that of a man about to faint from physical pain; the lids 
 drooped heavily over his eyes; his limbs trembled; he stood like a slave before 
 his taskmaster. The girl had left them at a murmured word in Spanish from 
 him, and they stood alone. Trevenna dropped himself into the painting-chair 
 with his easy familiarity, which, though sometimes polished and toned down by 
 the life he led and the circles he frequented, had all its old bon-camarade in- 
 formality: a looker-on would have said it was the brilliant minister, the moneyed 
 patron, who came on a good-natured visit to the foreign artist. 
 
 " You are not lively company, cher Agostino, nor yet a welcoming host," 
 he resumed. " Didn't expect to see me, I daresay ? I haven't much time to 
 run about ateliers; still, as I was staying at the court, I thought I'd give you 
 a look. So you've married, eh ? Very pretty creature, too, I daresay, for men 
 who understand that style of thing; myself, I'm a better judge of a bouillabaisse 
 than of a mistress. Married, eh ? You know what Bacon says about marriage 
 and hostages to fortune, don't you ? " 
 
 The artist's dry lips opened without words; his eyelids were raised for a 
 moment, with a piteous, hunted misery beneath them; he knew the meaning of 
 the question put to him. 
 
 " Don't know very well what Bacon meant, myself," persued Trevenna, 
 beating a careless tattoo with the mahl-stick. " Wives and brats are hostages 
 most men would be uncommonly glad to leave unredeemed, I fancy, goods 
 they wouldn't want to take out of pawn in a hurry, if they once got rid of 'em. 
 So you've married? Well, I've no objection to that, if you see any fun in it: 
 /shouldn't. You learned one piece of wisdom: you never try dodging now. 
 Quite right. Wherever you might go, /should know it." 
 
 The man who stood before him, like a slave whom the bloodhounds have 
 run down and brought back to their bondage, shuddered as he heard. 
 
 "Oh, God!" he murmured, "can you not spare me yet? I am so nameless 
 a thing in the world's sight, beside you! You have such vast schemes, such 
 vast ambitions, so wide a repute, so broad a field: can you never forget me, 
 and let me go ? " 
 
 " Cher Agostino," returned the Right Honorable Member, " you are illogi- 
 cal. A thing may be insignificant, but it may be wanted. A pawn may, be- 
 fore now, have turned the scale of a champion game of chess. Take care of 
 the trifles, and the big events will take care of themselves. That's my motto; 
 though, of courre, you don't understand* this, seeing that your trade in life is to 
 scatter broad splashes of color and leave fancy to fill 'em up, to paint a beetle's
 
 CHANDOS. 415 
 
 back as if the universe hung in the pre-Raphaelism, and to trust to Providence 
 that your daub of orange looks like a sunset, to make believe, in a word, with 
 a -little pot of oil and a little heap of colored earths, just for all the world as 
 children play at sand-building, is the very oddest employment that ever a fan- 
 tastic devil set the wits of a man after! You are unpractical, that's a matter 
 of course; but you are more: you are desperately ungrateful! " 
 
 A quiver of passion shook the artist's frame; the scarlet flood flushed the 
 olive of his delicate cheek; he recoiled and rebelled against the tyranny that 
 set its iron heel upon his neck, as years before the beautiful lad, whom the old 
 Hebrew loved, had done so in the gloomy city den. 
 
 "Ungrateful! Are men grateful whose very life is not their own? Are 
 men grateful who hourly draw their breath as a scourged dog's ? Are men 
 grateful who from their boyhood upward have had their whole future held in 
 hostage as chastisement for one poverty-sown sin ? grateful for having their 
 spirits broken, their souls accursed, their hearts fettered, their steps dogged, 
 their sleep haunted, their manhood ruined ? If they are grateful, so am I ; 
 not else." 
 
 Trevenna laughed good-humoredly. 
 
 " My good fellow, I always told you you ought to go on the stage: you'd 
 make your fortune there. Such a speech as that, now, all a rimproviste, too, 
 would bring down any house. Decidedly you've histronic talents, Agostino; 
 you'd be a second Talma. All your raving set apart, however (and you're not 
 good at elocution, tres-cher; who can ' fetter ' hearts ? who can ' break ' spirits ? 
 Tt sounds just like some doggerel for a valentine), you are ungrateful. I might 
 have sent you to the hulks, and didn't. My young Jew, you ought to be im- 
 measurably my debtor." 
 
 He spoke quite pleasantly, beating a rataplan with the mahl-stick, and sit- 
 ting crosswise on the painting chair. He was never out of temper, and some 
 there were who learned to dread that bright, sunny, insolent, mirthful good 
 humor as they never dreaded the most fiery or the most sullen furies of other 
 men. Even in the political arena, opponents had been taught that there was 
 a fatal power in that cloudless and racy good temper, which never opened the 
 slightest aperture for attack, but yet caught them so often and so terribly on 
 the hip. 
 
 " Very ungrateful you are, my would-be Rubens," resumed Trevenna. 
 "Only think! Here is a man who committed a downwright felony, whom I 
 could have put in a convict's chains any day I liked, and I did nothing to him 
 but let him grow up, and turn artist, and live in the pleasantest city in the world, 
 and marry when he fancied the folly, and do all he liked in the way he liked 
 best: and he can't see that he owes me anything! Oh, the corruption of the 
 human heart! "
 
 416 GUI DA'S WORKS. 
 
 With which Trevenna, having addressed the exposition to the Dryad on the 
 easel, dealt her a little blow with the mahl-stick, and made a long, cruel blur 
 across the still moist paint of her beautiful, gravely-smiling mouth, that it had 
 cost the painter so many hours, so many days, of loving labor to perfect. 
 
 Agostino gave an involuntary cry of anguish. He could have borne iron 
 blows rained down on his own head like hail, better than he could bear that 
 ruin of his work, that outrage to his darling. 
 
 "I do it in the interest of morality; she's too pretty and too sensual," 
 laughed Trevenna, as he drew the instrument of torture down over the delicate 
 brow and the long flowing tresses, making a blurred, blotted, beaten mass 
 where the thing of beauty had glowed on the canvas. He would not have 
 thought of it, but that the gleam of fear in his victim's eyes, as the stick had 
 accidently slanted towards the easel, had first told him the ruin he might make. 
 To torment was a mischief and a merriment that he never could resist, strong 
 as his self-control was in other things. 
 
 It was the one last straw that broke the long-suffering camel's back. With 
 a cry as though some murderer's knife were at his own throat, the painter 
 sprang forward and caught his tyrant's arm, wrenching the mahl-stick away, 
 though not until it was too late to save his Dryad, not until the ruthless cruelty 
 had done its pleasure of destruction. 
 
 "Merciful God! " he cried, passionately, " are you devil, not man? Sate 
 yourself in my wretchedness; but, for pity's sake, spare my works, the only 
 treasure and redemption of my weak, worthless, accursed life! " 
 
 Trevenna shrugged his shoulders, knocking his cigar-ash off against the mar- 
 vellous clearness of limpid, bubbling, prismatic, sunlight water at the Dryad's 
 feet, that had made one of the chief beauties and wonders of the picture. 
 
 "Agostino, ban enfant, you should go on the stage. You speak in strophes, 
 and say 'good-day' to anybody like an Orestes seeing the Furies! It must be 
 very exhausting to keep up at that perpetual melo-dramatic height. Try life in 
 shirt-sleeves and slippers; it's as pleasant again as life in the tragic toga. Be 
 logical. What's to prevent my slashing that picture across right and left with 
 my penknife, if I like ? Not you. You think your life ' weak and worthless; ' 
 far be it from me to disagree with you; but what you think you ' redeem ' it in 
 by painting young ladies au naturel from immoral models, putting some weed 
 on their head and a pond at their feet, and calling it ' Idealism,' I can't see: 
 that's beyond me. However, I'm not an idealist: perhaps that's why." 
 
 With which he swayed himself back in the painting-chair, and prodded the 
 picture all over with his cigar, leaving little blots of ash and sparks of fire on 
 each spot. Martin and Gustave Dore are mere novices in the art of inventing 
 tortures, besides the ingenuity of Trevenna's laughing humor. 
 
 The man he lectured thus stood silent by, paralyzed and quivering with an
 
 CHANDOS. 417 
 
 anguish that trembled in him from head to foot. Agostino had not changed; 
 the yielding, timorous, sensitive nature, blending a vivid imagination with a 
 woman's suceptibility to fear, was unaltered in him, and laid him utterly at the 
 mercy of every stronger temperament and sterner will, even when he was most 
 roused to the evanescent fire of a futile rebellion. 
 
 " Oh, Heaven ! " he moaned, passionately, " I thought you had forgotten 
 me ! I thought you had wearied of my misery, and would leave me in a little 
 peace ! You are so rich, so famous, so successful; you have had so many vic- 
 tims greater far than I; you stand so high in the world's sight. Can you never 
 let one so poor and powerless as I go free ? " 
 
 " Poor and powerless is a figure," said Trevenna, with a gesture of his cigar. 
 " You will use such exaggerated language; your beggarly little nation always 
 did, calling themselves the chosen of Heaven, when they were the dirtiest little 
 lot of thieves going, and declaring now that they're waiting for their Messiah, 
 while they're buying our old clothes, picking up our rags, and lying au plaisir 
 in our police-courts ! You aren't poor, cher Agostino, for a painter; and you're 
 really doing well. Paris talks of your pictures, and the court likes your young 
 ladies in ivy and nothing else. You're prosperous, on my word, you are; but 
 don't flatter yourself I shall ever forget you. I don't forget ! " 
 
 He sent a puff of smoke into the air with those three words; in them he em- 
 bodied the whole career, the key-note of his character, the pith and essence at 
 once of his success and of his pitilessness. 
 
 A heavy, struggling sigh burst from his listener as he heard: it was the self- 
 same contest that had taken place years previous in the lamp-lit den of the bill- 
 discounting offices, the contest between weakness that suffered mortally and 
 power that unsparingly enjoyed. The terrible bondage had enclosed Agostino's 
 whole life; he felt at times that it would pursue him even beyond the grave. 
 
 " Is there no price I can pay at once ? " he said, huskily, his voice broken 
 as with physical pain, " no task I can work out at a blow ? no tribute-money 
 I can toil for, that, gained, will buy me peace ? " 
 
 " As if I ever touched a sou of his earnings, or set him to paint my walls 
 for nothing ! Mercy ! the ingratitude of the Hebrew race ! " cried Trevenna, 
 amusedly, to his cigar. 
 
 The black, sad, lustrous eyes of the Spanish Jew flashed with a momentary 
 fire that had the lodging in them, for the instant, to strike his tyrant down 
 stone-dead. 
 
 " Take my money ? No ! You do not seek that, because it is a drop in 
 the ocean beside all that you possess, all that you have robbed other men of so 
 long! I make too little to tempt you, or you would have wrung it out of me. But 
 you have done a million times worse. You have taken my youth, my hope, 
 my spirit, my liberty, and killed them all. You have made a mockery of mercy, 
 
 VOL. HI. 14
 
 418 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 that you might hold me in a captivity worse than any slave's. You have made 
 me afraid to love, lest what I love should be dragged beneath my shame. You 
 have made me dread that she should bear me children, lest they be born to 
 their father's fate. You have ruined all manhood in me, and made me weak 
 and base and terror-stricken as any cur that cringes before his master's whip. 
 You have made me a poorer, lower, viler wretch than I could ever have been 
 if the Law had taken its course on me, and beaten strength and endurance into 
 me in my boyhood, by teaching me openly and unflinchingly the cost of crime, 
 yet had left me some gate of freedom, some hope of redemption, some release 
 to a liberated life when my term of chastisement should have been over, left 
 me all that you have denied me since the hour you first had me in your power, 
 in a cruelty more horrible and more unending than the hardest punishment of 
 justice ever could have been." 
 
 The torrent of words poured out in his rich and ringing voice, swifter and 
 more eloquent the higher his revolt and the more vain his anguish grew. This 
 was his nature to feel passionately, to rebel passionately, to lift up his appeal 
 in just and glowing protestation, to recoil under his bondage suffering beyond 
 all expression, but to do no more than this, to be incapable of action, to be 
 powerless for real and vital resistance, to spend all his strength in that ago- 
 nized upbraiding, which he must have known to be as futile as for the breakers 
 to fret themselves against the granite sea-wall. 
 
 Trevenna listened quietly, with a certain amusement. It was always un- 
 commonly droll to him to see the struggles of weak natures; he knew they 
 would recoil into his hands, passive and helpless agents, conquered by the sheer, 
 unexpressed force of his own vigorous and practical temperament. Studies of 
 character were always an amusement to him; he had a La-Bruyere-like taste 
 for their analysis; the vastness of his knowledge of human nature did not pre- 
 vent his relishing all its minutiae. What the subjects of his study might suffer 
 under it was no more to him than what the frog suffers, when he pricks, flays, 
 cuts, beheads, and lights a lucifer match under it, is to the man of science in 
 his pursuit of anatomy and his refutation of Aristotle. 
 
 "'Very well done ! pity it's not at the Porte St. Martin. All bosh ! Still, 
 that's nothing against a bit of melodrama anywhere," he said, carelessly. 
 " Shut up now, though, please. Let's go to business." 
 
 The artist seemed to shiver and collapse under the bright, brief, words; the 
 heart-sick passions, the flame of sudden rebellion, and the fire of vain recrimina- 
 tion faded off his face, his head sunk, his lips trembled: just so, years before, 
 had the vivid grace of his youth shrunk and withered under his taskmaster's eye. 
 
 "You paint the Princess Rossillio's portrait?" pursued his catechist. 
 
 Agostino bent his head. 
 
 " And go to her, of course, to take it ? "
 
 CHAN DOS. 419 
 
 The Spanish Jew gave the same mute assent. 
 
 " Can't you speak ? Don't keep on nodding there, like a mandarin in a tea- 
 shop. You'd words enough just now. You paint it in her boudoir, don't you, 
 because the light's best ? " 
 
 Agostino lifted his heavy eyes. 
 
 " Since you know, why ask me ? " 
 
 " Leave questions to me, and reply tout bref" said his interrogator, with a 
 curt accent that bore abundant meaning. " You've seen a Russian cabinet 
 that's on the right hand of the fireplace ? " 
 
 " I have." 
 
 "Ah! you can answer sensibly at last! Well, that cabinet's madame's 
 despatch-box. You know, or you may know, that she is the most meddlesome 
 intriguer in Europe; but that's nothing to you. In the left-hand top drawer is 
 her Austro- Venetian correspondence. Among it is a letter from the Vienna 
 Nuncio. When you leave the boudoir to-day, you will know what that letter 
 contains." 
 
 Agostino started; a dew broke out on his forehead, a flush stained his clear 
 brown cheek ^with its burning shame; his eyes grew terribly piteous. 
 
 " More sin ! more dishonor ! " he muttered, in his throat. " Let me go and 
 starve in the streets, rather than drive me to such deeds as these ! " 
 
 Trevenna laughed, his pleasant bonhomie in no way changed, though there 
 was a dash more of authority in his tone. 
 
 " Quiet, you Jew dog ! Really, you do get too melo-dramatic to be amusing. 
 There's no occasion for any heroics; but you'll be able to tell me this time 
 to-morrow." 
 
 The artist covered his face with his hands, and his form shook to and fro in 
 an irrepressible agitation. 
 
 " Anything but this ! anything but this ! Give me what labor you will, 
 what poverty, what shame; but not this ! I can never look in peace into my 
 darling's eyes, if I take this villany upon my life ! " 
 
 "Nobody's alluding to villany," said Trevenna, with a tranquil brevity. 
 " As to your darling's eyes, they're nothing to anybody except yourself: you 
 can make what arrangements for ' looking into ' 'em you like. If the only men 
 who ' look into ' women's eyes are the honest ones, the fair sex must get un- 
 common few lovers. You've heard what I said. Know what the letter's about. 
 I don't tell you how you're to know it. Get the princess to show it you. You're 
 a very handsome fellow, black curls and all the rest of it, and her Highness 
 is a connoisseur in masculine charms." 
 
 With which Trevenna laughed, and got up out of the depths of the painting- 
 chair. 
 
 Agostina stood in his path, a deep-red flush on his forehead, the blaze of
 
 420 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 freshly-lightened rebellion in his eyes, his Murillo-like beauty all on fire, as it 
 were, with wretchedness and passion. 
 
 " You use your power over me to force me to such things in your service as 
 this ! What if they were spoken ? what if they were cited against you ? You, 
 high as you are in your success and your wealth and your rank, would be 
 thought lower yet than / have ever fallen. Do you not fear, even you, that one 
 day you may sting and goad me too far, and I may give myself up to your 
 worst work for the sake of obtaining my vengeance ? " 
 
 Trevenna smiled, with a certain laughing good-tempered indulgence, such as 
 a man may extend to a child who menaces him with its impotent fury. 
 
 " Tres-cher, who would believe you? Say anything you like; it's nothing to 
 me. I have a little bit of paper by me that, once upon a time, M. Agostino 
 Mathias signed with a name not his own. I was very lenient to him; and if he 
 dosen't appreciate the clemency the world will, and think him an ungrateful 
 young Hebrew cur, who turns, like all curs, on his benefactor. Prosecute you 
 now it wouldn't, perhaps, since the matter's been allowed to sleep; but criminate 
 you and disgrace you it would most decidedly. You'd be hounded out all over 
 Europe; and for your pretty Spaniard, I heard a court chamberlain admiring 
 her yesterday, and saying she was too good for an atelier: she'd soon be his 
 mistress, when she knew you a felon. Ah, my poor Agostino, when you once 
 broke the law, you put your head into a steel-trap you'll never draw it out 
 of again. Only fools break the laws. Excuse the personality ! " 
 
 Under the ruthless words of truth Agostino shrank and cowered again, like 
 a beaten hound; he had no strength against his taskmaster, he never could 
 have had: he was hemmed in beyond escape. Moreover, now he had another 
 and a yet more irresistible rein by which to be held in and coerced, the love 
 that he bore, and that he received from his young wife. 
 
 " You'll do that, then ? " said Trevenna, with the carelessness of a matter 
 of course. " Bring some picture to show me to-morrow morning, Darshamp- 
 ton likes pictures, because it couldn't tell a sixpenny daub from a Salvator 
 Rosa, and remember every line of the Nuncio's letter. You understand ? I 
 don't want to hear your means; I only wants the results." 
 
 " I will try," muttered Agostino. He loathed crime and dishonor with an 
 unutterable hatred of it; he longed, he strove, to keep the roads of right and 
 justice; his nature was one that loved the peace of virtue and the daylight of 
 fair dealing. Yet, by his unconquerable fear, by his wax-like mobility of tem- 
 per, by his past sin, and by his future dread, he was forced into the very paths 
 and made the very thing that he abhorred. 
 
 " People who ' try ' aren't my people," said the Member for Darshampton, 
 curtly. " Those who do are the only ones that suit me." 
 
 Agostino shrank under his eye,
 
 CHAN DOS. 421 
 
 "I will come to you to-morrow," he murmured, faintly. He had no 
 thought, not the slightest, of how he should be able to accomplish this sinister 
 work that was set him; but he knew that he must do it, as surely as his coun- 
 trymen of old must make their bricks without straw, for their conquerors and 
 enslavers. 
 
 Trevenna nodded, and threw down his mahl-stick with a final lunge at the 
 Dryad. 
 
 " All right ! of course you will. You ought to be very grateful to me that 
 I let you off so easily. Some men would make you give up to them that 
 charming Spanish Senora of yours, as Maurice de Saxe took Favart's wife de la 
 part du rot. But that isn't my line. I've coveted a good many thing in my 
 day, but I never coveted a woman." 
 
 With which he threw his smoked-out cigar away, and went across the atelier 
 and out at the door, with a careless nod to his victim. He had so much to fill 
 up every moment of his time, that he could ill spare the ten minutes he had 
 flung away in the amusement of racking and tormenting the helplessness of the 
 man he tortured, and he knew that he would be obeyed as surely as though he 
 spent the whole day in further threats. 
 
 Trevenna had two especial arts of governing at his fingers' ends ; he never, 
 by any chance, compromised himself, but also he never was, by any hazard, 
 disobeyed. He had a large army of employes on more or less secret service 
 about in the world; but as there was not one of them who held a single trifle 
 that could damage him, so there was not one of them who ever ventured not 
 to " come up to time" exactly to his bidding, or to fail to keep his counsel with 
 " silence a la mart" 
 
 The artist Agostino, left to his solitude, threw himself forward against the 
 broad rest of his chair, his arms flung across it, his head bent down on them: 
 he could not bear to look upon the defaced canvas of his treasured picture; he 
 could not bear to see the light of the young day, while he knew himself a tool 
 so worthless and so vile. The world smiled on him; fame came to him; peace 
 surrounded him; the desires of his heart were fulfilled to him; and all was 
 poisoned and broken and ruined and made worthless by the tyranny that 
 dogged him unceasingly, that seized him when he thought he had cheated it into 
 forgetful ness, that haunted him and hunted him with the phantom of his dead 
 crime, and through it drove him on to do the things he cursed and scorned. 
 He might have been so happy ! and this chain was forever weighting his limbs, 
 eating into his flesh, dragging him back as he sought a purer life, waking him 
 from his sleep with its chill touch, holding him ever to his master's will and to 
 his master's work, will and work that left him free and unnoticed perhaps for 
 years, and then, when he had begun to breathe at liberty and to hope for peace, 
 would find him out wherever he was, and force him to the path they pointed !
 
 422 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 Agostino had hoped oftentimes that as his bond-ruler rose in the honor of 
 men and the success of the world he would forget so nameless and so power- 
 less a life as his own: he had found his hope a piteous error. Trevenna had 
 said truly he never forgot; the smallest weapon that might be ready to his hand 
 some day he kept continually finely polished and within his reach. The painter 
 knew that he must learn what was indicated to him, by betrayal or chican- 
 ery, or secret violence, or whatsoever means might open to him, or be blasted 
 for life by one word of his tyrant. He abhorred the dishonor, but he had not 
 the courage to refuse it, knowing the cost of such refusal. It was not the first 
 time by many that such missions had been bound on him: yet every time they 
 brought fresh horror and fresh hatred with them. But he was hunted and help- 
 less; he had no resistance; throughout his life he had paid the price exacted, 
 rather than meet the fate that waited him if it were unpaid. He clung to the 
 sweetness, the tranquillity, the growing renown, and the newly-won love of his 
 existence; he clung to them, even embittered by the serpent's trail that was 
 over them, with a force that made him embrace any alternative rather than 
 see them perish, that laid him abjectly at the mercy of the one who menaced 
 them. 
 
 Lost in his thoughts, he did not hear the footfall of the Spanish girl as she 
 re-entered the atelier. She paused a moment, amazed and terrified, as she saw 
 his attitude of prostrate grief and dejection, then threw herself beside him with 
 endearing words and tearful caresses, in wonder at what ailed him. He raised 
 himself and unwound her arms from about him, shunning the gaze of her eyes. 
 She thought him as true, as loyal-hearted, as great, as he knew himself to be 
 weak and criminal and hopelessly enslaved. 
 
 " What is it ? What has happened ? " she asked him eagerly, trying to 
 draw down his face to hers. 
 
 He smiled, while the tears started woman-like beneath his lashes. He led 
 her gently towards the ruined canvas. 
 
 " Only that; an accident, my love! " 
 
 The brightness of the Dryad all blurred and marred by the ruthlessness 
 of tyranny was a fit emblem of his life. 
 
 By noon that day, in the boudoir of the Italian princess, all glimmering 
 with a soft glisten of azure and silver through its rose-hued twilight, he chanced 
 to be left for a few moments in solitude. Her Highness had not yet risen. 
 
 " O God! " he thought, " do devils rule the world ? There are always doors 
 opened so wide for any meditated sin !" Then, with a glance round him like 
 a thief in the night, his hand was pressed on. the spring of the Russian cabinet;
 
 CHANDOS. 423 
 
 the letter of the Nuncio lay uppermost, with its signature folded foremost; a 
 moment, and its delicate feminine writing was scanned, and each line remem- 
 bered with a hot and terrible eagerness that made it graven as though bitten 
 in by aquafortis on his memory. The note was put back, the drawer closed; 
 the artist stood bending over his palette, and pouring the oil on some fair 
 carmine tints, when the Princess of Naples swept into the chamber. 
 
 She greeted him with a kindly, careless grace, with a pleasant smile in the 
 brown radiance of her eyes; and she saw that his cheek turned pale, that his 
 eyelids drooped, that his voice quivered, as he answered her. 
 
 " Povero ! com' bello!" thought Irene Rossillio; and she laughed a little, 
 as she thought that even this Spanish Jew of a painter could not come into her 
 presence without succumbing to its spell. 
 
 BOOK THE EIGHTH. 
 
 Leave him, still loftier than the world suspects, 
 Living or dying. 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE CLAIMANT OF THE PORPHYRY CHAMBER. 
 
 BEFORE the door of an Italian albergo, some men had been drinking and 
 laughing in the ruddy light of an autumn day, just upon the setting of the sun, 
 men of the mountains, shepherds, goat-herds, and one or two of less peace- 
 able and harmless callings, rough comrades for a belated night on the hill- 
 side, whose argument was powder and ball, and whose lair was made with the 
 wolves and hares. The house, low, lonely, poor, was overhung with the fes- 
 toons of vines, and higher yet with the great shelf of roadside rock, from which 
 there poured down, so close that the wooden loggia was often splashed with its 
 spray, a tumbling, foaming, brown glory of water that rolled hissing into a 
 pool dark as night, turning as it went the broad black wood of a mighty mill- 
 wheel. The men had been carousing carelessly, and shouting over their wine 
 and brandy snatches of muleteer and boat-song, or the wild ribaldry of some 
 barcarolle, their host drinking and singing with them, for the vintage had been 
 good, and things went well with him in his own way, here out of the track of
 
 424 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 cities, and in the solitude of great stretches of sear sunburnt grass, of dense 
 chestnut-forest, of hills all purple and cloud-topped in the vast, clear, dream- 
 like distance. Now, flushed with their drink and heedless in their revels, rough 
 and tumultuous as wild boors at play, they were circled round the doorway in 
 a ring that shut out alike all passage to the osteria and all passage to the road; 
 and they were enjoying torture with that strange instinctive zest for it that 
 underlies most human nature, and breaks out alike in the boor who has a 
 badger at his mercy and the Caesar who has a nation under his foot. 
 
 They had the power and they had the temptation to torment, and the animal 
 natures in them, hot with wine and riotous with mirth rather than with any 
 colder cruelty, urged them on in it; one or two of them, also, were of tempers 
 as coarse and as savage as any of the brutes that they hunted, and peals of 
 brutal laughter rang out from them on the sunny autumn air. 
 
 " Sing, my white-throated bird ! " cried one. " Dance a measure with me ! " 
 cried another. " Pour this down your pretty lips, and kiss us for it ! " " You'll 
 be humble enough before we've done with you, my proud beauty ! " " We'll 
 tie you up by a rope of that handsome bright hair ! " " Come, now, laugh 
 and take it easy, or, by Bacchus, we'll smash those dainty limbs of yours like 
 maize-stalks ! " 
 
 The shouts echoed in tumult, ringing with laughter, and broken with oaths, 
 and larded with viler words of mountain-slang, that had no sense to the ear on 
 which they were flung in their polluting mirth. In the centre of the ferocious 
 revelry, beneath the bronzed and crimson canopy of the hanging porch-vine, 
 and with the western light shed full upon her, stood Castalia. The tall, lithe, 
 voluptuous grace of her form rose out against the darkness of the entrance-way 
 like the slender, lofty height of a young palm; the masses of her hair swept 
 backward from her forehead. Her face was white as death to the lips; an un- 
 utterable horror was on it, but no yielding fear; it was proud, dauntless, heroic 
 with the spirit of dead Rome, that rose higher with every menace. Her eyes 
 looked steadily at the savage, flushed faces round her so coarse, so loathsome in 
 their mirth; her hands were folded on her bosom, holding to it the book she car- 
 ried. They might tear her limb from limb, as they threatened, like the fibres of 
 the maize; but the royal courage in her would never bend down to their will. 
 They had hemmed her in by sheer brute strength, and their clamor of hideous 
 jest, their riot of insolent admiration, were a torture to her passing all torture 
 of steel or of flame; but they could not wring one moan from her, much less 
 could they wring one supplication. 
 
 " Altro ! " laughed the foremost, a sunburnt, colossal mountain-thief of the 
 Apennine. " Waste no more parley with her. If she will not smile for fair 
 words, she shall squeak for rough ones. My pretty princess, give me the first 
 kiss of those handsome lips of yours ! " 

 
 CHANDOS. 425 
 
 He launched himself on her as he spoke, his hand on the gold of her hair 
 and the linen broideries of her delicate vest: but her eyes had watched his 
 movement: with a shudder like the antelope's under the tiger's claws, she 
 wrenched herself from him, pierced the circle of her torturers before they 
 could stay her, and, before they could note what she did, had sprung with the 
 mountain swiftness of her childhood on to the rocks overhanging the water- 
 wheel. Another bound in mid-air, light and far-reaching as a chamois's, and 
 she stood on the broad wooden ledge of the wheel itself, that was stopped from 
 work and was motionless in the torrent, with the foam of the spray flung 
 upward around her, and the black pool hissing below. A yell of baffled rage 
 broke from her tormentors; yet they were checked and paralyzed at the daring 
 of the action and at the beauty of her posture, as she was poised there on the 
 wet ledge of the wheel-timber, her hair floating backward, her eyes flashing 
 down upon them, her hands still holding the book, the roar and the surge of 
 the torrent beneath her moving her no more to fear than they move the 
 chamois that spring from rock to rock. They forgot their passions and their 
 fury for the moment in amaze and in admiration, wrung out from them by a 
 temper that awed them the more because they could comprehend it in nothing. 
 
 " Come down ! " they shouted, with one voice; "come down ! You have 
 gone to your death ! " 
 
 Where she stood on the wood-work, with the water splashing her feet and the 
 boiling chasm yawning below, she glanced at them and smiled. 
 
 " Yes; I have that refuge from you." 
 
 " Per fede ! " thundered the mountaineer who had first menaced her, " there 
 are two can play at that game, my young fawn." 
 
 With a leap, quick and savage as his own rage, he sprang on to the shelf of 
 rock. There was only the breadth of the falling water between them; she had 
 cleared it, so could he. She looked at the pool, cavernous and deep, at her feet, 
 then let her eyes rest on him calmly. 
 
 " Do it, if you dare ! " she said, briefly; and her gaze went backward to the 
 torrent with a dreaming, longing, wistful tenderness. " You will save me ! " 
 she murmured to the water. " There is only one pain in dying, to leave the 
 world that has his life." 
 
 She swayed herself lightly, balancing herself to spring with unerring meas- 
 ure where the eddy of the torrent was deepest. Arresting her in the leap, and 
 startling her persecutors, a voice, deep and rich, though hollow with age, fell on 
 the silence. 
 
 " Wait ! Will you be murderers ? " 
 
 Out of the darkness of the entrance issued the tall, bent wasted form of the 
 blind Hebrew, majestic as a statue of Moses, with his hands outstretched, and 
 his sightless eyes seeking the sunlight.
 
 426 OUIDA'S WORKS. 
 
 "lam blind," he said, slowly; "but I know that wrong is being done. 
 Maiden, whoever you be, do not fear; come to me; and the curse of the God 
 of the guiltless fall on those who would seek to harm you ! " 
 
 The men, stilled though sullen, riotous rather than coldly cruel, stood silent 
 and wavering, glancing from her, where she was poised amidst the dusky mist 
 of the foam-smoke, to the austere and solemn form of the old man suddenly 
 fronting them: they were shamed by his rebuke, they were awed by her cour- 
 age; they hung like sheep together. 
 
 " Take care ! " murmured the host, who was alarmed, and wished the scene 
 ended. " Let her go. The Jew has the evil eye." 
 
 A faint smile flitted over the withered, saturnine face of the Israelite. 
 
 " Yes," he answered, with a bitterness that under the turn of the words was 
 acrid with remorse, " yes, I have the evil eye. Many souls have been cursed 
 by me: many men have wished that their mothers' had never borne them when 
 once I have looked on their faces; many lives, that were goodly as the young 
 bay-tree ere I saw them, withered and fell under my glance. Let the maiden 
 come in peace to me; and go, or worse will happen unto you." 
 
 The subtlety of the Hebrew turned to just account the boorish and super- 
 stitious terrors of the men: they slunk together in awe of him. 
 
 " It was only play," they muttered: " we meant no harm." 
 
 The blackness of the stern sightless eyes that were turned on them filled 
 them with terror: they crossed themselves, and wished the earth would hide 
 them from his poison-dealing glance. Castalia, where she stood, watched him 
 with that meditative, far-reaching gaze that had all the grave innocence of a 
 child, all the luminous insight of a poet. She held her perilous station still 
 high above on the plank of the wet mill-wheel, with the white steam of the tor- 
 rent curling round. 
 
 With the instinct of the blind, Ignatius Mathias turned towards her. 
 
 " Come down my child: I will have care of you." 
 
 She looked at him gratefully, earnestly. 
 
 " I will come when they have left." 
 
 The Jew turned to them with a gesture majestic as any prophet's com- 
 mand.. 
 
 " You hear her: go! " 
 
 With sullen, muttered oaths, snarling like dogs baffled of a bone, the 
 mountaineers slunk from him into the osteria, to drown their wrath and quench 
 their superstitious fears in some fresh skins of wine. Then he lifted his eyes 
 to the place where he knew that she was, and where the rushing of the torrent 
 told him her danger. 
 
 " I cannot aid you; I have no sight: but you will trust me ? " 
 
 She looked at him a moment longer, then, with the deer-like elasticity and
 
 CHANDOS. 427 
 
 surety of her mountain-training, sprang once more across the width of the 
 falling stream, and down the stone ledges, all slippery with the moisture and 
 holding scarce footing for a lizard, and came to him, touching his hand with a 
 a grave, reverential gentleness. 
 
 " Yes, I will trust you. I thank you, very greatly." 
 
 He raised his hand, and touched her hair. 
 
 " I cannot see you. Your voice is sweet, and sounds very young; but it is 
 proud. It is not the voice of a wanderer; it speaks as though it ought to com- 
 mand. What are you ? " 
 
 " Very friendless." 
 
 He had said aright. Her voice was proud; it spoke without a tremor now, 
 though she had been so near a self-sought death. 
 
 " Truly. Are you far from your home ? " 
 
 " Very far." To her it seemed that she had traversed half the world. 
 
 " And why have you left it ? " 
 
 " Partly, because they said unjust evil." 
 
 "Of you ?" 
 
 " Of me, and of one other. I would not stay where the false speakers 
 dwelt." 
 
 A smile, sardonic and sad, passed over his face. 
 
 "You had better have sought the refuge beneath the water, then; you will 
 find no footing to your taste on earth. Are you alone, wholly alone ? " 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Ah! and are still but a child, by the clearness of your voice. To-day is 
 but a sample of the dangers that lie in wait for you: the lions will not let 
 such a fawn go by in peace." 
 
 The color flushed her face. 
 
 " There is always death," she said calmly. 
 
 " Not always. And where is it you are bound now ? " 
 
 A sigh, heavy and exhausted, escaped her. 
 
 " I want to go to large cities." 
 
 " To go to the lions' den at once, then. Large cities! And for you, who 
 chose the risk of your grave rather than a rough caress from these men of the 
 hills ? Do you know what cities are ? " 
 
 "No; but I must go to them." Her hands pressed the book closer; she 
 thought that in cities alone could she see or hear what she sought. 
 
 The austere, worn, darkened face of the Hebrew grew gentler; she 
 moved his pity, all pitiless though he had been; she recalled to him the youth 
 of his dead darling, when, far away in the buried past, his heart had beat and 
 his life had loved in the summer glories of the sierras. He was very old, but 
 that memory lived still.
 
 428 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 " And do you know the way to any cities ? " 
 
 " Not at all." 
 
 " How do you guide yourself, then ? " 
 
 " By chance." 
 
 " And chance plays you cruel caprices, my homeless bird ! What chance 
 was it led you to those men ? " 
 
 She shuddered; but the passionate blood that ran in her flushed her cheek 
 and glowed imperially in her eyes. 
 
 " They were boors, and had boors' barbarity ! I asked my way, and wanted 
 a little bread, if they would sell it me at the osteria; and, before I could see 
 them, those men were round me, bidding me laugh and dance and sing." 
 
 " Mayhap if you had done so you would have put them in good humor." 
 
 He was blind, and could not see the look that glanced on him from the dark 
 shadows of her lashes. 
 
 "// beg their sufferance, by obeying their bidding, by amusing their 
 idleness, like any strolling tambourine-singer ? They should have killed me 
 first ! " 
 
 " Verily, you should have emperors' blood in you ! You wellnigh killed 
 yourself to escape them." 
 
 The darkened scorn that told the strength and the depths of her nature 
 came on her. 
 
 "Well, what else was there to do ? Men can avenge themselves; women 
 can only die." 
 
 He bent his eyes on her as though, sightless as they were, he would fain 
 read her features. 
 
 " You have grand creeds. Who taught them ? " 
 
 "They are not creeds, I think; they are instincts." 
 
 "Only in rare natures. But have you none in all the world to shield you 
 from such risks ? " 
 
 " None. But I can shield myself." 
 
 " How do you live, then ? " 
 
 " I have sold the flowers, arid sung an office here and there. God is always 
 good." 
 
 The tears welled slowly into her eyes. She would not say what she had 
 suffered. 
 
 " But why is it that you wander thus ? You can come of no peasant blood ? " 
 
 She was silent. She could not have spoken of the thoughts that lay at her 
 heart, of the goal that made her search for the sake of life itself. The words 
 which had been said to her in the Italian town had wakened shame and frozen 
 her to silence, though neither her purpose nor her will faltered. 
 
 " What has sent you out alone ? Have any done you wrong ? "
 
 CHANDOS. 429 
 
 "Only they who spoke evil unjustly." 
 
 " If you hold that a wrong, do not come into cities. But you speak faintly. 
 Have you broken your fast ? " 
 
 " Not to-day." 
 
 She spoke very low; she could not lie, but she could not bear to say the 
 truth, that she had eaten but a little milk and millet-bread in the past twenty- 
 four hours. She had intense strength to endure, and she had too much pride 
 to complain, though a faint weakness was on her, and her limbs seemed 
 weighted with lead in the aching exhaustion that comes from want of food. 
 His sightless eyes sought her with a grave compassion; the self-restraint and 
 force of endurance touched the iron mold of his nature as softer things might 
 not have done. 
 
 " Well, see here. I am poor, but I am a little wealthier than you. I go to 
 cities where my people are good. I am very aged; but still I can give some 
 guidance, some shield, at least from insult. Come with me." 
 
 She shook her head. 
 
 " No. It is a gentle charity; but I cannot take charity." 
 
 His keen ear caught the haughty meaning of the words. 
 
 " Whoever you are, you should be the daughter of kings ! Listen. You 
 are but a child, and I claim the title of age. I am blind, as you see; I am soli- 
 tary, I have no companion, save only my little dog; you can aid me in much. 
 Lend me your sight, and I will lend you my counsel. It will be quittance of all 
 debt between us. I go to Venice; come there, and from there you can do what 
 you will." 
 
 " To Venice ! " 
 
 Her eyes lighted; it was the city of which she had heard most from him 
 whom she sought, the city whence Chandos had come into the beech-woods 
 below Vallombrosa. 
 
 "Yes," answered the Jew. " One has gone thither whom I follow. Your 
 eyes will be fair friends to me; let me have their companionship on the road, 
 at least. 
 
 She wavered. The longing on her was great to reach Venice. She thought 
 that there the silence that reigned between her and the life she had lost might 
 be broken. 
 
 "Shall it be so ? " he asked her. 
 
 She stooped with her soft, supple grace, and touched his hand again 
 gently. 
 
 " If it will not weary you." 
 
 "That is well! Who should serve each other, if not the desolate? And 
 yet I spoke not altogether wrongly when I told those ruffians that I had the 
 evil eye. Not in the sense of their fools' superstitions, but my eyes have been
 
 430 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 evil; sight has been blasted from them in a just judgment. My life has been 
 long, and cruel, and darkly stained. You have no fear of me ? " 
 
 She looked at him with a musing, lingering gaze. The face she saw was 
 stern and harsh and ploughed with deep lines; but she read its true meaning 
 aright. 
 
 " No," she said simply; " I have no fear." 
 
 The brow of the old man cleared. Because he had forfeited the right to 
 trust, trust was the sweeter to him. 
 
 " So! that is right. Youth without faith is a day without sun. Yours will 
 not be wronged by me. Wait a while, then; I need food, and they shall bring 
 you some grapes. Your hands are hot. When I have fairly rested, we will 
 begin to travel onward. Guide me to the shade. Are there no trees ? There; 
 let us stay there. Have no fear; your persecutors will not return." 
 
 So they rested beneath the gold-flecked boughs of a broad sycamore that 
 grew beside the pool of the water-mill, with the depth of shadow flung on the 
 white Syrian head of the old man, and the deep space of the eddying stream, 
 and the sun through the leaves lighting on the grace of her young limbs and 
 the musing beauty of her eyes, as, where the book of " Lucrece " lay open on 
 the grass, they dwelt on the words that Castalia knew by heart as a child knows 
 its earliest prayers, that had never spoken to any as they spoke to her, that 
 were richer in her sight than all the gold of the world, and were to her as in 
 Oriental ages the scroll that their prophets and kings had traced were in the 
 sight of the people's awed love and listening reverence. 
 
 " It was not true to say I was alone," she mused; "not alone while his 
 thoughts are with me." 
 
 And in them solitude, and danger, and -the gnawing of famine, and the 
 heart-sickness of her young life, cast adrift on the fever and the wilderness of 
 the world, were alike forgotten when she leaned, in the autumn light, beside 
 the only man among his creditors who had not uncovered his head before the 
 dignity of calamity in the porphyry hall of Clarencieux. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 "MAGISTER DE VIVIS LAPIDIBUS." 
 
 UNDER the great smoke pall that overhung Darshampton there were riots, 
 riots of the eternal conflict which has been waged since the Gracchan Prole- 
 tariate, and will be waged on, God knows how long, through the cycles of the 
 future. Prices were high: trades were bad; political ignorance was run mad,
 
 CHAN DOS. 431 
 
 catching half-truths and whole wrongs as it went, but braying of them so that, 
 the sane were fain to stop their ears, in the same blunder as the burrowing 
 ostrich makes. Workers had struck almost to a man; masters would not or 
 could not yield; there were misery, error, wild justice, blind injustice, crippled 
 creeds groping in twilight, wrong codes hunger-sharpened, right premisses and 
 wrong deductions, the ignoratio elenchi of individual suffering, that thought 
 itself an injured world, the passion of starving lives that persuaded themselves 
 want of bread was resistless logic; all the eternal antagonisms of Labor and 
 Capital were camped here as it were on one common battle-ground, with the 
 angry smoke looming above their hostile battalions. 
 
 The mighty-sinewed iron-workers, like the Moyen-Age smiths of Antwerp 
 and Bruges, the pale delicate artisans of the loom, wan and frail as the flax 
 they wove, the gaunt giants of the blasting-furnaces, and the sickly weavers of 
 fine linens, the men poisoned with stifling air, the men scorched with foundry- 
 flames, the men dying of steel-dust in their lungs, the men livid with phospho- 
 rus-flames inhaled to get daily bread, the men who died like so many shoals of 
 netted herrings, that the Juggernaut of trade might roll on, all these were 
 here, or their representatives, men who were told, and believed it, that it was 
 the Aristocratic Order which wronged them, never thinking that it was the mer- 
 ciless Thor of Commercial Cupidity which crushed them under its sledge-ham- 
 mer, beating gold out of their bruised flesh. All these were here, filling the 
 vast squares and the dark streets with clamor and menace and sullen omnious 
 murmur, the volcanic lava which runs beneath the fair surface of the careless 
 world, which soon or late will break from bondage and overflow it to fertilize 
 or to destroy ? 
 
 To fertilize, if light be given them; to destroy, if darkness be locked in on 
 them. 
 
 The thirst for liberty was in them, the liberty that the sons of men knew 
 while yet the earth was in her youth, the liberty of pathless woods, of track- 
 less seas, of wild fresh winds, of free unfettered life. They wanted it, though 
 they had never known it. These who from the birth to the grave were pent in 
 factories, and sheds, and garrets, in glass-ware, and crowded alleys, and dens 
 of squalid vice, with the whirr of machines ever on their ear, and the dead 
 weight of smoke ever in their breath, wanted life, wanted the sweet west winds 
 they never breathed, the strong ocean air they never tasted, the waving seas of 
 grass they never looked on, the unchained liberty of boundless moorland they 
 had never seen but in their dreams, the human heritage of freedom that in all 
 ages through is taken from the poor in price for the scant barren porridge of 
 daily sustenance. Ah, God ! it is a bitter price to pay, a whole life given up 
 for food enough to keep alive in knowledge that life is endless pain and end- 
 less deprivation !
 
 432 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 They wanted this grand simple freedom that instinct made them pine for, 
 though its knowledge had never been theirs or their sires' ; and their teachers 
 told them they needed the ballot-box and the game-laws' repeal ! 
 
 It is many centuries since Gaius Gracchus called the Mercantile Classes to 
 aid the people against the Patricians, and found too late that they were dead- 
 lier oppressors than all the Optimates; but the error still goes on, and the 
 Money-makers still churn it into gold, as they churned it then into the Asiatic 
 revenues and the senatorial amulets. 
 
 The trades had struck. They were wrong, very wrong, in the application 
 of theories and predicates which had their root in right. But it were hard not 
 to be wrong in philosophies when the body starves on a pinch of oatmeal, with 
 the whole width of the known world drawn in between the four pent walls of a 
 factory-room or the red-hot stones of a smelting-house. It is the law of ne- 
 cessity, the balance of economy: human fuel must be used up, that the ma- 
 chine of the world may spin on; but it is not perhaps marvellous that the living 
 fuel is sometimes unreconciled to that symmetrical rule of waste and repair, of 
 consumer and consumed. 
 
 They were sullenly angry, tempestuously bitter, these surging tumultuous 
 masses, now raging like seas in a storm, now more ominously silent, with the 
 yellow sickly gleam of the pale sun shining through the reeking fog on to their 
 faces, here so white and eager and emaciated, there so black and dogged and 
 bulldog-like, here so gaunt with old age of hungered patience, there so terrible 
 with youth of vicious desperation. They were at war with all the world in the 
 aching of their hearts, in the dimness of their insight; at war even with their 
 darling whom they had so often crowned, their hero whom they had long been 
 content to follow as hounds follow their feeder. 
 
 They were riotous and desperate. The furnaces had long been cold, the 
 looms had long been idle, the wheels had long been silent throughout their 
 country; their own Unions had been hard on them, and there were dark tales 
 afoot of what had been done on renegades in the Unions' name. Their em- 
 ployers would not yield, and it was said that strange hands were pouring in 
 and taking the work they had left, taking it at peril of answering with life 
 and limb for the temerity. They were very bitter, very savage, very maddened, 
 in the nauseous fog-mist steaming round them, in the cold northerly cutting 
 air, burdened black with smoke, though through them the chimneys had 
 so long been without warmth. They were fierce in their wrath; their hearths 
 were fireless, their children had no food, their women were dying of fever, 
 their old people lay dead by the score of famine; their hand was against 
 every man's, and they clamored even against their Representative. He was 
 faithless to them, he was untrue to his pledges; he feasted in foreign palaces, 
 and forgot them; he sold them for the sake of office; he grew great himself,
 
 CHAN DOS. 433 
 
 and let them perish; he joined the ministry, and denied all that he had said to 
 them. Thus they murmured, and yelled, and hooted against him, in their rest- 
 less misery. The love of a people is the most sublime crown that can rest on 
 the brow of any man; but the love of a Mob is a mongrel that fawns and 
 slavers one moment to rend and tear the next, sycophant whilst bones are 
 tossed to it, savage when once not surfeited. 
 
 They loved him with a bold, rough love, that was a million-fold truer than 
 his own heart had ever been; they were proud of him; they would have died 
 for him; they believed in him; but, irritated against him, they were capable of 
 killing their god, and weeping over it, when shattered, like Africans. Impre- 
 cations even on him were hurled at intervals through the city, while the crash 
 of falling slates, of shivered glass, of flung stones, of levelled bricks, was added 
 to the hurricane of noise, where clamorous for bread, or incensed at the stranger- 
 hands hired by their employers, the mob wrecked a provision-shop or tore 
 down a machine-house. It was a pandemonium under the dark murky atmos- 
 phere; in the dull glare cast from the westward flames, where some had fired a 
 factory; in the midst of the thousands let loose and made savage with hunger; 
 in the storm of curses thundered out from the bared hollow chests gnawed with 
 want, curses that blasted even their idol's name. He had sold them for the 
 bribe of office; he had betrayed them for the possession of power; he had 
 gone over to their oppressors for the sake of his own aggrandizement! 
 
 Perhaps it was but a multitude's reaction and caprice; perhaps it was the 
 great, weary, fettered heart of the people, earnest with all its tyrannous error, 
 and tossed by demagogues from lie to lie, vaguely felt that its own living, 
 aching humanity was but used as a stepping-stone for ambition, vaguely felt 
 that what it trusted was not true. Be it which it would, they upbraided, and 
 menaced and cursed him. He was theirs, and he coalesced with the nobles; 
 he was theirs, and he went to banquet in palaces; he was theirs, and he was 
 betraying them to sit in the Cabinet Council and to wear the gewgaws of 
 honors! 
 
 The murmur and the threat rose louder and louder, stretched wider and 
 wider. When the tempest was at its height, into the surging waves of the 
 stormy human sea Trevenna rode leisurely down. 
 
 Staying at the country-seat of a millionnaire some ten miles away, whither 
 rumors came with every hour of the Darshampton riots, he had heard how his 
 subjects had mutinied against him, heard as he was shooting over a pleasant- 
 cover that had been specially reserved for him, with sundry other good shots of 
 the nobility of rank and the princes of the plutocracy. He had given his gun 
 to a loader, without a second's hesitation, and ordered a horse to be saddled. 
 His friends had crowded around him, and sought to dissuade him; he had 
 shrugged his shoulders. " They curse me behind my back; let's see what
 
 434 OUIDAS WORKS. 
 
 they'll dare say to my face." There was no bravado in it; but there was the 
 cool audacity, the dauntless zest in peril, which made him, despite all his self- 
 love and caution, bold in a fray as a mastiff; his teeth clenched, his hand 
 gripped a riding-switch with a meaning force: the lion-tamer had no thought 
 of leaving his lion-whelps to riot unchecked; and he rode now into Darshamp- 
 ton, with the gentlemen who were his hosts and fellow-guests, about him like a 
 cohue of courtiers round a king. 
 
 " It is very unwise to risk it," whispered one of them. " They are at wild 
 work, and your life is of national value." 
 
 Trevenna laughed, and bowed his thanks for the compliment. 
 
 " Nobody's life's of value, my dear lord: there are always plenty to fill the 
 vacancies. There aren't two people whose death would lower the Consols for 
 two days. To affect the money-market is the acme of greatness: I'm afraid 
 the exchanges would scarce stay twelve hours below par for me yet." 
 
 And he rode leisurely down, as he would take his morning canter along the 
 park, into that sea of turbulent, hooting, swaying, sullen, fog-soaked human 
 life that, for the first moment since his clarion-words had challenged Dars- 
 harnpton, were angered against him and upraiding him as a renegade. There 
 was laughter in his eyes as they glanced over the heaving mass. To his 
 worldly wisdom and bright sagacity, there was an irresistible comedy in this 
 passionate, raving, undoubting sincerity of a hungry multitude; there was an 
 inexpressible ridicule for him in these poor purblind tools that rushed with such 
 ardor to do his work for him, thinking all the while they were doing their own, 
 never knowing that they but tunnelled the way, or threw the bridge, by 
 which he would pass to his ambitions, while they would lie gasping, kicked 
 aside and unknown. To his shrewd common sense' there was something un- 
 utterably droll in the sight of men in love with an idea, amorous of a principle, 
 sincere in anything except self -love; there was something unutterably ludicrous 
 in the notion of men who starved for lack of a crust crazing their heads about 
 the world's government. Trevenna was a democrat, because he hated every- 
 thing above him, delighted to lead, and held a bitter grudge against the pes- 
 tilential tyranny of class; but at heart he cared not a button more for the 
 people than the most supercilious of aristocrats, and, had he been given a 
 supreme power, would have been as strong a tyrant in his own way as ever 
 made a nation the mill-horse to grind for his treasuries and fill his granaries. 
 He had a thorough, manly, passionate contempt for the differences of rank ; 
 but all the same his one motive was simply to get rank for himself, and such a 
 sentimentality (as he would have called it) as pity for the suffering of multitudes 
 could never enter into the strong, practical astuteness of his sagacious temper. 
 
 But bold he was, bold as a lion, and more politic even than bold: so he 
 rode now down into the close-wedged ranks of the crowds, into the sulphurous
 
 CHAN DOS. 435 
 
 heat from the distant flames, into the clamor and the uproar and the storm of 
 rage, till his horse could push way no more, and he faced the whole front of 
 those who were clamorous against him, with the dull red light shining full on 
 the keen brave blue of his eyes. 
 
 They were amazed to see his apparition rise there so suddenly out of the 
 cloud of smoke and fog: he was their idol, moreover, though they had cursed 
 him when they had no bread, as men beat the god Pan when he sent them 
 no game for the hunting; and a silence fell for a moment on them: in it he 
 spoke: 
 
 " So, fellows, you are damning me, they say. Tell me my faults to my face, 
 then ! " 
 
 There was the familiar, half-brusque, half-bantering tone that was so popu- 
 lar with the throngs he challenged; but beneath that there was something of 
 the grand insolence of Scipio ^milianus: " Surely you do not think I shall fear 
 those free whom I sent in chains to the slave-market ! " 
 
 " You sold us for office ! " " You have broken your pledges ! " " You 
 have heen false to your promises ! " " You have abandoned Reform ! " " You 
 have been bribed by courts ! " " You have recanted your creeds ! " " You 
 have joined the aristocracy ! " " You have feasted in palaces ! " " You have 
 turned traitor ! " "You only seek your own dignities, and leave us to starve ! " 
 Sullen, hoarse, savage and uncouth oaths, yelled out in the northern accent, the 
 charges were hurled against him. The multitude were waking, in their irrita- 
 tion, to the truth, and vaguely feeling their way to it, vaguely feeling that they 
 were only used by the idol whom they had hugged the belief they had created 
 and could dethrone. 
 
 He heard. them quite patiently, his bold frank eyes resting on them with a 
 certain insolent amusement that lashed them like cords: it was the amusement 
 of the lion-tamer who let his mutinous cubs fret and fume beneath his gaze, 
 knowing that a crack of his whip will break them into obedience. 
 
 He laughed a little. 
 
 " You rebuke me for taking office ? Why did you re-elect me after my 
 acceptance of it, then ? " 
 
 The mob, indignant to have their own inconsistency and mutability brought 
 in their teeth against them, broke out into tenfold uproar; shrieks, curses, yells, 
 hooting, menaces, crossed each other in horrible tumult; a shower of stones 
 was hurled through the darkened air, a thousand hands struck out with massive 
 iron weapons or cleft the mist with flaming fire-brands. His horse reared 
 and fretted, while the masses of half-naked figures were jammed and crushed 
 against its flanks; a thousand arms were stretched out, brawny and terrible in 
 their threats, ten thousand voices thundered imprecations, hungry savage eyes 
 glared on him like wild beasts', hot breath panted on him from mouths foul
 
 436 O UIDA ' S WORKS. 
 
 with curses and livid with famine. Trevenna sat firm as a rock, with the fresh 
 sanguine color in his face unblenched, and his eyes watching the riot as though 
 it were an opera ballet. Had Trevenna been Napoleon, he would have won at 
 Waterloo ere Blucher could turn the day, or else would have died with the Old 
 Guard. 
 
 The missiles of iron, and stone, and lead, and wood, and slate, flew about 
 him, hissing and roaring through the fog; his horse plunged nervously, but he 
 never swerved in his saddle, never moved his head to avoid the blows that with 
 every second rained at him, as the angered worshippers pelted their god because 
 their bodies were fasting. At last, a flint, sharp, jagged, heavy, struck him, 
 cutting through his clothes and wounding him in the shoulder; the blood 
 poured out down his arm. 
 
 With a careless glance at it, he thrust his hand into the breast of his coat, 
 took out his cigar-case, struck a fusee, and began to smoke, smoke, as calmly 
 and with as much indifference as if he were on the couch of a smoking-room. 
 
 The crowds fell back, the thirsty menacing eyes stared vacantly at him, 
 the yells dropped down into a low, unwilling, sullen muttering of wonder and 
 admiration; the cool bravery, the calm sang-froid, of the action struck a chord 
 never dumb in the English heart; they had pelted their god, and, lo ! he was 
 but the greater for it. They loved him once more with all a people's swift, 
 passionate, volatile repentance; they broke out into riotous cheering, they 
 tossed his name upward to the murky skies, with all the old faith and honor. 
 Without speaking a word, he had conquered. 
 
 " That was like the Clarencieux blood ! " thought Trevenna of his own 
 coolness with a smile. Then, sitting there in his saddle, he spoke, spoke with 
 all his skill and all his eloquence, rating them soundly like a whipper-in rating 
 his hounds, till the great masses hung their heads penitent and ashamed before 
 him, yet speaking so that they loved him more furiously than they had ever 
 done, and making them, to a man, believe that all he took, all he did, all he 
 said, all he projected, were only with one view, their service. -And on the 
 morrow the whole nation was full of adoring applause for the self-devotion and 
 the courage and the serenity with which a Cabinet Minister had risked his life 
 to quell the northern riots, and to lead the people back to reconciliation and to 
 quietness with the charm of his eloquence and the spell of his personal daring. 
 
 " Magister de Vivis Lapidibus " was the title given in the Gothic age to the 
 sculptors of the Gothic fanes. Trevenna might have borne it: it was out of 
 the living stones of other men's lives that he carved the superstructure of his 
 envied triumphs. It is only to those who have this supreme art that success 
 comes.
 
 CHANDOS. 437 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 " TO TELL OF SPRING-TIDE PAST." 
 
 IT was the blossoming-time of the early year in Venice, with the glow on the 
 variegated marbles, and the balmy breeze stirring calm lagunes, and the scent 
 of a myriad of spring-born flowers filling the air with their fragrance from the 
 green-wreathed ruins of arches and the deep embayment of pillared casements. 
 The world was waking after winter, and the joy of its renewed life laughed in 
 every smile of color, and crowned the earth with a diadem of leaf and of bud 
 like a young Bacchus rousing from sleep to his revels. 
 
 " How its youth renews ! " said Chandos to his own thoughts; "and w only 
 know the value of ours when its beauty has faded forever ! " 
 
 " L'artiste est un dieu tombe qui se souvient du temps ou il creait un 
 monde." The memories of his perished world were with him, the world in 
 which his word had been as the thyrsus of Dionysus, a wand beneath whose 
 touch all the earth laughed round him into fragrance. He had resisted the 
 mandragora-steeped despair in which the great lives of Byron and De Quincey 
 quenched their pain and ebbed away; he had taken the broken wreck of his 
 peace boldly and calmly, and had sustained himself, sustained his courage, by 
 desires loftier than happiness, by the treasuries of intellect, by the consolations 
 of freedom. He had borne with the desolation of life for the sake of his man- 
 hood until it had ceased to be wholly desolate, because filled with the dignity 
 of a pure and high labor. He had done this, and done it so that no Ciceronian 
 lament for exile ever was heard to pass his lips, done it so that through it 
 there had come to him the power most foreign to the careless sensuousness of 
 his inborn nature, the power of serene and unswerving endurance. He had 
 suffered, but he had never lamented. He had known that to yield to suffering 
 was to debase manliness and that resistance and conflict are the only noble 
 weapons with which adversity can be worthily met. He had been stung, and 
 bruised, and cheated; he had been offered the bitterness of the hyssop and 
 vinegar when his whole life was athirst for the living waters of loyalty and joy. 
 Men had fooled him, betrayed him, forsaken him; but he had never in turn 
 abandoned them, never reviled the humanity with which he had common bond, 
 never abjured the faith and creeds of his youth. The love he had borne men 
 when they were at his feet, and the suns of cloudless day had been shed across 
 his path, lived with him still, now that he had been stabbed deep by their 
 traitor-blades and had passed through the starless night of bereavement and 
 of despair. 
 
 Yet at times the anguish of a great longing stole on him; at times the lust
 
 438 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 of a great vengeance seized him. At times he would wake from some dream 
 of his youth, some dream that had borne him, for its hour, back to the home 
 he had lost, borne him to the fresh shelter of its forest leafage, to the sight of 
 its beloved beauty, to the lulling echo of its familiar waters; wake, and seeing 
 the gray gleam of some foreign city in its wintry dawn or the torrid, reddened 
 sun-glow of some eastern sky around him, clinch his teeth like a man in 
 torture to keep down the great tearless sob that shook him as the wind shakes 
 reeds. At times he would break from the noble and tranquil repose of phi- 
 losophy, from the treasuries of intellectual creation, from the calm of deep and 
 scholarly ambition and meditation, break from them as men break from the 
 stillness of monastic cloisters and the coldness of monastic vows, with an agony 
 of desire for the vivid joys and the vivid hues that had died from his life, 
 with as passionate an agony for the mere bloodthirst of revenge, that, under the 
 goad of a giant wrong, will change the purest nature to the sheer brute instinct 
 of self-wrought amends, of Mosaic justice. 
 
 He had said that he knew himself weak; all men, who know themselves 
 truly, know this of their natures. He was doubtful of his own duration of 
 control, doubtful that the lessons of a long ordeal might not be forgotten in 
 one instant before the power and the temptation of a day of vengeance. 
 
 He drifted now through Venice, beneath the marble walls and the casements 
 dark and narrow, out of whose twilight glowed the smile of the flowers' birth, 
 with the water lazily parting under his boat's prow, and the green of spring-time 
 foliage hanging over the jasper ledges. His heart was with spring-times that 
 were past, when there had been no shadow on the earth for him, and the kiss 
 of a woman's lips had made his idle golden paradise. " Love ! " he thought, 
 with a momentary regret that was in itself almost a passion. " It can live no 
 more in my life; it is dead with all the rest." Yet now for the instant at 
 least he would have given the kingship of half the world, had he owned it, 
 to steep himself once more in the sweet, senseless delirium; he could have 
 murmured, with Mirabeau when he looked back in his dungeons to the hours 
 of his love, " Jouissance ! jouissance ! que de vies je donnerais pour toi ! " 
 
 " If I returned to her ? " he mused, in a donbt, in a desire, that had long 
 haunted him, mingled with an anxiety that was almost remorse. " And yet 
 a child's love; it may be forgotten ere this. Besides, God knows her fate now; 
 and, whatever it may be, I have no right to sacrifice her life to mine." 
 
 But there, in the sunset radiance, in the lulling of the water's murmur, in the 
 heavy fragrance of the many blosssoms, the thoughts of his youth were with 
 him, and they wandered alone to Castalia. He had not known it while he had 
 been with her, but in absence the desire of his heart had gone to her in what 
 was scarce less than love. He had thrust it from him, because on her the world 
 would have visited that love as dishonor.
 
 CASTALIA. Page 439, Fol. III.
 
 CHANDOS. 439 
 
 As he passed through the charmed peace of the silent city in the first hour 
 of his arrival there, all odorous and rich in the hues of the flowers' spring-tide 
 luxuriance, the vessel floated down the noiseless highway into a sequestered, 
 desolate street, whose dark walls faced each other with all life, all movement, 
 banished, only with the intense glow of the sun on its many-colored stones, and 
 the wreathing of stone-clinging leafage filling the gaps of its broken sculptures. 
 It was that in which, a few years before, the young patriots of Venice had given 
 him the homage of their song of liberty. It was lonely, decayed, abandoned, 
 with no sound in it but the endless lapping of the water on its sea-stairs; but 
 it was grand despite that, with its mute records of the glory that once had 
 reigned there, its imperishable memories of things forever perished. 
 
 The keel grated on the marble steps, worn and glistening with the splash of 
 the water-spray; he landed, and passed up them to the place where he had once 
 made his dwelling in Venice. The arc of a vast archway spanned the slope of 
 the stairs, shutting out the light of the sun, and leaving only a flckering ray of 
 the daylight's brilliance to lie across the interspaces of dense shadow that were 
 cast downward from the mighty structure and the massive carvings, rich in 
 jasper, and porphyry, and agate, which loomed in the height above. In the 
 depth of the gloom, midway on the stone flight, a resting figure leaned in the 
 passive, motionless repose of fatigue or of exhaustion, a form that would have 
 arrested an artist's glance in long- lingering admiration, that was Venetian in its 
 perfect grace, Titian-like in its perfect color, that was set as a brilliant painting 
 in an ebony framework in that cavernous gloom of the arch, in exquisite har- 
 mony yet in exquisite contrast with the antique and melancholy majesty of the 
 forsaken palace-way. The head was drooped forward: but there was no sleep 
 in the eyes that gazed wearily down on the ebb and flow of the gliding canal; 
 the lids were heavily weighted, but it was not with slumber, but with an unshed 
 mist of tears; the lips were slightly parted, as with pain, but there was on them 
 a proud fixity of resolve; the hands leaned on the twisted osier handle of a 
 basket from which spring flowers fell unheeded in coils and masses of blossom 
 down about her on to the worn stone. The single flash of sunlight that found 
 entrance beneath the marbles fell, intense and concentred in its heat and its 
 glow, alone on the scattered foliage and on the golden gleam of her uncovered 
 hair. The attitude, the flower-fragrance, the Southern languor of repose, were 
 the same as they had been under the beech-shadows of Tuscany; but the 
 dreaming peace of childhood was banished forever. 
 
 He saw her as, coming out of the splendor of the day, he glanced, half 
 blinded, up the twilight of the palace-steps; and her name left his lips with a 
 cry, "Castalia!" She looked up with a look in her eyes that smote him 
 with a pang keen and heavy as a murderer's remorse, and, starting from her 
 musing rest, sprang towards him with all the wealth of the spring buds and
 
 440 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 blossoms scattered into the gliding darkness of the water; then like a shot 
 fawn she fell downward at his feet, the shower of her glistening tresses trail- 
 ing on the sea-wet marbles of the stair. 
 
 If he had never loved her, he loved her then. He lifted her, senseless to 
 his touch, into his arms, where she had rested through the tumult of the storm; 
 he murmured to her a thousand names that had never been on his utterance 
 since the days of his youth, when there was no toy so fair to him as the fair- 
 ness of woman; he swept the burnished weight of her hair back from the 
 face from which he had exiled the smile of its childhood, the light of its peace. 
 For the moment he was once more young; for the moment time and calamity, 
 and the bitterness of disillusion, and the coldness of dead hopes and dead de- 
 sires, were as though they had never been; for the moment passion once again 
 transfigured all his existence, and blinded him with its warm golden glow, so 
 sweet because so transient, so strong in power and so vain in reason. The 
 cost of it is oftentimes deadly and far-reaching; but its lotus-dream of forget- 
 fulness is worth it while it lasts. 
 
 The shock of joy had stunned her; she lay unconscious in his embrace. 
 No living thing was near them in the darkness of the old sea-palace; there was 
 only the sound of the retreating oars beating out a soft, sad, distant music; 
 there was only the one broad beam of vivid light that flushed the tint of the 
 fallen carnation-buds to scarlet, and burned on the loosened splendor of her 
 hair that swept across his breast. He stooped his head over her, gazing on 
 her with a love that had silently grown, born in absence and from pity, and 
 that sprang up like a tropic flower which springs to its height in one short 
 Eastern night, with the sudden sight of her young beauty. 
 
 " Castalia ! my child, my love ! " he murmured, as his head sank, and his 
 lips touched her own, as in the sunset haze of the Tuscan night, when for the 
 first time the charm of her childhood took for him a woman's deeper power. 
 As though his kiss wakened her dull senses and called back the mind from 
 its trance, her heart, where it beat on his own, throbbed faster; the blue-black 
 lustre of her eyes opened wide and startled, as they had opened when he had 
 roused her from her sleep in the storm; for an instant she lay passive in his 
 arms, gazing upward at him with the glory of a joy, bewildered as a dream, 
 dawning, as the day dawns, on her face. 
 
 " O God, be pitiful! Let me never wake." 
 
 The words were murmured, breathless, in her Tuscan tongue; she thought 
 that she was dreaming. Such dreams so often had mocked her. 
 
 He drew her closer to his bosom. 
 
 Castalia, look at me, hear me. I am with you. Have you loved me so 
 well, then ? " 
 
 At the sound of his voice a flush like the scarlet heat of the fallen carnation-
 
 CHAN DOS. 441 
 
 leaves glowed in her cheek; her eyes looked upward to him, but half-conscious 
 still. 
 
 " At last ! at last ! " 
 
 The murmur broke from her, stifled with the rush of tears; she quivered 
 from his embrace, and crouched down at his feet, till her face was veiled from 
 him. The knowledge of love was on her, and it stilled and filled with the 
 dread of his scorn the anguish of joy with which her heart seemed breaking as 
 a nightingale's breaks with the rapture of song. 
 
 He stooped to her, and his hand touched her with a gentleness that thrilled 
 her with its caress like fire. 
 
 " Castalia, have you loved me despite my desertion, through all my 
 cruelty ? " 
 
 Her brow drooped still, till the bright masses of her hair touched his feet. 
 
 " Eccellenza! I have only prayed God to let me see your face, and die." 
 
 The words were so low they barely stirred the air, yet he heard them; and 
 his eyes grew dim: it was long since any had given him love; it had an infinite 
 sweetness for him. He stood silent and motionless a moment, looking down 
 on her where she knelt with the Venetian light shed like an aureole about her. 
 Then the old dominion, the reckless sovereignty, of passion vanquished him; 
 he drew her once more into his arms, he lifted again her bowed head, that sunk 
 downward like a broken flower on the chill dark marble of the water-stairs; the 
 gaze that had never, sleeping or waking, been absent from her memory, met 
 hers with a look that made her senses sick and faint with the paradise of joy 
 that doubted its own being. 
 
 "Castalia, we are both alone; let us be the world to one another." 
 
 She lay passive in his hold; her face was turned upward to him with the 
 radiance of the sun fallen across her proud bright brow; her lips trembled, she 
 heard him with a breathless incredulity, a breathless ecstacy. 
 
 " Oh, my lord, you mock me! " she murmured, while her voice was faint. 
 " Love! your love! for me ! " 
 
 It seemed to her the gift of so divine a world, the treasury of so vast a sov- 
 ereignty, the benediction of so godlike a mercy! She could not think that it 
 could be her own. She could not hold a lifetime of service and of sacrifice title 
 sufficient for it. 
 
 He drew her closer and closer to his breast, and, for all answer, spent his 
 kisses on her lips. 
 
 4< Do you doubt now ? " 
 
 With the touch of his caresses the consciousness alike of the passion she 
 wakened and the passion she cherished stole on her; the barrier betwee'n them, 
 that her veneration for him had raised by the deep humility of its own worship, 
 seemed to fall as his eyes gazed down into hers; for the first time the knowl-
 
 442 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 edge of what love he might bear her, of what love she might render him, came 
 to her with the glow of its warmth, with the wonder of its deep and hushed de- 
 light. The carnation flush of her face burned deeper in its soft shame; a sigh 
 trembled through her, where she rested in his arms as a hunted bird rests in 
 its haven of shelter. 
 
 "For the pity of God if I am dreaming, kill me while I dream !" 
 The words died in their prayer; her gaze met his, heavy with the voluptuous 
 weight of new-born thoughts, lustrous as her own Southern skies by night, the 
 eyes of Sappho, under the first breath of love. His hand wandered among 
 the floating gold of her sun-lightened tresses; his lips sought ever and again the 
 warmth of hers. 
 
 " Let me dream with you, if I can ! Let me dream, too, once more, 
 dream that you give me back my youth ! " 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 "TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE." 
 
 HE gazed down on her, and wondered how he could ever have left her. 
 
 The flight of a few months had brought her loveliness to its perfection ; and 
 the silence of endurance, the passion of suffering, had left on it a heroism and a 
 power that gave tenfold more beauty to the luxuriance of its youth, more inten- 
 sity to the splendor of its hues. Young though she was, hers was already a 
 life to be a poet's mistress, to comprehend and to inspire loftiest ambitions, 
 highest efforts, noblest v thoughts, to gain from the lips of a man the words of 
 Dante, 
 
 Quella che imparadisa la mia mente, 
 Ogni basso pensier dal cor m'avulse. 
 
 As the full consciousness of his presence and of his love wakened in her, as 
 the sense of his words and the truth of her dream dawned on her till her haert 
 seemed breaking with its rapture, she drew herself from his embrace, and sank 
 down beside him, her head bowed upon his hand. 
 
 " Ah, eccellenza ! this is but your pity ? " 
 
 The words were low-breathed as a sigh. 
 
 To her, he was far above her, far as the stars in their divine majesty; to her 
 it seemed that she could have nothing to raise her into fitness with his life. 
 For all answer he lifted her head upward as he stooped over her. 
 
 " Only pity ? Look in my eyes, and see ! "
 
 CHAN DOS. 443 
 
 Once before he had said the last words to one whom they had no power to stir, 
 whose heart was chill as ice against his own. Now the whole fervor of a South- 
 ern nature thrilled in answer to them. Castalia looked up, and met his gaze; 
 then the burning color flushed her cheek and her bosom, a light like a flash of 
 sunlight trembled over her face, her lips parted with a deep broken breath. 
 From his eyes she had learned what her reverence in its humility could, not 
 realize; she never asked, she never doubted, again whether he loved her. 
 
 And the weight and the wonder of its joy seemed to kill her with its glory. 
 
 " What can I give thee back, O liberal 
 And princely giver, who hast brought the gold 
 And purple of thine heart ? " 
 
 her own heart asked. 
 
 " Oh, my lord, my king ! " she murmured, while her lips hesitatingly 
 touched his hand in the kiss of a slave's veneration, " I am not worthy ! A 
 word from you, a smile from you such as you give the dogs, were all 7 prayed 
 for ! What can I render you ? I am nameless and desolate ! " 
 
 Of the gifts of her own loveliness she never thought; she had known 
 them no more than the passion-flower knows its own hues. His arms pressed 
 her closer to his breast. 
 
 " You will give me yourself, and you will give me youth, gifts more pre- 
 cious than the treasures of a world, Castalia ! My love ! all my youth through 
 I sought your likeness, and never found you ! You waited to be the angel of 
 consolation to the darkness of years, that were without a joy in them until you 
 brought one." 
 
 She lifted her eyes, wistful and humid. 
 
 " Oh ! you are not happy ? " 
 
 He smiled, a smile in which the melancholy of his fate was tinged with 
 impassioned tenderness for her. . 
 
 " When I look on you, I am.' 
 
 She gave a swift, low sigh. 
 
 "Oh, my lord ! if I can make you so one hour, I shall have lived enough." 
 
 He understood her. This vivid, intense, devotional love was very precious 
 to him; he had dreamed of it in the ideals of his poetic fancies; and it was 
 doubly sweet now that it came to him after the desert waste of many years, in which 
 no smile had lightened for him, no lips touched his own. Where he rested in 
 the shadow and the solitude of the old palace-entrance, as he gazed on her and 
 swept back the magnificence of her hair, the dead days revived once more for 
 him. Once more he lost himself in the languor and the warmth and the oblivion 
 of passion, as he murmured to her a thousand caressing Italian names, and 
 drew from her the story of her wanderings, touched beyond words by the pa-
 
 444 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 thetic simplicity of that search for him through the vastness of an unknown 
 
 world. 
 
 " I sought you, eccellenza; yes," she murmured, while she looked up at him 
 with an appealing deprecating prayer, " I could not stay when you were gone; 
 my heart was dead, my life was broken. And I heard them speak evil against 
 you, and the Padre Giulio lifted up his voice with them; and I would not wait 
 and eat the bread of those who had once touched your name. For I heard that 
 name at the last, and I knew you then greater than any kings; I knew the book 
 that I loved as your book, the thoughts I had treasured as your thoughts. 
 But, though I sought you, it was not to seek your pity, not to ask your mercy. 
 I never meant that you should know that I was near: if ever I met you, I 
 only meant to watch you from a distance, to hear your voice, to see your face, 
 while you knew nothing. You believe me ? you believe it ? " 
 
 The terror on her was great lest he should think that she had followed him 
 to appeal to his compassion, to force herself on his life. His eyes were dim, his 
 voice quivered, as he answered her, 
 
 " Believe it ? Yes ! each word your lips say. My darling, my darling, what 
 you have suffered ! and suffered through and for me ! " 
 
 She shuddered, and her eyes closed a moment as in the recollection of some 
 unbearable torture; then the radiance of light came on her face, a smile sweet 
 as the daybreak on her lips. 
 
 " Eccellenza," she said, under her breath, " I would suffer a thousand 
 years of that for this one hour." 
 
 The passion of his kisses stayed her lips. 
 
 "Hush! hush! or I shall love you too well; and all that /love I lose. 
 Such courage, such patience, such fidelity; and you ask, what you have that 
 you give me ? " 
 
 " Those are nothing," she said dreamily. " The mercy is to let me ren- 
 der them. It has been so long, O God ! so long ! Here in Venice it was a 
 little happier. The people speak of you; they love you, though they say it be- 
 neath their breath, because of the tyranny. They said you would come here 
 with the spring; and so I waited." 
 
 The words were simple, spoken with the tears of remembered anguish heavy 
 on her lashes; but all her story was told in them. " She had waited," with the 
 ith of a child, the passion of a woman: it was the epitome of the intense vo- 
 lition and the silent power of sacrifice that met in her nature. It was the ideal 
 of which he had once vainly dreamed; it moved him now to an emotion keen 
 to pain. 
 
 Castalia, in my youth I loved many, yet my youth never had such love as 
 yours. What you have suffered while I knew nothing ! And you never loathed 
 me for my cruelty ? "
 
 CHAN DOS. 445 
 
 " Cruelty ? You were never cruel. You saved my life; it was yours to take 
 or to leave, to command or to neglect." 
 
 " But I left you to this loneliness, to this peril ! How have you lived, 
 fragile and friendless, and dowered with the danger of such beauty ? " 
 
 Her face grew pale. The past was terrible to her, a time never to be 
 dwelt on without a horror of remembrance; and she would not wound him 
 by confessing all she had endured. 
 
 " It is over," she said, softly; " let it sleep." 
 
 " It will never sleep in my memory," he murmured, as he drew her closer 
 to his bosom and called her color back with his caress. " And now, now that 
 we have met, what does the thought of my love bring you ? " 
 
 Her eyes dwelt on his, deep and dreamy as the night, with the fire of a 
 tropic nature in their depths; her voice was hushed below her breath. 
 
 " How can I say ? I know now how possible it is to die of joy; I feel as if 
 I should die so to-night! " 
 
 He drew her nearer still into his embrace. The words sent a chill through 
 him; all that his heart had clung to had been taken, soon or late. 
 
 " God forbid! Live to bless me, Castalia; live to be my love, my consoler, 
 my mistress, my wife ! " 
 
 The last words left his lips in unconsidered impulse. She was his so 
 utterly, his to cherish or destroy, to honor, or dishonor, to lead as he chose, to 
 make what he would; the absolute defencelessness of her life, the absolute 
 abandonment of her trust, forbade him to seek from her aught that others 
 would have held her sacrifice. 
 
 Where she rested in his arms, she trembled from head to foot, the liquid 
 darkness of her eyes grew burning with the bewildered vision of a future that 
 passed all which her thought had ever reached; her senses seemed blind and 
 faint; she felt as though angel hands had been laid on her and had raised her 
 upward into the light of eternal suns. 
 
 " No, no! " she murmured, while her gaze dwelt on his with all the humility 
 and all the idolatry that were in her; " I have no title! I was born of shame, 
 they say; I am without name, or kin, or worthiness. I am yours to neglect, to 
 smile upon, to forsake, to command, as you will! Let me be as your slave; 
 let me follow and serve and obey you as spaniels may; let me live in your 
 sight, and have honor enough in one word, in one touch: that is all that /am 
 meet for from you! " 
 
 The words moved him as no words that had claimed her justice or his ten- 
 derness would ever have done, words that had the sublime self-oblivion and 
 self-devotion of Heloi'se. 
 
 " Not so ! You were worth empires if I had them in my gift. Castalia, 
 there is but one passion possible between us now. The world, as its bigotry
 
 446 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 stands, would call that passion your shame, unless my name were bestowed 
 with it, unless the marriage-benediction were on you. I have little left to 
 give; but such as I have shall be yours." 
 
 The scarlet flush deepened over her bosom; her head drooped till her lips 
 touched his hand again in their reverent kiss; her voice was broken and lost in 
 tears. 
 
 " Ah, God ! what can I say to you ? how can my life repay you ? You 
 gave me all gave me the world when you once gave me your love ! " 
 
 Past the darkened arch of the entrance a gondola floated slowly down the 
 solitary and neglected street, a vessel richly arrayed, and piled in the prow 
 with a fragrant load of gathered violets and red carnation-buds. Lying back 
 in it was a form, delicate and patrician, covered with costly laces and velvets: 
 her cheek rested on her hand; her hand glittered with diamonds. She looked 
 up languidly as the boat dropped past the high and massive sculpture of the 
 mighty archway. The gloom was deep as twilight beneath its arc, yet her eyes 
 pierced it and caught the hues of the fallen flowers, the gleam of the golden 
 hair, eyes falcon-bright, pitiless, and unerring, the eyes of Heloise de la 
 Vivarol. 
 
 " She has found him ! " she said, in her teeth. " And he loves her. So it 
 comes round, so it comes round ! " 
 
 So her vengeance came round to her, her vengeance vowed in the years 
 that were gone. Women may forget their love, and change it; but there are 
 few who ever forget the oath or the desire of jealously. 
 
 The flitting by of that single gondola was unseen by them, the noise of its 
 oars drowned in the ripple of the water beneath the wide slope of the stairs. 
 He surrended himself once more to the forgetfulness and the sweetness of 
 passion; and her life seemed to rest in a trance divine as that which comes to 
 the lotus-eaters. The darkness of the vast stone pile enclosed them in its 
 shadow and its solitude; the red gold of the fast-declining sun only stole in a 
 single ray across the lustre of her eyes as they looked up to his. The heavy 
 fragrance of the fallen flowers weighted the air; the delicious monotone of the 
 water's ebb and flow below against the marble alone stirred the stillness. 
 Time passed on; neither counted its flight. The sun set, the odorous night 
 fell ; it seemed to her at once brief as a moment, long as a lifetime, since she 
 had found him whom she had grown to hold her sovereign and her religion.
 
 CHANDOS. 447 
 
 Through the gloom, as the depth of night fell, a voice came from above them. 
 
 " Castalia, art thou not home ? " 
 
 Chandos started: he knew the voice again, the voice of the blind Hebrew. 
 
 " Who is that ? " he said, swiftly. " Who calls you by your name ? " 
 
 " Ah ! I had forgotten him, she murmured, with that soft contrition with 
 which she had once pleaded her forgetfulness of the Tuscan priest. " I was 
 wrong to say I was wholly friendless. He has been very good. He is a Jew, 
 old, and blind, and poor; but he led me here, and he brought me to some 
 women of his nation, who have been gentle to me, because they knew me to be 
 homeless and motherless." 
 
 As she spoke, the old man came slowly down the steps, feeling his way 
 with that wavering uncertain movement of his hands that was in so pathetic a 
 contrast with the dignity of his austere and venerable age. A gleam of the 
 white luminous Venetian moon fell across the majesty of his bowed head and 
 lofty form. 
 
 " Good God ! at last ! " 
 
 The words escaped Chandos involuntarily as he rose to his feet, facing the 
 figure of the Israelite. He had sought the lost life of the old man far and 
 diligently since the night when he had found him wandering in the streets, 
 sought him on vague, baseless, shapeless thoughts and the unerring instinct 
 of the desire for vengeance. 
 
 The Jew paused and listened; his quick ear apprized him of her presence, 
 and of another beside hers. 
 
 " Castalia, thou art so late ! And who is with thee ? " 
 
 "It is I !" 
 
 At the sound of his voice the Jew started, and over the brown worn stern- 
 ness of his face Chandos saw the look that had come there when he had spoken 
 his name in the blind man's ear. 
 
 " It is I," he continued, as he passed up the sea-stairs, and stood beside the 
 Israelite on the breadth of the marble landing-place. " You have been good 
 and pitiful to a life that is very dear to me, I hear. Take my deepest grati- 
 tude for every tenderness you have shown her, every pang you have striven to 
 spare her." 
 
 Over the old man's face swept the look of pain and of shame that had been 
 there in the after-midnight in Paris, a look that hardened instantly into a 
 rugged iron calm. 
 
 " I have served her little," he said, briefly. " The maiden has gained her 
 own bread by the choirs of her Church, and the sale of flowers while flowers 
 bloomed. I owe her more than she owes me. And what is she to you ? " 
 
 " The only thing I love." 
 
 A sigh rose to the Hebrew's lips. Castalia's life had been precious to him;
 
 448 OU1DAS WORK 3. 
 
 he had grown to listen for her voice, and her step, and her presence, as the aged 
 listen for the only thing that reminds them of the world in which they once had 
 place: he knew that she would be lost to him now. But the rigid austerity of 
 his face kept its reticence. 
 
 " Love ! And you left her to wander and starve ? " 
 
 " I had no knowledge of her fate. Had I left her as you think, I should 
 merit now your worst reproach, your worst rebuke." 
 The Israelite bent his head. 
 
 " Pardon me, sir. / should not have doubted your mercy. Yet, for the 
 child's sake, I would hear more. Is she your daughter?" 
 " Mine ! God forbid ! " 
 
 The Hebrew turned his sightless eyes on Castalia. 
 " Wilt thou leave us ? " 
 
 She lifted her eyes to Chandos; her life now had no law but his word, no 
 sun but his smile. He stooped and drooped his lips in one long caress upon 
 her own. 
 
 " Leave us, my love, one moment. I will be with you soon." 
 She passed from them into the darkness of the palace-entrance. The He- 
 brew bent his face so that the moonlight which he felt was on it should not be 
 shed there. 
 
 "Sir, I have not title to arraign you. Yet they tell me she has a marvellous 
 loveliness. Will you make of her but your mistress ? " 
 "No; she shall bear my name." 
 " Verily ? And you were ever so proud ! " 
 
 " I am too much so now, perhaps. Yet I may justly be too proud to mis- 
 lead what trusts me." 
 
 " Ah ! your creeds were never those of your fellow-men. They are not of 
 the world, sir, not of the world ! " 
 
 There was an acrid bitterness in the Israelite's words, because he felt a 
 poignant suffering; he moved to feel his feeble way down the steps, to escape 
 the presence that was one continual rebuke to him. Chandos laid his hand on 
 him and arrested him. Memories were rising from the vague chaos of far-off 
 remembrance; knowledge was coming to him dimly and with difficulty. 
 
 " Wait ! We have other words to speak. Who was your chief, your 
 tyrant ? " 
 
 For a moment the Hebrew's frame shook in every fibre; the next, the com- 
 plete control, the steel-like power of endurance, in him returned, immovable. 
 
 "That secret will be buried with me." 
 
 "Buried? It is not buried; it is clear tome. Answer me. Your bond- 
 master was my foe ? " 
 
 His face grew eager, and quivered with swift-rising passion, in which all
 
 CHANDOS. 449 
 
 softer memories were lost. The Hebrew's features never changed; they were 
 cast in bronze, when he would. 
 
 " It may be so. Perhaps your foes are many." 
 
 " You equivocate ! Answer me, yes or no. It was John Trevenna ? " 
 
 "I equivocate in nothing; I simply keep silence. I shall keep it until 
 death." 
 
 The answer was so unmoved in its iron serenity that not even the man who 
 watched and who heard him could gather one sign by which to know the truth. 
 
 " Keep it ? And he tortured you, chained you, cursed you ! " 
 
 There was a magnificent grandeur in the old man's attitude as he raised his 
 head. 
 
 "What of that? I swore the oath to the God of Israel; I keep it because 
 he spared the life of the youth. The Gentiles take oaths by our God, to break 
 them; ours are redeemed, come what will." 
 
 Chandos stood silent a moment. On his nature, even in the first agony of 
 the desire for vengeance, the appeal could not be lost. He recognized the 
 greatness of the fidelity, even whilst it stood like a barrier of granite between 
 him and the justice of retribution, the knowledge of his past. But, as he gazed 
 on the Hebrew, the light of remembrance broke on him; the crowd of the 
 porphyry chamber came back on his memory; a great cry broke from him. 
 
 " Wait ! / swear that this darkness shall be made light. You were among 
 the claimants on Clarencieux ? " 
 
 The Jew turned his sightless eyes, his rugged face upon him, impassive as 
 death. 
 
 " Say that I was; what does that prove ? There were many claimants, and 
 just ones." 
 
 The fire of deadly instincts gathered in Chandos' eyes. 
 
 " It proves enough to me ! A Jew firm was the largest of my creditors: 
 that firm was yours. Your tyrant ruled it: that tyrant was my traitor. My 
 wealth went to him: he devoured it. The world called me mad: I was so, for 
 I was his dupe ! Answer me: your torturer and my enemy were one ? " 
 
 The Hebrew's features were impenetrable as the night; he was stirred no 
 more than were the marbles around him. 
 
 "You speak widely, sir, and without warrant. It is vain to appeal to me. 
 I neither deny nor affirm; I keep the silence for which I suffered." 
 
 " Suffered ! and for a fiend ? " 
 
 " Suffered, for my oath's sake." 
 
 The granduer of the resistance to him wrung his reverence from Chandos, 
 even whilst the anguish, the fire, the impotence of awakening wrath and awaken- 
 ing knowledge rose in tumult. 
 
 "Keep it ! " he said, while his voice rang with the might of his passions. 
 
 VOL. HI. 15
 
 450 
 
 GUI DA'S WORKS. 
 
 Kept or broken, it shall avail nothing to guard him from my vengeance. I 
 know enough, without more knowledge, to stamp his infamy in the sight of 
 men. Those lost deeds, that hidden usury, that trading in the trust and the 
 necessities of his friends, it will blast his name through Europe ! " 
 
 The Hebrew's harsh calm tones answered him with judicial brevity. 
 
 " What do you know ? Nothing! You suspect; you will speak on suspicion; 
 baseless and unproved, the accusation will recoil harmless from the accused, to 
 brand the accuser as a libellist and a false witness." 
 
 Chandos quivered in every limb as he heard; the rage of justice paralyzed 
 from its stroke, of truth impotent to make manifest its truth, seized him with 
 maddening misery. He was once again in the coils of the net that had wound 
 itself so long about his life to fetter and destroy. 
 
 " Oh, God! " he said, " why will you shield your destroyer and mine ? why 
 will you shelter the iniquity you have said you repent ? Your own soul is 
 noble: what sympathy have you with the villany you have abjured ? Your own 
 sacrifice has been grand: why will you have so much tenderness of sins that are 
 vile as murder ? " 
 
 " I have none; but I am true to him by whom my son was spared." 
 
 " What! are traitors, and tyrants, and criminals to find such loyalty, whilst 
 honest men are betrayed and abjured by the score ? Have you no pity, no 
 remorse, for the wrongs of a life ? " 
 
 " Sir, if I had ever known either pity or remorse, I had not been what I 
 was." 
 
 Chandos' hand clenched on the old man's shoulder. Conviction, strong, 
 unbearable, intense, was on him that this Hebrew held the secret of his enemy's 
 hatred, and that John Trevenna was the curse of both their fates; yet he was 
 as impotent to wring the truth as to force blood from the cold black marbles 
 beneath their feet. 
 
 "Listen! I have pitied you from my heart, honored your endurance from 
 my soul; but I have the wrongs of a lifetime to avenge. I knou>, as though the 
 proof were by me, that my foe is one with your master, that fraud and treachery 
 and baseness had more share in my ruin than my own extravagance. Speak 
 now, or as we believe in one God the law shall make you." 
 
 The Hebrew turned his blind eyes on him with the patience of his race. 
 
 " The law? It did its worst on me: had it power to make me speak ? " 
 
 Chandos almost reeled from him. 
 
 4 Great Heaven ! crime gets such loyalty as this, while I found love and 
 friendship traitors ! " 
 
 The Jew's bronzed face grew paler, his close-set lips shook slightly under 
 the snowy whiteness of his beard; but he remained immovable. Chandos stood 
 above him, his eyes black, his teeth set.
 
 CHAN DOS. 451 
 
 u Man man ! if you ever loved, if you ever hated, give me my vengeance ! " 
 
 " Sir," said the Hebrew, with his grave and caustic speech, " beware ! You 
 lust for an evil thing." 
 
 " No ! I claim a barren justice." 
 
 " Justice is not given on earth. Hear me. You urge me to evil 
 
 " I urge you to the service of truth, to the chastisement of infamy 
 
 " It may be so; yet hear me. You tempt me to evil, because you tempt 
 me to forswear the sole fidelity in gratitude that redeems my baseness. I know 
 your- life; I know your thoughts; I know that you have loved men well, served 
 them unwearingly, taught them high and gracious things. When you heard my 
 story, you called it a martyrdom whose nobility men seldom reached: why call 
 it now a sheltering of evil, because your own wish is to behold that evil un- 
 earthed ? You told me then I had atoned for my past: why tell me now I only 
 stain it further ? This is unworthy you, untrue to your creeds. Were your 
 passions now unloosed, your life now unbiassed, you would be the first to say 
 to me, ' Before all, keep your oath sacred.' " 
 
 Chandos' hand fell, his breath came loud and quick; he stood like one 
 pierced to the heart with an exceeding bitterness. 
 
 " Sir," went on the Hebrew's unbroken, impassive voice, ' : it is true that 
 you have a secret of mine that you can torture me with, if you will; but I have 
 read your nature wrong if you will use against me the weapons that I, uncon- 
 scious, placed in your hold. You have passed through vast calamities since 
 the day that I stood amidst your spoilers; they will have failed to teach you 
 what I believe they have taught you, if you tempt another to dishonor because 
 through that dishonor you believe your own desires would be served, your own 
 revenge gained to you." 
 
 Chandos stood silent still; a mortal struggle shook him. 
 
 " I am no god," he said, hoarsely; " what you ask of me is a god's divine, 
 impartial justice ! I, as a man, claim a man's right, a man's weakness, a man's 
 sin of vengeance." 
 
 "It may be so: yet, if you be true to yourself, it is that very impartiality 
 of justice all hard though it may be that you will render." 
 
 There was a long silence, in which only the lapping of the water sounded. 
 No demand that honor had ever made on him had been so merciless in cruelty 
 as this, no contest that had wrung his life so hard to meet. His voice was very 
 low as it fell at last on the stillness. 
 
 " You are right ! I tempt you no more." 
 
 The Hebrew bowed his head. 
 
 " There a great life spoke." 
 
 Then, slowly, with his sightless, feeble movement, he passed down the water- 
 stairs till the dignity of his dark, bent form was lost in the breadth of the
 
 45 2 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 shadows. Chandos let him go, unarrested. He stood there, blind to all around 
 him, dead to all memory save one. The blackness of night was on his soul, 
 and the violence of baffled passion shook him as a storm-wind the strength of 
 the cedars. There was but one terrrible thirst upon him, the thirst for his 
 vengeance. 
 
 Where he stood, his arm dropped as though the nervous force of it were 
 broken; his eyes gazed without sight down the shaft of the gloomy stairs where 
 the water glistened cold and gliding in the flicker of the moon. The convic- 
 tion of his foe's guilt was scored on his mind as though he had beheld it writ- 
 ten up through the length and breadth of the lands; the meshes of his own 
 impotence for chastisement and retribution bound him helpless as one para- 
 lyzed; the human lust of evil possessed him as his madness possessed Saul. 
 
 A while, and in the soft Venetian darkness of the young night Castalia 
 stole to him, she touched his hand with the suppliant kiss of her tender homage, 
 she raised upward to his face the dreamy lustre of her eyes. 
 
 " My lord, is regret with you because you were too merciful to me ? If it 
 be, say it. My life is only lived for you." 
 
 His arms drew her to him in the vibration 'of the passions that beat in him; 
 his lips, hot and white, burned in their kisses on her own. 
 
 "Regret! when in you I find all the consolation I shall ever know ? 
 Castalia, dark hours come on me: you must not fear them. My heart is sick 
 because of its own failure. Tempted, I am weak as water, I am cruel as mur- 
 derers. I have lived, and striven, and suffered, and sought to serve men, only 
 at the last to reel back into a barbarian's lust, to be athirst with a Cain's 
 desires ! " 
 
 For the evil that his foe had wrought him had not yet reached its end, and 
 it poisoned now the first sweet hours of reviving happiness. 
 
 It might go farther yet, and close his life in crime. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE CODES OF ARTHUR. 
 
 IN the darkness of large, jutting marble blocks in another quarter of 
 Venice, Ignatius Mathias held his almost nightly vigil, the vigil which had 
 but one aim and but one reward, to hear the passing footstep of his son. 
 Agostino had come to Venice in the restlessness of one who has peace nowhere 
 and vainly thinks with each new refuge to escape what haunts him. He lived 
 the life that a hare leads in hunting seasons: the season may pass and leave
 
 CHANDOS. 453 
 
 the animal in safety, unmolested under the shade of fern and thyme, but none 
 the less with every hour must its heart beat, and its sleep be broken, and 
 its nerves tremble at every crack of the brandies, every sough of the wind, 
 lest its hunters be out on its scent. Years would go, and his tyrant need nothing 
 of him; but all the same he was never sure but that some cruel task might any day 
 be required at his hands, and no alternative left him but to do its work, how- 
 ever abhorrent, or to brave the shame of public slander and public exposure 
 from which the feminine terrors of his nature had so long shrunk as more 
 unendurable than death. But of this tyranny that ruled his life his father 
 knew nothing: he heard of the painter's fame, of his talent, of his growing 
 wealth, of his adoration of his art, of his love for his Spanish wife, and he 
 believed Agostino happy with the happiness that he had himself sacrificed all 
 to purchase for " the lad." He was ever but a youth in the old man's thoughts, 
 a beautiful, yielding, caressing, tender-natured boy, won by a smile, crushed by 
 a stern word, as he had been when the eyes whose blindness now kept him ever 
 young in their memory had last looked upon the graciousness of his early 
 years. That Agostino could grow older with the growth of time never came 
 to the remembrance of one who had parted with him in his boyhood; he had 
 eternal youth in the love of the sightless man. There is thus far mercy for the 
 blind, that they know nothing of the stealing change that robs the beauty 
 which is cherished from the eyes that cherish it, slowly and cruelly, until the 
 last change of all. 
 
 Ignatius Mathias stood now, so guiding himself by the marvellous compen- 
 sative instinct which his calamity confers, that he was secured from all passers- 
 by by the jutting out of the stone, and his long, black, floating garments could 
 scarce be told from the marble that shrouded him. If by any chance a stray 
 moonbeam wandered through to the deep shelter of the statueless niche, it 
 would have seemed to any casual passer-by that it was filled by some sculptured 
 figure of prophet or of priest which was in perfect keeping with the solemn and 
 melancholy grandeur round. He was listening eagerly, intently; but his hands 
 were clenched on the marble where he leaned, and his heart ached with the 
 burden of remorse, the dry, tearless, hopeless grief of age. 
 
 It had pierced him to the quick to remain steeled to Chandos' prayer, as it 
 had been bitter to him to show no sign of respect in the porphyry hall at 
 Clarencieux, when all the heartless crowd about him had been moved and awed 
 by the dignity of adversity. The keen Israelite could reverence from his soul 
 the man who in his deadliest passions was still obedient to the demand and the 
 duty of justice; and he felt that he too had sinned towards him. 
 
 " It was a villanous sin to rob him," he mused, " vilest treachery, vilest 
 murder. He heaped coals of fire on my head with everyone of his just words; 
 and yet it would bring him nothing even if he knew all. We were always with-
 
 454 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 in the law. He would wreck all the nobility of his nature in the bloodhound 
 thirst for vengeance; he would do what would belie his life. Pshaw! why do I 
 deal with these sophistries ? If he slew his foe, and slew me, it would be no 
 more, as he said, than barren justice. But give it him I never will. Sin or 
 martyrdom, whichever it be, added crime or atoning fidelity, I will die silent; 
 I will be true to him by whom my son was spared, true to the last." 
 
 His face set in stern, unflinching resolve, the firmness of silence; the dig- 
 nity of faithfulness, which would be true to its bond, even if that bond were 
 forged by crime, lent it nobility; then the caustic and ironic bitterness in which 
 his temper had steeled itself long to all gentler things passed over it. 
 
 " Why should I care for one? " he muttered. " There were thousands. If 
 I ever spoke, I should unloose hell-dogs; if I ever made atonement by turning 
 traitor, what lives I should have to summon out of their graves to hear my mea 
 culpa, if I called all my auditors! " 
 
 The smile was evil on his face, though that evil was more sad than other 
 men's sorrow. His hands had been a millstone, grinding all that went through 
 them to powder, that the grist might feed the yawning sack of money-lust. If 
 all his accusers would rise against him, the tomb must yield up its dead. 
 
 A slight sound caught his ear; he started, and listened as Indians listen. 
 He had kept this vigil long and often, in divers scenes, and divers hours, 
 under the cold shadow of green leaves, under the driving snow of winter nights, 
 under the broad gables of antique houses, under the drenching rains of autumn 
 skies, under the mild stars of vintage eves, moving unweariedly in the chang- 
 ing, restless track of an artist's wanderings, content if reward came in the echo 
 of a laugh, in the distant murmur of a voice, in the passing of a far-off footfall. 
 Unseen, unthanked, unrecompensed, save by such fleeting things as could be 
 borne on summer air or heard through winter blasts, his great and silent love 
 endured. A step passed him; he held his breath as it went; he knew that his 
 son was nigh. Then the faint sound died to silence, and the light died from 
 his face; this was all, all that was left him, one moment to be' scored against 
 a martyrdom; and his lips moved in voiceless prayer and thanksgiving. He 
 breathed his blessing on the life that passed by him in the hush of the night; 
 he was grateful even for so little. It sufficed; his son lived. 
 
 Where the silver lustre of the Venetian moon poured down through lofty 
 casements of a desolate palace-chamber; Chandos, as he looked into the eyes 
 that once more spoke to him in the language of his youth, strove to put 
 from him the remembrance of his traitor, the thirst for his vengeance; and he 
 could not. The darkness of a violent and unsparing hatred had seized him.
 
 CHANDOS. 455 
 
 Hate was foreign to his nature, yet it had sprung in growth fast as poison- 
 plants from poison-seeds in the rank soil of Africa. With his foe in his hands 
 now, he could have stamped his life out with as little mercy as men show who 
 crush a rattlesnake. The fangs of a snake had bitten him; the coils of a snake 
 strangled him; the virus of a snake entered his whole life to change and wither 
 and consume it. The snake was Treachery; and he could have killed the 
 traitor with the fierce meed of such justice as men took when the sword made 
 alike law and judge and avenger. 
 
 He strove to thrust it from him, and it would return, return to darken and 
 embitter the sweetness of a love long denied to him, vivid and voluptuous as 
 any that had usurped him in the years when the fairness of woman had made 
 his paradise. He had left her a child, to pity, to caress, to play with, without 
 deeper thought; he found her in a few brief months, extreme as her youth still 
 was, a woman in her superb beauty, her courage, her genius, her patrician 
 grace, her far-reaching meditative thought, her endurance of suffering, her fear- 
 lessness through danger. With the simplicity of a child, she had left Vallom- 
 brosa on the sting of coarse jests of the peasantry, that she had resented with- 
 out wholly comprehending, of imputed dishonor to her and to him which had 
 roused her like a young lioness, though she had but dimly known their mean- 
 ing, left it, and flung herself on the unknown, untraversed world with the sim- 
 plicity of a child; she was now abandoned to him, to his will, to his wish, to his 
 power, asking him nothing of his life, yielding him an absolute submission, 
 and seeking no more of him or of the world than the one joy of his presence. 
 But it was the fire of the South with which she worshipped him; the intense 
 strength of a supreme passion vibrated through the unquestioning idolatry she 
 rendered him. " Poco spero, mulla chiede" had b^en the soul of the rever- 
 ence she bore him; but with it ran the burning warmth of the suns that had 
 shone on her from her birth, with it was blent the proud impassioned self-ob- 
 livion that would have made her say for her own fate, in the words she had 
 once quoted ere she wholly knew their meaning, " Si 1'empereur cut voulu 
 m'honorer du nom de son epouse, j'aurais mieux aimer etre appele ta maitresse." 
 
 It was the love of which he had dreamed, the love which he had desired, 
 and never found. 
 
 In those long hours of the spring night, while the lulling of the water 
 sounded softly through the open casements, and no light was about them ex- 
 cept the light of the great stars above Venice, he almost resigned himself to 
 their enchantment, he almost cheated himself into the belief that the years of 
 his youth had revived, almost. The desire of vengeance, the baffled justice, 
 the impotence to cast off one stone from the granite cairn that had been heaped 
 to crush his peace beneath it, all these that were upon him forbade him the 
 one lotus-draught he longed for, forgetfulness. The intensity of the hatred
 
 456 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 roused in him, the exhaustion of the conflict through which he had passed 
 when the code of his justice had been arrainged against the instincts of his 
 nature, had left a shadow upon him dark as the past to which they stretched. 
 Of that past he did not speak to her; he could not travel backward over it, 
 even in words; she would know it in the future, but not yet could he relate it. 
 With her he strove to let it die; the kiss of her lips, the touch of her hair, the 
 beating of her heart upon his own, the gaze with which their eyes met in the 
 dreamy luminance of the moonlight, were better eloquence than speech. 
 
 Once alone regret broke from him as he looked down on the sovereign 
 loveliness with which nature had gifted her, as though in recompense for all 
 which it denied her. 
 
 " Ah, Castalia ! once I could have given you the royalties that you would 
 have graced so richly ! Now, my love, my mistress, my darling, my life is but 
 dark, and lonely, and joyless for such years as yours. It is very weary, it is 
 little above poverty; it is spent in banishment." 
 
 Where she rested on his breast, the liquid brilliance of her gaze met his in 
 the flickering shadows. 
 
 " Your thoughts are greater glory than any crowns. And do you not know 
 yet that I could have no exile while your hand touched mine ? that I could feel 
 no poverty while I could still look upward to your face ? Oh, my lord, my 
 king ! do not shame me. I am nameless and unhonored, and without worth in 
 me to have one title to your life. You honored me more than empires could 
 honor, when you once let rest on me the graciousness and pity of your love ! " 
 
 His arms drew her closer to his bosom, and his lips dwelt long on her own; 
 this heart so wholly yielded to him, this faith which asked him nothing of what 
 his past had been, this nature which gave echo to all that was highest in his 
 own, were more precious to him yet than even the luxuriance of beauty that 
 he looked on in the midnight gleam of Venice, beauty that would be his while 
 breath should move and existence throb in it. 
 
 " Oh, my child ! my darling ! " he murmured, as his hand wandered 
 among the lustre of her hair, who could behold you and fail to give you love ? 
 While I look into your eyes, I live in my lost world once more." 
 
 For love itself is youth, and cannot revive without bringing some light of 
 youth back with it. 
 
 With her, his life seemed once more what it had been when, in the languor 
 of the East, and under the glow of the Southern skies, he had loved and been 
 loved in the careless vivid sweetness of a poet's passions, deep-hued and chang- 
 ing as a sapphire in the sun. But when later he left her for the few short hours 
 emaining of the Venetian night, left her lest foul tongues should touch her 
 lefenceless innocence, the spell broke, the black desires that had wakened in 
 him embittered and banished the softer dreams that for the moment had
 
 CHAN DOS. 457 
 
 usurped him. His soul was set upon his vengeance, set in the impotence 
 of David's desperation: "How long, O Lord? how long?" It seemed to 
 him as though no retribution could ever serve to wash out his wrongs, and 
 stamp his traitor what he was in the sight of the people who followed and believed 
 in him; it seemed to him that no justice that could rend the living lie of this 
 man's life asunder, and show its hidden vileness to the world he fooled, would 
 ever cut deep enough, ever stretch wide enough, ever avail enough to avenge 
 the endless treachery with which his foe had taken food and raiment and 
 wealth from him with one hand, to thieve and stab him with the other. " My 
 God ! " he thought, as he went alone through the stillness of the after-midnight, 
 " what could vengeance do sufficient ? None could give me back all the world 
 I have lost, all the years I have consumed, all the joy he wrecked forever, all 
 the youth he slew in me at one blow. Vengeance ! the worst would be as a 
 drop beside an ocean. He has prospered, and enjoyed, and triumphed, all his 
 life long: how would vengeance merely at the end strike the balance between 
 us ? If my hand were at his throat now, how would one death-pang pay me for 
 all the living torture of nigh half a lifetime? " 
 
 No requital that thought could reach seemed vast enough to embrace the 
 wrongs wrought on him from the first hour when the generous faith of his boy- 
 hood had flung him without defence into the net and power of his traitor's 
 subtlety. If the means came to his hand to strike his enemy down from the 
 eminence of station and the fruitage of achieved ambition, it could do at its 
 best so little; if it could destroy the future, it could efface nothing of the past, it 
 could change none of these years that had seemed so endless, through whose 
 course he had dwelt in banishment and bitte'rness and seen his Iscariot caressed 
 2nd crowned. Though his hand should ever dash down the brimming cup of 
 Trevenna's success, the uneven balance between them could never be redressed; 
 the world-wide wrong must ever remain unrequited, uneffaced. What could 
 give him back all it had killed forever in him ? What could bring back to 
 earth the gallant and beloved life of the old man whom it had slain ? What 
 could restore him to all he had forfeited through it ? What could make him 
 ever again as he had been when its ruin had blasted the glory from his years 
 forever ? 
 
 Vengeance! its fatality, its insufficiency, its weakness of act, beside the 
 strength and longing of his own passions, recoiled upon him with the heart- 
 sickness of vain desire: yet the world seemed to hold but one thought, one 
 future, one travail on him, justice against his traitor! 
 
 Where he went in the silence of the late night, past the great Austrian 
 palaces of Venice, that were filled with revelry and music, and the fragrance of 
 flowers, and the masking-of Carnival balls, with the gay riots of the melodies 
 echoing through the conquered city, and the wreathing of gold and silk and
 
 458 QUID AS WORKS, 
 
 many-colored blossoms hanging all alight with lamps over the melancholy and 
 the dignity of the time-honored, sea-worn marbles, the rich, rolling, silver 
 cadence of a Bacchic chant, sung with careless mirth and deep Olympian 
 laughter, rang across the water and above the strains of the Austrain music. It 
 was the voice of Philippe d'Orvale. 
 
 In his carnival dress, with its scarlet-and-gold floating back, and the light 
 of the stars and the crescents of lamps glittering on its jewelled brillance, he 
 came down a flight of stone stairs from some reckless revelry, the song on his 
 lips, the laughter still given back in answer to a challenge from some fair 
 maskers that leaned above, the fragrance of wine only just dashed from the 
 auburn silver-flecked waves of his beard. " Vivre selon son cceur ! " was the 
 epitome of "the mad duke's " life, as of Diderot's; and, as in Diderot's, there 
 was a grand, careless, Titan majesty in this handsome head, tossed back in 
 such fiery defiance, such sunny laughter, against the laws of conventionality 
 and the snow-barriers of prejudice. Life was too rich with him to be stinted 
 by a niggard measure; its joys, its passions, its treasures, its scope, too wide, to 
 be meted out by the foot-rule of custom; and while men of his own years grew 
 gray about him, the prince-Bohemian laughed at Time, and found the roses of 
 his wine-feasts blossom never fading to his hand. 
 
 His Bacchan chaunt paused; a gentle, softened look gleamed from the 
 
 flash of his brown, fearless eyes, as in the shadow of the street he saw Chandos. 
 
 "Ah! c'esttoi!" And in the caress of the French tutoiement, and the 
 
 touch of his hand as it fell on the shoulder of the man he loved best, there was 
 
 the welcome of a friendship close as brotherhood. 
 
 Not a tree had ever been felled'at Clarencieux, not a picture been stirred, 
 not a horse, useless from age, been shot, not a trifle in the whole length of the 
 chambers, not an unfinished sketch in the forsaken atelier, not a disordered 
 manuscript in the solitude of the Greuze Cabinet, been touched, under Philippe 
 d'Orvale's reign. With him the exile was honored; with him the memory of 
 the disinherited was kept green and cherished and sacred in the hearts of the 
 people. "I am but his viceroy: keep your homage for the absent," he had 
 said once when the peasantry had addressed him as their lord. 
 
 "So ! you are in Venice?" he said, softly, where he paused in the deeper 
 shadow, with the festoons of light and the arabesque of flower-wreathed bal- 
 cony far above, reflected in the "black surface of the canal. " I half hoped to 
 meet you here when I came for this riotous Carnival time with which our 
 Austria Felix tries to drown the murmurs of her prey. You have not been 
 long, Ernest?" 
 
 " I came but to-day. Lulli needed me " 
 
 u Lulli ? what ails him ? " This princely Bohemian, whose own strength 
 was so superb and whose existence so joyous, had always had a singular com-
 
 CHAN DOS. 459 
 
 passion and tenderness for the cripple whose art was his only happiness: his 
 home had always been open to him, his aid always ready for him. The strong 
 hand of the aristocrat had often raised the fame of the musician above 
 the envy or the rivalry that had tried to crush it, and not a little of the wealth 
 given to Lulli for his music had gone in secret from D'Orvale, unguessed by 
 the recipient. 
 
 " Nothing ails him," Chandos answered, wearily: his thoughts were far in 
 other things. " But a singer has been arrested here for giving some of his 
 music in public, some song of freedom too free for Austria; and his heart is 
 set on her liberation." 
 
 " Ah !" the duke ground his heel into the pavement; "I will see to that. 
 They shall give her her liberty in twenty-four hours. The fools ! to think that 
 by scourging a woman they can consolidate an empire ! Every weakness 
 persecuted becomes strength against its persecutor when once hunted into 
 martyrdom. And they will not know that !" 
 
 " When they do, human life will have entered on a very different phase 
 from what we live in." . 
 
 Philippe d'Orvale flashed a quick glance on him. This wild, headlong, in- 
 souciant rioter could read men like a book. 
 
 " Tell me," he said, gently (and his voice had the sweetness of a tender 
 woman's), " tell me: you have had some fresh pain, some new wrong ? " 
 
 "Scarcely; but I have had fresh temptation, and I have little strength 
 for it." 
 
 " You always underrate your strength ! " 
 
 " Not I; Sometimes I think that were impossible. We flatter ourselves we 
 have strength, we pride ourselves on our codes, on our philosophies, on our for- 
 bearance; and the momenta spark is dropped on our worst passions, they flare 
 alight and consume all else ! " 
 
 The duke tossed back the glitter of his Carnival dress. 
 
 " May-be ! But the age rants too much against the passions. From them 
 may spring things that are vile; but without them life were stagnant, and heroic 
 action dead. Storms destroy; but storms purify." 
 
 Chandos paused in the shade of the marble wall looming above, and turned 
 his eyes on his companion. To the man who' had been faithful to him under 
 trial as no other had been, to the man who had saved the honor of his heritage 
 from being parcelled out amidst knaves and hucksters, he bore more than 
 friendship, and he spoke with the frankness of brethren. 
 
 " There is truth in that; but we are, at our best, half passion, half intelli- 
 gence, and at a touch the brute will rise in us and strangle all the rest. No 
 man can wholly suppress the animal in him; and there are times when he will 
 long to kill as animals long for it."
 
 460 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 " Ay ! " Philippe d'Orvale's fair frank faced flushed, and his right hand 
 clenched: he had known that longing. 
 
 " Tell me tell me whether to-night I was weak as a fool, or did but barren 
 
 justice. I barely can tell myself. John Trevenna has been the foe of my life; 
 
 you know that " 
 
 Know it! Yes ! a hound who turned on his master! By my faith, when 
 I see that man in honor and eminence, I knew what Georges Cadoudal meant 
 when he said, ' Que de fautes j'ai commis de ne pas etouffer cet homme-la 
 dans mes bras ! ' If there be a regret in my life, it is that 7 did not kill him 
 where he stood laughing and taunting on your hearth, while you went out to 
 your exile! " 
 
 The blood flushed Chandos' face, and his teeth set hard. 
 "You left it for me!" There was a terrible meaning in the brevity of 
 the words. " Well, to-night I could have had my vengeance on him, to-night 
 I could have unearthed his villany to hold it up before the nation that takes 
 him as a chief; to-night I know as though I saw it written before me that he 
 betrayed me, chicaned me, robbed me as usurers rob; and I let justice go! " 
 "Let it go! Are you mad?" The duke's eyes were aflame like a lion's, 
 his breath came hotly, his Southern temper was on fire like so much spirit 
 lighted at the words and the wrongs of his friend. 
 
 "That is what I doubt ! I would sell my own life for justice on him; I 
 fear I could kill him with less thought than men kill adders! and yet I let it 
 go. I could not reach it without forcing another to break his oath, to for- 
 swear his conscience, to sin against the only redemption of his life: what 
 could I do ? " 
 
 " Do ? I would have crushed ten thousand to have struck at him! Tell 
 me more." 
 
 " I cannot. It is another's secret, not my own; were it mine, you should 
 know it. All the laws of justice and humanity bound me powerless; I could 
 not break through them. I had honored this man's fidelity when I was in 
 ignorance whom it was rendered to: I could not dishonor it because I learned 
 that it was shown to my enemy." 
 
 Philippe d'Orvale stood silent, his teeth crushing his silken beard. 
 " Few men would have stayed for that," he said, curtly, at the last. 
 " May-be ! It was hard for me to stay for it. It is hard as death now ! It 
 were surely small crime to tempt anyone to betray a trajtor; it were but to 
 turn against him his own poisoned weapons. One oath broken more or less, 
 what would it be in self-defence against one who has broken thousands, broken 
 every tie and bond of gratitude, of honesty ? And yet right is right. I 
 could not bid another turn betrayer because I had been betrayed. Look ! to 
 have my justice of vengeance, I must have done injustice to one placed, in
 
 CHAN DOS. 461 
 
 his own unconsciousness and by his own trust, in my power. Which could I 
 choose ? to forego it, or to wrong him ? " 
 
 Philippe d'Orvale lifted his lion's head with a toss of his lion's mane; his 
 eyes rested on Chandos with a loyal, flashing, noble light. 
 
 "Forego it! Your vengeance were ill purchased by any falsehood to 
 yourself." 
 
 It wrung his heart to say so, wellnigh as hard as it had cost Chandos to 
 yield the sacrifice the Israelite had asked for him; for he could hate with a 
 great hatred, fierce and stern as his friendship was fervent, and that hate fell 
 on none heavier than on John Trevenna. But the creeds of the superb gentle- 
 man could not forswear themselves. 
 
 Chandos stretched out his hand in silence; D'Orvale's met it in a close 
 firm grasp. They said no more; they understood each other without words: 
 only, as they parted farther on in the lateness of the night, the prince-Bohe- 
 mian's regard dwelt on him with something that was wistful for once almost to 
 sadness, a thing that had no place in the brilliant and heedless career of the 
 " mad duke." 
 
 " Chandos, you were made for Arthur's days, not for ours. Those grand 
 creeds avail nothing except to ruin yourself. Yet you would rather have 
 them ? Well, so would I, though I am but a wine-cup roysterer." 
 
 As he spoke, the lights burning above among a sea of flowers and colors, 
 in crescents and stars and bands of fire, shone on the leonine royalty of his 
 head and the majesty of his height, all lustrous with the scarlet and the gold 
 and the diamonds of his Carnival attire. There was an unusual softness in 
 his brown, bold eyes, an unusual touch of melancholy in his voice: that one 
 memory of him was never to pass away from Chandos, 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 ET TU, BRUTE ! 
 
 THROUGH the brilliance of the earliest sun-dawn a gondola shot swiftly 
 through the silent highways, with the light on the water breaking from under 
 its prow in a shower of rippling gold, and the brown shadows lazily sleeping 
 under the arches of bridges, and under the towering walls, as though they were 
 loath to wake and flee before the rising of day. It was just morning; no more, 
 but morning in all its radiance, with the scarlet heads of carnations unclosing, 
 and the many-colored hues warm over land and sea, with the darkness only
 
 4)j ., QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 left in the hushed aisles of churches, and the breath of the sea-wind blowing 
 balmily from thfc Adriatic. Guide Lulli, where he leaned in the vessel, saw it 
 all with an artist's eye, felt it all with an artist's heart, and wove magical dreams 
 of sound from the melody of the oars. Life had been but captious with him, 
 giving him the head of a seraph and the limbs of a stricken child, the heart of 
 a man and the frame of a paralytic, breaking his youth into weakness and tor- 
 ture and starvation and strengthlessness, calling his manhood into the fame of 
 the world and crowning him with the great masters; it had been cruel and lavish 
 at once, taking from him all happiness, all knowledge of happiness, all con- 
 sciousness of what health could mean or freedom from pain be like, all sense 
 of "the wild joys of living " and of the liberties and heritage of manhood, 
 taking them from him, from the hour of his birth, and making every desire of 
 his heart an unending pang; yet giving him in one Art, giving him with the 
 eye, and the ear, and the temperament of genius, a sovereignty wide as the 
 world, and a treasury of beauty that could only be closed when the touch of 
 death should make his sight dark and his hands motionless. Others, beholding 
 him, saw but a pale, shattered, silent cripple, with great wistful eyes, ever seem- 
 ing to seek what they never found, a man whom a child could cheat, whom a 
 buffoon could mock, whom a stare could make nervously and unbearably 
 wretched; but others had come to know that this man had a kingdom of his 
 own in which he was supreme, had a power of his own in which he was godlike, 
 and lived as far above the fever and the fret of their own lives as the stars move 
 above them in their courses. He heard what they never heard, he saw what 
 they never saw; and to Lulli's sublime transcendentalism the whole universe 
 was but as one chaunt of God. 
 
 As his gondola glided now, he was looking dreamily upward: he was in 
 Venice because the young Venetian had been arrested for singing a song of 
 liberty from one of his operas, might be imprisoned, might be scourged perhaps, 
 and he came to save her from chastisement, or to insist that he had a right 
 to share it. He knew nothing of her except the fact that she had suffered 
 through singing his music in defiance of the usurpers; but he had a lion-bold- 
 ness where wrong menaced weakness, and a pure chivalrous instinct conquered, 
 whenever it was needed, the shrinking sensibilities and the physical feebleness 
 of this man, whom other men had called for three parts of his life a fool. The 
 buzz and the fret and the money-seeking crowds of the world passed by him 
 unnoticed, unheard; he took no more heed of the stir about him than if he had 
 been a palm-tree set in their midst, and they thought him a fool accordingly; 
 but let one spark from the flame of wrong, one blow from the gauntlet of 
 tyranny, fall on anything near him, and the enthusiast, the dreamer, the iso- 
 lated visionary, became on the instant filled with fire and with action. And for 
 this yet more they called him fool: the man who does not care for his own
 
 CHAN DOS. 463 
 
 purse and his own palate, but only rouses for some alien injury, what is he but 
 the Quixote of all ages ? 
 
 As he went now, to welcome to Venice the one friend of his life, he looked 
 up at that towering marble and the blue of the cloudless skies above. Above a 
 lofty archway, out of an oval casement, with her arms resting on the jasper ledge, 
 and the umber darkness behind her, so that as the sun fell full upon her face 
 and her hair she was like one of those master-pictures where the golden head of a 
 woman gazes out from a black unbroken surface of deepest shade, leaned Cas- 
 talia. Her eyes were glancing above, following a flight of white pigeons whose 
 wings flashed silver in the light; and on her face was the look, more spiritual- 
 ized than any smile, more intense than any radiance, more hushed and yet 
 more passionate than any words can paint, of that happiness which is "the 
 sweetest vintage of the vine of life." 
 
 Lulli glanced up and saw her there, leaning down over the dark mosaics; 
 he strove to rise, ere the boat had swept past. 
 
 "Valeria!" 
 
 As the name left his lips, reason and memory and the space of years were 
 all as naught; he was back in the days of his youth and his poverty; he believed 
 that his lost one lived unchanged, imaged; with the warmth of Southern suns 
 upon it, and made richer and fairer yet by that higher and softer light it wore, 
 the face of his lost darling looked on him once more from the jasper setting of 
 the Venetian casement. A gondola, that had followed him from his dwelling, 
 glided up swiftly in his wake and came side by side with his own; from the 
 awning a woman's hand was stretched and touched his arm. 
 
 " Signer Lulli, one word with you." 
 
 He uncovered his head, with the instinct of courtesy, and turned to her; 
 but his thoughts were whirling: what he had seen seemed to him like a resur- 
 rection from the dead. 
 
 "With me? Whom have I the honor ? " 
 
 " A friend to you, and to one you lost. Let us wait a moment, there in the 
 shadow." 
 
 The speaker who had arrested him leaned from beneath her awning, her 
 hand lying on the side of his gondola: he could not see her features, but her 
 voice was very melodious and low. 
 
 " There was once a life that was very dear to you in the old days at Aries ? " 
 
 He trembled violently; his frame was very feeble, and his heart had dwelt 
 so long on this one stolen treasure, had so long abandoned all hope that its 
 spoiler or its refuge could ever be known, that the thought of touching at last 
 the secret buried so long, overcame him, as when they come, at last, upon the 
 gold vein, the toil-worn and heart-sickened gold-searchers are beaten with 
 their joy.
 
 464 QUID AS WORKS. , 
 
 " Dear to me ? Yes, God knows ! You bring tidings of Valeria ? " 
 She whose form was lost in the shapeless folds 'of a Carmelite's habit, and 
 whose face was obscured by the hood of the order, stooped from under the 
 black shade of the gondola. 
 
 " Land; and I will tell you all I have to tell." 
 
 He obeyed her, his weakened limbs bearing him slowly and with labor up 
 the water-stairs. Fronting them was the porch of a church, a great, gray, 
 dim, noble place, with marvellous carvings of time-browned stone, and feathery 
 grasses floating from its colossal height, and Titian statues that looked blind 
 and weary down from their niches on the water below, as though evil days had 
 fallen on them and on their Venice. 
 
 The entrance was wide and of vast depth, a lofty cavern, roofed and walled with 
 carvings on which countless hearts and hands had spent their lifetime's labor; 
 and from it, in the body of the building, were seen by changing glimpses, 
 as the air moved the vast moth-eaten fall of Genoese velvet to and fro, glimpses 
 of twilight gloom with the ethereal tracery of the ivory pyx gleaming white 
 from the shadow, and the marble limbs of a crucified Christ nailed against a 
 dark pillar of Sienna marble. She motioned him to rest on the stone bench 
 within the porch, and stood herself beside him. He never asked her who she 
 was; he never thought of her save as one who knew Valeria; her religious habit 
 made her sacred in his eyes, and his soul held but one thought, the fate of 
 the one lost to him. His eyes sought the Carmelite's with longing anxiety. 
 " Speak now ! speak in one word, if you can. Where is Valeria ? " 
 " Dead." 
 
 The word was spoken very gently, but it dealt him a keen blow; though he 
 had long said that she was dead to him, said it in the bitterness of his soul 
 when he had first heard of her flight to dishonor, he had unconsciously cher- 
 ished hope that some day, ere it should be too late, he would find her. 
 
 "Dead?" he murmured: "and without one word for me ! But that face 
 yonder ? it was hers ! " 
 
 His heart was full, and he spoke on its impulse; he never remembered that 
 he addressed a stranger, he only knew that he spoke to one who might give him 
 some link with his long- broken past; his mind was giddy; his love for Valeria, 
 his loathing of her shame,- were wakened in all their first intensity; his life had 
 been entirely uneventful, and the few things that had marked it held him for- 
 ever, as they could never have held a life of action. 
 
 ' She brings you some memory ? " pursued his questioner. The voice was 
 ubdued, and yet had a certain imperious command in it that would not be re- 
 isted and was unaccustomed to delay as to disobedience. The eyes of the 
 cripple turned with pathetic entreaty upon her. 
 
 " You must know that she does, or why speak to me of her ? Whoever you
 
 CHANDOS. 465 
 
 are, whoever she be, tell me, for the love of mercy. You know the fate of 
 Valeria? " 
 
 " She whom you now saw is Valeria's daughter." 
 
 The Provencal's face flushed scarlet, his eyes lighted with an infinite ten- 
 derness, that flashed and darkened into the fiery wrath that had used to arise 
 in them against the unknown lover of the last of his name. 
 
 His teeth set; his hands clenched. 
 
 " Her daughter ? My God! And he 
 
 " He led Valeria where dishonor was forgotten in recklessness, and shame 
 was lost in diamonds and wine and evil laughter." 
 
 The fury of his Southern blood dyed his face and lightened his eyes; the 
 stab of the disgrace to his name, long ennobled by art and long pure from the 
 faintest taint, smote him as keenly as in the first moment when he had learned 
 Valeria's fate; the old vengeance that he had vowed against her lover rose in 
 him, black as night; his breath came short and stifled; the hand that drew 
 such aerial and tender melodies from the keys clenched as though ready to do 
 avenging work, 
 
 " His name ?" he said. It was but a whisper; yet a vibration ran through it 
 that told without words the strength which this frail and suffering-worn cripple 
 would find against the spoiler and polluter of the only life round which his 
 memory, his imagination, and his heart had ever woven the fair, if the vain 
 dreams of love. 
 
 She was silent. 
 
 " His name ? " he said, with an imperious force that rang through the 
 silence. His eyes dilated and flashed fiery gleams from their black soft sweet- 
 ness; his whole frame was instinct with the vivid energy of the manhood that 
 leaped into sudden power under the touch of wrong, at the power which 
 came into his hands after the lapse of so many hopeless and silent years. 
 
 "Can you bear its telling? " she said gravely. 
 
 " I will not bear its denial. His name ? and may my worst vengeance 
 light " 
 
 "Hush!" She lifted her hand to silence him ere the imprecation was 
 breathed. " You know not whom you curse." 
 
 "Nor care! If he live, my hate shall find him. Feeble and womanish and 
 worthless as my limbs are, they shall have strength in them to track him where- 
 ever he hides, and teach him that one still lives who can remember and avenge 
 her. His name?" 
 
 "Wait! Be calmer ere you hear it." 
 
 " Calmer! when her child lives there ?" 
 
 "Yes. Her child knows nothing of her parentage; nor what that parentage 
 is can I well tell. Valeria's life grew very evil."
 
 466 
 
 OUIDAS WORKS. 
 
 The dark blood grew purple over Lulli's delicate features, his lips turned 
 white as death; he suffered excruciatingly; no noble was more tenacious of the 
 nonor of his name than he. 
 
 "Speak!" he said, hoarsely. "Who was her tempter? Who lured her 
 first to her sin ? " 
 
 "Wait! Hear her history first. She was a beautiful, heartless, wayward, 
 unscrupulous woman, to whom honor was nothing, to whom levity and shame 
 were sweet." 
 
 " He made her that, if ever she became it. The greater, then, his crime. 
 His name ? " 
 
 " Patience: do not hasten your own bitterness." 
 
 " I hasten to end it. It can only be quenched in vengeance." His hand 
 knit nervously, the long, fair, womanlike fingers trembling as though in long- 
 ing to hold the weapon of his chastisement. 
 
 "She lived for a while in sinful magnificence; but she died in the utmost 
 poverty, in a Tuscan village. It is a common fate." 
 
 He shook in his whole frame as he heard. 
 
 " And then you bid me withhold my curse ? She died in want, after a short, 
 shameful life of glided vice ? No curse is wide enough to reach him, if he 
 drove her to that infamy." 
 
 "It was scarce his fault: she loved the fatal power of her beauty but too 
 well. She died at Fontane Amorose: if you need a witness, it is here." She 
 stretched out to him a small, silver, heart-shaped relic-box, worn and almost 
 valueless, on which were rudely graven the words, " Valeria Lulli." A moan 
 broke from him as he saw it; his face grew white, his eyes filled with tears. 
 
 " Oh, God ! I gave her this myself; she was a child then, a child so beau- 
 tiful, so innocent!" His voice sank, his head drooped; the sight, the touch, 
 of the little relic struck him to the heart; the hour of its gift came back on him 
 as though lived but yesterday, the hour when, with many a denial of self, he 
 had treasured up coins till he had bought the thing that had been the wish of 
 her heart, and slung it, as his recompense, round the fair throat of the laughing 
 child who paid him with her kisses. 
 
 " She left it, on her death-bed, with a contadina for me. I had known her 
 in days evil to us both. There were a few feeble lines to me with it, unfinished. 
 The peasant kept it, telling no one of it, and thinking it of value for its holiness, 
 till a few months ago, when the child Castalia was lost from Fontane, the 
 woman's conscience woke, and she sent it to me. I have left the world; I am 
 in a religious order now: thus it was long in finding me. Once received, and 
 hearing also for the only time of this young girl's life, my first wish was to seek 
 out you, and leave you to become, if you should choose, the avenger of the 
 dead, the protector of the living."
 
 CHAN DOS. 40 T 
 
 The words had a pathetic and solemn earnestness. Lulli bowed his head, 
 and pressed his lips on the silver heart. 
 
 " I swear to be both," he said, simply. " And now, once more, his name ? " 
 
 " Her lover was Chandos ! " 
 
 A cry, such as that which men give on the battle-field, broke from him, a 
 cry of torture. 
 
 " It is false ! false as hell ! " he swore, in the agony of his passion. " No 
 lie ever touched his lips; no treachery ever belonged to him." 
 
 " No," said the Carmelite, gently: "you are right. But Valeria Lulli was 
 only known to him as Flora de 1'Orme." 
 
 The Provencal's attenuated form seemed suddenly to shrink and wither 
 and lose all life as he heard; the name came back on his memory after long 
 oblivion of it; he had used to hear it in those days that were gone, the name of 
 the magnificent, reckless, extravagant lionne who had wasted her lover's gold 
 right and left, and given but a mocking laugh at his ruin. 
 
 " He met her in Aries," pursued the voice of his companion, with a gentle 
 pity in its intonation. " She left Aries with him. She was known to him only 
 by her nom de fantaisie. What her life became you are aware." 
 
 He scarcely heard her; his hands had clenched on the stone-work; he quiv- 
 ered from head to foot; the flame in his eyes had died in an anguish beside 
 which the mere fury for vengeance was dwarfted and stilled as he gazed down 
 on the silver relic. 
 
 " O Christ! have pity. I swore my oath against him!" 
 
 The words were inarticulate in his throat; every fibre in him thrilled with 
 the fire of his rage against Valeria's tempter, and every debt his life had owned 
 bound him in fealty to the man whom in his blind haste he had, unknowing, 
 cursed.- He would have died willingly to spare one pang to Chandos, and he 
 had vowed to the dead, and to the living to know no rest till the work of retri- 
 bution should be accomplished. He loved with such loyalty, such faith, such 
 honor, such self-oblivion, as those with which patriots love their country, the 
 one in whom he had found the succor of his existence, the giver of every 
 earthly gift that had redeemed him from the bondage of poverty and pain; 
 and in him he must now forever see the foe on whom he had sworn to wreak 
 the wrongs and the shame of Valeria. 
 
 The man to whom he had held his very life a debt to be yielded up if need 
 arose, from whose lips alone he turned for the sole praise he heeded, whose 
 liberal and royal charity had lifted him from a beggar's death-bed into the 
 light of the world's renown, and to whom his heart had clung more tenderly 
 and truly in the darkness of adversity than even in the splendor of fair fortune, 
 was the injurer against whom through the long course of so many years he had 
 cherished his silent and baffled hate !
 
 468 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 The dead love and the living love, the bonds that bound him to her mem- 
 ory and the bonds that bound him to his gratitude, wrenched him asunder, 
 divided, agonized. All the withering weight of his curse had been breathed 
 upon her destroyer; all the fealty and adoration of his nature had been lavished 
 upon Chandos. Choosing betwixt them, he must sin, whichever he cleaved to, 
 be faithless, whichever he elected. 
 
 He let his head fall on the cold stone arm of the bench; he knew nothing, 
 felt nothing, was conscious of nothing; he only seemed numbed and killed 
 with this one thought, the feud that rose to stand forever between him and 
 the man he loved with the love of the son of Saul for David. 
 
 "Oh, God !" he moaned; "and I ate of his bread, I was saved by his 
 mercy ! ' 
 
 The Carmelite looked at him, then gently glided away, leaving the silver 
 relic in his hand. He never heard her or remembered her: he sat in the gray 
 shadows of the church entrance as though he were turned to stone, silent and 
 senseless as the robed statues of the Hebrew kings that had kept their motion- 
 less vigil above, while the centuries passed uncounted, and the glory of 
 Venetia fell. 
 
 He could not have told how long or how brief a time had swept by: he had 
 sense and memory for nothing save the one knowledge that had come to him. 
 The street and the church were alike deserted : nothing aroused him. He sat 
 there as in a stupor, his clasped hands clenched above his head. The lapping 
 of the water, the warmth of the sun, the flight of time, were all lost to him; the 
 great pall of the velvet wavered with the wind, the gleam of the white Passion 
 was seen from out the gloom within; all was still, and he had no consciousness 
 except his misery. 
 
 A hand touched his shoulder; the only voice he loved fell on his ear. 
 
 " Lulli ! you here ? What ails you ? " 
 
 Passing the entrance of the vast deserted church, as he went to seek Cas- 
 talia with the morning light, Chandos had seen the bent, broken attitude of 
 grief that shrank even from the light of the sun. The Provencal started and 
 shuddered under the touch as at the touch of flame; he staggered to his feet, 
 his eyes looking at his solitary friend with the wild piteousness of a dog that 
 has been struck a death-blow by its master's hand. His lips parted, but no 
 sound came from them; he gasped for breath, and could find no words; there, 
 face to face with the savior of his life, with the spoiler of the honor dearer than 
 his own, the force of the old love borne so long, the force of the old vengeance 
 so long sworn, rose in twin strength, wrestling with and strangling each other. 
 
 Chandos gazed, amazed and touched with a vague dread: he laid his hand
 
 CHANDOS. 469 
 
 on Lulli, and drew him gently within the hushed aisles of the church, where 
 the still, brown, sleeping shadow slept so darkly, only broken by the pale gleam 
 of some white carving or the glow of some blazoned hue. 
 
 " Lulli, what has happened ? You are suffering greatly. Tell me." 
 
 " Tell you, oh, Christ ! How can I tell you ? " 
 
 " Why not ? Did I ever fail you ? " 
 
 The words had the gentle compassion that he had first heard when he had 
 lain dying among the bleak and rugged hills of Spain; the voice had ever been 
 sweet to him as the echoes of music, welcomed as the weary drought-parched 
 forests welcome the stealing breath of the west wind: it pierced him to the 
 heart, it killed him with its very gentleness. He threw his arms upward, and 
 his cry rang shrill and agonized as a woman's: 
 
 " Great God, have pity ! Let my curse light on my own head ? I knew 
 not what I did ! " 
 
 Chandos laid his hands upon his shoulders and held him there, in the twi- 
 light of the lofty narrow aisle, with the Crucifixion looming cold and white out 
 of the mist of shade. His eyes looked down in Lulli's, where he stood above 
 him, and stilled him as a dog is stilled by its master's gaze. 
 
 " You rave ! What grief has befallen you ? Tell me." 
 
 A convulsion shook the Provencal's frail, yielding form: he loved so utterly 
 the life he had voted to vengeance, the life on which in his sight rested the crime 
 of Valeria's fail, of Valeria's shame, of Valeria's death. 
 
 " Grief ! grief ! " he muttered, in his throat; "it is shame, black, burning, 
 endless shame ! I have broken your bread, while you wrought her dishonor; 
 I have cursed you, when my whole life is but a bond to you for debts beyond 
 life, above life ! Which is the worst sin, the worst dishonor ? / know not ? " 
 
 " Sin ! dishonor ! And whose ? " 
 
 " Hers, and mine, and yours." 
 
 The syllables left his lips stifled and slowly; the last two barely stirred the 
 silence. He had honored the man to whom he spoke them as though he were 
 a deity; he had obeyed him as though he were a king. The blood flushed 
 Chandos' face where he stood in the shadows of the arches. 
 
 " Mine ! No other living should say that to me. Mine ! And for what ? " 
 
 Lulli lifted his head: his wasted, misshapen frame gathered suddenly vital- 
 ity and vigor; there was the dignity of wrong and of manhood in the carriage 
 of his head. 
 
 " For this: you were the lover of Valeria." 
 
 "Of Valeria?" 
 
 He repeated the name mechanically: it had been unspoken between them 
 for so long; it had scarce a meaning on his ear. 
 
 " You brought her to the pomp of vice; she died in the misery of vice. I,
 
 470 O UIDAS WORKS. 
 
 your debtor, lived on the alms of the destroyer of the last of my name. Va- 
 leria was your mistress, Flora de 1'Orme." 
 
 The words ran cold and clear; in the moment of their speech he had for- 
 gotten all save the disgrace that had made him the guest, the debtor, the alms- 
 taker, of the one by whom she had been tempted into the ruin that had de- 
 voured her in her youth. Chandos stood silent, his eyes fixed on Lulli's face; 
 back on his thoughts rushed a flood of forgotten memories, memories of the 
 splendid, vile, pampered beauty who had stooped her rich lips to his wine and 
 wound the scarlet roses in his hair in many a careless, riotous hour, memories 
 of the night when, in the studio at Clarencieux, he had paused before the pic- 
 ture of Aries and been haunted for a moment with the doubt of that which he 
 now heard. 
 
 " Valeria ! " he echoed, slowly, an intense pity and contrition in the tone of 
 his voice; " Valeria ! Is it possible ? " 
 
 " It is true." The musician's words had a fierce, dogged misery in them, 
 and his hand clenched on the silver heart. " A Carmelite has given me her 
 story. She died long ago; but her wrongs do not sleep with her." 
 
 Chandos looked at him a moment, arid a great pain passed over his face. 
 Had this man also forsaken him ? He could have said that this woman had 
 been shameless ere ever he saw her, that her heart was false as her form was 
 perfect, that gold and luxury bought her love as it would, that she had been 
 vain, merciless, evil, corrupt to the core; but he held his peace, since to speak 
 in his own defence would have been to pierce and would the cripple who still 
 believed in her. 
 
 " If this be true," he said, simply, "you will not doubt my faith to you, at 
 least ? You will know that I was as ignorant as you ? She came from Aries 
 it might have told me; but I never thoaght that she had other name than that 
 by which she called herself. You know you must know that the vilest thing 
 on earth should have been sacred to me had I been told you heeded it." 
 
 " I believe ! Nothing but truth was ever on your lips. Yet none the less 
 were you her lover, her tempter, her destroyer; none the less does the curse of 
 her shameless life, of her bondage to evil, lie with you, you alone." 
 
 He spoke hoarsely; his hand was clenched on the relic, his head was lifted, 
 his eyes flashed, and over the spiritual fairness of his face the darkness of 
 avenging hatred gathered. 
 
 Chandos looked at him, and a slight, quick sigh escaped him. 
 
 " You too !" he said involuntarily. " Well, the wrong I did you was in 
 ignorance: if it must part us, let us part in peace." 
 
 To the man who had loved him, as to the enemy who had betrayed him, 
 he alike never quoted the claim of the past, never argued the one reproach, " I 
 served you." But in the words there was a weariness beyond all speech, there
 
 CHAN DOS. 471 
 
 was the et tu, Brute, which once had pierced even the adamant of his traitor's 
 hate; and it 'cut to the heart of the hearer deep as a scourge cuts into the bared 
 flesh; its very gentleness rebuked him with the keenest reproach that could 
 have pierced him. His life-long debt, his subject reverence, his deathless 
 gratitude, his loyal love for the man by whose mercy he was still amidst the 
 living, and by whose aid the creations of his genius had been given their place 
 and their name among men, rushed back on his memory in a tide that swept 
 aside the passions of the hour and broke asunder the chains of his oath. He 
 seemed to himself vile as any ingrate that ever stabbed the heart of his bene- 
 factor. The moment of supreme temptation had come to him, the test that 
 should prove whether he was as others were, loyal only whilst the gift of 
 generous service bound him, faithless and without memory the instant that 
 ordeal came. The hour was here for which he had often longed, the hour that 
 could try the truth of his allegiance, and in it he had been wanting. 
 
 All the tenderness of his nature, all the remorse of his heart, went out in 
 wretchedness to the man whom he had arraigned and upbraided and wounded 
 as though no debt of life, no years of charity and pity and succor, had stood 
 between them, he had no thought left except the sin of his own unworthiness. 
 He bowed down at Chandos' feet, his face sunk on his hands, his supplica- 
 tion passionate with all the swift and mobile emotion of his nation and his 
 temperament. 
 
 " Monseigneur, forgive me! I knew not what I said. I swore an oath 
 before Heaven to avenge her, but I break it now and forever, if it must 
 light on you. Let my curse recoil on my head; let the weight of my for- 
 sworn words be on my life; let me forsake the dead and abjure my bond. 
 Better any crime than one thought of bitterness to you ! Forgive me, for the 
 pity of God, what the vileness of my passion spoke. If you killed me now 
 with your own hand, you would have right. I should be bound to let my last 
 breath bless you! " 
 
 Wild, incoherent, senseless, the words might be, yet they were made rich 
 and sweet as music by the love that spoke in them; they gave full recompense 
 to Chandos for many weary years of patient faith in human life and patient 
 forbearance with its traitors and time-servers. Against all trial, and through 
 all suffering, the heart of this cripple was true to him; in his creeds, the one 
 fidelity sufficed to outweigh a thousand Iscariot kisses. 
 
 He stooped and raised him gently. 
 
 " Forgiveness ! It is I who must ask it. Whatever debt you think you 
 owed me in the past, you have paid and overpaid now." 
 
 Lulli stood before him, his head still sunk, his face very white in the gray 
 hues of the darkened aisles. 
 
 " No: there are debts which we can never pay, which we never'wish to pay,"
 
 472 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 he murmured, faintly. Though his fidelity had stood its trial, the trial was not 
 less terrible to him: in the man he loved and honored he still saw the destroyer 
 of Valeria, the unknown foe on whom his hate so long had fastened. 
 
 " But her daughter ? " he said, suddenly, as the remembrance flashed on 
 him, " that beautiful child, here in Venice " 
 
 " Here ? Where ? " His voice, hoarse and rapid, cut asunder the Proven- 
 cal's words; his face grew livid, a hideous dread possessed him. 
 
 " The daughter she left in Tuscany, the young girl, Castalia." 
 
 " Hold ! O Heaven ! " 
 
 Chandos staggered forward, as he had done when the bolt of his ruin had 
 struck him: the sweat of an unutterable terror on his brow; the agony of an 
 unutterable guilt devoured him. 
 
 " Her daughter hers! " 
 
 The words were stifled in his teeth; he could not breathe his thought 
 aloud; the fibre of a love whose very wish was nameless sin consumed him: 
 the blankness of an utter desolation fell on him, passing all that his life had 
 known of misery. 
 
 The Provencal watched him, paralyzed, silenced with a great bewildered 
 fear; he swayed heavily back; guilt seemed to thrill like poison in his blood; 
 his face was dark with the flushing of the black, stagnant veins; he reeled 
 blindly against the sculpture of the marble Christ. 
 
 " Love between us! Great God ! what horror ! " 
 
 With the mellow flood of artificial light that still shone there, instead of the 
 glory of the risen day, shed about her, Heloi'se de la Vivarol stood before her 
 mirror in the dressing-chamber of the Venetian palace that was honored by her 
 for a brief space: her haughty, delicate, regal head was lifted; the gray, heavy 
 serge of a religious habit fell back from the brilliantly-tinted hue of her face and 
 the still exquisite grace of her form: it was the habit she had worn at a prince's 
 Carnival ball, shrouding her beauty, for once, under an envious disguise and in 
 a whimsical caprice, that she might more surely be unknown by those titled 
 maskers with whom she had played the carte and tierce of her state-craft fence. 
 By mere hazard, the caprice had served her well; her subtle, unerring wit was 
 ever served well, alike by the weapons she forged and the accidents that 
 favored her. 
 
 Now, her glance flashed a cruel triumph at her own reflection, that was given 
 there with the glow from the silver branches on its bright hawk eyes and on its 
 arched, smiling, mocking lips. She had waited^neigh twenty years, but she had 
 her vengeance.
 
 CHANDOS. 473 
 
 " / have divorced them ! " she thought, " forever, forever ! And none 
 can trace my hand in it, suffer as he may, search as he will." 
 
 And none ever did. 
 
 Her art was perfect as Bianca Capella's, as Caterina de Medici's. The science 
 of destruction has its fair apostles and its titled proficients now, as in the Cinque 
 Cento; the only change is that their poisons now kill peace and honor and 
 fame, and spare the life to suffer. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 LIBERTA. 
 
 THERE was a great tumult rising through Venice. Swelling at the first from 
 a distant quarter, it had been borne nearer and nearer through the silence of 
 the city of the waters, the tumult as of a surging sea, as of the roar of sullen 
 winds, the tumult of a people, long suffering and launched at last against their 
 oppressors. The sound had not penetrated the depth of the church-aisles; 
 only its low muffled echoes could reach there, and they had been unheard by 
 those who stood in its solitude, 'lost in the misery of their own passions. In 
 the clear golden morning, in the luxuriance of color and of beauty, in the 
 warmth of the fragrant air, in the hush of the tranquil streets, revolt had risen 
 as it had risen in the great northern hive of labor; but here in the " sun-girt 
 South " it rose for liberty; there in the gaunt, smoke-stifled Black Country it 
 rose for wages. Venice was athirst for her freedom; the north-men had been 
 hungry for so many more coins a week. 
 
 They were but the youths of Venice, the young men whose hearts were 
 sick, and whose lives were aimless, like the life of Leopardi, the children of 
 eighteen or twenty summers, whose blood was kindled and whose souls were 
 pure with patriot fire; who would have flung themselves away like dross to cut 
 the fettering withes from their Venetia; whose ardor thought the world a tour- 
 nament, where it sufficed to name "God and the Right" to conquer and to see 
 the foe reel down; who fed their eager fancies on the memory of Harmodius 
 and Aristogeiton, and who refused to see that the nations of their own day 
 adored the Greeks in story, but called a living patriot an " agitator " if he 
 failed, and sent him to the cell, the scourge, the death of felons. It was the 
 boyhood of Venice that had risen. The past day had been an Austrian festa 
 for an Austrian chief, and the music, the laughter, the glitter, the salvoes of 
 artillery, the wreaths of flowers, all the costly follies, had driven the iron deeper 
 into the souls of those who closed their shutters to the sound of revelry, and
 
 474 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 mourned, refusing to be comforted, desolate amidst the insolence of the usurp- 
 er's magnificence and mirth. The festa, following on the arrest of a songstress 
 beloved of the city, who had been siezed for signing an ode of liberty, had 
 broken their patience down, had driven them mad, had made them believe 
 once more, in their old sublime fatal blindness, that a pure cause and a high de- 
 votion would prove stronger than the steel and the granite of mailed might. 
 They expiated the error as it is ever expiated: they were made the burnt- 
 sacrifice of their own creeds. 
 
 They met with little mercy: in the .sight of their foes they were but seditious 
 malcontents, to be shot down accordingly, or pinioned alive like young eaglets 
 taken for a caravan cage. The soldiers of Austria made swift work with them, 
 so swift that the hundreds who had risen with the dawn with the shout of 
 " Liberta " upon their lips as with one voice, and the noble insanity of the 
 liberator's hope beating high in their fearless breasts, were, almost ere the first 
 echo of the chaunt had rung through the silent highways to wake the slumbering 
 spirit of a Free Republic, shot down, cut down, wellnigh as quickly as seeding- 
 grasses fall beneath the scythes, were driven as the deer are ^driven under the 
 fire of the guns, yielding never, but overborne by the weight of numbers and 
 the trained skill of veteran troops, never losing their courage and their resist- 
 ance and their scorn, but losing order and adhesion, and seeing their young 
 chiefs fall in the very moment of their first gathering, seeing their long-counted 
 enterprise, their long-watched opportunity, their long-cherished hope of union 
 and strength and victory, fade and wither and perish under the upward course 
 of the bright morning sun. 
 
 The tumult had been brief; the chastisement would be life-long for such as 
 lived under the heavy iron pressure of the battalions that forced them down, 
 through the mitraille of the balls that hissed along the brown, still waters and 
 shook the echoes of the mighty palaces. They were young, they were nobly 
 trained; they chose death rather than life in a prison-cell with a convict gang, 
 than the shame of the gyves and the scourge. One band of them, some hun- 
 dred, fought inch by inch step by step, their backward passage into the great 
 porch of the church, into the dim and solemn loneliness of the aisles, gaining 
 breath from their enemies for a while, holding aloft still their standard, the 
 colors of a free Italy. 
 
 Suddenly, and with the tempest of sound without as suddenly entering there 
 with the forcing open of the large bronze doors, they fell backward, with their 
 faces ever to the foe, into the darkness and the silence of the edifice. The 
 burst of clamor rolled strangely through the stillness of the avenues of stone; 
 the conflict of the world seemed to pour like hell let loose into the sacred hush 
 and peace; the throngs of hot, heroic, fever-flushed, tyranny-wrung life, with 
 the vivid colors of the banner-folds flung high above their ardent, sun-warmed
 
 CHANDOS. 475 
 
 faces, filled, as though they had sprung from the sealed tombs where the great 
 of Venetia lay dead, the gray, cavernous gloom of the porch, the twilight of the 
 stretching aisles, the marble space beneath the marble Christ. Crueller wrong 
 had never sought the refuge of sanctuary, the shelter of the altar, the shadow 
 of the Cross. But they did not come here to ask for peace, to demand pro- 
 tection: they came to die with their colors untouched, with their limbs 
 unfettered. 
 
 The bronze gates of the larger entrance were forced open by their pressure 
 in the very moment that a horror, besides which all Chandos had ever borne 
 looked pale and painless, rose from the depths of his past to seize the one dream 
 of revived happiness that had come to him. In the first instant that its blow 
 fell on him he had no sense but of unutterable loathing, of sickening despair, 
 before the abyss of unconscious guilt that had yawned beneath him, no con- 
 sciousness but of the living love that burned in him passionate as the love of 
 his earliest years, and the dead love that made it hopeless and forbidden and 
 accursed, that made it a sin before which all his life shuddered and recoiled, 
 that made each kiss of her lips poison, each word of his tenderness crime. As 
 the thunder from the streets smote his ear, and the flood of the daylight poured 
 in, he was shaken from his trance of misery as men are started from a night- 
 mare; his eyes were blood-shot, his face flushed red, his limbs shook; he was 
 blind and deaf, he knew neither where he was nor who had spoken; but his 
 hands fell heavily on the shoulders of Lulli, swaying him backward. 
 
 " It is false ! Devils have forged the lie ! not the first forged to me. Cas- 
 talia her child mine ! God ! such horror could not be. Do you know-what 
 she was ? a shameless, loveless, profligate woman, a vampire, whose thirst was 
 gold, a Delilah, who stole her lover's strength to shear him of all value. Cas- 
 talia sprung from her ? It is a lie, I tell you, coined to pollute and to divorce 
 from me the fairest thing that ever lived or loved me ! " 
 
 Lulli stared fear-stricken in his face. 
 
 " Loved you ? " he echoed; " loved you ? " 
 
 " Ay, loved me as I was never loved. And you tell me a life so pure as 
 that was born from a courtesan ! You tell me that I I " 
 
 The words died in his throat; he could not shape in them the ghastly 
 thought that he flung from him as men fling off an asp's coil about their limbs. 
 He gasped for breath, where he stood there above the man who had brought 
 this lemur from his past: there was the ferocity of a maddened beast in him. 
 
 The bronze doors were burst open; the shock of the firing without pealed 
 through the stillness; the throng of the young soldiers poured in. They saw 
 him, him to whom they had rendered the homage of their song of liberty in 
 the summer night of a few years past, and the echoes of the vaulted roof rang 
 again with one shout, one Viva to his name.
 
 476 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 They knew his face well, it had long been among them in Venice; they 
 knew his words well, that in the poems of his early manhood and in the deeper 
 thoughts of his later years had borne so far the seeds of freedom; they hon- 
 ored him and loved him. 
 
 His eyes dwelt on them a while without light or sense; he felt drunk as with 
 an opiate under the storm of disbelief and sickening terror that possessed him. 
 They filled the space about him under the crucifix that hung aloft, with the sad, 
 passionless, thorn-crowned face of the statute bending above from out the 
 darkness, and the white limbs stretched in martyrdom. The folds of the stand- 
 ard streamed above the crowd of upturned faces with the glow of their earliest 
 manhood and the resolve of their settled sacrifice set as with one seal upon all. 
 They had fallen in close in their ranks, and stood so still in unbroken phalanx. 
 Alone and foremost was the youth with the head like the head of a Gabriel, 
 who had spoken in the summer eve the gratitude of Venice to the teacher and 
 the lover of liberty. Their weapons were in their hands, and their blood poured 
 from their wounds on the black mosaic pavement worn by priestly feet. Some 
 had their death-wound, and knew it; but they only pressed their hand closer, to 
 stay for a moment the stream that carried life with it, and they looked with a 
 smile to his face. 
 
 One a child in years, scarcely seventeen, with the flushed fair features of 
 childhood still stooped and touched his hand with a kiss of homage. 
 
 " Signore, wait and see how we can die; see we do not dishonor your 
 teaching." 
 
 The simplicity of the words pierced his heart; through the wreck of his own 
 misery, through the sirocco of his own passions, they came to him with the 
 weary, eternal sigh of that humanity which, however it had deserted him, he 
 had never, in requital, forsaken. Death would have laid its seal upon his lips, 
 and chained his hand, and veiled his sight, ere ever he would be cold to the 
 sufferings of his fellow-men, silent to the prayer of the peoples. 
 
 That love, unswerving and unchilled, for mankind, which had given so noble 
 a glow to the dreams of his youth and filled with so gentle a patience the temper 
 of his later years, survived in him now amidst all the desolation of his fate, all 
 the horror that glided from the shadows of his past and seized the one hope 
 left him. As the heart of Vergniaud was, to the last on the scaffold, with the 
 human life in which he had placed too sublime a faith, for which he had dreamed 
 of too sublime a destiny, so his heart was still, even in his own torture, with 
 those young lives self-given up to slaughter. The boy's touch roused him; he 
 looked at the heaving mass that pressed about him, at the pale, brave faces 
 that turned to him with one accord in the gloom of the aisle. He saw at a 
 glance they were there as sheep are hemmed into the shambles; he divined 
 what folly had brought them, folly nobler, perhaps, than some prudential
 
 CHAN DOS. 47? 
 
 wisdom. He pressed forward into their van on the simple instinct of their 
 defence, while they fell back and made way for him, watching him reverently 
 as he passed. He had loved Venetia, he had served Liberty; he was sacred 
 in their sight. In the front the standard caught a beam from the golden air 
 without, and was wafted higher and higher by the breath of a free sea-wind; 
 behind, far in the gloom, the altar-lights burned dully, rayless in the blackness 
 of the shadow shrouding them, meet symbols of the clear noontide of freedom, 
 of the midnight mists of creeds and churches. He forced his passage to where 
 that banner floated. 
 
 " Children, children ! what are you doing ? Why will you spend your lives 
 like water ? " 
 
 The youths of the front file, the first rank that would receive the shock of 
 the bayonets or the fire of the musketry with which the soldiers would in another 
 moment come to drive them down into obedience, lowered their arms as guards 
 lower them to monarchs. 
 
 " Better to lose our lives than spend them in usurpers' prisons ! Leave us 
 while there is time, signore; you can trust us to die well." 
 
 They left the space free, the space out into the glowing sunlight, into the 
 fragrant air. He stood still, and motioned their weapons up. 
 
 " You know me better than that." 
 
 Their eyes filled; he had lived much amidst them, and his written words had 
 sunk deep into their hearts. The young patriot who held the banner held it 
 with his left hand, because the right wrist had been broken by a spent ball 
 flashed back on him an answering comprehension. 
 
 " We know the greatness of your nature yes; but the greater your life, 
 the less should you expose it here. There will be slaughter: the world must 
 not loseyou." 
 
 He heard but vaguely, half without sense of what was spoken; his life seemed 
 on fire with the torment that possessed him, the hideous doom from which his 
 whole soul shuddered. Instinctively his eyes sought the musician; the look 
 that was in them was worse to Lulli than if he had seen them glazed and fixed 
 in death. 
 
 "Go you," he said, briefly: "I wait with these." 
 
 The flush and light that only stole there when in music he lost the feeble- 
 ness and the pain of his daily being, came on Lulli's face. 
 
 "I deserted you one moment," he murmured low; "not again, never 
 again ! " 
 
 The tramp of the Austrian soldiery came nearer and nearer, ringing like iron 
 on the stone pavements without; the flash of steel glanced in the sun beyond 
 the great bronze doors of Cinque Cento arabesque; the arch of the entrance 
 was filled with dark faces and the glitter of levelled steel; behind were the dim,
 
 478 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 solemn, majestic aisles of the church, with the white Passions gleaming through 
 the gloom, and the ethereal tracery of the pyx rising out of the sea of shadow; 
 in front, hemming them in with a circle of bayonets, and blocking up the lofty 
 space through which the blue sky and the sunlit air of the living day were seen, 
 were the mercenaries of Austria. 
 
 Some touch of reverence for the sanctuary that their Church had made 
 sacred from earliest time to all who sought the refuge of its altars, stilled their 
 zest for slaughter and held back their weapons; there was a moment's pause 
 and silence. The boy-patriots only gathered closer in their ranks, and looked 
 out on the bristling line of rifles in the sunlight of the day. Chandos forced 
 his way to the front, and stood between them and their foes. 
 
 " O children ! why will you give the unripe corn of your young life to such 
 reapers as these ?" he said, passionately. "You serve Venice in nothing; you 
 but drain her of all her youngest and purest blood ! Why will you not learn 
 that to contain your souls in patience for a while is to best perfect your strength 
 for her ? Why will you not believe that there is a world-wide love higher even 
 than patriotism, that while men suffer, and resist, anywhere upon earth, there 
 we can find a country and a brotherhood ? " 
 
 They heard in silence, their young faces flushing; they knew that he who 
 spoke the rebuke to them spoke but what he had himself done, that, under 
 exile and wretchedness, he had not fled to the refuge of death, but had made of 
 truth his kingdom, and of mankind his brethren. 
 
 " It is better to die than to live fettered ! " they murmured, as they lifted 
 their eyes to his. 
 
 " True ! But when the freedom of a nation, the deliverance of a people, 
 rest on our bearing with the chains a while, that we may strike them off with 
 surety at last, the higher duty is to endure in the present, that we may resist in 
 the future. Malefactors have died nobly: it is the greater task to live so." 
 
 His voice, rich and clear with the music of the born orator, rang through 
 the silence of the church, moving the hearts of the young Venetians like music, 
 and stirring even the fierce and sullen souls of the German soldiery, though to 
 them the language of its utterance was unknown. He had the power in him 
 which leads men by the magic of an irresistible command, the power that, in 
 forms widely different, his enemy and he alike possessed. In the early ages of 
 the world he would have been such a ruler as Solomon was in the sight of Israel, 
 such a liberator and leader of a captive people as Arminius or Viriathus, when 
 the life of a country hung on the life of one man, and fell when that life fell. 
 
 The Austrian in command, to whom his face was unknown, thought him the 
 leader of the revolt, and wondered who this chief was that thus swayed even 
 whilst he rebuked his followers. He lowered his sword courteously. 
 
 " Signore, surrender unconditionally, or we must fire."
 
 CHANDOS. 479 
 
 Chandos stood between the ranks of the combatants, unarmed, his head un- 
 covered, behind him the dark hues of the paintings, within the whiteness of 
 the sculpture and the shade of the vaulted aisles, a single breadth of light fall- 
 ing across his forehead and the fairness of his hair. 
 
 " I cannot dictate surrender to them, for they have done no crime," he said, 
 briefly; " and to shoot them down you must fire first through me." 
 
 The Venetians nearest him pressed round him, shielding him with their 
 weapons, and covering his hands, his dress, his feet, with their kisses, in the 
 vehement, demonstrative fervor of their Southern hearts. 
 
 " Signore ! " they shouted, with one breath, " we will surrender to save you. 
 You shall not die for us. We can find some way to kill ourselves afterwards ! " 
 
 He put them gently back; his eyes rested on them with a great tenderness. 
 
 "No: you shall not surrender. I know what surrender means. Besides, it 
 is only cowards' resort. Do you think I am so in love with life that I fear to 
 lose it ? I could not die better than with you." 
 
 As the words left his lips, through the ranks of the soldiery, through the 
 serried lines of steel, as the men in amaze fell back before her, and she thrust 
 aside the opposing weapons as she would have thrust aside the stalks of a field 
 of millet, through the radiance of the day, and the gloom of the ribbed stone 
 arches, Castalia forced herself with the chamois-like swiftness of her mountain- 
 training and the dauntless courage that ran in her blood. Before the Austrians 
 could arrest her, she had pierced their phalanx, crossed the breadth of the 
 marble pavement, and reached Chandos, where he stood beneath the sculpture 
 of the crucifix. His face grew white as the face of the sculptured Christ 
 above, as he saw her. 
 
 " Oh, Gocf ! what love ! " 
 
 Involuntarily, with a great cry, he stretched his arms out to her. At that 
 instant a large stone, cast over the heads of the soldiery from an unseen hand 
 behind them, was hurled through the air, and struck the colors of a Free Italy 
 from the grasp of the youth who held them: he reeled and dropped dead: the 
 blow had fallen on his temple. As the banner was shivered from his hold, the 
 folds drooping earthward, Castalia caught it and lifted it in the front of the 
 German troops. Her eyes flashed back on them with a daring challenge; her 
 face was lighted with the glow that liberty and peril lend to brave natures as 
 the sun lends warmth. 
 
 Viva la liberta! rang in the clear echo of her voice through the cavernous 
 depth of the church. Then, with a smile that had the heroism of a royal fear- 
 lessness, with the fidelity of a spaniel that comes to die with its master, she 
 came and stood by Chandos, her eyes looking upward to him, her hand leaning 
 on the staff of the standard. Unconsciously, in the violence of the torture 
 that consumed him at her sight, her touch, her presence, he drew her to his
 
 480 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 breast, crushing her beauty in an embrace in which all was for the moment for- 
 gotten, save the love he bore her, save the love that sought him even through 
 the path of death. 
 
 Roused by the echo of that rallying-cry, infuriated by their comrade's fall, 
 seeing her loveliness given into their defence, the Venetian youths sprang for- 
 ward like young lions, their swords circling above their heads, their hearts 
 resolute to pierce the net that held them, or to perish. The Austrian raised his 
 sword : 
 
 " Fire ! " 
 
 Obedient to the command, the first file dropped on one knee, the second 
 stood above them with their rifles levelled over the shoulders of the kneeling 
 rank, the bayonets were drawn out with a sharp metallic clash, the double 
 line of steel caught the morning rays upon the glitter of the tubes: every 
 avenue of escape was closed. 
 
 Chandos stooped his head over her, where he held her folded in his arms, 
 to shield her while life was in him. 
 
 " You do not fear ? " 
 
 She smiled still up into his eyes; she saw in them an agony great as that 
 which the sculptor had given to the marble agony upon the cross. 
 
 " I have no fear with you." 
 
 His embrace closed on her in the vibration of a dying man's farewell. 
 
 " Death will be mercy for us ! " 
 
 With the sunlight of her hair floating across his breast, he stood looking 
 straight at the levelled guns; her eyes rested on his face alone, and never left 
 their gaze. With his arms thus about her, with her head resting on his heart, 
 she had no fear of this fate; he wished it, he resigned himself to it; she was 
 content to die in the dawn of her life, with him, and at his will. 
 
 Guido Lulli stood near them. He was forgotten he had no thought that 
 it could be otherwise; but where he leaned his delicate withered limbs on the 
 sculpture beside him, his eyes rested calmly on the circle of the soldierly, on 
 the gleam of the rifle-barrels; weak as a woman in his frame, he had no 
 woman's weakness in his soul. He had forsaken the man he loved for one 
 moment in life; he would be faithful to him through the last pang of death. 
 
 The sudden crash of the musketry rolled through the silence; the white 
 thick clouds of smoke floated outward to the brightness of the day, and down- 
 ward through the length of the violated church. Castalia never shrank as the 
 boom of the guns pealed over her; she only looked up still to the face above 
 her. There was not a sound, not a moan, as the volley poured out its fire; 
 when the smoke cleared slightly, they stood untouched, though shots had 
 ploughed the stone above them and beneath them; but under the white sculp- 
 ture of the Passion the young lives of Venice lay dying by the score, there lips
 
 CHAN DOS. 481 
 
 set in a brave smile, their hands still clenched on their sword-hilts. A voice 
 rang out like thunder on the stillness: 
 
 " Brutes ! do you murder in cold blood ? " 
 
 Thrusting his way through the dense crowds of the entrance, as Castalia 
 before him had thrust hers, Philippe d'Orvale strode through the soldiery into 
 the church, felling down with a blow of his mighty arm a rifle that was levelled 
 at Chandos; with his hair dashed off his forehead, his glance flaming fire, he 
 swung round and faced the German levies, grand in his wrath as a god of 
 Homer. " So ! you turn the church to a slaughter-house ? Not the first time by 
 many. By my faith, a fine thing, to shoot down those brave children ! Cow- 
 ards, tigers, barbarians, fire again at your peril ! " 
 
 The passion and the dignity of the reprimand stilled them for a moment by 
 the force of surprise; but only for that, only to rouse their savage ruthlessness in 
 tenfold violence. Dressed, in one of his Bohemian caprices, in the boat-dress 
 of a barcarolo, for he loved to mingle with the people in their own garb and in 
 their own manner, and but dimly seen in the midst of smoke and the twilight 
 of the building, they failed to recognize him; they took him for a Venetian and 
 a revolutionist. Infuriated by his words and by his forced entrance, the Aus- 
 trian in command gave the word to fire again. The volley of the second line 
 rolled out as he stood in the midst between the soldiery and the body of the 
 church, as a lion stands at bay; he staggered slightly, and put his hand to his 
 breast; but he stood erect still, his bold, brilliant eyes meeting the sun. 
 
 " You have killed me; that is little. But kill more of them, and, by the God 
 above us, I will leave my vengeance in legacy to France, who never yet left 
 debts like that unpaid ? " 
 
 Then, as Chandos reached his side, he reeled and fell backwards; he had 
 been shot through the lungs. 
 
 " If it stop the carnage, it was well done," he said, as the blood poured from 
 his breast. 
 
 Awed at their work, recognizing him too late, terror-stricken to have struck 
 one for whose fall vengeance might be demanded by a nation that never slurs 
 its dishonor or lets sleep its enemies, the Austrains in command, motioning 
 back their brigades, pressed towards him, to raise him, to succor him, to protest 
 their lamentation, their ignorance, their horror. Chandos shook them from 
 him, and swept them back, his voice hoarse with misery as he bent over the 
 superb stricken majesty of the dying man. 
 
 " His blood is on your heads: you murdered him ! Stand off ! " 
 
 Philippe d'Orvale had known that his death-wound had struck him in the 
 instant that the ball had crushed through the bone and bedded itself where every 
 breath of life was drawn; but the careless laughter of his wit, the fine scorn of 
 the old noblesse, was on his face as he looked at the Austrians. 
 
 VOL. III. 16
 
 482 O UIDAS WORKS. 
 
 " So ! brave humanity, messieurs ! You apologize for shedding my blood, 
 because my blood is called princely; if I had been a gondolier, you would have 
 kicked my corpse aside ! No, dear friend, let me die. No good can be done, 
 and it will be but for a moment." 
 
 A voiceless sob shook Chandos as he hung over him; he knew also that but 
 for a moment this noble life would be among the living. 
 
 The thoughts of Philippe d'Orvale were not of himself; they were with those 
 children of Venice, who were perishing from too loyal and too rash a love for 
 her. His eyes gathered their lion fire as they rested on the Austrians; his voice 
 rang stern and imperious. 
 
 " If you regret my death, give me their lives." 
 
 The officers stood mute and irresolute: they dared not refuse; they dared 
 not comply. 
 
 "Give me their lives !" his voice rolled clearer and louder, commanding 
 as a monarch's, " without conditions, free and untouched forever. Give me 
 them, or, by Heaven, I will leave France to avenge me. Give me them, I say ! " 
 
 There was no resistance possible, in such an hour, to such a demand, they 
 submitted to him; they pledged their honor that the lives he asked for as his 
 blood-money should be spared. 
 
 " That is well; that is well," he said, briefly, as the rush of the air through 
 his wound checked his utterance, where he lay back in Chandos' arms just be- 
 neath the sculpture of the Passion. " All that youth saved ! No shot ever 
 told better. Ah, Chandos ! do not suffer for me, caro. It is a fair fate, a 
 long life enjoyed, and a swift death by a bullet, with your eyes on mine to the 
 last. Dieu de Dieu ! what room is there for regret ? I am spared all the lin- 
 gering tortures of age. That is much ! " 
 
 " Oh God ! to lose you ! " 
 
 The cry broke from Chandos in an anguish mightier far than if his own life 
 had been ebbing out with every wave of the blood that flowed out on the mar- 
 ble floor. He had lost all else, and, at the last, this life he loved was taken ! 
 
 Philippe d'Orvale's eyes looked up at him, tender as a woman's. 
 
 "Chut! If 1 be content, what matter? 'The king will enjoy his own 
 again.' You will take from your friend dead what you refused from him liv- 
 ing. Make my grave in Clarencieux, Chandos, under the forests some- 
 where, that your step may pass over it now and then, and the deer come 
 trooping above me." 
 
 " Hush ! hush ! You kill me." 
 
 Hot and bitter tears welled into Chandos' eyes, and fell on the brow that 
 rested against his breast: he would have accepted exile and poverty forever 
 rather than have bought the joys and the wealth of a world at such a price 
 as this.
 
 CHAN DOS. 483 
 
 Philippe d'Orvale smiled, the sunlit, careless, shadowless smile that had 
 been always on the lips of this bright, fearless reveller, though the blood was 
 pouring faster and faster out as his chest heaved for breath and the chillness 
 and numbness of death were stealing over the colossal limbs that were stretched 
 on the marble floor. 
 
 " Nay; I tell you I am fortunate. My roses have never lost their fragrance 
 yet, and now I shall not see them wither. Do not grieve for me, Ernest; it 
 is well as it is, very well ! Ah, Lulli ! is it you ? " 
 
 He stretched out one hand to the Provencal, who bent over him convulsed 
 with the unrestrained impassioned grief of his temperament; it seemed to him 
 strange and terrible beyond compare, that this mighty magnificence of man- 
 hood should be laid low while death passed by his own strengthless, pain-racked 
 frame and left unsevered his own frail bonds to earth. An intense stillness had 
 fallen over the scene of the carnage where the prince-Bohemian lay dying in 
 the broad space of the arched aisle; the soldiers of Austria stood mute and 
 motionless; the young Venetians gazed heart-broken at the man who had given 
 his life for theirs. All those who were wounded lay as still as the stiffened dead 
 beside them, letting existence ebb out of them with the same fortitude as his. 
 The tumult had died; a stricken awe had come upon the multitude. Above, in 
 the twilight of the dim vaulted vista of columns, the free colors of liberty still 
 floated, catching a gleam of light still on their folds. Castalia held them where 
 she stood looking down on the first death that her eyes had ever watched, as 
 the purple stream of the blood flowed to her feet, and each breath, as it con- 
 vulsed the vast, torn, heaving chest, dealt a separate pang to her as though her 
 own life went with it. 
 
 The glance of Philippe d'Orvale, growing more languid now, and losing the 
 fiery brilliance of its gaze, dwelt on her with a gleam of wonder and of light. 
 
 "Who is that ? " he asked, as he raised himself slightly. 
 
 She knelt beside him, holding the standard still, while its bright hues dropped 
 on the marble. 
 
 " They call me Castalia." 
 
 He looked at her dreamily. 
 
 "Castalia ! Ah ! you have eyes that are like some I loved once. I loved 
 so many, so many ! Life has been sweet, sweet as wine. Stoop down 
 and touch me with your lips; it will be a better assoilzement than a priest's 
 chrism." 
 
 She lifted her eyes to Chandos, where she knelt beside him; he bent his head 
 in silence, then at the sign from him she stooped softly nearer and nearer, and 
 let her lips rest on the French prince's brow in the farewell he asked. 
 
 He smiled, and touched her hair with his hand. 
 
 " I thank you, belle enfant" he said, gently; the light was fading fast out of
 
 484 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 his gaze, his senses were fast losing all their hold on earth, as wave on wave 
 of his life-blood surged from the broken, shattered bones of his breast. He 
 lifted himself slightly with a supreme effort, and the sunlit laughter with which 
 he had ever met existence was on his face as he met his last hour. 
 
 " Your foe waited for the ' Mad Duke's ' death ! Well, we have cheated him: 
 he will see the rightful lord go back to his heritage. It irked me reigning there, 
 Chandos, while you were exiled. No Austrian bullet ever did a better stroke. 
 Nay ! why mourn me ? I have drunk the richest of life, and I am spared the 
 gall of the lees. Your hand closer, dear friend. I do not suffer; it is nothing, 
 nothing ! Let me see your eyes to the end, Ernest. So ! that is well ! " 
 
 And with those words his head fell back, and under the white sculpture of 
 the Passion Philippe d'Orvale lay dead. 
 
 While Venice was hushed in awe at the greatness of the victim who had fallen, 
 and the vengeance of tyranny was stayed in obedience to his last wish, the 
 Prince who had died for the People was borne with reverent hands into the 
 gloom of a state-chamber of his own palace, and laid reverently down, with the 
 radiance of the morning shut out, and the gleam of funeral lights burning 
 round. A pall of purple velvet covered the limbs; fine linens veiled the breadth 
 of the chest, with its yawning, blood-filled cavity. The face was still left un- 
 shrouded, with its fair, frank brow pale in the pallor of the wax-light, the lux- 
 uriance of the curling beard flecked with silver threads, the eyelids closed as in a 
 peaceful slumber. There was but one watcher with him. Besides the bier Chan- 
 dos knelt, motionless as the dead, with his forehead resting on the hand which 
 in life had never clenched but in a righteous cause, and which, once clasped in 
 friendship or in pledge, would have been cut off sooner than have let go its bond. 
 That hand, cold as ice, and lying open like the strengthless palm of a child, had 
 given him his home, given him more than empires; that hand, by its last act 
 and will, had restored him the one longing of his life, had summoned him 
 from exile to the honor of his race once more; that hand had swept aside a 
 score of years, and brought him back his birthright. This gift of a recovered 
 joy such as dreams sometimes had mocked him with, came to him in the very 
 hour that a horror worse than guilt laid his heart desolate. One desire of his 
 soul was bestowed on him in the very moment that all others were laid waste 
 and banned as sin, one resurrection of dead hopes granted him in the very 
 moment that all other hopes were blasted from his hold. It was his once more, 
 this land that he had never forgotten, this thing that he had mourned as Adam 
 mourned the forfeited loveliness of paradise, this lost treasure to which his mem- 
 ory had gone, waking or sleeping, with every flicker of green leaves in morn-
 
 CHANDOS. 485 
 
 ing twilight, with every sough of summer winds through arching aisles of wood- 
 land, with every spring that bloomed on earth, with every night that fell; and 
 it was his only when the one friend that had cleaved to him loyally was stretched 
 dead before his eyes, only when the poison of his past rose up and turned to 
 incestuous shame the love which had seemed the purest and the fairest treasure 
 that his life had ever known ! He knelt there, where, the daylight was shut 
 out and the stillness was unstirred as in a vault. That he had regained his 
 birthright by the seal of eternal silence laid forever on those brave lips that no 
 lie had ever tainted, could assuage in nothing the bitterness of his regret; to 
 have summoned Philippe d'Orvale back amidst the living, he would have taken 
 up forever a beggar's portion and a wanderer's doom. Where he had sunk 
 down, with his arms flung over the motionless limbs, and his frame shaken ever 
 and again by a great tremor as the scorch of passions that he had been told 
 were guilt thrilled through him, a woman's hand was laid upon his shoulder. 
 As he started and raised his eyes, he saw, in the pale silvery shadows of the 
 death-lights burning round, the gaze of Beatrix Lennox bent upon him. 
 
 "Ah ! I am too late," she said, wearily. "I am always too late for good: 
 for evil one is sure to be ready." 
 
 Her voice was very low; she stood looking, not at him, but at the noble 
 head that had fallen never to rise again, at the mouth that still wore its last 
 smile, from which no chaunt of laughter, no melody of welcome, would ever 
 again ring out. 
 
 Chandos rose and stood in silence also. There was too great a wretched- 
 ness on him to leave him any wonder at her coming there, at her forcing her 
 entrance into the state-chamber where the guards without denied all comers. 
 He thought some tie might bind her to Philippe d'Orvale's memory: he had 
 never known that it was himself she loved. 
 
 " He had a lion's heart, he was true as the sun, he never lied, he never broke 
 a bond, he never failed a friend; no wonder the world had no name for him but 
 ' Mad ! ' " she said, as her voice fell on the stillness of the funeral chamber. 
 " He died but four hours ago, they say; and I was those four hours too late. 
 It is always so with me ! " 
 
 " He was dear to you ? " 
 
 She smiled; she thought how closely she had kept her own secret. 
 
 " No ! If he had been, do you think I could stand calmly here ? But he 
 was a superb gentleman: he died superbly. The world has few grand natures; 
 it can ill spare them. Besides, I have much to say to you." 
 
 " Hush ! not here." 
 
 " Yes, here. What I shall say is no desecration to his presence. He would 
 have been the first to be told it, had he lived. You loved him well ? " 
 
 His mouth quivered.
 
 486 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 " Who was ever so true to me ? loyal and generous and chivalric to the 
 last ! " 
 
 He could have thrown himself beside the bier of the slaughtered man, and 
 wept as women weep, when he thought of the smile that would never again 
 greet his, of the fearless eyes that would never again unclose to the waking 
 of day. 
 
 She waited some moments; then, with her face turned from him, she spoke: 
 
 " Chandos, she whom you love " 
 
 " Spare me that, for God's sake ! " 
 
 " What ! is she false to you ? " 
 
 " Would to heaven she were, rather than 
 
 " Rather than what ? " 
 
 He shuddered. 
 
 " I cannot tell you ! " 
 
 " You must if but for her sake. It is ? " 
 
 " That Valeria Lulli was her mother." 
 
 " That is the truth ! What if she be ? " 
 
 " IVhat? She was my mistress, an adventuress who came with me from 
 France " 
 
 " It is false ! It is basely, utterly false ! " 
 
 He caught her hands in his. 
 
 " Prove it, prove it ! and no saint was ever merciful as you " 
 
 " I can prove it. Valeria Lulli gave her birth; but her father lies there." 
 
 He drew a deep, gasping breath, like a man who has escaped from the close 
 peril of some awful death. 
 
 " This is true ? " 
 
 " True as that we live." 
 
 She turned from him, that she might not see his face in that moment of 
 supreme deliverance. There was a long, breathless silence, the silence which 
 is a greater thanksgiving than any words can utter. 
 
 He lifted his head at last, and his eyes dwelt on her with a look that repaid 
 her for twenty years of unspoken, unrequited love. 
 
 " Her father /k? / Oh, God ! how strange ! " 
 
 " Yes, it is strange. And, yet, why do we say so ? Life is full of tragedies 
 and comedies crossing each other in wilder mystery than any fiction fancies. 
 Months ago, in the autumn, you bade me feel a woman's pity for your young, 
 forsaken Tuscan. Well, I sought for her; I wished to know if she were worthy 
 you. You had told me where you had left her; I went there to find her gone, 
 lost out of all sight and knowledge. The belief of the people and of the priest 
 was that she had fled with you. I knew the falsehood of that, and I set myself 
 to the discovery, first of her history, then of herself. It took me long, very
 
 CHANDOS. 487 
 
 long; but at last I succeeded. Woman rarely fail when they are in earnest. 
 We are patient limeurs on a track. The priest told me, after long conference 
 with him, that her mother had confided to him a sealed packet, but he was never 
 to open it unless some imminent danger assailed the child; then, and then only, 
 he might read what it held, and act as he might see fit. She had died without 
 confession, died what he considered impenitent. He was a grand old man in 
 his creeds of duty; he had never violated the sanctity of the seals to sate his 
 curiosity or to lighten his charge of Castalia. I had less self-restraint. I per- 
 suaded him that the moment had arrived. He was very hard to convince; he 
 considered the command of the dead woman sacred. At last, however, I over- 
 came his reluctance. We opened the papers: from them I learned that she was 
 the daughter of Valeria Lulli and of the Due d'Orvale," 
 
 " Valeria had been his mistress ? " 
 
 " No, his wife; but she had disbelieved that she was so; hence her conceal- 
 ment of herself and of her offspring. The account of her life is very inco- 
 herent; written as women write under wrong and grief. It is plain to see that 
 she was passionate, jealous, doubtless of extraordinary beauty, but of a fervid, 
 uncontrolled temperament, one to beguile him into hot love, but soon to 
 weary him. There are many such women, and then you are blamed for incon- 
 stancy ! She had left Aries because persecuted by the love of an Englishman, 
 Lord Clydesmore, a roue, though a saint: the union is common ! She 
 went to Florence, and there saw Philippe d'Orvale. He heard her voice in 
 a mass at Easter, and sought her out. A passion, ardent as his always was, 
 soon sprang up between them. Of course he" had no thought of marriage; but 
 she had the same pride that Guido Lulli cherishes so strongly. She would 
 not yield to him. Call it honor, call it egotism, which you will; in the end she 
 vanquished him. The marriage was performed privately, and remained secret. 
 Reasons connected with his great house made this imperative for a brief 
 while; but he kept her in the utmost luxury in a palace of his on Como, 
 and intended shortly to announce their union. It is easy to see by her own 
 confession that her jealous love left him little peace, and must have been 
 unendurable to such a temperament as his; but throughout she speaks of 
 his unvarying tenderness, lavish generosity, and sweetness of temper. It 
 is conceivable that he went back to his old freedom when once the restless 
 tyranny of her passion began to gall him; but she never hints that his kind- 
 ness or his affection altered. He left her once for Paris, intending but a 
 short absence. While he was away, she received anonymous letters, telling 
 her that her marriage had been a false one, that his equerry in a priest's guise 
 had performed it. A woman who had read his nature aright would have 
 known a fraud impossible to Philippe d'Orvale; but she was very young, very 
 impulsive, at once, as I think, weak and passionate. She flew to Paris; he
 
 488 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 had gone to stay with you at Clarencieux. She knew her cousin was there, and 
 went thither to declare her marriage, or arraign the duke if he confessed it 
 false. She was his wife, but she knew so little of d'Orvale as that ! In the 
 Park she was met by the lover she had repulsed, Lord Clydesmore. Possibly 
 it was by him the letters had been sent: that we shall never know. At any rate, 
 he imposed on her with a great show of regret and of devotion, told her that 
 all the world considered her Prince Philippe's mistress, that her cousin had 
 cursed her as a dishonor to his name, and that she might see on that very spot 
 how utterly d'Orvale had forgotten her. As it chanced, the duke was that mo- 
 ment riding with the Countess de la Vivarol and other ladies. Clydesmore 
 drew her where she could see them without being seen. She heard her hus- 
 band's laughter; she saw the beautiful women he was with. She knew so little 
 the worth of the heart she had won, that she believed all the falsehoods Clydes- 
 more poured in her ear, believed in d'Orvale's faithlessness and in her own 
 dishonor. Her first impulse was to accuse him before all his friends, the next 
 to flee from him and from every memory of him, and hide herself and her 
 shame where none could ever reach her. That she did. She made her way 
 back into Italy, where she gave birth to her child. She would not even let him 
 know that she had borne him one. There is little doubt that the shock of what 
 she believed his cruelty, the falsehoods that Clydesmore had woven about her 
 in his revenge, had unsettled her reason. That the duke sought her far and 
 wide, though unsuccessfully, is shown by the difficulties which she relates beset 
 her in her avoidance of discovery by him." 
 
 He heard in silence, his breathing quick and loud, his hand on the dead 
 man's. 
 
 " His child ! If she could be more dear to me than she is, that would make 
 her so ! Go on; go on ! " 
 
 " The remainder is soon told. I read this record of a life thrown away 
 by such blind folly, such mingling of utter credulity and mad mistrust; her 
 marriage-ring was enclosed in it, the certificate of the child's birth, and other 
 matters. She, of course, wrote her absolute belief that she was not his wife. I 
 reasoned otherwise. Philippe d' Orvale might be a voluptuary, but his honor 
 was true as steel. A false marriage would have been a fraud impossible to him; 
 he would never have betrayed anything. So I sought out the evidence. Most 
 would have gone to him. That is not my way. I have known the world too 
 well to call the accused into the place of witness. I sought Castalia, and I 
 sought evidence of the marriage, ere I went to her father. I found the priest 
 who had performed the rites, with difficulty; he had joined the Order of Jesus, 
 and was in Africa. With patience I reached every link, those who had wit- 
 nessed it and all. The marriage was perfectly valid, legally recorded, though 
 its privacfc had been kept. It is easy to conceive that, with his nature, which
 
 CHANDOS. 489 
 
 loved enjoyment and loathed regret, when he found Valeria irrevocably lost to 
 him, he had no temptation to re-open a painful thought by relating his connec- 
 tions with her. Doubtless other loves chased her memory away, though 
 doubtless that memory always prompted his extreme tenderness towards Lulli. 
 That the union was strict to the law, you will see when I show you the proofs, 
 and, in all that you choose to claim for her, Castalia must be recognized as a 
 daughter of the house of D'Orvale." 
 
 He heard in perfect stillness, the sudden relief of the deadly strain which 
 had been on him for the past hours leaving him giddy and speechless; he 
 doubted his own hearing: he had touched joy so often only to see it wither 
 from him, he dreaded that this too was but a dream. A thousand thoughts 
 and memories rushed on him: that superb courage which flashed from Castalia's 
 eyes, that imperial grace which had marked her out among the Tuscan con- 
 tadini, as Perdita was marked out among the peasants of her foster-home, that 
 pride of instinct in her which had repelled insult as worse than death, they 
 were the heritage in her of the man who lay dead beside him, the heritage of a 
 great dauntless race, that in the annals of centuries had never failed a friend 
 or quailed before a foe. His hand closed tighter on Philippe d'Orvale's, and 
 his head drooped over the lifeless limbs, the stilled heart that never again would 
 beat with the brave pulse of its gallant life. 
 
 " If he were but living " 
 
 In the first moment of a release so sudden that it seemed to break all his 
 strength down beneath his joy, his heart went out to the slaughtered friend 
 whose love had been with him to the last. In all the width of the world; 
 could he have chosen, there was no life from which he would have had 
 hers taken so soon as from Philippe d'Orvale's, in which honor and chivalry 
 and loyalty and all bright and fearless things of a royal temper had met and 
 been unstained. The dignities, the titles, the possessions that would accrue to 
 her through her heirship with the mighty race she issued from, never passed 
 over his memory; the inheritance that he remembered in her, the inheritance 
 he thanked God for in one who would bear his name and hold his honor, was 
 the inheritance of her father's nature. 
 
 " You noblest among women ! " he said, brokenly, as he took the hands of 
 Beatrix Lennox in his own and bent over them as men bend over an empress's. 
 " How can I thank you ? What can I render you for the mercy you have 
 brought me, for the torture you have taken from my life ? So vast a gift, 
 so unasked a service ! What words can ever tell you my gratitude ? " 
 
 She smiled, but the smile was very sad. 
 
 " Don't you remember, long ago, I told you I would serve you if I could, 
 though it were twenty years later ! Well, I have kept my word; but there is 
 no need of thanks for that: it cost me nothing."
 
 490 OU IDA'S WORKS. 
 
 It had cost her much to labor to give him to another's love, to know that 
 the passion of his heart was gone to the one whom she restored to him. But 
 that cost was uncounted; the world-stained lionne could attain a sacrifice of 
 which the pure cold Lady of Lilliesford could never have faintly dreamed. 
 Her hands were clasped still in his; his voice quivered as he answered 
 her. 
 
 "No cost ! It is such a debt as leaves me bankrupt to repay it; my life, 
 her life, will never suffice to return it." 
 
 Her eyes were very beautiful as they dwelt on him in the dimness of the 
 darkened chamber. 
 
 " Chandos, it is paid enough. You will know happiness once more. It is 
 your native sunlight; could my lips pray, they should pray that it may shine on 
 you forever." 
 
 And there was that in the words, as they were spoken, which told him the 
 truth at last, told him of what sort and of what strength this woman's ten- 
 derness for him had been. 
 
 " Hush ! " she said, softly, with that weary smile which had in it more sor- 
 row than tears. "No; do not thank me; do not say more. It only pains 
 me. Ah, Christ ! I have done so little good ! If you think that I merit any 
 wage, give me one only; let me see your darling." 
 
 " See her ! Who should be cherished and honored by her always, if not 
 you, you who have given her back her mother's honor ? " 
 
 She made a sign of dissent. 
 
 " No; my life has no fitness for hers. But I would see her once ere she 
 knows this, see what has won your last love." 
 
 As she spoke, into the shadows of the chamber of death Castalia entered. 
 
 She knew no cause for his long absence; she knew no cause for that misery 
 with which his arms had crushed on her as they had stood waiting the volley of 
 the guns. She had borne the silence a while with the absolute submission to 
 him that mingled with the passion of her love; at last the latter conquered; 
 she came to seek him, came to know what this barrier was which had risen up 
 between them with the morning light. She paused as she saw him not alone. 
 Her face was very pale; the suffering and martyrdom that she had witnessed 
 had wrung her heart, and stirred the depths of a nature that had in it the love 
 of liberty, and the tenderness for the people, for which hef father had died; but 
 the brilliance of her hair flashed to gold in the gloom of the state-room, out 
 of which the height and grace of her form rose; and, as she waited, beyond 
 the gleam of the funeral-lights, the royalty was on her which had seemed to 
 rest like a crown on her young head when she had lived among the peasants of 
 Tuscany, and had made them speak of her with a hushed awe as a fairy's 
 changeling.
 
 CHAN DOS. 401 
 
 Beatrix Lennox looked on her long in silence, with a quick deep sigh; there 
 was that in her loveliness which far passed beyond mere beauty, mere youth; 
 and between her face and the kingly majesty which was stretched dead on 
 the bier there was, in that moment, a strange likeness. 
 
 The heart of this adventuress, whom the world had long condemned, had 
 thus much of rare nobility and self-forgetfulness in it; it could rejoice in others' 
 joy, rejoice that what it had itself forfeited still lived to gladden others. It 
 was untainted by that which corrodes many whose acts are blameless; it was 
 untainted by the gall of envy. 
 
 Beatrix Lennox looked on this life that opened to the fulness of existence 
 while her own was faded, that would lie in the bosom of the man she loved, 
 that would rest in the golden glory of joy whilst she herself had nothing left 
 but regret and remorse and the phantoms of dead years; but there was no 
 bitterness in her; there was only a heart-felt thanksgiving for him. 
 
 "She is worthy even of you, Chandos," she said, softly; then she paused a 
 moment, looking down into the lustrous, meditative, poetic eyes of Castalia with 
 a long, searching, thoughtful gaze. " You will have a great trust," she said, 
 simply, " and a great treasure; but there is no need to say to you, guard both 
 dearer than life." 
 
 Then, silently, with one backward farewell glance at the dead man lying 
 there, she passed slowly and musingly from the chamber. Chandos followed 
 her, and took her hands once more within his own. 
 
 " Wait, /do not judge as the world judges. You have come as the angel 
 of mercy to me; you have released me from a misery passing all I had ever 
 known. You will live in our love and reverence forever; you will let us both 
 strive to repay you ? " 
 
 "You have more than repaid me by those words only. I have much still 
 to tell you, to place with you. But she will never see my face again. You 
 know what my life has been! " 
 
 He stooped nearer, and, looking upward, she saw a divine compassion on 
 his face. 
 
 " I know that it has had magnanimities many blameless lives have never 
 reached. Hear me. Do you think that, in view of such an act as yours, I 
 could hold a Pharisee's creed ? God is my witness, there is no one whom I 
 would more fearlessly trust with her than you, none that I more surely know 
 could reverence her youth, and leave untouched her innocence. Can I say 
 more ? " 
 
 " More ! You have said far above what I merit. But what you mean can- 
 not be. I am no meet associate for Philippe d'Orvale's daughter, for Ernest 
 Chandos' wife. She must be above suspicion; she could not be so were I once 
 seen beside her. No, my years have been too evil to leave me any place with
 
 492 O UIDA'S WORKS. 
 
 hers; but they will not be wholly desolate in future, for I shall have your pity 
 always, and, sometimes, your remembrance." 
 
 She touched his hand with her lips ere he could stay her, and hot tears fell 
 on it as she stooped; then she went from him, content, because she had given 
 him happiness, content, because it had been hers to serve him. 
 
 " Ah, Heaven ! will even she love him better than I have loved ? " thought 
 the woman whom the world had called as evil, perilous, fatal to all she saw, as 
 Antonina; and in truth none could love more purely or more deeply than she did. 
 
 He passed back into the chamber where the lights burned around the soli- 
 tude of the dead, and his arms closed on what he cherished with a convulsive 
 pressure as though she were just rescued from her grave. He could not speak 
 for many moments, but held her there as a man holds the dearest treasure 
 of his life; then he drew her to the bier, where the brave, serene face smiled 
 on them in eternal rest. 
 
 "Your lips were the last to touch his; thank God that it was so. I have 
 much to tell you; it is best told here. My love, my love ! could you be more 
 sacred to me, you would be so for his sake ! " 
 
 That night, in the palace where the dead man lay, the palace that, with 
 most of his vast chieftainship, of his princely appanage, would fall to the only 
 one who owned his name, Guido Lulli stood before her in whose eyes the 
 smile of his lost Valeria looked once more upon him. 
 
 " Castalia," he said, softly, "you will be very great in the world's sight; but 
 you will not forget that your mother loved me once, when she was a bright and 
 gracious child, and I had no thought through the length of summer days and 
 winter nights save to make her pleasure ? " 
 
 She stooped to him with that grace which, even when the ban of peasants' 
 scorn and of a foundling's shame had rested on her, had been so proud, and 
 had so much of royalty in it. 
 
 " Ah ! can you think so basely of me as to need to ask it ? My fondest 
 reverence will be ever yours; and as for greatness, what greatness can there be 
 like " 
 
 Her eyes turned on Chandos, and the glance spoke what was mute on 
 her lips. 
 
 " His love ? " added the musician, gently, while his own gaze dwelt also on 
 the man who had come to him as his savior in the bleak and burning heat of 
 Spain, when both were in their youth. " Right. There will be your proudest 
 coronal: and by you, through you, some portion of my debt will be paid to 
 him."
 
 CHANDOS. 493 
 
 Chandos silenced him with a gesture. 
 
 "Hush ! You paid it long ago, Lulli; paid it afresh to-day; paid it when 
 you gave me a rarer thing than gold, fidelity." 
 
 " Not so. There are debts that, I have told you, are too noble to be repaid 
 like counted coin. Mine is one of them. Let it rest on me ever, ever. It will 
 be my last thought, and my sweetest in my death-hour." 
 
 There was an exceeding pathos in the brief and simple words; with them he 
 turned and passed from the chamber. He looked back once, himself unseen, 
 and his face grew pale with a certain pang. The light that shone on their lives 
 would never come to him; the lotus-lily of which they ate his lips could never 
 touch. There was no bitterness on him, no sin of envy, no thought save a 
 voiceless prayer for them; yet still the pain was there. No joy could ever be 
 his own, no fragrance of Eden reach him. He must dwell forever an exile 
 from that golden world in which men for a while forget that no dreams last. 
 Had it been his to give, he would have poured on them the glory of the life of 
 gods; but in their love he saw all his own life had missed, all his own life for- 
 ever was denied. 
 
 As he went back alone into his desolate home, into the music room where 
 the things of his art were, it was deep in shade; only across the keys of the 
 organ at the end a white pure light was streaming from the rays of a lamp that 
 swung above. 
 
 A smile came on his lips as he saw it; to him it was as an allegory, Heaven- 
 painted. 
 
 " Alone ! while I have you ? " he murmured. 
 
 The artist was true to his genius, he knew it a greater gift than happiness; 
 and as his hands wandered by instinct over the familiar notes, the power of his 
 kingdom came to him, the passion of his mistress was on him, and the grandeur 
 of the melody swelled out to mingle with the night, divine as consolation, 
 supreme as victory. 
 
 Where he had left them in the solitude of a happiness hushed, yet only deep- 
 ened, by the memory of the dead that bound them closer still, Castalia, where 
 she leaned in her lover's arms, looked up with the languor and the fire of 
 Southern love burning softer and richer through the mist of unshed 
 tears. 
 
 " Ah, my lord, my king ? " she murmured, with a smile proud, but of an 
 unspeakable tenderness, " I rejoice that I shall be no shame to you, that you 
 will not give your name to the nameless, that I have that noblest heritage of 
 his noble death. And yet almost I wish it had been ever otherwise; that I 
 had owed all to your gift only; that I had taken honor alone from you, like 
 the broom-flower that was worthless until Flantagenets wore it on their hearts
 
 494 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 and lent it their own royalties. He spoke of my greatness ! I have but one 
 greatness, shall have but one while my life lasts, you! " 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 LEX TALIONIS. 
 
 WITH the sunset a mad storm had broken over Venice, rolling in funeral 
 mass for the souls of those who had died for liberty. At midnight it lulled 
 somewhat; the thunder grew more distant, and died away in low, hoarse anger; 
 sheets of heavy rain succeeded, and through the hot sulphurous air the wind arose 
 in fitful and tempestuous gusts. In its violence, the Jew kept his patient vigil. 
 
 All through the day he had heard the noise of the tumult, the echoes of the 
 firing, the shrieks of women, the clash of swords; he had heard the terror- 
 stricken stillness that fell over the city when a great man was slain ; he had 
 heard the murmur of many tongues, that told him many strange, conflicting 
 tales. And his heart was ill at rest; he feared for his son. Death had been 
 abroad in the streets; death had smitten the innocent with the guilty: whom 
 might it not have touched ? As soon as darkness gave him the safety and the 
 secrecy that for Agostino's sake he kept, he made his way to the place where 
 his son dwelt. He heeded neither the fury of the winds nor the beat of the 
 rain; he thought some passing sound, some echo of a voice, some stray word 
 borne to his eager ear, might tell him what he sought. From sunset to mid- 
 night he waited in the shadow of the stone-work, waited and listened. Dark- 
 ness and light were alike to him; no sunrays ever pierced the gloom before 
 his sight, even when the heat of a Southern noon told him the golden glow 
 that shone on all the world, denied alone to him and to the Legion of the Blind. 
 He stood and listened, his long white hair blown back in the wild wind, the 
 rushing storm of driving rain beaten against him unheeded; he waited to hear 
 the one step that should tell him the son he loved still lived: to know that he 
 was near, to be conscious of his presence for one fleeting moment, were enough 
 for the great patient heart of the Hebrew. 
 
 For these only he watched now, watched in vain. No sound repaid him; 
 hours had passed, and there had been nothing. The storm had drenched his 
 garments, and his snowy beard was heavy with water; still he listened, listened 
 so eagerly that the caution he had exercised so long to remain unseen was for- 
 gotten as he leaned out from the shadow, hearkening in the rush of the rain 
 for the footfall he knew so well. He forgot that the darkness which veiled 
 the world from him could not shroud him from sight; he could not tell that
 
 CHAN DOS. 495 
 
 the wavering light of the lamp which swung above from the doorway near fell 
 on his olive brow, upturned as though in the Psalmist's weariness of prayer. 
 He had worn the fetters of his taskmaster so long; he had so long borne the 
 burden and the weight of this iron silence bound on him; death seemed so long 
 in its coming ! It took the young, the beloved, the fair, the child from its 
 mother's bosom, the beauty of youth from the lover's embrace, the glory of 
 manhood from its fruitage of ambition, from its harvest of labor; and it would 
 not come to him, but left him here, poor, old, sightless, solitary alone in the 
 midst of all the peopled earth. 
 
 And yet there was a vague hope in his soul to-night: he felt as though 
 death were not far from him, as though the release of its sweet pity would soon 
 stoop to him, and touch him, and bid his bitterness cease; and ere it came, he 
 longed to hear once more his darling's step, to feel once more near him the 
 existence born of his dead love, the heart to which once he had been dear. 
 He had strength in him to be silent unto death, to accept his martyrdom and 
 bear it onward to his grave, untold to any living thing: all he asked was to listen 
 once to a single living echo of his lost son's voice. Through the hush of the 
 midnight the beat of oars trembled; a gondola grated against the stairs. It 
 came, that sound which thrilled through the rayless darkness which was ever 
 around him, as it never trembled on any ear whose sense was linked with the 
 power of sight, that sound of Agostino's voice, as it spoke to the boatman, 
 that sound which was the sole joy left to the blind. His son came towards 
 him nearer and nearer up the wet stone steps; he leaned forward, knowing not 
 how the light shone down on his face, and an unspoken blessing trembled on his 
 lips in the tongue of the patriarchs of Judea: if he died to-night, he would 
 have prayed with his last breath for the son of the love of his youth. 
 
 The footfall paused: it was beside him now, so close that he could hear 
 every breath. A loud, wild cry broke through the night. Agostino staggered 
 back, white-stricken, ghastly as Saul in the cave of Endor. A moment, and he 
 gazed there paralyzed with spectral awe, with superstitious horror; then, un- 
 witting what he did, senseless and breathless, and prostrate, he fell down at the 
 old man's feet in the supplication of his childhood. 
 
 " Father ! father ! dead or living, for the love of God forgive me ! " 
 
 The Hebrew stood above in the flickering shadowy light; and on his face 
 there was the strife of a terrible conflict. All his soul yearned to the man flung 
 there in that passionate prayer at his feet: yet for his very sake he must deny 
 him! 
 
 " I do not know you," he said, and his voice trembled sorely. " None call 
 me father." 
 
 There have been heroisms far less noble than this one heroic lie. 
 
 Agostino looked up, his face all flushed with warmth, his eyes alight with
 
 496 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 bewildered, questioning amaze; the voice, once heard, bore back a thousand 
 memories of by-gone years. The words might deny, but the voice blessed 
 him. 
 
 " Forgive me! " he implored, scarce conscious of what he said, but remem- 
 bering alone the sin with which he had wrung the old man's heart so long ago 
 in the days of his boyhood, the sin which had pursued him ever since. 
 " Whether you come to me in spirit or in life, come only to me in pardon, by 
 the love you bore me! " 
 
 The Hebrew stood mute and motionless, his tall and wasted frame swaying 
 like a reed, his face changing with swift and uncontrollable emotions, under 
 the force of the imploring conjuration. His sightless eyes gazed instinctively 
 down upon his son; but their blindness gave them, to Agostino, a look unearthly 
 and without sense. 
 
 " Father! speak, O God! " he cried, " or you will kill me! " 
 
 The infinite love restrained in him broke through the rigid fixity of the 
 old man's set features as the sun breaks through the darkness of a winter 
 dawn; his hands were stretched out seeking to touch the beloved head lifted to 
 him; he could hold his silence no more, no more be as one dead to the son 
 who knew him still. 
 
 His answer trembled, tender beyond all words, through the sighing of the 
 wild winds and the rush of the beating rain. 
 
 " Agostino! my child! what have /to pardon ? Rise, rise; guide my hands 
 to you; let my arms feel you ere I die! You have your mother's face, and I 
 cannot behold it; I am blind! " 
 
 In the dim light of the chamber within, kneeling at the old man's feet rev- 
 erently as ever Isaac knelt at the feet of Abraham, Agostino heard his father's 
 history, heard quivering with torture, his breath caught by sobs, his kiss 
 touching the withered hands that were to him as the hands of a martyr, great 
 tears in his eyes that never left their gaze upon those in whose darkness he could 
 still read love. He heard to the end. Then, when he had heard, he wept con- 
 vulsively; the torrent of his agony loosened. 
 
 " You have borne this martyrdom through him ! this curse for his sake! " 
 
 The Hebrew stayed him with one gesture. 
 
 " Silence ! His name is sacred to me. My son, he had mercy; he spared 
 you." 
 
 Agostino sprang to his feet as an arrow springs from the bow. 
 " Spared me ? Oh, God, you have thought that ? " 
 
 The old man bent his head with the patient dignity with which he had 
 ever borne the burden laid upon him.
 
 He leaned forward, not knowing how the l^ht shown down on his face, etc. 
 
 Page 495, Vol. III.
 
 CHAN DOS. 497 
 
 "He spared you; yes! For it I bless his name. My life mattered 
 nothing." 
 
 " Spared me ? He cursed me from my youth up! " his voice rang as steel 
 rings: the bondage of half a life was broken at last. " He loosed me from the 
 law's chastisement to break me down into slavery worse than the worst tortures 
 the sternest law ever dealt yet. He let me escape a moment to fetter me for 
 an eternity. He traded in my misery; he traded in my crime. He set me to 
 do the vilest work, and, when I shrank from it, threatened me with my buried 
 sin. He made my life one endless dread; he never let me know one moment's 
 peace, one hour's security. Ah, Heaven! why do I speak of it as past ? He 
 does it still. I am his tool, his serf, his hound. Every day I wake, I know 
 that I may rise only to be commanded some fresh infamy to serve him! " 
 
 The old man, as he heard, rose also, and stood erect; his sunken eyes 
 filled with the fire of his dead manhood, his mouth set like a vice; years of 
 living vigor, of mighty strength, seemed poured into his veins: his olive face 
 was dark as night. 
 
 " What! he was faithless to me ? You have suffered ? " 
 
 His words were brief, but they carried an ominous meaning. 
 
 " Suffered! It is no word for what I have borne through him. But what is 
 his crime to me, beside his crime to you ? I was guilty, I merited my punish- 
 ment; but you, you who endured indignity and torment for my sake and for 
 his, you had no error, save too firm a loyalty to him, too noble a tenderness to 
 me! ' His voice fell in a deep tearless sob; he had the heart of a woman, and 
 his father's sacrifice was holy in his sight as any martyrdom. 
 
 " He has been your tyrant ? " 
 
 The question was hard as iron. 
 
 Agostino flung himself down afresh at the old man's feet; he felt that he 
 could kneel there forever in expiation of the sin of his youth that had brought 
 this doom darker than death upon his father's life. 
 
 " Mine! what matters that ? It is nothing beside your captivity! " 
 
 "Yes! By it my bonds are loosed; by it my oath is broken. He has 
 had my patience long, my truth long, my servitude long; now he shall have 
 my justice." 
 
 His whole height was erect, his blind eyes blazed with fire, his arm was 
 out-stretched in imprecation; he stood like one of the prophets of his own 
 Palestine, cursing in the name of Jehovah a hostile host, an ingrate land. 
 
 Agostino, looking upward, caught the same fire from him, caught the kind- 
 ling glow of liberty and of revenge. He had writhed and rebelled under his 
 own bonds, though only to sink more hopelessly under the fetters; but before 
 the martyrdom of his father there rose in him that nobler rage for another's 
 wrong which would have made him content to perish himself, if in his fall
 
 498 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 he could have dragged down his tyrant: it is the emotion which makes tyran- 
 nicides. 
 
 " Ay! " he cried, passionately, " let us be avenged if the power be still with 
 us. Let him shame me, ruin me, kill me; but let me see him struck down ere 
 I die. His guilty secrets have been the curse of both our lives; let them be 
 told against him! /was impotent; but you " 
 
 The figure of the aged Hebrew towered in the gloom, and on his face was 
 the stern ruthless justice of the Mosaic law. 
 
 " As he dealt with us, so will I deal with him; there is no bond with traitors. 
 An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. It is just. Go! fetch the man he 
 strove hardest to destroy. He is in Venice; bring him here." 
 
 The weaker nature of his son trembled as he touched, at last, the liberty, 
 the atonement, the avenging blow for which he had so long thirsted. The slave 
 had been a slave so long, he trembled before the daring that would loose his 
 chains. 
 
 " But only to have shared such infamy was so vile ! I cannot bear that he 
 should know us its accomplices " 
 
 "Silence! What matter? We were beasts of burden; we carried what 
 loads our master laid on us, dead men or blood-stained weapons. Go; bring 
 him quickly ! quickly ! Do you hear ? " 
 
 An ashen hue stole over the bronze of his face, his lips were pressed in a 
 straight line under the flowing of his beard, his hands moved with a swift 
 impatient movement. Agostino looked up at him in fear. 
 
 " Father ! wait. You are too weak." 
 
 The old man's voice rung, stern and imperious, across his own. 
 
 "I shall be strong to do this ere I die. Go to him; tell him I will give him 
 his vengeance. Go tD him; I command you bring him here." 
 
 The inflexible command brooked no disobedience; it swayed his listener 
 with the old force of the Jewish parental power. Agostino was once more the 
 youth before his father's might, under his father's hand. He dared dispute 
 no longer. 
 
 The old man sat, and waited. Moments seemed hours to him; the flame 
 of his life was burning low, he dreaded lest it should die out ere it should have 
 time to shine upon his vengeance and light the fires that would devour his 
 tyrant's fame and crumble it to ashes in the sight of men. His pulse beat 
 faintly, his heart was oppressed, his limbs felt chill as ice; but he had said that 
 he had strength in him to do this thing ere he passed away among the vanished 
 crowds; and he sat there with his ear straining eagerly, his lips braced, his 
 whole force stung, to keep in him the powers of thought and speech and mem- 
 ory, on which his hold was now fast slackening. 
 
 His son knelt near him; he had sent the bidding to the one whom it sum-
 
 CHANDOS. 499 
 
 moned, and he crouched near like a beaten dog. For the moment, he had 
 panted to break his bonds at any cost; but the vehemence of that impulse had 
 its reaction; he felt sick with shame, he trembled with dread: the whip had 
 done its invariable, inevitable work; it had made the spaniel a coward to the 
 core. Moreover, he loathed his own sins; he held himself viler than the harsh- 
 est judge would ever have held him, and he feared unspeakably the sight of the 
 man who had cleaved to honor at all cost, the man whom he might have saved, 
 had he but had the courage to risk a personal peril. 
 
 Where the Hebrew sat with his head bent forward, his hand clenched on the 
 wood-work near him, his quick hearing caught a distant sound; his lips moved 
 eagerly. 
 
 " He comes ! Bring him, bring him quickly! Let me speak while I can ! " 
 
 Agostino started to his feet, and staggered out, at the imperious command, 
 out into the gloom of the stone passages. From the wild night without, 
 Chandos entered. The storm had risen afresh, the lashing of water and wind 
 had beaten on the black sea-piles, the darkness of the hot tempestuous air was 
 impenetrable, the rains were pouring down in torrents; through the tempest, 
 heedless that his hair was drenched and that the lightning scorched his eyes, he 
 had come, with but one memory on him, with but one hope, his vengeance. 
 
 Passionate as his love was, dear as his heritage, closely as he had cloven to 
 a barren honor through barren years of bitterness, he would have been capable 
 in that instant of throwing honor and heritage and love away, if by them only 
 he could have purchased this one thing. No life so utterly and so surely attains 
 strength, that it may not give way and fall at the last; no life is so absolutely 
 free of baser passions, that when the slaughter-lust is on it, it may not reel 
 headlong into crime. 
 
 As he entered, with the dignity of command, the glow of passion, upon his 
 face, on which the grief that the day had borne and the light of recovered hap- 
 piness mingled, there was in him the beauty that the Spanish lad had likened 
 in the days of his youth to the golden-haired sovereign of Syria; and as Agos- 
 tino saw him, involuntarily, unconsciously, he threw himself at the feet of this 
 man, whose wrongs he had buried in silence through the pusillanimity of a sel- 
 fish terror; he abased himself there as Eastern slaves before their rulers. 
 
 " Forgive me, if you can ! I can never forgive myself. I was like one who 
 sees a murder done, and will not raise his voice to stay the lifted blade, lest it 
 be thrust into his own throat instead. I loved you, honored you, though 
 your eyes never fell on me but twice in my boyhood; and yet I never told you 
 where the assassin hid ! " 
 
 Chandos forced him upward by sheer strength; light flashed from his eyes, 
 his lips parted with fevered eagerness, his whole frame thrilled with one desire 
 alone.
 
 500 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 " I see who you are; I see what you know. If you can give me vengeance, 
 there is no guilt on earth / will not pardon you. Vengeance, I say ! Give me 
 but JUSTICE, and it will beggar the wildest vengeance that men ever took. Your 
 father sent for me: lead on, quick ! " 
 
 The softness of his love, the bereavement of the noon, were alike flung off 
 him as though they had no place in his life; the world held nothing for him 
 save this only, a lifetime of wrong, left unavenged so long. 
 
 Agostino looked at him in one fleeting look; then the crouched, shuddering, 
 beaten shame came on him that had moved him when in the oak-forest he had 
 seen the hopeless melancholy of the face that he had once known brilliant as 
 the Spanish sun that had shone on them when they had first met. He had 
 lived in the world, he had made fame, he had carried himself fairly before men; 
 but he had been but a slave, and a slave's weakness and prostration were in his 
 nature forever. 
 
 He gave a heart-sick, shivering sigh. 
 
 " Ah, you may pardon, but I cannot pardon myself. You have known 
 calamity and desolation; but you have never known the worst pang of all, to 
 be disgraced in your own eyes ! " 
 
 Even in that moment the anguish of the accent reached and touched 
 Chandos. He turned and looked an instant on the face that he had once seen 
 in its boyish grace, with the hot amber light of Granada upon it. 
 
 " He who feels disgrace so keenly is on the surest road to leave it behind 
 him forever. Now, lead on, quick, for the sake of Heaven ! " 
 
 The wax-like, flexible, impressive nature of the Castilian Jew was awed and 
 stilled by the might of the avenging power he had summoned. He led the way 
 in silence, led him into the great chamber where the blind man sat, lonely, 
 and old and poor, but grand as the sightless seer of Chios. 
 
 The light from above beamed on the massive bronze of his forehead and on 
 the snow-white falling beard. His eyes strained into the gloom they could not 
 pierce; he rose at the sound of the footstep, and stood erect as the Prophet of 
 his own rabbinical tale, when he rose to bless the Israel whom his taskmaster 
 had bade him curse. 
 
 " Come hither," he said, briefly, and his voice gathered the force of his 
 manhood. "You craved a perilous thing, and I refused it; the lust is mine 
 now, and I will yield you what you sought. ' He who rises by the sword shall 
 perish by the sword: ' it is just. You shall deal with him as by the law of 
 Moses: ' every man shall be put to death according to his sin.' Come hither 
 and listen while my lips have still speech." 
 
 Where Chandos stood against him, his face was eager with a fiery hunger, 
 flushed and set with a mighty passion; his breath caught in quick gasps, 
 
 " But your oath ? "
 
 CHAN DOS. 501 
 
 The bond was not his, yet he remembered the sanctity of the vow that had 
 been in his path as a rock. 
 
 His slight ironic smile wavered an instant over the Jew's stern mouth. 
 
 " Sir, you are thrice a madman! You guard other men's honor as well as 
 your own, even to your own hindrance. Beat rest. My oath is broken justly. 
 It was sworn for so long as my son was saved by him. He has cursed my son; 
 I am released. Traitors shall be slain by their own weapons. I was silent 
 and faithful whilst I believed silence and fidelity due. He has been false to 
 me; the bond is rent by his own hand. You said aright in the night that is 
 past; he whom I served was your enemy." 
 
 The oak-wood of the bench on which his hands were clenched broke like a 
 reed in Chandos' grasp as he heard. He had known this iniquity ere yet it 
 had been told; but its utterance fell on him like the stroke of an iron mace. 
 His foe's life, had it been by him in that one moment, had not been worth a 
 moment's purchase; it would have been broken asunder as the strong rail was 
 snapped in his hands. 
 
 " Tell me all," he said, briefly, between his teeth, that fastened together 
 like a steel lock. 
 
 " Sir, to tell you all the inquity that /wrought were to speak for a score of 
 years, and I shall not live as many minutes," said the Israelite, in his grave, 
 caustic satire. " ' When thou cuttest the harvest in the field, leave a sheaf for 
 the fatherless,' said the law. Well, we kept law so well that we sheared the last 
 wheat-ear from every land in our reach. ' No man shall take the millstones 
 to pledge; for he taketh a man's life to pledge," the law has written. Well, we 
 obeyed so well that we took the millstones and ground the life to powder be- 
 tween them. But, of all that we wronged, we wronged you most. You had 
 had mercy on him when he was a debtor and wretched; you had given him 
 food, and shelter, and comfort, and friendship, and the smile of the world; and 
 in payment he wrung your life dry of all wealth and all peace, as men wring a 
 skin dry of wine." 
 
 He paused; life was flickering dully and feebly in him. Chandos shook 
 with rage where he heard. 
 
 " Do you think I have not known that ? More, more, for the love of God! 
 To be told my wrongs is no vengeance." 
 
 " Patience. Your vengeance lies in them. Your enemy never broke the 
 laws of his land; he was too wary in wisdom: he plundered, but he plundered 
 within the statutes. The worst felons are those who can never be brought to 
 the bar. He persuaded you to waste your substance; he drew it much of 
 it into his hands; but it was always you who signed your own death-warrant. 
 I have had your signatures by the hundred ; the sums they signed away were 
 cheated from you, because lies were told you of their use and their purport;
 
 502 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 but you were very careless in those matters, and he was very able. There 
 is not one of them that is forged; they were all legal, though they were 
 villanies." 
 
 " Oh, God ! is he never to be reached, then ? " 
 
 It rang out from him in a loud cry, like the cry of a drowning man from 
 whose hands the last plank slips. 
 
 " Patience ! Have I not said you shall have your vengeance and mine ! 
 You cannot bring him to the felon's dock, but you shall gibbet him in the sight 
 of the nations; you shall rend his robes asunder; you shall tread his crowns 
 beneath his feet. Half nay, a tithe of what I can tell would suffice to drive 
 him out in shame and cover his head with ignominy. The breath of his life 
 now is to be untainted before the country that holds him a chief; lay bare his 
 corruption, and ruin will blast him, he will fall, stricken to the roots." 
 
 His breath caught, his cheek grew ashen; the strength was dying in him, and 
 the stagnant course of his blood was nigh ceasing forever; but he had a ruthless 
 will, he forced life back to him, and his words rang clear as a herald's menace. 
 
 "Let me say the chief thing first; my breath will fail ere you know one- 
 thousandth part. Briefly, take my signet-ring, here, to one of my people in 
 Paris, Joachim Rosso, a worker in silver, in the street where you found me. 
 At that sign, bid him give you the sealed papers he keeps for me. He knows 
 nothing of what is in them; but he has guarded them for me many years. He 
 is a good friend and faithful. In them you will find the record of all I have no 
 strength to tell you, the proofs of the trade that your foe and I drove in 
 men's necessities. This Englishman, my bondmaster, was very keen, very wise; 
 and when he held me by my son's danger and by my own gratitude, he held me 
 by iron chains; he knew he could trust me to suffer anything and keep silence. 
 But " his sardonic smile passed over his lips " he dealt with a Jew, and the 
 Jew could meet the fox with a fox's skill. He had heavily weighted me into 
 slavery; and while I believed him true to the lad, my tongue should have been 
 rooted out rather than be made to utter one syllable against him. But a Jew's 
 life is lived only to cheat, they say; and I outwitted even my tyrant so far. I 
 kept papers he never knew; I complied proofs he never dreamed. Had he 
 been true to me in his dealing with Agostino, they would have been burnt by 
 Joachim the day that I died. He broke faith with me: I turn the blade of his 
 own knife against him; I net him in the threads of his own subtlety." 
 
 There was the sternness of the Leviticus law in the words as they rolled out 
 from the hollow chest of the sightless man where he sti etched his hands in 
 imprecation. 
 
 "As he sowed, so let him reap; as he dealt, so let him be dealt with: as he 
 filled his unjust ephah with ill-gotten wheat, so let the bread he has made thereof 
 be like poison to consume him! "
 
 CHAN DOS. 503 
 
 The fierce unflinching justice thrilled like a curse through the stillness of 
 the chamber. 
 
 Chandos' hand closed on the signet-ring; his face was very white, and 
 through his teeth his breathing came in a low hissing sound, as though 
 the weight of the evil of his traitor lay like lead on his chest. 
 
 " One word; my ruin was worked by fraud ? " 
 
 The Hebrew bent his head, and the red shame that had before come there 
 in the sight of Chandos flickered with momentary warmth over the bloodless 
 olive of his cheek. 
 
 " Sir, I duped men without a pang of conscience. I have said I was very 
 evil. My work throve in my hands so well because I was without one yielding 
 or gentle thing in me. But when we duped you, even I shrank. You trusted 
 him so utterly, you were such a madman in your generosity, such a fool in 
 your lack of suspicion, so noble in your utter carelessness and faith! And I 
 knew that you had served him, fed him, sheltered him, that you trusted him 
 as a brother. When you were drawn down into our bottomless pit, even / 
 abhorred the work! " 
 
 " There was fraud, then ? " 
 
 His voice was hoarse; the syllables slowly panted out; till the life of his 
 foe was wholly in his power, he felt as lions feel when cage-bars hold them 
 from their tormentors. 
 
 " Fraud ? surely! But I doubt if the law could touch it; it was deftly 
 done. He led you on into a million extravagances; he blinded your sight; 
 he cheated you utterly. You set your name to your friends' bills, and we 
 bought those bills in, and then we wrung the money out of you; you signed 
 what you thought leases and law trifles, and you signed in reality what made 
 you our debtor for enormous sums. You gave him blank checks; when he 
 filled them up to pay for your pictures, for your horses, for your mistresses' 
 jewels, he drew his own percentage on them all. You gave him fatal power 
 over your properties, and he undermined them. Yet I doubt if, at this dis- 
 tance of time, you could arraign him for fraud. You disputed nothing then; 
 you could scarce dispute now, after the lapse of so many years. It was viler 
 work than murder; he killed you by inches; he drained your blood drop by 
 drop; he made the earth under your feet a hollow crust, and at his signal the 
 crust broke, and you sank into the pit that he had dug. But he kept within 
 the law; he kept within the law ! " 
 
 There was a world-wide sarcasm in the acrid words; he had known so many 
 criminals great men in their nations whose crimes were never guessed, 
 because " within the law ! " 
 
 " But what matter ? See here." His withered fingers grasped like steel 
 the arm of the man he had aided to rob. " In my papers you will find the
 
 504 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 whole detail of our business system. You will find the list of the men we 
 helped to ruin. You will see how he stripped bare to the bone the friends 
 whom he fed, and drove and laughed and jested with. You will see how the 
 chief of his riches were made, how in real truth he was but a usurer, who 
 churned into wealth the needs of his associates in the world that he fooled. 
 Tell the tale to the world; it will blast him forever. Show how the man you 
 succored repaid you. Let them behold the first steps by which their favorire 
 rose to his power; trace the vile subways by which he travelled to dignity. 
 Point to the dead, the exiled, the cursed, whom he dwelt with in friendship 
 while he drove his barter in their shame and their want. Go and unmask him; 
 go and condemn him. You will find proofs in my legacy that will brand him 
 your destroyer and theirs. Go ! though he be brought into no felon's dock, 
 you will scourge him, dishonored forever, out of the land where he stands now 
 a chief ! " 
 
 The deep, rich voice of the Hebrew rolled out like an organ-swell; the 
 vitality of manhood was lent for a moment to the wasted powers of age. Faith- 
 ful through all ordeals to his very grave, he turned in his death-hour to stamp 
 out the traitor whom in that hour he had found false to his bond. 
 
 Chandos stood beside him, his lips parted, his eyes filled with fire; his face 
 dark with the passions of that bloodthirst which had risen in him. 
 
 " Dishonor him ! dishonor him ! " he said, in his ground teeth. " If I slew 
 him, I should be too merciful ! " 
 
 There was silence for a while in the chamber; they who heard knew the 
 width and depth of his vast wrong, knew that no chastisement his hand should 
 take could be too deadly. The old man's white head sank, his hands trembled 
 where they were knitted together. 
 
 " And forget not that I wronged you equally, that I forged the steel that 
 pierced and wove the net that bound you ! To-night my soul will be required 
 of me; it is dark with evil, as the night is dark with storm. Could it be free 
 of your curse, I could die easier." 
 
 Chandos stooped to him; and his voice, though the fire of his hate burned 
 in it, was hushed and gentle with pity. 
 
 " My curse ! When you succored what I love ? When you render me my 
 vengeance ? Not equally did you wrong me; you never ate my bread, you 
 never owned my trust. Your martyrdom may surely avail to buy your pardon 
 both from God and man." 
 
 The large, slow tears of age welled into the Hebrew's sightless eyes; the 
 hard, brave, ruthless nature was stricken to the core by the mercy it had never 
 yielded; he lifted his hands feebly, and rested them on the bowed head of the 
 man whom he had wronged. 
 
 " May the desire of thine eyes be given thee, and thine offspring reign long
 
 CHAN DOS. 505 
 
 in the land ! May peace rest on thee forever ! for thou art just to the end, 
 to the end." 
 
 Purer blessing was never breathed upon his life than this which his spoiler 
 and his foe now uttered. 
 
 Then, as the darkness that had veiled his sight so long was lost in the dark- 
 ness of death, the old man stretched his arms outward to his son, seeking what 
 his silent unrequited love had found at last only to lose forever. 
 
 " Nearer to my heart ! nearer, nearer. God cherish thee ! God pardon 
 thee ! Ah ! will any love thee as I have loved ? Death is rest; yet it is bitter. 
 In the grave I cannot hear thy coming, I cannot hearken for thy step ! " 
 
 And, with his blind eyes seeking thirstly the face so well beloved, on which 
 they could not look, even to take one farewell gaze, a deep drawn sigh heaved 
 the heart that had been bound under its iron bonds of silence for so long, the 
 weary limbs stretched outward as a worn wayfarer's stretch upon a bed of rest, 
 and, in a hush of stillness as the tempest lulled, the long life of pain was ended. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 " KING OVER HIMSELF." 
 
 THERE was a great banquet in the city of London, a banquet held chiefly 
 in honor of the brilliant statesman, the popular favorite, who had quelled the 
 riots of the North with so fearless a courage, so admirable an address, who 
 was the keystone of his party, the master-mind of his cabinet, the inspirer of his 
 colleagues, the triumphant and assured possesser of that virtue of Success which 
 vouches for, and which confers, all other virtues in the world's sight. The 
 gorgeous barbarism, the heavy splendor, the ill-assorted costly food, the pon- 
 derous elephantine festivity, were in his honor; the seas of wine flowed for his 
 name; the civic dignities were gathered for his sake; the words he spoke were 
 treasured as though they were pearls and rubbies; the great capital crowned 
 him, and would have none other than him. These things wearied other men; 
 this pomp, so coarse and so senseless and so repeated in their lives, sickened 
 most whom it caressed as it caressed him; but on Trevenna it never palled. 
 The rich and racy temper in him never lost its relish for the comedy of life; 
 and the vain-glorious pleasure of his victories was never sated by the repetitions 
 that assured him of them. The Ave Imperator was always music on his ear, 
 whatever voices shouted it; the sense of his own achievement was ever delight- 
 ful to his heart, and was never more fully realized than when there were about 
 him those public celebrations of it, the feasting and cheering and toasting and
 
 50G QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 servile prostrating which to most statesmen are the hardest and most hateful 
 penalty of power, but in which he took an unflagging and uneffected pleasure 
 with every fresh assurance of his celebrity that they brought him. His part in 
 the mighty farce was played with the elastic vivacity, the genuine enjoyment, 
 of a jovial humorist; it had no assumption in it, for it was literally incessant 
 amusement and infinite jest to him; and the good humor, the mirth, and vital- 
 ity with which he came ever among the people, and went through all the course 
 of public homage and public conviviality, were but the cordial expression of the 
 temper with which he met life. 
 
 To-night, at the civic dinner given in his honor, all eyes turned on him, 
 acclamations had welcomed his entrance, no distinction was held sufficient for 
 such a guest, and compliment and tribute and reverential admiration were 
 poured on him in the speeches that toasted his name and quoted his acts, his 
 fame, his ever-growing strength, his master-intellect, his place in the councils 
 and in the love of the nation; and he enjoyed with all a wit's keen relish the 
 verbiage and the hyperbole and the cant, and enjoyed but the more for them 
 the ascendency he held, the fearless footing he had made, the ambitions crowned 
 to their apex, and the future of ambitions even higher yet, which had come to 
 the force of his hand, to the compelling of his genius. Of a truth he was a great 
 man, and he knew it; he had brought to his conquest such patience and such 
 qualities as only great men poccess; he was a giant whose tread was. ever certain, 
 who eyes ever saw beyond his fellows, whose armor was ever bright, whose 
 grasp was ever sure. It was natural that on the breathless, pushing, toiling 
 weaknesses of the liliputians around him he should look with a Rabelaisan 
 laugh, with a Sullan contemptuousness of unflinching and unsparing victory. 
 
 The banquet ended somewhat early; for a measure of considerable moment 
 was passing, a measure framed and carried through two readings by himself, 
 and its third reading was to take place with the present night. The crowded 
 feast had given him all the idolatry and applause of the city of London, given 
 it with wines, and massive meats, and soups, and sauces, and gold plate, and 
 interminable speeches, as is its custom in that strange antithetical relic of bar- 
 barism which must gluttonously feed what it intellectually admires; and from it 
 he went to the arena of his proudest conquest, to the field in which it is so hard 
 to keep a footing when against the wrestler is flung the stone "adventurer," to 
 the place where many mediocrities pass muster, but where a combination of 
 qualities the most difficult to gain and the most rarely met in unison can 
 alone achieve and sustain a permanent and high success. If any had asked 
 him to what crown among his many crowns he attached the proudest value, he 
 would have answered, and answered rightly, to the sway that he had mastered 
 over the House of Commons. 
 
 As he drove to Westminster, the carriage rolled passed the statue of Philip
 
 CHANDOS, 507 
 
 Chandos, at which, going and coming from the councils of his country, he 
 oftentimes glanced with the sweetness of his attainments made sweeter by the 
 look he cast at that colossal marble, which he would banter and talk to and 
 jeer at with that dash of buffoonery which mingled with the virile sagacious 
 force of his.nature as it has mingled with many a great man's acumen. 
 
 "Ah, tres-cher! " he murmured to himself now, with a cigar in his teeth, as 
 he caught sight of it in the gaslight, "the Mad Duke's been shot in a brawl 
 they say, in the only end fit for him. /will have your Clarencieux, now. 
 Crash shall go the old oaks, and we'll smelt down the last marquis's coronet 
 into a hunting-cup for me to drink out of; my hounds should have their mash 
 in it, only the nation might think me insane. Is there anything you particu- 
 larly loved there, I wonder ? If there were, it should, be flung in the fire. 
 The great hall was your beggared successor's special pride. Well, we'll burn 
 it down when I get there, by accident on purpose! A flue too hot will soon 
 lay its glories in ashes. Tout vient a point a qui salt attendre." 
 
 All things had come to his hand, and ripened there to a marvellous harvest; 
 but even the exultation of success and the gravity of power had not changed in 
 him the womanlike avidity of hatred, the grotesque rapacity of spoliation, 
 which he still cherished against the inanimate things of gold and silver and 
 stone and wood which had been the household gods of the race he cursed. It 
 remained the single weakness in a steel-clad life. 
 
 As he entered the House, to which he had once come on suffrage, and 
 which he had made the scene of as complete a triumph as the perseverance 
 and the ability of man ever wrung from hostile fortune and hostile faction, all 
 eyes turned eagerly on him. There was the murmur of welcome and im- 
 patience; the benches were all full, at midnight, with a crowded and heated 
 audience. His measure had been received with a vehement partisanship, 
 violence in opposition, violence in alliance; and his coming was watched for 
 at once with irritation and anxiety. He made his way to his seat, cool, keen, 
 bright, as he would have gone alike to be crowned as a king or be hanged as 
 a scoundrel. Moments of emergency were the tonics that he loved best, the wine 
 that gave the fullest flavor of his life; and none could have arrived to him that 
 would ever have found him unprepared, none save one which to-night waited 
 for him. 
 
 Other members had risen as he entered, but there were loud imperious cries 
 for his name; the Commons were in one of their turbulent tempers, when they 
 riot like ill-broke hounds, and they would have none other than the man who had 
 learned to play upon their varying moods as a skilled hand plays on an organ. 
 He had brought his measure through the tempestuous surf of two readings; 
 it was now for him to ride it through the last breakers and pass it into the 
 haven by which it would become a law. It was thought strangely careless that
 
 508 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 he should be late on such a night; but this was the temper of the man, to be 
 daringly independent at all hazards, and to take his revenge on a party that 
 had been glad of him, but that had never fairly relished his alliance, by 
 caprices which made them wait his pleasure, which kept them ever uncertain of 
 his intentions, and for which his popularity gave him full and free immunity. 
 
 As he rose to speak, the winged words paused on his lips, his eyes grew 
 fixed with a set, astonished gaze; he stood for a moment silent, with his hand 
 lying on the rail; his glance met that of Chandos. 
 
 Among the nobles and the strangers who had come down to listen to the de- 
 bate, he saw the form that he had once seen senseless and strengthless on the 
 wretched pallet in a Paris garret, where he had watched the throbbing of the 
 heart under the naked breast, and had thought that he would have well loved 
 to still it forever with an inch of steel, had not a wider torture been found in 
 letting it beat on to suffer. The burden of the years seemed fallen from 
 Chandos, and to him had returned, though saddened and grave with thought, 
 and with a melancholy that would never now wholly pass away, much of the 
 proud, sun-lightened beauty of his early manhood. The vivid sweetness of 
 passion was once more his; the inheritance of his fathers was recovered; the 
 might of avenging justice had been given to his hand; above all, he was an 
 exile no more. He looked as he had looked in the days of the past. 
 
 The animal thirst to kill, of which he had spoken, had risen; his veins 
 seemed to run fire; there was a wild triumph in his blood even while the heart- 
 sickness at his traitor's baseness was upon him. It was his to avenge, to 
 chastise, to pay back a lifelong wrong, to unmask a lifelong infamy, to hurl his 
 foe from the purples of power and point out in the sight of the people the 
 plague-spot on the breast of the man they caressed. It was his, this ven- 
 geance which would cast his traitor down, in the midst of the fulness of life, 
 from the height of his throned successes. It was his at last, this power denied 
 so long, which should pierce the bronze of his enemy's laughing mockery and 
 shatter to dust the adamant of his invulnerable strength. It was his at last, 
 this avenging might which should reach even the brute heart that had seemed 
 of granite, callous to feel, impenetrable to strike. And he felt drunk with it 
 as with alcohol; he felt that its worst work would never plough deep enough, 
 never blast wide enough. 
 
 " O God," he thought, " how can vengeance enough strike him ? None can 
 give me back all that he killed forever ! ' Just to the end.' He shall have 
 justice, the justice of the old law, a 'life for a life.' " 
 
 And, as their eyes met, the chill of the first fear his life had ever known 
 passed over Trevenna; a vague, shapeless horror seized him; he knew that 
 never would the disinherited have returned to his forsaken land unless the 
 doom of banishment had been taken from him, unless some power of all that
 
 CHAN DOS. 509 
 
 he had been dispossessed of had recoiled back into his grasp. For the moment 
 one brief, fleeting, uncounted second he stood paralyzed there, the un- 
 formed dread, the venomous hatred in him making him forgetful of all, save 
 the eyes that were turned on him, eyes that seemed to quote against him the 
 whole history of his life. He had no conscience, he had no shame, he had 
 never known what fear was, and he had ascended to an eminence from which 
 he would have defied the force of the world to eject him; and yet in that single 
 instant a terror scarce less keen, less ghastly, than that which an assassin 
 would feel at sight of the living form of the prey he had left for dead came on him, 
 as in the lighted assembly, in the midnight silence in which his own words were 
 awaited he saw the face of Chandos. It passed away almost as instantaneously 
 as it had moved him; the bold audacity, the dauntless courage, the caustic 
 mirth, the mocking triumph of his temper reasserted themselves; instantly, ere 
 any others had had space to note the momentary pause, and the momentary 
 paralysis which had arrested the eloquence on his lips and chained his gaze to 
 the features of the man whom he had wronged, he was himself again; he recov- 
 ered the shaken balance of his priceless coolness; he looked across the long 
 space parting him from his antagonist with a full, firm, laughing insolence in 
 the sunny bravery of his blue eyes; his voice rolled out on the hushing mur- 
 murs and the broken whispers of the great gathering, mellow, resonant, far- 
 reaching as a clarion, clear as though each syllable were told out on a silver 
 drum. 
 
 The man he hated was before him; the man in whom he had seen incarnated 
 all the things against which his life had been arrayed, all the wrongs that he 
 cherished till the cockatrice brood had bred a giant vengeance; the man whom 
 he hated but the more, the more he injured him; the man whom he best loved, 
 of any in the world, should see the eminence, the power, the sovereignty which 
 he the adventurer, the outsider had aspired to and won. Chandos was 
 before him, witness of his sway, spectator of his triumph, hearer of his words. 
 He swore in his teeth, even in that moment when their glance first met, that 
 oratory and triumph and sway should never be so victorious as they should be 
 to-night; that he would fight as he had never fought before, that he would win 
 as he had never won, this chamber should ring with acclamations for him as it 
 had never yet rung with them, favored and crowned there though he was. The 
 one whom of all others in the breadth of the empires he would have chosen as 
 the beholder of his fame fronted him. To Trevenna the hour was as it was to 
 Sulla when the great Desert King whom he had conquered and weighted with 
 chains, and brought from the golden suns and royal freedom of his own warm 
 land to the bath of ice of the Tullianum, stood fettered to behold the ovation 
 given to the welcomed victor of the Jugurthine War. 
 
 To Trevenna it was the crown of the edifice that his own mighty patience
 
 510 O UIDA ' S WORKS. 
 
 and unresting brain had raised out of the dust and ashes of a banned and name- 
 less life, when into his own arena, before his own idolaters, the man in whom 
 the whole passions of that life had seen their deepest hate embodied came to 
 behold his triumph. Though he should have died for it with the dawn, he 
 would have made that night the night of his supreme success, or perished. 
 There was in him the temper which in old days made men take oath to their 
 gods to gain the battle though they should, as its price, be cast headlong to 
 the foe. In that moment he rose beyond egotism into something infinitely 
 grander; in that moment, however guilty, he was great. 
 
 And he spoke greatly. 
 
 The fire of personal hate, the weakness of personal triumph, did but serve 
 as spur and as stimulant to the genius in him. To know that the eyes of Chan- 
 dos looked on him was to lash his strength into tenfold performance; to know 
 that Chandos heard his words was to form them into tenfold eloquence. It 
 was not only to invective, to rehetoric, that he rose; but the brilliance of 
 thought, the closeness of argument, the fineness of subtlety, the vastness of 
 memory, were beyond compare. Men who had held him a master ere this lis- 
 tened breathless, and marvelled that even they never had known what his power 
 could be. Wit, reason, learning, ralliery, wisdom, and logic were pressed, turn 
 by turn, into his service, and used with such oratory as had rarely rung through 
 that chamber. He was what he had never been; he surpassed all that he ever 
 achieved; and when his last words closed, thunder on thunder of applause 
 rolled out as in the days when Sheridan bewitched or Chatham awed the listen- 
 ing and enchanted crowds. Once his eyes flashed on Chandos as the cheers 
 reeled through the body of the House; no other caught that glance in which 
 the victory of a lifetime was expressed. 
 
 He to whom it was given saw it; and his head sank slightly; darkness 
 gathered over his face; the thought of his heart was bitter, less in that mo- 
 ment for himself than of mankind. He thought, " How great, to be so vile! " 
 
 That night was the proudest of John Trevenna's triumphs. 
 
 The bill passed, carried by an overwhelming majority, which secured 
 stability to the Treasury benches and sealed the trust of the nation in them. 
 If he had been high in men's fame and favor before, he was unapproached 
 now, as on their tongues through the whole of the late night his name and his 
 genius alone were spoken. For it had been genius to which he had risen, genius 
 that had given the fire to his words, the persuasion to his speech, the resistless 
 force to his command, that had borne him out of himself into that loftier power 
 which makes of men as they listen the reeds that sway to the wind of the magi- 
 cal voice, genius that had wakened in him under the consciousness of one 
 glance that watched, of one ear that heard. And for once, in its pride and its 
 dominion, caution, and coolness slightly forsook him; his eyes glittered, his
 
 CHAN DOS. Dll 
 
 forehead was flushed, his smile laughed as one warmed with wine, as he ivent 
 out to the night. 
 
 As the air of the dawn blew on his face, his shoulder was grasped by a 
 hand that forced him forward. Chandos' words were spoken low on his ear: 
 
 " Out yonder! come in peace, or I shall forget myself, and deal with you 
 before the men you fool." 
 
 Trevenna gave one swift glance upward. Though bold to the core with a 
 leonine courage, he shrank, and quailed, and sickened. That one glance told 
 him more than hours could have spoken. He felt as though a knife had been 
 plunged and plunged again into his heart, seeking the life and draining the 
 blood. 
 
 " Lead on ! " he said, between his teeth; "lead on, whatever you want. 
 You and I need not waste pretty words, beau sire." 
 
 He felt the hand that was on his shoulder clench closer and closer till it 
 tightened like an iron clasp. In the darkness, through the throngs, under the 
 fitful glare of the gas, the pressure of that hand forced him away out of the 
 masses and the noise and the tumult of the streets, down into the quiet of the 
 cloisters, where the gray beauty of the Abbey rose in the haze of the starless 
 mists of earliest dawn. Then, where they stood alone under the darkling pile, 
 that clasp loosed its hold and flung him backwards as men fling snakes off their 
 wrist. Chandos faced him in the dim gray solitude; the passions that had been 
 held in rein whilst he watched for his foe broke loose as he stood alone with the 
 man whose present held so proud an eminence, whose past he had traced into 
 such sinks of villany, whose favor was so sightless in the nation's sight, whose 
 guilt had been so vile to net, and pierce and drain, and rob, and ruin him. 
 
 "You have fooled your world for the last time to-night; with another day it 
 will know you as you are, you usurer who traded in your friends' worst needs ! " 
 
 The words cut the air like the cords of a scourge lead-weighted. In that 
 instant it was all he could do not to stamp out under his feet the life before him, 
 as men tread out an unclean beast whose breath is poison. Ere the words were 
 spoken, Trevenna had known that the day of his retribution had come to him, 
 a day his acumen had never foreseen, a day his skill had never forecast. 
 One glance had told him that his prey had changed to his accuser, that the 
 man he had exiled and beggared and reviled had come back to take his ven- 
 geance. For a moment the sickness of the dispair that he had often dealt, and 
 and often laughed at, blinded him, and made the pale shadow of a stormy dawn 
 reel round him; the next, his blood rose before peril, and his wit grew but 
 keener in danger. He planted himself firmly, with his arms folded across his 
 chest. 
 
 "We need not waste pretty words, but we need not use such ugly ones," he 
 said, coolly. " If you called me out to take libel, why there are courts in
 
 512 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 which you'll have to make it good. You always were bitter about my success; 
 but you needn't be tragic. You're savage, I suppose, because the Mad Duke's 
 dead, and I shall get my way and buy up Clarencieux for auld lang syne ! " 
 
 Chandos' hands fell once more on both his shoulders, swaying him back, 
 and holding him motionless there, as they had held the frail form of the musi- 
 cian under the marble Crucifixion at Venice. In the gloom his eyes turned 
 down into his foe's; his face was darkly flushed and mercilessly set, as though 
 it were cast in stone: the muscles swelled like cords upon his arms and throat. 
 He could have strangled this vampire that had drained all the best life of his 
 youth ! the worst chastisement that he could ever wreak was so tardy, so 
 tame, so vain, so ill-proportioned, besides the vastness of his wrongs ! 
 
 "Speak one more lie, and I shall kill you. Clarencieux is mine; but for 
 your infamy, I had never lost it. Silence ! silence, I tell you, or I shall choke 
 you like a dog ! The Jew who was your victim and your tool confessed all to 
 me in his dying hour. Not a thing in your life is hidden from me; not a 
 thread in your network of villany has escaped me. You are free of the law, 
 perhaps, you were too wise to break it in the letter; but the world shall know 
 you as I know you; the world shall be your judge and my avenger. I will give 
 you justice, pure justice. I will unmask you as you are, and leave the rest to 
 follow. The men you ruined, the friends you traded in, the usuries that made 
 your wealth, the frauds you worked under a legal shield, the treacherous, 
 shameless, accursed trade you drove in the lives of those who trusted you and fed 
 you and sheltered you, I shall leave- my vengeance to them; they will repay 
 it more utterly than I could now if I laid you dead, like the snake you 
 are ! " 
 
 Where John Trevenna stood, his bright and fearless face grew white as a 
 woman's, a tremor shook him as the wind shakes a leaf, a cold sweat was dank 
 on his forehead: he answered nothing; he was too wise to dream of vain denial, 
 too bold still to betray terror; but he knew that he had fallen into the power of 
 the one living man whose most merciless vengeance would be but sheer and 
 simple justice, he knew that the serpent of his unsparing hate had recoiled and 
 fastened its venomous fangs into his own veins; he jcnew that the antagonist 
 who stood above him, holding him there in that grasp of steel, would speak no 
 more than he had power to work out to the uttermost latter; he knew that 
 from that hour, at Chandos' will and choice, the magnificent superstructure of 
 his proud ambitions would crumble like a toy of sand, and the bead-roll of his 
 riches and his dignities wither like a scroll in fire under the scorch of shame. 
 The agony and desolation of a lifetime were pressed into that one instant, which 
 seemed eternity. 
 
 Yet the courage in him neither cowed nor pleaded. " It is easy to put lies 
 in dead men's mouths! " he said, with his old insolence, with his old coolness;
 
 CHAN DOS. 513 
 
 "and Jews have borne false witness since the world began. It will take a little 
 more than a vamped-up slander to unseat me, mon beau monsieur! " 
 
 Chandos swayed him to and fro as though he were a child. The voice, the 
 glance, the presence of his enemy maddened him; he feared the work of his 
 own passions; he felt drunk with the delirium of hate and wrong. 
 
 " Silence! if you care for your own life, you traitor, who ate my bread 
 and betrayed me, who took my shelter, and robbed me! The commerce you 
 drove in men's miseries, the friends you netted into your bondage, the thefts 
 that made up your wealth, the secrets you stole to trade in, the slaves you ruled 
 with your own tyrannies, I 'know them; with another day, the world will know 
 them through me. Listen ! All the evil you churned into gold with that 
 dead Hebrew for your tool, all the years that you throve on that barter of men's 
 disgrace and men's fears, all the iniquities that went to make up your rise into 
 wealth, all the tortures you dealt on the servant who served you so faithfully, 
 when, to screen your own crime, you sent him out in old age among felons, all 
 the shame and sin, of your past, I know, and can prove to disgrace you for- 
 ever. I warn you; I will not have so much likeness with you, as to steal on 
 you, even in justice, like a thief in the night; but as God lives if the law 
 fail to give me redress, I will so blast your name through all Europe, that the 
 foulest criminal who hides for a murder shall be held to be worthier than you, 
 you who slew like Iscariot, never knowing Iscariot's remorse. Sum up the 
 lives you destroyed; they will be your accusers, they will be my avengers! " 
 
 The breathless magnificence of the fiery wrath was poured out on the hush 
 of the night; the moment in which every joy and power he had possessed had 
 been struck down by his enemy's hand was dealt back at last, as with one 
 blow he shivered to the dust the honors, the dignities, the ambitions, the vic- 
 torious and secure successes of the career that had so bitterly mocked, so 
 mercilessly cursed, his own. 
 
 Trevenna staggered slightly, and an oath of prurient blasphemy was crashed 
 through the locked firmness of his clenched teeth. He saw at a glance how 
 he had been given over to his antagonist's power; he knew without words how 
 out of the multitude of his unmatched successes one rope-strand had given 
 away and dragged the whole superb edifice of a life's labor with it He never 
 denied : he was too keen to sham a guiltlessness that would have availed noth- 
 ing save to render him contemptible; he never gave a sign of terror: he was 
 too bold not even in that moment to retain his courage. But he laughed, a 
 hard rasped, bitter laugh, that sounded horribly on the silence. In that instant 
 of supreme peril, of utter desolation, the keenest pang to him was not even his 
 own extremity, his own shame, but was the restoration of the disinherited to 
 the land of his birth and of his love; it was stranger still, though part and par- 
 cel of his nature, that the cynic humor of his temper found a broad farcical 
 
 VOL. III. 17
 
 514 O UIDAS WORKS. 
 
 mockery of himself in the ruin that recoiled on him in the hour of the most 
 splendid domination his genius had ever yet attained. 
 
 He saw that the man he had wronged knew how he had wronged him; he 
 saw that enough had been told of the ruined lives which had been the stones to 
 upbuild the stately temple of his celebrity and his eminence, to drive him out 
 forever a dishonored outlaw; but he laughed for all that, and his eyes, glitter- 
 ing like blue steel through the mists, met those of Chandos without flinching. 
 
 " Life's a see-saw; I always said so. Are you going to ride atop again ? 
 Scarcely fair; you fooled away such lordly chances ! " 
 
 " I fooled away my faith, and gave it to a liar and a trickster, who took my 
 hand in friendship while he stabbed me in the back ! " 
 
 " Damn you ! I hated you; I never said I didn't. I cursed you ' in your 
 uprising and your downlying,' as the ' man after God's own heart ' cursed his 
 enemies." 
 
 " And why ? How had I ever wronged you ? " 
 
 " Did you never guess ? " 
 
 He spoke with the snarl of a bulldog at bay; an agony was on him as intense 
 as the worst torture he had ever dealt to others; but the firmness of his attitude 
 never changed, and his voice, though bitter as gall, never shook. 
 
 Chandos' eyes dwelt on him with the kingly lustre of scorn with which the 
 eyes of Viriathus might have looked upon the traitor lieges who sold him for 
 Roman gold to Roman steel. 
 
 " You ate my bread, and betrayed me; it was enough to beget your hate." 
 
 Wider rebuke no words ever uttered. 
 
 Under them, for the instant of their utterance, a red flush burnt in Tre- 
 venna's face, a pang of shame smote a shameless heart. The memory of both 
 went backward to that distant time when no gift had been too great for the 
 royal largesse of the one to lavish on the other, whose only coin of requital had 
 been treachery. 
 
 Trevenna's white, close-shut lips laughed slightly with the ironic truth which 
 he had never spared himself. 
 
 "Well, that was enough, more than enough. We're all cuckoos at soul, 
 and kick out those who feed us. But my hate went further back than that. I 
 hated you when you were a child, and I trampled out your sweetmeats in the 
 street. I hated you when I was an ugly young clown, and you rode with your 
 servants after you and your gold hair a-flying in the wind. I hated you when 
 you were a baby-aristocrat, when you were a boy-patrician. I hated your 
 laugh, and your voice, and your womanish beauty; and I swore to pull you 
 down and get up in your place, I cursed you then as I curse you now ! " 
 
 The intense virulence that ran through the words left no doubt of their 
 veracity.
 
 CHAN DOS. 515 
 
 Chandos, where he stood, gazed at htm mute with amaze; to his own knowl- 
 edge, he had never beheld this enemy of his whole life until the days of his 
 young manhood, when with his gold he had released from a debtor's prison one 
 who had proved the tempter and destroyer of all he owned on earth. This 
 animosity that stretched out to the childish years of his bright infancy stole on 
 him like the cold, clinging, sickly coils of an asp. 
 
 "Are you a madman?" he said, under his breath. " In my childhood! 
 how could I wrong you then ? " 
 
 Trevenna looked at him doggedly, with a red sullen fire in his blue eyes, 
 like the angry flame in a mastiff's eyeballs. It was deadly as death to him to 
 part with that one secret, the secret of his life. 
 
 "Answer me! answer! or, by God, I shall do worse to you! Why was it?" 
 
 " Because I was your father's bastard! " 
 
 The reply left Trevenna's lips very slowly; to him it was as the drawing of 
 a jagged steel out of a deep festering wound. 
 
 His listener fell back as though a shot had struck him, his face death-white, 
 his eyes dilated with abhorrence. 
 
 "Great God! My father's " 
 
 Trevenna laughed, a short, contemptuous laugh. 
 
 " Ay! why not ? You dainty gentlemen never remember your illegitimate 
 sons and brothers that are flung off to go to hell as they will; but they may 
 crop up awkwardly in spite of you. They are unowned mongrels, banned 
 before they're born; but they've the same blood in them as you have." 
 
 Chandos breathed heavily; a sickening loathing was upon him. 
 
 " It is false! false as your own life! a fraud vamped up to to cover your 
 own villany. You have no bond of blood with mine! " 
 
 " But for that bond of blood, you would have been free from me. I have 
 as much of your ancestry in me as you have." 
 
 The words were dogged, but they bore truth with them. Chandos lifted 
 his arm with an involuntary gesture to silence with a blow the lips that claimed 
 kinship with him. 
 
 "You hound! you dare to say that Philip Chandos " 
 
 " Was my father just as much as he was yours. Curse him and his memory 
 both! Pshaw! You can strike me if you like; I only say the truth. Look 
 here. I loved my mother; I never loved anything else; even mongrels 
 love their dams, you know! and she was one of your father's mistresses. 
 He paid her off when he married a duke's daughter, paid handsomely, 
 that I don't deny; but she never forgot nor forgave, and she trained me to 
 avenge her. She used to take and show me you in all your grace and your lux- 
 ury, and she would say in my ear, ' There is your father's heir: when you are 
 both men, make him change places with you.' I was taught to hate and destroy
 
 516 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 you, as other boys are taught their prayers. I did it thoroughly, I fancy. I'd 
 vengeance for a foster-nurse, and sucked hate as Caligula sucked blood: both 
 Caligula and I took to the milk kindly ! I had as much of the famous ' Claren- 
 cieux race' in me as you had; and you had all the gifts of the gods while I was 
 a nameless cross-breed cur, only bred to be kicked to the streets. You won the 
 charoit-race, while the people shouted, ' A patrician ! ' / was sent out to 
 wrestle with the base-born in the Ring of Cynosarges. Well, I swore with 
 Themistocles to drag in the Eupatrid to wrestle with the Bastard, and teach him 
 that the Bastard could throw him. Don't you know now why I hated you ? " 
 
 Chandos stood silent, livid, breathless; this endless hate borne to him from 
 his birth up seemed to press on him with a weight like granite; this kinship 
 claimed to him by the traitor, whose guilt he would have compassed heaven and 
 earth to have exposed and have arraigned, revolted him with a loathing horror. 
 
 " Why ? why ? " he echoed, mechanically. " No ! you are only viler than 
 I knew before. What wrong had I ever wrought you ? " 
 
 " How had Abel wronged Cain ? By having the favor of earth and heaven? " 
 said Trevenna between his teeth, that were still tight-shut. " I hated you be- 
 cause I was not as you were. Every good you did me, every gift you gave me, 
 every liberality that marked you the noble and I the adventurer, you the pa- 
 tron and I the debtor, only made me hate you the more, only made me swear 
 the more to tempt and hunt and drag you down, and see your pride in the dust, 
 and your heritage given to the spoilers, my brilliant, careless, kingly brother /" 
 
 The word hissed through the stillness of the dawn with the lust of a Cain 
 centred in it. If a word could have slain, that word should have slaughtered 
 with the slaughter of Cain. 
 
 Chandos shivered as he heard it, such a shiver as will pass through the 
 bravest blood when the gleam of an assassin's knife flashes out through the 
 gloom. The bond that his vilest foe claimed to him seemed to taint and shame 
 him with its own pollution. 
 
 " This cuts you hard ! Come ! that is a comfort ! I have some vengeance 
 yet, then. You can't break your kinship ! But you are just; you will be just 
 to me," pursued Trevenna. " I knew that I had the making of a great man in 
 me, and I was born into the world cursed beforehand as a harlot's son whom 
 every fool could jibe at. I knew that I had the brain and strength and the 
 power to reach the highest ambitions, and I found myself clogged at the start- 
 ing-point with the ton-weight of bastardy. I was shut out from every fair 
 chance, because my mother had worn no gold toy on her ringer; my whole ex- 
 istence was damned, because a bar sinister stretched across it. The blot on 
 my birth, as idiots call it, was the devil that tempted me; and no gifts and no 
 good faith of yours could touch me while you remained what I envied: they 
 only made me hate you the more, because now and then they burned down
 
 CHAN DOS. 517 
 
 into what cant will call Conscience. I hated the world; I hated your order; I 
 hated your race and your house, and all things that were yours. I swore that I 
 would win in the teeth of it all; I swore that I would conquer, cost what it 
 should. I was guilty, you'd say; pshaw ! what of that? ' He who wins is the 
 saint; he who loses, the sinner.' What did I care for guilt, so long as I once 
 had success? I proved the mettle I was made of; I carved my own fortunes; 
 I trod down my own shame under foot so that none ever guessed it; I vindi- 
 cated my own rights against all the world. I triumphed: what else mattered 
 to me?" 
 
 There was a certain dauntless grandeur in the words, despite all the shame- 
 less hardihood, the brutalized idolatry of self, that ran in them; his means had 
 been vile, but his indomitable resolve had its element of greatness, and the hour 
 of his direst extremity could not make this man a coward. There was that in 
 the words which, foul as they were to himself, touched Chandos to the same 
 passionate regret for his vileness of nature that ran side by side with this 
 splendor of courage, as had moved him when he listened to the genius of the 
 traitor whose secret villanies he came to unmask and avenge. 
 
 " Oh, Christ ! " he cried involuntarily, " with so much greatness, how could 
 you sink into such utter shame ! Why have hated and tortured me ? Why 
 not have trusted me?" 
 
 For the moment, over Trevenna's face a softer, better looked passed, though 
 it died instantly. This man, whom he had wrought worse work on than mur- 
 derers do, knew the depths of his iniquity, and yet had a noble regret for him ? 
 
 "Why? Don't you know what hate is, that you ask?" he said, savagely. 
 " Oh, I don't lie to you now, because you have got me at last in your power ? 
 I would not recall one thing in the past if I could. You suffered: I would 
 suffer a hell myself to know that. You have your Clarencieux back ? Well, 
 that is more bitter to me than the shame that you threaten. But you will never 
 have back the years that I ruined ! " 
 
 Chandos moved to him with a sudden impulse, as a Ijon moves to spring. 
 
 " Are you devil incarnate ? God ! can you face me now and think without 
 one pang of remorse of all you robbed of me forever ? My wealth, my treas- 
 ures, my lands, were as nothing; it was the years that you killed, the youth 
 that you murdered, the faith that you withered, that you can never restore! I 
 would forgive you the gold that you stole, and the riches you scattered; but 
 the life that you slew in me, never! " 
 
 He turned away; he was sick at heart, and he could not bear to look on the 
 face of this man who had betrayed him as Judas betrayed, and now claimed 
 the kinship of blood. 
 
 Trevenna placed himself in his path. 
 
 " One word. You will take your vengeance ? "
 
 518 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 " I will have justice. You know its measure!" 
 
 "Very well! I thank you for your warning. I shall be dead before the 
 sun rises. I do not wait for disgrace while the world holds an ounce of lead 
 in it." 
 
 It was no empty menace, no stage-trick of artifice, no piece of melodrame: 
 it was a set and firm resolve. He who had counted no cost all his life through 
 to attain triumph, would not have counted a death-pang to escape defeat. 
 
 Chandos' face was dark and weary beyond words, as the paleness of the 
 early dawn shone on it. 
 
 "You will end a traitor's life by a suicide's death? So be it: so died 
 Iscariot." 
 
 Trevenna said nothing in either prayer or plea; he stood with a bold, dogged 
 determination on the features that had a few moments ago flushed with victo- 
 rious pride and lightened with the glow of intellect. He was made of too tough 
 a courage, too bright a temper, to know a coward's fear of death; and death to 
 him meant only annihilation, and conveyed no thought of a possible " here- 
 after." Yet, as he felt the course of the brave blood through his veins, the 
 strength of the virile lite in his limbs, as he felt the might and force of his 
 brain, and the power of his genius to achieve, an anguish passing any physical 
 pain or poltroon's terror came upon him. 
 
 " To kill all that, while fools live on, and beget fools by the million ! " he 
 said, ferociously, in his ground teeth. 
 
 It was the man's involuntary homage to his own intellect, his irrepressible 
 longing to save, not his body from its dissolution, but his mind from its ex- 
 tinction. It was a suffering that had its dignity; it was a regret far higher and 
 far nobler than a mere regret for the loss of life. 
 
 Chandos stood silent, his face white and set. He thought how mercilessly 
 his foe had done his best to stamp out all intellect and peace and power from 
 his own existence, how brutally he had doomed him to perish like a dog in 
 the years of his youth, in the brilliance of his gladness. Trevenna would have 
 but the fate himself that he had dealt with an unsparing hand. It was no more 
 than justice, tardy and insufficient justice, take it at its widest. He lifted his 
 eyes, and turned them full upon his betrayer. 
 
 " Did you ever remember that with me ? " 
 
 The one reproach struck a throb that was near akin to shame from the 
 mailed callousness of Trevenna's conscience; but his gaze did not flinch. 
 
 " No," he said, sullenly, " I never did. I would have killed you a thou- 
 sand times, if you could have died a thousand deaths. You are right enough; 
 I don't deny it. You only take blood for blood." 
 
 " I do not take even that. I but give you to the world's chastisement, that 
 the world may know what it harbors."
 
 CHANDOS. 519 
 
 " Call it what name you like ! Words matter nothing. You will have your 
 vengeance, a swift one, but a sure. See here, Ernest Chandos. You know 
 what I am, what I have been. You have seen how I could keep hold of one 
 purpose through a lifetime; you have seen what eminence and what power I 
 have gained in the teeth of all arrayed against me. And you know, as we 
 stand here to-night, that I will never live for one taste of Defeat. I don't 
 complain; I don't plead, not I ! You are acting fairly enough. Only put 
 no disguise on it. Let us understand one another. You will take your ven- 
 geance, of course, since you have got one; but you may be sure as we both 
 live to-night that you shall only find my dead body to give to the public to kick 
 and to strip. That's all. It is good Hebrew law, a life for a life. You've 
 fair title to follow it Only, know what I mean to do; I shall die in an 
 hour." 
 
 There was no quiver in his voice; there was no tone of entreaty: he spoke 
 resolutely, coolly; but to the uttermost iota he meant what he said, and his own 
 death was as sure as though he had plunged a knife in his entrails. Chandos 
 shuddered as he heard. All his life through, the web of Trevenna's subtlety 
 had encompassed him, and it netted him now. He had a justice to do, in 
 which the rights of the world met the rights of his own vengeance; and by it he 
 would drive out this man, who claimed the same blood as his own, to a suicide's 
 grave, by it he was made to stand and to feel as a murderer ! He knew that 
 the hour which should find his traitor self-slaughtered would be but late and 
 meet chastisement of a lifetime's triumphant guilt; and the burden of that 
 slaughter was flung on his hands, so that, giving to justice its course and its 
 due, he was weighted with the life that through justice would fall. 
 
 " So be it ! " he said in his throat; "if you die for your crimes, what is that 
 to me ? Murderers die for theirs; your brute hatred has been viler than any 
 murderer's single stroke." 
 
 " Perhaps so! Well, you can hang me, when I am dead, as high as Haman; 
 but you shall never pillory me alive. You give me my death-warrant, and I 
 daresay it's just enough; only remember it's the blood of the man that lies 
 yonder you shed, and but for that blood you had never had my hate or envy. 
 You are just; you'll be just even to me, and put so much down to the credit 
 side when you tell the world of my wickedness. Farewell! If you are 
 to reign again at Clarencieux, tell your heir, when you have one, that the 
 Bastard of your House beat you hollow till he was betrayed by a Jew's fluke, 
 and that even when he was beaten he showed himself still of your cursed race, 
 and died game to the last." 
 
 There was not a touch of entreaty or of shrinking in the firm, contemptuous 
 words; he laughed shortly, as he ended them, and turned away. The caustic 
 mirth, the ironic audacity of his temper, found a terrible satire in his own fall,
 
 520 OUIDAS WORKS. 
 
 and triumphed still in the thought of how long and how proudly he had 
 vanquished the race against which he had pitted himself. 
 
 Chandos stood motionless; his forehead was wet with dew; he breathed 
 heavily in the gray twilight, out of whose mists the beauty of the great pile 
 where his father's ashes lay rose dim and shadowy, and mighty as the dead it 
 guarded. 
 
 " Just to the end." 
 
 The dying words of the Hebrew's blessing came back upon his memory. 
 Which was justice ? to yield up the traitor to the death he merited and the 
 obloquy he had earned, or to remember the birth and the breeding that 
 from its first hour had stained and warped the strong tree which without their 
 fatal bias might have grown up straight and goodly and rich in fruit? 
 Vengeance lay in the hollow of his hand, to slay with or to spare. With the 
 dawn this man would perish, perish justly in late-dealt retribution for a long 
 career of guilt, of treachery, of base and pitiless hate. He merited a felon's 
 death; let him drift on to a suicide's! 
 
 Trevenna stood a moment, in his eyes the red, angry fire of a chained 
 hound still burning, but on his close-braced lips no tremor, all the courage, 
 all the insolence, all the resolve that were in him summoned to meet the awful 
 chastisement that had suddenly fallen upon him in the plentitude of his power 
 and his pride. 
 
 " Beau sire" he said, with a staunch bravery in him to the last, and that 
 pride of intellect which in its arrogance was far above vanity or egotism, 
 "there is not one of your haughty line who will beat the mongrel for power! 
 You and your people were born crowned; but I have won my diadem out of the 
 mud of the sewers and in the face of the whole world set against me. You 
 have nothing so grand in all your princely escutcheon as that. Pshaw ! if a 
 dying Hebrew had not turned virtuous and played king's evidence, I'd have had 
 my grave by Philip Chandos yonder, and been even with him to my death. You 
 have a fine vengeance at last! Few men kill as much brain as you'll killin mef 
 
 He motioned his right hand towards the Abbey, and turned away, to die 
 before the dawn. The action was slight, and had no supplication in it; but it 
 was very eloquent, eloquent as were the words in their contemptuous self- 
 vindication, their insolence of self-homage. 
 
 Chandos involuntarily made a gesture to arrest him. 
 
 " Wait! " 
 
 The word had the command of a monarch in it. His head sank on his 
 hands, his whole frame quivered; one who had brotherhood with him went out 
 to lie dead with the breaking of day. 
 
 " Oh, God! " he moaned, in a mortal suffering. " I cannot send you to 
 your death; and yet "
 
 CHAN DOS. 5->l 
 
 And yet his whole soul clung to the justice that would strike the traitor 
 down in his crime: half a lifetime of torture claimed its meet requital. To 
 spare this man passed his strength. 
 
 Trevenna mutely watched him without a sign of supplication, but with an 
 acrid, ruthless hate, the hate of a Cain who saw his brother rise from the 
 murderous blow that had struck him to the earth, and deal back into his own 
 heart the fratricidal stroke. 
 
 Chandos stood with his head dropped on his chest, his breathing loud and 
 fast; to let go his vengeance was harder than to part with his own life. The 
 wrongs of years that seemed endless in their desolation bound him to it with 
 bands of iron. Yet he knew that if he took it, his foe would die ere the sun 
 rose, die in his guilt, cursing God and men, as he had once bidden his own 
 existence end. 
 
 There was a long, unbroken silence. 
 
 A justice higher, purer, loftier than the justice of revenge stirred in him; 
 a light like the coming of the day came on his face. He remained true to the 
 vow of the days of his youth, and, though men had abandoned him, he forsook 
 not them nor their God. He was king over himself, sovereign over his pas- 
 sions. He lifted his eyes and looked at his betrayer; there was that in the gaze 
 of which Shakspeare thought when he wrote, " This look of thine will hurl my 
 soul from heaven ! " It spoke wider than words; it pierced more deeply than 
 a death-thrust. 
 
 " I give you your life," he said, briefly; " learn remorse in it, if you can ! 
 I will spare you to the world; it will be vengeance enough that I know your 
 shame. Go, and show to others hereafter the mercy you need now." 
 
 The words fell gravely, gently, on the stillness. Over his enemy's brow a 
 red flush of shame leaped suddenly, his firm limbs trembled, he shook for a 
 moment like a reed under the condemnation which alone bade him go and sin 
 no more. Of mercy he had never thought; as he had never known it, so he 
 had never hoped it. It pierced and beat him down as no revenge could ever 
 have power to do; under it he suffered what he had never suffered. While 
 their lives should last, he knew that bond of pardon would be held unbroken; 
 and for once he was vile and loathsome in his own sight. 
 
 " Damn you ! " he said, fiercely, while his white lips trembled, " you are 
 greater than I at the last ! For the first time in my life, I wish to God I had 
 not harmed you ! " 
 
 In the savage words, as they choked in their utterance, was the only pang of 
 remorse that John Trevenna had ever known.
 
 522 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 In the vast shadowy space of the porphyry chamber Chandos stood, with 
 the white lustre of starlight sleeping at his feet, and the glories of his race 
 made his once more. In the silence, that was only broken by the dreamy dis- 
 tant sound of many waters, he looked upon his birthright, looked as the long- 
 banished alone look on the land for whose beauty they have been an-hungered 
 through a deadly travail, for whose mere fragrance they have been athirst 
 through the scorch and solitude of desert wastes. 
 
 Every sigh of forest leafage came to him like a familiar voice; every breath 
 of woodland air touched his forehead like a caress of one beloved; the odor of 
 the grasses, as the deer trod them out, was sweet to him as joy; the free fresh 
 wind seemed bearing back his youth; the desire of his eyes was given back to 
 him, the passion of his heart was granted him. He gazed, and felt as though 
 no gaze were long enough, on all for which his sight had ached in blindness 
 through so many years of absence; and, where he stood, with the life that he 
 loved folded in his arms and gathered to his heart, his head was bowed, his lips 
 trembled on hers, his strength broke down: the sentence of severance fell off 
 him for evermore. 
 
 Through the hush of the night a murmur like the sough of the sea swelled 
 through the silence, the murmur of a great multitude whose joy lay deep as 
 tears. It was the welcome of a people. 
 
 The sound rose, hushed by the death which had given them back their lord, 
 through the stillness of the night, through the endless aisles of forest, reaching 
 the halls of the great race whose sovereignty had returned and whose name was 
 once more in the land. 
 
 Where he stood, they saw him; his eyes rested on them in the soft shadows 
 of the night, and his hands were stretched to them in silence, a silence that 
 spoke beyond words, and fell in turn on them, upon the vast throngs that looked 
 upward to his face, unseen so long, upon the strong men who wept as children, 
 upon the aged who were content to lay them down and die because the one 
 they loved had come to them from his exile; and that hour repaid him for his 
 agony. 
 
 He had dealt with his enemy, and reached a mercy that the world would 
 never honor, laid down a vengeance that the world would never know. No 
 homage would ever greet his sacrifice; when death should come to him he must 
 fall beneath the stroke with that victory untold, that foe unarraigned. He 
 would see his traitor triumph, and lift up no voice to accuse him; he would be- 
 hold men worship their false god, and hold back his hand from the righteous 
 blow. But through bitterness he had cleaved to truth, through desolation he 
 had followed justice, and while men forsook him he had remained constant to 
 them, constant to himself. He had followed the words of the Greek poet; he
 
 CHAN DOS. 
 
 523 
 
 had been " faithful to the dreams of his youth," and peace was with him to the 
 end. 
 
 In the hush of the night, with the sanctity of a people's love upon him, the 
 bitterness of the past died; the crucifixion of his passions lost its anguish; the 
 serenity of a pardon hard to yield, yet godlike when attained, came to him with 
 the self-conquest he had reached, and the promise of the future rose before 
 him, 
 
 Even as the bow which God hath bent in heaven.
 
 524 OU IDA'S WORKS. 
 
 RANDOLPH GORDON. 
 
 PART THE FIRST. 
 I. 
 
 OUR CORPS, AND WHO COMPOSED IT. 
 
 I AM sorry to record it, our county is a very big fellow on the map, and it 
 is very celebrated for corn, cattle, and cheese, as the geography says, whose 
 kindly alliteration helped me to escape the dire wrath of that odious governess 
 of my sister's who first made study hateful to me when I was a little chap in 
 the nursery; our county is picturesque, fruitful, and aristocratic, but it is a 
 weathercock, as twirling and whirling and changing a girouette as the very 
 fierce cock who sits on the top of our village church, looking as tremendous as 
 the Gallic cock looks in alarmists' letters, but in reality is only innocently ready 
 for squalls, as perhaps the Gallic cock is too, desperately as we vilify him. 
 
 Our country is a weathercock, and changes its manners as a beauty her 
 dresses, careful only of one thing to be in the fashion. When Uncle Tom 
 was the popular idol, we talked of nothing but niggers; in '54, we were solely 
 Crimean, and ladies, working away at Chersonnese comforters, almost wished 
 the war were in England, that they might have " those darlings " near them, 
 ignorant of the fact that when the darlings were bayoneted, and they pinned 
 against the wall till they told where there jewelry was hidden, the proximity 
 would not have been altogether so pleasurable. In '58, we were petris with 
 Indian mutiny, and would not hear of any massacre that was not most fright- 
 fully and impossibly horrible, or of any vengeance less than the instant impal- 
 ing of every separate Hindoo, and now, of course, we, who talked the most 
 beautiful Odes to Peace that can be imagined when the Great Exhibition was 
 up, and would have turned our swords into ploughshares if any agriculturists 
 had taken a fancy to use such implements, have veered round the other way, 
 and have fallen down before butts, Long Enfields, and cock's-tails, in the wor- 
 ship common just now to all England. We were a little bitten with Garibaldism, 
 and, should the promised February campaign come on, nothing will go down 

 
 RANDOLPH GORDON. 505 
 
 but a man who has fired a shot in the Calabrian battle; but at present we are 
 inoculated with volunteering as strongly as small boys with passion for smok- 
 ing, or city dandies with that abominable patchouli, a whiff of which would have 
 killed poor Brummel, who counselled us, " No perfumes, only country-washed 
 linen." 
 
 When the Toadyshire Militia was all in its glory, the county thought that 
 nothing ever would equal them; but militia are gone down now so very far 
 down as to be clean out of sight and out of mind, and nothing is heard of but 
 the Volunteer Rifles. Sweetly bray the bran-new bugles down road and street, 
 through town and country; swiftly through the turnpikes dash scores of those 
 pepper-salt coats, whose wearing saves their gallant owners from all two- 
 penny taxations; pop go our rifles all the livelong day, with a crack of 
 doom which, we believe, must shake the Tuileries to its foundations; 
 the cock-tails we require must have, shorn every barn-door mon- 
 arch in the kingdom; ladies give up their thirteenth new bonnet to subscribe 
 for our silver bugles; and the stiffest of governors, who would not let us out 
 with a latch-key to save our lives, believes, without a murmur, that we have been 
 at the butt till midnight. We can cover any short-comings we like with the patri- 
 otic click of our blessed rifles; our mothers and wives fully accredit us when we 
 tell them we have spent the evening in practising, though, if we made any other 
 excuse, they would pounce straightway with feminine shrewdness on suspicion 
 of that " abominable little fright at the cigar-shop," or that " detestable man 
 Captain Birdseye, who teaches you such bad habits;" en un mot, our county in 
 toto is gone mad about rifles, and its capital, Boshcumbury, in particular, turns 
 out to a gamin; and shouts, as Duke Constantine when he saw the Guards. 
 " Ces hommes marchent comme des dieux ! " when they behold us, tramping 
 in our small boys' bugle calls, self-confident as Alexander, patriotic as Her- 
 manicus, our cock-tails waving grandly as the Roman eagles, each rifle as 
 omnipotent as William Tell's bow; and we the West Goosestep Volunteers 
 if we never do anything else more martial, at least have carried our county by 
 storm. We are in very large numbers; we swarm, in fact; we are tall and 
 short; we are fat and lean; we are of all statures, from that of Daniel Lambert 
 to that of Jeffrey Hudson, which is somewhat detrimental to the comparison 
 to the gods, mentioned above; but, n'importe, we are Volunteers, and our uni- 
 form does what charity is stated, but never discovered to do cover a multitude 
 of sins, and what is much more detrimental to a man in feminine eyes than the 
 biggest sin he can commit, personal defects; and to be cased in it passes over 
 a man's short-comings in Toadyshire, as to be rolled up in a black sermon-case 
 or printed by a religious publisher passes over bad English and false reasoning, 
 which would be pulled up mercilessly if found in an " exceptional novel," what- 
 ever that new style of romance may be in these raftine days, when Henry
 
 526 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 Fielding, I presume, would have had the circulating libraries' doors shut upon 
 him lest he should demoralize the morals of his readers, who must all be under 
 age, I suppose, if they cannot be trusted to choose their literature for them- 
 selves. 
 
 Our corps presents every possible variety of that genus homo concerning 
 whose parentage Mr. Huxley answered the Bishop of Oxford so wittily the 
 other day. There is my cousin, Randolph Gordon, of Eton Chase, who had 
 been captain and lieutenant-colonel in the Guards, till knocking down another 
 man for killing a pet dog of his with a savage kick, led to a duel, which led, 
 in turn, to his selling out nolens volens, and who, having one of the finest 
 places in the country, was applied to, to head the " movement;" there is 
 Freddy Audley, twenty-two, five feet three, pretty as a girl, and as afraid 
 of wetting his feet as his maiden Aunt Clementina's pet Tom; there is Lacquer's 
 of Grassmere, who, having a dragon of a wife, and a secret and unholy 
 passion for cards, returns daily thanks -for the volunteer movement that 
 enables him to have such snug loo parties sub rosa at the Angel in Snob- 
 bleton and to go home looking innocent and professedly fagged to death 
 with his patriotic efforts to hit the bull's-eye; there is old Turbot, the town 
 clerk, who suffers frightfully in struggling into his uniform and in frantic 
 efforts to buckle his belt, but who sleeps with his Enfield under his pillow, 
 in constant apprehension of burglarious approaches from Louis Napoleon; 
 there is little Jemmy Fitzpop, who went to-day to Boulogne, firmly impressed 
 that the sight of his harness, which he persisted in sporting on all possible and 
 impossible occasions, will produce such an effect on French nerves as will 
 make them quiet by force of terror, as his used to be at whisper of " Bogey; " 
 there is Bassompierre Delafield, the pet physician of Snobbleton, who shares 
 the town-worship with the popular preacher of St. Faithandgrace, who, being of 
 a nervous, not to say timorous character, suffers silent agonies when he hears 
 the rear rank man capping at full-cock, and feels in vivid imaginings a little 
 accidental jar discharging all the contents of the barrel sans ceremonie into his 
 spinal cord; there is little Beak, the coroner, who, not content with holding in- 
 quests on the accidental deaths that fill his purse, does his very best to cause 
 them when aspiring to be martial, and forgetting his gun's not a quill, carries 
 his rifle in such a gracefully lassier aller manner, that it went off the other day 
 in a totally unexpected freak, and singing playfully on its path, grazed a knife- 
 grinder's donkey, carried a buuch of wheat-ears off a lady's bonnet, bowled 
 between Piper, the mayor's little fat legs, causing him next door to apoplexy, 
 and finally lodged itself in a perambulator, whose nurse fled, with a shrill 
 shriek, into the murderous Beak's paralysed arms, leaving her unharmed 
 charge in infantine calm, the only individual present that wasn't in hysterics or 
 a syncope; there is Simmons, the cashier at the bank, who, from the first hour
 
 RANDOLPH GORDON. 527 
 
 he was at drill, when he pricked Doddington, the county-court judge's son, with 
 the point of his bayonet, causing grave Dodd to jump in a most unpremeditated 
 and un-Spartan manner, has never gone through the manoeuvres right as yet, and 
 never will, it is my firm belief, till he marches shoulder to shoulder with Ulysses 
 in the Elysian Fields; there is your humbler serviteur myself, Cosmo Lyle, who 
 am in it because the governor is Colonel-commandmant, a county member, and 
 a very opinionated individual, riding, as his present hobby, that England can only 
 be saved by the crack of Long Enfields, as at the Great Exhibition he 
 held it was to be saved by peace at any price, at the Spithead review by Jack 
 Tar, and at the era of the Alma by " the Queen's " (who, when they're 
 wanted are called " our gallant troops," but, when they've done the service, 
 get grumbled at as a "standing army; ") and there are, besides us, innumer- 
 able lawyers and bankers and gentry of all degrees; clerks, who are dream- 
 ing of platoon firing while drawing up settlements; drapers, who catch 
 themselves bringing their measure well up to shoulder, to the imminent peril 
 of affrighted customers' eyes; grocers, whose martial eyes flash at the 
 mere sight of the delicious word "Gunpowder" on their tea-papers; hair- 
 dressers, who lacerate their subjects in the most terrible manner in their 
 having to fling down their razor for their rifle gentry, in fact, who made 
 Boshcumbury and all Toadyshire the fac simile of Edinburgh when the "Anti- 
 quary " saw it, bitten with martial hydrophobia, and found his solicitor's 
 quill turned to a sabre, and his physician learning to kill instead of cure, 
 and all the world gone volunteer-crazy, as he tells us in his racy Scotch. 
 And the women are gone as mad about us; not for our beauty, for our 
 jackets, like Mr. Tupman's brigand jacket at Mrs. Leo Hunter's fete; our 
 sleeves, so symmetrically full at the top and meagre at the bottom, our little 
 hats, with those wonderf ul before-mentioned panaches de coq waving therefrom, 
 like the little funny forelock with which poor old Time is always decorated, are 
 not embellishing; at least, not to my fancy, though little Fitzpop, and a good 
 many others I could mention, will think treason for me to say so, deeming I 
 believe, that it is the perfection of neatness, elegance, and military style, and 
 that the Belvedere Apollo himself would look even more superb if we could 
 deck his marble limbs in volunteer uniform. 
 
 N'importe, the women have lost their pretty little, glossy, empty heads 
 after us, and cherished pets, the parsons, are at a discount so much at 
 a discount, that one daring young curate, driven to desperation at the con- 
 tempt his black surplice met with from his quasi-worshippers, joined us, 
 seeing no reason why he shouldn't fight, like William of Ely, and got lectured, 
 on consequence, in humiliating style, by his diocesan, who forbade him all 
 combat, save that peculiar privilege of parsons and spinsters, the war of words. 
 Our file-firing has taken all the shine out of pulpit philippics, and the assembly
 
 528 OUJDAS WORKS. 
 
 and the roll-call drown the bell for early matins, to which the fair daughters of 
 the Church used to swarm in flocks to the sanctuary of their best-looking and 
 biggest-whiskered high-priests. They are all at a discount; nothing goes down 
 but the Toadyshire Rifles, and even little Fitspop, that infinitesimal morsel, 
 that smallest of boys, who could be put under his own cock-plumed tile, as 
 Robin used to put his wife under the extinguisher, brags of his being a "good 
 soldier," (!) and gets petted by the ladies who six months ago gave him sugar- 
 plums, because he is a " defender of his country," and carries a rifle that is 
 longer than himself. 
 
 There is but one heterodox sceptic and scoffer in Toadyshire; she will 
 persist in making fun most cruel fun of us. " Learn to shoot, most noble 
 seigneurs, it's the very best thing you can do, but, for Heaven's sake don't 
 call yourselves soldiers ! Soldiers, indeed ! a lot of lawyers, and bankers, 
 land merchants, and brewers, and grocers, and tailors, who just pop away at 
 a butt, out of business hours ! " cries that most mechante and provoking of 
 all pretty women, with a toss of her chestnut-haired, gold-netted head, who 
 takes a malicious delight in scoffing at the Goosestep Volunteers, at all the 
 great things we plan, and all the small things we do, just because she is the 
 idol before whom the majority of our corps do most love to bow and tumble 
 down in abject humiliation. This abominable little unbeliever is Miss Fanny's 
 (Fred Audley's you know) sister. He has three of them; what their nom de 
 bapteme may be, I hardly believe I know to this day; everybody that ever I 
 heard calls them Sunshine, Pearl, and Rosebud poetic nicknames given them 
 in the nursery from their respective exteriors, and clinging to them, as nick- 
 names generally do, ever since. Freddy and his sisters dwell with their maiden 
 aunt, Miss Clementina Audley, who, though possessing Audley Court, and much 
 property in those. weather-glasses of political affairs, the funds, is Miss Clem- 
 entina still, so rigid a martinet that we did think of her for commandant of our 
 corps, and so petrie with conventionalities, that she is generally supposed to be 
 the author of those mysterious works on etiquette, whose manufacture must 
 emanate from such a very rare and peculiar stamp of genius, that it is a pity 
 we refuse so obstinately to follow their rules. Freddy is her heir, and she pets 
 him much as she pets her black Tom, which she elegantly christens Koh-i-noor, 
 but which the girls send her straight into hysterics by calling Saturnus, and the 
 Diable a Quatre. Her nieces are her betes noires. Freddy is quiet, lady- 
 like, and, for his silky hair, his aversion to cold, his affection for soft cush- 
 ions, and laziness, exactly like his co-pet the black Tom. But the girls ? 
 " They are dreadful," Miss Clementina informs her bosom friend, Mrs. Tom- 
 tit, the vicaress; "they are never still, they are never quiet; they ride as be- 
 come only rough-riders; they play battledore and shuttlecock in the picture- 
 gallery, till the horrible pat, pat, pat, of these odious things are enough to
 
 RANDOLPH GORDON. 520 
 
 drive anybody distracted," she assures her, "to say nothing of the waste 
 of time; they do nothing that's useful; they can't work; if Sunshine did 
 try to make a cobweb pocket-handkerchief, she took a needle the size 
 of a hedge-stake; they can only make one's head ache almost to vertigo, 
 with singing, and playing; they talk and laugh so ridiculously, all through 
 breakfast and dinner, that they hardly know whether they are eating grouse or 
 broad beans, mock turtle or skilligalee; and their conduct with gentlemen 
 she believes it passes now under that odious new word, flirtation, but 
 And Miss Clementina throws up her eyes and hands, and thinks of the modest 
 and maidenly times of her girlhood, when D'Orville bowed over Evelina's hand 
 when she had promised to be his wife, and knelt down, respectfully, to touch 
 that main blanche with his moustaches, when he had rescued her from a yawn- 
 ing tomb. What a pity it was all that modesty and maidenliness were unap- 
 preciated by the sex who could have rewarded them, and that where these 
 demoralized young ladies had twenty soupireurs, Miss Clementina had not had 
 one! 
 
 At Audley Court our corps was worshipped. Freddy was in them 
 (Frederick Augustus she termed him;) that was enough for Miss Clementina, 
 who having, moreover, horrible visions of ruthless and savage Zouaves, who 
 would break one night in on her slumbers, and behold her in all the 
 sublimities of her toilette de nuit (a sight, I have been told, quite sufficient 
 in itself to frighten any amount of Zouaves back again across the channel), 
 was filled with solemn gratitude towards us " British legions," as she grandly 
 termed us, and poured fearful and terrible abuse upon heterodox Sunshine, 
 when she declared she would " rather have one troop of the Queen's to 
 take care of her than all the battalions of bourgeois they could -muster." Sun- 
 shine, you will perceive, was, as I say, the only scoffer in Audley Court 
 and in Toadyshire Pearl and Rosebud admired, nay, adored us; in fact, 
 gazed on our evolutions at battalion drill, skirmishing, forming squares, file 
 firing, and all the rest of it, with worshipping eyes, and had started a subscrip- 
 tion for a silver bugle for us. They had not been long at Audley Court, 
 when the " movement " began which has heaved England up into so many 
 mounds called butts, and elevated her into so many flat portions called prac- 
 tising-grounds, as if the amount of powder required in the country had produced 
 a general violent earthquake. The first time I saw them was, when we were 
 first formed, just budding, just beginning to enroll ourselves, and admire our- 
 selves, and swell ourselves into, what we are just now, gallant 1st West Goose- 
 step Volunteer Rifles, when my cousin, Randolph Gordon, Freddy Audley, and 
 I, were riding home from drill at Snobbleton, and were passed at full gallop by 
 three ponies, with young ladies on their backs, who laughed as they flashed 
 past us.
 
 530 OVID AS WORKS. 
 
 " Take care Freddy, it is going to rain, and Aunt Tina will be so anxious 
 about you ! " 
 
 "Hallo ! who are those acquaintances of yours?" said Gordon, whose eye- 
 glass was up in a second, our gallant captain being as keen after pretty women as 
 a terrier after rats. 
 
 "My sisters," said Fred, rather sulkily; "they are such chaffy girls, they 
 make game of everything." 
 
 " And you in particular, I suppose ? Well, you are rather tempting, Fanny. 
 By George ! how well they ride; that front one in especial wouldn't she go 
 straight over a bullfinch ! " 
 
 "That's Sunshine," said Freddy, still gloomily; "she's a regular little 
 devil." 
 
 " Vraiment ! that's attractive," said Randolph. " Women are so given to 
 swearing they're angels, and the newspapers to repeating it, nowadays, when 
 they take up the strict morality line, because it pays cent, percent, and induces 
 ' the clergy ' to subscribe, that to hear of anybody who's a little demonical is a 
 positive treat. She hasn't a cloven foot, though, I hope, because I do like a 
 small brodequin; but what in the world do you call her ? " 
 
 " Sunshine," yawned Fred. " Deuce take that rifle, how my shoulder aches ! 
 That ain't her name, of course, but everybody calls her so; the house would be 
 as dull as death without her, though she does teaze one horribly. She makes 
 no end of game of the volunteers." 
 
 " No great difficulty to do that, my dear fellow," laughed Randolph. " If I 
 illustrated for Punch, I'd engage to draw some scenes from the life, the antithe- 
 sis of the martial, and the perfection of the ludicrous: Little Fitzpop, who's 
 only fit to shoot sparrows with a popgun, but who thinks himself individually a 
 match for a whole regiment of Chasseurs Indiennes; my worthy Sergeant 
 Stitcher, who uncurls his legs and sets down his goose to come and play at sol- 
 diers for an hour, when he's sent home Mr. A.'s coat and Mr. B.'s trousers; 
 those young fellows from the Bank, who jump off their stools to rush at their 
 uniforms as vehemently as they used to rush at the inkstands to indite sonnets 
 to Miss Mary's eyelash, or Miss Emma's flounces. Oh, you are all wonderfully 
 good fun; and if I don't laugh when I form you into line for inspection next 
 month, I shall deserve as much credit as an alderman who does't tumble when 
 he backs before her majesty." 
 
 " Confound you ! " said I, " you, too, make fun of everything. Why the 
 deuce did you join us, then ? " 
 
 " Because I was solicited, my dear Lyle, and a man as amiable as I am al- 
 ways does what he's asked. Besides, sans doute, it's a very good movement; 
 all movements are that tend to make a nation strong, self-reliant, and able to 
 take care of itself; all those countries are greatest where the use of arms forms
 
 RANDOLPH GORDON. 531 
 
 a part of every individual's education. En meme temps, why you should all 
 trouble yourselves to buy cock-tailed hats / assure you there's no particular 
 military virtue in them why you should persist in going about in uniform, at 
 every unseemly hour, when we, the lawful owners of uniform, cast it, and get out 
 of harness and into mufti as soon as ever we can; why you make such fools of 
 yourselves by going over to France, and exhibiting your bran-new livery to 
 frighten Napoleon's four hundred thousand men, and brag of what you would 
 do in such very outrageous bad taste, I can't imagine; and while you will per- 
 sist in such betises, I must make game of you. I'll get acquainted with Miss 
 what is her name ? Sunshine; we can have some chaff together. Come in 
 and dine with me; it is going to rain, as the young ladies said, and the Goose- 
 step Volunteers haven't had their regulation goloshes yet have they, Audley ? 
 Come in; I can promise you some good claret and some first-rate Latakia." 
 
 We did go in, and had a very jolly evening over Randolph's venison and 
 olives. His place, Eton Chase, having as many agremens and as good an 
 establishment as the epicurean heart of man could desire, though he did not 
 often abide there to enjoy them, having certain faithless, restless tastes for 
 wandering, and an attachment to excitment and pleasure which would have 
 made him supremely wretched to be tied down in Toadyshire, even though one 
 of the lords and kings of that very stuck-up, but, I must confess, not very 
 brilliant county. 
 
 II. 
 
 HOW SUNSHINE, PEARL, AND ROSEBUD SHOT AT BULL'S-EYES AND HIT OTHER 
 
 MARKS. 
 
 RANDOLPH and I made a point of calling at Audley Court, a courtesy we 
 had always confined before to leaving cards, when we were quite sure Miss 
 Clementina was out, a tete-a-tete with that awful lady being a point much to 
 far for the politeness of either of us to stretch. Freddy had always been at the 
 Court, but his sisters had lived in Ireland with their mother's sister, till she, 
 going with her husband to Jamaica, had thrown them on the tender mercies of 
 Miss Clementina, their mother having died when they were all little, and their 
 father having been shot out at the Cape some few years afterwards. 
 
 " If we can find anything to give us a little fun in Toadyshire, tant 
 mieux ! " said Randolph; and when we got well acquainted they did give us a 
 good deal of fun. Miss Clementina used to look very black black as night 
 black as her pet Tom whenever Gordon or I were shown into her draw- 
 ing-room. "It is my opinion," she averred to Mrs. Tomtit, " that they
 
 532 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 are two of the worst men in England. Colonel Gordon never bore a good 
 character, and he has the most impertinent manner of staring at Sunshine, 
 and leaning over her chair and talking to her just as if she were his own 
 property, like that nasty chattering parrot of his. And as for Mr. Lyle, he 
 is no better, with his flowers, and compliments, and trumpery to Pearl. How- 
 ever, if girls will cheapen themselves to men, we can hardly blame men for 
 taking advantage of it. / kept gentlemen in their proper places, but the young 
 women of the present day know nothing of that self-respect which compels the 
 respect of the opposite sex." And Miss Clementina shut the steel clasp of her 
 district bag with a resentful snap, perhaps at the recollection that she had made 
 the opposite sex a trifle too respectful so much so, that they had never 
 proffered anything at all warmer. Randolph and I were no favorites with Miss 
 Clementina: she required for her beau-ideal some such spotless collet-monte 
 individual as the virtuous tanners and pure-minded coal merchants of the 
 present day novels, who can never drink anything stronger than milk-and- 
 water, and who are as hideously unattractive as they are impossibly virtuous. 
 Randolph's life and mine were calculated to alarm her more than seance a 
 nervous lady. We smoked, we talked slang, we read French novels, we flirted 
 with every woman who came near us worth the attention. We were over thirty, 
 but we hadn't taken any " mission," nor headed any " philanthropical move- 
 ment;" in fact, there was no end to our sins. We were her antipodes and 
 pet betes noires after her nieces, and Miss Clementina looked black at us 
 accordingly. " The Audley girls " became the idols, the stars, the queens 
 of our corps. Sunshine, the eldest, with her riant smile, her radiant eyes, 
 and her gay spirits, her moquant laugh, more fascinating than strictly pretty; 
 Pearl; dark, stately, beautiful as you could wish a woman, but a little 
 severe, with that pure Grecian profile of hers; Rosebud, a lovely pink and 
 white, lazy, lovable little thing, just seventeen they all had their separate 
 troops of worshippers; and when Randolph was playing pool in the Boshcum- 
 bury Supscription Rooms, or lunching at the pretty pastry-cook's over the 
 way, he would laugh till he cried when the Audley pony trap stood at a shop- 
 door, to see the frantic haste with which little Fitzpop would dash down a 
 neighboring street in that brilliant uniform, in which popular report had it that 
 he slept; and young Simmons dash open the door of his governor's bank, 
 where he was cruelly immured till the tower clock struck four; and Lacquers 
 fly into the same shop for something for his sister, for whom he was never 
 known to purchase presents at any subsequent or previous period of his life; 
 and Doddington flee from Stubbley's the tobacconist's, as if he wouldn't be 
 seen talking to Fanny Stubbley for a million, leaving his Manillas on the counter, 
 and poor Fanny inconsolable behind it; and all the others in view gather and 
 cluster and hover round that little Shetland trap till the small quadrupeds were
 
 RANDOLPH GORDON. 533 
 
 quite hidden in the moving sea of peper-and-salt coats and green cock-tails 
 swaying round them. Randolph laughed; but he would as often as not lose 
 his three lives in double quick time, or leave his lobster salad half finished, 
 and lounge up the street with his glass in his eye, as if he, too, had come there 
 from accident, till he came to the Shetlands, where he would stand, leaning 
 against the dash-board, and talking witty nonsense with Miss Sunshine, their 
 conductress, while Fitzpop, and Simmons, and Lacquers, and Dodd, and all the 
 rest of them, fell back respectfully, but swore with very small reverence at their 
 Captain in their own minds, or I am much mistaken in the nature of man in 
 general, and our corps in particular. 
 
 " You seem to like that girl's devilry," said I to him one day, when Ran- 
 dolph and I rode to an archery fete, where those trois sceurs, separately voted 
 by their separate worshippers the " most charming things in the county," were 
 expected to be in due Toxopholite glory. 
 
 Randolph stroked his moustaches, and smiled the same sort of smile with 
 which a man regards a stag with nine points, or thirty- six brace in a morning, 
 or any other pleasant game. 
 
 " Yes, I like her devilry, as you term it; it's very innocuous mischief, and 
 has a sweet temper to soften it. She can do a thousand mechancetes I'd defy 
 another girl to attempt; yet she's a thorough-bred lady through it all. Yes, I 
 like Sunshine; it's such fun to hear her talk. And you seem to like that dark- 
 eyed sister of hers eh, old boy ? Well, she's a very handsome girl, I grant 
 you, but she's too stately for me; besides, I don't care for your brunes; tall 
 women haven't, generally, much fun in them." 
 
 " Pearl's plenty of fun in her, I assure you," said I; " only it's her hobby at 
 eighteen ! to talk of woman's rights, and woman's intellect, and such-like 
 themes of dignity and grandiloquence." 
 
 " Ah ! " laughed Randolph, " ' Pearl's Martineau's bristles/ as Sunshine 
 calls them. I bet you, if it came to the trial, that my little devil, as you politely 
 term her, with all her satire and her quick wits, would be easier to coax, and 
 gentler to judge one, than your Pearl, though seemingly she's milder and 
 quieter. If ever any of our naughty stories come to light, Lyle, and those 
 young ladies are on the jury, you'll see we shall get most mercy from the one 
 whose tongue seems the keenest, as it is, I grant you, the sharpest." 
 
 " I bet you five pounds Pearl would be merciful to my peccadilloes ! " 
 
 " I bet you five pounds she wouldn't be so kind to yours, as her sister 
 would be to mine." 
 
 " Done ! " 
 
 " Done ! There they are, both of them. I must go and teaze her a little, 
 it is such fun to see her when her blood's up." 
 
 With which Gordon made his way to Sunshine, who shot utterly wide of the
 
 534 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 target in her hurry to turn and talk to him, and I made mine to her sister, who 
 stood leaning on her bow, looking like a young Polycrita, or Queen Carcus, in 
 her plus beaux jours. 
 
 " So you are going to have a silver bugle given you, Colonel Gordon ? " 
 said Sunshine, welcoming her ally and friend. 
 
 " Yes; and you won't present it; it is very cruel of you." 
 
 " Not I ! " laughed Sunshine, with a toss of her head. " I leave it for Aunt 
 Clementina. I am no patroness of gentlemen who boast of having learnt in a 
 year what a drill sergeant teaches Hodge or Ambrose in a quarter; and rush 
 with such a true amateur ardor to their Enfields that the dog killed, and the win- 
 dows smashed, and the old ladies frightened into apoplexy, must distract the 
 magistrates and swell the bills of mortality most fearfully. Pray do you pay 
 for all the damages done by your corps ? because, if you do, Mr. Fitzpop shot 
 my King Charles one day in his martial ardor, and I shall come upon you for 
 another." 
 
 " You shall have the best dog in England if I can find him. But you should 
 have made a sacrifice and given us the bugle, as I made a sacrifice and 
 took command of the corps. After the Coldstreams these gentlemen in 
 Melton seem painfully slow, and the way in which they rush about in cross belts 
 and shakos, haversack and uniform, is most curious. The idea of showing 
 in harness whenever one can get out of it ! But amateurs always overdo. 
 So does England when she takes a fit of enthusiasm. It doesn't sit well 
 on her; she's a calm, strong nation, who can make her voice heard in 
 Europe without any boasting, and is grandest when she is quietest, like 
 her own lion couchant. But now and then she goes mad about some hobby 
 once or twice in a century and then she dins it into everybody's ears till they 
 are so heartily sick of it that it looks ludicrous, however good it may be in the 
 main; the kitten's freaks sit very clumsily on the old lion. Vivacity, vehe- 
 mence, red-hot elan and adventure are French characteristics, but, when Eng- 
 land imitates them, she is sure to make a blunder; it isn't her style, and her 
 hobbies perish in the vehement hug she gives them. Men certainly can't do 
 better than to learn the use of their rifle, and however hypothetical invasion 
 may be, it is no use locking the door after the horse is stolen; but we can't do 
 it quietly. We must go and rave about it, and brag of it, and call all Europe 
 to look at it, till, bothering them to admire the glory of our/r0 tempo sun, we 
 force the spots on it on their notice. Why the deuce civilians can't practise at 
 butts without people's comparing them to a regular army with whom they can't 
 possibly form any parallel yet, at the least, and believing in some speeches 
 from soldiers, who as the Athenceum lately said, ' invite a cheer by lavishing 
 praises which pass with an unmilitary people,' does puzzle me, I confess. But 
 we are a singular nation, you know; we scribbled nothing but peace-at-any-
 
 RANDOLPH GORDON. 535 
 
 price poems in '51, and in '60 we think of nothing but cartridges and percus- 
 sion-caps, ties and butts, wars and rumors of wars. Look ! your sister has hit 
 the centre. She has hit something else, or I am mistaken: I never saw Lyle 
 so devoue." 
 
 " Who is that very pretty woman who is now taking aim ?" asked Sunshine. 
 
 Randolph looked, and f swore a little mentally, for causes best known to 
 himself. 
 
 " That ? Mrs. Rocksilver." 
 
 " You look rather irritated at her presence," laughed Sunshine. " Do you 
 know her ? " 
 
 "Oh, yes; slightly." 
 
 " And who is she ? A name tells me nothing." 
 
 " Unless it is as expressive as Sunshine," said Randolph. " Well, she is 
 Mrs. Rocksilver. She married poor Rock when he was only twenty-three, and 
 she has flirted, a outrance, ever since. Of course, before a week of the honey- 
 moon was out, they were bored to death. I never heard of anybody yet who 
 wasn't. Any two human love-birds, caged up together, will fret their very 
 feathers off in ennui, and hate each other like fighting-cocks, before a month 
 is out." 
 
 " If they do," said Sunshine, with that rapid anger which it was Gordon's 
 inhuman delight to arouse, "you may depend on it that it is because the soft- 
 ness of the love-bird has only been put on for some purpose of convenience, 
 and that the hate of the game-cock has always been au fond." 
 
 "Oh no," answered Randolph, "that doesn't follow; a man may worship a 
 woman, but if he isn't desillusione in a month, she must be of something more 
 than mortal mold " 
 
 " Yet he will swear to pass a lifetime with her ! " interrupted Sunshine, too 
 indignant to let him finish. " Good Heavens ! if two people are to be weary 
 of one another in a month, how dare they undertake to spend a whole exist- 
 ence together ? No wonder marriages are unhappy if such is their creed. 
 How will they smooth each other's trials, bear with each other's faults, learn 
 to feel for each other's errors, if they love no better than that ? And if poverty 
 overtake them, and they are thrown on their own society for resources, what 
 affection will they have to solace each other and support their ruin ? " 
 
 " Affection ! you don't look for that in the world, do you ? " laughed Ran- 
 dolph, true to his laudable intention to teaze her. " We don't form love unions 
 nowadays; we only make 'good matches.' " 
 
 "No; and that is why Sir Cresswell's is fuller than it can hold," said Sun- 
 shine, with dire contempt for his prosaic views. " What people term ' good 
 matches ' too often bring bad fruit. From a wife who accepts him for position, 
 what man can expect fidelity?"
 
 536 OUIDAS WORKS. 
 
 " Most visionary of sunbeams, no man expects it ! " said Randolph caress- 
 ing his moustaches to hide a smile of more gratification than he cared his com- 
 panion to see; "and he has no right, for women will never give it. If ever I 
 marry, three days will be the limit of my constancy, and I doubt if I shan't be 
 tired of my wife before that. Three days alone with one woman is an ordeal to 
 try the devotion of any man ! " 
 
 " Then, Heaven grant that no man with views like yours may ever marry a 
 woman that loves him, or he will break her heart." 
 
 " Hearts don't break. I don't know whether they used to be Sevres, to 
 make the poet's expression correct, but they're all stone-china now, and won't 
 even crack, I assure you; but you dwell in the clouds sunbeams always do 
 so that the earth, when it is just warm enough for its sensible inhabitants, strikes 
 them as most chillily cold." 
 
 "Especially," said the young lady, half laughingly, half petulantly, "when 
 they fall upon hard iron icicles like you, that are so incrusted with society's 
 hoar frost that nothing will dissolve them." 
 
 " Except Sunshine," said Randolph, with a smile, and a glance from his 
 beautiful velvet eyes, as ladies called them, astonishingly warm for an icicle ! 
 He an icicle ! By Jove, Miss Sunshine should have had a glimpse into his past ! 
 
 " You here, Randolph ? Why, you wrote me word last time you were going 
 yachting to the Levant. It is wonderful to see you in your own country. Are 
 you thinking that il faut vous ranger at last ? " 
 
 Randolph swore again under his moustaches, and glanced impatiently at 
 Sunshine. He lifted his hat to Mrs. Rocksilver, and took her proffered Jouvins 
 as she floated up to him a pretty, affected, bold-eyed, dashing-looking woman, 
 of eight-and-twenty or thirty. 
 
 " I thought you said you only knew her slightly ? " said Sunshine, with a 
 lift of her contemptuous pencilled eyebrows, as Mrs. Rocksilver passed on with 
 old Lord Saltire, at whose house she was staying, giving Gordon a very familiar 
 nod, smile, and au revoir. 
 
 " Did I ? Well, what of that ? " 
 
 " Why, that your slight acquaintances seem very intimate ones. You write 
 to her, and she calls you Randolph," said Miss Sunshine, quickly, who, having 
 had his exclusive attention for the last two months, could have slain any other 
 human being who got a word from him. 
 
 " Oh ! that's nothing. In some sets one soon becomes familiar, and one 
 has to write to lots of people one doesn't care a button about. Her mail- 
 phaeton horses were not broken well enough for her to drive, and I offered to 
 break them for her, and had to write about them. Won't you come and have 
 an ice? We can't talk pleasantly with all these people about us." 
 
 Tete-a-tete over glace a la vanille, he did talk, very pleasantly, too; but
 
 RANDOLPH GORDON. 537 
 
 Sunshine was disquieted, like a brood of partridges at sight of a pointer's nose 
 among the turnips. She would have liked to call him Randolph herself, and allow 
 nobody to do so besides. That story of the phaeton horses didn't quite satisfy 
 her and she hated Mrs. Rocksilver instantly and vehemently, being a young 
 lady of very hot and rapid impulses, accustomed to treasure Randolph's notes 
 of acceptation of the Audley Court invitation as if they had been deeds of gift 
 to all the money in Barclay's. 
 
 PART THE SECOND. 
 III. 
 
 HOW A SILVER BUGLE SOUNDED DIFFERENT NOTES, AND RANDOLPH LOST A 
 
 PONY-RACE. 
 
 Miss CLEMENTINA, the richest woman in Toadyshire, had bought in common 
 with other feminine county magnates, a silver bugle for her beloved " British 
 Legions; " it being the custom nowadays to reward those defenders of their 
 nation who pop away at butts with a portion of Potosi ore, as righteous god- 
 mothers give young Christians a drinking-mug on the occasion of their being 
 entered into the kingdom of Heaven, and zealous congregations present pious 
 pastors with costly soup-tureens to hold their mock-turtle, as a reward for the 
 elaborate periods with which he has taught them to turn away their eyes from 
 beholding vanity, and to reject all the pomps and vanities of this wicked world, 
 giving all their goods unto the poor. If Miss Clementina had been poor, the 
 whole of East Toadyshire would have shouted with laughter at the idea of a 
 middle-aged lady filling so prominent a place, to the exclusion of all the pretty 
 women with which the county was glutted; but Miss Clementina being Miss 
 Audley, of Audley Court, paying the heaviest income-tax in the shire, all the 
 volunteers were bound to be excessively flattered by the condescension, and 
 everybody thought her the most proper person that could possibly have been 
 selected, except certain of the disaffected among us, who swore at the old lady's 
 office tomfoolery, as we politely termed it, in not delegating the office to one 
 of her charming nieces. 
 
 " Confound it! " said Randolph, savagely; " what folly it all is! And here 
 am I, who hate humbug worse than any man going, forced to take a share in 
 it. It is enough to make one sick only to think of all the bosh that old lady 
 will talk about her ' noble defenders,' and / shall have to listen to it all, and 
 reply to it!" With which, Sunshine's quondam Guardsman struck a fusee 
 wrathfully, and lamented, with extreme pathos, his own weakness and amiabil-
 
 538 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 ity in consenting to accept the honor of commanding the East Goosestep. 
 The East Goosestep, however, notwithstanding his and his ally Sunshine's 
 scorn, considered themselves more killing than those very dazzling gentlemen 
 the St. Georges or the Six Footers, and quite able, by the mere sight of their 
 serried ranks, to carry terror into the bosoms of every French, Austrian, and 
 Russian soldier in Europe, if Europe could have looked on when we marched 
 up the wide elm avenues of Audley Court, where the inspection by Lord Saltire, 
 the Lord-Lieutenant and Gustos Rotulorum of the county, and the presentation 
 of the silver bugle were to take place. How glorious we were! though little Fitz- 
 pop did fall flat on his face, owing to the extreme torture of some very new boots 
 he had donned for the occasion, and Mr. Turbot, the town-clerk, did puff and 
 blow under the burden of his epicure's tons of adipose tissue, and the anguish 
 of that horrible belt, which would never come to without the united strength 
 of his wife and his footman at either end; and young Simmons did get out of 
 step in a manner calculated to drive himself and everybody distracted, and try 
 to get right with such frantic efforts that he made himself black in the face, and 
 had to partake of brandy from some humane pocket-pistol, barring these and 
 other small detrimental accidents, we were very grand, very grand indeed at 
 least we thought ourselves so, and that is the primary thing after all; if a 
 woman thinks herself the belle of a ballroom, it will be very difficult to per- 
 suade her that others don't consider her so too. Most of the spectators, 
 however, concurred in our self-adoration; for we were their pet hobby, and 
 love made them blind to all faults in us or our manoeuvres. 
 
 " How splendid they look ! " said Pearl, gazing upon us like a young Semir- 
 amis on her battalions, as we passed her at double-quick. " Don't they walk 
 as if they said ' We are gentlemen, not common soldiers ? ' ' 
 
 " Well, dear, as the individuals at the present moment closest to my eyes 
 are that diminutive shoemaker of Snobbleton who sent home my kid boots 
 this morning, and Mr. Turbot, who has about as unmilitary an aspect as an 
 alderman after a corporation dinner, I can't see the force of your remark as 
 much as I could wish," returned mechante Sunshine, " and a ' common soldier ' 
 is no inglorious appellative. / haven't forgotten the Crimea, though every- 
 body else has." 
 
 I don't suppose she had, with Randolph there in front of her, with his C. B. 
 cordon and his medals on that grizzled Melton that had replaced his Cold- 
 stream scarlet! 
 
 We went through position, and battalion, and skirmishing; we performed 
 manual and platoon exercise; we formed into line, and we formed into square; 
 fired in file, and we fired in volleys; and we marched in open column and in 
 quarter distance column; and we did everything contained in those volunteer 
 manuals, which have been to us of late what her breviary is to a good
 
 RANDOLPH GORDON. 539 
 
 Catholic; and, what with the clash of the ramrods, and the tramp of the march- 
 ing, and the smell of the powder, and the sight of the cartridge-strewn turf, 
 all Toadyshire was stricken with the deepest admiration of us, and perfectly 
 persuaded that neither Caesar's legions, nor Attila's hordes, nor Scipio's con- 
 querors, were ever fit to hold a candle to us, which flattering sentiment our 
 Lord-Lieutenant conveyed to us in a speech sweet as milk-punch and fragrant 
 as attar of roses, calculated to fill us with the most delicious self-adoration, 
 and to secure our votes to a man for his son in the coming county election. 
 
 Lord Saltire having concluded with much applause, as reporters say, Miss 
 Clementina advanced, stately, solemn, severe, as Miss Clementina ever was, 
 amidst as much cheering as Three per Cents, ever obtained for a lady, and 
 made us, I think I may say, one of the most sublime perorations that ever issued 
 from female lips since the Virgin Queen harangued the troops at Tilbury Fort. 
 Hersillia, Hortensia, Aldrude, Bertinora, Isabel of Arundel, Marthar Glar, all 
 their eloquence was nothing to it, and I grieve that, instead of being handed 
 down to posterity, Miss Clementina's oration will only live to line portmanteaus 
 and butter-tubs, in company with the Toadyshire Post and the Boshcumbury 
 Herald. She called us "the saviors of England;" she spoke of the homes 
 and hearths we were banded together to protect; she enlarged on the defence- 
 less sex, for whose safety we were armed. Altogether she was so touching 
 that all Toadyshire was strung up to the most rapturous pitch of enthusiasm, 
 and many ladies present were moved even to tears. Mrs. Turbot wept plente- 
 ously at the thought of that dear twelve-stone lord of hers going out to stick 
 invaders, dinnerless andgrogless; Fitzpop's mother nearly went into hysterics 
 at the vision of her dear boy, with gory wounds, defending that " hearth " 
 where it was her delight to behold him every evening warming his slippers and 
 going into muffins; and even flinty-hearted Sunshine was fain to hide her face 
 in her cambric handkerchief, and give one little sob, but I am half afraid it 
 was of a cachinnatory character, for, catching Randolph's ear, it sent him 
 straight into agonies of suppressed laughtei, which his pet ruse of stroking his 
 moustaches could not hide so entirely but Miss Clementina, saw it, paused 
 one second, continued with extra solemnity, and presented him his silver bugle, 
 with a mental vow that the captain of the East Goosestep Rifles should never 
 blacken the doors of Audley Court again, by her invitation at least. That 
 smile was never forgiven him; it was blacker in Miss Clementina's eyes than 
 the blackest of Randolph's sins which were d'une latitude enorme ! 
 
 I question if Knowsley, lavish as it was, was better in its way than the Aud- 
 ley Court luncheon with which Miss Clementina regaled her beloved British 
 Legions to a man I ought to say to a boy, for our smallest bugler, aged ten, 
 eat as much as a parish overseer would consider maintenance for six whole 
 families for a month, in the tent prepared for their regalement while we, the offi-
 
 540 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 cers of the gallant Goosestep, walked into Strasbourg pates and Moe't's best in the 
 great old hall of Audley Court, where Miss Clementina, boiling with rage at 
 Randolph's unpardonable sin, which was not assuaged by the three times three 
 we gave her, presided with solemn majesty, with Lord Saltire on her right, and 
 my governor on her left Pallas herself was never more imposing. I had Pearl 
 all to myself, a proximity, I believe, I managed to make as agreeable to the 
 young lady as it was to me; and Randolph was so devoue to Sunshine, that 
 Mrs. Rocksilver's handsome eyes scintillated with annoyance as she sat oppo- 
 site to him, and gave him now and then a peculiar smile, which made him rest- 
 less, and think to himself what a confounded fool he had been the previous sea- 
 son when the Rocksilver box, boudoir, and barouche had seen more of him 
 than was wise, and a certain Buhl writing-case in the Rocksilver Davenport had 
 been the receptacle for notes signed Randolph Gordon, which would have been 
 much better left unwritten, especially now that a pair of softer eyes had chased 
 the Rocksilver's sparkling black ones out of his mind. 
 
 " Do you like her ? " asked Sunshine, noticing an anxious glance which Ran- 
 dolph gave across the table. 
 
 " Her whom ? " asked he, the quick and exceedingly unwelcome question 
 upsetting that sang froid which Randolph was accustomed to boast a man going 
 into a fit of apoplexy at his side, intelligence that the house was on fire, the 
 receipt of a challenge, an order for active service, 'and a summons for breach, 
 all at the same moment, would be powerless to disturb. 
 
 " Your friend Mrs. Rocksilver," said Sunshine, with that impatience with 
 which a woman always speaks of a rival, real or imaginary. 
 
 " Like her ? Oh no ! She can be very agreeable, but she is a frivolous, 
 heartless woman of the world nothing in her nothing that I should admire 
 now, at the least," said Randolph, with an assurance by his eyes that Sunshine 
 had spoilt him for every other breathing woman. 
 
 " Merci, mon ami." The whisper was very low, but both Randolph and his 
 new favorite heard it, and there was a smile soft and amused, it is true, which 
 said to him as plainly as smiles can speak, " I will pay you for that, monsieur ! " 
 on the Rocksilver's handsome passe face. 
 
 "Hark ! your aunt is off upon spiritualism," began Randolpli, propos de 
 bottes, to draw Sunshine's attention from the very malin glance of the Rock- 
 silver's beautifully tinted eyes. " What a dear woman it is to to take up fash- 
 ionable follies, and I'm always tilting up against them. This very morning you 
 made me laugh in the most mal-a-propos and ill-bred manner in the very midst 
 of her most pathetic peroration ! She's a firm believer in Mr. Howitt and Mr. 
 Home, isn't she? I was looking at Mackay's Popular Delusions the other day, 
 and thought we could scarcely laugh much longer, with any show of justice at 
 the least, at the witch Mamia, the mesmerism furore, or the philosopher's stone,
 
 RANDOLPH GORDON. 541 
 
 now that people of education, intelligence, and accredited position can be found 
 who will lend their drawing-rooms and give their credence to the legerdemain and 
 vulgarities of clever charlatanism. The generation of a century hence will cer- 
 tainly be puzzled whether to vote us wilful fools or helpless idiots. It seems 
 very curious to me that (with the power these mediums claim to possess of con- 
 constant contact and intimate liaison with the spirit world, who in their turn 
 know everything that has taken and will take place in the world they have 
 quitted), instead of going about in such very infra dig. style, earning their few 
 guineas a night at a seance, they don't make their fortunes by some noteworthy 
 prophecy that would do some credit to their powers of vaticination: tell us the 
 fate of Gaeta or Venice, or what the state of the funds will be a week before- 
 hand, or how long Louis Napoleon will keep as his motto ' L'empire c'est la 
 paix,' or something worth hearing. Ah ! there is Miss Audley rising. Shall I 
 ever make my peace with her I wonder ? " 
 
 Sunshine didn't answer him with her usual readiness and zest. She was 
 pondering over Mrs. Rocksilver, a problem she could not solve to her liking; 
 and she was probably wishing with all her heart that she had a medium for 
 her friend, who would tell her the meaning of the sort of by-play that went on 
 between the Captain-commandant of the Toadyshire Rifles and Lord Saltire's 
 dashing and dangerous guest. 
 
 " So you are entete with one of the Audley girls, I hear, Randolph," said 
 that lady, with a laugh and a sneer, as, after the luncheon was over, we broke 
 into groups to go and see the shooting-match for a beautifully-mounted rifle 
 and a silver cup Lord Saltire and my governor had offered for the best shot in 
 Toadyshire. "You were not made for a marrying man, mon cher; the Bene- 
 dict role won't suit you, though you are thirty-four. I doubt if you ever keep 
 the same thought through twelve hours. Miss Audley is very charming, sans 
 doute, still I have half a mind to do a good deed and save you from your 
 doom." 
 
 " What do you mean ? " said Randolph, with a carelessness that did him 
 infinite credit as an actor. 
 
 " N'importe ! " laughed Mrs. Rocksilver, gaily, with a glitter in her eyes. 
 " I was only thinking of some letters I have, which might postpone your sacri- 
 fice; but if sacrifice is to your taste, I don't see why I should interfere to rescue 
 you from it." 
 
 Randolph stroked his moustaches with an impatient frown on his brow. 
 
 " You can exhibit your correspondence where you please, of course; but 
 whether it will be more to your credit than mine " 
 
 " Fear makes you discourteous, mon ami," cried Mrs. Rocksilver, with 
 another light, pleasant laugh, her sweet temper in no wise disturbed. " Don't 
 be afraid, you are not such a great prize that I shall dispute you. Ah ! Major
 
 542 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 Thornton, how do you do ? I have not seen you before. Are you come 
 to have a shot for Lord Saltire's rifle ? " 
 
 Whether she had any particular design to make Randolph fail to win the 
 prize or not, I can't say, but her words and her smiles rankled sufficiently in 
 his mind to make him so careless of his laurels as the shot of Toadyshire, that 
 he who could hit anything a willow wand at three hundred yards, if he had 
 liked when he and I were tied for the first prize, scoring fiifteen points each, 
 missed, and let me make a centre without dispute. 
 
 " Why don't you win it ? You can" said Sunshine, impatiently, as he 
 rejoined her. " Aunt Clementina looks so pleased, and so does that Mrs. 
 Rocksilver." 
 
 When one lady applies the pronoun that to another, it invariably means a 
 great amount of dislike, jealousy, and general contemptuous irritation. " That 
 Julia Vernon ! " says your sisters of that girl without tin, whom you like and they 
 dread, wishing to hook you for their rich friend, Miss Fitzingots. " That Miss 
 Flirtington ! " says your wife, of your pretty cousin, whom you ventured to 
 take to the Crystal Palace one day. 
 
 '''That Mrs. Rocksilver!' she is jealous already," thought Randolph, 
 skilled in all feminine weaknesses, as he asked her very tenderly, " Do you 
 wish me to win ? " 
 
 " Of course I do," said Sunshine more impatiently still. "You were meant 
 to do something better than fire at electric targets for silver cups, but since you 
 are doing it, do well in it. No man should ever do less than his best; if every- 
 one remembered that we should have greater men than we have; patriots 
 would not sink into placemen, eloquence into clap-trap, genius into money- 
 fetching trash. Why the first myrtle-wreaths are the brightest, is because a 
 man puts out all his strength when he enters the arena, and thinks any blows 
 will suffice to keep the belt when he has once been declared champion. Go 
 and win; never let these civilians say they beat a man who fought on the Sand- 
 Bag battery." 
 
 Randolph smiled; he liked his " little devil " best in her hot, impatient, 
 contemptuous anger. He whispered something that nobody heard but Sun- 
 shine and took care to carry off the governor's cup with eighteen points at a 
 distance of five hundred yards, throwing to despair everyone of our corps, 
 who, from fat old Turbot to little sprat of a Fitzpop, had each seen in their 
 several imaginations that portion of Hunt and Roskell's plate standing on their 
 sideboards to be handed down to admiring generations in memoriam of the 
 gallant Toadyshire Rifles, and was rewarded for his exertions with so radiant a 
 smile from his Sunshine, that he wondered as a man always does wonder when 
 he changes his loves what beauty he could possibly ever have seen in the bold, 
 roving, tinted eyes of Augusta Rocksilver, as they had flashed on him in the
 
 RANDOLPH GORDON. 543 
 
 grand tier, the Ring, and artistically darkened and very embellishing boudoir 
 in Curson Street, the season before, when that lady had marked him out as the 
 most agreeable man about town, from the day she first saw him driving his til- 
 bury by the Serpentine. 
 
 " What's the matter with you, Randolph ? " said I, when we were waiting 
 for Lacquers and some others of the county men to go and play loo at the 
 Angel, in Boshcumbury, where we had dined after the Audley Court affair. 
 
 " Matter with me ? Nothing particular. But devil take her ! What did she 
 come here for?" said Randolph, with an angry stab at his cigar, that wouldn't burn 
 
 " Who are you anathematizing ? " 
 
 " Who ? Augusta Mrs. Rocksilver, of course. I was a fool last season, 
 you know, Cosmo. I thought her a very handsome woman and so she is 
 but I told her so a good deal too much, and I was idiot enough to give her my 
 picture, and write to her, and do all sorts of compromising things that are 
 always in black and white against one, as if I'd been four-and-twenty instead 
 of four-and-thirty; and now here she turns up in Toadyshire just when " 
 
 " You're making the same love to another woman. Very inconvenient, I 
 admit." 
 
 " Not the same love, thank you! The liking for the one is very different to 
 the liking for the other," muttered Randolph, with his weed between his teeth. 
 
 " I never liked the woman there's nothing in her to like she's all artificial; 
 but she was deucedly handsome, and I made love to her. Tant pis! And now 
 she'll go showing those letters and things to Sunshine. I'm certain she will; 
 confound it! " 
 
 With which colloquy to himself, not to me, Randolph flung his refractory 
 Cuba into the grate, as if it had been that luckless Rocksilver notecase which 
 contained those dangerous letters with which his last love held him in check 
 with his new one. 
 
 " And can't you trust to her forgiveness ? " 
 
 He smiled. " Well, perhaps. She's very plucky: but your most plucky 
 are often the gentlest to coax, and women always like a dash of the mauvais 
 sujet, even when it militates against themselves; they prefer a man's mind 
 to be a sealed envelope, about which there is a little mystery and a good deal 
 of pride in getting it to unclose, to a blotless breviary that lies open before 
 them; a Rousseau's Confessions that they mustn't look into, to an open letter 
 that those who run may read. How handy it would be if one could score out 
 some of the days of one's life. If a man would set up in business to sell 
 Lethe like porter by the pot, he'd very soon make his fortune wouldn't he ? 
 However, if one does foolish things, I suppose one must expect to pay for 
 them eh ? There come the men." And Randolph took up a fresh cigar, and 
 struck a fusee, humming to himself Beranger's
 
 544 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 " Fi des coquettes mani6r6es ! 
 Fi des b6gueufes de grand ton ! " 
 
 appropriating the refrain, I presume, to his quondam admiration and present 
 detestation, Augusta Rocksilver, nee Fixatrice; while I congratulated myself 
 that the Rocksilvers of my past were not on the scene, but thought, if ever they 
 did turn up, that I should soon persuade Pearl, with her languid eyes, and her 
 calmness, and her very deep, though, perhaps not very demonstrative, attach- 
 ment to me, of which I had made myself sure that day under the tete-a-tete 
 favoring orange-trees of the Audley Court conservatories, to listen to reason 
 and forgive me; while with that vivacious, satirical, and very vehement Sun- 
 shine, I doubted if Randolph would not find it up-hill work to obtain his 
 absolution if ever he asked her for it. 
 
 Our butt is about a mile out of Boshcumbury, the practising ground 
 rejoicing in the non-military appellative of the Sheep Fields, from the 
 fact that, when Boshcumbury possessed an abbey, of which the ruins re- 
 joice the souls of the archaeologists to this day, the old monks pastured 
 their flocks, where now, as Randolph remarks, we are teaching our lambs to be 
 lions, or, at least, our asses to don a leonine skin and semblance, and like Bot- 
 tom, " roar that it will do any man's heart good to hear, and fright the ladies 
 till they shriek." The butt is a mile out of the town: and a sorry mile that 
 is to all our corps when the practising days are wet ones, and their cock-tails 
 are bedraggled, their Melton soaked through, and water dripping off every 
 point of their beloved harness. Such a day was it after the Audley Court 
 inspection: and if Randolph had given us the option of deferring the drill, I 
 venture to say, martial though we were, we shouldn't have scorned the per- 
 mission as pluckily as the Guards did the other day, when they were up to 
 their knees in water at Aldershot. But he offered no such thing that winter 
 before Sebastopol had made him horribly contemptuous of all effeminacies, 
 and cruelly impervious to all " babies' whinings," as he brutally termed our most 
 severe but mildly-silent sufferings. We went through the drill that pouring 
 summer evening. Poor Turbot, who had got out of a comfortable after-dinner 
 doze, snatched the handkerchief from his brow that kept the flies away while 
 he slumbered, gazed wildly at the clock, and struggled frantically into harness, 
 his wife pulling at that miserable belt till the poor little woman's face was 
 .scarlet, and the good town clerk decidedly apoplectic, in his haste to be in time. 
 It was a picture of. the most touching misery to see that bon bourgeois, who 
 had never stirred out without his goloshes, his umbrella, and his waterproof, 
 dripping like a Newfoundland after a bath himself puffing, blowing, saturated 
 a portrait of distress to touch the most flinty heart; and many an oath did 
 he swear to himself for having exchanged his quill for an Enfield the shelter 
 of his snug office for the windy pampas of the Sheep Fields. Bassompierre
 
 RANDOLPH GORDON. 545 
 
 Delafield, the pet physician, who had bought a rifle and a ten pound diploma 
 almost en meme temps, and divided the worship of the fair women of the borough 
 with the popular preacher at St. Faithandgrace, getting the more votes of the two 
 because he was still unmarried, thought wildly of bronchitis, diphtheria, phthisis, 
 and every pulmonary evil under the sun, as the rain ran off his little shako into 
 his neck in countless and chilling streamlets, and wished the volunteer movement 
 at the devil, and his own fondly-cherished person safe in the drawing-room of 
 one of his lady patients. Horrible as the bank and its imprisonment had once 
 seemed to poor Simpson, the vision of that hated stool and desk seemed paradise, 
 for they at least were dry, which not a thread of that beloved uniform of his could 
 purport to be this dreary, pouring, remorseless, practising day; poor little 
 Freddy Audley, shivering and wretched as his idolized curls hung dank and 
 dripping, shrank under the great plash of each rain-drop as if it were the thug 
 of a French cannon ball; even Lacquers, that jolliest of men (when away from 
 his wife,) looked as blue and dull as if he were having one of my lady's diur- 
 nal lectures; and through it all our heartless captain kept us hard at it as if it 
 were a sunshiny noon, swore to himself what a fool a soldier was to have any- 
 thing to do with a set of civilians, and looked as cool and unconcerned with 
 the water dripping off his long moustaches as if he were an otter, or a boatman, 
 or a seal, or a bathing-woman, or any other amphibious being to whom the ele- 
 ment came as second nature. 
 
 " Go home and have a warm bath, Freddy," said he, with the most unfeel- 
 ing laugh imaginable, as the poor little dripping heir of Audley Court wrapped 
 the plaid round his knees as he started his dog-cart off from the Angel yard. 
 " Mind you have some white wine whey, and ask Miss Clementina for her 
 chaufferette; and a few drops of nitre, I've heard, are the very best thing for 
 catarrh; but your aunt will see to all that. What a blessing a maiden aunt is 
 to young volunteers, who'd like to play at soldiers only in fine weather ! I won- 
 der what you'd have done, my boy, if you'd been with us the night before Alma. 
 Cambridge himself had only a tilted cart, and, by George ! how it poured all 
 night; splash, splash, into the puddle where we lay, sans cloaks, sans tents, sans, 
 anything. You'd have shone there, Freddy, and Miss Clementina's whey would 
 really have been most acceptable, though on my life, I don't think you'd have 
 been alive to drink it, since you suffer so frightfully from a little rain." 
 
 " A little rain ! Cats and dogs ! You're as bad as Sunshine," murmured 
 Freddy, between a growl and a lisp. 
 
 The last name silenced Randolph, or at least sent him into a reverie, so that 
 poor Freddy was allowed to start his mare off in peace from further assaults; 
 and the captain of the East Goosestep threw himself across his gray, shook his 
 bridle, and clattered down the high street, the young demoiselles at the pastry 
 cook's looking longingly at him through the dripping plate-glass of their shrine, 
 
 VOL. III. 18
 
 546 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 as they solaced shoals of moist volunteers with steaming mock turtle and cherry 
 brandy, or piping hot oyster patties. Turbot went home to an extra tumbler of 
 whiskey-and-water, warm slippers, and every creature comfort that his little 
 wife could heap upon her patriotic and self-sacrificing lord. Bassompierre 
 Delafield changed and went to dine with a pet patient, who had his favorite en- 
 trements for him, and who listened to his recital of the horrors of the day with 
 as thrilling an admiration as Europe now listens to the sufferings of Poerio, 
 Arrivabene, or Teleki. Young Simmons and little Fitzpop turned into the 
 Angel, to warm themselves with mulligatawney, bemoaning bitterly that their 
 dear jackets were so utterly soaked through, that they should be obliged to go 
 in mufti to the Fitzvalseurs' carpet-dance. Lacquers went home to a stately 
 dinner and an admirably dressed and coiffee Zantippe, who would have been more 
 cheering and refreshing if she had a little less handsome a toilette and a little 
 more pleasant good humor. Freddy drove me off with him to Audley Court, where 
 he had asked me to dine, L gladly accepting, hours with Pearl being the sum- 
 mum bonum of earthly felicity with me; and Randolph galloped on his own way 
 back to Grassmere, thinking of the Rocksilver, of Sunshine, with some other 
 entanglements of his past and plans for his future, as he rode his gray at a pace 
 fit for Croxton Park or the Grand Military. 
 
 As he passed along by the side of that small stream dignified in Toadyshire 
 by the name of river, which bordered the Audley estate, he heard the ring of a 
 pony's hoofs, and a merry laugh that he knew well enough. 
 
 " Ah, bonjour ! Will you ride a race after the rain ? " 
 
 Quick as the wind, Sunshine rode past him, lifting her gay, bright face to 
 his, all the brighter for gleaming out of the dark afternoon mist. 
 
 " My little Arab shall beat your Gray Darrell. Fifty to one I reach the 
 milestone first ! " 
 
 " Done ! For the best Jouvins ! " laughed Randolph, though he felt a 
 much greater desire to snatch her up from her little Arab, and carry her off to 
 Grassmere, as the Gordons of old had summarily wooed and won the ladye loves 
 whom fate and foe kept from them. Away they went, and the little half-bred 
 Arab set off at such speed when his rider struck his silky black flanks with her 
 riding-whip, as promised to beat Randolph by a length, though he was counted 
 one of the best riders that had ever graced the Queen's or cleared bullfinches 
 with the Pytchley and the Tedworth. Probably he did not try to work up his 
 gray to do her best; probably, he preferred losing the Jouvins, and giving her 
 the pleasure of victory; at any rate, the little Arab dashed along the turfy road 
 at a pace worthy of his ancestry, both English and Syrian, that would really 
 have drawn him down admiration if he could have been entered for the Good- 
 wood or the Ascot Cup, and Sunshine won the distance by a couple of yards, 
 clapping her gauntlets with joyous laughter.
 
 RANDOLPH GORDON. 547 
 
 " I won! I won! I told you I should! Who can defy me ? " 
 
 The bright blue eyes lifted to him chased the Rocksilver's black ones 
 straight out of Randolph's mind. 
 
 " Not I," said he passionately, as he reined up Gray Darrell close by the 
 Arab's side. " Sunshine, some people will tell you that my love is no great 
 prize, but such as it is it is yours, as long as my life will last, stronger and 
 deeper than I ever felt it for any woman before. Whatever faults I may 
 have had for others I will have none for you, for God knows how dear you are 
 to me! " 
 
 This form of address would have had far too little Grandisonian reverence 
 in it to suit Miss Clementina, who would doubtless have expected Randolph to 
 kneel on the ground, without any respect to the muddy state of the roads, and 
 tender in submissive language his respectful homage and undying devotion. 
 But Sunshine seemed to be very well satisfied with it in its modern, brief, and un- 
 reverential form. As Randolph bent down from his saddle, and his moustache 
 touched those mischievous lips which spoke such cruel satire on his volunteer 
 rifle corps, Miss Clementina, on the other side of the river, going to visit her 
 district, after the rain, with a gigantic umbrella, goloshes in which you could 
 have put Sunshine's whole body, and her own pet page, bearing a packet of 
 stiff tracts, looked stricken dumb with righteous indignation, trembling till every 
 bone in the umbrella skin rattled. 
 
 " In a public road! " she murmured, almost paralyzed with horror. "What 
 next ? How utterly lost to all self-respect, to all maidenly feeling, to all 
 proper reserve! He shall never enter my house again! " 
 
 Past them, too, in the usually deserted highway rolled, just at the juncture, 
 a carriage with the Saltire arms on the panels and hammer-cloth, and Mrs. 
 Rocksilver looked through the window at Gray Darrell and the little Arab, and 
 set her fine white teeth together. 
 
 "Faites votre jeu, monsieur; but it will be odd if you win! " 
 
 PART THE THIRD. 
 IV. 
 
 HOW RANDOLPH AND I SINNED AND CONFESSED IT, AND HOW WE GOT 
 PARDON AND PENANCE. 
 
 MARKET ROTTENBOROUGH, twin capital of Boshcumbury, sent the East 
 Goosestep an invitation to drill with the West Toadyshire. Their strength
 
 548 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 was about fifty; ours amounted to eighty; fifty and eighty volunteers 
 one huodred and thirty in all! Was that not a force enough to sneer at 
 any imperial whatsoever, and bestow upon the county blessed with such a 
 phalanx as sweet a sense of security, as a maiden lady experiences when she 
 "bolts the door," before retiring to rest, with a miniature bar of iron that 
 a burglarious file would cut through in a second ? Market Rottenborough 
 was to give us an ovation. We were to drill at Bottlesmere, a village two miles 
 off, where Sir Cheque Ingotts, the banker of Rottenborough, had bought a 
 seat, and set up as a country gentleman. We were to dine in the town-hall, 
 and the Toadyshire Railway Company had offered to take us in second-class 
 carriages for third-class fare to show their sense of our patriotism a munifi- 
 cence which Randolph did not feel as he ought to have done, but, on the con- 
 trary, gave a most ungrateful sneer to it." 
 
 Market Rottenborough went quite as mad about us as ever the Yankees about 
 the Prince of Wales. They dressed up the town with evergreens and flowers, 
 they had out the election flags, which hung together in unity for the first time 
 since their manufacture, and the charity school banners, whose inscriptions 
 were not particularly appropriate, as they inculcated giving the other cheek if 
 one was buffeted, and similar injuctions of an anti-gunpowder character, and 
 the shops were shut, and the bells fired, and the old militia band performed 
 that familiar fantasia peculiar to itself, with the bugle at a gallop, the clarionet 
 at a trot, and the fife at a slow march, till we could not possibly have been 
 more fetes if we had taken Paris, invested Petersburg, or stormed Pekin. 
 
 As we marched under the triumphal arch into the park, and wheeled into 
 line to give general salute, we saw Miss Clementina with Sunshine, Pearl, and 
 Rosebud. The lady of Audley Court made her eyes into stone, and gave 
 Randolph a glance as fixed and chilling as that of the Medusa, as she bestowed 
 on him her shortest and stiffest bow. We had no time for a tete-a-tete, for 
 after we had been reviewed and complimented, we had to march back to Rot- 
 tenborough, and go through the horrible ordeal of a public dinner, where Ran- 
 dolph and I, being not gifted with patience, and having visions of Sunshine 
 and Pearl at a ball, whither we were going at Bottlesmere as soon as we were 
 released, chafed unspeakably during the laudatory orations which passed 
 between the Rottenboroughites and Boshcumburyonians. 
 
 Randolph and I were profoundly thankful when we could shake ourselves 
 free of it, and go off to the ball at Sir Cheque's where Miss Clementina had 
 immolated herself to impose some check by her presence on her nieces, and 
 who looked black as thunder as Randolph, recklessly regardless of the Rock- 
 silver, took possession of Sunshine in a cool, right-of-way manner, authorized, 
 of course, by her improper conduct under the elms the day before. The 
 independent conduct of her nieces irritated Miss Clementina. Rosebud alone
 
 RANDOLPH GORDON. 54!) 
 
 was acting properly, and seriously, encouraging the Hon. Augustus Priedieu, 
 third son of Lord Saltire; but Pearl, whom she had always considered the only 
 manageable one of the three, cut her to the heart, in engaging herself to such a 
 mauvais sujet as Cosmo Lyle; and Sunshine, " she should never be surprised at 
 anything dreadful that happened to that girl," she assured Mrs. Tomtjt, as, 
 tired of chaperoning, they sat talking over the parish, the county, the company 
 and her nieces, in a deserted whist-room. 
 
 "She is wild, headstrong, wayward; and this handsome reprobate, Colonel 
 
 Gordon Hark! who is that, talking in the ante-chamber?" said Miss 
 
 Clementina, interrupting herself. 
 
 "Randolph, do you remember that miniature of yours; the one Mayall 
 took ?" said somebody invisible in the inner apartment. 
 
 " Mine ! a miniature ? Really I have had so many taken, that I can't 
 remember. None of them were like me," said a man's voice, that Miss Clem- 
 entina knew but too well. 
 
 " I don't agree with you, mon cher; mine is an admirable likeness of you; 
 so good, indeed, that I think Miss Audley would like to have it, if you really 
 are engaged to her. You've been engaged to so many, it's almost a cry of 
 ' Wolf ! ' I will send it her, if you like ?" 
 
 There was a suppressed "The devil !" and a more audible " Thank you; 
 I don't doubt she would be much obliged to you, but I have a picture by me I 
 have already promised her." 
 
 " Vraiment ! which old love did it belong to last, Ranolph Lady Aurora 
 or Georgie, or Madame de Tintiniac, or La Roville, or whom ? " 
 
 " To none of them. I shall not insult my future wife by offering her others' 
 leavings." 
 
 This was very haughty and laconic: it was answered by another laugh. 
 
 " Then don't offer her your heart, mon ami ! However, you are right, 
 Benedict, to play propriety, and I have no wish to be behind you, so I will 
 certainly send Miss Audley that miniature, and all your letters too. Your 
 future wife is the most proper keeper of them; don't you think so? " 
 
 " For God's sake, Augusta 
 
 " Augusta ! For shame, Colonel Gordon, you insult your ' future wife ' 
 and me too." 
 
 " Great Heavens ! that for a few months of folly -" began her interlocutor, 
 passionately. Then he went on, keeping his anger down: "You can do as you 
 please; Miss Audley loves me too well to revenge anything of my past upon 
 me. N The only result of your sending her my letters will be to show that Mrs. 
 Rocksilver cares enough for Randolph Gordon to be jealous of his forgetting 
 her in a truer, fonder, stronger love for another." 
 
 Miss Clementina rose, grasped Mrs. Tomtit's arm, and dragged her from
 
 550 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 the room; then she looked at her with a face pale with anger, and feelings out- 
 raged, till every link in her bracelets, and every tip of her marabouts, trembled 
 and quivered, while her voice was sepulchral enough to have drawn crowded 
 houses to Sadler's Wells or the Grecian. 
 
 "I am always lighting on something horrible and to think my niece might 
 have married that wretch! Oh, Annette! can we ever be too prudent and too 
 circumspect with his dreadful sex ? " 
 
 Miss Clementina quite shook with her awful secret as she stepped into the 
 carriage. She shivered as her dress touched Randolph, and she could have 
 shrieked when she saw him hand Sunshine in, and saw his moustache touch her 
 hair and cheeck, under pretext of giving her her bouquet, as he bade her good 
 night, and held her hand in his. 
 
 " Sunshine, do you dream of ever marrying that Colonel Gordon ? " asked 
 Miss Clementina, as her fat bays puffed along the dark road, in a tone so fright- 
 fully funereal that Sunshine started, then colored, smiled, and intimated that 
 she had dreamt of it, and had, moreover, been recently assured that her dream 
 should come true. " Then never think of such a thing again; it would be the 
 greatest calamity that could befall you; he is the worst, the vilest of his sex ! " 
 resumed her aunt, with such solemn and startling emphasis, that Sunshine 
 dropped her fan and her bouquet in amazement. To slander her beau ideal 
 thus, she thought Miss Clementina must be fit habitant for Hanwell. No 
 language was ever heard so thrilling and so severe as that in which Miss 
 Clementina told the story of that fatal conversation overheard between Ran- 
 dolph and Mrs. Rocksilver; she didn't pause till a violent jolt in a rut stopped 
 her peroration, and compelled her, weak in bronchia though strong in vehe- 
 mence, to halt for breath. 
 
 "You won't see him again, will you, Sunshine?" said Rosebud, strong in 
 the devotion and spotlessness of the Hon. and Rev. Augustus. 
 
 " After such an insult, you will call up all your pride to punish him as he 
 merits the same love he gives to you offered to Mrs. Rocksilver ! abomi- 
 nable ! " chimed in Pearl, that devout upholder of woman's dignity. 
 
 " There is but one course left for you, and that is, for me to write and end 
 all communication in your name," resumed Miss Clementina's frigid tones. 
 
 Sunshine was very pale. To have her fears of the Rocksilver confirmed 
 was not welcome. "He loves me now," she said, hurriedly; " it is nothing 
 whom he has liked before." 
 
 " What ! you call such an outrage ' nothing ! ' " shrieked Miss Clementina 
 " You think it ' nothing ' for another woman to have his picture and his love- 
 letters ! " cried Rosebud. 
 
 Sunshine's eyes grew dark; she spoke bitterly and passionately, as she felt, 
 and Miss Clementina gazed at her aghast. She collapsed under the horrible
 
 RANDOLPH GORDON. 551 
 
 suggestion that her life could, under any provocation whatsoever, have by any 
 possibility borne any comparison with Randolph Gordon's ! She regarded 
 Sunshine with stern despairing pity, reserving her grand coup for the last. 
 
 "Very well, you do as you please, of course; but I forbid that man my 
 house ! " 
 
 I was breakfasting the next morning, when Randolph came in sans ceremonie 
 and threw himself down on a sofa. 
 
 " Cosmo, I want you to do something for me." 
 
 " A votre service. What is it ? " 
 
 " Why," said Randolph, lashing his boots impatiently, " I sent a groom over 
 this morning to Audley Court with a letter to Miss Clementina, telling her I 
 loved her neice, and wished to make her my wife. Nobody else in the county 
 would take it as an offence, I should fancy rather an contraire, wouldn't you 
 say ? I must confess, however, there's no knowing what one may come to ? 
 Well, what does my man bring me back in return but a cold and frigid little 
 document, written in the most buckramish hand, expressing her conviction that 
 Sunshine will go to the devil her own way, but repudiating the connection, and 
 forbidding me the house. Did you ever know anything more cursedly annoy- 
 ing? Deuce take the women all but one. What on earth shall I do? " 
 
 " Have you heard from Sunshine ? " 
 
 " No. I promised her last night to go and ride out with her at twelve, but I 
 can't go now. I won't force myself into anybody's house, not even for her 
 sake; and yet not to see her ! Heaven knows what lies the Rocksilver mayn't 
 have told her about me and those confounded letters of mine too. Stay, I'll 
 write a line to Sunshine, and you'll take it for me. Give it to her maid, that 
 nice little Frenchwoman, you know. Will you ? " 
 
 And drawing the paper and inkstand to him, he dashed off at express speed 
 his one line, alias his three or four sheets. 
 
 " Now go and find Marie, there's a good fellow," said he, when he had 
 finished. " Gallop all the way there if you've any pity in your composition." 
 
 With which he fairly pushed me out of my own room, and sent me gallop- 
 ing down the road that led to Audley Court, and I thought myself in wonderful 
 good luck when, as I rode through the lodge gates, I lighted on Marie, flirting 
 with the head gardener. 
 
 " Non, je ne prendrai pas la lettre," said she with a shake of her glossy- 
 tressed head. " Madame sa tante ne le veut pas." 
 
 " Mais Monsieur le Colonel le veut; vous ferez tout pour lui, Marie," said 
 I, thrusting half a sovereign into her little plump fingers. 
 
 " Ah ! le Colonel ! " laughed Marie; "mais otii. II est bien beau ce mon- 
 sieur, mais il est bien mechant aussi, je pense: et monsieur, je n'ose pas ! " 
 
 " Si, si, Marie, vous le donnerez a mademoiselle, j'en suis bien sur; vous
 
 552 OUIDA'S WORKS. 
 
 ferez tout pour servir & 1'amour, n'estce pas ? " said I, as I put the letter in her 
 hand, and reinforced my request with another little bit of gold, and such a 
 caress as soubrettes, on and off the stage, have expected from time immemorial. 
 
 "Fi done ! monsieur ! " cried Marie, taking the letter with a laugh, when 
 oh horror of horrors ! in a gardening costume, with gauntlets too large for the 
 stoutest coporal in Randolph's Coldstreams, and dress looped up to show most 
 strong-minded balmorals, a broad hat on her brow, some cuttings in her hand, 
 and on her face the greatest wrath that ever mortal lineaments portrayed, that 
 evil genius of East Toadyshire I saw Miss Clementina ! 
 
 How I repassed those lodge gates I can't tell you. I turned my mare's 
 head, with some faint hope that Miss Clementina mightn't recognize me, and I 
 tore back along the road, heaping curses, loud and deep, on Randolph's love, 
 which ten to one had cost me mine. 
 
 "Well, did Marie take my letter?" asked Randolph, eagerly, as he stood 
 smoking on my hearth-rug, when I reached home, after riding as if all the furies 
 had been after me. 
 
 "Yes," said I, savagely; "and I wish you had been at the devil before you'd 
 given it me." 
 
 " Bien oblige ! What's the row ? " 
 
 I told him, and he looked deeply sympathizing when I had. 
 1 When Randolph and I had done luncheon, a groom from Audley Court 
 brought two notes. Randolph tore his open; I held mine, touching it, touching 
 it as fearfully as if it were a Brinvilliers's poisoned billet. 
 
 " Well, what does Miss Pearl say to you, old fellow ? " asked Randolph, as 
 he crushed his up and put it into his breast-pocket, looking as radiant as a man 
 might whose horse had won "the blue riband of the turf." 
 
 " Say ? " I repeated savagely, " why, that after what her aunt has told her 
 she witnessed this morning, everything must be at an end between us." 
 
 " The devil she does ! " interrupted Randolph. " She hasn't lived with Miss 
 Clementina for nothing, then. Does she expect to find a man like Trollope's 
 impossible Arabian, who touches a woman's lips for the first time, we are told 
 to believe, at forty ! On my life, Cosmo, how grieved I am ! " 
 
 " She's heard some garbled tale of it," said I, hoping against hope, with valor 
 worthy a volunteer. "I'll see her before night; I'll make her hear me at the 
 least. Women often say more than they mean. Is Sunshine kinder to you, 
 pray ? " 
 
 " God bless her little heart, yes ! " said Randolph, emphatically. " I told 
 you my 'little devil ' was true metal, Lyle." 
 
 That evening Randolph leaned over the white gate that parted one of the 
 paddocks of Audley Court from a bridle-path, talking to Sunshine, confessing 
 his sins, and receiving his absolution.
 
 RANDOLPH GORDON. 553 
 
 " You see, my pet," he was saying, half laughing, after graver converse, 
 "we men are very often like that luckless bee Mr. Gosse tells us of, who, catch- 
 ing sight of a crascicornis, mistook it for a flower, and darting delightedly on 
 to its tentacles, was hooked, impaled, and swallowed. We see what we fancy 
 very beautiful flowers, we fly down to taste the honey of eye love, and our 
 seemingly innocent rose thrusts out its thorns, and impales us there long after 
 it has ceased to have any fragrance for us, and we have found out our foolish 
 mistake. Such was my love for Mrs. Rocksilver, and others like her, but it 
 was not love of which you need be jealous, nor love that could ever feel after 
 that I bear for you. You will not visit my sins upon me, Sunshine ? " 
 
 Sunshine, that keen satirist, whose wicked tongue all his corps feared, lifted 
 her face to his with a smile, half mechancete, half of tenderness, a little bit 
 saddened that he should have loved so many before her, but wholly trustful 
 that he would love her alone in the future. 
 
 "No; you told me yourself that two days would be the extent of your 
 fidelity to anyone, still I am not afraid to trust you, mechant though you are." 
 
 Randolph bent over the gate, and thanked her so fervently, that it was a 
 very fortunate thing Miss Clementina was then pouring her woes into Mrs. 
 Tomtit's ear before dinner, and was not there to have her nerves startled with 
 a third severe galvanic shock. At that same hour I was vainly entreating Pearl 
 to hear reason, which that young lady as absolutely declined to hear, being in 
 a state of most dignified wrath, and that frame of mind in which her sex talk 
 nineteen to the dozen, and give Lynch law verdicts with the greatest ruthless- 
 ness and severity. I had managed to catch her walking on the terrace, and 
 pleaded my cause with an eloquence which I should have thought calculated to 
 touch the most flinty heart. But Pearl was more than dint, and wouldn't even 
 listen to a plea. Disengaging her hand without looking at me, she swept off 
 into the house like a young empress. 
 
 In the high road Randolph and I met. He was riding, smoking, with a 
 most contented smile on his lips. 
 
 " I owe you a fiver," said I, with pardonable bitterness, considering that it 
 was through being his postman that I had lost my fiancee. "You were right; 
 your ' little-devil ' has pardoned all your past, and her sister won't forgive me a 
 bit of harmless nonsense in a friend's cause. Like a fool, helping you to trap 
 your sunbeam I've shut myself out of Audley Court, and every ray of Pearl's 
 favor; and how the deuce I shall get back into either is far more than I can 
 guess! "
 
 554 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 V. 
 
 HOW SPIRITUALISTIC AGENCY WAS BROUGHT IN FOR MATERIAL PURPOSES. 
 
 SUNSHINE was so determined to have her own way, and so very satirical 
 upon those who opposed her, that people were speedily tired of doing so, and 
 Randolph got the entree of Audley Court on a sort of suffrance and condition 
 that he would not long pollute its walls with his presence, but rid it both of 
 himself and of his " little devil." Freddy, who had his own way in everything, 
 the only soul on earth that Miss Clementina worshipped and listened to, gave 
 her a blowing up for rejecting his captain's offer. Sunshine avowed her un- 
 swerving loyalty to her ame damnee, and Miss Clementina had to give in, for 
 the very first time in her maiden existence! She permitted Randolph to come 
 to her house, but treated him with frigid hauteur, which was intended to show 
 him she had not forgiven his faux pas. Not so fortunate was I; no re-entry 
 could I make into Audley Court; its doors were fast closed against me. Ran- 
 dolph's intervention, Sunshine's artillery, Freddy's mediation, were all powerless 
 in my cause. Pearl was inflexible, and Miss Clementina backed her, glorying 
 in the fact that one, at least of her poor brother's children had some sense of 
 womanly dignity, and could resent an insult and revenge men's shameless 
 levity. 
 
 Pearl was lost. Nohow could I regain her; not even gain her ear again; 
 and bitterly did I anathematize that evil day when I had been mad enough to 
 play the part of Randolph's postman. 
 
 The doors of Audley Court were closed against me, and there seemed no 
 chance of my ever getting inside them again, not even to plead for mercy with 
 my cruel and relentless fiancee, till one day, after drill, little Freddy came to 
 me the good-natured little fop was heart and soul my friend. 
 
 " Lyle, I've thought of something." 
 
 " You thought, Freddy ! what a phenomenon ! Well, what did you think 
 about ? " 
 
 " A way to get you inside the Court, to have a good lark, and to bring Miss 
 Pearl to reason," answered Freddy. " You know the old lady's rampant about 
 spiritualism and all that humbug; she's heard of the seances in town, and she's 
 crazy to have one of the mediums down here. She got me to write to one of 
 'em, to know their terms. I didn't post the letter I have it in my pocket now 
 and I thought if you'd take the role (you're a good ventriloquist and a cap- 
 ital actor, and you learnt some legerdemain of Houdin) we would soon get up 
 the rest of the clap-trap, and you might say something, as if from the spirits, 
 you know, that might bring Pearl to reason, eh ? It would be such a lark, you
 
 RANDOLPH GORDON. 555 
 
 know. Do; we won't tell Gordon or Sunshine, because, though they'd do any- 
 thing in the world to help you, they'd be certain to laugh, they couldn't help 
 it. We'll only tell Marie. Come along, Lyle; let's talk it over. You'll never 
 see Pearl unless you take her by storm, and it would be such fun to do Aunt 
 Tina. 
 
 Freddy's suggestion, seemingly wild and visionary at first glance, grew 
 more practisable at consideration. After a good deal of talking over and 
 reiterated persuasion from him, who was egotistically eager for it, as "such 
 a lark," it assumed a guise of possibility, and I consented to turn medium. 
 
 It was about a fortnight after I had lost alike my fiancee and my bet, 
 when Miss Clementina, on the tiptoe of expectation, and with her nerves strung 
 to the highest pitch of reverential excitement, invited her beloved friend, 
 Mrs. Tomtit, to be present at a seance. Mrs. Tomtit, on the strength of many 
 wonders of lively- minded tables and gossiping ghosts that had been revealed 
 to her on a recent visit to town, was a firm believer in the new arch-humbug, 
 rejected any rational explanation of her beloved miracles as disgustedly as a 
 divine would of his, and was, therefore, considered eligible by Miss Clementina 
 to be present at a seance for which she had engaged a celebrated London 
 medium, who, like all other mediums, would only transact his celestial affairs 
 if he was paid for it, and appeared to carry his spirits about with him, as the 
 showman carries his Punch and Judy, beadle and devil, in a box, till called for 
 and paid for their performances. The spirits won't perform for nothing, any 
 more than Punch will give his " Too te too te too-o-o-e! " to the unremunera- 
 tive small boys on the pave. 
 
 I dressed myself that night with minute care, and, I may say, that no more 
 venerable-looking individual than I ever turned away from a cheval-glass. I 
 had a snowy beard, I had spectacles which shaded my eyes from all inquisitive 
 gaze. I was seventy at the least; a most respectable person for the spirits to 
 confide in. I was as thoroughly disguised as if detective Al had been after 
 me; and satisfied myself as to its completeness when, ringing at our own door, 
 and asking for myself, old Waters replied, without an idea of my identity, 
 "Mr. Lyle is not at home, sir." 
 
 Freddy and Marie were my accomplices. We had selected a night when 
 Randolph and Sunshine were going to dine with a cousin of his, for I 
 wouldn't have had their keen eyes on me for any money. Miss Clementina was 
 disposed to be more amiable to a medium than to any other thing on earth. 
 Everything smiled propitious as I entered, and Freddy, meeting me in the hall, 
 whispered, " All right coast's clear Marie's ready, and the iron's fixed to the 
 drawing-room table the oval one, remember." 
 
 They ushered me into the drawing-room; there Miss Clementina sat in 
 state, the most imposing person that can be imagined, calculated to inspire with
 
 556 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 solemnity and respect the spirit of Tom Wharton, or Mahun, or the " roaring 
 boys" of the Restoration, or the wildest scamp going; there was little Mrs. 
 Tomtit, tremendously excited, a little bit frightened, and ready to go into hys- 
 terics at any moment; there, too, was my granite-hearted fiancee, looking so 
 handsome as she leant back in her chair, that I was on the point of forgetting 
 my role and throwing myself at her daintily chausses feet instanter; and there 
 was not Randolph and Sunshine, for which absenteeism I thanked Heaven de- 
 voutly, for no slight ordeal was it, I can tell you, with Miss Clementina's pitiless, 
 and Pearl's haughty, and Rosebud's laughing, and the little Tomtit's inquisitive 
 eyes upon me, when I knew that I had stolen into Audley Court in borrowed 
 plumes, that I was making game of its mistress, and that one false step might be 
 detection, and detection more irrevocable exile than before. But I summoned 
 up my courage as became a Goosestep Volunteer, and opened the seance in due 
 form. I was solemn, I was grandly dignified, I was deeply mysterious, as became 
 a correspondent with an unseen world; I was a man after Miss Clementina's own 
 heart; I believe I realized that Jack-o'-lantern ideal which she had ever 
 been pursuing and never caught. I was certainly more imposing, with my snowy 
 beard and my six feet of height, than some of those very fat and not remarkably 
 impressive elderly females, who sometimes summon the dear departed from the 
 darkness of the tomb into the gas-lights of a London drawing-room. 
 
 First of all I requested to have the room darkened; spirits, you know, don't 
 admire light, it jars on their feelings, or exposes the ravages of time too much. 
 One candle was left on a console at the far end of the room, which shed such a 
 dim religious light, that, like very many religious lights, it was as good as none 
 at all. I heard Mrs. Tomtit shudder. " Isn't it awful ? " whispered the little 
 woman; to which Miss Clementina returned a short, stern, snappish " Pshaw ! " 
 under which Mrs. Tomtit collapsed, silenced by the superior energy of a mind 
 greater than her own. There was a dull, gray, mysterious twilight, that made 
 everything dark look black as night, and everything large, gigantic: a twilight 
 of itself, quite a nightmare to any nervous susceptibilities, under which Rose- 
 bud murmured, How horrid ! " and the poor little Tomtit shivered till the 
 bugles of her cap and the links of her bracelets rang a little chattering duet of 
 terror, which so incensed Miss Clementina that she asked her sharply " if she 
 thought the spirits would bite her ? " which was a lowering, not to say ridicu- 
 lous, view of the spirits' pursuits, quite in consonance with the nineteenth century 
 view of them. It was a dim, mysterious twilight, and in it having selected 
 Freddy to read off the alphabet I rapped on the drawing-room table, and 
 asked the rosewood in courteous terms if the spirits were there in its pillar 
 and claw, in fact, which must be a very inconvenient domicle for some of them 
 for stout old Luther, par exemple unless, indeed, the Silent Land had shrunk 
 them to the size of homunculi. Then I struck the floor with my left foot, too
 
 RANDOLPH GORDON. 557 
 
 slightly for anybody to see it: and my boot having a loose brass heel, which 
 clicked easily, did the spirits' business a ravir, and announced through my taps 
 and Freddy's alphabet that their excellencies were coming, with an amiable 
 celerity they didn't always display, perhaps, in answering their duns' calls, or 
 their wives' appeals, in a former state of existence; and at which supernatural 
 evidence Mrs. Tomtit gave a little suppressed scream, and Miss Clementina was 
 too much imposed to correct her. I asked the spirits if they had any objection 
 to the present company, and my boot gave me three taps, to answer me they 
 had not, which was a great relief to me, as spirits, you know, are as averse to 
 showing before an unbeliever as a clergyman is shy of opening argument 
 with a clever secularist. 
 
 " The spirits are present with us," said I, in the most sepulchral tones to 
 which I could force my voice. 
 
 " Oh ! it's dreadful, Clementina ? " sobbed Mrs. Tomtit. " I can see them, 
 I can hear them, I can feel them. Oh ! take me away somebody ! I can't bear 
 it, it's so awful ! " 
 
 " Be silent," said Miss Clementina's deepest tones, sunk to an awe-stricken 
 whisper; " I can realize a presence not of earth, but it is ill becoming 
 us to show timorous dread of any of the mysteries of life and death. Oh ! 
 good gracious ! what's this ? " screamed that dignified lady, with a shrill scream 
 like a small rocket, changing from solemnity to terror. 
 
 "You are honored, madam; the spirits communicate personally with you," 
 said I, in a reproving tone, as I drew back into my pocket, with that rapidity I 
 had paid Robert Houdin many a guinea to learn, a pair of long-handled pin- 
 cers, with which I had nipped up a small portion of Miss Clementina's person. 
 
 " How mysterious ! how awfully mysterious ! " soliloquised the mistress of 
 Audley Court. " What singular means they take of testifying their presence. 
 My arm is painful now; it is really awful ! " 
 
 " Awful it is horrible ! " sobbed the little vicaress. " Ah ! oh ! Clemen- 
 tina, they are pinching my ankles ! " 
 
 " Silence ! " said I. " Do you not recognize the presence of the Unreal 
 and Impalpable ? " 
 
 "Yes !" said Miss Clementina, Mrs. Tomtit, and Rosebud, in awe-stricken 
 concert. 
 
 " Do you not feel their cold touch upon your brow, their ghostly breath 
 upon your lips, their holy phantoms riding on the wings of night ? " 
 
 " Yes ! " they all sobbed in trio. Their voices were hardly to be heard, 
 their nerves were strung up to the highest pitch. They felt, saw, heard any- 
 thing and everything that could be suggested to thei'r heated imaginations, and 
 their fancy, warmed to fusion, would have taken any flights that mine had pro- 
 posed to them. My miracles, signs, and wonders, like many others, owed their
 
 558 OUIDA'S WORKS. 
 
 reality solely to the gullibility of my believers. I was in high spirits; I was 
 succeeding a ravir; every one of my auditors was far too profoundly impressed 
 with the terrors of the supernatural to have any material reason left with which 
 to penetrate my eleusinia and see through my disguise. I was just proceeding 
 a step further in the seance, and my spectators, with quivering nerves, clinging 
 together in vague dread of palpable pinches and impalpable spirits, were quite 
 ready to swallow any wonders I might summon from the nether world, when 
 the drawing-room door opened, letting in a flood of outer light into our dark- 
 ened spiritual temple, and I prayed wildly to the Auxerre carpet to open its 
 velvet boson and drop me down under the sheltering shade of one of its bright- 
 hued bouquets, when there entered Randolph and Sunshine. 
 
 " We are come back, Aunt Tina," laughed Sunshine. " The poor dear 
 horses slipped down Catsmore Hill, and Sultan hurt his knees so much we 
 hadn't the heart to take him on a whole five miles of heavy roads; the rains 
 
 have made it so But what are you doing here ? The lights are out, 
 
 and " 
 
 " Hush ! " said Miss Clementina, impressively; " your interruption is most 
 untimely; we are in the middle of a seance. This gentleman Mr. Muffles 
 is come down from London at my solicitation. You will oblige me by with- 
 drawing." 
 
 " Allow me to stay, Miss Audley," said that confounded Randolph, with 
 extreme solicitude, though /detected the laughter which made his voice shake, 
 though he tried to control it. " I have always had the greatest desire to be 
 present at a seance, and so, I know, has Sunshine. We will be very good 
 indeed we will." 
 
 " I have no objection, of course, if Mr. Muffles has none," said Miss 
 Clementina, stiffly, turning to me. 
 
 " The spirits must be consulted, madam," said I, wishing myself along with 
 the spirits under the table, and cursing Freddy fiercely for his tomfoolery in 
 leading me into such a madman's lark, and hoping to Heaven Randolph would 
 not recognize my voice. " The spirits answer in the negative: this lady and 
 gentleman must not be present, they are disturbing influences," said I, giving 
 my taps, and spelling off my alphabet selon les regies. 
 
 " Your spirits are not over-courteous, Mr. Muffles," said that abominable 
 fellow, looking at me very keenly so keenly that I thought if he did not see 
 through spectacles, white wig, trickery, and all, it would be uncommonly odd, 
 and most miraculously propitious. " It looks rather suspicious in them to be 
 so careful of observation from any but orthodox believers; they should embrace 
 the occasion of shaming the skeptical. Try them again or I shall think they 
 have some private pique against me." 
 
 And he looked at me so sharply, putting up his confounded eye-glass, that
 
 RANDOLPH GORDON. 559 
 
 I saw if I did not let him stay he would make such miserable fun of the whole 
 thing as would show me and my spirits up to everybody. I could see he 
 thought I was an imposter, and was very ready to have Lynch law upon me, 
 and stuck inextricably between the horns of a dilemma, in half-crazed despair 
 I put the question to the spirits, and wrapped out an unwilling permission. 
 
 " Since you are permitted to stay, Colonel Gordon, I must request you not 
 to interrupt the seance with unbecoming levity," said my staunch apostle, Miss 
 Clementina. 
 
 Randolph bowed, sat himself down by Sunshine on a couch, fixed his glass 
 in his eyes, and fastened so stern a gaze upon me, that I felt my false heels, 
 my pincers, my spirits, my legerdemain, my ventriloquism, were all being seen 
 through, and penetrated, and rent into smithereens, and I trembled, shook, and 
 shivered as no volunteer should ever have done, considering the amount of 
 brag we make of what our Spartan courage would be if it were tried. But 
 I looked at Pearl in the demi-lumiere. I thought of the old proverb of faint 
 hearts. I remembered that brass may win where truth may fail. I made a 
 dash at it, and, plunging in medias res up to my ears in spiritualistic temerity, 
 told them the spirits would answer a question put by any or each of them. 
 
 "A daring fellow, that! but I am certain he's a humbug. However 
 people in this wide-awake century can credit this tomfoolery, is the deepest 
 problem to me," was the whisper I caught, to console me, of Randolph to Sun- 
 shine. 
 
 I put a bold face upon it, and turned round to him. 
 
 " You are a mocker, I perceive, sir. Have you any question you would wish 
 answered ? " 
 
 " Certainly," said Randolph. " Ask them, will you, if my father is right in 
 his religious opinions, and how he feels in the other world ? " 
 
 "The devil !" thought J; "was your father an orthodox gentleman, or a 
 good-for-nothing vaurien, like yourself, I wonder ? " I knew he did something 
 about the church-rates, but whether it was to hold them up or pull them down 
 I couldn't for the life of me remember; so I compromised the matter, and 
 tapped, and spelt a mild reply, which trimmed between extremes, like a parson 
 of the " Broad Church," whose leanings are Low but patrons High, and answered 
 him, " Pretty well." 
 
 "Thank you," said Randolph; "there is a purgatory, then, I suppose, con- 
 trary to the Church of England, who doesn't allow any medium between 
 angelic harps and perpetual happiness, and roaring fires and everlasting frying 
 thereon." 
 
 I turned a deaf ear to his heretic mockery, and an attentive one to Mrs. 
 Tomtit's quivering treble, who, with much fear and trembling, asked if the spirits 
 could lend her any aid to the discovery of a very sweet brooch, with her little
 
 560 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 boy's hair in it, set with emeralds, recently lost; and when we spelt her out the 
 spiritual assistance conveyed in the laconic sentence, " Look in your maid's 
 boxes," her sense of the marvellous power employed, and the sublimity of 
 spiritualism, was so overpowering that she could not resist the expression 
 of it. 
 
 " Good gracious ! Clementina, isn't it most extraordinary ? I always knew 
 that girl was a thief. I was perfectly certain of her. I will give her warning 
 to-morrow. Who could be incredulous after such proofs as these ? " 
 
 Altogether, I was going off in flying colors. Randolph didn't know where 
 to pick a hole in me; Miss Clementina was deeply gratified with a reply con- 
 cerning the immoral tendencies of the age; which entirely coincided with her 
 own private sentiments. Pearl looked pale and excited, Rosebud puzzled; Mrs. 
 Tomtit divided between awe of the spirits and rejoicing over her beloved brooch; 
 I was getting easy in saddle, and going on au grand galop, when Randolph's 
 little devil, with true demonical mischief, asked, through my agency, where her 
 younger brother was drowned ? Now, I had never heard of her having any 
 other brother than Freddy; I didn't know his name; I hadn't an idea when 
 he'd died; whether he was locked up along with Franklin, or lying under the 
 tropic suns of the Pacific, I couldn't for the life of me divine. With a cold 
 perspiration all over me, in dread of making a mistake in designating the un- 
 lucky youth's watery grave, I answered her with a despairing recklessness of 
 geography, "Off Caxamarquilla." 
 
 " I am much obliged," answered Sunshine, calmly: " but, imprimis, Caxamar- 
 quilla is an inland town in Peru; secondly, I never had a brother drowned; 
 thirdly, I never had a younger brother at all. Your spirits must have gone 
 wrong somehow or other, Mr. Muffles." 
 
 Oh, that Auxerre carpet and that one especial bouquet of roses and lilies 
 just under my feet, how I would have prayed to it if it only had had ears to 
 hear, to open, and swallow me up, and hide me for evermore from human eyes; 
 but, sauve qui peut, I had to acknowledge a blunder, but referred it a la pro- 
 fessional medium, to the "disturbing influence," indicating Randolph, I put a 
 good face on the blunder, and drew attention from it with a cool dexterity 
 quite worthy a real medium, I assure you, by stretching out my hand to the 
 oval table, which came after me as docilely as a well-trained dog, ambling 
 amiably over the bright flowers in the carpet like a good -hearted but somewhat 
 clumsy donkey, lifting its leg when I raised my hand and tilting forward on its 
 nose when I depressed it in a lively and amusing manner, which quite covered 
 over the slip of Caxamarquilla. The table was quite a lion; it danced so 
 prettily it really might have learned of Madame Michaud-Davis; everybody 
 admired it; even Sunshine held her breath and looked puzzled; but that 
 wretch of a Randolph, how fearfully I hated him, once my Pylades, kept his
 
 RANDOLPH GORDON. 561 
 
 abominable glass down upon me and it, and, stroking his moustache, called 
 out, just as my table was turning round to come back to its place, 
 
 "Miss Audley, that man is an impostor; all that's done with a magnet; if 
 you'll allow me to search, I'll wager any money I find a loadstone in his hand 
 and a piece of iron fixed under your table." 
 
 But my staunch ally and apostle, Miss Clementina, cut in and saved me 
 with that determined obstinacy which, in many other disciples of other churches, 
 passes current as " faith." 
 
 " Profanity ! " she muttered, disgusted, turning her back on her bete noire, 
 as I led my table back in triumph, taking very good care that that confounded 
 fellow shouldn't catch a glimpse of the material means he had guessed at so 
 shrewdly. But I determined to baffle him if I could, and with a severe solemn- 
 ity worthy of Miss Clementina, I told him that the spirits would condescend to 
 rebuke his mockery, and convince him against his profane prejudices: and with 
 a bolder stroke than I think any medium ever ventured on before, I told him 
 the secret thoughts of each should be revealed, and I tapped away in grand style, 
 and charging at Randolph first, told him that he was wishing time to fly for the 
 twenty-eighth of next month to come. Sunshine started and colored, and 
 Randolph stared, though he whispered skeptically to her. 
 
 " That is nothing, he could learn the day easy enough from the servants; 
 though certainly I must say the fellow's hit on the truth." 
 
 "You madam," said I to Mrs. Tomtit, " are hoping your husband will get 
 the deanery, and that your entremets, when the bishop dines with you on 
 Tuesday, will beat Mrs. Babbicombe's hollow." 
 
 Mrs. Tomtit opened her lips and eyes, and sank back in her chair aghast; 
 the deanery and the entremets were the objects of her extremest solicitude; she 
 couldn't gainsay it. 
 
 " And you, young lady," said I, turning to Pearl, after a little more tapping 
 and spelling, "are wishing that sharp words, spoken in a moment of irritation 
 at fancied insult could be recalled, and the person whom you love be induced 
 to forget them." 
 
 " He is right there, Pearl, I am sure," whispered Sunshine. 
 
 I caught Pearl's low-answering " Yes." And so did Randolph, for even he, 
 the unbeliever, stroked his moustaches, puzzled and astonished, and tempted 
 to think there must be something in it after all. As for me, I was in such a 
 state of delirious ecstasy, that I tapped away at a mad canter, and, determined 
 to pay Miss Clementina off for all she'd made me suffer, turned sharp on to 
 her with a spiritual communication. 
 
 " And you, madam, are thinking that if your friend happened kindly to die, 
 what a much better clergyman's wife you'd make in her stead for your old 
 love, the Reverend Thomas Tomtit."
 
 562 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 Mrs. Tomtit sprang from her chair with a shrill shriek, then fell back into 
 it in hysterics, beating the carpet frantically with her little satin slippers. 
 
 " Perfidious wretch ! My friend ! my bosom friend ! Oh, Clementina, 
 how I have trusted you ! how I have loved you ! and for what ? " 
 
 Miss Clementina sat bolt upright, her eyeballs distended, her lips blanched, 
 in an attitude of frozen horror. She, the immaculate spinster, the spotless, the 
 spiritual, the virtuous, to whom love seemed a folly, thoughts of marriage 
 profanity, to be told that she coveted her neighbor's husband, and committed 
 murder in her thoughts ! 
 
 I was at the culmination of my glory. I stretched my hand towards the 
 end of the room: "See, the spirits themselves attest to my veracity ! " and 
 there, in the gloaming, stretched a white, shadowy, ghostly arm, tracing in 
 phosphorus on the wall the words, " Scoffers beware and tremble ! " 
 
 The Tomtit's shrieks redoubled; Pearl and Rosebud screamed; Miss Clem- 
 entina sat staring at it, speechless as a marble statue; even Sunshine clung 
 close to Randolph, but he oh devil take him ! sprang up. " By Jove ! there's 
 the spirit made manifest in the flesh, and no mistake ! Let me go, my dar- 
 ling ! " And striding over the room, my evil genius caught the ghostly arm 
 with exceedingly material strength, and giving it no very gentle tug, Marie, 
 standing perdue behind the curtains, fell forward, through the satin damask, 
 into his arms. 
 
 " Oh, M. le Colonel, de grace ! vous me faites du mal ! Vous etes si forts, 
 vous autres Anglais ! " 
 
 " Here's an abominable imposture ! " said Randolph, angrily; " Miss Aud- 
 ley, you must allow me to go to the bottom of this. Your own servants are in 
 the plot; we will soon sift it. As for this fellow, a month at the tread-mill will 
 do him a vast deal of good; he can practise his shams at leisure there." With 
 which he seized hold of me, caught my snowy beard, which came off in his 
 clutch, and let go his hold, falling back with my hirsute appendages dangling 
 from his hand, fairly startled and bewildered for once in his life of scepticism 
 and" sang-froid: " Hallo ! Good Heavens ! By George ! " 
 
 " What is it ? " cried Sunshine, clinging to her lover. 
 
 " What's the matter ? " screamed Rosebud, ringing the bell frantically. 
 
 "Thieves! fire! murder! help, help, somebody! " shrieked the incoherent 
 and excitable Tomtit, beating that wild tatto upon the carpet which passes 
 under the suave cognomen of hysteria. 
 
 "Mon Dieu! mon Dieu! comme j'ai ete bete! " sobbed Marie. 
 
 " The devil! shan't we catch it, all of us! " moaned Freddy. 
 
 " By Jove! old boy, I'm doomed to bring you to grief," sighed Randolph. 
 
 " Cosmo, is it you ? " murmured Pearl, white as a veritable spirit herself. 
 
 Pearl looked up, a crimson flush on her face, excited, terrified, amazed.
 
 RANDOLPH GORDON. 5G3 
 
 Wild was the dismay; loud the chattering of tongues; fiercely rang Rose- 
 bud's peals at both the bells: awfully shrill rose the sharp shrieks of the 
 prostrate Tomtit; great was the rush of many feet, as every domestic in the 
 servants' hall poured in, confident that the " sperits " had been guilty of a 
 double, triple, perhaps quadruple murder; and amidst the hubbub, the uproar, 
 the fright the screams, Miss Clementina sat bolt upright, as a marble goddess 
 might sit unmoved amidst an Irish riot, with iron rigidity and stony eyeballs 
 and paralyzed nerves, and when she struggled for speech we caught the hoarse 
 and solemn murmur, 
 
 " /, to be be told I love another woman's husband! to live to be insulted 
 thus! " 
 
 Need I say that Marie was turned away the very next morning; Freddy 
 nearly killed with the terrors of the Damocles' sword of disinheritance that 
 was hung, in terrorum, above his head; that Miss Clementina and Mrs. 
 Tomtit never spoke again for ten whole days; that I was forbidden the house 
 in real and unrelaxing exile; and never, while she lives, will its mistress pardon 
 me the insults of that seance. Dire as the wrath is, however, I have strength 
 to bear it, for when I was turned from the house in majestic fury that night, 
 somebody else followed me out under the stars, and I asked her not in vain this 
 time, " Pearl, will you forgive me now ? " As for Randolph and Sunshine, the 
 misery Miss Clementina prophesied for them is very bearable at present, I be- 
 lieve, though two days after that longed-for " twenty-eighth," Randolph, sitting in 
 a window looking out on to Windermere, put down his Times, and took the mouth 
 of his hookah out of his lips, when he saw Sunshine standing by him, buttoning 
 her gloves with her hat on, and otherwise got up in general walking costume. 
 
 " Where are you going, my pet ? " he asked; " its only just eleven. I haven't 
 done smoking, nor even looked at the Times. It's so very early to turn out, 
 don't you think?" 
 
 "Yes; but I am going by myself," answered his nouvelle mariee. 
 
 " By yourself ! I daresay I'll let you," laughed Randolph, amazed. There 
 were no shops on the lake, and for this period of sublimated existence he had 
 chosen, expres, a county in which he hadn't a single acquaintance to bother him 
 and spoil his elysium. 
 
 Sunshine held out her hand to him, with an expression of deep-seated melan- 
 choly on that radiant face which had gained her sobriquet, and a sigh loud 
 enough to be heard over Windermere. 
 
 11 1 am come to bid you good-by ! " 
 
 " To bid me good-by ! " re-echoed Randolph, startled into genuine
 
 564 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 anxiety and the greatest amazement. " My darling Sunshine, what is the 
 matter ? What do you mean what has happened ? " 
 
 Sunshine shook her head with another profound sigh, and held out her hand 
 a second time. 
 
 " Don't you remember telling me that if ever you married, two days would 
 be the extreme of your fidelity to any woman ? I don't wish to try your pa- 
 tience, nor yet to wait to be turned out, so I am come to take leave of you ; 
 but we can part in peace, you know, and I won't speak very badly of you. 
 Good-by, monsieur." 
 
 Randolph shouted with laughter, then caught her up in his arms and kissed 
 her fifty times. What further answer he gave is not upon record, but I sup- 
 pose it was a vow to be faithful to her for a few days more at the least, for he 
 and his " little devil " are not likely to part as yet.
 
 SLANDER AND SILLERY. 565 
 
 SLANDER AND SILLERY 
 
 I. 
 
 THE LION OF THE CHAUSS^E D*ANTIN. 
 
 Ma m&re est a Paris, 
 Mon pre est & Versailles. 
 Et moi je suis ici, 
 Pour chanter sur la paille, 
 L'amour ! 1'amour ! 
 La nuit comme le jour. 
 
 HUMMING this popular if not over-recherche ditty, a man sat sketching in 
 pastels, one morning, in his rooms at Numero 10, Rue des Mauvais Sujets, 
 Chaussee d'Antin, Paris. 
 
 The band of the national guard, the marchands crying " Coco ! " the char- 
 latans puffing everything from elixirs to lead-pencils, the Empress and Mme. 
 d'Alve passing in their carriage, the tramp of some Zouaves just returned from 
 Algeria nothing in the street below disturbed him; he went sketching on as if 
 his life depended on the completion of the picture. He was a man about thirty- 
 three, middle height, and eminently graceful. He was half Bohemian, half 
 English, and the animation of the one nation and the hauteur of the other were 
 by turns expressed on his chiselled features as his thoughts moved with his pen- 
 cil. The stamp of his good blood was on him; his face would have attracted 
 and interested in ever so large a crowd. He was very pale, and there was a 
 tired look on his wide, powerful forehead and in his long dark eyes, and a 
 weary line or two about his handsome mouth, as if he had exhausted his youth 
 very quickly; and, indeed, to see life as he had seen it is somewhat a fatiguing 
 process, and apt to make one blase before one's time. 
 
 The rooms in which he sat were intensely comfortable, and very provoca- 
 tive to a quite pipe and idleness. To be sure, if one judged his tastes by them, 
 they were not probably, to use the popular jargon, " healthy," for they had
 
 566 O UIDA ' S WOItKS. 
 
 nothing very domestic or John Halfaxish about them, and were certainly not 
 calculated to gratify the eyes of maiden aunts and spinster sisters. 
 
 There were fencing-foils, pistols, tobacco-boxes of every style and order, 
 from ballet-girls to terriers' heads. There were three or four cockatoos and 
 parrots on stands chattering bits of Quartier Latin songs, or imitating the cries 
 in the street below. There were cards, dice-boxes, albums a rire, meerschaums, 
 lorgnons, pink notes, no end of De Kock's and Lebrun's books, and all the et 
 cseteras of chambres de gargon strewed about: and there were things, too 
 pictures, statuettes, fauteuils, and a breakfast-service of Sevres and silver 
 that Du Barry need not have scrupled to put in her "petite bonbonniere as 
 Luciennes. 
 
 So busy was he sketching and singing 
 
 "Messieurs les Studians 
 Montez la Chaumtere!" 
 
 that he never heard a knock at his door, and he looked up with an im- 
 patient frown on his white, broad forehead as a man entered sans ciremonie. 
 
 " Mon Dieu! Ernest," cried his friend, "what the devil are you doing 
 here with your pipe and your pastels, when I've been waiting at Tortoni's a 
 good half-hour, and at last, out of patience, drove here to see what on earth 
 had become of you ? " 
 
 " My dear fellow, I beg you a thousand pardons," said Vaughan lazily. " I 
 was sketching this, and you and your horses went clean out of my head, I 
 honestly confess." 
 
 " And your breakfast too, it seems," said De Concressault, glancing at the 
 table. " Is it Madame de Melusine or the little Bluette whose portrait absorbs 
 you so much ? No, by Jove! it's a prettier woman than either of 'em. If she's 
 like that, take me to see her this instant. What glorious gold hair! I adore 
 your countrywomen when they've hair that color. Where did you get that face ? 
 Is she a duchess, or a donseuse, a little actress you're going to patronize, or a 
 millionnaire you're going to marry ? " 
 
 " I can't tell you," laughed Vaughan. " I've not an idea who she may be. 
 I saw her last evening coming out of the Frangais, and picked up her bouquet 
 for her as she was getting into her carriage. The face was young, the smile 
 very pretty and bright, and, as they daguerreotyped themselves in my mind, I 
 thought I might as w^ell transfer them to paper before newer beauties chased 
 them out of it." 
 
 "Diable! and you don't know who she is ? However, we'll soon find out. 
 That gold hair mustn't be lost. But get your breakfast, pray, Ernest, and let us 
 be off to poor Armand's sale." 
 
 " That's the way we mourn our dead friends," said Vaughan, with a sneer,
 
 SLANDER AND SILLERY. 567 
 
 pouring out his coffee. " Armand is jesting, laughing, and smoking with us 
 one day, the next he's pitched out of his carriage going down to Asnieres, and 
 all we think of is that his horses are for sale. If I were found in the Morgue 
 to-morrow, your first emotion, Emile, would be, ' Vaughan's De 1'Orme will be 
 sold. I must go and bid for it directly.' " 
 
 De Concressault laughed as he looked up at a miniature of Marion de 
 1'Orme, once taken for the Marquis of Gordon. "I fancy, mongarcon, there'll 
 be too many sharks after all your possessions for me to stand any chance." 
 
 "True enough," said Vaughan; "and I question if they'll wait till my 
 death before they come down on 'em. But I don't look forward. I take life 
 as it comes. Vogue la galere ! At least, I've lived, not vegetated." And 
 humming his refrain, 
 
 "L'amour! Famour! 
 La nuit comme le jour! " 
 
 he lounged down the stairs and drove to a sale in the Faubourg St. Germain, 
 where one of his Paris chums, a virtuoso and -connoisseur, had left endless 
 meubles to be sold by his duns and knocked down to his friends. 
 
 Vaughan was quite right; he had lived, and at a pretty good pace, too. 
 When he came of age a tolerably good fortune awaited him, but it had not 
 been long in his hands before he contrived to let it slip through them. He'd 
 been brought up at Sainte Barbe, after being expelled from Rugby, knew all 
 the best of the " jeunesse doree," and could not endure any place after Paris, 
 where his life was as sparkling and brilliant as the foam off a glass of cham- 
 pagne. Wild and careless, high spirited, and lavish in his Opera suppers, his 
 cabaret dinners, his Trois Freres banquets, his lansquenet parties, his bouquets 
 for baronnes, and his bracelets for ballerinas, Ernest gained his reputation as a 
 Lion, and ruined himself, too, poor old fellow ! 
 
 His place down in Surrey had mortgages thick on every inch of its lands, 
 and the money that kept him going was borrowed from those modern Satans, 
 money lenders, at the usually ruinous interest. " But still," Ernest was wont 
 to say, with great philosophy, " I've had ten years' swing of pleasure. Does 
 every man get as much as that ? And should I have been any happier, if I'd 
 been a good boy, and a country squire, sat on the bench, amused my mind 
 with turnips, and married some bishop's daughter, who'd have marched me to 
 church, forbidden cigars, and buried me in family boots ? " 
 
 Certainly that would w/have been his line, and so, in natural horror at it, he 
 dashed into a diametrically opposite one, and after the favor he had shown him 
 from every handsome woman that drove through Longchamp, wore diamonds 
 at the Tuileries, and supped with dominos noirs at bals d'Opera, and the favor 
 he showed to cards, the courses, and the coulisses, few bishops would have im- 
 perilled their daughters' souls by setting them to hunt down this wicked Lion,
 
 r )68 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 especially as the poor Lion now wasn't worth the trapping. If he had been, 
 there would have been hue and cry enough after him I don't doubt; but the 
 Gordon Cummings of the beau sexe rarely hunt unless its's worth their while, 
 and they can bring home splendid spoils to make their bosom friends mad 
 with envy; and Ernest, despite his handsome face, his fashionable reputation, 
 and the aroma of conquest that hung about him (they used to say he never 
 wooed ever so negligently but he won), was assuredly neither an " eligible 
 speculation " nor a " marrying man," and was an object rather of terror to 
 English mammas steering budding young ladies through the dangerous vortex 
 of French society with a fierce chevaux de frise of British prejudices and a 
 keen British eye to business. If Ernest was of no other use, however, he was 
 invaluable to his uncles, aunts, and male cousins, as a sort of scapegoat and 
 Ipouvantail, to be held up on high to show the unwary what they would come 
 to if they followed his steps. It was so pleasant to them to exult over his 
 backslidings, and, cutting him mercilessly up into little bits, hold condemnatory 
 sermons over every one of the pieces. " Dans 1'adversite de nos meilleurs 
 amis, nous trouvons toujours quelque chose qui ne nous deplait pas ; " and 
 Vaughan's friends, like the rest of us Pharisees, dearly loved to glance at the 
 publican (especially if he was handsomer, cleverer, or any way better than 
 themselves), and thank God loudly that they were not such men as he. Ernest 
 was a hardened sinner, however; he laughed, put the Channel between him and 
 them, and went on his ways without thinking or caring for their animadversions. 
 
 " By Jove ! Emile," said he as they sat dining together at Leiter's, " I 
 should like to find out my golden-haired sylphide. She was English, by her 
 fair skin, and though I'm not very fond of my compatriotes, especially when 
 they're abroad (I think touring John Bull detestable wrapped up in his treble 
 plaid of reserve), still I should like to find her out just for simple curiosity. I 
 assure you she'd the prettiest foot and ankle I ever saw, not excepting even 
 Bluette's." 
 
 " Ma foi ! that's a good deal from you. She must be found, then. Voyons ! 
 shall we advertise in the Monileur, employ the secret police, or call at all the 
 hotels in person to say that you're quite ready to act out Soulie's ' Lion 
 Amoureux,' if you can only discover the petite bourgeoise to play it with you ? " 
 
 Vaughan laughed as he drank his demi-tasse. 
 
 "Lion amoureux! that's an anomaly; we're only in love just enough pour 
 nous amuser; and of us Albin says, very rightly, 
 
 Si vous connaissiez quelques meilleurs, 
 Vous porteriez bientdt cette ,me ailleurs." 
 
 "Very well, then: if you don't know of anything better, let's hunt up this
 
 SLANDER AND SILLERY. 569 
 
 incognita. If she went to the Francais, she's most likely at the Odeon to-night," 
 said De Concressault. " Shall we try ? " 
 
 "Aliens! " said Vaughan, rising indolently, as he did most things. "But 
 it's rather silly, I think; there are bright smiles and pretty feet enough in Paris 
 without one's setting off on a wild-goose chase after them." 
 
 They were playing the last act of " La Calomnie," as Vaughan and De 
 Concressault took their places, put up their lorgnons, and looked around the 
 house. He swore a few mental " Diables! " and " Sacres! " as his gaze fell on 
 faces old or ugly, or too brunes or too blondes, or anything but what he 
 wanted. At last, without moving his glass, he touched De Concressault's arm. 
 
 " There she is, Emile, in the fourth from the centre, in a white opera cloak, 
 with pink flowers in her hair." 
 
 " I see her, mon ami," said Emile. " I found her out two seconds ago 
 (see how well you sketch!) but I wouldn't spoil your pleasure in discovering 
 her. Mon Dieu! Ernest, she's looking at you, and smiles as if she recog- 
 nized you. Was there ever so lucky a Lauzan ? " 
 
 Vaughan could have laughed outright to see by the brightness of the girl's 
 expression that she knew the savior of her bouquet again, for though he was 
 accustomed to easy conquests, such naive interest in him at such short notice 
 was something new to him. 
 
 He didn't take his lorgnon off her again, and she was certainly worth the 
 honor, with her soft, lustrous gold hair, the eyes that defy definition black 
 in some lights, violet in others a wide-arched forehead, promising plenty of 
 brains, and a rayonnate, animated, joyous expression, quite refreshing to any- 
 body as bored and blase as Vaughan and De Concressault. As soon as the 
 last piece was over Vaughan slipped out of his loge, and took up his station at 
 the entrance. 
 
 He didn't wait in vain: the golden hair soon came, on the arm of a gentle- 
 man middle aged, as Vaughan noticed with a sensation of satisfaction. She 
 glanced up at him as she passed: he looked very handsome in the gas glare. 
 Vaughan perhaps was too sensible a fellow to think of his pose, but even we 
 have our weaknesses under certain circumstances, as well as the crinolines. 
 Luckily for him, he chanced to have in his pocket a gold serpent bracelet he 
 had bought that morning for some fair dame or demoiselle. He stopped her, 
 and held it out to her. 
 
 " I beg your pardon, mademoiselle," he said in French, " but I think you 
 dropped this?" 
 
 She looked up at him with the sunniest of smiles as she answered, in a pure 
 accent, " No monsieur, thank you, it does not belong to me." 
 
 The middle-aged man glanced sideways at him with true British suspicion 
 I daresay a pickpocket, a Rouge, and Fieschi, were all mixed up in his mind
 
 570 QUID A' S WORKS. 
 
 as embodied in the graceful figure and bold glance of the Lion. He drew the 
 girl on, looking much like a heavy cloud with a bright sun ray after it; but she half 
 turned her head over her shoulder to give him a farewell smile, which Ernest 
 returned with ten per cent, interest. 
 
 "Anglais," said Emile, concisely. 
 
 " Malheureusement," said Ernest as briefly, as he pushed his way into the 
 air, and saw the gold hair vanish into .her carriage. He went quickly up to the 
 cocher. 
 
 " Oil demeurent-ils, mon ami ? " he whispered, slipping a five-franc piece 
 into his hand. 
 
 The man smiled. " A 1'Hotel de Londres, monsieur; No. 6, au premier." 
 
 " The devil ! pourquoir ne allez pas ? " said an unmistakably English voice 
 from the interior of the voiture. The man set off at a trot; Ernest sprang into 
 his own trap. 
 
 " Au Chateau Rouge ! May as well go there, eh, Emile ? What a deuced 
 pity la chevelure doree is English ! " 
 
 " I wish she were a danseuse, an actress, a fleuriste anything one could 
 make his own introduction to. Confound it there's the ' heavy father,' I'm 
 afraid, in the case, and some rigorous mamma, or vigilant beguine of a govern- 
 ess: but, to judge by the young lady's smiles, she'll be easy game unless she's 
 tremendously fenced in." 
 
 With which consolatory reflection Vaughan leaned back and lighted a 
 cheroot, en route to spend the night, as he had spent most of them for the last 
 ten years, till the fun had begun to be more bore than pleasure. 
 
 II. 
 
 NINA GORDON. 
 
 " HAVE you been to the Hotel de Londres, Ernest ? " said De Concressault, 
 as Vaughan lounged into Tortoni's next day, where Emile and three or four 
 men were drinking Seltzer and talking of how Cerisette had beaten Vivandiere 
 by a neck at Chantilly, or (the sport to which a Frenchman takes much more 
 naturally) of how well Riviere played in the "Prix d'un Bouquet;" what a belle 
 faille la De Servans had; and what a fool Senecterre had made of himself in 
 the duel about Madame Viardot. 
 
 " Of course I have," said Vaughan. The name is Gordon general name 
 enough in England. They were gone to the Expiatoire, the portiere told me. 
 There is the heavy father, as I feared, and a quasi-governess acting duenna;
 
 SLANDER AND SILLERY. 571 
 
 they're travelling with another family, whose name I could not hear: the woman 
 said ' C'etait beaucoup trop dur pour les levres.' I daresay they're some Brum- 
 magem people some Fudge family or other on their travels. Confound it ! " 
 
 " Poor Ernest," laughed De Concressault. " Some gold hair has bewitched 
 him, and instead of finding it belongs to a danseuse, or a married woman, or a 
 fleuriste of the Palais Royal, or something attainable, he finds it turn into an 
 unapproachable English girl, with no end of outlying sentries round her, who'll 
 fire at the first familiar approach." 
 
 " It is a hard case," said De Kerroualle, a dashing fellow in one of the 
 " Regiments de famille." " Never mind, mon ami; ' centre fortune bon coeur,' 
 you know: it'll be more fun to devastate one of our countrymen's inviolate 
 strongholds than to conquer where the white flag's already held out. Halloa ! 
 here's a compatriot of yours, I'd bet; look at his sanctified visage and stiff 
 choker a Church of England man, eh ? " 
 
 " The devil ! " muttered Vaughan, turning round; " deuce take him, it's my 
 cousin Ruskinstone ! What in the world does he do in Paris ? " 
 
 The man he spoke of was the Rev. Eusebius Ruskinstone, the Dean's 
 Warden of the cathedral of Faithandgrace, a tall, thin young clerical of eight or 
 nine-and-twenty, with goodness enough (it^was generally supposed) in his little 
 finger to make up for all Ernest's sins, scarlet though they were. He had just 
 sat down and taken up the carte to blunder through " Potage au Due de 
 Malakaff," " Fricassee de volaille a la Princesse Mathilde," and all the rest of 
 it, when his eye lit on his graceless cousin, and a vinegar asperity spread over 
 his bland visage. Vaughan rose with a lazy grace, immensely bored within him: 
 " My dear Ruskinstone, what an unanticipated pleasure. I never hoped Vanity 
 Fair would have power to lure you into its naughty peep-shows and round- 
 abouts." 
 
 The Rev. Eusebius reddened slightly; he had once stated strongly his 
 opinion that poor Paris was Pandemonium. " How do you do ? " he said, 
 giving his cousin two fingers; "it is a long time since we saw you in England." 
 
 " England doesn't want me," said Ernest, dryly. " I don't fancy I should 
 be very welcome at Faithandgrace, should I ? The dear Chapter would 
 probably consign me to starvation for my skeptical notions, as Calvin did Cas- 
 tellio. But what has brought you to Paris ? Are you come to fight the Jesuits 
 in a conference, or to abjure the Wardenship and turn over to them ? " 
 
 Eusebius was shocked at the irreverent tone, but there was a satirical smile 
 on his cousin's lips that he didn't care to provoke. " I am come," he said, 
 stiffly, " partly for health, partly to collect materials for a work on the 
 ' Gurgoyles and Rose Moldings of Mediaeval Architecture,' and partly to 
 oblige some friends of mine. Pardon me, here they come." 
 
 Vaughan lifted his eyes, expecting nothing very delectable in Ruskinstone's
 
 573 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 friends; to his astonishment they fell on his beauty of the Fran9ais! with the 
 outlying sentries of father, governess, and two other women, the Warden's 
 maiden sisters, stiff, manierees, and prudish, like too many Englishwomen. 
 The young lady of the Francais was a curious contrast to them: she started a 
 little as she saw Vaughan, and smiled brilliantly. On the spur of that smile 
 Ernest greeted his cousins with a degree of empressement that they certainly 
 wouldn't have been honored by without it. They were rather frightened at com- 
 ing in actual contact with such a monster of iniquity as a Paris Lion, who, they'd 
 heard, had out-Juan'd Don Juan, and gave him but a frigid welcome. Mr. 
 Gordon had doubtless heard, too, of Vaughan's misdemeanors, for he looked 
 stocial and acidulated as he bowed. But the young girl's eyes reconciled 
 Ernest to all the rest, as she frankly returned a look with which he was wont to 
 win his way through women's hearts, 'midst the hum of ballrooms, in the soft 
 tete-a-tete in boudoirs, and over the sparkling Sillery of petits soupers. So, for 
 the sake of his new quarry, he disregarded the cold looks of the others, and 
 made himself so charming, that nobody could withstand the fascination of his 
 manner till their dinner was served, and then, telling his cousins he would do 
 himself the pleasure of calling on them the next day, he left the cafe to drive 
 over to Gentilly, to inspect a gray colt of De Kerroualle's. 
 
 " La chevelure doree is quite as pretty by daylight, Ernest," said De Con- 
 cressault. "Bon Dieu! it is such a relief to see eyes that are not tinted, 
 and a skin whose pink and white is not born from the mysterious rites of the 
 toilet." 
 
 Vaughan nodded, with his Manilla between his teeth. 
 
 " That cousin of yours is queer style, mon garcon," said Kerroualle. " How 
 some of those islanders contrive to iron themselves into the stiffness and flat- 
 ness they do, is to me the profoundest enigma. But what Church of England 
 meaning lies hid in his coat-tails ? They are, for all the world, like our 
 reverends peres! What is it for ?" 
 
 " High Church. Next door shop to yours, you know. Our ecclesiastics 
 are given to balancing themselves on a tight rope between their ' mother ' and 
 their 'sister,' till they tumble over in their sister's open arms the Catholics 
 say into salvation, the Protestants into damnation; into neither, I myself opine, 
 poor simpletons. Ruskinstone is fearfully architectural. The sole things he'll 
 see here will be facades, gurgoyles, and clerestories, and his soul knows no 
 warmer love than ' stone dolls,' as Newton calls them. I say, Gaston, what do 
 you think of my love of the Francpais; isn't she chic, isn't she mignonne, isn't 
 she spirituelle ? " 
 
 "Yes," assented De Kerroualle, " prettier than either Bluette or Madame 
 de Melusine would allow, or relish." 
 
 Ernest frowned. " I've done with Bluette; she's a pretty face, but ah,
 
 SLANDER AND SILLERY. 573 
 
 bah! one can't amuse oneself always with a little paysanne, for she's nothing 
 better, after all; and I'm half-afraid the Melusine begins to bore me." 
 
 " Better not tell her so, mon ami," said De Kerroualle; "she'd be a nasty 
 enemy." 
 
 " Pooh! a woman like that loves and forgets." 
 
 "Sans doute; but they also sometimes revenge. Poor little Bluette you 
 may safely turn over; but Madame la Baronne won't so easily be jilted." 
 
 Vaughan laughed. " Oh, I'm not going to break her heart. Don't you 
 know, Gaston, ' on a bien de la peine a rompre, meme quand on ne s'aime plus.' " 
 
 " I shouldn't have said you found it so," smiled De Concressault, " for you 
 change your loves as you change your gloves. La chevelure dore"e will be the 
 next, eh ? " 
 
 " Poor little thing! " said Ernest, bitterly. " I wish her a better fate." 
 
 He went to call on la chevelure doree, nevertheless, the morning after, and 
 found her in the salon alone, greatly to his surprise and pleasure. Nina Gor- 
 don was pretty even in the morning as Byron says and she was much more, 
 she was fascinating, and as perfectly demonstrative and natural as any peasant 
 girl out of the meadows of Aries, ignorant of the magic words toilette, cosme- 
 tique, and crinoline. 
 
 She received him with evident pleasure and perfect unreserve, which even 
 this daring and skeptical Lion could not twist or contort into boldness, and 
 began to talk fast and gaily. 
 
 " Do I like Paris ? " she said, in answer to his question. " Oh yes; or at 
 least I should, if I could see it differently. I detest sight-seeing, crowding 
 one's brains with pictures, statues, palaces, Holy Families jostling Polinchi- 
 nelle, races, mixing up with grand masses, Versailles, clouding St. Cloud the 
 Trianon rattled through in five minutes all in inextricable muddle, /should 
 like to see Paris at leisure, with some one with whom I had a ' rapport,' my 
 thoughts undisturbed, and my historical associations fresh and fervent." 
 
 " I wish I were honored with the office of your guide," said Ernest, smiling. 
 " Do you think you would have a ' rapport ' with me ? " 
 
 She smiled in return. " Yes, I think I should. I cannot tell why. But 
 as it is, my warmest souvenir of Conde is chilled by the offer of an ice, and my 
 tenderest thought of Louise de la Valliere is shivered with the suggestion of 
 dinner." 
 
 Vaughan laughed. " Bravo ! " thought he. " Thank God this is no tame 
 English icicle. I would give much," he said, " to be able to take my cousin's 
 place, and show you Paris. We would have no such vulgar gastronomical 
 interruptions; we would go through it all perfectly. I would make you hear 
 the very whispers with which La Valliere, under the old oaks of St. Germain, 
 unknowingly, told her love to Louis. In the forest glades of St. Cloud you
 
 574 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 should see Cinq-Mars and the Royal hunt riding out in the chasse de nuit- in 
 the gloomy walls of the prisons you should hear Andre Chenier reciting his 
 last verses, and see Egalite completing his last toilet. The glittering 'Cotil- 
 lons ' on the terraces of Versailles, the fierce canille surging through the salons 
 of the Tuileries, the Templars dying in the green meadows at the back of St. 
 Antoine they should all rise up for you under my incantations." 
 
 Positively Ernest, bored and blase, accustomed to look at Paris through the 
 gas-lights of his Lion's life, warmed into romance to please the eyes that now 
 beamed upon him. 
 
 " Ah ! that would be delightful," said the girl, her eyes sparkling. " Mr. 
 Ruskinstone, you know, is terrible to me, for he goes about with ' Ruskin ' in 
 one hand, ' Murray ' in the other, and a Phrase-book or two in his pocket (of 
 course he wants it, as he's a < classical scholar ' ), and no matter whatever asso- 
 ciations cling around a place, only looks at it in regard to its architectural 
 points. I beg your pardon," she said, interrupting herself with a blush, " I 
 forgot he was your cousin; but really that constant cold stone does tease 
 me so." 
 
 At that moment the heavy father, as Ernest irreverently styled the tall, pom- 
 pous head of one of the first banks in London, who was worth a million if he 
 was worth a sou, entered, and the Rev. Eusebius after him, who had been 
 spending a lively morning taking notes among the catacombs. He was pre- 
 pared to be as cold as a refrigerator, and the banker to follow his example, at 
 finding this bete noire of the Chaussee d'Antin tete-a-tete with Nina. But Ernest 
 had a sort of haughty high breeding and careless dignity which warned people 
 off from any liberties with him; and Gordon remembered that he knew Paris 
 and its haute volte so well that he might be a useful acquaintance if kept at 
 arm's length from Nina, and afterwards dropped. Unlucky man ! he actually 
 thought his weak muscles were strong enough to cope with a Lion's ! 
 
 Vaughan took his leave, after offering his box at the Opera-Comique to Mr. 
 Gordon, and drove to the Jockey Club, pondering much on this new species of 
 the beau sexe. He was too used to women not to know at a glance that she had 
 nothing bold about her, and yet he was too skeptical to credit that a girl could 
 possibly exist who was neither a coquette nor a prude. As soon as the door 
 closed on him his friends began to open their batteries of scandal. 
 
 " How sad is it to see life wasted as my cousin wastes his," said the Warden, 
 balancing a paper-knife thoughtfully, with a depressed air; " frittered away on 
 mere trifles, as valueless and empty as soap-bubbles, but not, alas ! so innocent." 
 
 " What do you mean ? " Nina asked, quickly. 
 
 "What do I mean, Miss Gordon?" repeated Eusebius, reproachfully; 
 " what can I mean but the idle whirl of gaiety, vitiating pleasures, the debts and 
 the vices which are to be laid at poor Ernest's door. Ever since we were boys
 
 SLANDER AND SILLERY. 575 
 
 together, and he was expelled from Rugby for going to Coventry fair and stay- 
 ing there all night, he has been going rapidly down the road to ruin." 
 
 " He looks very comfortable in his descent," smiled the young lady. " Pray 
 why, after all, shouldn't horses, operas, and Manillas, be as legitimate objects 
 to set one's affections upon as Norman arches and Gregorian chants ? He has 
 his dissipations, you have yours. Chacun a son gout ! " 
 
 The Warden had his reasons for conciliating the young heiress, so he made 
 a feeble effort to smile. u You know as well as I that you do not think what 
 you say, Miss Gordon. Were it merely Vaughan's tastes that were in fault 
 it would not be of such fearful consequence, but unfortunately it is his 
 principles." 
 
 "He is utterly without any," said Miss Selina Ruskinstone, who, ten years 
 before, had been deeply and hopelessly in love with Ernest, and never forgave 
 him for not reciprocating the passion. 
 
 " He is a sceptic, a gambler, a spendthrift; and a more heartless flirt 
 never lived," averred Miss Augusta, who hated the whole of Ernest's sex even 
 the Chapter -pour cause" 
 
 " Gentlemen can't help seeming flirts sometimes, some women pay such 
 attention to them," said Nina, with a mischievous laugh. " Poor Mr. Vaughan ! 
 I hope he's not as black as he is painted. His physiognomy tells a different 
 tale; he is just my ideal of 'Ernest Maltravers.' How kind his eyes are; have 
 you ever looked into them, Selina ? " 
 
 Miss Ruskinstone gave an angry sneer, vouchsafing no other response. 
 
 " My dear Nina, how foolishly you talk, about looking into a young man's 
 eyes," frowned her father. " I am surprised to hear you." 
 
 Her own eyes opened in astonishment. " Why mayn't I look at them ? It 
 is by the eyes that, like a dog, I know whom to like and whom to avoid." 
 
 " And pray does your prescience guide you to see a saint in a ruined Lion 
 of the Chaussee d'Antin ? " sneered Selina. with another contemptuous sniff. 
 
 "Not a saint. I'm not good enough to appreciate the race," laughed Nina. 
 " But I do not believe your cousin to be all you paint him; or, at least, if cir- 
 cumstances have led him into extravagance, I have a conviction that he has a 
 warm heart and a noble character au fond." 
 
 " We will hope so," said the Warden, meekly, with an expression which 
 plainly said how vain a hope it was. 
 
 " I think we have wasted a great deal too much conversation on a thankless 
 subject," said Selina, with asperity. " Don't you think it time, Mr. Gordon, 
 for us to go to the Louvre ? " 
 
 That day, as they were driving along the Boulevards, they passed Ernest 
 with Bluette in his carriage going to the Pre Catalan: they all knew her, from 
 having seen her play at the Odeon. Selina and Augusta turned down their
 
 576 OUIDA'S WORKS. 
 
 mouths, and turned up their eyes. Gordon pulled up his collar, and looked a 
 Brutus in spectacles. Nina colored, and looked vexed. Triumph glittered in 
 Eusebius's meek eyes, but he sighed a pastor's sigh over a lost soul. 
 
 III. 
 
 " LE LION AMOUREUX." 
 
 THE morning after, as they were going into the Expostion des Beaux Arts, 
 they met Vaughan; and no ghost would have been more unwelcome to the 
 Warden than the distingue figure of his fashionable cousin. Nina was the only 
 one who looked pleased to recognize him, and she, as she returned his smile, 
 forgot that the evening before it had been given to Bluette. 
 " Are you coming in too ? " she asked. 
 
 " I was not, but I will with pleasure," said Ernest. And into the Exhibition 
 with them he went, to Ruskinstone's wrath and Gordon's annoyance. 
 
 Vaughan was a connoisseur in art. The Warden knew no more than what 
 he took verbatim from the god of his idolatry, Mr. John Ruskin. It was very 
 natural that Nina should listen to the friend of Ingres and Vernet instead of to 
 the second-hand worshipper of Turner. Vaughan, by instinct, dropped his 
 customary tone of compliment compliment he never used to women he de- 
 lighted to honor and talked so charmingly, that Nina utterly forgot the luck- 
 less Eusebius, and started when a low, sweet voice said, close beside her, 
 " What, Ernest, your here ? " 
 
 She turned, and saw a woman about eight-and-twenty, dressed in perfection 
 of taste, with an exquisite figure, and a face of brunette beauty; the rouge 
 most undiscoverable, and the eyes artiscally tinted to make them look larger, 
 which, Heaven knows, was needless. She darted a quick look at Vaughan's^ 
 companion, which Nina gave back with a dash of hauteur. A shade came over 
 his face as he answered her greeting. 
 
 " Will you not introduce me to your friend ? " said the new comer. " She 
 is of your nation, I fancy, and you know I am entetee of everything English." 
 Ernest looked rather gloomy at the compliment, but turning to Nina, 
 begged to introduce her to Madame de Melusine. The gay, handsome 
 baronne, taking in all the English girl's points as rapidly as a groom at Tatter- 
 sail's does a two-year-old's, was chatting volubly to Nina, when the others 
 came up. Gordon, though wont to boast that he belonged to the aristocracy 
 of money, was always ready to fall in the dust before the noblesse of blood, 
 and was gratified at the introduction, remembering to have read in the Moni-
 
 SLANDER AND SILLERY. 577 
 
 teur the name of De Melusine at the ball at the Tuileries. And the widow 
 was very charming even to the professedly stoical eyes of a Brutus of sixty- 
 two. She soon floated off, however, with her party, giving Vaughan a gay " A 
 ce soir! " and requesting to be allowed the honor of calling on the Gordons. 
 
 "Is she a great friend of yours ?" asked Nina, when she and he were a 
 little in advance of the others. 
 
 " I have known her some time." 
 
 " And you are very intimate, I suppose, as she called you by your Christian 
 name ? " 
 
 He smiled a smile that puzzled Nina. " Oh! we soon get familiar here! " 
 
 " Where are you going to see her again this evening ? " she persevered, 
 playing with her parasol fringe. 
 
 " At her own house a house that will charm you. By the way, it once 
 belonged to Bussy Rabutin, and it has all Louis Quatorze furniture." 
 
 " Is it a dinner ? a ball ? " 
 
 " No, an Opera supper she is famed for her Sillery and her mots. Ten to 
 one I shall not go; what amuses one once palls with repetition." 
 
 " I don't understand that," said Nina, quickly; " what I like, I like pour 
 toujours." 
 
 " Pauvre enfant! you little know life," muttered Ernest. "Ah! Miss 
 Gordon, you are at the happy age when one can believe in the feelings and 
 friendships, and all the charming little romances of existence. But I have 
 passed it, and so that I am amused for a moment, so that something takes 
 time off my hands, I look no further, and expect no more. I know well 
 enough the champagne will cease to sparkle, but I drink it while it forms, and 
 don't trouble myself to lament over it. Qu'importe ? when one bottle's empty, 
 there is another! " 
 
 " Ah ! it is such women as Madame de Melusine who have taught you that 
 doctrine," cried Nina, with an energy that rather startled Ernest, though his 
 nerves were as strong as any man's in Paris. " My romances, as you term 
 them, still I believe sleep in your heart, but this world you live in has stifled 
 them. Do you think amusement will always be enough for you ? do you think 
 you will never want something better than your empty champagne foam ? " 
 
 " I hope I shall not, mademoiselle," said Vaughan, bitterly, " for I am cer- 
 tain I do not believe in it, and am quite sure I should never get it. Leave me 
 to the roses of my Tritericae; they are all I shall ever enjoy, and they, at the 
 best, are withered." 
 
 "Nina, love," interrupted Selina, coming up with much amiability, "I was 
 obliged to come and tell you not to be quite so energetic. All the people in the 
 room are looking at you." 
 
 " I daresay they are," said Vaughan, calmly. " It is not often the Parisians 
 
 VOL. III. 19
 
 578 OU IDA'S WORKS. 
 
 have the pleasure of seeing beauty unaffected, and fascinations careless of their 
 own charms. Nature, Selina, is unhappily as rare one side the Channel as the 
 other, and we men appreciate it when we do see it." 
 
 When Vaughan parted from them soon after, he swore at himself for three 
 things. First, for having driven Bluette, en plein jour, -through the Boulevards, 
 though he had driven Bluette, and such as Bluette, a thousand times before; 
 secondly, for having been so weak as to introduce Madame de Melusine to the 
 Gordons; and, thirdly, for having he the thorough-paced Lion, whose manual 
 was Rochefoucauld, and tutor in love, De Kock actually talked romance as if 
 he were Werter or Paul Flemming, or some other sentimental simpleton. 
 
 Vaughan, to his great disgust, felt a fit of blue devils stealing on him, 
 hurled one or two rose notes waiting for him into the fire with an oath, smoked 
 half a dozen Manillas fiercely, and then, to get excitement, went to a dinner at 
 the Rocher de Cancale, played ecarte with a beau joueur, went to an Opera 
 supper not to the De Melusine's then to Mabille and came home at seven in 
 the morning after a night such as would have raised every hair off Brutus's 
 head, given a triumphant glitter to the Warden's small blue eyes, and possibly 
 even staggered the hot faith of his young champion. Pauline de Melusine was 
 as good as her word she did call on the Gordons and Brutus, stoic though 
 he was, was well pleased; for the baronne, though her nobility only dated from 
 the Restoration, and was not received by the exclusive Legitimists of the old 
 Faubourg St. Germain, had a very pleasant set of her own, and figured among 
 the nouvelle noblesse and bourgeois decores who fill the vacant places of the De 
 Rochefoucauld, the De Rohan, and the Montmorency, in the " imperial " salons 
 of the Tuileries, where once the noblest blood in Europe was gathered. 
 
 " It is painful to me to frequent Ernest's society," the Warden was wont to 
 say, " for every word he utters impresses me but more sadly with the conviction 
 of his lost state. But we are commanded to be in the world though not of it, 
 and, if I shun him, how can I hope to benefit him ? " 
 
 "True; and, as your cousin, it would scarcely be charitable to avoid him 
 entirely, terrible as we know his habits to be. But there is no necessity to be 
 too intimate, and I do not wish Nina to be too much with him," the banker was 
 accustomed to answer. 
 
 " Anglic*, Vaughan gets us good introductions, and makes Paris pleasant to 
 us; we'll use him while we want him: when we don't, we will give him his 
 conge." 
 
 That's the reading of most of our dear friends' compliments and caresses, 
 isn't it ? 
 
 Vaughan knew perfectly well that they would like to make a cat's-paw of him, 
 and was the last man likely to play that simple and certainly not agreeable role 
 unless it suited him. But he had reasons of his own for forcing Gordon to be
 
 SLANDER AND SILLERY. 579 
 
 civil and obliged to him, despite the prejudices of that English, and therefore, 
 of course, opinionated gentleman. It amused him to mortify Eusebius, whom 
 he saw at a glance was bewitched with the prospect of Nina's dot, and it amused 
 him very much to see Nina's joyous laughter as he leaned over her chair at the 
 Opera Comique, to hear her animated satire on Madame de Melusine, for whom, 
 knowing nothing of her, the young lady had conceived hot aversion, and to 
 listen to her enthusiasm when she poured out to him her vivid imaginings. 
 
 Gradually the cafes, and the Boulevards, and the boudoirs missed Ernest 
 while he accompanied Nina through the glades of St. Cloud, or down the Seine 
 to AsniereSj or up the slopes of Pere la Chaise, in his new pursuit; and often at 
 night he would leave the coulisses, or a lansquenet, or the gas-lights of the 
 Maison Doree, and the Closerie des Lilas, to watch her thorough enjoyment of 
 a vaudeville, her fervent feeling in an opera, or to waltz with her at a ball, and 
 note her glad recognition of him. 
 
 To this girl, Ernest opened his heart and mind as he being a reserved, 
 proud, and skeptical man had never done to any one; there was a sympathy 
 and confidence between them, and she learned much of his inner nature as she 
 talked to him soft and low under the forest trees of Fontainebleau, such talk 
 as could not be heard in Bluette's boudoir, under the wax-lights of the Quartier 
 Breda, or in the flow of the Sillery at la Melusine's soupers. All this was new 
 to the tired Lion, and amused him immensely. La chevelure doree was twist- 
 ing the golden meshes of its net round him, as De Concressault told him one 
 day. 
 
 " Nonsense," said Ernest; " have I not two loves already on my hands more 
 than I want ? " 
 
 " Dethrone them, and promote la petite." 
 
 Vaughan turned on his friend with his eyes flashing. 
 
 " Bon Dieu ! do you take her for a ballet-girl or a grisette ? " 
 
 " Well, if you don't like that, marry her then, mon cher. You will satisfy 
 your fancy, and get cinquante mille francs de rente at a sacrifice, of course; 
 but, que veux-tu ? There is no medal without its reverse, though a ' lion 
 marie ' is certainly an anomaly, an absurdity, and an intense pity." 
 
 "Tais-toi," said Ernest, impatiently; " tu es fou ! Caught in the toils of a 
 wretched intrigante, in the power of any tailor in the Rue Vivienne, any jeweller 
 in the Palais Royal, my money spent on follies, my life wasted in play, the turf, 
 and worthless women, I have much indeed to offer to a young girl who has 
 wealth, beauty, genius, and heart ! " 
 
 " All the more reason why you should make a good coup," said Emile, 
 calmly, after listening with pitying surprise to his friend in his new mood. 
 "You have a handsome face, a fashionable reputation, and a good name. Bah ! 
 you can do anything. As for your life, all women like a mauvais sujet, and
 
 580 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 unless the De Melusine turn out a Brinvilliers, I don't see what you have to 
 fear." 
 
 "When I want your counsel, Emile, I will ask it," said Vaughan, shortly; 
 " but, as I have no intention of going in for the prize, there is no need for you 
 to bet on the chance of the throw." 
 
 "Commetu veux ! " said the Parisian, shrugging his shoulders. "That 
 homme de paille, your priestly cousin, will take her back to the English fogs, 
 and make her a much better husband than you'd ever be, mon gar9on." 
 
 Vaughan moved restlessly. 
 
 " The idiot ! if I thought so - The devil take you, Emile ! why do you 
 talk of such things ? " 
 
 At that minute Nina was sitting by one of the windows of their hotel, 
 watching for Ernest, with a bouquet he had sent her on a table by her side; 
 and the Rev. Eusebius was talking in a very low tone to her father. She 
 caught a few words. " Last night Vaughan at the Freres Provenfaux a souper 
 au cabinet Mademoiselle Celine, premiere danseuse quite terrible," etc., etc. 
 
 Nina flushed scarlet, and turned round. " If you blame your cousin, Mr. 
 Ruskinstone, why were you there yourself ? " 
 
 The Warden colored too. With him, as with a good many, foreign air 
 relaxed the severity of the Decalogue, and what was sin at home, where every- 
 body knew it, was none at all abroad under the rose. Some dear pharisees 
 will not endanger their souls by a carpet-dance in England, but it a little bird 
 followed them in their holiday across the Channel, it might chance to see them 
 disporting under a domino noir. 
 
 " I had been," he stammered, " to see, as you know, a beautiful specimen 
 of the arcboutant in a ruined chapel of the Carmelites, some miles down the 
 Seine. It was very late, and I was very tired, so turned into the Freres Pro- 
 vencaux to take some little refreshment, and I there saw my unhappy cousin 
 in society which ought, Miss Gordon, to disqualify him from yours. It is very 
 painful to me to mention such things to you. I never thought you over- 
 heard " 
 
 " Then, if it is very painful to you," Nina burst in, impetuously, her bouche de 
 rose, as De Kerroualle called it, curving haughtily, " why are you ceaselessly rak- 
 ing up every possible bit of scandal that you can against your cousin ? His life 
 does not clash with yours, his acts do not matter to you, his extravagance does not 
 rob you. I used to fancy charity should cover a multitude of sins, but it seems 
 to me that, nowadays, clergymen, like Dr. Watt's naughty dogs, only delight to 
 bark and bite." 
 
 "You are cruelly unjust," answered the Warden, in those smooth tones that 
 irritate one much more than " hard swearing." " I have no other wish than 
 Christian kindness to poor Ernest. If, in my place as pastor, I justly condemn
 
 SLANDER AND SILLERY. 581 
 
 his errors and vices, it is only through a loving desire to wean him from his 
 downward course." 
 
 " Your love is singularly vindictive," said his vehement young opponent, 
 her cheeks hot and her eyes bright. " No good was ever yet done to a man 
 by proclaiming his faults right and left. 7 should like you. much better, Mr. 
 Ruskinstone, if you said, candidly, I don't like my cousin, and I have never 
 forgiven him for thrashing me at Rugby, and playing football better than I did." 
 
 Eusebius winced at this little touch of his bygone years, but he smiled a 
 benign, superior, pitying smile. " Such petitesses, I thank Heaven, are utterly 
 beneath me, and I should have fancied Miss Gordon was too generous to sup- 
 pose them. God forbid that I should envy poor Vaughan his dazzling quali- 
 ties. I sorrow over him as a relative and a precious human soul, but as a 
 minister of our holy Church I neither can, nor will, countenance his gross vio- 
 lations of all her divinest laws." With which peroration the Warden, with a sigh, 
 took up a work on " The Early English Piscini and Aspersoria," and became 
 immersed therein. 
 
 " Poor Mr. Vaughan ! " cried Nina, impatiently. " Probably he is too wise 
 to concern himself about what people buzz in his absence, or else he need 
 be cased in mail to avoid being stung to death with the musquito bites of 
 scandal." 
 
 Gordon came down on her with his heavy artillery. " Silence, Nina ! you 
 do not know what you are defending. I fear that no slander can darken Mr. 
 Vaughan's character more than he merits." 
 
 " A gambler a roue a lover of married woman, of dancing-girls," mur- 
 mured Eusebius, in an aside, meant, like those on the stage, to tell killingly 
 with the audience. 
 
 Nina flushed as scarlet as the camellias in her bouquet, and put up her head 
 with a haughty gesture. " Here comes the subject of your vituperation, Mr. 
 Ruskinstone, so you can repeat your denunciations, and favor him with a ser- 
 mon in person unless, indeed, the secular recollections of Rugby intimidate 
 the religious arm." 
 
 I fear something as irreverent as " Little devil ! " rose to the Warden's 
 pious lips as he flashed a fierce glance at her from his pale-blue eyes, for he 
 loved not her, but the splendid dot which the banker was sure to pay down if 
 his son-in-law were to his taste. He caught his cousin's glance as he came in- 
 to the salons, and in the superb scorn gleaming in Ernest's dark eyes, Euse- 
 bius saw that they were not merely enemies, but rivals: a Warden with 
 Church principles,' all the cardinal virtues, strict morality, and money; and a 
 Lion with Paris principles (if any), great fascinations, debts, entanglements, 
 and an empty purse. Which will win, with Nina for the cup and Gordon for 
 the umpire ?
 
 582 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 IV. 
 
 MISCHIEF. 
 
 " Qui cherchez-vous, petite ? " 
 
 The speaker was la Melusine, and the hearer was Nina who considerably 
 resented the half- patronizing, half-mocking, yet intensely amiable manner the 
 widow chose to assume towards her. Gordon was stricken with warm admir- 
 ation of madame, and never inquired into her morality, only too pleased when 
 she condescended to talk to or invite him. They had met at a soiree at some 
 intimate friends of Vaughan's in the Champs Elysees. (Ernest was a favorite 
 wherever he went, and the good-natured French people at once took up his 
 relatives to please him.) He was not there himself, but the baronne's quick 
 eyes soon caught and construed her restless glances through the crowded 
 rooms. 
 
 " Je ne cherche personne, madame," said Nina, haughtily. Dressed simply 
 in white tulle, with the most exquisite flowers to be had out of the Palais Royal 
 in the famous golden hair, which gleamed in the gaslight like sunshine, she 
 aroused the serpent which lay hid in the roses of madame's smiles. 
 
 Pauline laughed softly, and flirted her fan. " Nay, nay, mignonne, those 
 soft eyes are seeking some one. Who is it ? Ah ! it is that mechant Mon- 
 seiur Vaughan n'est-ce pas ? He is very handsome, certainly, but 
 
 On dit au village 
 Qu'Argire est volage." 
 
 " Madame's own thoughts possibly suggest the supposition of mine," said 
 Nina, coldly. 
 
 " Comme ces Anglaises sont impolies," thought the baronne. " No, indeed," 
 she said, laughing carelessly, " I know Ernest too well to let my thoughts dwell 
 on him. He is charming to talk to, to waltz with, to flirt with, but from any- 
 thing further Dieu nous garde ! Lauzun himself were not more dangerous or 
 more unstable," 
 
 " You speak as bitterly, madame, as if you had suffered from the fickle- 
 ness," said Nina, with a contemptuous curl of her soft lips. Sweet temper as 
 she was, she could thrust a spear in her enemy's side when she liked. 
 
 Madame's eyes glittered like a rattlesnake's. Nina's chance ball shot home. 
 But madame was a woman of the world, and could mask her batteries, with a 
 skill of which Nina, with her impetuous abandon, was incapable. She smiled 
 very sweetly, as she answered, " No, petite, I have unhappily seen too much of 
 the world not to know that we must never put our trust in those charming mau-
 
 SLANDER AND SILLER Y. 583 
 
 vais sujets. At your age, I daresay I should not have been proof against your 
 countryman's fascinations, but now, I know just how much his fondest vows 
 are worth, and I have been deaf to them all, for I would not let my heart mis- 
 lead me against my reason and my conscience. Ah, petite ! you little guess 
 what the traitor word ' love ' means here, in Paris. We women grow accus- 
 tomed to our fate, but the lesson is hard sometimes." 
 
 " You have been reading ' Mes Confidences,' lately ? " asked Nina, with a 
 sarcastic flash of her brilliant eyes. 
 
 " How cruel ! Do you suppose I can have no emotions except I learn them 
 second-hand through Lamartine or Delphine Gay ? You are very satirical, 
 
 Miss Gordon: How strange ! " said the baronne, interrupting herself; "your 
 
 bouquet is the fac-simile of mine ! Look ! De Kerroualle sent you that I 
 fancy ? You know he raffoles of you. I was very silly to use mine, but Mr. 
 Vaughan sent me such a pretty note with it, that I had not the resolution to 
 disappoint him. Poor Ernest ! " And Madame sighed softly, as if bewailing 
 in her tender heart the woes her obduracy caused. The blood flamed up in 
 Nina's cheeks, and her hand clenched on Ernest's flowers : they were the fac- 
 similes of the widow's ; delicate pink blossoms, mixed with white azalias. " Is 
 he here to-night, do you know ? " madame continued. " I daresay not; he is 
 behind the coulisses, most likely. Celine, the new danseuse from the Fenice, 
 makes her debut to-night. Here comes poor Gaston to petition for a valse. 
 Be kind to him, pray." 
 
 She herself went off to the ballroom, and the effect of her exordium was 
 to make Nina very disagreeable to poor De Kerroualle, whom she really liked, 
 and who was enteti about her. Not long afterwards, Nina saw in the distance 
 Vaughan's haughty head and powerful brow, and her silly little heart beat as 
 quick as a pigeon's just caught in the trap: he was talking to the widow. 
 
 " Look at our young English friend," Pauline was saying, " how she is 
 flirting with Gaston, and De Lafitolle, and De Concressault. Certainly, when 
 your Englishwomen do coquet, they go further than any of us." 
 
 " Est-ce possible ? " said Ernest, raising his eyebrows. 
 
 " Mechant ! " cried madame, with a chastising blow of her fan. " But, do 
 you know, I admire the petite very much. I believe all really beautiful women 
 had that rare golden hair of hers Lucrezia Borgia (I could never bear Grisi as 
 Lucrezia, for that very reason). La Cenci, the Duchess of Portsmouth, ^Enone 
 and Helen, I am sure, netted Paris with those gold threads. Don't you 
 think it is very lovely ? " 
 
 " I do, indeed," said Vaughan, with unconscious warmth. 
 
 Madame laughed gaily, but there was a disagreeable glitter in her eye. 
 " What, fickle already ? Ah well, I give you full leave." 
 
 " And example, madame," said Ernest, as he bowed and left her side, glad
 
 584 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 to have struck the first blow of his freedom from this handsome tyrant, who was 
 as capricious and exacting as she was clever and captivating. But fetters made 
 of fairer roses were over Ernest now, and he never bethought himself of the 
 probable vengeance of that bitterest foe, a woman who is piqued. 
 
 " Tout beau ! " thought Pauline, as she saw him waltzing with Nina. 
 " Mais je vous donnerai encore 1'echec et mat, mon brave joueur." 
 
 " Did you give Madame de Melusine the bouquet she carries this evening ? " 
 asked Nina, as he whirled her round. 
 
 " No," said Ernest, astonished. " Why do you ask ? " 
 
 " Because she said you did," answered Nina, never accustomed to conceal 
 anything; " and, besides, it is exactly like mine." 
 
 " Infernal woman ! " muttered Ernest, " How could you for a moment 
 believe that I would have so insulted you ? " 
 
 " I didn't believe it," said Nina, lifting her frank eyes to his. " But how 
 very late you are; have you been at the ballet ? " 
 
 His face grew stern. " Did she tell you that ? " 
 
 " Yes. But why did you go there, instead of coming to dance with me ? 
 Do you like those danseuses better than you do me ? What was Celine's or 
 anydody's debut, to you ? " 
 
 Ernest smiled at the native indignation of the question. " Never think 
 that I do not wish to be with you; but I wanted oblivion, and one cannot 
 shake off old habits. Did you miss me among all those other men that you 
 have always round you ? " 
 
 " How unkind that is ! " whispered Nina, indignantly. " You know I 
 always do." 
 
 He held her closer to him in the waltz, and she felt his heart beat quicker, 
 but she got no other answer. 
 
 That night Nina stood before her toilette-table, putting her flowers in water, 
 and some hot tears fell on the azalias. 
 
 "I will have faith in him," she cried, passionately; " though all the world 
 be witness against him, I will believe in him. Whatever his life may have been, 
 his heart is warm and true; they shall never make me doubt it." 
 
 Her last thoughts were of him, and when she slept his face was in her 
 dreams, while Ernest, with some of the wildest men of his set, smoked hard and 
 drank deep in his chambers to drive away, if he could, the fiends of Regret 
 and Passion and the memory of a young, radiant, impassioned face, which lured 
 him to an unattainable future. 
 
 " Nina dearest," said Selina Ruskinstone, affectionately, the morning after, 
 " I hope you will not think me unkind you know I have no wish but for your 
 good but dont you think it would be better to be a little more more reserved, 
 a little less free, with Mr. Vaughan ? "
 
 SLANDER AND SILLER Y. 585 
 
 " Explain yourself more clearly," said Nina, tranquilly. " Do you wish me 
 to send to Turkey for a veil and a guard of Bashi-Bazouks, or do you mean 
 that Mr. Vaughan is so attractive that he is better avoided, like a man-trap or 
 a Maelstrom ? " 
 
 "^Don't be ridiculous," retorted Augusta; " you know well enough what we 
 mean, and certainly you do run after him a great deal too much." 
 
 " You are so very demonstrative," sighed Selina, " and it is so easily mis- 
 construed. It is not feminine to court any man so unblushingly." 
 
 Nina's eyes flashed, and the blood colored her brow. " I am not afraid of 
 being misconstrued by Mr. Vaughan," she said, haughtily; "gentlemen are 
 kinder and wiser judges in those things than our sex." 
 
 " I wouldn't advise you to trust to Ernest's tender mercies," sneered Augusta. 
 
 " My dear child, remember his principles," sighed Selina; "his life his 
 reputation " 
 
 " Leave both him and me alone," retorted Nina, passionately. " I will not 
 stand calmly by to hear him slandered with your vague calumnies. You preach 
 religion often enough; practise it now, and show more common kindness to 
 your cousin: I do not say charity, for I am sick of the cant word, and he is 
 above your pity. You think me utterly lost because I dance, and laugh, and 
 enjoy my life, but, bad as my principles are, I should be shocked yes, Selina, 
 and I should think I merited little mercy myself, were I as harsh and bitter 
 upon any one as you are upon him. How can you judge him? how can you 
 say what nobility, and truth, and affection that will shame your own cold 
 pharisaism may lie in his heart unrevealed ? how can you dare to censure 
 him ? " 
 
 In the door of the salon, listening to the lecture his young champion was 
 giving these two blue, opinionated, and strongly pious ladies, stood Ernest, his 
 face even paler than usual, and his eyes with a strange mixture of joy and pain 
 in them. Nina colored scarlet but went forward to meet him with undisguised 
 pleasure, utterly regardless of the sneering lips and averted eyes of the Miss 
 Ruskinstones. He had come to go with them to St. Germain, and, with a 
 dexterous manoeuvre, took the very seat in the carriage opposite Nina that 
 Eusebius had planned for himself. But the Warden was no match for the Lion 
 in such affairs, and, being exiled to the barouche with Gordon and Augusta, 
 took from under the seat a folio of the " Stones of Venice," and read sulkily 
 all the way. 
 
 "My dear fellow," said Vaughan, when they reached St. Germain, "don't 
 
 you think you would prefer to sit in the carriage, and finish that delightful 
 
 work, to coming to see some simple woods and terraces ? If you would, pray 
 
 don't hesitate to say so; I am sure Miss Gordon will excuse your absence." 
 
 The solicitous courtesy of Ernest's manner was boiling oil to the fire raging
 
 586 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 in the Warden's gentle breast, and Eusebius, besides, was not quick at retorts. 
 "I am not guilty of any such bad taste," he said, stiffly, " though I do discover 
 a charm in severe studies, which I believe you never did." 
 
 " No, never," said Ernest, laughing; " my genius does not lie that way; 
 and I've no vacant bishopric in my mind's eye to make such studies profitable. 
 Even you, you know, light of the Church as you are, want recreation some- 
 times. Confess now, the chansons a boire last night sounded pleasant after 
 long months of Faithandgrace services! " 
 
 Eusebius looked much as I have seen a sleek tom-cat, who bears a respect- 
 able character generally, surprised in surreptitiously licking out of the cream- 
 jug. He had the night before (when he was popularly supposed to be sitting 
 under Adolphe Monod) tasted rather too many petits verres up at the Pre 
 Catalan, utterly unconscious of his cousin's proximity. The pure-minded soul 
 thus cruelly caught looked prayers of piteous entreaty to Vaughan not to dam- 
 age his milk-white reputation by further revelation of this unlucky detour into 
 the Broad Road; and Ernest, who, always kind-hearted, never hit a man when 
 he was down, contented himself with saying: 
 
 " Ah ! well, we are none of us pure alabaster, though some of the sepulchres 
 do contrive to whiten themselves up astonishingly. My father, poor man, once 
 wished to put me in the Church. Do you think I should have graced it, Selina ? " 
 
 " I can't say I do," sneered Selina. 
 
 "You think I should disgrace it? Very probably. I am not good at 
 'canting.' " And giving Nina his arm, the Warden being much too confused 
 to forestall him, he whispered: "when is that atrocious saint going to take4iim- 
 self over the water ? Couldn't we bribe his diocesan to call him before the 
 Arches Court ? Surely those long coats, so like the little wooden men in Noah's 
 Ark, and that straightened hair, so mathematically parted down the centre, 
 look 'perverted ' enough to warrant it." 
 
 Nina shook her head. " Unhappily, he is here for six months for ill health ! 
 the sick-leave of clergymen who wish for a holiday, and are too holy to leave 
 their flock without an excuse to society." 
 
 Vaughan laughed, then sighed. " Six months and you have been here 
 four already ! Eusebius hates me cordially all my English relatives do, I be- 
 lieve; we do not get on together. They are too cold and conventional for me. 
 I have some of the warm Bohemian blood, though God knows I've seen enough 
 to chill it to ice by this time; but it is not chilled so much the worse for 
 me," muttered Ernest. " Tell me," he said, abruptly " tell me why you took 
 the trouble to defend me so generously this morning ? " 
 
 She looked up at him with her frank, beaming regard. " Because they dare 
 to misjudge you, and they know nothing, and are not worthy to know anything 
 of your real self."
 
 SLANDER AND SILLER Y. 587 
 
 He pressed his lips together as if in bodily pain. " And what do you 
 know ? " 
 
 " Have you not yourself said that you talk to [me as you talk to no one 
 else?" answered Nina, impetuously; "besides I cannot tell why, but the first 
 day I met you I seemed to find some friend that I had lost before. I was cer- 
 tain that you would never misconstrue anything I said, and I felt that I saw 
 further into your heart and mind than anyone else could do. Was it not very 
 strange ? " She stopped, and looked up at him. Ernest bent his eyes on the 
 ground, and breathed fast. 
 
 " No, no," he said at last; " yours is only an ideal of me. If you knew me 
 as I really am, you would cease to feel the the interest that you say 
 
 He stopped abruptly; facile as he was at pretty compliments, and versed in 
 tender scenes as he had been from his school-days, the longing to make this 
 girl love him, and his struggle not to breathe love to her, deprived him of his 
 customary strength and nonchalance. 
 
 " I do not fear to know you as you are," said Nina, gently. " I do not 
 think you yourself allow all the better things that are in you. People have not 
 judged you rightly, and you have been too proud to prove their error to them. 
 You have found pleasure in running counter to the prudish and illiberal bigots, 
 who presumed to judge you; and to a world you have found heartless and false 
 you have not cared to lift the domino and mask you wore." 
 
 Vaughan sighed from the bottom of his heart, and walked on in silence for 
 a good five minutes. " Promise me, Nina," he said at length with an effort, 
 " that no matter what you hear against me, you will not condemn me 
 unheard." 
 
 " I promise," she answered, raising her eyes to his, brighter still for the 
 color in her cheeks. It was the first time he had called her Nina. 
 
 " Miss Gordon," said Eusebius, hurriedly overtaking them, " pray come 
 with me a moment: there is the most exquisite specimen of the Flamboyant 
 style in an archway " 
 
 " Thank you for your good intentions," said Nina, pettishly, " but really, as 
 you might know by this time, I never can see any attractions in your prosaic 
 and matter-of-fact study." 
 
 " It might be more profitable than- " 
 
 " Than thinking of La Valliere and poor Bragelonne, and all the gay glories 
 of the exiled Bourbons ? " laughed Nina. " Very likely; but romance is more 
 to my taste than granite. You would never have killed yourself, like Brage- 
 lonne, for the beaux yeux of Louise de la Beaumesur-Blanc, would you ? " 
 
 " I trust," said Eusebius, stiffly, " that I should have had a deeper sense of 
 the important responsibilities of the gift of life than to throw it away because a 
 silly girl preferred another."
 
 588 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 "You are very impolitic," said Ernest, with a satirical smile. "No lady 
 could feel remorse at forsaking you, if you could get over it so easily." 
 
 " He would get over it easily," laughed Nina. " You would call her Delilah, 
 and all the Scripture bad names, order Mr. Ruskin's new work, turn your desires 
 to a deanship, marry some bishop's daughter with high ecclesiastical interest, 
 and console yourself in the bosom of your Mother Church eh, Mr. Ruskin- 
 stone ? " 
 
 " You are cruelly unjust," sighed Eusebius. You little know " 
 
 "The charms of architecture? No; and I never shall," answered his tor- 
 mentor, humming the " Queen of the Roses," and waltzing down the forest 
 glade, where they were walking. " How severe you look ! " she said as she 
 waltzed back. " Is that wrong, too ? Miriam danced before the ark and Jephtha's 
 daughter." 
 
 The Warden appeared not to hear. Certainly his mode of courtship was 
 singular. 
 
 " Ernest," he said, turning to his cousin as the rest of the party came up, 
 " I had no idea your sister was in Paris. I have not seen her since she was four- 
 teen. I should not have known her in the least." 
 
 " Margaret is in India with her husband," answered Vaughan. " What are 
 you dreaming of ? \Vhere have you seen her ? " 
 
 " I saw her in your chambers," answered the Warden, slowly. " I passed 
 three times yesterday, and she was sitting in the centre window each time." 
 
 " Pshaw ! You dreamt it in your sleep last night. Margaret's in Vellore, 
 I assure you." 
 
 " I saw her," said the Warden, softly; " or, at least, I saw some lady, whom 
 I naturally presumed to be your sister." 
 
 Ernest, who had not colored for fifteen years, and would have defied man 
 or woman to confuse him, flushed to his very temples. 
 
 " You are mistaken," he said, decidedly. " There is no woman in my 
 rooms." 
 
 Eusebius raised his eyebrows, bent his head, smiled and sighed. More 
 polite disbelief was never expressed. The Miss Ruskinstones would have 
 blushed if they could; as they could not, they drew themselves bolt upright, 
 and put their parasols between them and the reprobate. Nina, whose hand 
 was still in Vaughan's arm, turned white, and flashed a quick, upward look at 
 him; then, with a glance at Eusebius, as fiery as the eternal wrath that that dear 
 divine was accustomed to deal out so largely to other people, she led Ernest 
 up to her father, who being providentially somewhat deaf, had not heard 
 this by-play, and said, to her cousin's horror, " Papa, dear, Mr. Vaughan wants 
 you to dine with him at Tortoni's to-night, to meet M. de Vendanges. You 
 will be very happy, won't you? "
 
 SLANDER AND SILLERY. 589 
 
 Ernest pressed her little hand against his side, and thanked her with his 
 eyes. 
 
 Gordon was propitiated for that day; he was not likely to quarrel with a man 
 who could introduce him to "Son Altesse Monseigneur le due de Vendanges." 
 
 V. 
 
 MORE MISCHIEF AND AN END. 
 
 IN a little cabinet de peinture, in a house in the Place Vendome, apart from 
 all the other people, who having come to a dejeuner were now dispersed in the 
 music rooms, boudoirs, and conservatories, sat Madame de Melusine, talking 
 to Gordon, flatteringly, beguilingly, bewitchingly, as that accomplished widow 
 could. The banker found her charming, and really, under her blandishments, 
 began to believe, poor old fellow, that she was in love with him ! 
 
 "Ah ! by-the-by, cher monsieur," began madame, when she had soft-soaped 
 him into a proper frame of mind, " I want to speak to you about that mignonne 
 Nina. You cannot tell, you cannot imagine, what interest I take in her." 
 
 " You do her much honor, madame," replied her bourgeois gentilhomme, 
 always stiff, however enraptured he might feel internally. 
 
 " The honor is mine," smiled Pauline. " Yes, I do feel much interest in 
 her; there is a sympathy in our natures, I am certain, and and, Monsieur 
 Gordon, I cannot see that darling girl on the brink of a precipice without 
 stretching out a hand to snatch her from the abyss." 
 
 " Precipice abyss Nina ! Good Heavens ! my dear madame, what do 
 you mean ? " cried Gordon a fire, an elopement, and the small-pox all pre- 
 senting themselves to his mind. 
 
 " No, no," repeated madame, with increasing vehemence, " I will not permit 
 any private feelings, I will not allow my own weakness to prevent me from 
 saving her. It would be a crime, a cruelty, to let your innocent child be de- 
 ceived, and rendered miserable for all time, because I lack the moral courage 
 to preserve her. Monsieur, I speak to you, as I am sure I may, as one friend 
 to another, and I am perfectly certain that you will not misjudge me. Answer 
 me one thing; no impertinent curiosity dictates the question. Do you wish 
 your daughter married to Mr. Vaughan ? " 
 
 " Married to Vaughan ! " exclaimed the startled banker; " I'd sooner see 
 her married to a crossing sweeper. She never thought of such a thing. Im- 
 possible ! absurd ! she'll marry my friend Ruskinstone as soon as she comes 
 of age. Marry Vaughan ! a fellow without a penny "
 
 590 
 
 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 Pauline laid her soft, jewelled hand on his arm: 
 
 " My dear friend, he thinks of it if you do not, and I am much mistaken if 
 dear Nina is not already dazzled by his brilliant qualities. Your countryman 
 is a charming companion, no one can gainsay that; but, alas ! he is a roue, a 
 gambler, an adventurer, who, while winning her young girl's affections, has 
 only in view the wealth which he hopes he will gain with her. It is painful to 
 me to say this " (and tears stood in madame's long, velvet eyes). " We were 
 good friends before he wanted more than friendship, while poor De Melusine 
 was still living, and his true character was revealed to me. It would be false 
 delicacy to allow your darling Nina to become his victim for want of a few 
 words from me, though I know, if he were aware of my interference, the infer- 
 ence he would basely insinuate from it. But you," whispered madame, brush- 
 ing the tears from her eyes, and giving him an angelic smile, " I need not fear 
 that you would ever misjudge me ? " 
 
 " Never, I swear, most generous of women ! " said the banker, kissing the 
 snow-white hand, very clumsily, too. " I'll tell the fellow my mind directly 
 an unprincipled, gambling " 
 
 " Non, non, je vous en prie, monsieur ! " cried the widow, really frightened, 
 for this would not have suited her plans at all. " You would put me in the 
 power of that unscrupulous man. He would destroy my reputation at once in 
 his revenge." 
 
 " But what am I to do ? " said the poor gulled banker. " Nina's a will of 
 her own, and if she take a fancy to this confounded " 
 
 " Leave that to me," said la baronne, softly. " I have proofs which will 
 stagger her most obstinate faith in her lover. Meanwhile give him no sus- 
 picion, go to his supper on Tuesday, and you are asked to Vauvenay, accept 
 the invitation and conclude the fiancailles with Monseiur le Ministre as soon 
 as you can." 
 
 " But but, madame," stammered this new Jourdain to his enchanting 
 Dorimene, "Vauvenay is an exile. I shall not see you there?" 
 
 " Ah, silly man," laughed the widow, " I shall be only two miles off. I am 
 going to stay with the Salvador; they leave Paris in three weeks. Listen your 
 daughter is singing The Swallows.' Her voice is quite as good as Ristori's." 
 
 Three hours after, madame held another tete-a-tete in that boudoir. This 
 time the favored mortal was Vaughan. They had had a pathetic interview, of 
 which the pathos hardly moved Ernest as much as the widow desired. 
 
 " You love me no longer, Ernest," she murmured, the tears falling down 
 her cheeks her rogue was the product of high art, and never washed off" I 
 see it, I feel it; your heart is given to that English girl. I have tried to jest 
 about it; I have tried to affect indifference, but I cannot. The love you once 
 won will be yours to the grave."
 
 SLANDER AND SILLER Y. 591 
 
 Ernest listened, a satirical smile on his lips. 
 
 "I should feel more grateful," he said, calmly, " if the gift had not been 
 given to so many; it will be a great deal of trouble to you to love us all to our 
 graves. And your new friend Gordon, do you intend cherishing his gray hairs, 
 too, till the gout puts them under the sod ? " 
 
 She fell back sobbing with exquisite abandon. No deserted Calypso's pose 
 was ever more effective. 
 
 " Ernest, Ernest ! that I should live to be so insulted, and by you ! " 
 
 " Nay, madame, end this vaudeville," said he, bitterly. " I know well 
 enough that you hate me, or why have you troubled yourself to coin the un- 
 truths about me that you whispered to Miss Gordon ? " 
 
 " Ah ! have you no pity for the first mad vengeance dictated by jealously 
 and despair ? " murmured Pauline. " Once there was attraction in this face 
 for you, Ernest; have some compassion, some sympathy " 
 
 Well as he knew the worth of madame's tears, Ernest, chivalric and gener- 
 ous at heart, was touched. 
 
 " Forgive me," he said, gently, " and let us part. You know now, Pauline, 
 that she has my deepest, my latest love. It were disloyalty to both did we 
 meet again save in society." 
 
 " Farewell, then," murmured Pauline. " Think gently of me, Ernest, for I 
 have loved you more than you will ever know now." 
 
 She rose, and, as he bent towards her, kissed his forehead. Then, floating 
 from the room, passed the Reverend Eusebius, standing in the doorway, look- 
 ing in on this parting scene. The widow looked at herself in her mirror that 
 night with a smile of satisfaction. 
 
 " C'est bien en train," she said, half aloud. " Le fou ! de penser qu'il 
 puisse me braver. Je ne 1'aime plus, c'est vrai, mais je ne veux pas qu'elle 
 reussisse." 
 
 Nina went to bed very happy. Ernest had sat next her at the dejeuner; 
 and afterwards at a ball had waltzed often with her and with nobody else; and 
 his eyes had talked love in the waltzes though his tongue never had. 
 
 Ernest went to his chambers, smoked hard, half mad with the battle within 
 him, and took three grains of opium, which gave him forgetfulness and sleep. 
 He woke, tired and depressed, to hear the gay hum of life in the street below, 
 and to remember that he had promised Nina to meet them at Versailles. 
 
 It was Sunday morning. In England, of course, Gordon would have gone 
 up to the sanctuary, listened to Mr. Bellew, frowned severely on the cheap 
 trains, and, after his claret, read edifying sermons to his household; but in Paris 
 there would be nobody to admire the piety, and the " grandes eaux " only play 
 once a week, you know on Sundays. So his Sabbath severity was relaxed, 
 and down to Versailles he journeyed. There must be something peculiar in con-
 
 592 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 tinental air, for it certainly stretches our countrymen's morality and religion 
 uncommonly: it is only up at Jerusalem that our pharisees worship. Eusebius 
 dare not go he'd be sure to meet a brother-clerical, who might have reported 
 the dereliction at home so that Vaughan, despite Gordon's cold looks, kept by 
 Nina's side though he wasn't alone with her, and when they came back in the 
 wagon the banker slept and the duenna dozed, and he talked softly and low to 
 her not quite love, but something very like it and as they neared Paris he 
 took the little hand with its delicate Jouvin glove in his, and whispered. 
 
 " Remember your promise: I can brave, and have braved most things, but 
 I could not bear your scorn. That would make me a worse man than I have 
 been, if, as some folks would tell you, such a thing be possible." 
 
 It was dark, but I daresay the moonbeams shining on the chevelure doree 
 showed him a pair of truthful, trusting eyes that promised never to desert him. 
 
 The day after he had, by dint of tact and strategy, planned to spend en- 
 tirely with Nina. He was going with them to the races at Chantilly, then to the 
 Gaite to see the first representation of a vaudeville of a friend of his, and after- 
 wards he had persuaded Gordon to enter the Lion's den, and let Nina grace a 
 petit souper at No. 10, Rue des Mauvais Sujets, Chaussee d'Antin. 
 
 The weather was delicious, the race-ground full, if not quite so crowded as 
 the Downs on Derby Day. Ernest cast away his depression, he gave himself 
 up to the joy of being loved, his wit had never rung finer nor his laugh clearer 
 than as he drove back to Paris opposite Nina. He had never felt in higher 
 spirits than, after having given carte blanche to a cordon bleu for the entertain- 
 ment, he looked round his salons, luxurious as Engene Sue's, and perfumed with 
 exotics from the Palais Royal, and thought of one rather different in style to 
 the woman that had been wont to drink his Sillery and grace his symposia. 
 
 He knew well enough she loved him, and his heart beat high as he put a 
 bouquet of white flowers into a gold bouquetiere to take to her. 
 
 On his lover-like thoughts the voice of one of his parrots Ernest had al- 
 most as many pets as there are Bluette ! " Scarce bleu, elle est jolie ! Bluette ! 
 Bluette ! " in the Jardin des Plantes broke in, screaming " Bluette ! " 
 
 The recollection was unwelcome. Vaughan swore a " scarce bleu ! " too. 
 " Diable ! she mustn't hear that. Franfois, put that bird out of the way. He 
 makes such a confounded row." 
 
 The parrot, fond of him, as all things were that knew him, sidled up, arch- 
 ing its neck, and repeating what De Concressault had taught it: " Fi done, 
 Ernest ! Tu es volage ! Tu ne m'aimes plus ! Tu aimes Pauline ! " 
 
 "Devil take the bird ! " thought its master; "even he'll be witness against 
 me." And as he went down stairs to his cab, a chorus of birds shouting " Tu 
 aimes Pauline !" followed him, and while he laughed, he sighed to think that 
 even these unconscious things could tell her how little his love was worth. He
 
 SLANDER AND SILLER Y. 593 
 
 forgot all but his love, however, when he leaned over her chair in the Gaite, 
 and saw that, strenuously as De Concressault and De Kerroualle sought to dis- 
 tract her attention, and many as were the lorgnons levelled at the chevelure 
 doree, all her thoughts and smiles were given to him. 
 
 Ernest had never, even in his careless boyhood, felt so happy as he did that 
 night as he handed her into Gordon's carriage, and drove to the Chaussee 
 d'Antin; and though Gordon sat there heavy and solemn, looming like an ice- 
 berg on Ernest's golden future, Vaughan forgot him utterly, and only looked 
 at the sunshine beaming on him from radiant eyes that, skeptic in her sex as 
 he was from experience, he felt would always be true to him. The carriage 
 stopped at No. 10, Rue des Mauvais Sujets. He had given her one or two din- 
 ners with the Senecterre, the De Salvador, and other fine ladies grand affairs 
 at the Freres Provencaux that would have satisfied Brillat-Savarin but she 
 had never been to his rooms before, and she smiled joyously in his face as he 
 lifted her out the smile that had first charmed him at the Frangais. He gave 
 her his arm, and led her across the salle, bending his head down to whisper a 
 welcome. Gordon and Selina and several men followed. Selina felt that it 
 was perdition to enter the Lion's den, but a fat old vicomte, on whom she'd 
 fixed her eye, was going, and the " femmes de trente ans " that Balzac cham- 
 pions risk their souls rather than risk their chances when the day is far spent, 
 and good offers grow rare. 
 
 Ernest's Abyssinian, mute, subordinate to that grand gentlemen, M. Fran- 
 cois, ushered them up the stairs, making furtive signs to his master, which 
 Vaughan was too much absorbed to notice. Francois, in all his glory, flung 
 open the door of the salon. In the salon a sight met Ernest's eyes which froze 
 his blood more than if all the dead had arisen out of their graves on the slopes 
 of Pere la Chaise. 
 
 The myriad of wax-lights shone on the rooms, fragrant with the perfume of 
 exotics, gleamed on the supper-table, gorgeous with its gold plate and flowers, 
 lighted up the aviary with its brilliant hues of plumage, and showed to full 
 perfection the snowy shoulders, raven hair, and rose-hued dress of a woman 
 lying back in a fauteuil, laughing, as De Cheffontaine, a man but slightly known 
 to Ernest, leaned over her, fanning her. On a sofa in an alcove reclined an- 
 other girl, young, fair, and pretty, the amber mouthpiece of a hookah between 
 her lips, and a couple of young fellows at her feet. 
 
 The brunette was Bluette, who played the soubrette roles at the Odeon; the 
 blonde was Celine Gamelle, the new premiere danseuse. Bluette rose from 
 the depths of her amber satin fauteuil, with her little pttillant eyes laughing, 
 and her small plump hands stretched out in gesticulation. " Me"chant ! Comme 
 tu es tard, Ernest. Nous avons ete ici si longtemps dix minutes au moins ! 
 And dis is you leetler new Ingleesh friend. How do you do, my dear ? "
 
 594 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 Nina, white as death, shrank from her, clinging with both hands to Ernest's 
 arms. As pale as she, Vaughan stood staring at the actress, his lips pressed 
 convulsively together, the veins standing out on his broad, high forehead. The 
 bold Lion hunted into his lair, for once lost all power, all strength. 
 
 Gordon looked over Nina's shoulder into the room. He recognized the 
 women at a glance, and, with his heavy brow dark as night, he glared on Ernest 
 in a silence more ominous than words or oaths, and snatching Nina's arm from 
 his, he drew her hand within his own, and dragged her from the room. 
 
 Ernest sprang after him. " Good God ! you do not suppose me capable of 
 this. Stay one instant. Hear me " 
 
 "Let us pass, sir," thundered Gordon, " or by Heaven this insult shall not 
 go unavenged." 
 
 " Nina, Nina ! " cried Ernest, passionately, " do you at least listen ! you 
 at least will not condemn " 
 
 Nina wrenched her hands from her father, and turned to him, a passion of 
 tears falling down her face. " No, no ! have I not promised you ? " 
 
 With a violent oath Gordon carried her to her carriage. It drove away, 
 and Ernest, his lips set, his face white, and a fierce glare in his dark eyes that 
 made Bluette and Cecline tremble, entered his salons a second time, so bitter 
 an anguish, so deadly a wrath marked in his expressive countenance, that even 
 the Frenchmen hushed their jests, and the women shrunk away, awed at a 
 depth of feeling they could not fathom or brave. 
 
 The fierce anathemas of Gordon, the " Christian " lamentations of Eusebius, 
 the sneers of Selina, the triumphs of Augusta, all these vials of wrath were 
 poured forth on Ernest, in poor little Nina's ears, the whole of the next day. 
 She had but one voice among many to raise in his defence, and she had no 
 armor but her faith in him. Gordon vowed with the same breath that she 
 should never see Vaughan again, and that she should engage herself to Rus- 
 kinstone forthwith. Eusebius poured in at one ear his mild milk-and-water at- 
 tachment, and, in the other, details of Ernest's scene in the boudoir with 
 Madame de Melusine, or, at least, what he had seen of it, /'. e. her parting caress. 
 Selina rang the changes on her immodesty in loving a man who had never pro- 
 posed to her; and Augusta drew lively pictures of the eternal fires which were 
 already being kept up below, ready for the Lion's reception. Against all these 
 furious batteries Nina stood firm. All their sneers and arguments could not 
 shake her belief, all her father's commands and, when he was roused, the old 
 banker was very fierce could not move her to promise not to see Ernest 
 again, or alter her firm repudiation of the Warden's proposals. The thunder 
 rolled, the lightning flamed, the winds screamed all to no purpose, the little 
 reed that one might have fancied would break, stood steady. 
 
 The day passed, and the next passed, and there were no tidings of Ernest.
 
 SLANDER AND SILLER Y. 595 
 
 Nina's little loyal heart, despite its unhesitating faith, began to tremble lest it 
 should have wrecked itself: but then, she thought of his eyes, and she felt that 
 all the world would never make her mistrust him. 
 
 On the surlendemain the De Melusine called. Gordon and Eusebius were 
 out, and Nina wished her to be shown up. Ill as the girl felt, she rose haugh- 
 tily and self-possessed to greet madame, as, announced by her tall chasseur, 
 with his green plume, the widow glided into the room. 
 
 Pauline kissed her lightly (there are no end of Judases among the dear sex), 
 and, though something in Nina's eye startled her, she sat down beside her, and 
 began to talk most kindly, most sympathizingly. She was chagrinte, aesolcc 
 that her chere Nina should have been so insulted ; every one knew M. Vaughan 
 was quite entete with that little, horrid, coarse thing, Bluette; but it was cer- 
 tainly very shocking; men were such demons. The affair was already repandue 
 in Paris; everybody was talking of it. Ernest was unfortunately so well known; 
 he could not be in his senses; she almost wished he was mad, it would be the 
 only excuse for him; wild as he was, she could scarcely have thought, etc., etc., 
 etc. " Ah ! chere enfant," madame went on at the finish, " you do not know 
 these men I do. I fear you have been dazzled by this naughty fellow; he is 
 very attractive, certainly: if so, though it will be a sharp pang, it will be better 
 to know his real character at once. Voyez done ! he has been persuading you 
 that you were all the world to him, while at the same time, he has been trying 
 to make me believe the same. See, only two days ago he sent me this." 
 
 She held out a miniature. Nina, who hitherto had listened in haughty 
 silence, gave a sharp cry of pain as she saw Vaughan's graceful figure, stately 
 head, and statue-like features. But, before the window could pursue her ad- 
 vantage, Nina rallied, threw back her her head, and said, her soft lips set sternly: 
 
 " If you repulsed his love, why was he obliged to repulse yours ? Why did 
 you tell him on Saturday night that ' you had loved him more than he would 
 ever know now ? ' ' 
 
 The shot Eusebius had unconsciously provided, struck home. Madame was 
 baffled. Her eyes sank under Nina's, and she colored through her rouge. 
 
 "You have played two roles, madame," said Nina, rising, "and not played 
 them with your usual skill. Excuse my English ill-breeding, if I ask you to do 
 me the favor of ending this comedy." 
 
 " Certainly, mademoiselle, if it is your wish," answered the widow, now 
 smiling blandly. " If it please you to be blind, I have no desire to remove the 
 bandage from your eyes. Seulement, je vous prie de me pardonner mon indis- 
 cretion, et j'ai 1'honneur, mademoiselle, de vous dire adieu ! " 
 
 With the lowest of reverences madame glided from the room, and, as the 
 door closed, Nina bowed her head on the miniature left behind in the de"rvoutc, 
 and burst into tears.
 
 596 
 
 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 Scarcely had la Melusine's barouche rolled away, when another visitor was 
 shown in, and Nina, brushing the tears from her cheeks, looked up hurriedly, 
 and saw a small woman, finely dressed, with a Shetland veil on, through which 
 her small black eyes roved listlessly. 
 
 " Mademoiselle," she said, in very quick but very bad English, " I is come 
 to warn you against dat ver wrong man, Mr. Vaughan. I have.like him, helas ! 
 I have like him too veil, but I do not vish you to suffer too." 
 
 Nina knew the voice in a moment, and rose like a little empress, though 
 she was flushed and trembling. " I wish to hear nothing of Mr. Vaughan. 
 If this is the sole purport of your visit, I shall be obliged by your leaving me," 
 
 " But mademoiselle " 
 
 " I have told you I wish to hear nothing," interposed Nina, quietly. 
 "Ver veil, ma'amselle; den read dat. It is a copy, and I got de original." 
 She laid a letter on the sofa beside Nina. Two minutes after, Bluette 
 joined her friend Celine Gamelle in a fiacre, and laughed heartily, clapping 
 her little plump hands. "Ah, mon Dieu! Celine, comme elle est fiere, 
 la petite! Je ne lui ai pas dit un seul mot elle m'a arretee si vite! Mais la 
 lettre fera notre affaire n'est pas? Oui, oui! " 
 
 The letter unfolded in Nina's hand. It was a promise of marriage from 
 Ernest Vaughan to Bluette Lemaire. Voiceless and tearless, Nina sat gazing 
 on the paper: first she rose, gasping for breath; then she threw herself down, 
 sobbing convulsively, till she heard a step, caught up the miniature and letter, 
 dreading to see her father, and, instead, saw Ernest, pale, worn, deep lines round 
 his mouth and eyes, standing in the doorway. Involuntarily she sprang towards 
 him. Ernest pressed her to heart, and his hot tears fell on the chevelure doree, 
 as he bent over her, murmuring, " You have not deserted me. God bless you 
 for your noble faith." At last he put her gently from him, and, leaning against 
 the mantel-piece, said, with an effort, between his teeth, " Nina, I came to bid 
 you farewell, and to ask your forgiveness for the wrong I have done you." 
 
 Nina caught hold of him, much as Malibran seized hold of Elvino: " Leave 
 me ! leave me ! No, no; you cannot mean it ! " 
 
 " I have no strength for it now I see you," said Ernest, looking down into 
 her eyes; and the bold, reckless Lion shivered under the clinging clasp of her 
 little hands. " I need not say I was not the cause of the insult you received 
 the other night. Pauline de Melusine was the agent, women willing to injure 
 me the actors in it. But there is still much for you to forgive. Tell me, at 
 once, what have you heard of me ? " 
 
 She silently put the miniature and letter in his hand. The blood rushed to 
 his very temples, and, sinking his head on his arms, his chest rose and fell with 
 uncontrollable sobs. All the pent-up feelings of his vehement and affectionate 
 nature poured out at last.
 
 SLANDER AND SILLERY. 597 
 
 " And you have not condemned me even on these ? " he said at length, in a 
 hoarse whisper. 
 
 " Did I not promise ? " she murmured. 
 
 "But if I told you they were true?" 
 
 She looked at him through her tears, and put her hand in his. " Tell me 
 nothing of your past; it can make no difference to my love. Let the world 
 judge you as it may, it cannot alter me." 
 
 Ernest strained her to him. kissing her wildly. " God bless you for your 
 trust ! would to God I were more worthy of it ! I have nothing to give you 
 but a love such as I have never before known; but most would tell you 
 all my love is worthless, and my life has been one of reckless dissipation and 
 of darker errors still, until you awoke me to a deeper love to thoughts 
 and aspirationsthat I thought had died out forever. Painful as it is to 
 confess " 
 
 " Hush ! " interrupted Nina, gently. " Confess nothing; with your past 
 life I can have nothing to do, and I wish never to hear anything that it gives 
 you pain to tell. You say that you love me now, and will never love another 
 that is enough for me." 
 
 Ernest kissed the flushed cheeks and eloquent lips, and thanked her with 
 all the fiery passion that was in him; and his heart throbbed fiercely as he put 
 her promise to the test. 
 
 " No, my darling ! Priceless as 'your love is to me I will not buy it by con- 
 cealment. I will not sully your ears with the details of my life. God forbid I 
 should ! hut it is only due to you to know that I did give both these women 
 the love-tokens they brought you. Love ! It is desecration of the name, but 
 I knew none better then ! Three years ago, Bluette Lemaire first appeared at 
 the Odeon. She is illiterate, coarse, heartless, but she was handsome, and she 
 drew me to the coulisses. I was infatuated with her, though her ignorance 
 and vulgarity constantly grated against all my tastes. One night at her petit 
 souper I drank more Sillery than was wise. I have a stronger head than most 
 men: perhaps there was some other stimulant in it; at any rate, she who was 
 then poor, and is always avaricious, got from me a promise to marry her, or to 
 pay twenty thousand francs. Three months after I gave it I cared no more 
 for her than for my old glove. France is too wise to have Breach of Promise 
 cases, and give money to coarse and vengeful women for their pretended 
 broken hearts; but I had no incentive to create a scene by breaking with her, 
 and so she kept the promise in her hands. What Pauline de Melusine is, you 
 can judge. Twelve months ago I met her at Vichy; the love she gave me, and 
 the love I vowed her, were of eqnal value the love of Paris boudoirs. That 
 I sent her that picture only two days ago, is, of course, false. On my word, 
 as a man of honor, since the moment I felt your influence upon me I have
 
 598 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 shunned her. Now, my own love, you know the truth. Will you send me 
 from you, or will you still love and still forgive ? " 
 
 In an agony of suspense he bent his head to listen for her answer. Tears 
 rained down her cheeks as she put her arms round his neck, and whispered: 
 
 " Why ask ? Are you not all the world to me ? I should love you little if 
 I condemned you for any errors of your past. I know your warm and noble 
 heart, and I trust to it without a fear. There is no doubt between us now ! " 
 
 Oh, my prudent and conventional young ladies, standing ready to accuse 
 my poor little Nina, are you any wiser in your generation ? You have had all 
 nature taken out of you by "finishing," whose heads are crammed with 
 " society's " laws, and whose affections are measured out by rule, who would 
 have . been cold, and dignified, and read Ernest a severe lesson, and sent him 
 back hopeless and hardened to go ten times worse than he had gone before 
 believe me, that impulse points truer than " the world," and that the dictates of 
 the heart are better than the regulations of society. Take my word for it, that 
 love will do more for a man than lectures; and faith in him be more likely to 
 keep him straight than all your moralizing; and before you judge him severely 
 for having drunk a little too deep of the Sillery of life, remember that his 
 temptations are not your temptations, nor his way your ways, and be gentle to 
 dangers which society and custom keep out of your own path. The stern thorn 
 crows you offer to us when we are inclined to ask your absolution, are not the 
 right means to win us from the rose wreaks of our bacchanalia. 
 
 Nina, as you see, loved her Lion too well to remember dignity, or take her 
 stand on principle; and gallantly did the young lady stand the bombard- 
 ment from all sides that sought to break her resolutions and crash her " mis- 
 placed affections." Gordon chanced to come in that day and light upon Ernest, 
 and the fury into which he worked himself ill beseemed so respectable a phar- 
 isee. Vaughan kept tranquilly haughty, and told the banker, calmly, that he 
 " thanked God he had his daughter's love, and his money he would never have 
 stooped to accept." Gordon forbade him the house, and carried Nina back to 
 England; but before she went they had a parting interview, in which Ernest 
 offered to leave her free. But such freedom would have been worse than death 
 to Nina, and, before they separated, she told him that in three months more she 
 would be of age, and then, come what might, she would be his if he would take 
 her without wealth. Take her he would have done from the arms of Satanus 
 himself, but to disentangle himself from all his difficulties was a task that beat 
 the Augean stables hollow. The three months of his probation he worked hard; 
 he sold off all his pictures, his stud, and his meubles; he sold, what cost him a 
 more bitter pang, his encumbered estates in Surrey; he paid off all his debts, 
 Bluette's twenty thousand francs included; and shaking himself free of the 
 accumulated embarrassments of fifteen years, he crossed the water to claim his
 
 SLANDER AND SILLER Y. 599 
 
 last love. No poor little Huguenot was ever persecuted for her faith more than 
 poor little Nina for her engagement. Every relative she had thought it his 
 duty to write admonitory letters, plentifully interspersed with texts. Eusebius 
 and his 4000!. a year, and his perspective bishopric; were held up before her 
 from morning to night; the banker, whose deception in the Melusine had 
 turned him into sharper vinegar than before, told her with chill stoicism that 
 she must of course choose her own path in life, but that if that path led her into 
 the Chaussee d'Antin, she need never expect a sou from him, for all his property 
 would be divided between her two brothers. But Nina was neither to be 
 frightened nor bribed. She kept true to her lover, and disinherited herself. 
 
 They were married a week or two after Nina's majority; and Gordon knew 
 it, though he could not prevent it. They did not miss the absence of brides- 
 maides, Bishop, dejeuner, and the usual fashionable crowd. It was a marriage 
 of the heart, you see, and did not want the trappings v/ith which they gild that 
 bitter pill so often swallowed nowadays a " mariage de convenance." Nina, 
 as she saw further still into the wealth of deep feeling and strong affection 
 which, at her touch, she had awoke in his heart, felt that money, and friends, 
 and the world's smile were well lost since she had won him. And Ernest 
 Ernest's sacrifice was greater; for it is not a little thing, young ladies, for a 
 man to give up his accustomed freedom and luxuries, and careless vie de gar- 
 <pon, and to have to think and work for another, even though dearer than him- 
 self. But he had long since seen so much of life, had exhausted all its pleasures 
 so rapidly, that they palled upon him, and for some time he had vaguely 
 wanted something of deeper interest, of warmer sympathy. Unknown to him- 
 self, he had felt the " besoin d'etre aime " a want the trash offered him by 
 the women of his acquaintance could never satisfy and his warm, passionate 
 nature, found rest in a love which, though the strongest of his life, was still 
 returned to him fourfold. 
 
 After some months of delicious/ar niente in the south of France, they came 
 back to Paris. Though anything but rich, he was not absolutely poor, after he 
 had paid his debts, and the necessity to exertion rousing his dormant talents, the 
 Lion turned litterateur. He was too popular with men to be dropped because 
 he had sold his stud or given up his petits soupers. The romance of their story 
 charmed the Parisians, and, though (behind his back) they sometimes jested 
 about the " Lion amoureux," there were not a few who envied him his young 
 love, and the sunshine that shone round them in his expensive apartement garni. 
 
 Ernest was singularly happy and suddenly he became the star of the 
 literary, as he had been of the fashionable world. His mots were repeated, 
 his vaudevilles applauded, his feuilletons adored. The world smiled on Nina 
 and her Lion; it made little difference to them they had been as contented 
 when it frowned.
 
 600 OUIDAS WORKS. 
 
 But it made a good deal of difference across the Channel. Gordon began 
 to repent. Ernest's family was high, his Austrian connections very aristo- 
 cratic: there would be something after all in belonging to a man so well known. 
 (Be successful, ami lecteur, and all your relatives will love you.) Besides, he 
 had found out that it is no use to put your faith in princes, or clergymen. Euse- 
 bius had treated him very badly when he found he could not get Nina and 
 her money, and spoke against the poor banker everywhere, calling him, with 
 tender pastoral regret, a " worldly Egyptian," a " Dives," a " whitened sepul- 
 chre," and all the rest of it. 
 
 Probably, too, stoic though he was, he missed the chevelure doree; at any 
 rate, he wrote to her stiffly, but kindly, and settled two thousand a year upon 
 her. Vaughan was very willing she should be friends with her father, but 
 nothing would make him draw a sou of the money. So Nina the only sly 
 thing she ever did in her life after a while contrived to buy back the Surrey 
 estate, and gave it to him, with no end of prayers and caresses, on the Jour de 
 1'An. 
 
 " And you do not regret, my darling," smiled Ernest, after wishing her the 
 new year's wishes, " having forgiven me for once drinking too much Sillery, 
 and all the other naughty things of my vie de garcon ? " 
 
 " Regret ! " interrupted Nina, vehemently " regret that I have won your 
 love, live your life, share your cares and joys, regret that my existence is one 
 long day of sunshine ? Oh, why ask ! you know I can never repay you for the 
 happiness of my life." 
 
 " Rather can I never repay you," said Vaughan, looking down into her eyes, 
 " for the faith that made you brave calumny and opposition, and cling to my 
 side despite all. I was heart-sick of the world, and you called me back to life. 
 I was weary of the fools who misjudged me, and I let them think me what they 
 might." 
 
 " Ah, how happy you make me ! " cried Nina. " I should have been little 
 worthy of your love if I had suffered slander to warp me against you, or if any 
 revelations you cared enough for me to make of your past life, had parted us: 
 
 Love is not love 
 
 That alters where it alteration finds, 
 
 Or bends with the remover to remove. 
 
 There, monsieur ! " she said, throwing her arms round him with a laugh, while 
 happy tears stood in her eyes " there is a grand quotation for you. Mind and 
 take care, Ernest, that you never realize the Ruskinstone predictions, and make 
 me repent having caught and caged such a terrible thing as a hunted PARIS 
 LION ! "
 
 BLUE AND YELLOW. 601 
 
 BLUE AND YELLOW. 
 
 I. 
 
 FITZ GOES DOWN BY THE EXPRESS, AND MAKES AN ACQUAINTANCE EN ROUTE. 
 
 THERE was to be an Election. The Lords and Commons hadn't hit it; one 
 hon. gentleman had blackguarded another hon. gentleman; the big school- 
 boys of St. Stephen's had thrown stones at each other, and as they all lived in 
 glass houses, the practice was dangerous; the session had not benefited the 
 country so far as the country could see one bit; the Times opined that the 
 nation was going to the dogs, and suggested that parliament should dissolve. 
 The Times is Caesar nowadays, so parliament obeyed, broke itself up, and ap- 
 pealed to the country i. e. set the Carlton and Reform counting up their 
 money, the lawyers quarrelling for all the dirty work, and the io/. voters look- 
 ing out for XXX and rivers, and the country responded promptly, loving a 
 tussle as dearly as a beagle, by sharpening its bowie-knives for the contest, 
 wondering who would buy its votes the highest, and hunting up its stock of 
 Blue and Yellow banners. 
 
 " So the governor wants me to stand for Cantitborough. I'm not sure I 
 won't. I'm confoundedly tired of this life year after year. Perhaps the elec- 
 tion will give me a little fun. What do you say, Lady Fanny ? began my 
 brother Fitz one morning, lying reading the Field and drinking strong coffee 
 with brandy in it by way of breakfast, when I called on him in his chambers in 
 the Albany. 
 
 This atrocious sobriquet of " Lady Fanny " arose simply, be it known, from 
 the fact of my name being Francis, and from no womanish tendencies or taste 
 for ass's milk, like my namesake of the Hervey family. If any of us had 
 shown an effeminate turn, I believe the governor would have shot him straight 
 away as unfit to cumber the earth. 
 
 " Well," I answered, " I think I would if I were you, if you don't mind
 
 602 
 
 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 spending a couple of thousand or so to buy two little letters to stick after your 
 name, and have no objection to being cooped up on field-nights while the old 
 women badger each other. We may have some jolly fun cajoling the indepen- 
 dent electors, and making love to their wives and daughters." 
 
 " I think I will," said Fitz, twisting a refractory leaf around his weed. " I 
 want something to do; and, besides, if I'm a member, they won't be able to put 
 me in quod, that's a grand consideration. The town's so confoundedly Tory 
 though, there'll be no end of opposition. We shall set them all together by the 
 ears, the Blues and Yellows won't speak for years, and I shall be written up in 
 the Canlitborough Post as a leveller, a socialist, a skeptic, a democrat, and all 
 the delicious names that the slow coaches call anybody who's a little wide 
 awake and original. Yes, I think I'll put up for it." 
 
 " Who contests it with you ? " said I. I was just home from a reading tour 
 (where, by-the-by, we read not at all, but smoked and fished determinedly) 
 with some Trinity men, and knew nothing about my native county. 
 
 "There are two of "em," answered Fitz; "one an old Indian, Tory out- 
 and-out, worth a million, and consequently worshipped by his neighbors, at 
 whom, I believe, when heated with overmuch curry and cognac, he swears 
 more than is customary in these polite times. The next is a boy, just one-and- 
 twenty you know him, Cockadoodle's son. He was in petticoats the other 
 day, but, as his father's an Earl, he's to be transplanted from the nursery to 
 the Commons without any intermediate education. The other is that sneaking 
 thing, that compromise between right and wrong, that hybrid animal, a Liberal- 
 Conservative. You know him, too, Augustus Le Hoop Smith; that creature 
 who made his tin by wool, or something horrid, and bought Foxley, and set up 
 as the patriarchal father of his people, in the new-fangled country squire style, 
 with improved drainage, model cottages, prize laborers, and all the rest of it. 
 Two of us must go to the wall. I shall like the fight, and you'll do the chief 
 of the canvassing; mind, I'm no hand at soft-soaping. All I engage to do is 
 to kiss any pretty woman there may be in the place." 
 
 "You're very kind, taking the fun and giving me the work. I suppose you 
 know you'll have to shake hands with every one of the Great Unwashed." 
 
 " Brutes ! " rejoined Fitz, who was popularly supposed to be a Socialist and 
 Democrat; " I'll see them all hanged first ! " 
 
 " And you must joke with the butchers, and have a glass with the coal- 
 heavers, and make friends with the sweeps." 
 
 " I'd sooner lose my election," rejoined the Republican. 
 
 " And you must kiss a baby or two." 
 
 The horror, loathing, and disgust expressed on Fitz's face were as good to 
 see as " Box and Cox." 
 
 " Not to get the premiership would I touch one of the brats. Faugh ! I'd
 
 BLUE AND YELLOW. (JO: j 
 
 lose my seat fifty times over. Of all the loathsome ideas ! If you've nothing 
 pleasanter to suggest, Fan, you'd better get out of the room, if you please." 
 
 " Thank you. Don't you remember the sensation Mr. Samuel Slunkey pro- 
 duced by like caresses in Pickwick? " 
 
 "Pickwick go to the devil, and you too ! I shall do nothing more than give 
 them my tin, as everything is bought and sold nowadays, and tell them I shall 
 vote for free trade, cheap divorces, marriage with whoever one likes, religious 
 toleration in fact, for liberty, ' liberte cherie,' for everything and everybody. 
 Then, if they don't like my opinions, they can have the Liberal Conservative 
 instead, /shan't care two straws." 
 
 " Admirably philosophic ! It's lucky you're not going to try the county. 
 The farmers and clericals wouldn't have you at any price. You cut at the root 
 of their monopoly corn-laws and tithes, church-rates and protection. How- 
 ever, the more fight the more fun. We shall be like a couple of terriers in a 
 barn full of rats. When shall we go down ? " 
 
 " Tuesday. I shall go to Hollywood, it's a snug little box, and so much 
 closer the town than the governor's; and as he's so ill, poor chap, he won't want 
 the bother of us. I mean to have little Beauclerc as my agent; he was with 
 me at Eton, and is the sharpest dog in Lincoln's Inn. That's enough business 
 for to-day, Fan. I'm now going to Tattersall's to look at a roan filly to run 
 tandem with Rumpunch; then I'm to meet my lady Frisette in the Pantheon at 
 two; and at five I'm going to dine at the Castle with Grouse and some other 
 men. So ring the bell for Soames, and order trie cab round, there's a good boy." 
 My brother (Randolph Fitzhardinge, according to the register and his 
 visiting cards, but to us and to everybody briefly Fitz) is a fine, tall, handsome 
 fellow, a trifle bronzed, and more than a trifle blase, with aquiline features, a 
 devil-may-care expression, and a figure not beat in the Guards. He has been 
 amusing himself about in the world ever since he left Christ Church, ten years 
 ago, and as he will come into i2,ooo/. a year whenever the governor leaves him 
 to reign in his stead, has not thought himself necessitated to do more than live 
 in the Albany, hunt with the Pitchley, lounge in the " bay-window," habituate 
 the coulisses, and employ all the other ingenious methods for killing time in- 
 vented by men about town. He is a good old fellow, is Fitz, and the govern- 
 or's favorite, which I don't wonder at, though I believe Fitz has been more 
 trouble to him than any of us, as far as I O Us and screws at Newmarket and 
 Doncaster go. But he's the best oar in the Blue-Jersey B. C., the firmest seat 
 and the lightest hand in the county, as good a batsman as any in Lord's Eleven, 
 and these cover a multitude of sins in the governor's eyes; to say nothing that 
 Fitz is as clear-headed, generous-hearted, plucky a fellow as any man I know 
 and I've a right to think so, for Fitz used to tip me royally when I was a 
 little chap under my sisters' governess (by George! how I did hate that woman,
 
 604 
 
 OV 'IDA'S WORKS. 
 
 a horrid Wurtemburger, with red hair), and he a six-foot Etonian just going 
 up to Oxford. Besides, when I was in that devil of a mess for tying up old 
 Burton, the proctor to his own knocker, was it not Fitz who set it square with 
 the governor ? and when I dropped a couple of hundred over the Cambridge 
 Stakes, backing Mosella, who was scarcely fit for a cab-horse, did not Fitz 
 lend me the damage, with payment postponed ad infinitum, though he was 
 nearly cleaned out at the time himself ? 
 
 Tuesday came, and Fitz (leaving Lady Frisette dissolved in tears in her 
 boudoir, which tears, no doubt, were dried as soon as his back was turned, 
 as being no longer necessary, and destructive to rouge and beauty,) with 
 Beauclerc and myself and Rumpunch and the new filly in a horse-box put 
 himself in the express for Pottleshire. 
 
 We had a carriage to ourselves, and of course, as soon as we were out of 
 Paddington, took out our pipes and began to enjoy a quiet smoke. 
 
 " I do wish," began, Fitz, opening the window and taking off his cap, for 
 it was a hot June afternoon, " they'd keep a carriage, as they do in Venice, for 
 the muffs that can't stand the sweet odors of regalia, and not sacrifice us by 
 boxing us up without a weed for four, six, perhaps twelve hours, or else making 
 us pay 5/. for other people's olfactory fancies. I wonder somebody don't take 
 it up. They write a lot of nonsense about this nuisance and that evil, that 
 they're great idiots to notice at all; but if they would write up the crying in- 
 justice to smokers on British railways, there'd be something like a case the 
 Woolwich flogging's nothing to it." 
 
 " Wait till we've got the election, and then send a letter to the Times about 
 it, signed ' M P.,' or a ' Lover of Justice,' " said Beauclerc, a 'cute little fellow, 
 fast as a telegraph, and sharp as a ferret's bite. 
 
 " I'll get up a petition rather, signed by all smokers, and addressed to all 
 the directors. I think we're pretty safe for to-day. I don't fancy the express 
 stops at more than a couple of stations between this and Cantitborough, so we 
 are not likely to have any women to bore us. I detest travelling with Vomen," 
 said Fitz, looking out of the window as if he dreaded an advent of feminines 
 along the telegraph wires. " You have to put out your pipe, offer them your 
 Punch, and squeeze into nothing to make room for their crinoline. Let's look 
 at the Bradshaw. No! we only stop twice: thought so. It will certainly be 
 odd if we can't keep the carriage to ourselves." 
 
 With which unchivalrous sentiment Fitz poked up his pipe, cut the paper 
 with his ticket, and settled himself comfortably. Twenty minutes after, the 
 engine gave a shriek, which woke him out of his serenity. 
 
 " Here's Bottleston, confound it ! " cried Fitz. " I know the place there's 
 never anybody but a farmer or two for the second class. No fear of crinoline 
 out of these wilds."
 
 BLUE AND YELLOW. 005 
 
 Fitz made rather too sure. As we hissed, and whistled, and panted, and 
 puffed into the station, what should we see on the platform but six women 
 absolutely six talking and laughing together, with a maid and a lot of luggage 
 cased up, after the custom of females, in brown holland, as if the boxes had 
 put on smock-frocks by mistake. Fitz swore mildly as he took his pipe out of 
 his mouth, and leaned forward to show as if the carriage was full. Not a bit 
 of use was it with the instinctive obstinacy of her sex, up to our very door 
 came one of the fatal half dozen. 
 
 " There's room in here, Timbs," she said, with the supremest tranquillity, 
 motioning to her maid to put in the hundred things bouquet, dressing-case, 
 book, travelling-bag, and Heaven knows what, with which young ladies will 
 cumber themslves on a jounery of half an hour. 
 
 " The perfume is extremely like that of a tobacco-shop, where there is 
 a license to smoke on the premises," whispered the intruder to one of her com- 
 panionsall pretty women, by-the-by with a significant glance at us. 
 
 The whistle screamed the young ladies bid each other good-by with frantic 
 haste and great enthusiasm the train started, throwing the maid into Beau's 
 arms, who (as she was thirty and red-headed) was not grateful for the accident, 
 and her mistress seated herself opposite Fitz and began to pay great attention 
 to a poodle imprisoned in a basket, and very prone to rebel against his incar- 
 ceration. 
 
 " That little brute will yap all the way, I suppose ? " muttered Fitz, looking 
 supremely haughty and stiltified. 
 
 The dog's owner glanced up quickly. " Dauphin never annoys any one." 
 
 Fitz, cool as he was, looked caught, bent his head, and putting his pipe in 
 his pocket with a sigh, stuck his glass in his eye and calmly criticised the young 
 lady. 
 
 She was decidedly good style, with large bright hazel eyes and hair to 
 match, and was extremely well got up in a hat with drooping feathers, -and one 
 of those pretty tight jackets that, I presume, the girls wear to show their figures. 
 She was pretty enough to console Beau for the loss of his smoke, and even Fitz 
 thawed a little, and actually went the length of offering her (with his grandest 
 air, though,) the Athenaum he was reading. After a time he dropped a mono- 
 syllable or two about the weather; she was ready enough to talk, like a sensi- 
 ble little thing I hate that " silent system " of John Bull and his daughters 
 and in half an hour Fitz had examined and admired the poodle and was 
 forgetting his lost pipe in chatting with the poodle's mistress, when he somehow 
 or other got upon the general election. 
 
 "We are all excitement," laughed the young lady, whose cameriste, by the 
 way, looked rather glum on our conversation. " It is quite delightful to have 
 anything to stir up this unhappy county. I have only lived in it six months,
 
 GOG 
 
 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 but I am sure it is the dullest place in the world the North Pole couldn't be 
 
 worse." 
 
 Is it indeed ? " said Fitz. " Pray can you tell me who are the candidates ? ' 
 
 " General Salter, Mr. Fitzhardinge, Lord Verdant, and a Mr. Smith Le 
 Hoop Smith, I mean; I beg his pardon! " 
 
 " May I ask whom you favor with your good wishes ? " 
 
 " They are none of them worth much, I fancy," she answered. Mr. Fitz- 
 hardinge, I understand, is the only clever one; but everybody says he is good 
 
 for nothing." 
 
 " Not exactly the man to be a member, then," observed Fitz, gravely, 
 stroking the poodle. " What is said against him ? " 
 
 " I don't know, they call him extravagant, skeptic, socialist, republican 
 in fact, there is no name they don't give him. I think he would do Pottleshire 
 good for that very reason; it wants something original." 
 
 " Then you are a Radical," smiled Fitz. 
 
 She smiled too. 
 
 " It is treason for me to say so; we are all Blue a outrance. Ah! here is 
 Cantitborough." 
 
 It was Cantitborough, that neat, clean, quiet, antiquated town that always 
 puts me in mind of an old maid dressed for a party; that slowest and drearest 
 of boroughs, where the streets are as full of grass as an acre of pasture-land, 
 and the inhabitants are driven to ring their own door-bells lest they should 
 rust from disuse. 
 
 The train stopped, and Fitz looked as disgusted at losing his travelling 
 companion as he had done at her first appearance, and stared with " Who the 
 devil are you ? " plainly written on his face, at a young fellow who met her on 
 the platform. Fitz was before him, though, in handling her the poodle out, 
 and went to look after her luggage, for motives of his own, as you can guess. 
 He was "very graciously thanked for his trouble, had a pretty bow to repay him, 
 and saw the poodle and its mistress off with her unknown cavalier (a brother, 
 probably, from the don't carish way that he met her) before he got on a dog- 
 cart and tooled us down the road to Hollywood, a snug little box two miles from 
 Cantitborough, left him by Providence, impersonated by a godfather, with eight 
 or nine hundred a year. 
 
 " Of course you improved the occasion, Fitz, and saw the name on the 
 boxes ? " said Beau, as we drove along. 
 
 "Of course. It's Barnardiston. I never heard of it in the county, did you, 
 Fan ? She ought to be a lady,' by her style, and her voice (though it's wonder- 
 ful how the under-bred ones do contrive to get themselves up, so that you can 
 hardly tell the difference till they begin to speak, or move: then, I never mis- 
 take a lady.) I wonder who that young fool was who met her ? "
 
 BLUE AND YELLOW. GOT 
 
 " Why of necessity a fool because he chanced to be in your way ? " laughed 
 Beau. " He was a Cantab, I guess, by his cut; Cambridge is always stamped 
 on those little straw hats and fast coats, as Balmoral boots indicates a strong- 
 minded young woman, earrings out of their bonnets girls that want one to look 
 at 'em, Quaker colors and sun-shades girls who can't go in for the attractive 
 line, so have sought refuge in the district visiting. Bless your heart, I always 
 know a woman by her dress." 
 
 " What do you say to Dauphin's owner, then ? " 
 
 " Black hat and feathers possibly coquettish; tight jacket fast enough to 
 be pleasant; general style not fast enough to be bold; lavender gloves good 
 taste, but not a notion of economy; unexceptionable boots knows she's pretty 
 feet, and is too wise to disfigure them," promptly responded little Beau. 
 
 " Bravo ! " said Fitz, whipping up the mare (three parts thorough-bred, and 
 one of the best goers I ever saw), " that's just my style. We'll fish the girl up, 
 and show her that if I'm ' good for nothing ' in all the other capacities of life, I'm 
 first-rate at a flirtation: can't live without one, indeed, and I don't see why one 
 should try, since, as the women are never easy but when we're making love to 
 them, it would be a want of charity not to oblige them. Here we are. By 
 Jove ! I hope they'll have iced the wine properly; don't you long for a bottle, 
 Fanny ? " 
 
 " Soames," said Fitz to his man, when he had discussed the champagne, which 
 was iced as cold as a " wall-flower's " answer when you ask if she has enjoyed 
 her ball " Soames, go over this evening to Cantitborough, and find out for me 
 if there are any people called Barnardiston living anywhere there, and bring me 
 word all about them." 
 
 " Certainly, sir," said Soames. 
 
 And that night, when we were smoking out on the lawn, Soames, who had 
 often sped on like errands, made his report. There was a Barnardiston ptrc, a 
 gentleman of independent fortune, living at the Larches; a Barnardiston mere, 
 over whom he tyrannized greatly; a son, Mr. Herbert Barnardiston, who was 
 at John's; two small boys, and two daughters, one, Valencia, who was engaged 
 to the perpetual curate of St. Hildebrande's, and one, Caroline, who, as far as 
 Soames could hear, was not engaged to anybody at all. 
 
 " Now, by George ! " said Fitz, puffing his regalia in the moon's face, 
 " Dauphin's mistress is a fat lot too good for that pursy little Low Church 
 brute at St. Hildebrande's. I remember being by ill luck in that church once 
 when he was preaching, and he thumped his cushion so violently in his passion 
 with us sinners, that he sent the dust out of it in a regular simoom, which set 
 the old clerk off sneezing so, that we couldn't hear a word of the sermon- 
 providential interposition, considering the malice of the discourse. I wonder 
 if it is she ? Valencia sounds more like her than Caroline."
 
 608 
 
 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 " Calm your mind, old fellow," said Beau; " our beauty isn't engaged to a 
 parson, take my word for it. I always know the betrothed of the Church at a 
 glance. They're getting in training to take interest in the distribution of 
 flannel petticoats and brown-papered tracts; they cast their eyes away from 
 good-looking fellows, for fear they should be tempted to compare black ties 
 with white chokers; they wear already the Lady Bountiful head of the parish 
 air; they try to inflate themselves with big talk on the duties of a clergyman's 
 wife, but in their secret souls are they already weighed down by the dreadful 
 decree that 'deacons' wives must be grave, not slanderous; sober, faithful in 
 all things;' as if women would not just as soon be put in Newgate for life as 
 denied their natural food scandal and flirtation. No ! take comfort, Fitz, 
 your love of the railway carriage is no parson's fiancee, I'll swear." 
 
 II. 
 
 BEAU BEGINS ONE CANVASS AND FITZ ANOTHER. 
 
 UPON my honor I never saw a funnier contrast in my life, sir, than the 
 candidates for the borough; and when I saw them all four on the Market Hill, 
 I never laughed more at old Buckstone. There was first, of course, little 
 Verdant, long, lanky, and meek-looking, like all the Cockadoodles, sitting for- 
 ward on his horse's neck, as if he were afraid of tumbling off. There was his 
 brother Conservative, Le Hoop Smith, bland, sweet smiling, and for the world 
 like a tabby cat on its best behavior in a gorgeous turn-out, with his arms, 
 fished up by the Herald's Office, blazoned on the panels as big as a sign-post. 
 Then, on a fat, white shooting pony was Salter, the old fellow of the H. E. I. 
 C. S., as round as a pumpkin and as yellow as a buttercup, who'd have thought 
 nothing of lashing the independent electors as he'd flogged his Sepoys, and 
 who, not being able to do that, swore at them vigorously; and then, last of all, 
 was Fitz, haughty, dashing, "distingue" (as the shop people say of a 2s. 5d. 
 cotton), setting all the women mad about him, and sticking on to his thorough- 
 bred as if they were both cast togerher in bronze. There was no doubt of 
 Verdant's coming in; the fact of his being the son of the only live Earl near 
 Cantitborough secured that. The tradesmen were for Salter, because he ate 
 much and paid well. The clergy and professions were for Le Hoop Smith, be- 
 cause he was such a pious, poetical, spotless creature (though a pompous snob, 
 
 like all those money-made men); and for Fitz well, poor old Fitz had the 
 
 women, and one or two enlightened individuals, on his side; a very small 
 hap'orth of bread to a whole ocean of sack were all the constituents he seemed
 
 BLUE AND YELLOW. (>(>!> 
 
 likely to gain, though Beau and other agents set to work as hard as steam-en- 
 gines, and Fitz and I canvassed perseveringly, though the Socialist had a pro- 
 found contempt in practice for the Canaille, whom in theory he dignified into 
 the People; and despite his opinion that all men were equal, was not at all pre- 
 pared to suffer familiarity from his unwashed brethren. If you have ever had 
 the ill luck, as I have had, to be in a small spiteful country town in election 
 time, when everybody is spitting and swearing like cats on the tiles, you can 
 fancy, sir, what Cantitborough was at this period of its history. We stirred its 
 utmost depths. The best hotel was a Blue committee-room; its second best was 
 a Yellow committee-room. Big-wigs talked loud of their principles; gamins 
 flaunted rag flags in the gutters; mysterious strangers haunted its tap-rooms. 
 Mr. Brown cut Mr. Green because he was Yellow. Mrs. A. dropped her bosom 
 friend, Mrs. B., because she was Blue. The Town Council was divided against 
 itself, and, consequently, couldn't stand straight on its legs (a charge, by the 
 way, often brought against its members individually). Mary the kitchen-maid, 
 would no longer " walk along " with James the milkman, because he was all 
 for that " hugly Smith." Cobblin, the shoemaker, was surprised by seeing two 
 fivers lying snug in the heel of a Wellington; and Chalice, the rector, was 
 startled by a gentle hint that the Deanery of Turtlefat might be vacant. 
 
 " Who do you think I'm going to solicit the vote from this morning ? " said 
 Fitz at breakfast two or three mornings after. 
 
 " Pottler, of the Three Kings, I hope," said Beau, helping himself to a devil, 
 " if you do what you aught." 
 
 " The Three Kings be shot! " said Fitz. " The barmaid there is as ugly 
 as sin and forty, I'm certain. He's not an eye to trade to keep her; a pretty 
 face at a bar disposes of numberless shilling glasses." 
 
 "Old Hops, then; and do remember to tell him his beer is better than 
 Bass's," said Beau, whose refractory client gave him no end of trouble. 
 
 " What! that beastly stuff, full of jack ? Oh! confound it, I can't humbug 
 like that; tisn't my line, especially with those canaille." 
 
 " The devil take your pride! " retorted Beau. " How do you expect to get 
 along with your election, when its such a piece of work to make you shake 
 hands with even a respectable butcher or " 
 
 "Pah! hold your tongue! " cried the Radical, glancing at his own white 
 fingers. " I like the hydra-headed to have all the bread he wants, but I can't 
 bear touching his dirty paw. I'm sure I kiss the girls, Beau, though, with 
 most exemplary perseverance 
 
 "Rather too perseveringly," growled the exigeant Beau. "I don't think it 
 tells well with the fathers, and I'm quite sure it influences husbands the wrong 
 way. You're unexceptionable with your equals, but Rumpunch herself isn't 
 more unmanageable than you are with your inferiors. I always notice if a 
 
 VOL. III. 20
 
 G10 
 
 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 gentleman I mean a thorough-bred one takes up democracy, and all that 
 in opinions, the more exclusive, as sure as a gun, does he grow in his actions. 
 He may put on the bonnet rouge with the people, but he'll always expect the 
 people to doff theirs to him. .Well, it's human nature, I suppose; we're all 
 
 anamolies " 
 
 " For Heaven's sake, don't begin to moralize, Beau," said Fitz. " Of all 
 the abominations that pester the earth, the didactic style is the worst. 
 Well! will you come with me to the Larches ? " 
 " The where ? " shouted Beau, in amazement. 
 " The Larches; where the Barnardistons hang out." 
 
 Beau dropped some cutlet, en route to his lips, off his fork, in staring at 
 Fitz. " Are you mad ? Why, he's on Verdant's committee." 
 
 " What of that ? I've walked about ten entire days to meet his daughter, 
 and haven't met her; sequitur, I shall call there." 
 
 Beau gave a grunt of wonder and disgust. " Of all the cool chaps, I do 
 think you're the very coolest." 
 
 " Of course I am. rfiave you only now found it out ? Ring the bell, Fan, 
 and order the horses." 
 
 " Well," said Beau, with a touching air of resignation, " if you'd keep quiet, 
 and do as you're told, I'd bring you in as sure as this beer's Brighton Tipper; 
 but since you will act for yourself, why, if you lose you election, / wash my 
 hands of it." 
 
 Up to the Larches rode Fitz and I, a pretty house of very white stone, and 
 with very green Venetians that tried hard to look like an Italian villa on a 
 small scale, and failed signally standing in its grounds at the west end of 
 Cantitborough. 
 
 " There she is," whispered Fitz, as he paced up the carriage drive. True 
 enough, stooping over a bed of verbena, gardening seduously, with Dauphin 
 barking furiously round her, in ecstatic delight, was our late compagnon de 
 voyage. At the sound of our horses' hoofs the poodle rushed at us after the 
 manner of small dogs, and his mistress turned round to see the cause of his 
 irritation. Off went Fitz's hat, and he bowed to his saddlebow. At the same 
 moment a young lady came out^of a French window, and called " Valencia ! " 
 Dauphin's mistress threw down her trowel, obeyed the summons, and went into 
 the house; not without a bow to Fitz, though. " The devil ! she is Valencia, 
 and engaged to that owl, then," swore Fitz. " I say, she hasn't one bit the cut 
 of a parson's future, has she ? Upon my word it's a devilish pity horrid waste 
 of good material to throw her into the Church's arms. Never mind, though; 
 it will be the more fun for me. I shan't only have a flirtation, but the fun of 
 making fat little Whitechurch jealous into the bargain, which will be a little 
 more currant-jelly to my hare."
 
 BLUE AND YELLOW. Gil 
 
 " Glad you take it so philosophically, but it won't do you much good in the 
 borough to flirt with their pet preacher's fiancee." 
 
 " Hold your tongue, Fanny. If I prefer a flirtation to a seat in the Com- 
 mons; mayn't I indulge my preference ? " said the candidate for Cantitborough, 
 throwing his bridle to Soames, as a Buttons, that one wanted a microscope 
 to see clearly, opened the door, and ushered us into the library of the hottest 
 out-and-out Tory in the county. 
 
 There sat old Barnardiston in state, a tall, plethoric-looking fellow, the very 
 embodiment of conservatism, orthodoxy, and British prejudice. It was as 
 good as a play to see his face when the Radical candidate was shown in, and 
 to see Fitz, with his most nonchalant yet most courtly air, address him, and 
 solicit his vote, as if in perfect ignorance that Lord Verdant's proposer, the 
 Bluest of Blues, Barnardiston, who looked on free trade as treason to the 
 commonwealth, and on the ballot as a device of Satan, was not perfectly d 1 accord 
 with himself upon politics. The old gentleman was as chilling as achaperone's 
 " Good evening! " to an ineligible, and, of course, proceeded to bow us out 
 with a good deal of grandiloquent bosh about his principles, which he was 
 evidently very injured to think had not been too widely known to have pre- 
 vented Fitz's intrusion. Fitz was nonplussed; his call did not promise to be 
 very productive. The old Tory was unpropitious, and there was no sign of 
 the girls whatever. He was just going to take his leave in despair, when, by 
 Jove! as luck would have it, down came all at once such a shower of hailstones, 
 such claps of thunder, such a conflict of the elements, as the novelwriters 
 say, that, out of common courtesy, the old boy, though it was plain to see that 
 he looked on us as a brace of the most impudent scoundrels he had ever come 
 across, was obliged to ask us if we would wait till it was over. Fitz thanked 
 him, and said he would, in his pleaernt, easy manner, as if he and the great 
 Tory were the best possible friends; and (very stiffly, though,) Barnardiston, 
 fairly let in for the entertainment of the dangerous skeptic and socialist, asked 
 us to go into the drawing-room. 
 
 " Bravo ! brass and pluck always win," whispered Fitz aside to me, as the 
 door was opened, and we saw the identical Valencia feeding a brace of love- 
 birds in the window, her sister, quite unlike her a stout, square, business- 
 looking girl writing district papers, with a lot of tracts round her, and their 
 mamma reading in a dormeuse. 
 
 Breathing an inward prayer for the continuance of the thunderstorm, Fitz 
 sat himself down (just under the love-birds,) and proceeded to make himself 
 agreeable especially. to the betrothed of the incumbent of St. Hildebrande's. 
 You would have thought him the " enfant de la maison " for the last ten years 
 at least, to hear him talk news and literature with madame, fun and ornithology 
 with mademoiselle, utterly regardless that Barnardiston was keeping a gloomy
 
 612 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 silence, and the district collector looking glum on her sister's vivacious chat, 
 probably with the eye of a belle-sceur to the absent Whitechurch's interests. 
 He amused them so well, and was so well amused himself, that the sun had 
 stared him in the face for full twenty minutes, and the birds were telling 
 everybody the storm was gone, before Fitz thought proper to find out that it 
 was " beginning to clear up " a fact so undeniable that he had nothing for it 
 but to make his adieux, after offering to lend Mrs. Barnardiston some book or 
 other she wanted; and when the lodge gates closed behind us, Fitz had a good 
 shout of laughter. 
 
 " Now, then, Lady Fan, didn't I manage that gloriously ? " 
 
 "Yes! I never doubted your powers of impudence yet; but whether your 
 election " 
 
 " Confound my election! It was worth losing fifty votes only to see that 
 old boy's face when I asked for his support; and, by George! isn't she pretty ? 
 To see all that going to Whitechurch is rather a trial of one's patience. What 
 in the world was she thinking of to throw herself away on him ? A little flirta- 
 tion will be only common humanity to her, poor girl! Did you see how mis- 
 chievous she looked when she saw me ? The ' good-for-nothing' was lurking 
 in her mind, I bet you." 
 
 " In pleasant contrast with the good in everything of her future sposo. 
 The cardinal virtues ain't relished by women." 
 
 Fitz laughed as he pricked Rumpunch into a gallop. " She's a dashing 
 little thing; I must have some fun with her. I won't quite spoil her matri- 
 monial speculation, though, for I shan't be inclined to put it au serieux, like 
 the Rev. Augustine. Fish out the young fellow, Fan; he's a Cambridge man; 
 you can soon scrape acquaintance. Brothers are very useful sometimes, 
 though occasionally uncommonly meddling and disagreeble. By Jove! 
 look there. Confound it, there's Jimmy! What in the world is he doing 
 here ? " 
 
 " Hallo, old boy! how are you ? " said the man thus apostrophized, Jimmy 
 Villars, a chum of Fitz's. " I've heard lots about you, Randolph. You're 
 turning Cantitborough upside down and I'm come to help you! " 
 
 " That's right. Nobody more welcome. Where are you staying? " 
 
 " At the Levisons' you know them. No ? Then you shall immediately. 
 Levison was a great yachting man. He's range and married now; a very 
 pleasant girl hooked and finished him. They're county people and thorough- 
 going Liberals, so you won't frighten 'em, though they are connected with that 
 Arch- Blue old Barnardiston." 
 
 " By Jove ! " thought Fitz, if a man takes luck by the horns, don't it al- 
 ways favor him!' Introduce me, then, Jimmy," he said, aloud; "I want a 
 little fun. I'm bored to death with committees, canvassing, meetings, dinners,
 
 BLUE AND YELLOW. 
 
 613 
 
 speechifying, and letter-writing. Then the Cantitburghers are such awful owls, 
 and one's aims and ends do seem so small when one's mixed up with the bigotry 
 of prejudice and the tomfoolery of party, that I'm growing heartily sick of the 
 whole thing already." 
 
 III. 
 
 CUPID GIVES BEAU MORE TROUBLE THAN ALL THE BLUES. 
 
 POOR Beau was distracted. Fitz had been a refractory client enough before, 
 so far as obstinately speaking his mind, telling the truth, tilting against his 
 voters' opinions, and entirely refusing to butter anybody, went; but after he 
 met Jimmy Villars, Beau had ten times more trouble, for while little Verdant 
 was calling at every house and conquering them all with his title, and Le Hoop 
 Smith was giving to all the charities, and quoting the " Christian Year " largely 
 to the clergy, and giving a new lectern to St. Hildebrande, and Salter was de- 
 lighting the ten-pound men with coarse jokes, and flinging guineas and stout 
 away recklessly, Fitz, ten to one, was either bothering poor Beau not to bribe, 
 instead of letting things go on quietly; or talking rationalism and liberalism, 
 high over the head of some startled constituent (who came off from the inter 
 view with the decision that Mr. Fitzhardinge was as eminently " dangerous " as 
 O'Brien, and that he would give a plumper to Lord Verdant;) or playing bill- 
 iards, and going eel-netting with Villars and the Levisons; or sitting in Edith 
 Levison's drawing-room with her and her cousin, Valencia Barnardiston. 
 Nevertheless, Beau, the sharpest-witted, neatest-handed agent that ever lived, 
 worked on with the settled despair of a man baling water out of a leaking ship 
 with a teacup, and really grew quite worried and anxious in his personal appear- 
 ance, toiling for the devil-may-care Radical, for whom, ever since Fitz pounded 
 him on their first introduction at Eton, he had always entertained a sort of 
 dogged attachment, something, he used to say, like that of an aged grand- 
 mother for the " poor dear boy " who plagues her life out with crackers, and 
 goes more wrong than all his brothers put together. 
 
 The Levisons were, as Jimmy had promised, very pleasant, and liked larks 
 and fun as all pleasant people do; and as soon as we were introduced to them, 
 made Fitz and me, and Beau too, if he had had time for such puerilities, wel- 
 come to Elm Court, Levison's place, just four miles from Cantitborough, when- 
 ever we liked to go there. We went pretty often, for Levison's wife was a 
 merry little thing, and generally had one or two choice spirits like herself driven 
 over to spend the day; among them, her cousin and favorite, the fiancee of the
 
 614 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 Rev. Augustine Whitechurch, a fat, slick man of large Easter offerings, and 
 touching testimonials; of good family, and wide (Cantitborough) fame, whom 
 everybody praised, though nobody liked, as a sort of voucher for their own 
 religion. I have seen a good many serpents and rabbits, rats and beagles, doves 
 and tiger-cats chained together, but I never saw any pair who seemed to be 
 more uncongenial than Valencia and her pretendu. She was lively, high- 
 spirited, loved fun, parties, and mischief as much she hated Dorcas meetings, 
 missionary reports, and interesting converted beggars, while he was Low Church 
 /. e. looked upon life as a miserable pilgrimage that it was our duty to make 
 with the hardest possible peas in our shoes; wanted a wife the embodiment of 
 that dreadful individual, Hannah More's " Lucilla," and worried poor little 
 Val's very life out with animadversions on her pursuits, amusements, and friends. 
 He came sometimes with her to Elm Court, where he had as chilling an effect 
 as the inevitable rain on the swell Chiswick toilettes, and where he and Fitz 
 took an instantaneous dislike to each other, and kept each other at bay like a 
 cat and a spaniel. Val, though she was engaged was the centre of attraction. 
 Dosen't the green ticket " Sold " often make the dilettanti rave over a picture 
 in the Royal Academy they might not have noticed without it ? Jimmy Villars 
 adored her, en passant; little Lord Verdant, whose paternal acres joined Levi- 
 son's, bid fair to lose his silly little boyish head about her no great loss, by 
 the way; and Fitz Fitz always made himself agreeable to any charming woman 
 he came across, no more able to help it than Rover to help pointing when he 
 scents a covey; and while the Great Blue was throwing his influence into the 
 scale to worst the Radical candidate, the Radical candidate was tranquilly en- 
 gaged in riding, singing, waltzing, and talking, three days out of the week, with 
 Miss Valencia, at Elm Court, where Levison, having been a very high match 
 for his little niece Edith, Barnardiston thought it impossible for Val to come to 
 any grief, and encouraged her visits despite Whitechurch's chagrin at them, 
 
 " Do you think you will win your election, Fitz ? " asked Villars one even- 
 ing after dining there, and we were strolling over the grounds afterwards in the 
 twilight. 
 
 " Haven't an idea, my dear fellow," responded Fitz, cheerfully, " and am 
 not sure that I wish, for the Cantitburghers are such awful idiots, that to repre- 
 sent them faithfully I should be compelled to buy a pair of ass's ears, like 
 Bottom, which might produce a peculiar sensation in the House." 
 
 " Especially," smiled Valencia, "as the cap would fit . so many of its 
 members." 
 
 " Those that are ' good far nothing ' included," whispered Fitz, mischiev- 
 ously. 
 
 She laughed and colored. 
 
 " Oh, I had hoped you had not recognized me. What a shame to keep it
 
 BLUE AND YELLOW. G15 
 
 perdu all this time. I might have been begging your pardon in a long oration 
 every time we met. I shall take care how I talk to strangers again in a train." 
 
 " Pray don't. I'm exceptional in my taste, I know, but I do like truths 
 sometimes, even if they hit hard. Don't you ? " 
 
 " Yes; but I fancy my truths didn't hit you severely at all. I think I told 
 you you were condemned as a skeptic, a socialist, and a republican; and, since 
 all great men have been classed into one of the three, you should be super- 
 excellent to combine the trio." 
 
 Fitz laughed. 
 
 " I am quite content to be condemned by Cantitborough to any amount, 
 so long as you don't find me utterly good for nothing." 
 
 She looked up at him merrily. 
 
 "Certainly; you are good for waltzing, billiards, and German songs; those 
 are all the duties I require of you, so I don't ask any further." 
 
 " I only wish you required more," said Fitz, softly. " I am sorry you 
 think of me as a passing acquaintance, chatted with in a ballroom, and parted 
 from without regret, to meet no more in the eddies of society." 
 
 " I never said that I considered you so," interrupted Valencia, hurriedly, 
 snapping the roses off their stems as they walked along. 
 
 " But you implied it; and if you knew the pain your light words cause, you 
 would not speak them." 
 
 She was silent, so was he. It was part of Fitz's code of warfare to leave 
 his sentences to bear their fruit. 
 
 " Valencia, you are extremely imprudent to be out in this damp atmos- 
 phere in such a light evening dress," said the Rev. Augustine at her elbow. 
 
 " This exquisite evening ! Thank you for your care, but I don't belong to 
 the sanitary-mad individuals," replied Valencia, impatiently, " I never cloak 
 up, so never take cold; if I do, I will apply to you for some of those extraor- 
 dinary little hundreds and thousands you carry in the morocco case, and physic 
 the parish with, in alternate doses of texts and globules." 
 
 There was a sarcastic curl on Miss Val's lips which the popular preacher 
 did not quite relish, for he was an apostle of that arch-humbug homoeopathy, 
 firmly believed in a "millionth part;" in its strength being increased by dilu- 
 tion; in the virtue of infinitesimal doses, and all the rest of it; and was keenly 
 alive to any ridicule on the point, as people are when a point is untenable. 
 
 "Ah! do you believe in those little comfits, Mr. Whitechurch ? " said Fitz, 
 taking up the warfare. " You save the souls and the bodies en meme temps a 
 very nice arrangement, I daresay. It must be delightful to practise the two heal- 
 ing arts at once; and then, if you should ever chance to mistreat a case, it 
 wouldn't so much matter, because you'd have made sure your patient was ' fit 
 to die,' whether he was willing or not. Homoeopathy's a capital thing for trade.
 
 616 
 
 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 I'm very glad to see it spreading; they say the undertakers bid fair to be some 
 of the wealthiest men in the kingdom through it, and the sugar-bakers thrive 
 amazingly. You saw in the paper the other day didn't you ? that one of 
 'em gave the quantity of little hundreds and thousands some ton weight, I 
 think he had made for one of your great homoeopaths your men who buy a 
 diploma for twenty pounds in Germany, and set up here with a tiger and a 
 practice as minute as their pet medicine, and knowledge as infinitesimal as the 
 power of their doses." 
 
 " It requires no wit to jest upon deep subjects," said Whitechurch, loftily, 
 " The holiest topic, the gravest matter, can of course be turned into ridicule." 
 
 " If it is weak, certainly," returned Fitz, with a calm, courteous air. 
 
 " No, sir! " said the pet parson, pompously. " Not if it is weak, but if its 
 opponents are bigoted and coarse-mouthed. Ridicule was thrown upon 
 Moses's divining-rod " 
 
 " And he turned it into a serpent, and made it eat up all the other rods 
 which was ingenious, if not Christian," said Fitz, wickedly. 
 
 " I refuse to discuss such subjects in such a tone," returned Whitechurch, 
 with extreme severity. " Homoeopathy is a great, enlightened, rational, and 
 noble discovery in science, and does not require any defence." 
 
 " It can't make any," murmured Fitz. 
 
 Whitechurch turned from him with immeasurable disdain. 
 
 " My dear Valencia allow me to say you are exceedingly unwise not to wear 
 some hat, or cloak, or something warmer than that flimsy dress. Careful 
 wrapping " 
 
 " Is always followed by weak health," laughed Valencia. " We know what 
 the Sybarites were, and the English will be as bad if they wrap up their children, 
 and diet and frighten themselves, as that estimable lady in Two-pence a Week is 
 so fond of advising." 
 
 " But old maids' children are proverbial," laughed Fitz. " Of all mortals do I 
 pity most an unlucky small one in the clutches of a well-meaning, anxious maiden 
 aunt, who is primed with prescriptions, won't let him stir out if there's no 
 'ozone' in the air, or a breath of north wind; measures his warm young blood 
 by her own chill veins, and loads him with flannel like a gouty old man. Pretty 
 mess she'll make of him ! If it's a boy, he'll go down under the first breath of 
 east wind; and if it's a girl, she'll grow up an invalid, good for nothing, a misery 
 to herself and everybody else, with neither color in her cheeks nor use in her 
 limbs." 
 
 Valenica laughed, and her glance compared, disparagingly enough to the 
 clergyman, Fitz's sinewy, vigorous frame, which would have lifted ten stone 
 like a feather, with the fat, sleek, feminine, puffy form of the popular preacher, 
 as she answered,
 
 BLUE AND YELLOW. 017 
 
 " We should soon see an end to the hardy, strong-muscled, sport-loving 
 Britons. People nowadays study sanitary rules till they study all their health 
 away. I confess I've no patience with those lady dictators, such as that strong- 
 minded political economist who writes such awful advice from her ' Farm of 
 Three Inches.' Wants us to leave off high heels I wonder what for ? and 
 wear wretched, poking straw bonnets, so that nobody can see our faces, (con- 
 venient to those who have faces that won't bear looking at, I daresay,) and 
 would squeeze all romance out of everything, and would sweep all beauty off 
 the earth if she could. Why mayn't we have a pretty thing, if it isn't useful ? 
 Our eyebrows are no particular use, but we should look very funny without 
 them." 
 
 " I quite agree with you ; I hate utilitarians. It is your oracle from the 
 'Farm' who laments the sensual tendencies of schoolboys because they like 
 rabbit suppers and tuck. I wouldn't give much for a boy who didn't. Those 
 very spiritual individuals are nasty ones to deal with; they're so exalted 
 themselves, they have no sympathy with one's natural weaknesses, and as they 
 pretend to go in for no errors themselves, of course won't pity them in other 
 people." 
 
 " We are to condemn errors, not to sympathize with them," snapped White- 
 church. 
 
 " Indeed ! said Fitz, carelessly. " When I find a man free from all errors 
 himself, I'll let him find fault with another and I shan't chance on him for 
 many a year." 
 
 The clergyman smiled not pleasantly. 
 
 " All the borough are acquainted with your latitudinarian opinions, Mr. 
 Fitzhardinge." 
 
 " Are they ? " laughed Fitz. " They must be rather a treat to Cantitbor- 
 ough, after all the conservative oratory it has expended on it. By the way, 
 Mr. Whitechurch, that election sermon of yours last Sunday was an admirable 
 hit. I heard Lord Cockadoodle say that he wished old Ewen would kick off 
 and leave Dunslop in his gift." 
 
 Whitechurch colored. The sermon was a gross piece of toadyism, and 
 though he did keep his affections on things above, he couldn't help sometimes 
 taking a glance downwards, where the fat living of Dunslope was among the 
 prominent points that caught his eye. 
 
 Valencia sighed quickly, turned round, and said something about going 
 into the house. 
 
 " Do," said Fitz, bending towards her. " Let us go and try those German 
 
 airs." 
 
 Go they did, and Fitz's cornet, which he played as well as Koenig, sent out 
 its mellow notes in a concert of sweet sounds, which was anything but har-
 
 618 O UIDA ' S I VORKS. 
 
 monious to the ears of the incumbent of St. Hildebrande, as he walked up and 
 clown before the drawing-room windows, listening to Caroline, who, regarding 
 him already as a brother, took the liveliest interest in his parochial business 
 affairs, doubtless with the kindly view of covering her sister's short-comings in 
 that line. 
 
 " Poor dear Valencia ! " I heard her sigh, as she passed me when I was 
 smoking on the terrace with Jimmy. " Don't be annoyed with her, Augustine. 
 She does flirt a little, perhaps; but they say all pretty women do. I'm not 
 tempted, you know; I am plain and unpretending; but, thank Heaven ! my 
 thoughts are not fixed on this world, or on men's idle admiration. Don't be 
 vexed with her; she is thoughtless, I am afraid." 
 
 " But I am extremely annoyed," said the parson's dictorial tones. " I 
 spoke to her the other day about fixing the time for our marriage. I require a 
 wife; I cannot attend to the schools, and the cook wastes a great deal; but she 
 put me off would give me no answer, /am not to be treated so lightly; and 
 as for her dancing, and singing, and riding with those idle men, especially with 
 that wild, dissolute Fitzhardinge, it is intolerable, unbearable, most inde- 
 corous " 
 
 " I know it is very sad," chimed in the gentle Gary. " But dear Val never 
 had any due sense of the responsible position your wife will occupy. She is 
 careless, worldly 
 
 Here they went out of hearing, and I was no further enlightened, but went 
 into the drawing-room, where they were all playing vingt-et-un, and called me 
 to join them: and I thought, as I saw Valencia got up very becomingly, with 
 her large hazel eyes full of animation and fun, Verdant gazing at her senti- 
 mentally on her left, and Fitz discoursing with eloquent glances, and facile 
 compliment, on her right, her light laugh ringing through the room, and 
 her merry talk keeping all going, that it was a thousand pities for her to be 
 imprisoned in the sombre atmosphere of St. Hildebrande's rectory, under the 
 regime of St. Hildebrande's incumbent, whose gloomy doctrine would infallibly 
 silence the laughter, hush-hush the jest, burn the cards, interdict the waltz- 
 ing in short, crush all the native song out of the poor bird he had netted. 
 
 " I say, old boy," said I, when we were having a pipe that night in the 
 dining-room at Hollywood, " make hay while the sun shines; you won't have 
 much longer to flirt." 
 
 " Why not ? " said Fitz, sharply. 
 
 " Because Whitechurch wants to get married; not from any particular pen- 
 chant for the state, or any fresh acces of love, but because his girls' schools 
 want looking after, and his cook's ruining him." 
 
 "The fool!" ejaculated Fitz, with a giant cloud of Cavendish; "why 
 doesn't he go to the register-office and hire a seamstress and a housekeeper ?"
 
 BLUE AND YELLOW. G19 
 
 " Possibly because a wife will combine both, and be cheaper. Barnardiston 
 will give his daughters ten thousand pounds each if he like his son-in-law. 
 Fancy Valencia arming herself with needles and thread, and teaching half a 
 dozen charity-girls to make pocket-handkerchiefs for Ojibbeways, and going 
 into her kitchen to see that dear Augustine's curry is peppered to a T, or that 
 the cook doesn't encourage the policeman 
 
 " Faugh ! Be quiet, can't you ? " growled Fitz, in intense disgust. " You 
 might talk with just as much coolness of Rumpunch being set to run in a cos- 
 termonger's cart. The idea of the girl throwing herself away on that white- 
 chokered humbug ! What on earth could make her accept him ? " 
 
 "First offer," interrupted Beau; "couldn't tell she'd get another." 
 
 " Pooh ! nonsense; at her age girls ain't hard up in that way. If she were 
 thirty she might have been desperate; very rusty hooks are snapped up when 
 there's no longer a chance for silver ones, but at nineteen 
 
 " Hooks of all kinds are snapped at by all ages," interrupted Beau again, 
 " and you've said so scores of times, Fitz, when it suited you, and your per- 
 ceptions weren't clouded. Women are always mad to be married. Heaven 
 knows why they trouble themselves to tell the girls at the end of the marriage 
 service not to be afraid, with any amazement; there never was more needless 
 waste of words, for I never knew any of the crinolines who didn't catch at a 
 wedding-ring as Rover catches at a mutton-bone." 
 
 Fitz was quiet, puffing away with as much energy as if he were smoking 
 Whitechurch, as Bugeaud smoked the Algerines. 
 
 " It does puzzle me, though," said I, " how Val, with the pick of the county, 
 could choose that parson. She don't like him, I fancy." 
 
 " Like him ! " cried Fitz, with immeasurable scorn. " How should she ? 
 An ugly brute, with the pluck of a chicken, and as sour as beer after a thun- 
 derstorm ! " 
 
 " Don't call your spiritual pastors and masters bad names, Fitz," said Beau. 
 " You keep me in hourly terror, for if you have a row with the Cantitburghers' 
 pet preacher, it'll be all up with your election." 
 
 " I shan't have a row with him," sneered Fitz, with much contempt. " I 
 flirt with her because she amuses me, but if she likes the parson, she's welcome 
 to him for me." 
 
 Though she was so very welcome to him, I heard Fitz in his room (the 
 room is next to mine, and the walls are lath and plaster,) mutter to himself, as 
 he undressed, " What the devil does she tie herself to that fool for ? " a ques- 
 tion to which I do not suppose either his pipe, or his bed-candle, or Rover, 
 who always sleeps by his bedside, or the harvest moon that was looking through 
 the window, vouchsafed him any reply.
 
 G2o QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 IV. 
 
 THE RADICAL CANDIDATE BEATS THE POPULAR PREACHER OUT OF THE FIELD. 
 
 " THE Larches was, of course, forbidden ground to Fitz. He did call there 
 with the book for Mrs. Barnardiston, and was received very cordially by 
 that lady, but in the evening received a note from the old Tory thanking him 
 for his courtesy, but saying that at least until the " coming important contest" 
 was decided, he thought acquaintance, since their opinions were so opposite, 
 had better not continue. That was a settler; Fitz, with all the brass in the 
 kingdom, could not push himself in after that, especially as Fitz would not 
 make himself cheap for a kingdom. Nevertheless, sometimes when Valencia 
 was not at Elm Court, he would find occasion to ride past the Larches, Valen- 
 cia being given to amateur gardening, which generally consisted in gathering 
 the flowers, or throwing guelder roses at Dauphin, and a very pretty sight she 
 was when so occupied, though Caroline considered it childish, and Whitechurch 
 waste of time. By Jove ! if one may not dawdle a little time on the road 
 gathering the flowers one finds in life and precious few they are ! what 
 earthly use, I wonder, do the flowers grow there for ? Past the Larches we 
 were riding one evening after dinner, having spent all day in election business 
 that had bored us both to death, and very slowly was Rumpunch pacing under 
 the shadow of the shrubberies that divided the stronghold of " Blue " opinion 
 from the high road. Just opposite a break in the laburnums and hawthorns 
 that gave a view through a white gate into the garden, Rumpunch had, or was 
 supposed to have a nasty stone in his foot a stone that a man who adored 
 horseflesh as Fitz did was bound to look after. The stone took some moments 
 to find indeed I am uncertain that it was found after all but while Fitz was 
 examining the off hoof, through the trees we perceived Whitechurch and his 
 fiancee. Whitechurch looked more pompous than usual, and the serene brow 
 that the ladies of his parish raved about was certainly contracted. Val looked 
 excited, and rather ready to cry. They drew near the gate, not being able to 
 see us for the trees, and we caught the clergyman's last words very stiff 
 and icy they were, too. 
 
 " You will think over what I have said, Valencia, and I expect you to pay 
 some attention to it. Good night." 
 
 And Augustine bent his head over his stiff choker, and touched Val's fore- 
 head with his lips in as cool a sort of manner as a man kisses a plain sister. 
 Valencia gave not the slightest response. Whitechurch swung the gate open 
 and passed down the road with his back to us. Val stood still with her eyes on 
 the ground, in a reverie; then she caught Dauphin up, kissed him, burst into
 
 BLUE AND YELLOU'. <;>! 
 
 tears as she bent over the dog, and walked away through the trees. I glanced 
 at Fitz. His teeth were set like a mastiffs, and he looked after Whitechurch as 
 if he longed to deliver from his left shoulder, and floor the retreating figure. 
 
 "Very paternal, wasn't he?" said I. " You'd have improved the occasion 
 better than that, Fitz." 
 
 " Curse the fellow ! " muttered the Radical candidate. " I just wish I had 
 him out for a couple of rounds on a quiet morning a hypocritical idiot, that'll 
 worry all her young life out of her." 
 
 With which disconnected remark, and sundry smothered curses, the sight of 
 the farewell having seemingly stirred him into mighty wrath, Fitz sprang on 
 Rumpunch, and tore over the roads at a pace fit to win the Grand Military. 
 When he got home he vented it in pipes and whisky, and Beau looked at him 
 as a man might look on a pet hound, that he feared was going in for 
 hydrophobia. 
 
 "Something's come to Fitz," said Beau, anxiously, "for he's just signed me 
 a 1000/. check without a word; and I know he wouldn't have given it to me to 
 corrupt the people with without some bother, if he'd known what he was doing." 
 
 " I'm going over to Levison's, Beau," said he at breakfast the next day. 
 " We're to drive over to the Chase, for a sketching party; will you come ? " 
 
 " I ?" growled Beau. " I should think I've something better to do; if I 
 hadn't, the figure at your poll would be an O. The idea of a man's coming 
 down to stand for a borough, and then going spending all his time with a set of 
 women! I've no patience with you, Randolph." 
 
 " Haven't you, old fellow ? " laughed Fitz. " Patience is a virtue, and as 
 no lawyer has any virtues at all, I suppose we can't wonder at you. I did 
 begin enunciating my opinions, but you stopped my mouth." 
 
 "Opinions! Pray what have they to do with an election ?" retorted Beau. 
 " One would take you for a boy of twenty, talking as if you didn't know every- 
 thing going on on the face of the earth was an affair of pounds, shillings, and 
 pence. Who the devil cares two straws what opinions you have ? Can't you 
 keep 'em quiet, if you will have such things ? They hinder a man shock- 
 ingly. If he's a taste for 'em, he should lock 'em up in his study. You want 
 to get returned " 
 
 " Don't care a hang about it," cried Fitz. 
 
 " For Cantitborough ?" continued Beau, too irate to mind the interruption; 
 " and if you do, you should make up your mind to give your money to me and 
 Warning with your eyes shut, as a verger takes a Christmas-box, and to put 
 the stopper for a time on all that liberalist and rationalist stuff. It's all very 
 sensible, when shared with the esprits forts; but it don't sell just now it must 
 wait another century or two. If you want to get on with the world, you mustn't 
 frighten it by drawing Truth out of her well; for the world at present is a very
 
 622 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 great baby, and truth is its bogy, and makes it run away. But you're as wilful 
 as an unbroke colt, and one might as well talk to this reindeer tongue as to you. 
 So get along to your sketching party; you're out of mischief there, if you don't 
 make love to Whitechurch's bride, and raise the hue and cry after you, with 
 old Blue Bar springing the rattle." 
 
 With which oration, delivered with the spurt of a champagne cork, Beau 
 pushed his plate away, drank a glass of Bass, and ordered the dog-cart to drive 
 into the town, while his obstinate client put his block and his moist-color box in 
 his pocket, and took his cap to walk over to Elm Court. A nicer place to flirt 
 in than that Chase, with its soft turfy seats, and its thick shadowy woodlands, 
 and its picturesque distance, as an excuse for sketching, it was impossible to 
 find. Fitz was very great at sketching; he made a sketching tour once with 
 one of the " Associates," but to-day I fancy the outline of Dauphin's nose was 
 all he achieved, for he was chiefly busy mixing Miss Val's colors, fetching her 
 
 water, telling her how to tone down this, and deepen that, till Well, I didn't 
 
 envy the Reverend Augustine, as his fiancee sat at the roots of an old beech, a 
 little apart from the rest of us, with Fitz lying at full length on the turf beside 
 her, as handsome a dog as ever turned a girl's head with his pretty speeches. 
 
 Valencia was very shy and quiet with him that day; she, who generally 
 talked nineteen to the dozen, and was always ready for any lark. I was listen- 
 ing to the " Princess," which Jimmy Villars was reading aloud to Mrs. Levison 
 and another fair one, but it really did bore me to such a degree that I was 
 obliged to sneak out of sound to where I could light a pipe without offending 
 female nerves. I was near Fitz, who was smoking permitted the indulgence 
 by Valencia, who has no nonsence about her and I caught the end of his sen- 
 tence as he lay looking up at her, and gathering the ferns with his left hand. 
 Fitz has a quiet way of flirting, but it's a very effective one. 
 
 " No; I don't wish to get the election," he was saying. " My views have 
 changed since I came down here." 
 
 "What! has Cantitborough air turned you Blue?" laughed Valencia, with 
 her customary gaiety. 
 
 "Not exactly; but since, when I leave Cantitborough, I shall be forgotten 
 as a passagere acquaintance by those who have made the place dear to me, I 
 shall never set foot in it again, which I must do were I to become its represen- 
 tative. Isn't it old North, in the ' Noctes,' who says ' there are places in this 
 earth that we shudder to revisit, haunted by images too beautiful to be 
 endured ? ' I feel the truth of that now." 
 
 " By George! " thought I, " Fitz is growing very serious. Won't poor little 
 Val credit it all, and never dream it will be talked in the same strain to some 
 new flirtation next month! " 
 
 " Will you give me that sketch ? " Fitz went on, after a pause, in which the
 
 BLUE AND YELLOW. (j->3 
 
 ferns had come to considerable grief. " It is not much to ask, but I should 
 like some memorial of days that I shall never forget, though you will." 
 
 " Do you think I shall ever forget them ?" began Valencia, passionately; 
 then stopped short, bending her head over her drawing. 
 
 The temptation to revenge yesterday's scene was too sweet to be resisted. 
 Fitz put his arm round her waist, and drew her down towards him. " Will you 
 promise me that you will not " 
 
 But Valencia sprang up, scattering her materials to the four winds; her 
 face was flushed, and her voice agitated. " Hush, hush, you must not speak 
 so to me; you do not know " 
 
 What he didn't know never appeared, for Edith Levison turned her head 
 over her shoulder, saying. 
 
 " Val, darling, have you any ultramarine ? I can't find mine." 
 
 Val went towards her, and Fitz rose with a worried, anxious look on his face, 
 very different to the fun his love affairs generally brought him. 
 
 " Why did your cousin engage herself to Mr. Whitechurch ? " asked Fitz, 
 point-blank, of Mrs. Levison, finding himself alone with her for two minutes 
 before dinner that night. 
 
 "Ah ! isn't it a pity ? " cried Edith, plaintively; " a dreadful man like that, 
 who'll think it sinful for her to waltz or go to the Opera. If Gerald wouldn't 
 let me waltz, or have a box, I would sue for a divorce to-morrow. It's shameful, 
 isn't it? " 
 
 " But why accept him ? " said Fitz, impatiently. 
 
 " That was all my uncle's doing," answered Edith. " He's terribly mean, 
 you know, without the slightest reason to be so. Valencia came home from 
 school at seventeen. Augustine thought her very pretty, (clergymen are ttot 
 above those weaknesses,) and proposed for her. My uncle thought it a good 
 match, and ordered her to accept him; her mamma begged her not to go against 
 her papa. Poor little Val, as thoughtless as my canary bird, never knew the 
 misery she was making for herself, and consented. She has been miserable 
 ever since, poor child ! They've been engaged two years; and," continued 
 Edith with immense energy, " oh ! Mr. Fitzhardinge, I'd as soon see her join- 
 ing the poor Clares as wearing orange-blossoms for that pompous, bigoted 
 Whitechurch." 
 
 So would Fitz, probably, on the well known principle of the dog in the 
 manger; a very natural principle, especially when one has a fancy to eat the 
 straw oneself. He did not say so, however, but leaned against a console in 
 profound silence, while Edith whispered, as Valencia came into the room, " I 
 shouldn't be surprised if my uncle broke off the engagement now, for he thinks 
 Verdant is in love with her, as, indeed, he is, poor boy, and the peer's robes are 
 better than the priest's."
 
 624 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 Whitechurch came to dine that night at Elm Court. The dinner was not 
 so lively as usual, for Fitz and Valencia, generally the fastest hitters in the 
 tennis-ball of conversation, might have been Gog and Magog set down at the 
 table for any amusement they afforded the society. Whitechurch, too, looked 
 more glum and self-sufficient than ever, and Jimmy Villars whispered to me, 
 " that one might as well ask the terrace statues in the garden to dinner as a 
 trio of lovers and rivals, for any company that they were." 
 
 After dinner at Elm Court we were wont to take our cigars about in the 
 grounds instead of over the wine in the glorious sultry August evenings. Levi- 
 son went after his wife he was still dreadfully spoony about her Fitz 
 lighted a Havana and strolled off by himself, and Jimmy and I sat down in a 
 Robinson Crusoe hut to have a chat about the Cambridge Eight, the October 
 meetings, and other subjects we had in common. Villers was just telling me 
 how it was that Long Fortescue happened to make such a pot of money on 
 the Cesarewitch, when, through the thick shrubs and young trees that surrounded 
 our smoking-room, I caught a glimpse of Valencia's pink dress, as she stood 
 in earnest talk with somebody or other, invisible to us. 
 
 "Oh ! hang it, Jimmy," said I, "there's another love-scene going on; let's 
 get out of the way." 
 
 " Keep still, young one, rather," retorted Villars, " or you may just walk 
 into the middle of it, and smash all the fun. Is it that dear little pet, and Fitz 
 making a fool of himself about her ? It's horridly dirty to listen, but, boxed 
 up here, one can't help it. Fitz would shoot us if we walked out in his face and 
 spoiled sport. Besides, we shan't hear anything new; love-scenes are all alike." 
 
 This, however, seemed far from being a love-scene. Valencia was speaking 
 impetuously and hurriedly. " I have acted very wrongly, I know I have. A 
 girl always does, if she engages herself where she cannot give her affection. I 
 beg your pardon for having misled you. I blame myself very much for not 
 having spoken frankly to you long ago, and asked you to release me from an 
 engagement I can never fulfil." 
 
 " It is a pity you did not think so long "ago," replied Whitechurch, senten- 
 tiously. 
 
 " It is a pity. I wish to Heaven I had," cried poor little Val. 
 
 " I daresay you do, since you have seen your favorite reprobate, Mr. Fitz- 
 hardinge," smiled the pastor. "You say very justly that we are ill suited to 
 each other; our tastes, and aims and pursuits are utterly alien. I was lured, I 
 confess, by your personal attractions. I trusted that the good seed, once 
 sown, might flourish in so fair a soil; but I was deceived. You have only fore- 
 stalled me in the rupture of our engagement. I confess that I dared not take 
 a helpmate out of Philistia, and I have learnt that there are treasures elsewhere 
 superior to the ephemeral charms of mere exterior beauty."
 
 BLUE AND YELLOW. (#5 
 
 " I am rejoiced to hear it," retorted Val, rather haughtily. Our want of 
 congeniality cannot have struck you more forcibly than it has done me. You 
 will, at least, do me the justice to admit that I never simulated an affection I 
 could not feel." 
 
 "Certainly; we part in peace, and shall, I trust, meet again on perfectly 
 friendly terms," returned Whitechurch, with doubly pompous self-consciousness 
 to cover his inward mortification. 
 
 " He'll take Gary, mark my word," said Villars, as the incumbent of St. 
 Hildebrande's took the tips of his late fiancee's fingers, raised his hat, and left 
 her. "All her district visiting and ragged school teaching hasn't been without 
 an eye to business, I'll bet." 
 
 Valencia, fancying herself alone, threw herself down on a turf seat under a 
 mountain ash, looking pretty enough, with the sunset lighting up her bright 
 dress and uncovered hair, while she sat in thought out of which Dauphin, by the 
 application of a cold nose, the wagging of a short tail, and many impatient 
 barks, vainly tried to rouse her. 
 
 " Deucedly nice she looks, don't she ? " whispered Villars. " Do for the 
 Sleeping Beauty, if her eyes were shut. Why don't Fitz come and play the 
 Knight's part?" 
 
 He'd scarcely spoken when the scent of a Havana came to us on the evening 
 wind, and along the shrubbery path came Fitz with his arms folded and his 
 eyes on the ground. Dauphin ran up to him in an ecstatic state of welcome. 
 Valencia started up, her cheeks flushing as bright-hued as the sky, and said 
 something highly unintelligible about its going to rain, which, seeing there 
 wasn't a cloud in the heavens, seemed looking very far into futurity indeed. 
 Fitz did't answer her with regard to her atmosphere prophecies, but, throwing 
 away his cigar into the middle of an oleander, he began where he had left off in 
 the morning, caught both her hands, drew her to him, and kissed her, sans 
 ceremonie. 
 
 " By Jove ! that's rather too much for a man's charity," growled Villars. 
 " Master Randolph knows how to do the thing, don't he ? " 
 
 " Valencia, my love, my darling," murmured Fitz, too earnestly for it to be 
 a flirtation any longer, " I beseech you listen to me. It will kill me to see you 
 thrown away on that idiot. I would do him some mischief before I let him win 
 you, or saw him touch your very hand again. I seem never to have hated or 
 to have loved till now. For Heaven's sake free yourself from those accursed 
 ties, and give yourself to me " 
 
 "The deuce !" muttered Jimmy, when Valencia had whispered that she was 
 free, and the Radical candidate had pledged himself with every vow under the 
 sun to the great Blue's daughter, and they had strolled away among the shrub- 
 berries, " since Fitz has got up the steam and come it au serieux like this, a
 
 6 o 6 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 spavined 'bus horse may enter itself for the Derby. A pretty fellow he is to 
 come canvassing; but one might have been sure what sort of an election he'd 
 try for when hazel eyes like those were in the way." 
 
 I suppose Fitz found this style of canvassing more to his taste, for the har- 
 vest moon was high in the heavens, and the nightingale was jug-jugging in the 
 cool woodlands, and Edith had sung two or three songs after the coffee, be- 
 fore he and Valencia walked in through the bay-window, he looking calmly tri- 
 umphant, and she excitedly happy, as if they really thought a fusion of Blue and 
 Yellow the easiest thing in the world. 
 
 V. 
 
 FITZ WINS ONE ELECTION AND LOSES ANOTHER. 
 
 To see Beau's face when Fitz told him he had turned out Whitechurch, and 
 was going to marry Valencia himself, was as good a bit of fun as to see 
 Matthews's " Patter versus Clatter." 
 
 "Well, I do think you're gone clean mad, Randolph," he began, when he 
 recovered his first breathless horror. "To fly in the face of the borough like 
 that to steal their pet parson's fiancee to outwit their most influential house- 
 holder to get yourself called every name they can lay their tongues to, how 
 the deuce do you think that's likely to forward your election ? " 
 Fitz lay back and laughed without stopping for five minutes. 
 "You may laugh," growled Beau. "You won't laugh when you see two 
 thousand five hundred pounds six shillings and eightpence gone, and nothing 
 to show for it." 
 
 "That's your fault,'' put in Fitz, " for spending such a lot on unholy pur- 
 poses. What sort of face would you show in the Court of Inquiry ? " 
 
 " I should like to know," continued Beau, more furious every word he ut- 
 tered, " what a bit of girl is worth to lose an election for ? Girls are as cheap as 
 green peas, but you won't find free boroughs as easy to come by. A pretty 
 row we shall have in the town ! Won't the Blues print placards about you ! 
 Won't there just be choice epithets chalked after your name on the walls ! 
 Won't the Cantitborough Post catch hold of it, and rake up every one of your 
 love affairs; and pretty nice ones some of 'em are, as 7 know, since I was called 
 in to settle 'em ! Won't old Blue Bar move heaven and earth to keep you out ! 
 Well all I can say is, that you're more fit for a private asylum than a rational 
 hustings."
 
 BLUE AND YELLOW. G27 
 
 With which final philippic Beau flung out of the room, too irate to hear Fitz 
 call after him: 
 
 " Take my compliments to the editor of the Cantitborough Post, and ask 
 him to be so kind as to print, next week, in the biggest capitals he has, that I 
 consider a touch of Valencia's little soft lips worth the premiership ! Don't 
 forget, Beau ! And, I say, you may add, too, that Blue and Yellow are two of 
 the primary colors, and intended to unite from earliest memory." 
 
 Beau was quite right: the town, /. e. the ladies for Cantitborough was 
 petticoat-governed were mad with Valencia, because they had long privately 
 adored Fitz, and Whitechurch was still in the market, and therefore to be sided 
 with. The Blues were frantic with delight at being able to damage the Yellow 
 member, who, somehow, had been making ground in spite of them; and Bar- 
 nardiston, of course, was furious, not because Whitechurch was thrown over, 
 for Whitechurch had turned his affections towards the good working qualities 
 of Caroline, but because the man he hated worst in the whole county hand- 
 some, reckless, bold republican Fitz had cheated him out of the chance of a 
 coronet. The very day Valencia accepted Randolph she refused little Lord 
 Verdant, and so enraged was the great Tory, that he told Valencia to leave 
 his roof, and sent Fitz's letters back unopened. Poor Val, who, having her 
 mamma on her side, however, did not mind it so much, took refuge with Edith 
 Levison, Levison himself being indignant with Barnardiston for his folly and 
 ill-bred opposition to a match so much better than the one first looked for; 
 and in the sultry summer days and long summer evenings Fitz and Val passed 
 many a pleasant hour under the shady trees of Elm Court, while in the little 
 bigoted, quarrelling, peppery town four miles off, the Cantitborough men were 
 blackening his name in committee-rooms, and the Cantitborough women were 
 pulling her to smithereens at their tea-fights. 
 
 The day that beats the Derby for stirring English phlegm into mad excite- 
 ment the day when Blue and Yellov rise rampant against each other the day 
 when the demon of Party breaks loose, when the Unwashed smash each other's 
 heads to their full satisfaction, when voters are locked up in durance vile and 
 plied with hocussed grog, and torn hither and thither by distracted cabs when 
 men work, and wear, and quarrel, and growl, and swear by a bit of blue rib- 
 bon as if it were the sole stay of the country, and grasp at a yellow banner as 
 though it were the mainstay of liberty the election-day dawned on Can- 
 titborough, the sun shining extra bright, as if laughing with its jolly round 
 face at the baby play these little pigmies below fancied of such universal 
 importance. 
 
 The nomination- day arrived, and each separate Cantitburgher uprose from 
 his bed with the solemn conviction that the destinies of England hung on his 
 own individual hands. Beau splashed through his bath with the rapidity of a
 
 6 28 O UIDAS WORKS. 
 
 water-dog, brushed his whiskers as hastily as a Cantab too late for chapel, and 
 dressed himself in much the same eager excitement as a Coronet harnessing 
 for his first parade. 
 
 "Seven o'clock, and that fellow not up! " growled Beau, performing a fan- 
 faronade on his candidate's door. 
 
 " What the devil are you making that row for ? " responded Fitz. " Why 
 can't you take things quietly ! " 
 
 " If I had, I wonder how you'd stand," swore Beau, "on the poll to-day! 
 Not up! when Smith and Salter, and Verdant will be in the down by nine full 
 fig, and all your committee will be looking out for you at half-past at the Ten 
 Bells!" 
 
 Fitz laughed. 
 
 " You and Fan go and get your breakfast, and go into Cantitborough, 
 whether I'm up or not. And, I say, Beau, send Soames to me, and order some 
 one to saddle Rumpunch, will you ? " 
 
 " Go into Cantitborough without him ! He's certainly mad," muttered 
 Beau, in soliloquy. Being, however, of a philosophic turn of mind, he and I 
 ate a good breakfast, though ungraced by the presence of our host. " Why 
 is that fellow so late ? " said Beau fifty times to each cup of coffee. " Eight 
 o'clock, by Jove ! and we shall be a mortal hour getting into procession and 
 going to the town. Do ring the bell, Fan ring it loud. Thank you. James, 
 go and see if your master is up." 
 
 " Can't make anybody hear, sir," said James, returning. 
 
 " Not hear ? Bless, my soul, it's very extraordinary ! " said Beau, looking 
 the picture of unutterable worry and woe. " Fitz must have taken an 
 overdose of opium. Confound him ! what did he get in love for ? I'll call him 
 myself." Up went Beau and battered at the door, with not the slightest suc- 
 cess. " I say, Fitz ! Fitz ! are you deaf, or dead, or what ? " shouted Beau, 
 forgetting that in the event of either hypothesis Fitz would be the last person 
 calculated to give him an answer. " God bless me ! " cried Beau, bursting 
 the door open, " where are you ? If ever there was a wayward, obstinate, 
 
 provoking " Beau stopped in astonishment too great for speech. The 
 
 room was empty, the bed empty, Fitz, Rover, and Soames departed, all the 
 drawers open, a portmanteau on the floor, and shirts, and coats, and brushes, 
 and boots tossed about as when a man has packed in a hurry and left behind 
 all the things he did not want. " Bolted, by Heaven ! " cried Beau. " Where's 
 he gone ? What's he done ? He is mad he must be mad ! Send the ser- 
 vants off everywhere ! Where, in the devil's name can he be flown ? Oh, 
 curse it, Fan, what is to be done ? " 
 
 That was more than I could tell him. We did send the men everywhere, but 
 they could not find their master, nor Soames either. Beau had a faint idea of
 
 BLUE AND YELLOW. c,29 
 
 dragging the pond, in case Val had jilted him, and Fitz had thrown himself into 
 a watery grave; but then it was not probable that Soames was immolated as well. 
 Nine o'clock struck; there were the Yellow men with the Yellow banners, and 
 the Yellow ribbons, and the Yellow band, and yet no candidate. My father, 
 who would have been there, had been all along too ill to take any part in the 
 election, and this very nomination-day was chained to his room with his old foe 
 gout. In that half-hour I am sure poor Beau lost as much flesh as a jockey 
 before the Derby. " Well, we must go," said he, in sheer desperation. " Per- 
 haps he'll turn up in the town; if not, we must tell 'em he's seriously ill. By 
 George ! I wish he'd been at York before he brought me on such a fool's 
 errand." 
 
 Into Cantitborough we rode, with many shouts and enthusiastic rushes out 
 from the cottages we passed; and into the market-place we went with great row 
 and glory, save that we were a procession without a head. There was little 
 Verdant, meeker than ever after Valencia's rejection, looking like a noodle, with 
 his father and a galaxy of titles at the head of his procession; and there was Le 
 Hoop Smith, bland and smiling, at the head of his; and fat, yellow old Salter 
 at the head of his. And where was Fitz the handsome, dashing Fitz, whom 
 the women were crowded to admire and the mob to cheer ? at the head of his, 
 that gorgeous Yellow display which, thanks to untiring Beau, was grown popular 
 even in Blue Cantitborough ? And when the Blues saw not Rumpunch and his 
 rider, were they not frantic with triumph ? and were not Fitz's committee in 
 an agony of wonder and dread, and the women in a state of bemoaning agony 
 and woe, and the mob in a frantic fit of excitement and indignation, after the 
 custom of mobs from all ages downwards ? And was not Beau poor Beau 
 distracted in his own mind, and worried like a fox with fifty packs after him 
 more inimitably cool, and confident, and matchless, than any man could pos- 
 sibly be pictured, when he set the mayor's hair straight upon end with an 
 account of the frightful attack of cholera that had seized poor Fitz in the 
 morning; distracted the committee with assurances that he had left their can- 
 didates as blue as the lapis lazuli ring on his finger, and in mortal danger of 
 his life; appealed so touchingly to the enlightened men of Cantitborough not 
 to allow the unfortunate invalid's cause to be injured; and conducted himself 
 altogether so brilliantly, that the Blues whispered in knots in dismay ? 
 
 Yes, Beau was magnificent that day. I confess, though, he did push me 
 aside as a thundering muff when I made a mistake, and told one of the com- 
 mittee my brother had broken his ankle the night before yes, Beau was glori- 
 ous, I admit. The proceedings began with the crier's bell and the mayor's 
 oration, which was entirely unheard from calls from the crowd of " Go it, old 
 Baldhead ! " "Speak up, old Malt-and Hops ! " " How many nine gallons did 
 Salter order ? " and like personal allusions to his occupation. Then uprose old
 
 630 
 
 OU IDA'S WORKS. 
 
 Barnardiston, who was not very cordially received, for the simple reason that he 
 was the hardest magistrate on the bench; however, the Blues cheered him to 
 the skies when he proposed as a fitting representative for the free, loyal, honor- 
 able, enlightened, and all the rest of it, borough, the son of the noble and gen- 
 erous House of Cockadoodle, the benefactors and patrons of Cantitborough. 
 After his seconder came two out-and-out Blues, who proposed the gentle and 
 intellectual Le Hoop Smith, of Hooping Hall, Pottleshire; and two more, who 
 put forward that public-spirited, benevolent, and large-hearted gentleman, 
 Curry Salter, late of the Bengal Infantry; and then two Liberals arose, in a 
 wild storm of mad cheers and savage yells, to offer to the borough, as a mem- 
 ber, Randolph Fitzhardinge, Esq., of Hollywood and Evansdale, who had been 
 most unhappily stricken down by illness at the very moment he was mounting 
 his horse, to come and have the honor of addressing them in person. And 
 now up got little Beau, as plucky as a game cock, and began to tell them how 
 it was that he was compelled to take their candidate's place. So ingeniously 
 did he apologize for Fitz; so delightfully did he set the crowd screaming at his 
 witticisms; so mercilessly did he show up his opponent's weak points; so ad- 
 mirably did he describe Fitz's opinions much better than Fitz would have 
 done himself, who would have talked Plato and frightened them with his dar- 
 ing; so pathetically did he implore them not to let the great Liberal cause be 
 prejudiced by an unavoidable accident, that the mob cheered him, as if he had 
 been the Queen and they Etonians, hurraed for Fitzhardinge till their throats 
 were hoarse, and even some determined Blues were caused to waver in their 
 minds. The hands, clad in French kid, doeskin, silk, cachemere, or dirt, as it 
 might chance, that lifted themselves out from the tumultuous sea of shouting, 
 struggling, fighting Blues and Yellows, were declared in favor of Lord Verdant 
 and Randolph Fitzhardinge! Beau's triumph was magnificent, it smashed 
 hollow all the mural crowns that ever were manufactured; and it was worth a 
 guinea to see him in it, mercurial as quicksilver, rapid as a champagne cork, 
 sharp as a ferret on his foes and winning as a widow bent on conquest to his 
 friends, haranguing these, arguing with those, thanking a fat councilman, and 
 pledging a thin churchwarden, talking up for the Queen and down for the Pope, 
 agreeing with everybody and offending none, telling them poor Fitz was 
 Prussian Blue when he left him, and rapidly progressing towards Indigo, but 
 had not taken a favorable turn, as he had just heard by a messenger, thanks be 
 to, etc. etc. 
 
 Yes, Beau was grand on that day, and never more effective than when, at 
 twelve o'clock at night, having shaken the last hand, and drunk the last glass, 
 and talked the last solemn talk with the solemn committee, he sprang on his 
 horse in the Ten Bells yard to tear over to Hollywood to see how his poor friend 
 was. He had just his foot in the stirrup, and I was on my hack, receiving no
 
 BLUE AND YELLOW. 631 
 
 end of condolences for my brother's most ill-timed attack from three or four 
 of the principal of the committee when a hand was laid on my knee, and an 
 awful voice, which I knew only too well, said, in tones the fac-simile of the first 
 tragedian's at the Royal Grecian, 
 
 " Mr. Francis Fitzhardinge, you are a scoundrel and a liar ! " 
 
 " Hallo ! " said I, " mild language ! I am used to gentlemen, sir, not to 
 Billingsgate. What the devil do you mean " 
 
 " What do you mean, sir," stormed Mr. Barnardiston, " by daring to come 
 before an assembly of upright, loyal, Godfearing citizens with a lie on your 
 lips ? What do you mean by joining in- a vile plot to trick a whole community, 
 and rob a parent of a child " 
 
 "Take care, old gentleman; you are talking libel," interrupted Beau, pleas- 
 antly. " The cognac's too much for you. Go home and sleep it off, for 
 it don't do for the Romans to see their pet Cincinnatus a little the worse 
 for " 
 
 " Hold your tongue, sir," screamed Barnardiston, purple with rage, " or, by 
 Heaven, I'll find a way to make you. How dare you come here both of 
 you and tell the whole borough that the cursed villain you call friend and 
 brother " 
 
 "Gently: gently, my dear sir; remember how you compromise yourself," 
 put in Beau, with most solicitous courtesy. 
 
 " The consummate rascal," pursued Barnardiston, fiercer than ever, waxing 
 into sarcasm "I mean the honorable gentleman, the noble-hearted, high- 
 spirited Liberal candidate, who has sneaked out of a contest in which he knew 
 he could not win, and ordered his obliging agent and his boy-brother to chicane 
 a whole town with some garbled folly of the cholera to screen his private mar- 
 riage with the daughter of one whom her father would sooner see " 
 
 Eh ? what ? what did you say ? Married ! " cried Beau, nonplussed for 
 
 once in his life. 
 
 " Ay, sir; married. And you know it as well as I, despite your admirable 
 acting which would do credit to Macready ? " sneered the Arch Blue. 
 
 " By Heavens, if I had known ! " swore Beau, furiously; then stopped ' .u 
 changed his tone. 'Married, you say, and to your daughter ? We' * con- 
 gratulate you. You must feel uncommonly pleased; it is a much higner match 
 than you could have looked for." 
 
 Barnardiston was perfectly black in the face. He turned himself with his 
 back to us, and began to harangue the committee-men, who looked scared out 
 of their lives: 
 
 " Fellow citizens ! " 
 
 " Ah! that's the correct style," said Beau: " It's so beautifully patriotic." 
 
 " Men of Cantitborough, I appeal to you. Judge between me and the
 
 ,532 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 honorable gentleman you have chosen to represent you. We have been separ- 
 ated by politics, but we are old fellow-townsmen, and you will give me a patient 
 hearing. Mr. Fitzhardinge comes down to canvass a borough which has only 
 heard of him before through wildness and follies which disgrace his name. 
 He meets a girl a young girl, an innocent girl who is betrothed of her own 
 will to one of the purest-minded, sweetest-natured men that ever breathed a 
 man whom you have crowned with the honor of your reverence and esteem " 
 
 " And Easter offerings, with which he buys the whisky that makes his in- 
 spiration," interpolated Beau. 
 
 " A man whom you all revere and love, and whose heart is locked up in this 
 young girl's affections " 
 
 " Or her ten thousand pounds." 
 
 " What does this villian I can use no milder term, gentlemen do, but 
 seduce those pure and fond affections from the holy man who once held them 
 woo her, win her, persuade her to break off the ties of her engagement, and 
 fetter herself anew to him. I refuse my consent because I know Mr. Fitz- 
 hardinge's character too well to peril my child's happiness in his keeping " 
 
 "Because you thought Mr. Verdant was hanging after her," interrupted 
 Beau. 
 
 " I reject his suit. What does he do ? He induces her to brave me with 
 all the open disobedience which cuts so keenly to a father's heart " 
 
 " Turn on Lear a quotation will save you no end of trouble," said Beau, 
 kindly. 
 
 " He persuades her to go and reside " 
 
 " When you'd turned her out of your house." 
 
 " To reside with people to whom I have the most marked objection " 
 
 " Why did you court Levison so hard, then, to take your pretty niece ? " 
 
 " The most marked objection. I distinctly forbid her marriage. She 
 
 wants two years of her majority; and so this scoundrel Passion gets the 
 
 better of me, sirs ! " 
 
 " Or Cockadoodle's comet wine does." 
 
 " When I tell you that Mr. Randolph Fitzhardinge takes the day of his 
 nomination the day he knew I should be tied to town, endeavoring to serve 
 my country's interest to marry my poor child privately, with no witnesses but 
 the Levisons, in the church at Elm Court, at ten o'clock this morning. I need 
 comment no further on the miserable trick by which you, gentlemen, and all 
 the rest of Cantitborough, have been duped to-day. I only ask you, as fellow- 
 townsmen, once private friends, and always, I hope, friends in the common 
 cause of truth and honor, to side with me, and never allow this destroyer of 
 home peace, this wild, unprincipled scoundrel, to represent in the senate of our 
 nation this free, loyal, and Protestant borough."
 
 BLUE AND YELLOW. 633 
 
 " Gentlemen, hear my version," began Beau. 
 
 " Will you listen to a villain's employe ? " pursued Barnardiston. 
 
 " I give you my honor " cried Beau. 
 
 " What is his honor worth ? " shouted Barnardiston. 
 
 " Will you hear me?" 
 
 " Will you believe him ? " 
 
 Tumultuous was the scene, frightful the commotion, terrific the tempest of 
 Blue and Yellow which raged over devoted Cantitborough. Blues and Yellows 
 swarmed into the Ten Bells yard; Blues and Yellows surged round mine and 
 Beau's horses; Blues and Yellows asked franticly what was the row, and carry- 
 ing off but an unintelligible version, proceeded as the next best plan to kick up 
 a row on their own account. They screamed, and shouted, and pummelled 
 each others' shoulders, and punched each others' heads, and hissed, and yelled, 
 and swore, and cudgelled, and 
 
 Fought as only men can fight who know no reason why. 
 
 In vain the Yellow agent tried to speak. Every elegant missile that the dark 
 night could allow to come to hand was pelted at him and me; in vain the Blue 
 leaders tried to turn the tumult to account; the mob, who being in a mood to 
 pelt, would have pelted the moon could they have got at her, forced them to re- 
 treat, covered with much obloquy and still more rotten egg. Smash, crash, 
 went half the windows in the place; ladies rushed from their couches in night- 
 caps and hysteria; policemen turned and fled, or used their truncheons in some 
 private grudge; not a Town and Gown row, even with Fighting Bob or the first 
 of the fancy in surplice and mortarboard to help us, ever beat it; and at last, in 
 sheer desperation, having satiated ourselves with enough hard hitting to last a 
 twelvemonth, Beau and I set spurs to our horses, and knocking down, at a low 
 computation, some three hundred men and boys, fought our way out of the 
 town, and galloped on to Hollywood in silence. 
 
 " By heaven ! " said Beau, through his set teeth, as he threw himself down 
 at last in the arm-chair of the dining-room, thoroughly done up for the first 
 time in his life "by Heaven ! if I'd known Fitz was such a cursed fool, I'd 
 have seen him at the devil before he'd made one of me too. The election's 
 lost, smashed, ruined. I may as well withdraw his name from the poll. To go 
 and disgrace himself before all the county: to lose a free borough for a girl, 
 when girl's are as plenty as blackberries and quite as worthless; to go and offend 
 his father, and his constituents, and his county, and everything worth consider- 
 ing, from a ridiculous fancy for a little flirt whom he'll be wishing at the devil 
 in twelve months' time two thousand pounds fifteen shillings and eightpence 
 gone for nothing ! I'm a cool man a very cool man generally but I confess
 
 G 34 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 this does get the better of me. How shall I ever forget, or how will all the 
 Cantitborough men forget, my being brought down here only tell them a parcel 
 of lies, and not succeeding through them even ? By Jupiter ! " and Beau sprang 
 up from his chair and dashed his hand down on the table with an impetus that 
 made the bottles and glasses on it leap up terrified into the air" by Jupiter ! I 
 swear I'll never speak to your madman of a brother, Frank, or to his con- 
 founded wife, as long as I live never ! I, the sharpest dog in all Lincoln's Inn, 
 to be done green like this ! " 
 
 With which pathetic summary poor Beau fell back again into his chair, and 
 opened his lips no more that night. The morrow dawned; the poll was opened; 
 Beau, like a plucky soldier sticking to his colors as long as there was a rag of 
 them left, rode into Cantitborough early, and I with him, and made his way to 
 the polling-booth in the midst of the yells, and shouts, and fiendish exclama- 
 tions, and laughter, and derision of the mob, who swarmed through the streets 
 still strewn with the debris of the midnight conflict. In vain did Beau seek a 
 hearing from his chief constituents; in vain did he try to gather round him the 
 committee; in vain did he try to rally round him even a few straggling 
 troopers, to make a stand with him in this Thermopylasan fix. In vain ! The 
 Cantitburghers had been duped, and when did ever Christian live with magna- 
 nimity enough to pardon that ? The news of Fitz's marriage had spread 
 throughout the town; the ladies were furious against Valencia for having 
 hooked the only handsome man who had been seen in Cantitborough for the 
 last ten years. They made their husbands, and sons, and fathers solemnly 
 promise to withdraw their vote from such a wicked fellow, and the husbands, 
 and sons, and fathers, some of them being in love with Val, others liking to 
 buy religious reputation cheap by siding with the pet parson, and others having 
 Fitz's money already in their pockets, determined to hold virtuously aloof from 
 the contest, vowed the required vow, and the tide of public adoration set 
 steadily in for Verdant and Le Hoop Smith. 
 
 The committees sat in their respective rooms, the mob round the booth 
 danced, and shouted, and yelled, in utter absence of police, the Peelers being 
 hors de combat from the past night's fray; Beau, and two or three staunch Lib- 
 erals, stood firm, with anxious visage and hearts sunk to zero. The tower 
 clock struck four the poll was closed the votes stood thus: 
 
 Verdant 550 
 
 Le Hoop Smith 310 
 
 Salter . 2O o 
 
 Fitzhardinge 6 
 
 Great was the exultation, great the clamor, that arose. You do not need 
 to be told how the Blue banners waved, and the Blue band, inflamed with
 
 BLUE AND YELLOW. 635 
 
 triumph and purl, began to play, and the Blue members bowed down to the 
 ground, and thanked the noble, intelligent, and generous community which had 
 returned them as their representatives, how the Blues insulted the Yellow, with 
 frightful contumely, and how the Yellows, few in flesh but strong in spirit, re- 
 turned the compliment; and how the Yellow banners struck up the Blue ban- 
 ners when the triumphal procession formed, and Blue heads went down under 
 Yellow fists, and Yellow heroes collapsed beneath Blue boots, and the remain- 
 ing half of the windows were smashed; and how the uproar was at its height, 
 when into the market-place, spurring on Rumpunch, flecked with foam, came 
 the head and root of it, by brother Fitz, as handsome, as devil-may-care, and 
 as cool as ever. 
 
 Louder grew the yells, wilder the shouts, fiercer the row; up in the air flew 
 the eggs and the mud and the sticks and the stones, and all the popular missiles 
 of the Great Unwashed; but steady as a rock stood Rumpunch under Fitz's 
 curb, and firm as a rock sat Fitz himself, in the midst of it. There's nothing 
 like pluck for pleasing or awing the canaille; it is the one thing they will ap- 
 preciate and revere. Their shouts hushed for a second, and they stopped in 
 their onslaught upon him. He took advantage of it, and held up his hand: 
 " Men, listen to me for a minute ! " 
 
 They did listen to him (Barnardiston had been vigorously assaulted by a 
 potboy, and had gone home to the Larches,) and Fitz went on: "I hear I 
 have lost my election. I am sorry for it, but I could scarcely expect otherwise; 
 and if I have preferred securing an election of another kind, I hope the con- 
 stituents of Cantitborough are all too gallant and chivalric gentlemen to dis- 
 agree with me." Here uprose immense cheering from a few, and laughter even 
 from the enraged community. " I can't alter your decision now, but I'll try to 
 merit a different one next time I contend for the honor of representing you. I 
 have no right to ask any favor at your hands; but, nevertheless, I am going to 
 ask two: the first, that you will clear my brother, Mr. Francis Fitzhardinge, and 
 my agent and friend, Mr. Beauclerc, of any imputation of knowing the true 
 cause of my absence, and any deliberate intention of concealing it by a lie. 
 The other is, that there may be no disunion or bloodshed on my behalf, and no 
 broken heads caused through my fault. Let us all agree to differ; let the vic- 
 torious go to their homes without insulting the vanquished, and the vanquished 
 without quarrelling with the conquerors for justly earned success. Let us all 
 part in good will, and let my friends go to the Ten Bells and drink my health 
 and that of my bride, if they will be so kind, with three times three ! " 
 
 It was a queer election speech, and without precedent, certainly, but in the 
 little antiquated borough it told admirably. Never before was seen such an 
 election, without doubt; but, somehow or other, Fitz, going into a new track, 
 and doing such a thing as had never been done before, got, all of a sudden,
 
 636 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 more heartily cheered, applauded, and hurraed than the successful candidates 
 themselves. The gentlemen of the town sneered, and ridiculed, and fumed 
 about his speech being most illegal, most unprecedented, most absurd, but the 
 Unwashed, only looking at the pluck, and the manliness of tone, and the flow- 
 ing taps of the Ten Bells, cheered him vociferously, and would have had the poll- 
 ing done over again if they could. Beau stood looking on, with his brow knit 
 like a Jupiter Tonans, and turned into the Ten Bells with a grunt. 
 
 " That fellow should have lived in the middle ages, with all his confounded 
 folly. And yet, devil take him, why can't one hate him ? " 
 
 " Will you forgive me, old boy ? " laughed Fitz, following him into a private 
 room twenty minutes after. 
 
 " Get out ! " growled Beau, yet looking lovingly on him nevertheless. "A 
 pretty fellow youare ! making yourself look like a fool, and everybody else. 
 I should have thought you more a man of sense than to run mad after a mere 
 pretty face. Two thousand five hundred pounds fifteen shillings and eight 
 pence gone for nothing ! " 
 
 " Never mind, old fellow," laughed Fitz. " Barnardiston would have 
 scented the ceremony, and forbidden it, on any other day; and as to waiting till 
 she was of age, quite out of the question. I should have killed myself before 
 half the time was out, so I shouldn't have been much use to the community or 
 the Commons; and if her little face is not better to look at than the Speaker's 
 why " 
 
 "Spare me that, spare me!" cried Beau. "I'll forgive you, but I really 
 can't stand her praises." 
 
 " Come and look at her, and you'll soon forgive her," said Fitz, taking out 
 his watch. " I've made an immense sacrifice to you, Beau, in leaving her at 
 one o'clock to ride over to this little owl of a town, whose animadversions are 
 much more honor than its praise. She's at Sandslope you know, that little 
 place by the sea, ten miles from here ; I took her there yesterday, and now I 
 must gallop back to her, poor little dear, or she'll be thinking the Blues and 
 Yellows have eaten me up. Ring the bell, Fanny, and ask White to saddle me 
 the best horse in his stables Rumpunch is dead beat; and I say, Beau," went 
 on Fitz, " don't be vexed, dear old boy. I will canvass for the next election 
 in earnest; and when you come over to Sandslope (we don't want you just yet), 
 if you don't say my poor pet is excuse enough for anything, why you'll be 
 made of granite." 
 
 " Hum! " grunted Beau, " I shall always hate her. But that don't matter; 
 give my compliments to her (not my congratulations, for she'll find out that 
 to have you for a husband is no matter for felicitation,) and tell her that my 
 sister the other day walked down Regeant Street, with ' Chaste and Elegant, 
 2/. ioj.' on her cloak, and that I hope she'll ticket herself the same, ' Mrs.
 
 BLUE AND YELLOW. 637 
 
 Randolph Fitzhardinge, value 25007. 155. 8^.,' for she has cost you that to a 
 certainty." 
 
 Apparently Fitz still thinks Valencia worth it, for he has never regretted his 
 hasty step. She did look excuse enough for anything when we saw her a week 
 or two after, when they quitted Pottleshire for the Lakes, leaving the county to 
 pull them to pieces at leisure; and she asked Beau's pardon so prettily and 
 penitentially for the mischief she had done, that Beau, being the very reverse 
 of a stoic, forgave her her sins, only made her solemnly promise to leave Fitz 
 unmolested when next he stood for a free borough. Beau was made amiable, 
 too, that morning, by hearing that Le Hoop Smith had been unseated for 
 bribery, and that Barnardiston was already rumored to repent having treated 
 so cavalierly such a high match for his daughter. 
 
 Caroline married Whitechurch; they quarrel night and day at home, but 
 abroad administer, in amicable concert enough, very big texts and very small 
 globules to their unlucky parishioners. Beau is supremely happy just at pres- 
 ent, Fitz having procured for him a recordership, long the objects of his desires. 
 And Fitz ? Well, Fitz writes to me to-day that he is going yachting in the 
 Levant, with Valencia and " three or four other pleasant fellows," that Val is 
 as bright as a sunbeam, and agrees with him in thinking the sherbet, laughter, 
 and delicious bags of the Ionian Isles much better than the odors of the 
 Thames in the senatorial halls of St Stephen's. 
 
 But though they make a jest of it, and think the one election well won and 
 the other well lost, I doubt if Cantitborough has ever forgotten, or will ever 
 forget, the strangest contest that an enlightened borough of the enlightened 
 nineteenth century ever beheld, and if the Cantitburghers will ever cease dis- 
 cussing in news, and drawing, and tap room the memorable strife of BLUE AND 
 YELLOW WHEN MY BROTHER FITZ STOOD FOR CANTITBOROUGH!.
 
 638 
 
 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 BELLES AND BLACKCOCK. 
 
 OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY. 
 
 AUGUST had come, and grouse and black game, wildfowl and snipe, salmon 
 and deer, became the prominent ideas in my mind, and I longed for the 
 advent of the i2th as fervently as any ^cornet for his moustaches, or young 
 lady for her first ball. I had been bored to death by the season. I am not a 
 marrying man, and the great emporium of good matches is of no use to me; 
 so, after concerts and crushes, dejeuners and dinners, the coulisses and the 
 Commons, I was thankful enough when, after having eaten my customary 
 whitebait, I was free to turn my thoughts to the bracken and the mist, the 
 corries and the glens of the dear far-away Western Highlands. 
 
 I was impatient to be off. I had my guns browned, bought a new Enfield, 
 overhauled my rods, got no end of new flies, and of course felt discontented 
 with my kennel, though some of my pointers and setters are as good as any on 
 the hill-side, and Ascot, Moustache, and Puseyite cannot be beat either among 
 the turnips or the heather. My cousin Dyneley (Graham Cyril Beauchamp 
 Vavasour, tenth Baron Dyneley, according to that gourmand for strawberry- 
 leaves, Mr. Burke) had been asked to shoot over Steinberg's moor with him, 
 but at the eleventh hour the poor old Viscount had a fit of apoplexy; some 
 said from an exces in truffles and Tokay at a Star and Garter dinner he gave 
 the Aquilina. He was ordered to " les eaux," and condemned to a regimen, 
 and, bemoaning his bitter fate, despairingly told Dyneley to fill the box as he 
 pleased. So Dyneley asked me to go down with him and Willoughby of the 
 i4th (Light Dragoons) we always call him Claude, because there are no end 
 of Willoughbys in the army and one or two other fellows, to make up our 
 party to bag blackcock and stalk deer on poor Steinberg's moor at Glenmist, 
 in Argyleshire. 
 
 Dyneley and I had thrashed Bargees, beat the Westminster, pounded the
 
 BELLES AND BLACKCOCK. 639 
 
 Harrow boys, and pulled to Putney together years ago when we were young 
 bloods at Eton; and I have had many a day's sport with him since, here and 
 there, among the stubble at home, sticking pigs in the jungle, buffalo-hunting 
 in the prairies, going after elephants in Ceylon, and camping out to net ortolans 
 in Scinde. He has been fond of vagabondizing (so have I, entre nous,} and he 
 is known all over the world as well as Wortley Montagu was, and can make 
 himself equally at home in an Arab tent or in a European court; sleeping under 
 his horse's legs in the wilds of the Pampas, or flirting with a Spanish dona in 
 some luxurious palace in Madrid. 
 
 Dyneley is poor for a peer, though rich compared to such fellows as Wil- 
 loughby, who has not money enough to keep his horses. Dyneley's governor 
 went deucedly fast, and spent every shilling the entail would let him lay his 
 hand upon. To be a rich peer, is decidedly a very jolly birth- right; but a 
 poor one I would as soon be one of the grooms about the Yard. Dyneley 
 thought so too; so, after he had gone fast also, he shut up his place in Hamp- 
 shire to retrench by itself, sold the town-house, took his yacht Aphrodite and 
 wandered over the face of the earth, seeing life in all its possible phases, firing 
 a book or two now and then at the world, getting a reputation for cleverness 
 and eccentricity (everything is called eccentric that is at all out of the beaten 
 track), and at five-and-thirty came back from his travels to be admired by some, 
 cavilled at by others, likened by young ladies to Lara and Manfred, and to be 
 fete as a singular melange of Gordon Gumming, Lamartine, and Layard. 
 
 He was, however, utterly unlike any of the three, as it happened. 
 
 " Well, Monti, are all the traps ready ? " said he, when I wtnt to see him 
 one morning at Maurigy's, where he had been staying ever since he and the 
 Aphrodite had come home. He was swinging himself in a rocking-chair, smok- 
 ing a hookah he had brought from Cairo, his staghound Mousquetaire lying at 
 his feet. Willoughby chanced to be breakfasting with him, and was lying full 
 length on a sofa. He used to be nicknamed Bella in his troop, for he has all 
 the beauty of his mother who made a great row when she came out, but ended 
 by marrying for love upon nothing, which aerial inheritance she bequeathed to 
 poor Claude, with her soft almond eyes and fair hair. He is a tall, broad- 
 chested fellow, but Dyneley, swinging there in his rocking-chair, though not so 
 big, beats him hollow in sinew and power; and his face, with its haughty, pale, 
 refined features, and dark eyes that can soften and flash wonderfully when 
 they are moved has a greater charm for women than even Claude's, though he 
 is called the Crusher, from his merciless slaughter of the pretty game game 
 which he kills as I have shot parrots in India to leave where they fell. " If 
 you are ready," continued Dyneley, " I think we may as well start. Vere tells 
 me he never shot over better ground. There's a salmon river, plenty of snipe 
 in the moss, and Fitzcorrie's forest joins the moor. I know him intimately;
 
 640 OUIDA'S WORKS, 
 
 he'll let us kill some stags, to say nothing of the out-lying ones. Shall we 
 travel all night ? May as well." 
 
 " For Heaven's sake, Dyneley, no ! " cried Willoughby, with more energy 
 than he often threw into things. "It's all very well for you fellows, with your 
 muscles of iron, that that clever chap in " Guy Livingstone " writes so much 
 about, to talk in that barbarous style. You, who've worn sheepskins with 
 Bedouins, and crossed the Fjord with Laps, may find fun in such monstrosi- 
 ties, but I never tire myself if I can help it; and as to cramping my legs by 
 travelling all night, I'll be shot if I do it, not if you offer me half a million 
 at my journey's end." 
 
 " Haven't half a million to offer," said Dyneley, setting down some cold 
 game to Mousquetaire. " It's exactly the sum I want myself, and when I find 
 it I'll open Vauxley, and take my seat in the Lords. But I shouldn't have 
 thought you such a lazy dog, Claude, last February three years, when you 
 pegged that tiger at Darjeeling." 
 
 " That ? " said Claude. " Oh ! that was nothing. I wanted amusement, 
 and the brute turned up. No ! I'm a very lazy man. As I'm a poor devil, I 
 must stick in the Cavalry till I'm providentially shot in some scrimmage; but 
 if I were rich, I'd live among roses and myrtles in Arabia Felix, with a harem 
 and a hookah, lots of sherbet, and some Nautch girls, and never stir all 
 day." 
 
 "I tried that once when I was in the East," said Dyneley, "and got in- 
 tensely bored after a little while; and so would you. Sofa cushions, narghile, 
 and alme, made me keenly feel the truth of ' toujours perdrix.' I thought the 
 girls delightful at first, but for a continuance one wants something besides 
 ankles and almond eyes. They never open their lips for any better purpose 
 than to show their white teeth, and you know I've a weakness for brains." 
 
 "Do you find yourself any better served in that crmmodity by English 
 belles than by Turkish bayaderes ? I don't." 
 
 " No! " said Dyneley, after a long pull at his hookah; " women are women 
 all the world over. Whether the question is rouge or betel-nut, rings on the 
 fingers, or rings through the nose, women are born, live, and die solely for the 
 'toilette.' Last March, when I was staying down at Fairlie's, I noticed, one 
 wet day, that his wife and Fanny Villiers, being thrown on their own resources, 
 talked on for five consecutive hours, without stopping, of DRESS; how 
 splendidly somebody was got up on her presentation, how badly somebody 
 else was dressed at the Handel concert, what one woman's diamonds possibly 
 cost, how little, they knew for a certainty, another had given for her Honiton, 
 consoling themselves with the hope that ' Adelaide's' pearls were paste, pulling 
 their friends to pieces, cheapening this and envying that, till, by George! it 
 really made me sad to think with what bitter truth our mothers, and sisters,
 
 BELLES AND BLACKCOCK. G41 
 
 and wives, and daughters might write on their lily-white brows, ' Rubbish shot 
 here ! "' 
 
 " Their heads ain't more empty than their hearts are icicles," muttered 
 Claude stroking his silky chestnut moustache. " I've flirted, I daresay, as much 
 as most men, but, as Dick Swiveller says, ' I never loved a dear gazelle but 
 it was sure to marry a market-gardener.' A girl who was mad about me when 
 she was skating in a black hat and a red petticoat at Christmas, I was certain 
 to see the season after selling herself at St George's in Mechlin and orange- 
 flowers." 
 
 " My dear fellow, you're not singular," laughed Dyneley. " I remember 
 having very tender meetings in orange-groves as poetical, as you could wish 
 with a handsome Granadine, who vowed her heart would break when we parted, 
 there not being room for her in the yacht. Twelve months after, touching at 
 Frangerola, I went to see after my doila, feeling a friendly interest in her; lo ! 
 she'd married a lean old alcade a fortnight after my departure; and beautiful 
 Venetians, whom I left inconsolable, I was certain to find provided with my sub- 
 stitute when I and the Aphrodite called there again. But about starting to- 
 morrow; we may as well go at once. Curtis and Romer won't come down till 
 the 2oth. If you like to sleep in Glasgow, Claude, do. I shall push on; I hate 
 dawdling when I'm once en route. What of that new dog of yours, Monti, do 
 you think he'll stand the heather? Pointers can't often. My kennel's in first- 
 rate condition. You've never seen Mousquetaire pull down a stag. Empress 
 is second best, and Eros and Royal are good working dogs." 
 
 We talked on, as hard as a lot of girls talking over a wedding, of the re- 
 spective merits of Enfield and Purdey, rifle powders and cartridges, spoons, 
 governors, and flies, and all the thousand necessaries of the moors; comparing 
 notes of the royals we had stalked and the salmon we had played, with many a 
 reminiscence of a good day's sport wound up with a haunch of roe or grilled 
 blackcock, and washed down with steaming tumblers of Farintosh or foaming 
 pints of Prestonpans. 
 
 Start we did the next morning, and slept at Glasgow, too, for Dyneley, 
 though he is given to making out that he is a profound egotist, generally gives 
 up his own wishes to other people's. We went on to Greenock early the next 
 morning, and steamed up Loch Fine to Inverary, where Steinberg's head-keeper 
 was waiting for us with a dog-cart and some other traps to take us on the 
 twenty miles to Glenmist. 
 
 " Delicious ! isn't it ? " said Dyneley, looking down into a trout stream as 
 he drove along through the mist, smoking vigorously. " Don't you long to be 
 flinging a fly in there? " 
 
 " De licious ! well, I don't know," murmured Claude, wringing the wet 
 from his long moustaches, " people's tastes differ. I can't say myself that I 
 
 VOL. III. 21
 
 6 42 OUIDA'S WORKS. 
 
 ever thought being as moist as an otter or a Scarborough boatman was any 
 peculiar state of blessedness, but it may be one lives and learns." 
 
 "Ton my life, Claude, to hear you talk, if I hadn't seen you pig-sticking 
 up in Scinde, I should think you deserved the name of ' Bella,' you indolent 
 dog," said Dyneley, whipping up the mare. 
 
 " So I do," drawled Claude. " There's not a handsomer man in the Service. 
 All the women will tell you that." 
 
 " The almond-paste and kalydor are all you think about, I suppose ? " 
 
 " My dear fellow, I don't use anything so common. I've a private recipe 
 for cosmetique that I wouldn't suffer out of my hands for half Barclay's, bad 
 as I want tin. I wouldn't mind letting you have a little; it'll keep the sun from 
 bronzing you." 
 
 " Don't* be such a fool," laughed Dyneley. " Bah ! if I thought a girl used 
 either cosmetique or rouge, I wouldn't kiss her now if she were as beautiful as 
 Omphale. Would you ? " 
 
 " Can't say what I mightn't do under temptation," said Claude, piously. 
 " I'm afraid I haven't always forsworn actresses and danseuses. Have you ? 
 And, as my sister Julia paints, I've had to kiss rouge through a sense of duty 
 sometimes." ' 
 
 "Julia must be over thirty; she's only a year younger than you, if I re- 
 member?" 
 
 " No, poor thing ! She's flirted from Dublin to Devonport, and from 
 Canada to Calcutta, all to no purpose. She can't even hook a cornet." 
 
 " She must be very stupid, then," said Dyneley. " Between the ages of 
 eighteen and twenty-two I can distinctly remember being engaged to eight 
 different women all bond fide affairs, too rings, and hair, and all the rest of 
 it. Boys always take to old women, too; the sort of women from whom, in 
 after years, they'd flee to the uttermost ends of the earth. In my opinion, 
 there ought to be a law to prevent young fellows committing themselves. The 
 sylph in white muslin that they adore when they're one-and-twenty, they find 
 when they're one-and-thirty to be a common-place, and, alas ! too often fat or 
 red-nosed lady, who looks old enough to be their mother, and who, if they've 
 the misfortune to be tied to her, clings round their neck like a brickbat round 
 a drowning dog's." 
 
 " Bravo, Dyneley ! You're positively speaking philosophy and truth, two 
 combinations rarely seen on this earth," said I. " Are those the motives that 
 have kept you from matrimony hitherto ? " 
 
 " I ? No. I shall marry for money if ever I do sell myself to the highest 
 bidder, to keep up the title. That's what you'll end in, too, Claude, eh ?" 
 
 u No," answered Willoughby, sharply, for a wonder, " I shall never marry 
 at all."
 
 BELLES AND BLACKCOCK. 04:? 
 
 "Quite wise, if you can live without it. Here's the lodge; snug little place, 
 isn't it ? I wish poor old Steinberg were here to welcome us. I daresay we 
 shall find some grilled grouse waiting for us. Steinberg always tells Alister to 
 shoot some a few days before the i2th." 
 
 The grilled grouse was waiting for us, and a good fire, too, for the mist 
 made it a chilly night. Alister (the head keeper) gave us good accounts of 
 the moor. The broods of grouse were large; there were plenty of home-bred 
 snipe in the moss, and fowl in the pools, and salmon, and jack, and trout in the 
 river. Fitzcorrie was expected daily down at Glengrouse, and one or two out- 
 lying stags had been seen on our moor. Altogether, there was good sport in 
 prospect; and when we had done dinner, and sat round the fire in Steinberg's 
 cozy fauteuils, smoking Cavendish and drinking toddy, and listening to the 
 witty, graphic, satiric sketches with which Dyneley can, when he chooses, delight 
 a mess-table, charm a drawing-room, and even amuse a club-room, we felt as 
 contented and comfortable as any three men could, and rejoiced exceedingly 
 at having escaped drums, crushes, concerts, manoeuvring chaperones, and 
 inveigling belles, to enjoy ourselves on the moors, in the dear, free, sans gene 
 bachelor life. 
 
 II. 
 
 WE BAG BLACKCOCK AND MARK BELLES. 
 
 " EXTRAORDINARY what a deal one can do under pressure,' ' said Willoughby 
 when we were discussing Loch Fine herrings and a lot of other Highland deli- 
 cacies at six o'clock the following morning. "I never in my life breakfast 
 before twelve up in town or in barracks, except on Derby Day, and then every 
 one makes an effort, and sacrifices his natural term of rest. My cousin, little 
 Flo, and her mother came to see me the other day at Knightsbridge at two 
 o'clock, after their luncheon, dear primitive things ! I wasn't up; and I wrote 
 her word I was very sorry for her disappointment, but I didn't know it was her 
 habit to call upon people in the middle of the night." 
 
 " You're keener on the hills, old chap, or you wouldn't make a very heavy 
 bag," laughed Dyneley. " Your a prize specimen, Claude, of the militaire 
 noble all dolce, bouquet, and ennui at home, all pluck, and game, and true 
 as steel when you're marking birds in the open, or Caffres in a skirmish." 
 
 Claude bowed down to his plate at the compliment. " Well, you know 
 when one's blood is up one likes to polish off the devils handsomely; if I've 
 any very great impetus I don't so much mind tiring myself." 
 
 " There's an impetus strong enough for any man. Come along," said Dyne-
 
 6 44 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 ley, springing up, a/id going to the window, through which we saw a whole 
 crowd of keepers, gillies, pointers, retrievers, terriers, stag-hounds, setters, the 
 old white pony in the midst of them, with cold black game, sandwiches, Bass 
 and whisky on his back, for our luncheon when we'd shot up to the falls. By 
 Jove, such sport as we had that day was worth twenty guineas an hour! I'm 
 sure, to look calmly at a future time, when one will get out of condition, and the 
 gun will begin to feel heavy, and gout will make one hobble over the heather, 
 and asthma force one to puff and blow, requires more philosophy than all the 
 Greeks put together could have mustered if they'd ever known the pleasures of 
 the moors. Talk of Socrates smiling at the hemlock, and Seneca inspecting the 
 chopping up of his own veins! they are nothing to contemplating the days 
 when, tied to one's arm-chair, we shall recall the corries and the glens as joys 
 that are no more for us. We had splendid sport that day; there was a 
 Highland mist, (that in Hyde Park, or among the English turnips, we should 
 have thought a heavy shower;) a pull up a hill of some eight hundred feet; 
 rocks sharp as needles to scramble over, and deep burns to wade through, and 
 underwood as thick as jhow jungle, but we never had primer fun in our lives; 
 and Claude lazy dog, as he'd make himself out enjoyed himself more, wet, 
 stiff, and dead-beat in the moss, and marshes, and brushwood of Glenmist, 
 than he would have been in the most luxurious spot you could put him in. 
 
 He and I made very good use of our time, and knocked down grouse and 
 the black game, besides snipe, teal and a few hares, right and left. But Dyne- 
 ley took the shine off us. Alister looked on at him with as much delight as that 
 canny Scotsman could ever be stirred into; and, 'pon my honor, he does handle 
 a gun beautifully. To be sure, he's had such practice as few men have, and 
 the East and the West could tell you many a tale of his deeds, camping out in 
 the Punjab jungles and the primeval woods, and I daresay a better shot than he 
 was never seen on the moors; he does it all so coolly and yet so untiringly, too, 
 putting no end of energy into it, yet never half as fagged as other men are. 
 
 The mist had cleared off, and the sun came out, by the time we reached the 
 falls, and found the old pony, the plaids, and the Bass, and stretched ourselves 
 on the heather to have a pipe and enjoy our luncheon. 
 
 "Well, this is pleasant, decidedly, but I doubt if it's philosophic," said 
 Willoughby, taking a pull at the mountain dew, " when one looks upon it in a 
 serious light. I doubt if three sensible men, all over thirty, coming four hun- 
 dred miles on purpose to fatigue, exhaust, and take it out of themselves in every 
 possible way, for the express purpose of putting some shot into unhappy birds, 
 or crawling through bush and briar, after the manner of the serpent, that was 
 more subtle than any beast of the field I doubt, if taken philosophically there 
 is not something " 
 
 " Hang philosophy ! " laughed Dyneley. " What's in Plato, Lucullus,
 
 BELLES AND BLACKCOCK. 
 
 645 
 
 Swedenborg, Kant, Whewell, Stuart Mill, that will do a man half the good, 
 body and mind, that a good day on the hills does ? You know I've read pretty 
 well as much as most fellows, though I don't go in for a classic, and when I 
 get my half million, one of the first things I look after at Vauxley will be the 
 library; but I do say that a man who knows how to handle his rifle and his rod 
 is worth fifty of your regular bookworms. I remember, when I was at Granta, 
 fellows who used to sap tremendously, green tea, Greek roots, and all the rest 
 of it. Their mathematics were something wonderful; their whole brain was 
 one giant Euclid; they were a walking classical dictionary, and spent months 
 debating the derivation of a word. What were they worth in the world ? 
 Babies in practical knowledge; natural history or every-day politics a dead 
 letter to them. Put them across the Channel, they could not muster words 
 to ask for their dinner; and, tried in any manly sport, a boy from Eton would 
 laugh them to scorn. Bah ! what are such men worth ? " 
 
 " Nothing, most noble lord, in my opinion," said Claude. "Pity you're 
 not in the House, Graham: you'd be as eloquent as Sheil or Bernal Osborne." 
 
 "On the uses of the moors? that would be a novel debate, certainly; quite 
 as sensible as the Maynooth and certain others, perhaps. I tell you, when I 
 find my half million, I shall take my proxy out of Lord John's hands. But it's 
 no good putting on a peer's robes with a miserable six or eight thousand a year. 
 I prefer absenting myself and Bohemianizing to going in for certain expenses 
 which I have no money to meet. By George ! there's Empress pointing," said 
 he, jumping up. " Good old thing she is. Steady, Empress, steady. There, 
 we shall have them now beauifully. Whisky, Whisky, you little devil, con- 
 found you ! " 
 
 Whisky, a young dog of Steinberg's that had never been on the heather be- 
 fore, had spoiled the chance of a splendid brood of birds. Dyneley's eyes 
 flashed; he's impetuous and passionate sometimes, and Whisky's fault was very 
 provoking to a keen sportsman, remember; he raised his gun to the dog, and 
 would have shot him in the heat of the minute, but Alister stopped him. 
 " Whisky's unco young, my lord, and he don't know no better yet, poor brute." 
 Dyneley shook him off with a haughty gesture I tell you he can be fiery on 
 occasion but after a minute or two he cooled down, and, turned to Alister 
 with his frank, sunny smile. " You were right, and I was wrong. I am glad 
 you stopped me in a cruelty which I certainly should have been ashamed of and 
 sorry for afterwards." 
 
 I heard Alister say to my servant, a few days after, that " the laird was a bit 
 fiery, but he was a true gentleman and a leal heart, God bless him ! " to which 
 my man heartily agreed, tossing down some usquebaugh in his honor. 
 
 We had first-rate sport for the next few days; the weather was not the finest, 
 but the rain kept the streams up, there was a good speat in the river, and
 
 646 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 Dyneley, who is never happier than when whipping the water, hooked and 
 landed a thirty-pound salmon. We bagged plenty of ducks and snipe and some 
 few ptarmigan. We had a battue of mountain hares when Curtis and Romer 
 joined us, and we killed a hare and a two-year-old buck, and found the slot of 
 another, which we lost by his heading to the forest. 
 
 " Fitzcorrie'll come down to-morrow," said Dyneley one morning, when the 
 letter-bag came in. " Poor old fellow, he's been kept up in town, chained to 
 his gout-stool through this splendid August. He'll fill the Castle, of course, 
 and he hopes we shall have a good many days with him in his forest. I shan't 
 go and stay up there, though; will you? There'll be his wife and several other 
 women, and when one is dead-beat it's pleasanter to throw oneself on a sofa 
 and have a pipe than to dress for a nine-o'clock dinner, and waltz and talk non- 
 sense to the girls. You don't do justice either to the moors or the flirtations. 
 Fitzcorrie takes a most paternal interest in my affairs; he's always wanting me 
 to marry pour cause, he'd like to have me in the House to support his meas- 
 ures and he keeps a look-out for heiresses on my behalf. He will bring one 
 down with him to Glengrouse. Hark what he says: ' I have found exactly what 
 you want, my dear fellow. You have been so little in England, that probably 
 you may not know her. She is a belle, very accomplished, and worth twenty 
 thousand a year. Her father was a Brummagem peer created by Peel; but we 
 anciens pauvres cannot afford to be fastidious. You can have her for the ask- 
 ing, I don't doubt. Douglas Jerrold's tillocracy will give anything for your 
 quarterings. She's coming to stay with Florence, so you must mind and mark 
 something besides blackcock, for I really think either Adeliza or Constance 
 
 Vandeleur would be an admirable match for you Hallo, Claude, what's 
 
 the matter ? don't you feel well ? " 
 
 " Yes, thank you," said Claude, hastily taking a draught out of one of the 
 great silver tankards filled with XXX. " It's this confounded arm of mine 
 that the ball broke at Mejeerut; I daresay the gun strained it a little." 
 
 " Ah! broken limbs are the very deuce. I could almost blow my brains out 
 when the neuralgia comes on in the leg that got the grape into it when you and 
 I charged together, old boy, on those miserable little Caff re wretches," said 
 Charlie Curtis. 
 
 " Let Sandy carry your gun, Claude, up to the pass, for it's a good five 
 miles to the spot where they have seen the deer," said Dyneley. " Romer, do 
 you know this prize young lady?" 
 
 " Yes, I've seen her; everybody, except nomades like you, who forsake 
 Christian lands to stalk to and fro in the deserts. Her grandfather was a Bir- 
 mingham man it's disgusting what a set of snobs the peerage is getting 
 there's no end of tin in the family, produce of Japan tea-trays or electro-plate, 
 I forget which; and she is a good coup perhaps the best, as far as money
 
 BELLES AND BLACKCOCK. G47 
 
 goes, of the season so give her your coronet, pray, and ask us all down to 
 Vauxley for Christmas. By the way, you know her, don't you, Claude ? You 
 can tell us all about her. Isn't there a sister a co-heiress ? " 
 
 " I believe so." 
 
 " Believe so ? when you stayed in the same house with 'em at Somerleyton 
 three weeks last February ? " 
 
 "Well done, old fellow!" cried Curtis, laughing. "The XXX is too 
 strong for you, pauvre garcon, or have you met some Highland Mary here, 
 who's turned your brain ? Which is it ? 
 
 " Neither," said Claude, in his old lazy tone. "But my dear Charlie, how 
 can you possibly expect me to remember two girls I met full six months ago ? 
 I should want scores of memorandum-books merely to enter all the women 
 that make love to me. Sufficient for the day is the flirtation thereof, and to be 
 called on to recollect mere acquaintances is too great a run upon any man's 
 memory." 
 
 " Well," said I, " you can tell us, at any rate, what Fitzcorrie's find is like. 
 Never pretend, Claude, that the color of a woman's eyes, or the size of her 
 ankle, ever goes out of your mind." 
 
 " Can't indeed," answered Claude. " Blue eyes chase black, hazel succeed 
 gray, in very quick succession in my memory. We poor soldiers, you know, 
 learn to be inconstant in our own defence. If we couldn't leave London belles 
 for bright eyes at Exeter, Exeter eyes for Devonport waltzers, and Devonport 
 waltzers, in their turn, for Yorkshire Die Vernons, with a proper amount of 
 philosophy, our hearts would be broken in as many pieces as a coquette has 
 different locks of hair. I say, Dyneley, we must be off if we want to stalk that 
 buck. Mousquetaire will pull him down if any hound can. I envy you that dog. 
 
 Fitzcorrie came down the day after to Glengrouse, one of the finest estates 
 in Scotland, with his Viscountess, a haughty young beauty, Constance and 
 Adeliza Vandeleur, and several men, some of them the best shots in the three 
 kingdoms. Fitzcorrie, one of the keenest debaters in the House, is as fresh as 
 a boy again when he gets upon the moors. He is very fond of Dyneley, too, 
 and gave us all carte blanche to his forests, and a general invitation to go when- 
 ever we liked to the Castle, where dinner was on the table every night at nine, 
 when we were not too done up to consider ladies' smiles too dearly bought by 
 the trouble of a toilette, and to prefer a haunch and some Farintosh in bachelor 
 freedom at our snug little lodge. 
 
 The first day Dyneley and I went up alone. Glengrouse lay just across the 
 river, and we rode there in twenty minutes by a short cut. Claude was too 
 fagged, he said, to endure the exertion of putting himself en grande tenue, and 
 Curtis and Romer followed his example. We found a good sized party. 
 Dyneley took Constance Vandeleur in to dinner, and talked to her a good deal,
 
 64 g QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 studying her with a keen, critical glance. She quite deserved her character of 
 a belle: she had the Irish beauty, dark hair and blue eyes; she was just middle 
 height, graceful and natural, with nothing of the parvenue about her. Adeliza 
 was handsome too, but much more haughty and self-conscious; she came down, 
 however, to Dyneley, whom she tried to charm away from her sister, for Gra- 
 ham (I like to call him sometimes by the old boyish name) has a very soft, 
 gentle way with women, and very amusing conversation ; besides, his wandering 
 life, his known talents, and the originality and daring of what he had written, 
 threw a sort of aroma of interest round him. 
 
 " Well, what do you think of your proposed wife ? " said I, as we trotted 
 slowly home, smoking, in the warm August night. 
 
 "Do as well as another, don't you think?" 
 
 "Probably; but that is not very enthusiastic." 
 
 " Enthusiasm is gone by for me. I've done with it, and I don't expect ever 
 to be roused into it; indeed, I don't wish it." 
 
 I laughed. " You make yourself out very philosophic, Gra, but it seems to 
 me that when you have your mind set upon anything, you're much as impatient 
 and energetic as you were at Eton." 
 
 "In sport, very likely; and if I resolve upon any step, I do it at once. But 
 I assure you, Monti, life has trampled out all my romance and so best. I am 
 a practical man now. I expect nothing from people, so I shall never be dis- 
 appointed, as I was in my green youth, when I indulged myself, like a simple- 
 ton, in illusions and ideals, and such unprofitable ware. I think I shall marry 
 one of these Vandeleurs; the bargain will be even. I have the good blood, 
 they the money. Of the two, I prefer the blue-eyed one. Constance, isn't 
 she called ? She is more lively and less dignified; I hate a dignified woman. 
 She will be a graceful mistress for Vauxely. What do I want more ? " 
 
 " ' Love,' poets and women would tell you." 
 
 " Love, my dear fellow ? I never expect to love my wife, do you ? We 
 none of us do in these prudent days. I have never seen any one worth loving, 
 as perhaps I could love a woman; nor do I wish to be roused into anything so 
 stromy. This day ten years I shall care no more for Constance or her sister, 
 if I marry either, than I do now; but either of them will keep up my title, 
 head my table, make me an accomplished wife, and, as I am tired of vagabond- 
 izing, I shall absorb myself in political life, dashed with some good sporting, 
 and shall be a very happy man, as the world's happiness goes. Here we are. 
 I'm very tired, and shall be glad to turn in. We don't want any opiates to- 
 night. Bonne nuit, old fellow. How grave you look, Montague; one would 
 fancy you were thinking of marriage yourself ! " 
 
 I did not like, somehow or other, the idea of Dyneley's selling himself. I 
 knew his nature, and I thought But, however, I remembered this is a barter
 
 BELLES AND BLACKCOCK. 649 
 
 that our rigid moralist society sanctions, so I troubled my head about it no 
 more, but put the light out and turned in. 
 
 During the next few days, Dyneley, Curtis, and I dined once or twice at the 
 Castle. Constance was very accomplished, and sang splendidly, and would 
 have been charming but for a distrait manner at times that made her spirits as 
 variable as English weather. We could not get Claude up to Glengrouse; one 
 day he was dead-beat; another, his arm had the tic in it; another, he went up 
 in the evening to the Upper Water to fish; and two others, he separated him- 
 self from us about noon, and we never saw any more of him till nine or ten, 
 when he came in after a stalk or a hunt for ptarmigan that would have shut up 
 any fellow with less iron nerves than this disciple of the dolce. 
 
 " I wish I could get Claude up here," Dyneley was saying to Lady Fitzcorrie 
 one night. " He has a beautiful voice, and would help you with those duets. 
 He is a dear old fellow, but he is such an incorrigibly lazy dog, and really, 
 after the day's hard work, his arm that was broken by a spent shot pains him a 
 good deal, and prevents his enjoying society." 
 
 Constance, standing close by playing with a spaniel, looked up. " What 
 did you say, Lord Dyneley ? Did you speak to me ? " 
 
 " I was saying that my friend Willoughby would make you a good tenor. 
 But you know him, I think. Claude Willoughby of the i4th ? " 
 
 Constance started like a young fawn I thought of it long afterwards and 
 bent over the spaniel, while her voice trembled: "Captain Willoughby? 
 Where is he ? Is he here ? " 
 
 " He is staying with us at Glenmist," said Dyneley, without noticing her 
 particularly. " I will drag him here somehow, to-morrow, if his arm will give 
 him any peace." 
 
 The young lady flushed up and said, rapidly crossing the room to the con- 
 servatory before she could have an answer, " If we are such betes noires to 
 him, pray do not try to force him here against his will. Do you encourage 
 such cavalier treatment, Florence ? " 
 
 " Oh ! " said Lady Fitzcorrie, shrugging her snowy shoulders, " with the 
 vieille cour of the Trianon all courtesy died out in Europe. That rude fop, 
 Brummel, mistook impertinence for wit, and his disciples out-Herod Herod." 
 Constance had disappeared in the labyrinths of the conservatory, and left 
 Dyneley to conduct the defence, which that witty conversationalist sustained 
 very ably. 
 
 The next day we were to have a grand drive, and Fitzcorrie, ready to like 
 Willoughby as Dyneley liked him, would not let him off. The day was fine, 
 the wind just right, and there was a magnificent herd of fifty or more stags and 
 hinds. We killed five of them. Dyneley's was a royal; he had wounded him 
 mortally before Mousquetaire pulled him down. Claude's and Fiztcorrie's had
 
 650 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 nine points each; and altogether, I should say five finer stags were never killed 
 in the same drive. We all went to the Castle to dinner; Fitzcorrie, as I said, 
 would not let Claude off, spite of the tic; he told him Lafitte and Rudesheimer 
 were the best cures for neuralgia, and Claude had to accede. I could not imagine 
 why he shunned the Castle; for no sport was generally so agreeable to the 
 " Crusher " as a new flirtation, and he would leave any quarry to go after the 
 beaux yeux. As we crossed the park in front of the house, we saw the Vis- 
 countess and the Vandeleurs taking a stroll before dinner on the terrace, with 
 two or three other ladies staying there. 
 
 " There," said Fitzcorrie, lifting his bonnet to them, " don't you think, 
 Willoughby, that I've chosen well for our friend ? That's the future Lady 
 Dyneley; the one in white silk walking with Florence. Is she not really very 
 pretty ? " 
 
 The Light Dragoon's soft black eyes flashed, and he answered rather inco- 
 herently, stroking his chestnut moustache, something to the effect that near 
 Lady Fitzcorrie no one could hope to shine. 
 
 The old Viscount smiled. He was proud of his handsome wife, who, like 
 Themistocles's lady, ruled the ruler of Athens. 
 
 The Viscountess came down the steps laughing at some flowery speech of 
 Romer's to her; Adeliza smiled most generously at Dyneley, and began to in- 
 quire about our sport. Constance stood still, playing with the fuchsia in a vase; 
 all the color was out of her cheeks, but that might be the heat. It came back 
 in a rush, though, as Claude lifted his cap to her, spoke a few words to Adeliza, 
 and then leant on his gun in a silence and indifference very unlike the tender- 
 ness and empressment of his general manner with the sex. Dyneley put his 
 arm through his and pulled him up the steps toward her. 
 
 " Lady Constance, here is your Giuglini. You've heard him, I daresay, so 
 I needn't advertise his vocal powers; but I wish I had them, for when I am 
 hard up, as I too often am, I would have a concert at the Crystal Palace and 
 replenish my exchequer." 
 
 Claude's eyes were fixed on the girl with a look I could not exactly trans- 
 late. He laughed lightly, however. 
 
 " My dear fellow, you'd make me out a second Sim Reeves; but Lady Con- 
 stance knows better than to believe you that is, if her memory does Somerley- 
 ton the honor of remembering any of the evenings there." 
 
 This simple remark had great effect on Constance. Though she was a 
 belle, and had just run the gauntlet of her first season, and should, therefore, 
 have been self-possessed and impassive, her face glowed very couleur de rose, 
 she pulled the poor fuchsia mercilessly. 
 
 " You appear to regard Somerleyton as a very dim era of the past," she 
 said, quickly. " I have a sufficiently good memory to be able to go back as
 
 BELLES AND BLACKCOCK, 651 
 
 far as last March. You, however, have probably things of newer interest to 
 chase it out of your mind." 
 
 " I am a poor cavalry man, Lady Constance, with nothing but my holster 
 pistols and charger; and as I am sure of being forgotten, I am glad enough to 
 teach myself to forget," answered Claude, smiling, as he calmly stroked his 
 moustaches, and played with a setter's ears. 
 
 "You would throw Hermoine's name, then, into the fountain of oblivion 
 without mercy?" said the young beauty through her white teeth, but laughing 
 carelessly too. 
 
 "Why not? Hermione would throw mine." 
 
 " Constance," cried Lady Fitzcorrie, " come and look at Dyneley's dog. 
 This is the famous Mousquetaire; isn't he a fine fellow ?" 
 
 Constance bent over Mousquetaire, praising and caressing him most sedu- 
 lously; and her sister joined us, glancing at Mousquetaire's master, who, lean- 
 ing on his rifle, with his cap drawn down on his white forehead, looked, as I 
 heard a young lady with light eyes whisper, "just like the dear Corsair." As 
 we looked at the Vandeleurs and Mousquetaire, I daresay we all thought of 
 "Love me, love my dog." 
 
 Dyneley took Constance in to dinner, and made himself charming, as he 
 could when he liked, better than any man I know. Claude sat opposite to 
 them, and talked ceaselessly to the young lady with light eyes, whose intellect, 
 being of narrowed limits, took his random wit literally, and, I daresay, put a 
 mem. of him in her Diary with the green velvet cover and patent embossed lock, 
 interlining all her adjectives: " Sat next Captain Willoughby. He has beautiful 
 black eyes and fair hair, but is rather peculiar. I have heard of officers so 
 shocked by the scene of the battle-field, that they have never quite recovered 
 their senses. He tells me that he has so bad a memory, that the day after 
 Balaklava he was obliged to ask his servant how he got the cut on his sword 
 arm, I cannot believe it. I noticed Constance look at him very oddly while he 
 was talking to me. I hope he is not mad, he is so handsome." 
 
 III. 
 
 THE LITTLE DIAMOND IN THE DESERT. 
 
 A MORNING or two after, Dyneley and I went out by ourselves. Alister was 
 gone with Curtis and Romer to the head of the loch to drag for pike; Claude 
 had taken his gun, and said he should walk up to the pools, and have a shot at 
 the ducks; and Dyneley and I, with Mousquetaire and a brace of setters, had
 
 G52 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 a fancy to try the glen for black game, and, if we found a roe, so much the 
 better. We had good sport till two o'clock, when the pony met us, as usual, 
 by the falls, and we threw ourselves down by the river-side under some willows 
 to cool our throats with Prestonpans, and perfume the woods and hills with our 
 after-luncheon pipe. The pipes and beer made us fresh again, and, after a talk 
 of old Eton days and fun we had together in the Aphrodite, of wild things we 
 had done together and of dark days in his life, in which I only knew how he 
 had suffered or sinned, we got up to blaze away anew at the blackcock. " Let 
 bygones be bygones. They give me the blue devils to recall them! " said he, 
 springing up. " My life has never been very bright, and never will be. I 
 laughed the other day, when I read in the Literary Lorgnon, speaking of me 
 and my works ' This brilliant and wayward peer has been singularly favored 
 by fortune. With descent as pure as any in the peerage, and talents daring 
 and original, all the fairies, as Macaulay writes of Bryon, have surely blessed 
 his birth.' Good, wasn't it ? If the fairies were at my birth, there must have 
 been a devil or two among them who marred it all. Those double-distilled 
 donkeys should know more of a man's life before they venture to relate it. I 
 was made to be a happy man, I think, but, somehow, I've missed it. To ho! 
 Steady, Bluebell! Two brace. Nice birds, are they not? Wait a moment! 
 By Jove, Monti, look here! this is the slot of a deer, and a fresh one, too." 
 
 " That it is," said I. " What glorious luck ! And it's a good large one. 
 Let's go over the hill, and look down the other side." 
 
 "All right," said Dyneley, taking his rifle; and sending the little gillie, with 
 the pony, guns, and setters, round to the pass to which it was most likely the deer 
 would head, we began the stalk. We did the two miles over the hill quickly, 
 and, looking through' the glass, we spied the stag's horn far away crouching 
 among the heather. There was but one way of stalking him a very stiff pull, 
 and a good part of it in full view of the stag; but we would have gone through 
 Avernus to have a shot at him. Away went Dyneley at the swinging pace that 
 had taken him across the Cordilleras and Himalayas, and I after him, though 
 when it came to the serpentine crawl I confess he outdid me, and swore a trifle 
 at me for being such a slow coach. Over the slippery rocks, up to our knees 
 in a burn, pushing through the tangled brushwood, we went on and for miles, 
 and when Dyneley climbed to the top of the glen, and looked through his glass, 
 he found the stag had used his legs as well as we, and he could just make out 
 his antlers as he had lain down to rest again among the heather. A long dance 
 that unhappy beast led us; but had we been ten times worse beat, wasn't it 
 worth it all to hear the ping of Dyneley's bullet as it bedded itself in the stag's 
 shoulder, and see Mousquetaire, after a short chase, spring at his throat, and 
 pull him down, covered with the reeking blood of his gallant captive ? Bravo ! 
 my veins tingle when I think of it. Oh ! your rose wreaths, and your Falernian
 
 BELLES AND BLACKCOCK. 
 
 G53 
 
 and Epicurean joys, what are they all to a long day among the corries and glens 
 with No. 4 and dear old Purdey, and a royal hart in sight ! 
 
 But all pleasures are bought with a price at least, so those prosy old 
 gentlemen the moralists say; and to punish us for our pride and exaltation in 
 having stalked and shot one of the finest stags of the season, lo! Dyneley and 
 I found ourselves lost! Lost, as if we were the two babes in the woods of 
 time-honored celebrity, only, as Gra remarked, there were, unhappily, no dead 
 leaves and robins to finish us pathetically, there being nothing on the moors 
 but heather and black game. Lost we were: two men who had been over 
 almost every inch of ground in the Old World and the New! It was too 
 ridiculous, but it was getting late; we had come out into a distant part of the 
 moor we had never shot over; a mist had enveloped everything in density, and 
 in the opaque atmosphere neither he nor I could have told our way back to the 
 lodge, to save our lives. 
 
 " It's pitch dark, Monti," laughed he, drawing his plaid tighter. " We're in 
 for it, I expect. Do you mind camping out ? We've done it many a 
 time. It makes one rather stiff in the morning, though, that's the worst of 
 it; but with plaids and flasks one oughtn't to complain. I've been worse 
 off before now. Have you any fusees there ? " 
 
 " I had not, nor had he. He tried to get a light with two sticks but the 
 wood would not catch, it was too damp. 
 
 " Hang it ! " cried Dyneley, throwing them away impatiently patience is 
 not in his composition " to stay till morning, without a pipe! impossible! 
 Never suffered such a deprivation since I was seven, and smoked my first Queen! 
 And besides, the stag! Devil take it, Monti, I willg&t home! Come along." 
 
 Easier said than done. After we had bled and grallocked the deer, and 
 tied a handkerchief to his horns, we blundered on through the dark, he push- 
 ing his way with his usual reckless impetuosity. Till it was a mercy he didn't 
 pitch himself down some precipice, or brain himself against a rock, till we were 
 on the top of the hill on whose side we had killed the stag. We looked round; 
 there was plenty of dense fog and inky sky; nothing more perceptible till 
 Dyneley, who has the quick eye and ear of the Indians, with whom he has 
 hunted, caught sight of a. little light flashing in and out of the mist 
 
 "Look there!" said he; " that's a homestead of some sort. If it's only 
 a hut, it's better than nothing. The shepherd can put us right. Hie, Mous- 
 quetaire! show us the way, old boy." 
 
 Mousquetaire certainly the cleverest dog I ever knew looked in his face 
 with his wise, clear, brown eyes, sniffed, paused, and set off at a trot down the hill. 
 
 " He'll take us right," said Dyneley, who, skeptic though he is in human 
 flesh, has unbounded faith in Mousquetaire. 
 
 He did take us right. After groping our way, many times within an inch
 
 654 QUID AS WORKS 
 
 of our lives, with many headlong descents that would have seemed perils gigan- 
 tic to Brown, Jones, and Robinson touring for a fortnight on leave from 
 Twining's or Barclay's, we found Mousquetaire heading us to a gate before 
 the garden of a house, in one of whose windows the blessed light was still 
 twinkling. 
 
 " Quite romantic. What a pity we are not eighteen, to magnify it into an 
 adventure," whispered Dyneley, " whose house is it, I wonder ? Do you see a 
 bell or a knocker anywhere about ? I thought nothing but black game keepers 
 and shepherds dwelt in these parts. The deuce, Monti, look up there. What 
 a pretty face ! quite Rembrandtesque." 
 
 I looked up to where he pointed. It was a bedroom window the identical 
 one that had our light in it; there were no blinds, or at least they were not 
 drawn down, and before the glass stood a young girl putting fuchsia sprays into 
 her hair. She was very picturesque even to our tired eyes at least, in this 
 dismal night she seemed so. At a concert, or an opera, or a crush, we might 
 never have thought of her. She was smiling at herself as she twisted the flowers 
 in her shining gold hair; there was no self-consciousness or art of the toilette 
 about her, and it was pretty to see her put them in and pull them out, and laugh 
 at herself all the while. At last she threw some of the rejected flowers down 
 and glanced up at the night, a sad expression stealing over her face, so full of 
 fun a moment ago. Then she left the window, and Dyneley, finding the knocker, 
 performed on it as loudly as a Belgravian flunkey, only with much more im- 
 patience of entrance. There was considerable delay, and an amount of talk on 
 the other side of the door, such as it is customary in small households when an 
 unexpected inroad is made upon their domestic peace. The bolt was then 
 drawn back, and the door cautiously opened by a Scotch housemaid, prim and 
 plain, no very inviting soubrette, with " Avaunt thee ! thou art an Ishmaelite," 
 written on her brow, as Dyneley briefly stated the case, and asked if he could 
 see her master for a moment. 
 
 " Ye canna; he's gane oot," was the grim reply. 
 
 " Can I see any one, then, who will direct me my way back to Glenmist ? " 
 
 " I douna say, sirs; ye'd best gang off as ye came," she answered, almost 
 closing the door. 
 
 "My good woman, is this your Highland hospitality ?" said Dyneley, im- 
 patiently. " I tell you, we have lost our road. Can't you tell us, at least, 
 which way we ought to take ? " 
 
 "What do those gentlemen want Elsie ? " said a young, clear voice. 
 
 By George ! it was the little bedroom beauty herself, coming out of a room 
 into the hall, with the identical fuchsias round her head. 
 
 " Gentlemen ' I ken they're some lying loons," muttered the female Cerberus. 
 " Keep awa', Miss Lilla, the wind's cauld."
 
 BELLES AND BLACKCOCK. G55 
 
 She was closing the door in our faces, but Dyneley pushed it back with one 
 arm, entered, and, raising his cap, apologized to Miss Lilla for the intrusion, 
 and explained to her how we stood lost on the moors, we knew not how many 
 miles from Glenmist. 
 
 She looked up at him earnestly as he spoke I daresay such a specimen as 
 Dyneley wasn't often seen up there and answered him unhesitatingly. 
 
 " You have lost your way ? Pray come in and rest till my uncle returns. 
 He will be back soon; he's only just gone round the farm, and will be most 
 happy to put you en route again." 
 
 She spoke as naturally as a child, but with as much good breeding as Lady 
 Constance at a levee. We thought our lines had fallen in pleasant places, so 
 accepted the invitation joyfully. Not so did Elsie hear it given. 
 
 " Miss Lilla," she muttered, angrily, " are ye daft to daur let in these 
 laddies, and yer uncle awa', too ! " 
 
 " Silence ! " said Lilla, with an impatient gesture; " show these gentlemen 
 into the drawing-room, and send Robbie to seek for my uncle." 
 
 " By Jove ! Monti," whispered Dyneley, as he took off his wet plaid, " this 
 high-bred little beauty and her drawing-room, with this antiquated portress, 
 and an uncle who's out on his farm, is an odd anomaly. I say, drop the title 
 here; let me be Graham Vavasour, as I was at Eton, will you ! " 
 
 " If you choose, but I don't see why." 
 
 " I do, and that's enough," said my lord, shortly, as we entered the draw- 
 ing-room aforesaid, a long, low room, simply but tastefully arranged, with no 
 consoles, mirrors, statuettes, or Buhl cabinets about it, but still with a nameless 
 something of refinement, and in it the diamond of the desert, our wild gowan 
 of the moors. Dyneley introduced himself and me with a certain charm of 
 manner he possesses, which takes with every woman living, when he chooses to 
 exert it, and would, a witty Rosiere once told him, have won that chill bit of 
 propriety, Penelope herself, into forgetfulness of her wandering lord. The 
 little Highland chatelaine was easy to talk to. She was lively, unaffected, and 
 not shy; indeed, her manners would have done credit to a debutante of the best 
 ton, so young and natural was she. She told us her uncle was a tenant of Lord 
 Fitzcorrie; her own name Lillian Cardonnel; she did not like Scotland, she said, 
 it was so cold, so dull. 
 
 " You have not lived here always, then ? " said Dyneley. 
 
 " Oh no," she said, with a look of horror at the idea. " Till the last six 
 months I have lived in Italy dear, dear Italy. You cannot tell how I love it 
 The skies are so blue, the sun so bright there." 
 
 " From Italy to the Highlands ! " cried Dyneley. " What a change ! You 
 must feel your exile as much as Mary Stuart did." 
 
 Her eyes looked pitifully sad as she said, with a laugh,
 
 656 GUI DA'S WORKS. 
 
 "Yes, like Rachel, I shall die with Camille's words on my lips: 
 Albe, mon cher pays et mon premier amour." 
 
 This was growing very amusing, and we could have cursed her uncle's ad- 
 vent cheerfully, when shortly afterwards he came in and interrupted us. 
 
 Duncairn was a tall, stern-looking fellow of fifty or so, with a keen, honest 
 physiognomy, his manners rather formal and stiff, but heartily hospitable. He 
 was a curious contrast to his niece He could have acted Virginius, on occasion 
 I should say, if he had chanced to live in those severe ages but he was a very 
 good host to us, pressed us to supper, offered us beds, would not hear of our 
 stirring out in the storm that had now set in, and said he was delighted to show 
 any attention to friends of Lord Fitzcorrie's. So to supper we went, to a table 
 full of Highland dainties, whisky, and XXX, as good as we should have had 
 up at Glengrouse, and little Lilla did the honors with as much grace and self- 
 possession as anyone of the Castle belles. Dyneley is reckoned very proud: 
 so he is to pretentious snobs. He has made many enemies for life by declin- 
 ing to know nouveaux riches, and by putting that detestable, stuck up, yet al- 
 ways servile, noblesse of money. But he will be courteous to a sweep where 
 he would snub a duke, and to Duncairn, whom he found to be a sensible man, 
 who tried to make himself out no more than he was, Dyneley was cordial and 
 charming. To be sure, looking on him were a pair of very bright eyes, and 
 the beaux yeux level rank while their spell is on us, though he, the well-known 
 Eastern traveller, wayward author, and blase peer, was probably above such 
 weaknesses. Duncairn was a man of few words guano is apt to sodden 
 brains but Lilla made up for the deficiency; her tongue ran on about fifty 
 topics, and she really talked well, too. 
 
 " Isn't there a Lord Dyneley staying somewhere in the neighborhood ? " 
 asked Lilla, at length. 
 
 "Yes," said Graham. " Do you know him?" 
 
 "No; but I know his books, and I love them. Don't you? Besides, I 
 have read in the reviews of his restless wanderings, his great talents, his wild 
 adventures, till I have an intense curiosity to see him. Is it all true ? " 
 
 " That he has led a strange wild life ? " said Dyneley with grave tranquillity. 
 " I believe so, and of course, having run over the whole globe, he has met with 
 some few adventures. But as to the reviews, you mustn't credit them. Some 
 paint him in much too glowing, others in too satanical colors, though most 
 likely he has more of the demon than the angel about him, like all the rest of 
 us men." 
 
 " And is he handsome ? " asked Lilla. 
 
 " Some women tell him he is. I don't think him so myself."
 
 BELLES AND BLACKCOCK. 657 
 
 " But gentlemen can never judge one another," she said, laughing. " I 
 want dreadfully to see him. I wish they would put his portrait in the Illus- 
 trated. Do you think they will ? " 
 
 " I'm afraid he's not celebre enough for that questionable honor," said 
 Graham, smiling. " He'll never be a lord mayor, you see, or a pet preacher. 
 Perhaps, if they want to fill up a corner, they may stick in an imaginary pic- 
 ture, and put his name under it. But if you really care for his portrait, Miss 
 Cardonnel, I will ask him to sit to me. I know him very well, and he will in a 
 moment, if he knows the honor you do him." 
 
 " Will you ? " cried Lilla. " Oh ! thank you, Mr. Vavasour. How charm- 
 ing that would be ! I have engravings of Bulwer, and Thackeray, and all my 
 darlings up in my room, and I should so love to have Lord Dyneley, too. What 
 an incessant traveller he has been ! Meeting him on the high road, one might 
 say to him, as they said to the Chevalier de Boufflers, ' I am happy to meet 
 you at home' " 
 
 " What a little wonder that is, to be found in a Highland farm-house," said 
 Dyneley, when, shown up to our rooms, he came into mine to have a last pipe. 
 Lilla had not in the least objected to tobacco, but stayed in the fumes of the 
 Cavendish, laughing and talking, though Dyneley would have gone without his 
 darling nicotine rather than offend her olfactory nerves, if she had not threat- 
 ened to leave the room if he did not follow Duncairn's example, and take his 
 meerschaum a threat which soon induced Graham to light it. " Ton my life, 
 Monti, she's very entertaining, and her manners are so graceful, exactly the 
 juste-milieu, neither shy nor bold, though I daresay some fools might miscon- 
 strue her frankness and vivacity. She must have been brought up in good 
 society. How on earth does she come to be buried here, poor little thing ? " 
 
 " She seems to interest you," said I. 
 
 " Yes, she does. She puts me in mind of finding a flower up among the 
 snow on the Aigre." 
 
 " Quite poetic ! " 
 
 " Don't be sarcastic, Monti; that's my line. I haven't much poetry left in 
 me, thank Heaven; it's an unprofitable commodity that the world estimates 
 very low indeed. Before I knew the world I wrote sonnets; now I know it, I 
 write satires." 
 
 " Nevertheless, you seem so struck with this little wild gowan, that we may 
 live to see you writing ' Glenmist braes are bonny,' a la Douglas of Finland, yet." 
 
 " And keeping faithful to " Annie Laurie," who jilts me and marries Craig- 
 darroch ? Thank you; I don't think that is much like my role. I'm afraid I 
 have been more sinner than victim in the matter of faithlessness." 
 
 " So the poor gowan will find, I'll bet. With such a romantic beginning, 
 you can't reject the goods the gods have sent you."
 
 658 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 Dyneley laughed. Then he said with his pipe between his teeth, " No ! I'll 
 be merciful for once. I won't brush the dew off your gowan, as you call her. 
 Who's poetical now, I wonder ? Neither you nor I would do the poor flower 
 much good." 
 
 "Very possibly; but neither you nor I are much given to pausing for that 
 consideration." 
 
 Fresh and fair " the gowan " looked when she came down to breakfast, un- 
 conscious of our remarks concerning her, and beamed on " Mr. Vavasour " a 
 bright good morning smile. With Lillian Cardonnel it was not her face, though 
 that was pretty enough, nor her brain, though that was clever enough, but, as 
 we say of Piccolomini, it was her ways that had such a charm for us. I have 
 heard ladies very spiteful on the little Italian because we say so, and so I dare- 
 say they would have been on Lilla, had any known her, ladies being generally 
 addicted to those " nice quiet girls," whom they like because we don't (I never 
 heard one woman praise another unless she could damn her with that detest- 
 able little epithet "quiet"); but, as it was, fortunately Lilla had more lenient 
 judges, and Dyneley's and my verdict, when we bade her good-by, was " charm- 
 ing," and infinitely too good to be buried away in the solitude of the moors. 
 
 After breakfast I went with Duncairn to see some prize heifers of his. 
 Dyneley, who never cared a straw for cattle and corn, preferred the entertain- 
 ment indoors, where they got on very well, I daresay, for when we came back 
 she was sitting on a low stool, with Mousquetaire at her feet, and he was lean- 
 ing over her, looking at her drawings. She had never been taught, but had 
 real talent, as became a native of Rome, and they were as good friends as if 
 they had known each other twelve months. When we started homewards, Lilla 
 offered to guide us to the top of the hill about a couple of miles' distance, 
 whence we could find our way to the glen, and a very pleasant walk we had 
 with our lively little cicerone. We were quite loth to part with her when we 
 came to the hill. Dyneley stood still, and watched her run down the slope 
 homewards as fast as a greyhound. When she reached the bottom, she turned 
 too, to see if he was gone. He took off his cap to her, waved his hand, and 
 came on with a smile on his lips. 
 
 A couple of nights after we dined at the Castle, and plenty of chaffing we 
 got for having lost our way on the moors. 
 
 " So a tenant of mine gave you house room ! " said Fitzcorrie. " Did you 
 see little Lilla ? Of course you did, though. Trust you to be in the same 
 house with a pretty woman and not ferret her out ! " 
 
 " Oh yes," said Dyneley. " I saw her, and a pretty, dear little thing she is. 
 But, by Jove ! Fitzcorrie, she's utterly out of place there. How does she come 
 to belong to a farmer, of all horrible things ? She must have some gentle blood 
 in her veins."
 
 BELLES AND BLACKCOCK. 659 
 
 " You're right, old fellow," said the Viscount. " Though it's certainly a 
 good idea to ask me for the genealogies of my tenants, I can tell you something 
 about that. You've heard me talk of poor Charlie Cardonnel; he was a great 
 chum of mine in the old college days, and there couldn't have been a better 
 fellow if he hadn't been so miserably romantic. Well, one luckless Long, 
 Charlie came to shoot with me up here, and became dreadfully spoony over 
 Duncairn's sister Lillian. She was the beauty of Argyleshire, and Charlie, poor 
 dear fellow ! you'll hardly credit it, I daresay was actually fool enough to 
 marry her marry her a yoeman's daughter ! To marry young, we all know, 
 is one of the greatest evils that can betide a man, and to marry beneath him 
 damages him still worse; but do it he did; why, I couldn't say, nor he either. 
 Six months after, of course, he was sick of her; six years after, naturally he 
 met somebody else, and wanted to break his chains. Break them he couldn't, 
 so he ran away with his new love, and her brother shot him through the heart. 
 Poor dear Charlie ! a man had better take to drinking, racing, gambling, rather 
 than take to romance. Lillian had nothing to live on, and herself and her 
 daughter to keep. Served her right for entangling poor Charlie ! So she took 
 a tumble-down palace in Rome, and let rooms to English visitors, till she died 
 five years ago, when an old Italian Comtessa took a fancy to the child, and 
 brought her up till she died too, and Lilla came over to Duncairn. She's very 
 like poor Charlie in look, and manners, and mind. The Cardonnels, of course, 
 never notice her. I have got Florence to ask her here occasionally for her 
 father's sake; but it's difficult to take up one's friend's child, who is one's ten- 
 ant's niece, too, and I don't think my lady likes her." 
 
 " I daresay not," said Dyneley, sotto voce. " Well, she's a nice little thing. 
 I wish her a better fate than her mother's." 
 
 "Yes, she is certainly chic," said Fitzcorrie, " notwithstanding the plebeian 
 blood of the distaff side. I should be sorry you'd seen her if I didn't know you 
 were too old a hand to commit yourself a la pauvre, Charlie." 
 
 " I should say so. Romance has been beaten out of me long ago; and a 
 good thing too, for I couldn't afford such an expensive luxury." 
 
 Soon after we went into the drawing-room Lillian came on the tapis again. 
 Lady Fitzcorrie and Adeliza Vandeleur raised their eyebrows, and smiled the 
 smile with which woman sneer down an enemy of their own sex. 
 
 " What, are you talking of the farmer's little niece ? Do you admire her ? 
 Really ! She was here at the tenants' ball last Christmas; I remember noticing 
 her. She is not so gauche as one might expect, is she ? " 
 
 " Gauche ! " repeated Dyneley, with a peculiar smile. " I think I never 
 saw manners more graceful." 
 
 Adeliza's haughty under-lip protruded. " Indeed ! I had fancied I had 
 once heard you were fastidious, Lord Dyneley."
 
 660 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 " So I am," said Graham sipping his coffee. " I should say no man more so." 
 
 " Do you mean that girl with golden hair, that Lord Fitzcorrie called Lilla 
 when she came here last Christmas ? " interrupted Constance. " I thought 
 her lovely; she played so brilliantly, too." 
 
 Dyneley leant down over her chair. " Lady Constance, you show me a 
 miracle: one Helen has the generosity to toss the golden apple to another." 
 
 " You bitter satirist ! Why should not women praise each other ? " 
 
 " I don't know why they shouldn't, but I know they never do. At least, 
 never without some qualifying rider," laughed Dyneley. " Will you give us 
 some music ? Sing me my favorite, ' lo son ricco.' Willoughby there will be 
 charmed to accompany you." 
 
 "No, pray don't trouble him. I beg you won't," said Constance, hastily; 
 but Dyneley had already crossed over to where Claude stood leaning against 
 a console, talking to nobody, with a look of dignified ennui, as if he was long- 
 ing for a " new sensation," and couldn't for his life find one, and, taking him by 
 the shoulder, brought him up to Constance, very much against his will, I fancied. 
 
 " I am very sorry Lord Dyneley disturbed your dolce," she said, not look- 
 ing at him, and playing listlessly with her fan. " I suppose, Captain AVilloughby, 
 when there is no sunshine in society brilliant enough to attact you, you retire 
 like the moles, into a state of quiescence; they call it sleep, you call it ennui, 
 but it appears to me much the same thing." 
 
 "But the moles are better off," said Claude, in his most languid voice. 
 "You know they have holes to go into, and we haven't; we're constantly being 
 bored by being woke up and asked to do something fatiguing. But if you 
 want me to sing, I don't mind." 
 
 The tone, lazy as that in which was uttered the memorable words " the 
 Tenth don't dance ! " the air tranquilly rude, which Lady Fitzcorrie justly 
 stigmatized as " out-Brummeling-Brummel " which no man in the Service 
 knew better how to assume, when he chose, than did Claude made Constance's 
 eyes flash, and her color flush deep. 
 
 " Wish you to sing ! " she said, carelessly. " What could make you dream 
 that I did ? I wouldn't inflict the exertion upon you. Pray go back to the 
 dolce; there is a remarkable comfortable chair in the inner drawing-room, and 
 you need have no pangs of conscience, for when the moles abjure society, 
 nobody misses them, you know." 
 
 " Thank you," said Claude, stroking his long moustache. " You were very 
 kind to think of that chair; I'll go to it at once." 
 
 Go to it he did; and he sank down among its cushions, but enjoy the dolce 
 he didn't, for Lady Fitzcorrie was there, who has no objection to a flirtation 
 with a handsome cavalry man; and they flirted away, till the Viscount, who 
 was a bit of a George Dandin in his old age, would have been bitterly wrath-
 
 BELLES AND BLACKCOCK. GGl 
 
 ful if he hadn't happily been deep in whist in the card-room, where Dyneley 
 sooned joined him, while Adeliza looked very chagrined at his desertion, and 
 her sister sang duets with Curtis and with me as if she were aspiring to the 
 role of prima donna. I was standing by her at the piano when Claude came up 
 to bid her good-night. As she turned, he knocked down a song: he picked it 
 up, and a bitter smile came on his face as he laid it on the piano. Constance 
 turned pale, too, as he put it down, and said, with a laugh, " That used to be a 
 favorite of yours, Lady Constance, but newer music has come up since, and we 
 are not so cruel as to expect fidelity from ladies." 
 
 I glanced at the title of the song: it was " Wert thou but mine own, love; " 
 and on it was written, in Claude's writing, 
 
 " L'amour sait rendre tout possible, 
 
 Au coeur qui suit ses 6tendards. 
 " Somerleyton Feb. \6th." 
 
 I thought I began to see into Master Claude's hand, carefully as he held his 
 cards. 
 
 IV. 
 
 THE GOWAN OF THE MOORS GROWS MORE ATTRACTIVE THAN THE GAME. 
 
 " WHERE'S Dyneley ? " said Curtis one afternoon, some three weeks after, 
 when he and I were out after ducks at the pools; " gone to see that gold-haired 
 Highland belle of his again, I suppose. Poaching on one manor spoils shoot- 
 ing on another; but there never was such a fellow for ' large blue eyes and 
 fair white hands.' " 
 
 I laughed. " I daresay he's up there. Shall we go and see ? It's getting 
 dusk." 
 
 " Do," said Curtis, " I want to see her. Romer and Ashington have found 
 her out, and they say she's pretty enough to make Adeliza strychnine her. Do 
 you think that will be a match between Dy and the Vandeleur ? There's 
 plenty of tin for Dyneley." 
 
 "Can't say. She's willing, no doubt, and he's no money to speak of; it 
 may come off, though I doubt if Graham will ever put on the handcuffs mat- 
 trimonial. We're not very far off Duncairn's now. Come along, and give the 
 guns to Ronald." 
 
 An hour's walk brought us to the farm, a long, low, rather picturesque 
 house. Elsie, looking upon us with much suspicion, showed us into Lilla's 
 little drawing-room, where we found Dyneley sitting in the broad window-seat,
 
 662 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 and Lilla by him, in her customary low chair, looking up in his face while he 
 talked earnestly to her. For the first time, I think I may say in my life, he 
 looked anything but pleased to see me. He was expatiating on one of his 
 favorite topics, the great fault of the day, Intolerance not of anything warmer 
 but with her speaking ey.es fixed on him, and her quick intelligence answer- 
 ing him, I daresay he was wrathful at being interrupted. She looked sorry, 
 too, and showed it, which he didn't, he having had twenty years' icing in 
 society, and she none. She received us, however, in her graceful, lively style, 
 and Curtis studied her with more admiration than ever I saw in him for the 
 belles of the " Ride and the Ring." Dyneley leaned back against the window, 
 and didn't vouchsafe much conversation, save when Lilla appealed to him, which 
 was certainly about once every three minutes; and Curtis did his best to amuse 
 her: he's a very pleasant fellow, too, when he likes. It was quite a levee for 
 her; and I daresay the little Queen of our Argyleshire Balmoral enjoyed it. 
 
 " Won't you come to-morrow ? " she said to Dyneley, when he shook hands 
 with her; looking very earnest about her request. 
 
 He smiled. " We'll see." 
 
 "Ah! then I know you will; and when will you do Lord Dyneley's 
 picture ? " 
 
 " He hasn't sat to me yet," said Graham, " but I certainly will not forget 
 it. However, you'll be disappointed in him. You fancy him a demigod, and 
 you'll find him a very mortal indeed." 
 
 "I do not care; I know him in his writings," said Lilla, decidedly. "I 
 never judge a man by his life, but by his heart; circumstances may make the 
 one, but nature has formed the other, and if it be the right metal it will always 
 ring true." 
 
 We laughed involuntarily, but Dyneley looked grave; perhaps he was think- 
 ing his had not always rung as true as it might have done to his boyish dreams 
 of hope and energy, ambition and success. 
 
 " Miss Cardonnel," said Curtis, bidding her good-by, " I wish very earnestly 
 that you would make me the same request you did Vavasour here, /'d come 
 at your call." 
 
 " What a paladin ! " laughed Lilla. " It is quite a pity you didn't live in the 
 days of the Round Table, and Elaine and Morgue la Faye." 
 
 "One does not need to go back so far for fairies," said Curtis, with an elo- 
 quent glance. 
 
 Dyneley made an impatient movement. He never compliments by any 
 chance. 
 
 " But really," Charley went on, " may I, too, ' come to-morrow ? ' " 
 
 Lilla looked vexed, and hesitated. " If you wish, certainly, but it is a very 
 long walk."
 
 BELLES AND BLACKCOCK. 
 
 663 
 
 _ "My legs are as good as Vavasour's," said Curtis, laughing to hide the 
 pique he felt; but if you honor him with the monopoly " 
 
 Dyneley silenced him with a flash of his dark eyes. 
 
 Lillian looked haughty and dignified. " If Mr. Vavasour," she said quickly 
 "is so kind as to walk eight miles that I may have the pleasure of talking my 
 dear Italian once more, I am not so vain as to suppose that all his friends 
 would take the same trouble." 
 
 " Nor do you care that they should," thought I. 
 
 " Well, Dy, I congratulate you on your game," said Curtis, as he went home; 
 " it's better than the blackcock, and more easily knocked over, I guess. Take 
 care I don't poach on your manor, old fellow." 
 
 " If I had, to adopt your elegant parable, marked the game, I should know 
 perfectly well how to secure it," said my lord, with a contemptuous twist of his 
 moustaches. " But I consider Miss Cardonnel "a lady, if you don't, and I do 
 not speak of her as a grisette of the Quartier Latin." 
 
 "Lady ? So she is in manner, but a yoeman's niece ! The devil ! if one 
 mayn't have a little fun with her, with whom on earth may one ? " 
 
 "Try it, Charley," said Dyneley, dryly. 
 
 "Well, why not? By George! this is the first time I ever knew you so 
 scrupulous." 
 
 "Possibly. You are young yet, and boys do not know that there are 
 'femmes et femmes.' When you have lived as long as I, you will know that a 
 young girl, too frank and guileless to be a prude, too warm-hearted to be a 
 coquette, is not to be confounded with the Aspasias and Phrynes of our 
 experience." 
 
 "I say, Gra," said I, as Curtis went on in front, "I thought you were go- 
 ing to be merciful and spare the gowan. Making love to her and marrying 
 Adeliza won't " 
 
 " Pooh ! I never make love to her," said* he, shortly. " She is clever, and 
 amuses me to talk to; but anything beyond that would answer neither of us, for 
 I certainly can't marry her, and I'd never abuse Duncairn's hospitality. I tell 
 you she's a fair flower, and I'll leave her untouched." 
 
 " Then I wouldn't advise you to go after her quite so much." 
 
 " Keep your counsel till you're asked for it, Monti. Poor child ! she's no 
 idea of love in her head for me yet, and I shall not teach her." 
 
 I laughed outright. " My dear fellow ! I never thought I should like to 
 hear a man of the world like you talk such bosh. The poor gowan, I pity 
 her ! she's doomed ! " 
 
 Dyneley blazed away at a hare that crossed the path, and, I suppose, didn't 
 hear my remark. 
 
 Next morning he left the blackcock after luncheon, and spent his afternoon
 
 664 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 in the wide window-seat in Lilla's drawing-room, talking Italian and reading 
 Leopardi. And many afternoons went in the same manner, till Fitzcorrie and 
 all of us laughed about the game Dyneley had found on the moors. Curtis, 
 Romer, Ashington, and I often found occasion to shoot up in the direction of 
 the farm, and would drop in for some of Duncairn's Prestonpans, to which the 
 hospitable Highlander told us we were always heartily welcome. I fancy they 
 all thought that Chaumiere love and coulisses flattery would do very well for a 
 farmer's neice, but they soon found that little Lilla, frank and gay as she was, 
 required as refined a style as even Lady Constance, and consoled themselves 
 for their disappointment by jests at her and Dyneley. 
 
 " I wish those confounded fellows wouldn't keep hanging about here," said 
 he, savagely, one day. " There are women enough at the Castle, if they want 
 them." 
 
 " Hallo ! are we jealous ? " 
 
 " Jealous ! " repeated he, with scorn. " Of what, pray ? " 
 
 " Well, if you repudiate the sentiment, what do you care if fifty men came 
 round her ? " 
 
 "Because I don't want her spoiled. She has no art, or concealment, or 
 manoeuvres now, and it is a pity she should be taught them." 
 
 " I don't see why Romer, or Ashington, or Curtis is more likely to teach 
 her them than yourself; and if you won't have her either at Cupid's or Hymen's 
 hands, and will bid her good-by in a few weeks' time, and will find her, if ever 
 you come here again, the wife of some rich, thriving, hard-featured yeoman, it 
 can't matter much whether or no she is spoilt a little." 
 
 Dyneley held his head in the air, playing impatiently with his whiskers. 
 " Lilla marry a clod of the valley! Poor little thing, she'd better die first." 
 
 " Why do you never come up to the Castle ? " I asked her, a few days 
 after. 
 
 " Can't you guess ? You can ? " she said, turning to Dyneley, who bent 
 his head in acquiescence. " To begin with, I am very rarely asked ; secondly, I 
 know Lady Fitzcorrie dislikes to see me there; and thirdly, and chiefly, I am 
 too proud to be treated as they treat me. I will go nowhere on sufferance, to 
 be subjected to a condescension which is insult, to be scarcely spoken to, or, if 
 addressed, addressed with that supercilious smile, which says as plainly as any 
 words, ' Petite, how come you near us ? go back to your proper sphere. My 
 father was a gentleman, and I will never go anywhere where I am not received 
 as a lady." 
 
 " Quite right," said Dyneley, looking admirably at her animated eyes and 
 gestures. " If they cannot appreciate you, do not honor them." 
 
 Lilla colored with pleasure. Poor child! it was his first praise. I daresay 
 he thought it was quite right for her not to go to the Castle, since it kept his
 
 BELLES AND BLACKCOCK. G65 
 
 star in obscurity, to shine only for himself. Othello's form of selfishness is an 
 exceedingly natural and common one. 
 
 Nevertheless, he took Lady Fitzcorrie to task for not inviting her. She 
 only answered him with a smile and a sneer, being afraid of his witty tongue; 
 but I heard her say to Adeliza, " What do you think ? Dyneley actually dared 
 to ask me to invite that young person, as if we were to countenance and 
 receive his Scotch grisettes ! " 
 
 (N. B. My lady had tried to hook Dy, and failing, out of pique had taken 
 up with poor Fitzcorrie.) 
 
 Meanwhile, Claude and Constance either hated or loved each other very 
 warmly. They were as distant as they could be not to be remarked, and he 
 seemed, before her, to affect all the languor, indifference, and nil admirari-ism 
 that he could. 
 
 " What ts it between you two ? " said I one night, when we came back from 
 the Castle (he said he was not well enough to go,) and found him sitting by 
 the fire, looking a most gloomy contrast to the dashing, flirting, light-hearted 
 Dragoon I had always known him. " Come, tell me, old boy, what's Constance 
 done to you ? " 
 
 He looked very fierce at me. 
 
 " You've found it out, have you ? I hoped I'd concealed my folly too well 
 for fools to have it to mock at." 
 
 " Fools ! Bien oblige. My dear fellow, what's the matter ? what's it all 
 about ? You know 
 
 L'amour sait rendre tout possible, 
 Au coeur qui suit ses Standards." 
 
 Claude, the sweetest temper possible, glared at me as if I were going posi- 
 tively to take his life. 
 
 " Did she tell you that ? Did she make a jest of it to you ? " 
 
 "What are you talking about, Claude? Who's 'she?' I merely read 
 Moliere's lines on a song the other night in your handwriting." 
 
 "I wrote that when I was mad," said Claude beneath his teeth, poking the 
 fire recklessly. "You know I stayed in the same house with that girl down at 
 Somerleyton for six weeks. I admired her, and God knows whether she 
 meant it or not, but she waltzed, and sung, and rode almost solely with me, 
 and 7 thought preferred me to the other men. She never discouraged me. 
 The night I wrote those very words on the song, she smiled and look up in my 
 face as only the most fond or the most artful woman can. I said nothing decisive 
 to her, for I knew she was a great heiress, and I had nothing, and my pride re- 
 volted from owing my money to my wife, or seeming mercenary in her eyes. 
 So we parted. I went to join Ours at Aldershot, knowing we should meet in
 
 666 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 the season. I did meet her ! how do you think ? I was leaning on the rails 
 looking out for her; she passed me on her hack, riding with that idiot Cro- 
 marty, who's dangling after her now. She gave a bow without a smile 
 after the hours we had spent together ! and cantered on." 
 
 His voice shook, and he leaned his head on his arms on the mantel-piece. I 
 was going to speak but he stopped me. 
 
 "Hush! it's idle talking. I was mad to suppose she would fling herself 
 away on a poor cavalry man. You know my secret keep it. I must get over 
 it somehow, and end my days as soon as I can in some skirmish." 
 
 With a dreary laugh, he bid me good night, and, taking my pipe, I 
 mourned over the loss of one of the best fellows in the Service; caught and 
 bound in those tight rose-chains from which the blind god so seldom remem- 
 bers to take out the thorns. 
 
 " Monti," said Dyneley, coming in out of the hall, " I wish you'd give me 
 back that daguerreotype Claudet took of me when you were romantic enough 
 to wish to have one when I was going into Arabia Deserta, and you fancied 
 I might never come back. Will you ? " 
 
 " Well, it isn't over-generous of you, but I'll send to town for it if you 
 wish." 
 
 " That's a good fellow. I want it for little Lilla, and I'll have another 
 done for you." 
 
 " So you're going to make the child waste her years crying over your 
 daguerreotype ? That's being ' merciful,' is it ? " 
 
 "I promised her," he said, shortly, "and she shall have it." 
 
 " Very well, Gra," said I. " Don't take my head quite off. You've taken 
 care to photograph youself in her memory pretty indelibly, so she may as 
 well have the picture." 
 
 The picture came down. Dy's clear-cut features, his black hair and 
 whiskers, and eyes, came out strong in the photograph; he might pardonably 
 feel vain when he looked at it, but he put it in his pocket immediately it ap- 
 peared, and set off to Duncairn's. Lilla was looking for him, and let him in, 
 kissed Mousquetaire most warmly, and smiled upon Mousquetaire's master. 
 Without speaking, he held out the picture. She looked at the case in dismay. 
 
 "What! Lord Dyneley at last? How kind you are! But this is Claudet's 
 name, it is not your painting ? " 
 
 " Open it," said Dy, smiling. 
 
 She did as he told her; gave the picture one glance, and turned round to 
 him, her face flushed and agitated. 
 
 " It is you ! you ! And may I have it ? May I keep it ? Oh ! why did 
 you never tell me ' To think that it is your thoughts I have so long read in 
 your books ! You, whom I have "
 
 BELLES AND BLACKCOCK. (JUT 
 
 " Lilla ! Good Heavens ! what is the matter ? " said Dyneley, seeing, to his 
 consternation, that she trembled excessively, and tears stood in her eyes. 
 
 " I don't know," said the girl; "only you seem so much farther off me. I 
 feel as if some one had taken you away." 
 
 Dyneley was more touched than he knew was prudent, and thought he had 
 better end the scene. 
 
 " You feel too deeply, Lilla," he said hastily. " You will never be happy. 
 I cannot stay now, for Montague is waiting for me at the falls. Keep the 
 daguerreotype if if it interests you; and, though I bear another name than 
 you fancied, never think of me as other than your friend." 
 
 " Monti," said he that night, " I shall leave this in a day or two. It's the 
 middle of November, and I shall go down and look at Vauxley." 
 
 " By Jove ! " said I, " a new move. I thought you'd have spent Christmas 
 at the Castle." 
 
 " My dear fellow, I've stayed four months in the place. That's an unprec- 
 edented halt for me. Of course you can all stop, if you like." 
 
 " Not I," said Claude. " My leave's up on the 25th." 
 
 " Confound Cupid," thought I, " for breaking up a nice set of braves gar- 
 cons just as they are comfortable." 
 
 Two days after Dyneley lighted a cheroot, put on his waterproof, drew his 
 cap over his eyes, and started off you can guess where as easily as I did. As 
 he opened the gate to the garden, Curtis came out of it. Graham looked fierce 
 at him, for the young fellow had grown very spoony about Lilla, and, despite 
 his opinions at starting, was just as likely, being a young hand, to have com- 
 mitted himself, as Cardonnel had done before him. Curtis looked gloomy, and 
 brushed quickly past him, and Dyneley drew his own conclusions. 
 
 " I met Curtis," he said to Lilla, when he had been there about ten min- 
 utes, and their talk had not flowed quite so fluently as usual. " Has he been 
 with you ? Yes ? Then what has he said to vex you ? " 
 
 " To vex me ? Nothing." 
 
 " Yes he has, and to vex himself, too. I can guess what," said Dyneley, 
 impatiently; <: and you refused him?" 
 
 " Of course ! " said Lilla, in surprise. 
 
 " You were not wise," said Graham, speaking hard through his teeth. " He 
 is a boy, to be sure, but he is worth ten thousand a year. He has a very good 
 position. Many women would sell their souls to be mistress of his wide acres; 
 yet you refuse him without a thought." 
 
 " Hush ! hush ! " cried Lilla, vehemently. " You know well enough that I 
 would reject him, and twenty such as he. You are cruel unjust ungenerous!" 
 
 "Nay, I spoke only for your good," said he, in a cold, forced tone. " For- 
 give me if I offended you."
 
 668 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 " Offended me ? You ! " 
 
 He took her outstretched hands, and pressed them fiercely; then dropped 
 them, and traced the carpet pattern gloomily with his stick. There was a dead 
 silence. He tried to talk of a few trivialities, but could not get on well with 
 them; in desperation rose, and said, without looking at her, 
 
 " I came to bid you good-by. I leave to-morrow." 
 
 She caught hold of his arm, and looked up in his face with the look of a 
 stricken stag. 
 
 " You are not going away ? not for long ? You will come back soon ? I 
 shall see you again ? " 
 
 Dyneley did not look at her face, or, even with his iron will, he would have 
 found it difficult to answer as he did. 
 
 " I cannot say. I shall leave England possibly for years." 
 
 Lilla uttered a cry like a hunted hare's; she would have fallen to the 
 ground but for Dy's arm. He never wanted his self-control more, and he knew 
 he dared not try it long. Before she could speak a word to him, or a look of 
 her eyes shake him, he pressed her against his heart, kissed her passionately, 
 and, whispering in her ear " Forget me and forgive me, if you can," rushed out 
 of the house, and through the garden, like a madman. 
 
 We saw nothing of him that day. When he came home he said he was tired, 
 and went straight up to his room. The next day he made his adieus at the 
 Castle, foiling all Lady Adeliza's hopes, and, in a pelting storm, bade us good- 
 by, and steamed away down Loch Fine. The next thing I heard of him were 
 a few lines to say that he was starting in the Aphrodite, and had not determined 
 the route. Poor old fellow! his pride would not let him marry the girl; his 
 feeling of honor prevented him returning Duncairn's hospitality by running 
 away with his niece. He thought that in conquering himself, and leaving her, 
 he was doing what was kindest and best for her. I doubt if to poor little Lilla 
 the kindness was quite so apparent. 
 
 V. 
 
 THE LIGHT ON THE MOORS SHINES AGAIN FOR DYNELEY. 
 
 Claude was not, meanwhile, much better off. He, the dashing Dragoon, 
 who had lost his heart and found it again a thousand times in water parties and 
 archery fetes in Woolwich luncheons, Chatham balls, Exeter deux temps and 
 Portsmouth galops, had fallen headlong in love during the long days and 
 evenings at Somerleyton; and Constance's manner, sometimes distant or sar-
 
 BELLES AND BLACKCOCK. 
 
 669 
 
 castic to him, sometimes, when she thought he did not see her, silent and 
 subdued; the constant sight of her beauty, and the attention the other men 
 paid her, were not altogether calculated to cure him. I thought he mi^ht have 
 been happier if he had sought an explanation; but nothing would induce him; 
 he was too proud to risk a repulse. I thought I might as well act his Deus ex 
 machina. 
 
 " I think you're very mistaken in not giving Constance some chance of an 
 explanation," said I to him, as we went up to the Castle the evening before we 
 left. " If the girl does like you, and there has been any misconception, so 
 haughty and all but rude as you are to her, she must think you don't care any 
 more for her than you do for this mare." 
 
 " She knows better than that," said Claude, biting the end off his cigar 
 fiercely. " How can I speak ? If I were a rich man I would let my pride go 
 
 hang, and speak to her at once; but what would she and everybody think ? 
 
 that I was hunting her for her money, and pretending love, that I might build 
 up the broken fortunes of my family with the wealth she would bring me. 
 Where she penniless and I a Duke, I would risk her rejection to-morrow; as 
 it is " 
 
 He stopped, and blew a cloud of smoke into the frosty air. 
 
 " Oh the contradictions of human nature! " thought I. " Dyneley and his 
 love are in the very relative position that Claude thinks would make it all 
 square for him; and yet they are not one whit better off than these two." 
 
 At dinner, Claude had the length of the table between him and Constance, 
 so there did not seem much prospect of his following my advice. I, however, 
 took her in and turned the conversation upon him. 
 
 " So Lord Dyneley is gone," she said to me. " What an agreeable man ! 
 He is so amusing when he likes." 
 
 " I'm glad you like him. There isn't a better fellow upon earth," I answered. 
 " Yes, our party is breaking up. You leave next week, do you not ? I must be 
 down at my father's for Christmas, and Claude yonder joins the i4th at Dublin 
 to-morrow." 
 
 Her hand shook as she set down her wine-glass. She evaded a reply. 
 " Where is your place ? Fawnham, isn't it called ? " 
 
 "Yes, it's in Hants. I often hunt with Assheton Smith's hounds; and I 
 have often heard how you have followed a fox in the next county, Lady Con- 
 stance. I wanted Willoughby to spend Christmas with me, but his leave is up. 
 You knew him before, did you not ? Don't you think him much altered in 
 eight months ? " 
 
 She hesitated. " He seems as indolent as ever." 
 
 " Pardon me," I said. " I don't mean that, but his spirits are so gone down. 
 He was one of the lightest-hearted, sunniest-tempered men possible, for all his
 
 670 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 pretended laziness; but now, I only hope he mayn't go off into consumption, as 
 his father did before him." 
 
 For all her high breeding, the young lady was as white as her lace dress. 
 Now I lowered my voice confidentially, like a schoolgirl telling another of a 
 Valentine: 
 
 " Can you tell me, Lady Constance excuse my asking you, but I've known 
 Claude so long, and esteem him so highly but do you know whether there 
 was any one at Somerleyton who didn't treat him well, or of whom he seemed 
 at all epris? for ever since that luckless visit he hasn't been the same fellow." 
 
 Her color varied the bracelets on her arm trembled. Just then Lady 
 Fitzcorrie gave the move: she rose hastily, dropping her handkerchief in her 
 agitation. As I gave it to her she smiled and blushed (I wished Claude had 
 seen that smile and that blush), and said, quickly: 
 
 " He is to be married to Miss Melbourne, is he not ? " 
 
 "He? No; who can have told you so ? What, to Miss Melbourne, that 
 fat Australian heiress ! My dear Lady Constance, he'd as soon marry a Red 
 Indian; he is only too fastidious about poor militaires aspiring to any one with 
 riches." 
 
 Her eyes danced, and she gave a. quick sigh of relief; her glance dwelt on 
 Claude a moment as she passed out of the room; he did not deserve the glance, 
 for he had been flirting shamefully with Lady Fitzcorrie, but he caught it and 
 his eyes flashed out of their tired languor. 
 
 " If you don't win the game it will be your own fault," I whispered to him 
 as we went into the drawing-room. Constance was not there; the Viscountess 
 challenged him to chess; Claude let her checkmate him in no time; and when 
 it was over, regardless of my lady's annoyance, he lounged into the music- 
 room. Adeliza and another lady, with Romer and Ashington, were singing 
 glees. Constance was standing by the piano turning over some music, without 
 thinking of what she was doing. 
 
 Claude went up and looked over her: her hand lay on the memorable song. 
 He took out his pencil and wrote underneath his former lines two others: 
 
 " Apprenez-moi ma destin6e: 
 Faut-il vivre ? faut-il mourir ? " 
 
 She looked up at him that was enough for them both. The glees went on 
 a little longer, then we went back to the drawing-room. They lingered behind 
 us, putting up the music. I glanced round as I left the room; her head was 
 resting on his shoulder, and his moustache touched her hair, so I suppose they 
 had managed their explanations in a satisfactory style. 
 
 " Well." said I, as we drove back to the lodge, " I expect to be groomsman, 
 mon garcon, for certainly I've made your marriage for you. Is it all right, 
 pray, at last ? "
 
 BELLES AND BLACKCOCK. 071 
 
 "Thank God, yes; and you're a brick, Monti," said the gallant Captain, 
 fervently. You put it all square capitally, and I'm eternally obliged to you. 
 Poor darling ! she said she was just as miserable as ever I was when I left her 
 at Somerleyton without a word. The idea of her money making me hesitate 
 had never entered her head; and I can't make her see that it causes the slight- 
 est barrier. When I went away, that confounded Adeliza I always did detest 
 that woman told her I was engaged to Emily Melbourne (you know that 
 dreadful girl with large feet and unheard-of tin, who dresses, too, in such awful 
 taste ?) and when they were a month in Lowndes Square I never went near 
 them you know I couldn't, I was tied down at Aldershot she began to think 
 I'd only flirted with her, and in a momentary pique, that she's regretted ever 
 since, she bowed coldly to me in the Ring." 
 
 " That's the tale, is it ? A very good lesson to people not to ride off on an 
 idea without seeking an explanation. She's just of age, isn't she?" I asked, 
 having the practical side of the thing in view, and not being in love myself. 
 " So all the money must come to yo.u ? " 
 
 " The money, yes," said Claude, in disgust. " Her mother's her only 
 relative living, and she'd let her do anything she liked. I wish the money were 
 at the devil myself." 
 
 " You'd soon ask Satan for it back again." 
 
 " But the tin never crosses her mind," Claude went on, disdaining my inter- 
 ruption. " She said so prettily to me ' Never let us speak of it. What is mine 
 is yours. I know you would give me anything, and I would take anything 
 from you. Surely you love me sufficiently to do the same by me." " 
 
 I saw he wasn't likely to talk anything sensible that night, so I left him to 
 his delicious thoughts, and was only profoundly thankful that he did not turn the 
 dog-cart over with his headlong driving of the poor mare. Claude had to go 
 to Dublin the next day, to his own intense disgust. He always used to bemoan 
 early parade, and yet enjoyed a rough campaign. But Constance wrote to her 
 mamma, begging her to accept an invitation they had from the Viceroy, to 
 which her mamma, being wildly idolatrous of her, and exceedingly curious to 
 see Claude, immediately accepted. When she did see him, she fell decidedly 
 in love with him herself, and being of good birth, though allied to Brumma- 
 gem aristocracy, was better pleased with his gentle blood than she would have 
 been with a long rent-roll. I went over to his marriage, which was on New- 
 Year's day, and for the first time in his life he got up early without thinking it 
 a hardship. We all told him he was the luckiest dog in the Service, to have 
 won her love and twenty thousand a year by the same coup, and really on his 
 wedding-day he was too happy to be indolent; he only swore at the breakfast as a 
 horrid bore and a most cruel probation. Dyneley, dear old fellow, who ought 
 to have been there to season the affair with his sparkling sarcasms, was away
 
 072 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 yachting, Heaven alone knew where. An uncle of his had died, leaving him 
 considerable property, but his lawyers could not tell where to address him. He 
 was six months away. I began to get uneasy about it, for I thought he might 
 be gone shooting to Norway, and would be very likely to go on exploring north- 
 ward till he went a trifle too far into the ice-plains. At last, one night late, 
 when I was sitting smoking in the Albany, to my delight in stalked Dyneley 
 looking very ill and worn, restless and impatient in his manner quite unlike 
 himself. 
 
 "Where have I been ? " he said. " To Barbadoes. I set myself so many 
 miles to do, and, for fear I should break my resolution, I took out little Dal- 
 maine, who wanted to join his troop. " 
 
 " And have you heard your good news ? " 
 
 He looked up quickly. 
 
 " Good news for me? That would be a miracle indeed." 
 
 " The miracle has happened, then. Old Chesney has kicked off, and made 
 you his heir." 
 
 " Are you certain ? " he cried vehemently. 
 
 " To be sure. It would be nothing extraordinary." 
 
 He stood silent, leaning his head on the mantel-piece. At last, he looked 
 up. I was astonished to see how happy he seemed, for he was generally very 
 careless of money. 
 
 " Monti, I have farther to go to-night," he said, hastily. I can't stop with 
 you now. Good-by, dear old boy, and thanks for your news. I shall see you 
 soon again." And, before I could stop him, he was gone again as suddenly as 
 he had come. 
 
 As I heard afterwards, Dyneley, as soon as he left little Lilla, found out 
 that he had not been with her four months without finding her winning ways 
 and frank affection grow necessary to him. But having the strongest will of 
 any man I know, he set sail, and compelled himself to be away six months, 
 taking Dalmaine to Barbadoes, that in case his resolution failed him he should 
 still be obliged to go on. All that six months his fiery and unwelcome passion 
 grew and grew, as it does in strong natures, with absence or difficulty. Night 
 after night he paced the deck of the Aphrodite, trying, to no purpose, to stifle 
 it. It was not the slightest use. Love, in men like Dyneley, is not put away 
 at a word, and he came back to England worse than he was before, with only 
 one thought in his mind to see Lilla. Farther he did not look, for though 
 his pride now would have yielded, his want of money prevented his ever making 
 her his wife. It was a fair, fresh May morning when he steamed up Loch 
 Fine again, and saw once more the lovely woods and bays of Lilla's Argyleshire. 
 His love, fiery as Bucephalus unbroken, made his heart beat quick, with a thou- 
 sand anxieties and vague fears, and his veins thrill with a longing to see her
 
 BELLES AND BLACKCOCK. 07:; 
 
 face and hear her soft fond voice. At a slashing stride he walked the ten miles 
 from the shore to Duncairn's farm; the bodily exertion was a relief to him. 
 He came to the very glen where we lost our way; he saw the chimneys of the 
 house far off down the hill-side. His heart stood still in an anguish of dread. 
 
 She might be gone, she might be The last thought he shut out as too 
 
 hideous to be endured. He drew near the gate, and thanked God when he 
 saw her. He stood for a time behind a tree and- watching her sitting on the 
 steps of the window, her little thin hands and pale cheeks, with the total 
 absence of all the rayonnant brightness of expression once her peculiar charm, 
 were a mute reproach to him. Poor child! she was looking at his picture. 
 He pushed the gate open, and uttered her name. She glanced up, sprang 
 towards him with a wild cry, and threw herself on a his breast, laughing 
 and weeping in an agony of joy. She looked up in his face, tears raining down 
 her cheeks. 
 
 " You are come back at last. I knew you would. I have watched for you 
 every day. Ah, you will never leave me again promise me you never will ! " 
 
 Exhausted with the intensity of her joy, she turned sick and faint, and her 
 head drooped on his arm. He began to fear the shock might harm her; but 
 joy never hurts any one permanently, and Dyneley's words and caresses after a 
 time brought her to consciousness, though not for a very long time to calm- 
 ness. But, in truth, I daresay, though he sets up for a philosopher, my lord 
 was not so very much calmer himself, being, for all he may say to the contrary, 
 of an enthusiastic, vehement, impulsive nature when he is roused. 
 
 "Ah! it was cruel to leave me," murmured Lilla, when they had grown a 
 little more tranquil. " If you knew all the agonies of suspense, all I have felt 
 when I knew not where you were, whom you were with, whether you were well 
 or ill, happy or unhappy if you could guess how the days dragged on from 
 sunrise to sunset, and I watched for you, always in vain, and my brain whirled 
 and my heart sickened with the longing to look upon your face oh! if you 
 had known air I suffered, I do not think you would have gone." 
 
 Dyneley thanked her selon les regies: " Dear child, do you think I, too, 
 did not suffer ? I did what I thought best for you. Honor alone forced me 
 from you then. Had I stayed another day in Scotland I could never have left 
 you. But when I was away from you, I felt to the uttermost how dear you had 
 grown to me. I knew that as soon as I came to England, I should come to 
 you. Last night I heard of my inheritance of money, which enables me to 
 marry; and to you, who loved me when you knew not that I loved you, you, who 
 would have loved me through every trial and sacrifice to you I can now offer 
 both my name and my home. Make me happy, Lilla, as, since my boyhood, 
 T have never yet been." 
 
 They were married in Argyleshire very soon after, for if Dyneley sets his 
 
 VOL. III. 33
 
 074 O UIDA ' S WORKS. 
 
 mind upon a thing he never waits for it. She does make him happy. Her ca- 
 ressing, demonstrative, passionate devotion to him just suits him. He wants 
 something strong and out of the common. One of your " quiet " retiring girls 
 with their calm, domestic affection, would have bored him eternally never 
 understood, and never satisfied him. Anything cold, conventional, or inani- 
 mate in a wife would have distracted him, and driven him away from her in no 
 time. 
 
 Vauxley is thrown open, and little Lilla shines brilliantly in her new life, 
 which must be a curious contrast to that in Argyleshire. Women take her to 
 task for her enthusiasm, her impulsiveness, and for a hundred thousand things, 
 of course, because she is so delightful to us. The Cardonnels would now be very 
 happy to notice her, and make many advances towards it, but he does not choose 
 his little diamond of the Desert should be so taken up, and keeps them all at 
 arm's length. Dyneley's chums admire her immensely an admiration which, 
 though she likes it, as it does credit to Dyneley's taste, her exclusive worship 
 of him prevents her appreciating and cultivating as much as Lady Fitzcorrie, no 
 doubt, would do. Dyneley says he has but one fault to find with her she will 
 pet Mousquetaire, and give him cream, and such-like injurious condiments; 
 but the old dog is as game as ever, though he likes to follow her over the house 
 as well as to follow the slot of a deer. Claude and his wife, Romer and I, and 
 two or three other men, were down at Vauxley last September for the ist, and 
 very good fun we had. Altogether, my two friends have made a good thing of 
 that autumn at Glenmist, when they bagged en mime temps BELLES AND BLACK- 
 COCK. I often think, when I hear his clear ringing voice in the Lords, or his 
 musical laugh in the hunting-fields and he often says, when we sit in the 
 smoking-room at Vauxley (into which sanctuary of Cavendish, Lilla, too, some- 
 times penetrates) thai he has good cause to mark with a white stone that mem- 
 orable night when we lost ourselves in the mist, and A LITTLE CANDLE ON THE 
 
 MOORS LIGHTED HlM TO HIS DESTINY.
 
 A LINE IN THE "DAILY." 
 
 A LINE IN THE "DAILY." 
 
 WHO DID IT, AND WHO WAS DONE BY IT. 
 
 " LIEUTENANT-COLONEL FAIRLIE'S troop of Horse artillery is ordered to 
 Norwich to replace the i2th Lancers, en route to Bombay." Those three lines 
 in the papers spread dismay into the souls of Norfolk young ladies, and no less 
 horror into ours, for we were very jolly at Woolwich, could run up to the Clubs 
 and down to Epsom, and were far too material not to prefer ball-room belles to 
 bluebells, strawberry-ice to fresh hautboys, the sparkle of champagne-cups to 
 all the murmurs of the brooks, and the flutter of ballet-girls' wings to the rustle 
 of forest-leaves. But, unhappily, the Ordnance Office is no more given to con- 
 sidering the feelings of their Royal Gunners than the House Guards the 
 individual desires of the two other Arms; and off we went to Norwich, repining 
 bitterly, or, in modern English, swearing hard at our destinies, creating an 
 immense sensation with our 6-pounders, as we flatter ourselves the Royals 
 always contrive to do, whether on fair friends or fierce foes, and were looked 
 upon spitefully by the one or too young ladies whose hearts were gone east- 
 wards with the Twelfth, smilingly by the one or two hundred who, having 
 fruitlessly laid out a great deal of tackle on the Twelfth, proceeded to manu- 
 facture fresh flies to catch us. 
 
 We soon made up, I think, to the Norwich girls for the loss of the Twelfth. 
 They set dead upon Fairlie, our captain, a Brevet Lieutenant-Colonel, and 
 a C.B. for " service in India," where he had rivalled Norman Ramsay 
 at Fuentes d'Onor, had had a ball put in his hip, and had come home again to 
 be worshipped by the women for his romantic reputation. They made an 
 immense deal, too, of Levison Courtenay, the beauty of the troop, and called 
 Belle in consequence; who did not want any flummery or flirtation to increase 
 his opinion of himself, being as vain of his almond eyes as any girl just entered 
 as the favorite for the season. There were Tom Gower, too, a capital fellow, 
 with no nonsense about him, who made no end of chaff of Belle Courtenay; 
 and Little Nell, otherwise Harcourt Poulteney Nelson, who had by some mir- 
 acle escaped expulsion both from Carshalton and the College; and votre humble
 
 676 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 serviteur Phil Hardinge, first lieutenant; and one or two other fellows, who 
 having cut dashing figures at our Woolwich reviews, cantering across Black- 
 heath Common, or waltzing with dainty beauties down our mess-room, made 
 the Artillery welcome in that city of shawls and oratorios, where according to 
 the Gazetteer, no virtuous person ought to dwell, that volume, with character- 
 istic lucidity, pronouncing its streets "ill-disposed." 
 
 The Clergy asked us to their rectories a temptation we were often proof 
 against, there being three noticeable facts in rectories, that the talk is always 
 slow, " the Church " being present, and having much the same chilling effect as 
 the presence of a chaperone at a tete-a-tete; the daughters generally ugly, and, 
 from leading the choir at morning services, perfectly convinced that they sing 
 like Clara Novello, and that the harmonium is a most delightful instrument; 
 and, last and worst, the wines are almost always poor, except the port which 
 the reverend host drinks himself, but which, Dieu merci ! we rarely or never 
 touch. 
 
 The County asked us, too; and there we went for good hock, tolerable- 
 looking women, and first-rate billiard-tables. For the first month we were in 
 Norfolk we voted it unanimously the most infernally slow and hideous county 
 going; and I daresay we made ourselves uncommonly disagreeable, as people, 
 if they are not pleased, be they ever so well bred, have a knack of doing. 
 
 Things were thus quiescent and stagnant, when Fairlie one night at mess 
 told us a bit of news. 
 
 " Old fellows, whom do you think I met to-day ? " 
 
 " How should we know ? Cut along." 
 
 "The Swan and her Cygnets." 
 
 "The Vanes? Oh, bravo! " was shouted at a chorus, for the dame and 
 demoiselles in question we had known in town that winter, and a nicer, 
 pleasanter, faster set of women I never came across. " What's bringing them 
 down here, and how's Geraldine ? " 
 
 "Vane's come into his baronetcy, and his place is close by Norwich," said 
 Fairlie; " his wife's health has been bad, and so they left town early; and 
 Geraldine is quite well, and counting on haymaking,. she informed me." 
 
 " Come, that is good news," said Belle, yawning. " There'll be one pretty 
 woman in the county, thank Heaven! Poor little Geraldine! I must go and 
 call on her to-morrow." 
 
 " She has existed without your calls, Belle," said Fairlie, dryly, " and don't 
 look as if she'd pined after you." 
 
 " My dear fellow, how should you know ? " said Belle, in no wise discon- 
 certed. " A little rouge soon makes 'em look well, and as for smiles, they'll 
 smile while they're dying for you. Little Vane and I were always good friends, 
 and shall be again if I care."
 
 A LINE IN THE "DAILY." 677 
 
 " Conceited owl! " said Fairlie, under his moustaches. " I'm sorry to hurt 
 your feelings, then, but your pretty friend ' never asked after you." 
 
 "I daresay not," said Belle, complacently. "Where a woman's most 
 interested she's always quietest, and Geraldine " 
 
 " Lady Vane begged me to tell you you will always be welcome over there, 
 old fellow," said Fairlie, remorselessly cutting him short. " Perhaps we shall 
 find something to amuse us better than these stiltified Chapter dinners." 
 
 The Vanes of whom we talked were an uncommonly pleasant set of people 
 whom we had known at Lee, where Vane, a Q.C., then resided, his prospective 
 baronetcy being at that time held by a third or fourth cousin. Fairlie had 
 known the family since his boyhood; there were four daughters, tall graceful 
 women, who had gained themselves the nickname of The Swan and her Cygnets; 
 and then there were twins, a boy of eighteen, who'd just left Eton; and the girl 
 Geraldine, a charming young lady, whom Belle admired more warmly than that 
 dandy often admired anybody besides himself, and whom Fairlie liked cord- 
 ially, having had many a familiar bit of fun with her, as he had known her ever 
 since he was a dashing cadet, and she made her deT>ut in life in the first column 
 of the Times. Her sisters were handsome women; but Geraldine was bewitch- 
 ing. A very pleasant family they were, and a vast acquisition to us. Miss 
 Geraldine flirted to a certain extent with us all, but chiefly with the Colonel, 
 whenever he was to be had, those two having a very free-and-easy, familiar, 
 pleasant style of intercourse, owing to old acquaintance; and Belle spent two 
 hours every evening on his toilette when we were going to dine there, and 
 vowed she was a " deuced pretty little puss. Perhaps she might he wasn't 
 sure, but perhaps (it would be a horrid sacrifice), if we were with her much 
 longer, he wasn't sure she mightn't persuade him to take compassion upon her, 
 he was so weak where women were concerned ! " 
 
 u What a conceit ! " said Fairlie thereat, with a contemptuous twist of his 
 moustaches and a shrug of his shoulders to me. " I must say, if I were a woman, 
 I shouldn't feel over-flattered by a lover who admired his own beauty first, and 
 mine afterwards. Not that I pretend to understand women." 
 
 By which speech I argued that his old playmate Geraldine hadn't thrown 
 hay over the Colonel, and been taught billiards by him, and ridden his bay 
 mare over the park in her evening dress, without interesting him slightly; and 
 that though I don't think he knew it he was deigning to be a trifle jealous of 
 his Second Captain, the all -mighty conqueror Belle. 
 
 " What fools they must be that put in these things ! " yawned Belle one 
 morning, reading over his breakfast coffee in the Daily Fryer one of those 
 "advertisements for a wife" that one comes across sometimes in the 
 papers, and that make us, like a good many other things, agree with 
 Goldsmith:
 
 678 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 Reason, they say, belongs to man, 
 
 But let them prove it if they can; 
 
 Wise Aristotle and Smiglicious, 
 
 By ratiocinations specious, 
 
 Have strove to prove with great precision, 
 
 With definition and division, 
 
 Homo est ratione praeditum, 
 
 But for my soul I cannot credit 'em. 
 
 " What fools they must be ! " yawned Belle, wrapping his dressing-gown round 
 him, and coaxing his perfumy whiskers under his velvet smoking-cap. Belle 
 was always inundated by smoking-caps in cloth and velvet, silk and beads, with 
 blue tassels, and red tassels, and gold tassels, embroidered and filigreed, 
 rounded and pointed; he had them sent to him by the dozen, and pretty good 
 chaff he made of the donors. " Awful fools ! The idea of advertising for a 
 wife, when the only difficulty a man has is to keep from being tricked into 
 taking one. I bet you, if I did like this owl here, I should have a hundred 
 answers; and if it was known it was I " 
 
 " Little Geraldine's self for a candidate, eh ? " asked Tom Gower. 
 
 "Very possibly," said Belle, with a self-complacent smile. " She's a fast 
 little thing, don't check at much, and she's deucedly in love with me, poor little 
 dear almost as much trouble to me as Julia Sedley was last season. That 
 girl all but proposed to me; she did, indeed. Never was nearer coming to 
 grief in my life. What will you bet me that, if I advertise for a wife, I don't 
 hoax lots of women ? " 
 
 "I'll bet you ten pounds," said I, " that you don't hoax one! " 
 
 " Done! " said Belle stretching out his hand for a dainty memorandum-book, 
 gift of the identical Julia Sedley aforesaid, and entering the bet in it " done! 
 If I'm not asked to walk in the Close at noon and look out for a pink bonnet 
 and a black lace cloak, and to loiter up the market-place till I come across a 
 black hat and blue muslin dress; if I'm not requested to call at No. 20, and to 
 grant an interview at No. 84; if I'm not written to by Agatha A. with hazel, 
 and Belinda B. with black, eyes all coming after me like flies after sugar-cask, 
 why you shall have your ten guineas, my boy, and my colt into the bargain. 
 Come, write out the advertisement, Tom I can't, it's too much trouble; draw 
 it mild, that's all, or the letters we shall get will necessitate an additional Nor- 
 wich postman. By George, what fun it will be to the girls! Cut along, Tom, 
 can't you ? " 
 
 " All right," said Gower, pushing away his coffee-cup, and drawing the ink 
 to him. " Head it ' MARRIAGE,' of course ? " 
 
 " Of course. That word's as attractive to a woman as the belt to a prize- 
 fighter, or a pipe of port to a college fellow." 
 
 " ' MARRIAGE. A Bachelor ' "
 
 A LINE IN THE "DAILY." G?9 
 
 " Tell 'em a military man; all girls have the scarlet fever." 
 
 " Very well' an Officer in the Queen's, of considerable personal attrac- 
 tions ' " 
 
 My dear fellow, pray don't ! " expostulated Belle, in extreme alarm; "we 
 shall have such swarms of 'em ! " 
 
 " No, no ! we must say that," persisted Gower " < personal attractions, 
 aged eight-and-twenty 
 
 "Can't you put it, < in the flower of his age,' or his ' sixth lustre' ? It's so 
 much more poetic." 
 
 " ' the flower of his age,' then (that'll leave 'em a wide range from twenty 
 to fifty, according to their taste), ' is desirous of meeting a young lady of 
 beauty, talent and good family,' eh ? " 
 
 " Yes. All women think themselves beauties, if they're as ugly as sin. 
 Milliners and confectioner girls talk Anglo-French, and rattle a tin-kettle piano 
 after a fashion, and anybody buys a ' family ' for half-a-crown at the Heralds' 
 Office so fire away." 
 
 " ' who, feeling as he does the want of a kindred heart and sympathetic soul, 
 will accord him the favor of a letter or an interview, as a preliminary to the 
 greatest step in life.' " 
 
 " A step like one on thin ice very sure to bring a man to grief," interpo- 
 lated Belle. " Say something about property; those soul and spirit young 
 ladies generally keep a look-out for tin, and only feel an elective affinity for a 
 lot of debentures and consols." 
 
 " ' The advertiser being a man of some present and still more prospective 
 wealth, requires no fortune, the sole objects of his search being love and 
 domestic felicity.' Domestic felicity how horrible ! Don't it sound exactly 
 like the end of a lady's novel, where the unlucky hero is always brought to an 
 untimely end in a ' sweet cottage on the banks of the lovely Severn.' " 
 
 " ' Domestic felicity ' bah ! What are you writing about ? " yawned Belle. 
 "I'd as soon take to teetotalism; however, it'll tell in the advertisement. 
 Bravo, Tom, that will do. Address it to ' L. C., care of Mrs. Greene, confec- 
 tioner, St. Giles Street, Norwich.' Miss Patty'll take the letters in for me, 
 though not if she knew their errand. Tip seven-and-sixpence with it, and send 
 it to the Daily Fryer." 
 
 We did send it to the Daily, and in that broadsheet we all of us read it two 
 mornings after. 
 
 MARRIAGE. A Bachelor, an Officer of the Queen's, of considerable personal attractions, 
 and in the flower of his age, is desirous of meeting a young lady of beauty, accompli* 
 ments and good family, who, feeling as he does the want of a kindred heart and sympa- 
 thetic soul, will accord him the favor either of a letter or an interview, as a preliminary to 
 the greatest step in life. The advertiser being a man of some present and still mot 
 spective wealth; requires no fortune, the sole objects of his search being love and domestic 
 felicity. Address, L. C., care of Mrs. Greene, confectioner, Sj. Giles Street, Norwich.
 
 (580 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 " Whose advertisement do you imagine that is ? " said Fairlie, showing the 
 Daily to Geraldine, as he sat with her and her sisters under some lilac and 
 larch trees in one of the meadows of Fern Chase, which had had the civility, 
 Geraldine said, to yield a second crop of hay expressly for her to have the 
 pleasure of making it. She leaned down toward him as he lay on the grass, 
 and read the advertisement, looking uncommonly pretty in her dainty muslin 
 dress, with its fluttering mauve ribbons, and a wreath she had just twisted up, 
 of bluebells and pinks and white heaths which Fairlie had gathered as he lay, 
 put on her bright hair. We called her a little flirt, but I think she was an un- 
 intentional one; at least her agaceries were all as unconscious as they were 
 her worst enemies (/. e. plain young ladies) had to allow unaffected. 
 
 " How exquisitely sentimental ! Is it yours ? " she asked, with demure 
 mischief. 
 
 " Mine ! " echoed Fairlie, with supreme scorn. 
 
 " It's some one's here, because the address is at Mrs. Greene's. Come, tell 
 me at once, monsieur." 
 
 " The only fool in the Artillery," said Fairlie, curtly: " Belle Courtenay." 
 
 " Captain Courtenay ! " echoed Geraldine, with a little flush on her 
 cheeks, caused, perhaps, by the quick glance the Colonel shot at her as he 
 spoke. 
 
 "Captain Courtenay!" said Katherine Vane. " Why, what can he want 
 with a wife ? I thought he had Vembarras de choix offered him in that line; at 
 least, so he makes out himself." 
 
 " I daresay," said Fairlie, dryly, " it's for a bet he's made, to see how many 
 women he can hoax, I believe." 
 
 " How can you tell it is a hoax ? " said Geraldine> throwing cowlips at her 
 greyhound. " It may be some medium of intercourse with some one he really 
 cares for, and who may understand his meaning." 
 
 " Perhaps you are in his confidence, Geraldine, or perhaps you are thinking 
 of answering it yourself ? " 
 
 " Perhaps," said the young lady, waywardly, making the cowslips into a ball, 
 " there might be worse investments. Your bete noire is strikingly handsome; 
 he is the perfection of style; he is going to be Equerry to the Prince; his 
 mother is just married again to Lord Chevenix; he did not name half his at- 
 tractions in that line in the Daily." 
 
 With which Geraldine rushed across the meadow after the greyhound and 
 the cowslip ball, and Fairlie lay quiet plucking up the heathes by the roots. 
 He lay there still, when the cowslip ball struck him a soft fragrant blow against 
 his lips, and knocked the Cuba from between his teeth. 
 
 " Why don't you speak ? " asked Geraldine, plaintively. " You are not half 
 so pleasant to play with as you were before you went to India and I was seven
 
 A LINE IN THE "DAILY." ,;.M 
 
 or eight, and you had La Grace, and battledoor and shuttlecock, and cricket, 
 and all sorts of games with me in the old garden at Charlton." 
 
 He might have told her she was much less dangerous then than now; he 
 was not disposed to flatter her, however. So he answered her quietly. 
 
 " I preferred you as you were then." 
 
 "Indeed!" said Geraldine, with a hot color in her cheeks. "I do not 
 think there are many who would indorse your complimentary opinion." 
 
 " Possibly," said Fairlie, coldly. 
 
 She took up her cowslips, and hit him hard with them several times. 
 
 " Don't speak in that tone. If you dislike me, you can say so in warmer 
 words surely." 
 
 Fairlie smiled malgrt ' lui. 
 
 "What a child you are, Geraldine! but a child that is a very mischievous 
 coquette, and has learned a hundred tricks and agaceries of which my little 
 friend of seven or eight knew nothing. I grant you were not a quarter so 
 charming, but you were, I am afraid more true." 
 
 Geraldine was ready to cry, but she was in a passion, nevertheless; such a 
 hot and short-lived passion as all women of any spirit can go into on occasion, 
 when they are unjustly suspected. 
 
 " If you choose to think so of me you may," she said, with immeasurable 
 hauteur sweeping away from him, her mauve ribbons fluttering disdainfully. 
 "I, for one, shall not try to undeceive you." 
 
 The next night we all went up to a ball at the Vanes', to drink Rhenish, eat 
 ices, quiz the women, flirt with the pretty ones in corners, lounge against door- 
 ways, criticise the feet in the waltzing as they passed us, and do, in fact, any- 
 thing but what we went to do danc"e, according to our custom in such scenes. 
 
 The Swan and her Cygnets looked very stunning; they " made up well," as 
 ladies say when they cannot deny that another is good-looking, but qualify 
 your admiration by an assurance that she is shockingly plain in the morning, 
 and owes all to her milliner and maids. Geraldine, who, by the greatest stretch 
 of scepticism, could not be supposed " made up," was bewitching, with her 
 sunshiny enjoyment of everything, and her untiring waltzing, going for all tin- 
 world like a spinning-top, only a top tires, and she did not. Belle, who made 
 a principle of never dancing except under extreme coercion by a very pretty 
 hostess could not resist her, and Tom Gower, and Little Nell, and all the rest 
 not to mention half Norfolk, crowded round her; all except Fairlie, who leaned 
 against the doorway, seeming to talk to her father, or the members, or any- 
 body near, but watching the young lady for all that, who flirted not a h 
 having in her mind the scene in the paddock of yesterday, and wishmg, pei 
 to show him that if he did not admire her more than when she was eight, 01 
 men had better taste.
 
 68 o OU IDA'S WORKS. 
 
 She managed to come near him towards the end of the evening, sending 
 Belle to get her an ice. 
 
 " Well," she said, with a comical pitie cTelle-meme, " do you dislike me so 
 much that you don't mean to dance with me at all ? Not a single waltz all 
 night ? " 
 
 " What time have you had to give me ? " said Fairlie, coldly. " You have 
 been surrounded all the evening." 
 
 " Of course I have. I am not so disagreeable to other gentlemen as I am 
 to you. But I could have made time for you if you had only asked for it. At 
 your own ball last week you engaged me beforehand for six waltzes." 
 
 Fairlie relented towards her. Despite her flirting, he thought she did not 
 care for Belle after all. 
 
 " Well," he said, smiling, " will you give me one after supper ? " 
 
 " You told me you shouldn't dance, Colonel Fairlie," said Katherine Vane, 
 smiling. 
 
 " One can't tell what one mayn't do under temptation," said Fairlie, smiling 
 too. " A man may change his mind, you know." 
 
 "Oh yes," cried Geraldine; a man may change his mind, and we are ex- 
 pected to be eminently grateful to him for his condescension; but if we change 
 our minds, how severely we are condemned for vacillation: 'So weak! ' ' Just 
 like women! ' ' Never like the same thing two minutes, poor things! ' ' 
 
 "You don't like the same thing two minutes, Geraldine," laughed Fairlie; 
 " so I daresay you speak feelingly." 
 
 " I changeablej I am constancy itself! " 
 
 " Are you ? You know what the Italians say of ' ocche azzure ' ? " 
 
 "But I don't believe it, monsieur! " cried Geraldine: 
 
 " Blue eyes beat black fifty to seven, 
 For black's of hell, but blue's of heaven! " 
 
 "I beg your pardon, mademoiselle," laughed Fairlie: 
 
 " Done, by the odds, it is not true! 
 One devil's black, but scores are blue!" 
 
 He whirled her off into the circle in the midst of our laughter at their ready 
 wit Soon after he bid her good night, but he found time to whisper as he did so. 
 
 "You are more like my little Geraldine to-night!" 
 
 The look he got made him determine to make her his little Geraldine be- 
 fore much more time had passed. At least he drove us back to Norwich in 
 what seemed very contented silence, for he smoked tranquilly, and let the 
 horses go their own pace two certain indications that a man has pleasant 
 thoughts to accompany him.
 
 A LINE IN THE "DAILY." 683 
 
 I do not think he listened to Belle's, and Gower's, and my conversation, 
 not even when Belle took his weed out of his mouth and announced the 
 important fact: " Hardinge! my ten guineas, if you please. I've had a 
 letter! " 
 
 " What ! an answer ? By Jove ! " 
 
 " Of course, an answer. I tell you all the pretty women in the city will 
 know my initials, and send after me. I only hope they will be pretty, and 
 then one may have a good deal of fun. I was in at Greene's this morning hav- 
 ing mock-turtle, and talking to Patty (she's not bad-looking, that little girl, 
 only she drops her 'h's' so. I'm like that fellow what's his name ? in the 
 ' Peau de Chagrin;' I don't admire my loves in cotton prints), when she gave 
 me the letter. I left it on my dressing-table, but you can see it to-morrow. 
 It's a horrid red daubed-looking seal, and no crest; but that she mightn't use 
 for fear of being found out, and the writing is disguised, but that it would be. 
 She says she has the three requisites; but where's the woman that don't think 
 herself Sappho and Galatea combined ? And she was nineteen last March. 
 Poor little devil ! she little thinks how she'll be done. I'm to meet her on the 
 Yarmouth road at two, and to look out for a lady standing by the first mile- 
 stone. Shall we go, Tom ? It may lead to something amusing, you know, 
 though certainly it won't lead to marriage." 
 
 " Oh ! we'll go, old fellow," said I. " Deuce take you, Belle ! what a lucky 
 fellow you are with the women." 
 
 " Luckier than I want to be," yawned Belle. " It's a horrid bore to be so 
 set upon. One may have too much of a good thing, you know." 
 
 At two the day after, having refreshed ourselves with a light luncheon at 
 Mrs. Greene's of lobster-salad and pale ale, Belle, Gower, and I buttoned our 
 gloves and rode leisurely up the road. 
 
 " How my heart palpitates ! " said Belle, stroking his moustaches with a 
 bored air. " How can I tell, you know, but what I may be going to see the arbiter 
 of my destiny ? Men have been tricked into all sorts of tomfoolery by their 
 compassionate feelings. And then if she should squint or have a turn-up 
 nose ! Good Heavens, what a fearful idea ! I've often wondered when I've 
 seen men with ugly wives how they could have been cheated into taking 'em; 
 they couldn't have done it in their senses, you know, nor yet with their eyes 
 open. You may depend they took 'em to church in a state of coma from 
 chloroform. 'Pon my word, I feel quite nervous. You don't think the girl 
 will have a parson and a register hid behind the milestone, do you ? " 
 
 " If she should, it won't be legal without a license, thanks to the fools who 
 turn Hymen into a tax-gatherer, and won't let a fellow make love without he 
 asks leave of the Archbishop of Canterbury," said Gower. " Hallo, Belle, 
 here's the milestone, but where's the lady ? "
 
 684 
 
 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 " Virgin modesty makes her unpunctual," said Belle, puting up his eye-glass. 
 
 " Hang modesty ! " swore Tom. " It's past two, and we left a good quarter 
 of that salad uneaten. Confound her ! " 
 
 "There are no signs of her," 'said I. "Did she tell you her dress, Belle?" 
 
 "Not a syllable about it; only mentiond a milestone, and one might have 
 found a market-woman sitting on that." -, 1 
 
 " Hallo ? here's something feminine. Oh, good gracious ! this can't be it, 
 it's got a brown stuff dress on, and a poke straw bonnet and a green veil. No, 
 no, Belle. If you married her, that would be a case of chloroform." 
 
 But the horrible brown stuff came sidling along the road with that peculiar 
 step belonging to ladies of a certain age, characterized by Patty Greene as " tip- 
 putting," sweeping up the dust with its horrible folds, making straight en route 
 for Belle, who was standing a little in advance of us. Nineteen ! Good 
 Heavens ! she must have been fifty if she was a day, and under her green veil 
 was a chestnut front yes, decidedly a front and a face yellow as a Canadian's, 
 and wrinkled as Madame Pipelet's, made infinitely worse by that sweet maiden 
 simper and assumed juvenility common to vieilles filles. Up she came towards 
 poor Belle, who involuntarily retreated .step by step till he had backed against 
 the milestone, and could get no farther, while she smiled up in his handsome 
 face, and he stared down in her withered one, with the most comical expression 
 of surprise, dismay, and horror that had ever appeared on our " beauty's im- 
 passive features. " 
 
 "Are you the the L. C.?" demanded the maiden often lustres, casting 
 her eyes to the ground with virgin modesty. 
 
 " L. C. ar My dear madam, I don't quite understand you," faltered 
 
 Belle, taken aback for once in his life. 
 
 "Was it not you," faltered the fair one, shaking out a pocket-handkerchief 
 that sent a horrible odor of musk to the olfactory nerves of poor Belle, most 
 fastidious connoisseur in perfume, "who advertised for a kindred heart and 
 sympathetic soul ? " 
 
 " Really, my good lady," began Belle, still too aghast by the chestnut front 
 to recover his self-possession. 
 
 "Because," simpered his inamorata, too agitated by her own feelings to 
 hear his horrible appellative, keeping him at bay there with the fatal mile- 
 stone behind him and the awful brown stuff in front of him " because I, too, 
 have desired to meet with some elective affinity, some spirit-tie that might give 
 me all those more subtle sympathies which can never be found in the din and 
 bustle of the heartless world; I, too, have pined for the objects of your search 
 -love and domestic happiness. Oh, blessed words, surely we might might 
 we not ? " 
 
 She paused, overcome with maidenly confusion, and buried her face in the
 
 A LINE IN THE "DAILY." 685 
 
 musk-scented handkerchief. Tom and I, where we stood perdus, burst into un- 
 controllable shouts of laughter. Poor Belle gave one blank look of utter terror 
 at the tout ensemble of brown stuff, straw poke, and chustnut front. He forgot 
 courtesy, manners, and everything else; his lips were parted, with his small 
 white teeth glancing under his silky moustaches, his sleepy eyes were open wide, 
 and as the maiden lady dropped her handkerchief, and gave him what she meant 
 to be the softest and most tender glance, he turned straight round, sprang on his 
 bay, and rushed down the Yarmouth road as if the whole of the dignitaries of 
 the church and law were tearing after him to force him nolens volens into car- 
 rying out the horrible promise in his cursed line in the Daily. What was Tom's 
 and my amazement to see the maiden lady seat herself astride on the milestone, 
 and join her cachinnatory shouts to ours, fling her green veil into a hawthorn 
 tree, jerk her bonnet into our faces, kick off her brown stuff into the middle of the 
 road, tear off her chestnut front and yellow mask, and perform a frantic war- 
 dance on the roadside turf. No less a person than that mischievous monkey 
 and inimitable minic Little Nell ! 
 
 "You young demon!" shouted Gower, shrieking with laughter till he 
 cried. " A pretty fellow you are to go tricking your senior officer like this. 
 You little imp, how can you tell but what I shall court-martial you to-morrow ? " 
 
 " No, no, you won't ! " cried Little Nell, persuing his frantic dance. 
 " Wasn't it prime ? wasn't it glorious ? wasn't it worth the Kohinoor to see ? 
 You won't go and peach, when I've just given you a better farce than all old 
 Buckstone's ? By Jove ! Belle's face at my chestnut front ! This'll be one of 
 his prime conquests, eh ? I say, old fellows, when Charles Mathews goes to 
 glory, don't you think I might take his place, and beat him hollow, too ? " 
 
 When we got back to barracks, we found Belle prostrate on his sofa, heated, 
 injured, crestfallen, solacing himself with Seltzer-and-water, and swearing away 
 anything but mildly at that " wretched old woman." He bound us over to 
 secrecy, which, with Little Nell's confidence in our minds, we naturally prom- 
 ised. Poor Belle ! to have been made a fool of before two was humiliation 
 more than sufficient for our all-conquering blondin. For one who had so often 
 refused to stir across a ballroom to look at a Court beauty, to have ridden out 
 three miles to see an old maid of fifty with a chestnut front ! The insult sank 
 deep into his soul, and threw him into an abject melancholy, which hung over 
 him all through mess, and was not disipated till a letter came to him from Mrs. 
 Greene's, when we were playing loo in Fairlie's room. That night Fairlie was 
 in gay spirts. He had called at Fern Chase that morning, and though he had 
 not been able to see Geraldine alone, he had passed a pleasant couple of hours 
 there, playing pool with her and her sisters, and had been as good friends as 
 ever with his old playmate. 
 
 "Well, Belle," said he, feeling good-natured even with him that night, "did
 
 686 
 
 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 you get any good out of your advertisement ? Did your lady turn out a very 
 
 pretty one ? " 
 
 "No: deuced ugly, like the generality," yawned poor Belle, giving me 
 a kick to remind me of my promise. Little Nell was happily about the 
 city somewhere with Pretty Face, or the boy would scarcely have kept his 
 countenance. 
 
 " What amusement you can find in hoaxing silly women," said Fairlie, " is 
 incomprehensible to me. However, men's tastes differ, happily. Here comes 
 another epistle for you, Belle; perhaps there's better luck for you there." 
 
 " Oh ! I shall have no end of letters. I sha'n't answer any more. I think 
 it's such a deuced trouble. Diamonds trumps, eh ? " said Belle, laying the 
 note down till he should have leisure to attend to it. Poor old fellow ! I 
 daresay he was afraid of another onslaught from maiden ladies. 
 
 "Come, Belle," said Glenville; "come, Belle, open your letter; we're all 
 impatience. If you won't go, I will in your place." 
 
 " Do, my dear fellow. Take care you're not pounced down upon by a re- 
 spectable papa for intentions, or called to account by a fierce brother with a 
 stubby beard," said Belle, lazily taking up the letter. As he did so, the melan- 
 choly indolence on his face changed to eagerness. 
 
 " The deuce! the Vane crest! " 
 
 " A note of invitation, probably ? " suggested Gower. 
 
 " Would they send an invitation to Patty Greene's ? I tell you it's addressed 
 to L. C," said Belle, disdainfully, opening the letter, leaving its giant deer 
 couchant intact. "I thought it very likely; I expected it, indeed poor little 
 dear! I oughtn't to have let it out. Ain't you jealous, old fellows ? Little 
 darling! Perhaps I may be tricked into matrimony after all. I'd rather a 
 presentiment that advertisement would come to something. There, you may 
 all look at it, if you like." 
 
 It was a dainty sheet of scented cream-laid, stamped with the deer couch- 
 ant, such us had brought us many an invitation down from Fern Chase, and on 
 it was written, in delicate caligraphy: 
 
 " G. V. Understands the meaning of the advertisement, and will meet L, C. 
 at the entrance of Fern Wood, at eleven o'clock to-morrow morning." 
 
 There was a dead silence as we read it; then a tremendous buzz. Cheaplyas 
 we held women, I don't think there was one of us who wasn't surprised at Ger- 
 aldine's doing any clandestine thing like this. He sat with a look of indolent 
 triumph, curling his perfumed moustaches, and looking at the little autograph, 
 which gave us evidence of what he often boasted Geraldine Vane's regard. 
 
 " Let me look at your note," said Fairlie, stretching out his hand. 
 
 He soon returned it, with a brief, " Very complimentary indeed ! " 
 
 When the men left, I chanced to be last, having mislaid my cigar-case. As
 
 A LINE IN THE "DAILY." 687 
 
 I looked about for it, Fairlie addressed me in the same brief, stern tone be- 
 tween his teeth with which he spoke to Belle. 
 
 " Hardinge, you made this absurd bet with Courtenay, did you not ? Is 
 this note a hoax upon him ? " 
 
 " Not that I know of it dosen't look like it. You see there is the Vane 
 crest, and the girl's own initials." 
 
 "Very true." He turned round to the window again, and leaned against 
 it, looking out into the dawn, with a look upon his face that I was very sorry 
 to see. 
 
 "But it is not like Geraldine," I began. " It may be a trick. Somebody 
 may have stolen their paper and crest it's possible. I tell you what I'll do to 
 find out; I'll follow Belle to-morrow, and see who does meet him in Fern Wood." 
 
 " Do," said Fairlie, eagerly. Then he checked himself, and went on tapping 
 an impatient tattoo on the shutter. " You see, I have known the family for 
 years known her when she was a little child. I should be sorry to think that 
 one of them could be capable of such " 
 
 Despite his self-command he could not finish his sentence. Geraldine was 
 a great deal too dear to him to be treated in seeming carelessness, or spoken 
 lightly of, however unwisely she might act. I found my cigar-case. His 
 laconic " Good-night ! " told me he would rather be alone, as I closed the door 
 and left him. 
 
 The morning was as sultry and as clear as a July day could be when Belle 
 lounged down the street, looking the perfection of a gentleman, a trifle less 
 bored and blase than ordinary, en route to his appointment at Fern Wood (a 
 sequestered part of the Vane estate), where trees and lilies of the valley grew 
 wild, and where the girls were accustomed to go for picnics or sketching. As 
 soon as he had turned a corner, Gower and I turned it too, and with persever- 
 ance worthy a better cause, Tom and I followed Belle in and out and down 
 the road which led to Fern Wood a flat, dusty, stony two miles on which, in 
 the blazing noon of a hot midsummer day, nothing short of Satanic coercion, 
 or love of Geraldine Vane, would have induced our beauty to immolate himself, 
 and expose his delicate complexion. 
 
 " I bet you anything, Tom," said I confidently, " that this is a hoax, like 
 yesterday's. Geraldine will no more meet Belle there than all the Ordnance 
 Office." 
 
 " Well, we shall see," responded Gower. " Somebody might get the note- 
 paper from the bookseller, and the crest seal through the servants, but they'll 
 hardly get Geraldine there bodily against her will." 
 
 We waited at the entrance of the wood, shrouded ourselves in the wild haw- 
 thorn hedges, while we could still see Belle of course we did not mean to be 
 near enough to overhear him who paced up and down the green alleys under
 
 6 88 O UIDA 'S / / 'O&KS. 
 
 the firs and larches, rendered doubly dark by the evergreens, brambles, and 
 
 honeysuckles, 
 
 which, ripened by the sun, 
 Forbade the sun to enter. 
 
 He paced up and down there a good ten minutes, prying about with his eye- 
 glass, but unable to see very far in the tangled boughs, and heavy dusky light 
 of the untrimmed wood. Then there was the flutter of something azure among 
 the branches, and Gower gave vent to a low whistle of surprise. 
 
 "By George, Hardinge ! there's Geraldine ! Well! I didn't think she'd 
 have done it. You see they're all alike if they get the opportunity." 
 
 It was Geraldine herself it was her fluttering muslin, her abundant folds, 
 her waving ribbons, her tiny sailor hat, and her little veil, and under the veil her 
 face, with its delicate tinting, its pencilled eyebrows, and its undulating bright- 
 colored hair. There was no doubt about it: it was Geraldine. I vow I was as 
 sorry to have to tell it to Fairlie as if I'd had to tell him she was dead, for I 
 knew how it would cut him to the heart to know not only that she had given 
 herself to his rival, but that his little playmate, whom he had thought truth, and 
 honesty, and daylight itself, should have stopped to a clandestine interview 
 arranged through an advertisement ! Their retreating figures were soon lost 
 in the dim woodland, and Tom and I turned to retrace our steps. 
 
 "No doubt about it now, old fellow?" quoth Gower. 
 
 " No, confound her ! " swore I. 
 
 " Confound her ? Et pourquoi? Hasn't she a right to do what she likes ? " 
 
 "Of course she has, the cursed little flirt; but she'd no earthly business to 
 go making such love to Fairlie. It's a rascally shame, and I don't care if I 
 tell her so myself." 
 
 "She'll only say you're in love with her too," was Gower's sensible response. 
 " I'm not surprised myself. I always said she was an out-and-out coquette." 
 
 I met Fairlie coming out of his room as I went up to mine. He looked as 
 men will look when they have not been in bed all night, and have watched the 
 sun up with painful thoughts for their companions. 
 
 "You have been " he began; then stopped short, unwilling or unable to 
 put the question into words. 
 
 " After Belle ? Yes. It is no hoax, Geraldine met him herself." 
 
 I did not relish telling him, and therefore told it, in all probability, bluntly 
 and blunderingly tact, like talk, having, they say, been given to women. A 
 spasm passed over his face. " Herself! " he echoed. Until then I do not think 
 he had realized it as even possible. 
 
 " Yes, there was no doubt about it. What a wretched little coquette she 
 
 must have been; she always seemed to make such game of Belle " 
 
 But Fairlie, saying something about his gloves that he had left behind, had
 
 A LINE IN THR "DAILY." G80 
 
 gone back into his room again before I had half done my sentence. When 
 Belle came back, about half an hour afterwards, with an affected air of triumph, 
 and for once in his life of languid sensations really well contented, Gower and 
 I poured questions.upon him, as, done up with the toil of his dusty walk, and 
 horrified to find himself so low-bred as to be hot, he kicked off his varnished 
 boots, imbibed Seltzer, and fanned himself with a perodical before he could 
 find breath to answer us. 
 
 " Was it Geraldine ? ' 
 
 " Of course it was Geraldine," he said, yawning. 
 
 " And will she marry you, Belle ? " 
 
 " To be sure she will. I should like to see the woman that wouldn't," 
 responded Belle, shutting his eyes and nestling down among the cushions. 
 " And what's more, I've been fool enough to let her make me ask her. Give 
 me some more sherry, Phil; a man wants support under such circumstances. 
 The deuce if I'm not as hot as a ploughboy! It was very cruel of her to call 
 a fellow out with the sun at the meridian; she might as well have chosen 
 twilight. But, I say, you fellows, keep the secret, will you ? she don't want 
 her family to get wind of it, because they're bothering her to marry that old 
 cove, Mount Trefoil, with his sixty years and his broad acres, and wouldn't let 
 her take anybody else if they knew it; she's under age, you see." 
 
 " But how did she know you were L. C. ? " 
 
 " Fairlie told her, and the dear little vain thing immediately thought it was 
 an indirect proposal to herself, and answered it; of course I didn't undeceive her. 
 She raffoles of me it'll be almost too much of a good thing, I'm afraid. She's 
 deuced prudish, too, much more than I should have thought she'd have been; 
 but I vow she'd only let me kiss her hand, and that was gloved." 
 
 "I hate prudes," said Gower; "they've always much more devilry than the 
 open-hearted ones. Videlicet here's your young lady stiff enough only to 
 give you her hand to kiss, and yet she'll lower herself to a clandestine corres- 
 pondence and stolen interviews a condescension I don't think I should admire 
 in my wife." 
 
 " Love, my dear fellow, oversteps all what d'ye call 'em ? boundaries," 
 said Belle, languidly. " What a bore ! I shall never be able to wear this coat 
 again, it's so ingrained with dust; little puss, why didn't she wait till it was 
 cooler?" 
 
 " Did you fix your marriage-day ? " asked Tom, rather contemptuously. 
 
 "Yes, I was very weak !" sighed Belle; "but you see she's uncommonly 
 pretty, and there's Mount Trefoil and lots of men, and, I fancy, that dangerous 
 fellow Fairlie, after her; so we hurried matters. We've been making love to 
 one another all these three months, you know, and fixed it so soon as Thursday 
 week. Of course she blushed, and sighed, and put her handkerchief to her
 
 GOO QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 eyes, and all the rest of it, en regie; but she consented, and I'm to be sacri- 
 ficed. But not a word about it, my dear fellows ! The Vanes are to be kept 
 in profoundest darkness, and, to lull suspicion, I'm not to go there scarcely at 
 all until then, and when I do, she'll let me know when she will be out, and I'm 
 to call on her mother then. She'll write to me, and put the letters in a hollow 
 tree in the wood, where I'm to leave my answers, or, rather, send 'em; catch 
 me going over that road again ! Don't give me joy, old boys. I know I'm 
 making a holocaust of myself, but deuce, take me if I can help it she is so 
 deuced pretty ! " 
 
 Fairlie was not at mess that night. Nobody knew where he was. I learnt, 
 long months afterwards, that as soon as I had told him of Geraldine's identity, 
 he, still thirsting to disbelieve, reluctant to condemn, catching at straws to save 
 his idol from being shattered as men in love will do, had thrown himself across 
 his horse and torn off to Fern Dell to see whether or no Geraldine was at home. 
 
 His heart beat faster and thicker as he entered the drawing-room than it 
 had done before the lines at Ferozeshah, or in the giant semicircle at Sobraon; 
 it stood still as in the far end of the room, lying back on a low chair, sat Ger- 
 aldine, her gloves and sailor hat lying on her lap. She sprang up to welcome 
 him with her old gay smile. 
 
 " Good God! that a child like that can be such an accomplished actress ! " 
 thought Fairlie, as he just touched her hand. 
 
 " Have you been out to-day ? " he asked, suddenly. 
 
 "You see I have." 
 
 " Prevarication is conviction," thought Fairlie, with a deadly chill over him. 
 
 " Where did you go, love ? " asked mamma. 
 
 "To see Adela Ferrers; she is not well, you know, and I came home 
 through part of the wood to gather some of the anemones; I don't mean anem- 
 ones, they are over lilies of the valley." 
 
 She spoke hurriedly, glancing at Fairlie all the time, who never took his 
 iron gaze off her, though all the beauty and glory was draining away from his 
 life with every succeeding proof that stared him in the face with its cruel 
 evidence. 
 
 At that minute Lady Vane was called from the room to give some directions 
 to her head gardener about some flowers, over which she was particularly choice, 
 and Fairlie and Geraldine were left in dead silence, with only the ticking of 
 the timepiece and the chirrup of the birds outside of the open windows to 
 break its heavy monotony. 
 
 Fan-he bent over a spaniel, rolling the dog backwards and forwards on 
 the rug. 
 
 Geraldine stood on the rug, her head on one side in her old pretty attitude 
 of plaintiveness and defiance, the bright sunshine falling round her and play-
 
 A LINE IN THE "DAILY." 691 
 
 ing on her gay dress and fair hair a tableau lost upon the Colonel, who, though 
 he had risen too, was playing sedulously with the dog. 
 
 "Colonel Fairlie, what is the matter with you? How unkind you are 
 to-day ! " 
 
 Fairlie was roused at last, disgusted that so young a girl could be so accom- 
 plished a liar and actress, sick at heart that he had been so deceived, mad with 
 jealousy, and that devil in him sent courtesy flying to the winds. 
 
 " Pardon me, Miss Vane, you waste your coquetteries on me. Unhappily, 
 I know their value, and am not likely to be duped by them." 
 
 Geraldine's face flushed as deep a rose hue as the geraniums nodding their 
 heads in at the windows. 
 
 "Coquetteries ? duped ? What do you mean ? " 
 
 "You know well enough what. All I warn you is, never try them again on 
 me never come near me any more with your innocent smiles and your lying 
 lips, or, by Heaven, Geraldine Vane, I may say what I think of you in plainer 
 words than suit the delicacy of a lady's ears ! " 
 
 Geraldine's eyes flashed fire; from rose-hued as the geraniums she changed 
 to the dead white of the Guelder roses beside them. 
 
 " Colonel Fairlie, you are mad, I think ! If you only came here to insult 
 me " 
 
 "I had better leave? I agree with you. Good morning." 
 
 Wherewith Fairlie took his hat and whip, bowed himself out, and, throwing 
 himself across his horse, tore away many miles beyond Norwich, I should say, 
 and rode into the stable-yard at twelve o'clock that night, his horse with every 
 hair wringing and limb trembling at the headlong pace he had been ridden; 
 such a midnight gallop as only Mazeppa, or a Border rider, or Turpin racing 
 for his life, or a man vainly seeking to leave behind him some pursuing ghost of 
 memory or passion, ever took before. 
 
 We saw little of him for the next few days. Luckily for him, he was 
 employed to purchase several strings of Suffolk horses for the corps, and he 
 rode about the country a good deal, and went over to Newmarket, and to the 
 Bury horse fair, inspecting the cattle, glad, I daresay, of an excuse to get 
 away. 
 
 "I feel nervous, terribly nervous; do give me the Seltzer and hock, Tom. 
 They wonder at the fellows asking for beer before their execution. I don't; and 
 if a fellow wants it to keep his spirits up before he's hanged, he may surely 
 want it before he's married, for one's a swing and a crash, and it's all over and 
 done most likely before you've time to know anything about it; but the other 
 you walk into so deliberately, superintend the sacrifice of yourself, as it were, 
 like that old cove Seneca; feel yourself rolling down-hill like Regulus, with all 
 the horrid nails of the 'domesticities ' pricking you in every corner; see life
 
 693 O UIDA ' S WORKS. 
 
 ebbing away from you; all the sunshine of life, as poets have it, fading, sweetly 
 but surely, from your grasp, and Death, alias the Matrimonial Black Cap, 
 coming down ruthlessly on your devoted heads. I feel low shockingly low. 
 Pass me the Seltzer, Tom, do ! " 
 
 So spoke Geraldine's sposo that was to be, on the evening before his mar- 
 riage-day, lying on his sofa in his Cashmere dressing-gown, his gold embroid- 
 ered slippers, and his velvet smoking-cap, puffing largely at his meerschaum, 
 and unbosoming his private sentiments and emotions to the (on this score) 
 sufficiently sympathetic listeners, Gower and I. 
 
 " I don't pity you ! " said Tom, contemptuously, who had as much disdain 
 for a man who married as for one who bought gooseberry for champagne, or 
 Cape for comet hock, and did not know the difference " I don't pity you one bit. 
 You've put the curb on yourself, you can't complain if you get driven where 
 you don't like." 
 
 " But, my dear fellow, can one help it ? " expostulated Belle, pathetically. 
 " When a little winning, bewitching, attractive animal like that takes you in 
 hand, and traps you as you catch a pony, holding out a sieve of oats, and 
 coaxes you, and so-ho-ing you till she's fairly got the bridle over your head, 
 and the bit between your teeth, what is a man to do ? " 
 
 " Remember that as soon as the bit is in your mouth, she'll never trouble 
 herself to give you any oats, or so-ho you softly any more, but will take the 
 whip hand of you, and not let you have the faintest phantom of a will of your 
 own ever again," growled the misogamistic Tom. 
 
 " Catch a man's remembering while it's any use," was Belle's very true 
 rejoinder. " After he's put his hand to a little bill, he'll remember it's a very 
 green thing to do, but he don't often remember it before, I fancy. No, in 
 things like this, one can't help one's self; one's time is come, and one goes 
 down before fate. If anybody had told me that I should go as spooney about 
 any woman as I have about that little girl Geraldine, I'd have given 'em the 
 lie direct; I would, indeed! But then she made such desperate love to me, 
 took such a deuced fancy to me, you see: else, after all, the women 7 might 
 
 have chosen By George! I wonder what Lady Con, and the little Bosanquet, 
 
 and poor Honoria, and all the rest of 'em will say ? " 
 
 " What ? " said Gower; say Poor dear fellow! ' to you, and Poor girl, I 
 pity her! ' to your wife. So you're going to elope with Miss Geraldine ? A 
 man's generally too ready to marry his daughters, to force a fellow to carry 
 them off by stealth. Besides, as Bulwer says somewhere, Gentlemen don't run 
 away with the daughters of gentlemen.' " 
 
 Pooh, nonsense! all's fair in love or war," returned Belle, going into the 
 
 :k and Seltzer to keep up his spirits. " You see, she's afraid, her governor's 
 Bind being so set on old Mount Trefoil and his baron's coronet; they might
 
 A LINE IN THE "DAILY." 693 
 
 offer some opposition, put it off till she was one-and-twenty, you know and 
 she's so distractedly fond of me, poor little thing, that she'd die under the pro- 
 bation, probably and I'm sure I couldn't keep faithful to her for two mortal 
 years. Besides, there's something amusing in eloping; the excitement of it 
 keeps up one's spirits; whereas, if I were marched to church with so many 
 mourners I mean groomsmen I should feel I was rehearsing my own ob- 
 sequies like Charles V., and should funk it, ten to one I should. No! I like 
 eloping: it gives the certain flavor of forbidden fruit, which many things, 
 besides pure water, want to 'give them a relish.' ' 
 
 " Let's see how's the thing to be managed ? " asked Gower. " Beyond tell- 
 ing me I was to go with you, consigned ignominiously to the rumble, to witness 
 the ceremony, I'm not very clear, as to the programme." 
 
 " Why, as soon as it's dawn," responded Belle, with leisurely whiffs of 
 his meerschaum, " I'm to take the carriage up to the gate at Fern Wood 
 this is what she tells me in her last note; she was coming to meet me, but 
 just as she was dressed her mother took her to call on some people, and she 
 had to resort to the old hollow tree. The deuce is in it, I think, to prevent 
 our meeting; if it weren't for the letter and her maid, we should have been 
 horribly put to it for communication; I'm to take the carriage, as I say, 
 and drive up there, where she and her maid will be waiting. We drive away, 
 of course, catch the 8.15 train and cut off to town, and get married at the 
 Regeneration, Piccadilly, where a fellow I know very well will act the priestly 
 Calcraft. The thing that bothers me most of all is getting up so early. I used 
 to hate it so awfully when I was a young one at the college. I like to have my 
 bath, and my coffee, and my paper leisurely, and saunter through my dressing, 
 and get up when the day's warmed for me. Early parade's one of the crying 
 cruelties of the Service; I always turn in again after it, and regard it as a hide- 
 ous nightmare. I vow I couldn't give a greater test of my devotion than by 
 getting up at six o'clock to go after her deuced horrible exertion! I'm quite 
 certain that my linen won't be aired, nor my coffee fit to drink, nor Perkins 
 with his eyes half open, nor a quarter of his wits about him. Six o'clock! By 
 George! nothing should get me up at that unearthly hour except my dear, 
 divine, delicious little demon Geraldine! But she's so deuced fond of me, one 
 must make sacrifices fot such a little darling." 
 
 With which sublimely unselfish and heroic sentiment the bridegroom-elect 
 drank the last of his hock and Seltzer, took his pipe out of his lips, flung his 
 smoking-cap lazily on to his Skye's head, who did not relish the attention, and 
 rose languidly to get into his undress in time for mess. 
 
 As Belle had to get up so frightfully early in the morning, he did not think 
 it worth while to go to bed at all, but asked us all to vingt-et-un in his room, 
 where, with the rattle of half-sovereigns and the flow of rum-punch, kept up his
 
 094 QUID AS WORKS. 
 
 courage before the impending doom of matrimony. Belle was really in love 
 with Geraldine, but in love in his own particular way, and consoled himself for 
 his destiny and her absence by what I daresay seems to mademoiselle, fresh 
 from her perusal of "Aurora Leigh" or "Lucille," very material comforters 
 indeed. But, if truth were told I am afraid mademoiselle would find, save that 
 from one or two fellows here and there, who go in for love as they go in for 
 pig-sticking or tiger-hunting, with all their might and main, wagering even their 
 lives in the sport, the Auroras and Lucilles are very apt to have their charms 
 supplanted by the points of a favorite, their absence made endurable by the 
 aroma of Turkish tobacco, and their last fond admonishing words, spoken with 
 such persuasive caresses under the moonlight and the limes against those 
 " horrid cards, love," forgotten that very night under the glare of gas, while 
 the hands that lately held their own so tenderly, clasp wellnigh with as much 
 affection the unprecedented luck " two honors and five trumps ! " 
 
 Man's love is of man's life a thing apart. 
 
 Byron was right; and if we go no deeper, how can it well be otherwise, when 
 we have our stud, our pipe, our Pytchley, our Newmarket, our club, our cou- 
 lisses, our Mabille, and our Epsom, and they oh, Heaven help them ! have no 
 distraction but a needle or a novel ! The Fates forbid that our agremens should 
 be less, but I daresay, if they had a vote in it, they'd try to get a trifle more. 
 So Belle put his "love apart," to keep (or to rust, whichever you please) till six 
 A.M. that morning, when, having by dint of extreme physical exertion got him- 
 self dressed, saw his valet pack his things with the keenest anxiety relative to 
 the immaculate folding of his coats and the safe repose of his shirts, and at 
 last was ready to go and fetch the bride his line in the Daily had produced him. 
 As Belle went down the stairs with Gower, who should come too, with his 
 gun in his hand, his cap over his eyes, and a pointer following close at his heels, 
 but Fairlie, going out to shoot over a friend's manor. 
 
 Of course he knew that Belle had asked for and obtained leave for a couple 
 months, but he had never heard for what purpose; and possibly, as he saw him 
 at such an unusual hour, going out, not in his usual travelling guise of a wide- 
 awake and a Maude, but with a delicate lavender tie and a toilet of the most 
 unexceptionable art, the purport of his journey flashed fully on his mind, for his 
 face grew as fixed and unreadable as if he had had on the iron mask. Belle, 
 guessing as he did that Fairlie would not have disliked to have been in his 
 place that morning, was too kind-hearted and infinitely too much of a gentle- 
 man to hint at his own triumph. He laughed, and nodded a good morning. 
 
 Off early, you see, Fairlie; going to make the most of my leave. 'Tisn't 
 very often we can get one; our corps is deuced stiff and strict compared to the 
 Guards and the Cavalry."
 
 A LINE IN THE "DAILY:* 695 
 
 " At least our strictness keeps us> from such disgraceful scenes as some of 
 the other regiments have shown up of late," answered Fairlie between his teeth. 
 
 "Ah ! well, perhaps so; still, strictness ain't pleasant, you know, when one's 
 the victim." 
 
 " Certainly not." 
 
 " And, therefore, we should never be hard upon others." 
 
 " I perfectly agree with you." 
 
 " There's a good fellow. Well, I must be off; I've no time for philoso- 
 phizing. Good-by, Colonel.'* 
 
 " Good-by a safe journey." 
 
 But I noticed that he held the dog's collar in one hand and the gun in the 
 other, so as to have an excuse for not offering that poignee de main which ought 
 to be as sure a type of friendship, and as safe a guarantee for good faith, as 
 the Bedouin Arab's salt. 
 
 Belle nodded him a farewell, and lounged down the steps and into the car- 
 riage, just as Fairlie's man brought his mare round. 
 
 Fairlie turned on to me with unusual fierceness, for generally he was very 
 calm, and gentle, and impassive in manner. 
 
 " Where is he gone ? " 
 
 I could not help but tell him, reluctant though I was, for I guessed pretty 
 well what it would cost him to hear it. He did not say one word while I told 
 him, but bent over Marquis, drawing the dog's leash tighter, so that I might 
 not see his face, and without a sign or reply he was out of the barracks, across 
 his mare's back, and rushing away at a mad gallop, as if he would leave thought, 
 and memory, and the curse of love for a worthless woman behind him forever. 
 
 His man stood looking at the gun Fairlie had thrown to him with a puz- 
 zled expression. 
 
 " Is the Colonel gone mad ? " I heard him say to himself. " The devil's in 
 it, I think. He used to treat his things a little carefuller than this. As I live, 
 he's been and gone and broke the trigger ! " 
 
 The devil wasn't in it but a woman was, an individual that causes as much 
 mischief as any Asmodeus, Belphegor, or Mephistopheles. Some fair unknown 
 correspondents assured me the other day, in a letter, that my satire on women 
 was " a monstrous libel." All I can say is, that if it be a libel, it is like many 
 a one for which one pays the highest, and which sounds the blackest a libel 
 that is true ! 
 
 While his rival rode away as recklessly as though he was riding for his life, 
 the gallant bridegroom as the Court Circular would have it rolled on his way 
 to Fern Wood, while Gower, very amiably occupying the rumble, smoked, and 
 bore his position philosophically, comforted by the recollection that Geraldine's 
 French maid was an uncommonly good-looking, coquettish little person.
 
 GOG 
 
 QUID A 8 WORKS. 
 
 They rolled on, and speedily the postilion pulled up, according to order, 
 before the white five-bar gate, its paint blistering in the hot summer dawn, and 
 the great fern-leaves and long grass clinging up round its posts, still damp with 
 the six o'clock dew. Five minutes passed ten minutes a quarter of an hour. 
 Poor .Belle got impatient. Twenty minutes five-and-twenty thirty. Belle 
 couldn't stand it. He began to pace up and down the turf, soiling his boots 
 frightfully with the long wet grass, and rejecting all Tom's offers of consolation 
 and a cigar-case. 
 
 "Confound it ! " cried poor Belle, piteously, " I thought women were always 
 ready to marry. I know, when I went to turn of Lacquers of the Rifles at St. 
 George's, his bride had been waiting for him half an hour, and was in an awful 
 state of mind, and all the other brides as well, for you know they always marry 
 first the girl that gets there first, and all the other poor wretches were kept on 
 tenter-hooks too. Lacquers had lost the ring, and found it in his waistcoat 
 after all ! I say, Tom, devil take it, where can she be ? It's forty minutes, as 
 I live. We shall lose the train, you know. She's never prevented coming, 
 surely. I think she'd let me hear, don't you? She could send Justine to me 
 if she couldn't come by any wretched chance. Good Heavens, Tom, what 
 shall I do ? " 
 
 "Wait, and don't worry," was Tom's laconic and common-sense advice; 
 about the most irritating prabably to a lover's feelings that could pretty well 
 be imagined. Belle swore at him in stronger terms than he generally exerted 
 himself to use, but was pulled up in the middle of them by the sight of Geral- 
 dine and Justine, followed by a boy bearing his bride's dainty trunks. 
 
 On came Geraldine in a travelling-dress; Justine following after her, with a 
 brilliant smile, that showed all her white teeth, at " Monsieur Torm," for whom 
 she had a very tender friendship, consolidated by certain half-sovereigns and 
 French phrases whispered by Gower after his dinners at Fern Chase. 
 
 Belle met Geraldine with all that tender empressement which he knew well 
 how to put into his slightest actions; but the young lady seemed already almost 
 to have begun repenting her hasty step. She hung her head down, she held a 
 handkerchief to her bright eyes, and to Belle's tenderest and most ecstatic 
 whispers she only answered by a convulsive pressure of the arm, into which he 
 had drawn her left hand, and a half-smothered sob from her heart's depths. 
 
 Belle thought it all natural enough under the circumstances. He knew 
 women always made a point of impressing upon you that they are making a 
 frightful sacrifice for your good when they condescend to accept you, and he 
 whispered what tender consolation occured to him as best fitted for the occasion, 
 thanked her, of course, for all the rapture, etc. etc., assured her of his life-long 
 devotion you know the style and lifted her into the carriage, Geraldine only 
 responding with broken sighs and stifled sobs.
 
 A LINE IN THE "DAILY." GOT 
 
 The boxes were soon beside Belle's valises, Justine soon beside Govver, the 
 postilion cracked his whip over his outsider, Perkins refolded his arms, and the 
 carriage rolled down the lane. 
 
 Gower was very well contented with his seat in the rumble. Justine was a 
 very dainty little Frenchwoman, with the smoothest hair and the whitest teeth 
 in the world, and she and " Monsieur Torm " were eminently good friends, as I 
 have told you, though to-day she was very coquettish and wilful, and laughed a 
 propos de bottes at Gower, say what Chaumiere compliments he might. 
 
 " Ma chere et charmante petite," expostulated Tom, "tes moues mutines 
 sont ravissantes, mais je t'avoue que je prefere tes " 
 
 "Tais-toi, because ! " cried Justine, giving him a blow with her parasol, and 
 going off into what she would have called Eclats de rire. 
 
 "Mais ecoute-moi, Justine," whispered Tom, piqued by her perversity; " je 
 raffole de toi ! je t'adore, sur ma parole ! je Hallo ! what the devil's the matter ? 
 Good gracious ! Deuce take it ! " 
 
 Well might Tom call on his Satanic Majesty to explain what met his eyes as 
 he gave vent to all three ejaculations and maledictions! No less a sight than 
 the carraige-door flying violently open, Belle descending with a violent impetus, 
 his face crimson, and his hat in his hand, clearing the hedge at a bound, plung- 
 ing up to his ankles in mud on the other side of it, and starting across country 
 at the top of his speed, rushing frantically straight over the heavy grass-land as 
 if he had just escaped from Hanwell, and the whole hue and cry of keepers and 
 policemen was let loose at his heels. 
 
 " Good Heavens ! By Jove ! Belle, Belle, I say, stop ! Are you mad ? 
 What's happened ? What's the row ? I say the devil ! " 
 
 But to his incoherent but very natural exclamations poor Tom received no 
 answer. Justine was screaming with laughter, the postilion was staring, Per- 
 kins swearing, Belle, flying across the country at express speed, rapidly dimin- 
 ishing into a small black dot in the green landscape, while from inside [the 
 carriage, from Geraldine, from the deserted bride, peals of laughter, loud, long, 
 and uproarious, rang out in the summer stillness of the early morning. 
 
 " By Jupiter ! but this is most extraordinary. The deuce is in it. Are 
 they both gone stark staring mad ? " asked Tom of his Cuba, or the blackbirds, 
 or the hedge-cutter afar off, or anything or anybody that might turn out so 
 amiable as to solve his problem for him. 
 
 No reply being given him, however, Tom could stand it no longer. Down 
 he sprang, jerked the door open again, and put his head into the carriage. 
 
 "Hallo, old boy, done green, eh? Pity 'tisn't the ist of April !" cried 
 Geraldine, with renewed screams of mirth from the interior. 
 
 " Eh ? What ? What did you say, Miss Vane ? " ejaculated Gower, fairly stag- 
 gered by this extraordinary answer of a young girl, a lady, and a forsaken bride.
 
 698 
 
 OUIDAS WORKS. 
 
 " What did I say, my dear fellow? Why, that you're done most preciously, 
 and that I fancy it'll be a deuced long time before your delectable friend tries 
 his hand at matrimony again, that's all. Done ! oh, by George, he is done, 
 and no mistake. Look at me, sir, ain't I a charming bride ? " 
 
 With which elegant language Geraldine took off her hat, pulled down some 
 false braids, pushed her hair off her forehead, shook her head like a water-dog 
 after a bath, and grinned in Gower's astonished eyes not Geraldine, but her 
 twin-brother, Pretty Face ! 
 
 " Do you know me now, old boy ? " asked the Etonian, with demoniacal 
 delight, " do you know me now ? Haven't I chiselled him haven't I tricked 
 
 him haven't I done him as green as young gooseberries, and as brown as that 
 
 bag ? Do you fancy he'll boast of his conquests again, or advertise for another 
 wife ? So you didn't know how I got Gary Clements, of the Ten Bells, to 
 write the letters for me ? and Justine to dress me in Geraldine's things ? You 
 know they always did say they couldn't tell her from me; I've proven it now, 
 eh ? rather ! Oh, by George, I never had a better luck ! and not a creature 
 guesses it, not a soul, save Justine, Nell, and I ! By Jupiter, Gower, if you'd 
 heard that unlucky Belle go on swearing devotion interminable, and enough 
 love to stock all Mudie's novels ! But I never dare let him kiss me, though 
 my beard is down, confound it ! Oh ! what jolly fun it's been, Gower, no 
 words can tell. I always said he shouldn't marry her; he'll hardly try to do it 
 now, I fancy ! What a lark it's been ! I couldn't have done it, you know, 
 without that spicy little French girl; she did my hair, and got up my crino- 
 line, and stole Geraldine's dress, and tricked me up altogether, and carried my 
 notes to the hollow oak, and took all my messages to Belle. Oh, Jupiter ! 
 what fun it's been ! If Belle isn't gone clean out of his senses, it's very odd to 
 me. When he was going to kiss me, and whispered, < My dearest, my darling, 
 my wife ! ' I just took off my hat and grinned in his face, and said, ' Ain't 
 this a glorious go ? ' Oh i by George, Gower, I think the fun will kill me ! " 
 And the wicked little dog of an Etonian sank back among the carriage 
 cushions stifled with his laughter. Gower staggered backwards against a road- 
 side tree, and stood therewith his lips parted and his eyes wide open, bewildered, 
 more than that cool hand had ever been in all his days, by the extraordinary 
 finish of poor Belle's luckless wooing; the postilion rolled off his saddle in 
 cachinnatory fits at the little monkey's narrative! Perkins, like a soldier as he 
 was, utterly impassive to all surrounding circumstances, shouldered a valise 
 and dashed at quick march after his luckless master; Justine clapped her 
 plump French-gloved fingers with a million ma Fois! and mon Dieus! and O 
 Ciels! and far away in the gray distance sped the retreating figure of poor 
 Belle, with the license in one pocket and the wedding-ring in the other, flying, 
 as if his life depended on it, from the shame, and the misery, and the horror
 
 A LINE IN THE "DAILY." 699 
 
 of that awful sell, drawn on his luckless head by that ill-fated line in the 
 Daily. 
 
 While Belle drove to his hapless wooing, Fairlie galloped on and on. 
 Where he went he neither knew nor cared. He had ridden heedlessly along, 
 and the Gray, left to her own devices, had taken the road to which her head 
 for the last four months had been so often turned, the road leading to Fern 
 Chase, and about a mile from the Vane estate lost her left hind-shoe, and 
 came to a dead stop of her own accord, after having been ridden for a couple 
 of hours as hard as if she had been at the Grand Military. Fairlie threw him- 
 self off the saddle, and, leaving the bridle loose on the rnare's neck, who he 
 knew would not stray a foot away from him, he flung himself on the grass, 
 under the cool morning shadows of the roadside trees, no sound in the quiet 
 country round him breaking in on his weary thoughts, till the musical ring of a 
 pony's hoofs came pattering down the lane. He never heard it, however, nor 
 looked up, till the quick trot slackened and then stopped beside him. 
 
 " Colonel Fairlie ! " 
 
 " Good Heavens ! Geraldine ! " 
 
 " Well," she said, with tears in her eyes and petulant anger in her voice, 
 "so you have never had the grace to come and apologize for insulting me as 
 you did last week ? " 
 
 " For mercy's sake do not trifle with me." 
 
 " Trifle ! No, indeed ! " interrupted the young lady. "Your behavior was 
 no trifle, and it will be a very long time before I forgive it, if ever I do." 
 
 " Stay wait a moment." 
 
 " How can you ask me, when, five days ago, you bid me never come near 
 you with my cursed coquetries again ? " asked Geraldine, trying, and vainly, to 
 get the bridle out of his grasp. 
 
 " God forgive me ! I did not know what I said. What I had heard was 
 enough to madden a colder man than I. Is it untrue ? " 
 
 " Is what untrue ? " 
 
 " You know well enough. Answer me, is it true or not ? " 
 
 " How can I tell what you mean ? You talk in enigmas. Let me go." 
 
 "I will never let you go till you have answered me." 
 
 " How can I answer you if I don't know what you mean ? " retorted Geral- 
 dine, half laughing. 
 
 " Do not jest. Tell me, yes or no, are you going to marry that cursed 
 fool ? " 
 
 " What ' cursed fool ' ? Your language is not elegant, Colonel Fairlie ! " 
 said Geraldine, with demure mischief. 
 
 " Belle ! Would you have met him ? Did you intend to elope with 
 him ?"
 
 roo 
 
 OVID AS WORKS. 
 
 Geraldine's eyes, always large enough, grew larger and a darker blue still, 
 
 in extremest astonishment. 
 
 " Belle ! elope with him ? What are you dreaming ? Are you mad ? " 
 "Almost," said Fairlie, recklessly. " Have you misled him, then tricked 
 
 him ? Do you care nothing for him ? Answer me, for Heaven's sake, Ger- 
 
 aldine ! " 
 
 " I know nothing of what you are talking ! " said Geraldine, with her 
 surprised eyes wide open still. " Oblige me by leaving my pony's head. I 
 shall be too late home." 
 
 " You never answered his advertisement, then? " 
 
 " The very question insults me ! Let my pony go." 
 
 " You never met him in Fern Wood never engaged yourself to him 
 never corresponded with him ? " 
 
 " Colonel Fairlie, you have no earthly right to put such questions to me," 
 interrupted Geraldine, with her hot geranium color in her cheeks and her eyes 
 flashing fire. I honor the report, whoever circulated it, far more than it deserves 
 by condescending to contradict it. Have the kindness to unhand my pony, 
 and allow me to continue my ride." 
 
 " You shall not go," said Fairlie, as passionately as she, " till you have 
 answered me one more question: can you, will you ever forgive me ? " 
 
 "No," said Geraldine, with an impatient shake of her head, but a smile 
 nevertheless under the shadow of her hat. 
 
 " Not if you know it was jealousy of him which maddened me, 'love for you 
 which made me speak such unpardonable words to you ? not if I tell you how 
 perfect was the tale I was told, so that there was no link wanting, no room for 
 doubt or hope ? not if tell you what tortures I had endured in losing you 
 what bitter punishment I have already borne in crediting the report that you 
 were secretly engaged to my rival would you not forgive me then ? " 
 
 " No," whispered the young lady perversely, but smiling still, the geraniums 
 brighter in her cheeks, and her eyes fixed on the bridle. 
 
 Fairlie dropped the reins, let go her hand, and left her free to ride, if she 
 would, away from him. % 
 
 " Will you leave me, Geraldine ? Not for this morning only, remember, 
 nor for to-day, nor for this year, but for ever ? " 
 
 " No! " It was a very different " No " this time. 
 
 "Will you forgive me, then, my darling? " 
 
 Her fingers clasped his hand clos'ely, and Geraldine looked at him from un- 
 der her hat; her eyes, so like an April day, with their tears, and their tender and 
 mischievous smile, were so irresistibly provocative that Fairlie took his pardon 
 for granted, and thanked her in the way that seemed to him at once most elo- 
 quent and most satisfactory.
 
 A LINE IN THE "DAILY." 701 
 
 If you wish to know what became of Belle, he fled across the country to 
 the railway station, and spent his leave Heaven knows where in sackcloth and 
 ashes, I suppose meditating on his frightful sell. We saw nothing more of him; 
 he could hardly show in Norwich again with all his laurels tumbled in the dust, 
 and his trophies of conquest laughing-stocks for all the troop. He exchanged 
 into the Z Battery going out to India, and I never saw or heard of him till a 
 year or two ago, when he landed at Portsmouth, a much wiser and pleasanter 
 man. The lesson, joined to the late campaign under Sir Colin, had done him 
 a vast amount of good; he had lost his conceit, his vanity, his affectation, and 
 was what nature meant him to be a sensible, good-hearted fellow. As luck 
 would have it, Pretty Face, who had joined the Eleventh, was there too, and 
 Fairlie and his wife as well, and Belle had the good sense to laugh it over with 
 them, assuring Geraldine, however, that no one had eclipsed the G. V. whom he 
 had once hoped had answered his memorable advertisement. He has grown 
 wiser, and makes a jest of it now; it may be a sore point still, I cannot say 
 nobody sees it; but, whether or no, in the old city of Norwich, and in our corps, 
 from Cadets to Colonels, nobody forgets THE LINE IN THE " DAILY: " WHO 
 
 DID IT, AND WHO WAS DONE BY IT. 
 
 END OF VOLUME THREE.
 
 000 143